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Live From...
Operation Fred Continues
Aired February 26, 2004 - 14:17 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Big news on Operation Fred front. Fred's home in LIVE FROM has got him right here.
And if you're a regular viewer, and we all know that you are, you're well acquainted with Major Fred Wellman, U.S. Army, 101st Airborne. Wellman had boots on the ground in Iraq for 11 months, in the process, making quite an impression. Operation Fred was and is his baby, a lifeline from donors in America to needy Iraqis, primarily children.
But he can he tell it better than we can, that and many other fascinating stories from his often dangerous, never boring deployment.
Welcome home.
MAJ. FRED WELLMAN, U.S. ARMY: Thank you very much, Kyra. It's great to be here. I appreciate it.
PHILLIPS: Well, I know your wife, Crystal (ph), and your four kids are thrilled that you're home, too.
WELLMAN: Yes. Yes. I guess it was kind of crazy last night. I was actually gone for the first time and it was a little crazy at the house last night.
PHILLIPS: She's calling, going, OK, is everything OK? Are you ready? You going to do the segment?
All right. You're here. You brought some -- a number of things with you. Let's get right to the posters and the booklet here, OK? And tell us about this.
WELLMAN: Well, we moved north steadily through the country and we got to an our base, Cairo West air base in Northern Iraq.
It was an abandoned Iraqi air base. And we spent quite a bit of time selecting our buildings we were going to live in and cleaning them up. and was one of the first guys to arrive up there from my unit. And we went through. We found quite a bit of interesting stuff.
This is some Iraqi training manuals, is what this is. It's, of course, a picture of our good friend, now a prisoner of war, and just lot of interesting stuff there. My favorite thing and probably my most prized possession that I got is, these are Iraqi air force safety posters that they had up on the walls. And can you as -- burned up. The building in there in the hospital had gotten burned up. So I acquired these and they're pretty nice.
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIPS: Those were instructions to the pilots on how to fly the MiG safely.
WELLMAN: Yes. Exactly. But kind of the funny thing about this poster is -- I'll have to bring it back up -- is notice that the pilot had a bird stripe but is being threatened to be beaten, which is not something we do in the American military. You don't have to worry about that too much in ours.
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIPS: No, that's interesting. It's how Saddam ruled.
WELLMAN: It's a different way of doing things.
PHILLIPS: All right, you became friends with a very special individual, Dr. Mohammed.
WELLMAN: Yes.
PHILLIPS: This was a gift from him.
WELLMAN: Yes. This is one of these. Just like -- I admired his -- I always called it his sheik hat as a joke.
And so, before I left, he gave me one of them because he had taken to calling me sheik Wellman, as if I was a sheik. And so he gave me one of my own little sheik hats. And so I brought that home with me. And it was a really great relationship.
PHILLIPS: And while we're looking at some pictures of him now, I want you to talk about Dr. Mohammed. This is someone who -- of course, that's one of his kids.
WELLMAN: I love that picture, yes.
PHILLIPS: And this was doctor in an area where kids had never had a checkup before. And you guys built a medical clinic for him.
WELLMAN: Yes.
It really worked out great. And I can't -- again, I don't like to take credit for a lot of this stuff that we did. I was kind of the point man for a lot of it. But it was actually -- we met Dr. Mohammed, who was the sheik of the local village.
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIPS: These are supplies that came in via Operation Fred.
WELLMAN: This is Operation Fred. And Mohammed is a great man. He is both a doctor and a sheik. And he had not been practicing medicine to any great extent for about 10 years when I met him. They couldn't afford to build a clinic in the village. So, when the Army got their civil affairs funds and started the ball rolling, we were able to build a clinic right there in his village. And it was pretty exciting.
PHILLIPS: And the school here? Of course, all the kids excited.
(CROSSTALK)
WELLMAN: Yes, that's the school. That was our first school we built there. We ended up building 23 schools, the 101st Aviation Brigade. My chain of command was terrific at that. So we built schools.
So when we went to these villages -- I personally visited probably about 40 of the local villages around our base. And consistently it was always the same thing. We need water and we need schools. We need food -- or, excuse me...
PHILLIPS: And shoes.
WELLMAN: And shoes, yes. Isn't that neat? That is a great -- that is pairs of shoes sent to me from my church in Peachtree City, Georgia. And that's almost 66 pairs of shoes.
PHILLIPS: That's incredible.
WELLMAN: Isn't it amazing.
PHILLIPS: So all the kids got new pairs of shoes.
WELLMAN: Yes. That's exactly what we did. And we distributed them out to the villages right around Christmastime. Aren't these kids cute?
PHILLIPS: You got some amazing pictures of these children. Did they just flock to you?
(CROSSTALK)
WELLMAN: Oh, yes.
PHILLIPS: How did they respond to you and the other soldiers?
WELLMAN: Well, it's great. And I got to know the kids very well. It's funny. When I first visited Dr. Mohammed in his village -- he has a sign. You saw the first picture of his baby. And I have of course children. And I missed my kids so bad.
And his kids look like mine. This is a great picture. And I told Mohammed, I miss my children. And he said, if any time you want to see children, you come visit us and my children are your children. So I became very close to all the kids. And I love kids. And it became like my second family out there. That's an interesting picture, too.
PHILLIPS: Now, moving in, moving away from the people, this is actually a shot -- this is your convoy, right?
WELLMAN: Yes. Yes. Yes.
PHILLIPS: And your close air support, your security above you. What happened here? This shows you never know when something is going to blow up around you.
WELLMAN: Yes, that's actually my Humvee there. It's one of our Black Hawks. A good friend of mine, Major Dan Gall (ph), took that picture.
And they were pulling aerial security forces. We moved south. This is our convoy out of Iraq the beginning -- middle of January. And we came upon that burning vehicle. I think it was a taxicab. I'm not sure if it was ambushed or what, but it made a pretty dramatic photo from the air.
PHILLIPS: Speaking of dramatic photos, this one, this has a story tied to it. You came across a number of tanks. And tell us about the license plate that you brought with you and the connection to another tank you came across.
WELLMAN: This is actually from an air defense weapon, one of their gun systems. It was kind of funny. I was driving down the road one day and I saw these guys standing there inspecting this vehicle. I said, man, what are these guys doing here? It was my boss. I said, oh, it's my boss.
It's upside down. And we went over and inspected. And this was on the back. You see it took a beating, like most of the weapon system we found
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIPS: I can see the bullet holes.
WELLMAN: Yes. This was taken out by probably an A-10, one of our jets.
PHILLIPS: Wow.
WELLMAN: And it's just kind of a nice little souvenir. Can't hand it to kids. It's kind of sharp.
But we found a lot of the weapons. And amazing, in our area, there just wasn't that much of that kind of stuff. In Northern Iraq, there hadn't been a lot that kind of fighting out near Mosul. So...
PHILLIPS: And as you were doing a lot of flying -- I know that we have got some other pictures here of when you were airborne. Tell our viewers. A lot of them know that have seen this segment with you. You're a helo pilot.
WELLMAN: Isn't this beautiful?
PHILLIPS: A lot of myths about Iraq.
WELLMAN: Yes.
PHILLIPS: There's a lot of beautiful parts of the country.
WELLMAN: Gorgeous country.
PHILLIPS: It's not necessarily a danger zone every place you go.
WELLMAN: No, it's not. No, it's not.
And it's funny, because even our soldiers who are coming over now in the second wave, and you watch the news. And, of course, you're not going to report about nothing happened today. You're going to report about what happened. And so it provides -- I wouldn't say a false sense, but a belief that there is more going on, that there is more action going on than there really is. On the average day, our average day, there really wasn't going on.
And I was able to drive around and visit the villages quite safely. And I never had a problem. I never had a problem one time.
PHILLIPS: Finally, the battle flag, you got to tell folks about this.
(CROSSTALK)
WELLMAN: My most prized possession. As I was leaving to go to the airplane to fly out to Iraq, I went through my garage and I saw my old flag sitting there. And I grabbed it quickly and threw it in my bag and didn't think anything of it.
And when we got to Kuwait, I hung it on my truck and then over my headquarters. And as we went north, the flag flew the whole way until we got to Baghdad. And we all, of course, we removed our flags at that point. But you can see it's pretty tattered. We had a couple 50-mile-an-hour windstorms and it took a beating. But I've kept it -- I'm not going to wash it. I'm going to leave it the way it is.
PHILLIPS: I think you should, and frame it.
WELLMAN: This is probably my most valuable procession I got out of the war.
PHILLIPS: Well, I got to tell you, for more than a year, we've been in touch with you. You've brought us positive reports from Iraq, talked about the schools that you've built and how you've interacted with the children. It was a different side to this war. And we just appreciate you and we appreciate everything that you've shared with us. And we're glad you're home.
WELLMAN: Well, it's been a great experience, Kyra.
You gave me such an opportunity to tell the good news stories that going on in Iraq. It's not all bad news. And there is a lot of good work being done by your American soldiers. And I think the whole country should be proud of them. There's amazing real-life heroes every day working in Iraq serving their country. It's really something to be proud of.
PHILLIPS: And you're one of them, Major Fred Wellman. Thanks, Fred.
WELLMAN: Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
PHILLIPS: All right.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome home, Fred.
WELLMAN: Thank you very much.
PHILLIPS: Thanks for helping us with those pictures. I know, finally, we have got him in person.
O'BRIEN: I just pushed a few buttons. It was great. Enjoyed the story. Thanks for coming in.
WELLMAN: Thank you very much.
O'BRIEN: It's a pleasure.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired February 26, 2004 - 14:17 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Big news on Operation Fred front. Fred's home in LIVE FROM has got him right here.
And if you're a regular viewer, and we all know that you are, you're well acquainted with Major Fred Wellman, U.S. Army, 101st Airborne. Wellman had boots on the ground in Iraq for 11 months, in the process, making quite an impression. Operation Fred was and is his baby, a lifeline from donors in America to needy Iraqis, primarily children.
But he can he tell it better than we can, that and many other fascinating stories from his often dangerous, never boring deployment.
Welcome home.
MAJ. FRED WELLMAN, U.S. ARMY: Thank you very much, Kyra. It's great to be here. I appreciate it.
PHILLIPS: Well, I know your wife, Crystal (ph), and your four kids are thrilled that you're home, too.
WELLMAN: Yes. Yes. I guess it was kind of crazy last night. I was actually gone for the first time and it was a little crazy at the house last night.
PHILLIPS: She's calling, going, OK, is everything OK? Are you ready? You going to do the segment?
All right. You're here. You brought some -- a number of things with you. Let's get right to the posters and the booklet here, OK? And tell us about this.
WELLMAN: Well, we moved north steadily through the country and we got to an our base, Cairo West air base in Northern Iraq.
It was an abandoned Iraqi air base. And we spent quite a bit of time selecting our buildings we were going to live in and cleaning them up. and was one of the first guys to arrive up there from my unit. And we went through. We found quite a bit of interesting stuff.
This is some Iraqi training manuals, is what this is. It's, of course, a picture of our good friend, now a prisoner of war, and just lot of interesting stuff there. My favorite thing and probably my most prized possession that I got is, these are Iraqi air force safety posters that they had up on the walls. And can you as -- burned up. The building in there in the hospital had gotten burned up. So I acquired these and they're pretty nice.
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIPS: Those were instructions to the pilots on how to fly the MiG safely.
WELLMAN: Yes. Exactly. But kind of the funny thing about this poster is -- I'll have to bring it back up -- is notice that the pilot had a bird stripe but is being threatened to be beaten, which is not something we do in the American military. You don't have to worry about that too much in ours.
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIPS: No, that's interesting. It's how Saddam ruled.
WELLMAN: It's a different way of doing things.
PHILLIPS: All right, you became friends with a very special individual, Dr. Mohammed.
WELLMAN: Yes.
PHILLIPS: This was a gift from him.
WELLMAN: Yes. This is one of these. Just like -- I admired his -- I always called it his sheik hat as a joke.
And so, before I left, he gave me one of them because he had taken to calling me sheik Wellman, as if I was a sheik. And so he gave me one of my own little sheik hats. And so I brought that home with me. And it was a really great relationship.
PHILLIPS: And while we're looking at some pictures of him now, I want you to talk about Dr. Mohammed. This is someone who -- of course, that's one of his kids.
WELLMAN: I love that picture, yes.
PHILLIPS: And this was doctor in an area where kids had never had a checkup before. And you guys built a medical clinic for him.
WELLMAN: Yes.
It really worked out great. And I can't -- again, I don't like to take credit for a lot of this stuff that we did. I was kind of the point man for a lot of it. But it was actually -- we met Dr. Mohammed, who was the sheik of the local village.
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIPS: These are supplies that came in via Operation Fred.
WELLMAN: This is Operation Fred. And Mohammed is a great man. He is both a doctor and a sheik. And he had not been practicing medicine to any great extent for about 10 years when I met him. They couldn't afford to build a clinic in the village. So, when the Army got their civil affairs funds and started the ball rolling, we were able to build a clinic right there in his village. And it was pretty exciting.
PHILLIPS: And the school here? Of course, all the kids excited.
(CROSSTALK)
WELLMAN: Yes, that's the school. That was our first school we built there. We ended up building 23 schools, the 101st Aviation Brigade. My chain of command was terrific at that. So we built schools.
So when we went to these villages -- I personally visited probably about 40 of the local villages around our base. And consistently it was always the same thing. We need water and we need schools. We need food -- or, excuse me...
PHILLIPS: And shoes.
WELLMAN: And shoes, yes. Isn't that neat? That is a great -- that is pairs of shoes sent to me from my church in Peachtree City, Georgia. And that's almost 66 pairs of shoes.
PHILLIPS: That's incredible.
WELLMAN: Isn't it amazing.
PHILLIPS: So all the kids got new pairs of shoes.
WELLMAN: Yes. That's exactly what we did. And we distributed them out to the villages right around Christmastime. Aren't these kids cute?
PHILLIPS: You got some amazing pictures of these children. Did they just flock to you?
(CROSSTALK)
WELLMAN: Oh, yes.
PHILLIPS: How did they respond to you and the other soldiers?
WELLMAN: Well, it's great. And I got to know the kids very well. It's funny. When I first visited Dr. Mohammed in his village -- he has a sign. You saw the first picture of his baby. And I have of course children. And I missed my kids so bad.
And his kids look like mine. This is a great picture. And I told Mohammed, I miss my children. And he said, if any time you want to see children, you come visit us and my children are your children. So I became very close to all the kids. And I love kids. And it became like my second family out there. That's an interesting picture, too.
PHILLIPS: Now, moving in, moving away from the people, this is actually a shot -- this is your convoy, right?
WELLMAN: Yes. Yes. Yes.
PHILLIPS: And your close air support, your security above you. What happened here? This shows you never know when something is going to blow up around you.
WELLMAN: Yes, that's actually my Humvee there. It's one of our Black Hawks. A good friend of mine, Major Dan Gall (ph), took that picture.
And they were pulling aerial security forces. We moved south. This is our convoy out of Iraq the beginning -- middle of January. And we came upon that burning vehicle. I think it was a taxicab. I'm not sure if it was ambushed or what, but it made a pretty dramatic photo from the air.
PHILLIPS: Speaking of dramatic photos, this one, this has a story tied to it. You came across a number of tanks. And tell us about the license plate that you brought with you and the connection to another tank you came across.
WELLMAN: This is actually from an air defense weapon, one of their gun systems. It was kind of funny. I was driving down the road one day and I saw these guys standing there inspecting this vehicle. I said, man, what are these guys doing here? It was my boss. I said, oh, it's my boss.
It's upside down. And we went over and inspected. And this was on the back. You see it took a beating, like most of the weapon system we found
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIPS: I can see the bullet holes.
WELLMAN: Yes. This was taken out by probably an A-10, one of our jets.
PHILLIPS: Wow.
WELLMAN: And it's just kind of a nice little souvenir. Can't hand it to kids. It's kind of sharp.
But we found a lot of the weapons. And amazing, in our area, there just wasn't that much of that kind of stuff. In Northern Iraq, there hadn't been a lot that kind of fighting out near Mosul. So...
PHILLIPS: And as you were doing a lot of flying -- I know that we have got some other pictures here of when you were airborne. Tell our viewers. A lot of them know that have seen this segment with you. You're a helo pilot.
WELLMAN: Isn't this beautiful?
PHILLIPS: A lot of myths about Iraq.
WELLMAN: Yes.
PHILLIPS: There's a lot of beautiful parts of the country.
WELLMAN: Gorgeous country.
PHILLIPS: It's not necessarily a danger zone every place you go.
WELLMAN: No, it's not. No, it's not.
And it's funny, because even our soldiers who are coming over now in the second wave, and you watch the news. And, of course, you're not going to report about nothing happened today. You're going to report about what happened. And so it provides -- I wouldn't say a false sense, but a belief that there is more going on, that there is more action going on than there really is. On the average day, our average day, there really wasn't going on.
And I was able to drive around and visit the villages quite safely. And I never had a problem. I never had a problem one time.
PHILLIPS: Finally, the battle flag, you got to tell folks about this.
(CROSSTALK)
WELLMAN: My most prized possession. As I was leaving to go to the airplane to fly out to Iraq, I went through my garage and I saw my old flag sitting there. And I grabbed it quickly and threw it in my bag and didn't think anything of it.
And when we got to Kuwait, I hung it on my truck and then over my headquarters. And as we went north, the flag flew the whole way until we got to Baghdad. And we all, of course, we removed our flags at that point. But you can see it's pretty tattered. We had a couple 50-mile-an-hour windstorms and it took a beating. But I've kept it -- I'm not going to wash it. I'm going to leave it the way it is.
PHILLIPS: I think you should, and frame it.
WELLMAN: This is probably my most valuable procession I got out of the war.
PHILLIPS: Well, I got to tell you, for more than a year, we've been in touch with you. You've brought us positive reports from Iraq, talked about the schools that you've built and how you've interacted with the children. It was a different side to this war. And we just appreciate you and we appreciate everything that you've shared with us. And we're glad you're home.
WELLMAN: Well, it's been a great experience, Kyra.
You gave me such an opportunity to tell the good news stories that going on in Iraq. It's not all bad news. And there is a lot of good work being done by your American soldiers. And I think the whole country should be proud of them. There's amazing real-life heroes every day working in Iraq serving their country. It's really something to be proud of.
PHILLIPS: And you're one of them, Major Fred Wellman. Thanks, Fred.
WELLMAN: Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
PHILLIPS: All right.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome home, Fred.
WELLMAN: Thank you very much.
PHILLIPS: Thanks for helping us with those pictures. I know, finally, we have got him in person.
O'BRIEN: I just pushed a few buttons. It was great. Enjoyed the story. Thanks for coming in.
WELLMAN: Thank you very much.
O'BRIEN: It's a pleasure.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
