This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find disturbing and very strong language.
CHILDREN CHEER
May 2003.
In the weeks following the invasion of Iraq,
American troops were welcomed onto the streets of Baghdad.
No Saddam. No Saddam.
That sense of joy was a definite truth.
Now, the question is - how long did it last?
And that was not long.
Iraq was in absolute chaos.
What's been going on here?
A fucking war's going on.
GUNSHOTS
The regime of Saddam Hussein is no more.
America's more secure.
The world is more peaceful.
And the long-suffering people of Iraq are now free.
The politicians have had their say.
The evidence about Saddam having actual biological
and chemical weapons has turned out to be wrong.
In this series, the story of the Iraq War
is told by the civilians, journalists and soldiers
who lived through the 2003 invasion
and the years of chaos that continue to this day.
Through their eyes,
we'll see how events in Iraq have changed the world.
Ultimately, war -
it's a kind of laboratory of the human condition in extremis.
YELLING
You see the best of people and you see the worst.
You see moments of incredible heroism,
and also hatred and irresponsibility.
You know, I think back to Iraq 2003 kind of as the best year
and worst year of my life.
When I got back, I mean, my kids didn't know me
and I didn't know them. At all.
It was weird being back here.
Yeah, and I didn't do good with the reintegration.
I mean, you drive on a highway,
all I could think about for a while was waiting for the IED blast.
And I'm driving, this guy comes around
and totally gives me the finger, and I swear to God,
if I'd had my 9mm, I would have blown his brains out right there.
It would've taken me two seconds.
I was out of control, man.
And I'll never fire a weapon again.
Ever.
Protect and strengthen this band of brothers
as we endeavour to do your will.
A month after the invasion, there were 150,000 US troops across Iraq.
It is for you that we battle.
Lt Col Nate Sassaman led a battalion of almost 1,000 soldiers.
Send along your congratulations to Sgt Howard, as well.
OK, men, that's all I got. You guys are doing a great job.
Yeah, I'm good, I'm there.
I'm right there.
I'm back in Iraq right now.
I rarely go back there.
And frankly, I don't talk about it at all. Ever.
Unless I'm with a veteran.
Nate Sassaman, son of a Methodist minister, star quarterback,
total star in the Army, destined to be a general.
Sassaman was the most impressive officer I met in Iraq.
Dexter Filkins covered the Iraq War for the New York Times.
He wrote about Sassaman's year-long tour.
What Sassaman, I think, experienced was perfect microcosm
for what happened in the war at large.
Hi, I'm Lt Col Nate Sassaman,
former West Point quarterback for 1984,
and the battalion commander for 1st Battalion 8th Infantry Regiment
serving here in Balad, Iraq.
I'd like to introduce you to my special friend...
I seem to be a likeable fella.
I kind of wanted to meet everybody.
How about a little raki coffee here to go with my prayers?
I knew virtually almost nothing on Iraq and the Muslim culture,
as a commander who then got to control
one of the main provinces in the country of Iraq.
Yeah.
In the early days, I actually think we were trying to go in there
and make it right for the folks.
Get some stability.
We would be doing the noble thing of helping reconstruct this country.
This place is Adhamiyah District.
First of all, it's a very old district here in Baghdad.
Second of all, it's very, very public...
After the invasion, things were changing so fast.
Like, you turn from a kid into...
..someone that has to be rigid, cold, you know,
and it's like, just to survive.
Waleed Nesyif lived in Baghdad and was 18 when the war started.
As an English speaker,
he managed to secure a job as a translator for foreign journalists.
We're going to go now for a very, very public place,
so we have to be careful, OK?
One of the things that I used to do is basically drive around the city.
Take a journalist with me and we'd just drive around.
It's a ghost town...
..that is destroyed - either by bombs or looting.
And then Iraqis were under this impression, it's like,
"OK, this is the greatest power in the world.
"They're going to come and rebuild everything in, like, months."
Month one passed, there's still no electricity, there's still no water.
Baghdad became like a city of garbage.
You know, like, even during Saddam's time, man,
like, I remember Baghdad was clean.
There was sanitation. And now, it's just like...
And you're meant to continue functioning as a sane human being.
Six weeks after the invasion,
George W Bush landed on an aircraft carrier off the coast of San Diego.
Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.
In the Battle of Iraq, the United States
and our allies have prevailed.
CHEERING
"Mission accomplished."
Yeah?
Seriously?
And now, our coalition is engaged in securing
and reconstructing that country.
That was the time, again, when people started questioning.
You know, it was like, "OK, well, since mission is accomplished
"and everything is good right now, when is security going to be there?"
Because there is no security.
GUNSHOTS
You know, all this by American support.
It happen by the American support.
People started taking matters within their own hands, right?
So, for instance,
security starting being imposed by the people of the neighbourhood.
EXPLOSION
Everybody had a gun.
Strange car comes in, it's like, "Who the fuck are you?
"What do you want? Who are you coming to visit?"
Americans will pass by, they didn't really give a shit.
I remember this image, literally, of a guy with a donkey
pulling a cart with Katyusha rocket launcher on it.
Just driving on the street, you know,
and the Americans passing by, "Hello."
What is he going to do with it?
Use it or sell it, right?
Simple things are what we were asking for.
Very simple.
Dignity, electricity, and some semblance of security.
These things, had they happened,
Iraqis would not have reacted in the way they did to the American Army.
The Star-Spangled Banner
OK, please be seated. We'll have a few words from Col Sassaman.
I pray for a lot of things every day.
But mostly, I pray for wisdom.
I pray for wisdom...
There's this euphoria feeling that, wow, you're in a foreign land...
..we got a bunch of forces here, we've got a mission.
You know, what is my... What is...
You know, how am I going to make...
..the best progress
in this 750 sq km area that I've been given as my area of operation?
Sassaman's battalion was stationed just over 50 miles
north of Baghdad, in the city of Balad.
It's right there in the heart of the Sunni Triangle.
We're smack dab in the middle, and this is our home now for the next...
..for the next year.
On a map, if you start with Baghdad
and go out to basically the Jordanian border,
and then up to Mosul, and then down the Tigris,
it looks like a triangle.
That's where... That's where the majority of the Sunnis are.
Saddam Hussein was born in the Sunni Triangle.
Sassaman and his men found themselves
amongst his most ardent supporters.
How you doing?
That, I think, is like the first time
I accepted an invitation from a sheikh.
Trying to, like, set up some kind of dialogue.
Right here?
It was believed that if the Army won the hearts and minds
of the Iraqi people, that security, democracy,
and the reconstruction efforts would all fall into place.
The way I was winning hearts and minds
was engaging with you in dialogue.
I don't know, I was always trying to find some common ground
and to talk to the sheikhs or the leaders.
Frank, can you get it... Can you get it any closer to me, Frank?
That's what I want to know.
All the soldiers that I was talking to, they said,
"You've got to spend some time with Col Sassaman."
Like, "He's the guy."
And you could tell he had kind of a wider view of the war.
It's my job, along with the sheikhs, to maintain the peace
so that we can rebuild Iraq with dollars.
Along with everything else, we want to be able to get electricity
to everybody all the time.
The Iraqis, like, loved him.
They were, like, gathering around him.
He was incredibly charismatic.
If there's any country in the world that needs a little peace,
it's right here in Iraq.
They quickly realised I enjoy a Coca-Cola.
And I would hold it up and I would go,
"Man, what a great world we live in."
That, like, a Judeo-Christian white man
can come over into your country and we can drink Coke together.
Now, I thought that was funny, I don't think they did as much.
You can see in the video, there's some sceptical dudes in that group.
There was kind of like this, "What just happened?"
It's kind of like the Martians have just landed.
You know, we were trying to do some reconstruction
for the local clinics.
I can remember the first one I went to in that area,
and I'm telling you, the woman running it
had to have been 50 or 60. She was hard as woodpecker lips.
She goes, "I don't want any of your stuff. I don't want you here.
"I want you to go back to the United States.
"I never want to see you again."
That's my first personal effort to reconstruct the area.
They were not interested in the Americans being there
and whatever we were bringing for reconstruction.
And they were definitely not interested in hearts and minds.
In May, George W Bush's presidential envoy arrived.
Paul Bremer was appointed to oversee reconstruction
and implement democracy in Iraq.
He was to become the most powerful man in the country.
We're not here to be a colonial power.
We're here to help turn over, as quickly as we can
efficiently do it, to the Iraqi people their country.
Thank you very much.
Within days of his arrival,
Bremer issued two orders that would irreversibly change Iraq's future.
Saddam Hussein was a truly evil man.
And those who were on high before - in particular the Ba'athists,
who used their power to repress the Iraqi people -
will be removed from office.
Shortly, I will issue an order on measures to extirpate
Ba'athists and Ba'athism from Iraq forever.
They did this whole sham of the de-Ba'athification.
You've got to go and renounce the Ba'ath Party
so you can basically re-engage.
But I was a Ba'athist.
And I was. Everyone in Iraq was Ba'athist.
You cannot not be a Ba'athist.
It's like... It's basically saying no to Saddam.
And who's going to say no to Saddam?
Like, everybody was in the Ba'ath Party, you know?
If you were a school principal, you joined the Ba'ath Party.
If you were a teacher, you joined the Ba'ath Party.
Iraq was a functioning, sophisticated,
middle-class society, and it essentially gutted the Iraqi state.
It just put all those people on the street.
I haven't any money. Do you have a family?
Do you have children?
Yes, I have, a big family. 11. 11.
11 persons.
The de-Ba'athification was the crippling blow
to the reconstruction.
Not only does the whole country come to a standstill
because the teachers can't teach, the hospitals are shutting down,
I mean, we're not letting anybody do their job,
because they have a Ba'athist card.
Who's going to reconstruct the country? Me?
Me and my soldiers, are we going to?
We're going to be the guys to...
..to restore power and teach the kids?
And set up the police stations?
We're not staying there for the rest of our lives,
so it has to be the guys who have the Ba'athist cards.
Soon afterwards, Bremer issued order number two -
to dissolve the entire Iraqi military
that was seen by many as loyal to Saddam.
SOLDIERS CHANT
This meant there were another 400,000 men out of work.
Every family in Iraq had an army personnel in it, you know,
this was our salaries, this was their job.
This is the only thing that they knew, like, my father being one.
Here's my dad.
Assalaamu alaikum.
THEY CONVERSE IN ARABIC
Erm...
Colonel.
He was a colonel in the army.
CONVERSES IN ARABIC
So you have people like my father, who spent all of his life
serving in the army.
He knew nothing but that.
Now, all of a sudden, you have hundreds of thousands
of individuals with actual skills,
abundance of weapons, abundance.
What I just remember is the streets had been lined
with hundreds if not thousands of young men.
And they couldn't support their families.
I mean...
Oh, man.
You need to help us. I don't need to help you with shit.
Get away from me. Let's go.
THEY CONVERSE IN ARABIC
A lot of young, bearded, man-robed folks that were not happy.
VEHICLE HORNS BLARE
They're not, like, older generation people.
These are the most physically able men in Iraq.
And they're from a long lineage of warriors
who have fought for centuries to protect their homeland there.
Dude, their country's not 200 years old.
We set up the perfect conditions.
It's the perfect storm for an insurgency.
HE SIGHS
So, in the beginning, the insurgency was overwhelmingly,
almost exclusively driven by the Sunni Arabs.
The Sunni Triangle, that was the epicentre of the insurgency.
We knew we were going to be attacked.
Wasn't a matter of if, it was when.
We started seeing a lot of different insurgency cells attacking us.
They started in July, and once the fight started,
I think we started averaging about seven or eight a day.
Guidons, guidons, guidons.
This is Eagle Six,
and welcome to the Friday night Fighting Eagle FM update.
EXPLOSIONS
So you might have small arms, mortars,
IEDs or a combination thereof.
Three to four mortar rounds were reported
as to landing within the vicinity.
We have 18 soldiers who are wounded.
I had some folks that were wounded early on, you know, badly.
Yeah, you know you're in it. I was always like, never underestimate...
I've always been
a never underestimate your enemy type of guy.
I don't care if they're running around in, like,
black pyjamas or rags,
and they're, you know, they're not outfitted.
It's their land, it's their territory, it's their turf.
HELICOPTER BLADES WHIR
During the summer, the fledgling insurgency
spread from the Sunni Triangle to cities across the country.
Waleed witnessed the aftermath of one of the first insurgent attacks
on American forces in Baghdad.
In fact, we're going for Haifa Street in order to do
a follow up for a story
of an explosion happened for a Humvee for the...
I remember going and doing this story.
There is an attack near an American Humvee
but then kids were there and they all got basically
shredded by shrapnel, some of them died, some of them survived.
And something happened that just fucked me up that day
for a long, long time.
WALEED SPEAKS ARABIC
Waleed visited the families three weeks after the attack.
The whole casualties of this was 17 child, 5 of them get killed.
And 12 of them were injured.
A girl lost her eye.
Completely lost her eye.
This is the child.
She lost her eye.
Hello.
WOMAN WEEPS
Alaa...
OK.
WOMAN SHRIEKS
That's it.
Her daughter was seriously injured in this attack.
They were in the street.
WOMAN WAILS
WOMAN WEEPS
FOOTAGE PLAYS
Ai...
This generation have seen absolutely nothing but this now.
If I was lucky enough to live throughout the '80s and the '90s,
where we had some semblance of security,
safety, we had fun with our friends and all of that,
these kids have seen absolutely nothing.
I mean, that girl represents the beginning of the end...
..for me.
In a sense, that marked to me, like, the destruction of the country
from... in a way that made it irreparable.
The country was disintegrating and getting darker by the day.
And then we would go in and listen to Bremer tell us how good it was.
We have met all of our goals in restoring essential services.
All the schools and hospitals are open.
Electricity is back at pre-war levels.
We're moving ahead with our plan.
Increasingly over time,
it bore absolutely no relationship to reality.
Like, at all. It was like Alice in Wonderland.
The overall thrust is in the right direction and good days outnumber
the bad days, and that's the thing we need to keep in perspective.
Every day, Iraq is making progress.
Every day, Iraq draws closer to the free
and functioning society its people were long denied,
and we will complete the great work we have begun.
The moment when I realised that we were in a situation that we
probably couldn't get out of, was the morning of...
..it was in October,
it was the first day of Ramadan in 2003.
There was a double suicide car bomb attack
on the International Committee of the Red Cross.
CHAOTIC DIN
SIRENS WAIL
I mean, we got there minutes after the bombs went off, enormous bombs.
It was a horrible situation and I remember standing in the rubble
as people were kind of sobbing and wailing over the bodies
and the body parts that they were finding.
But hearing five other car bombs go off
within the space of about three minutes.
Get back!
And I just thought, you know, "Jesus," you know.
"This is hell, this is hell on Earth."
MAN SHOUTS IN ARABIC
ALARM WAILS
This place is the most dangerous place in Iraq, you know.
I'm asking all the Americans here, or in America or Mr Bush,
because sooner or later we will hate Mr Bush, you know.
Because he is not trying to help civilian people.
Stay out here.
Why? Why?
We were very safe when Saddam was here.
What happen now?
The attacks spiked in the October, November time period.
Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.
DEAFENING EXPLOSION
The RPGs and the IEDs, those are all pretty good weapons of terror.
LOUD EXPLOSION
Those things are ruthless.
I mean, it's terrifying, it's paralysing.
It's a paralysing fear.
Allahu Akbar.
LOUD EXPLOSION
After a while, I would start patrolling in the Bradley
with my fingers inside the cupola -
I just didn't want to lose my fingers.
Isn't that funny?
I was always afraid my fingers were going to get blown away.
Despite his men being attacked daily,
Sassaman continued to meet local leaders.
He even took the initiative to set up elections
for the Balad Town Council.
Lots of photos, everybody's having fun.
It's fun, it's exciting.
The whole idea was to like, you know,
get this institution of, you know, political reform.
I mean, this was like, people were walking for miles
to, like, cast their ballot.
We may have been the first area
that ran the first democratic elections in Iraq.
They were, like, hungry to govern themselves
and not to be stomped on all of the time, and you could tell.
It was amazing, it was amazing.
It was moving. I was moved by it.
It was, like, so exciting and you could feel that they had never...
..they just never had that opportunity to vote,
where they could have a voice.
And this is, this is, this is the core of being a human.
Having a voice in where you live.
Does that sound naive? No.
OK.
Witnessing that scene, I thought, well, God,
if we can do this everywhere, you know, maybe it'll work.
There's the colonel with Hannah and Hashique.
They're ready for another picture.
So it was basically the effort to build an Iraqi state,
and at the same time, this growing insurgency
which threatens the whole thing.
And it was like, you could see it,
it was both of those things were co-existing at the same time
and they were in a race with each other.
You know, which one of these was going to win?
The problem is, we'd have the sheikh meeting and then that night,
they're picking up their weapons and fighting us.
It's like, come on, man. HE CHUCKLES
LOUD EXPLOSION
Another attack in broad daylight.
In one of the most volatile parts of the country.
Burning wreckage on the horizon and more American dead.
This, the latest of a string of attacks in and around Fallujah,
a killing ground for US troops.
You know, there were units in other places that were just
getting their teeth handed to them through softer tactics,
and some of those units got hurt bad.
That was not how I wanted to run the battalion.
If anyone shot at one of our soldiers,
I was going to do absolutely everything in my power to
make sure that was going to be their last day on the face of the Earth.
And I went to extraordinary lengths to make sure that happened.
You've got to meet aggression with controlled violence.
A lot of people will say violence leads to more violence.
I'll tell you that controlled violence leads to no more violence.
Yesterday, they fired from north west.
SOLDIER CHEERS
There was a large proportion of attacks that were emanating
out of this area.
And guess what?
The attacks went down.
Sassaman's battalion had yet to suffer a fatal casualty.
His aggressive tactics to quell the insurgency
were endorsed by the US Army's most high-ranking officers.
We had three- and four-star generals coming through on a regular basis.
There's only ten four-stars in the entire army, you know,
and we had several come through,
to say, "Look at the model of progress these guys
"have worked through."
First thing is that I'm absolutely proud of you all,
all of you, and what you've done.
What I don't want you to do is to lose your edge,
and to remember that, you know, that there are still bad guys out there,
and that you've got to remain balanced and aggressive,
and, er, to keep your head up.
But you're... you've just done magnificently.
My standard was, everyone was going to come back alive.
But, you know, the plan is great, and it's like Mike Tyson -
the plan is great till somebody hits you in the face,
and then, you know, the plan kind of changes.
5406.
On 17th November, Sassaman's men were patrolling
a few miles outside of Balad in Abu Hishma.
Abu Hishma's hardcore Sunni, dudes want to fight all the time.
But it's a little, sleepy village.
Yeah, there are some bad things that go down there.
And that's when, and that's when, um...
..Staff Sergeant Dale Panchot is killed,
in what's pretty much the most sophisticated ambush I think we saw,
which was launched with a volley of RPGs, eight or nine.
Staff Sergeant Dale Panchot, I mourn him as a brother.
I will always have a special place in my heart for Dale Panchot.
God bless him and his family.
There is no greater honour than to lead men and women in combat.
But there is no sense of greater failure than to come home...
..with men on your command that died.
Please rise for roll call.
Private Short. Here, First Sergeant.
Specialist Hamilton.
Here, First Sergeant.
Sergeant Panchot.
Staff Sergeant Dale Panchot.
Staff Sergeant Dale A Panchot.
Last Post
I think 17 November would be an accurate date, 2003,
to say when, er, some of my optimism went away.
This is where Dale Panchot was killed,
just on the outskirts of Abu Hishma.
Yeah, Dale was killed right there.
Hell, yeah, baby!
Burn, motherfucker, burn.
We cleared a square mile of palm trees,
so it couldn't be used again to attack.
That was fucking sweet!
Yeah!
It's just weird, James, because I'm just,
I'm just back in the fight, dude.
I'm just back, I'm back there. I'm like... I'm back.
Rashid Al Hishmawi comes from a family of farmers in Abu Hishma.
Things got real Draconian after that.
We, like, barbed-wired the entire village.
So, we wired them in, with curfews,
and they had to have an ID card to leave and come back in.
We would not have done that if Dale hadn't died.
It was more of just like punishment and retribution for the attacks
that they had been committing on American forces.
DOG BARKS
I was driving around the Sunni Triangle.
We came across Abu Hishma.
I remember Dexter as saying, "Some colonel is doing, like,
"Israeli tactics, and I think we should go and do a story on it."
There's nothing funny about what happened at Abu Hishma at all.
Ashley Gilbertson photographed the war
on assignment for the New York Times.
God, it was so fucked up.
The tactics of wrapping a town in barbed wire
imprisoned an entire Iraqi population in their own homes.
"It was like, "Whoa, what is going on here?" you know?
So, there were signs that said, "If you cross this fence,
"you'll be shot."
I didn't want to put up with any kind of resistance to us.
We were the law.
Man, what are you going to do? Are you going to do this
to every village? You know, are you going to do this to Baghdad?
Like, what are you doing? You know, this is crazy.
And this, I found really troubling.
This is a guy who's having his ID made.
I can only imagine what that must do
to the civilian...occupants of that town - their town.
20357.
Sassaman was enraged.
Sassaman was...feared in the area.
We're having to drop a bomb right now for...
..for where they shot at us yesterday.
Five-minute window, sir. They want to drop it now.
OK. We're good.
MISSILE WHIZZES
MISSILE EXPLODES
We were trying to eliminate all these different threats.
The rules of engagement were such that, "You can smoke them."
"You can take them out."
This is one of the houses that was destroyed by Sassaman,
er, in an air strike.
Did you have to deal with civilians that had been killed?
Yeah.
Yeah, we dealt with the first one in Abu Hishma, which was...
..which was, which was,
which was...it was devastating.
Um, you know, it wasn't an attack on their family compound,
it was on targets, but the meteorological data
hadn't been updated, so the rounds fell short.
You know, it's just, I don't know,
it's got to be that way in all of the history of warfare.
That's...that's...that's part of when you push the button
and decide we're going somewhere, that, um...
Yeah, the folks of that land are going to...
There's going to be suffering.
There's going to be a lot of pain and suffering.
GUNSHOTS
Good morning, dickheads. Wake up!
Ladies, get out of the way.
Move out of the way.
Yeah, you fucking speaking English, too, don't you, you little prick?
HE RESPONDS IN HIS OWN LANGUAGE
AMERICAN MIMICS PRISONER Yeah, fuck you, too.
You speak English, and I know you speak English,
and I'm not your boyfriend, so don't smile at me.
Yeah, they took all the guys away, you know, zip-cuffed them.
This is not just futile, this is, er, this is a catastrophe.
The company jail.
Say hello to everyone back home! Hello! Hi.
Oh, he loves America. Awww, isn't that sweet?!
They spend all day in the prison cells,
so they need to get out and do some stretching.
One, two, three.
Not too often they see rain, huh? Probably not.
HE SIGHS
This is tough. I watch that clip, I'm like...
Is this something you find sort of
personally a bit troubling?
Yeah.
Just set up for some friction there, and dehumanising kind of deals.
Yeah, yeah. On your knees. On your knees. Come on! Get down!
These tactics weren't limited to Sassaman's battalion.
No. Down. Get down!
MAN GROANS IN PAIN
Other American forces were doing the same across the country.
Get...down.
This is not liberation activity, it's not peacekeeping,
rebuilding, no. It's an all-out war.
They were just hardcore.
American forces had difficulties distinguishing insurgents from
civilians, so the order was to treat everyone as a potential threat.
We went in for some night raids.
There was no discrimination.
They went to every house and, man, they did not knock.
BANGING
You know, they'd go in there and they'd just tear the house up,
like, looking for guns.
Outside!
That was happening across the Sunni Triangle
several times a night.
You know, in villages everywhere, every night.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
Hey, lay the BLEEP down.
Lay the BLEEP down. Lay down. Lay the BLEEP down! Lay down!
FEMALE SOBS
Then three times in a week, you have 40 men go through your house,
go through your wife's underwear drawer.
SHE WAILS
It's humiliating.
PEOPLE SHOUT IN OWN LANGUAGE
SHE SOBS
Every day, all over the country at any given time,
there were doors being kicked in,
there were guys being dragged outside, detained, taken away.
There is humiliation, degradation.
We don't have jobs, we don't have security,
we don't have anything, and now you come and you break down our homes?!
Iraq is a very tribal, patriarchal country.
You know, our honour is represented by those whom we protect.
You know, atop of which stands our women.
And it's also a society in which you are obligated to avenge
a wrong or a humiliation.
You are absolutely required to do that.
Anyone who was not a member of the insurgency
when you went into that village
would sure as hell be a member of the insurgency by the time you left.
You took this tiny insurgency, uh, tiny in the beginning,
and then just, you know, like pumped it up.
It was like a wildfire. You know, it was everywhere.
We make some...calamitous mistakes.
You're making folks enemies for life,
like that.
Fire in the hole!
SHE LAUGHS
SPEAKS TEARFULLY IN OWN LANGUAGE
SHE SOBS
Sassaman and his men were placed in an impossible situation.
They didn't speak the language, they were surrounded by a population
that loathed them, and their mission was to, like,
bring order and, like, build a democracy, or build a new state.
Like... Good luck, man. You know?
So we deal with Dale's death...
And then I got orders to take the battalion to Samara.
Samara, 80 miles north of Baghdad, had a largely Sunni population.
Saddam Hussein had been captured in December 2003...
MACHINE-GUN FIRE
..which led to an upsurge in violence against US forces.
PEOPLE CHANT
Now I was going to have to pick up the battalion
and go up to this place,
because the unit up there couldn't get it done.
"Send Sassaman."
Yeah. Send Sassaman.
The only reason we were asked to go up there is
cos we were aggressive, so it was like...
Showdown.
Samara, for too long, has been pushing folks around,
and terrorising it, and it ends... it ends this morning.
The soldiers blew their way into house after house,
each door pushed in by a quarter pound of plastic explosive.
Samara's completely out of control.
They openly defied American authority.
So what day is today? It's Christmas. It's Christmas.
And so, what's the mission... AUDIO FADES OUT
# Holy night... #
Yeah, so Christmas in Samara was not where I thought
we would spend Christmas.
The missions sucked and the people hated us.
We hunkered down in this warehouse.
# Round yon virgin mother and child
# Holy infant so tender... #
Dude, it was chaos, man. With guys who want to fight.
We were in a godforsaken place, and I'm clearly on the dark side now.
When I say going over to the dark side,
I get really focused on combat operations.
Are you more dangerous?
Yeah. We were... Yeah, we were lethal.
What do you do if you're Colonel Sassaman?
You, like, take the gloves off,
and you kill more people.
He lost it. You know?
Man, he like, spun out of control, you know?
Nobody's getting away with nothing.
GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS
It was akin to killing an ant with a sledgehammer.
They were going to disappear.
You're surrounded by this death.
Not just death, but then this...just carnage.
HE WAILS
What I hoped to believe,
all in the name of giving the Iraqi people an opportunity for a...
..for a better... For a better deal for them.
But, man, sometimes it's hard to see that.
My whole experience over months with Colonel Sassaman was,
it was a kind of descent,
but it was totally clear that that was the kind of logical progression
of where things were headed, you know?
And not just with him, but like everywhere.
It was becoming more violent everywhere, everywhere.
GUNFIRE, SHOUTING
And so, it became this kind of psychotic, bloodthirsty, you know...
"Begin the apocalypse of Iraq."
GUNFIRE
Once you think that you've hit that threshold of, OK,
this is the bottom now, we've reached it...
..obviously things are going to get better.
But no, got worse and worse and worse and worse and worse.
CAR HORNS
In 2004, Nate Sassaman was officially reprimanded
after some of his men were convicted
for the assault of two Iraqi detainees.
A year later, he retired from the army.
You know, I'm retired military. I had the...
..just the honour to lead over 1,000 men and women in combat,
and lucky us, we got to be right in the middle of the Sunni Triangle,
so it was really exciting.
I had about five years of leadership experiences packed into about
13... 12, 13 months.
Do you consider yourself a leader?
I like just to say I teach leadership. Yeah, I really
enjoy being in the classroom. I have a passion for people, you can see.
It's relationship-based leadership. You got to know your people.
You got to know each other.
As I sit here now 16 years later, I'm still trapped,
commanding my battalion in Iraq, and I can't get out of it.
HE SIGHS
It's not a physical fight, it's a mental fight now.
Trucks, as far as you can see.
And there comes the new guys!
Sad for them.
Two little kids wandering by.
You know what, the kids were great.
The kids were great.
Right now we've got a whole...
Kids just want to be kids, and we robbed those kids of that.
We did.
We did that.
We did that when we pressed that button and we put everybody...
And that's just...that's just it.
War as an institution is pure evil.
It's pure evil. But I just...
You know, this is really the sole reason I'm sitting
in this chair, is that when we get to 2038,
and there's a whole nother generation of lawmakers,
instead of us rushing into things, I feel like we rushed so badly,
that we sit back and we go through a whole bunch of other options
before we set the force in action,
because once the force is put into action, you can't pull it back.
SHOUTING AND SCREAMING ON VIDEO
LOUD SCREAM
SHE SNIFFS
SHE CRIES
Fallujah was bad from the beginning.
It had become, like, a giant car bomb factory.
Every time I look at the number of deaths,
I see that one of those guys died because of a decision that I made.
I'm here today because another man died.