So, and I want to ask all of you this, what is your assessment? What was your assessment about the insurgency? How effective was it? You've all painted a picture of a constant atmosphere of danger. It was very effective. And the thing they have us beat at is the human intelligence side. Maybe you can speak more to this. But they can use cruel and unusual methods in order to extract information from people that we couldn't use. There's sort of this torture that word is getting thrown around. Well, the true torture is when you behead innocent civilians and throw them on the side of the road, which we came up on more than once. That's how they get their message across. It's very effective at holding the Iraqi people in oppression. Same as what Saddam did. Except now we got a different enemy and different people holding the Iraqi people down. And Greg Baumgartner, you also speak Arabic. A little. Well, probably more than the rest of us. So, probably gave you a particular insight
into the insurgency and how it was regarded by the rest of the population and how effective it was and why. I think that their insurgency is very effective. And I think, especially through their use of intimidation, we would go into a particular area in a convoy or in a patrol or on a raid. And we would see people on the street who we would approach and talk to, but they would shy away. They'd take a step back. They'd begin looking at other people in the crowd. And we knew that there were insurgents in the crowd we were talking to, influencing them right in front of us. And they're not armed. They're not wearing a uniform that says, I'm an insurgent. So, it's very difficult to determine who that person is. And then once you do, can you arrest them? They haven't done anything. Sam, I've seen you nodding as Greg was talking. Yeah, and I agree with a lot of it. And one of the biggest things is the anonymity. We would have people that they go into a crowd. They come out of the crowd.
They shoot at us and they go back into the crowd. And you don't know who has a gun. You don't know who had a gun. You don't know this or that. So that is one of the things that they have going with them. But I thought that I thought was very frustrating was the fact that one of my Marines was one of the Marines that was in my unit. He was killed by an IED. And as his vehicle, the IED exploded on it, the vehicle in the rear saw these two people on the side of the road and then these two people running off. So they automatically reacted and went over there and detained these people. But the only way that they could really tell that as a person that did it is they took them back to the site where they actually exploded the IED and they matched his footprints up. How much interaction did you, Patrick Resta ,as a medic have with the insurgency? What was your view of how effective
they were? I went on patrols in the town surrounding my village pretty regularly. It was clear to me that at least some people had infiltrated the Iraqi security forces. I was teaching a first aid class. And I remember introducing myself and then I asked, you know, who in the class had had any kind of first aid training before. And it was a class of about 30 and about 20 of them raised their hands. And when I asked where they said there were in Saddam's security forces and in his military. So it was clear to me that no one had done any background checks on any of these individuals. And then to go into the towns and have roadside bombs planted regularly. Obviously people are seeing who's digging the holes, wiring these things, burying them. And our camp attacked regularly from inside the towns, having mortars fired at us. And no one would help us out or tell us who was behind the attacks, even though it was obvious. It's all of us that they knew who was doing it. How much interaction did you have with everyday Iraqi people? And I know you don't speak Arabic, but to what degree could you gauge
how they really felt about the U.S.? The U.S. first of all coming in and toppling Saddam and then the U.S. staying on? I think obviously no one is going to complain about Saddam being gone. Obviously he was an evil person, but I think the war was sold to them as kind of a drive-through toppling of Saddam. And obviously that's not what happened. My unit got there replacing a unit that had been there for a year. And all the locals knew we were going to be there for a year also. And they saw this as kind of an ongoing thing that would go on for several years. And that's not what they want. Craig Baumgartner, what was your... I assume you talked to a lot of Iraqi citizens given your language ability. There was a small portion of Ramadi, a place called Tameem. And it had a lot of teachers, a lot of more educated people, a little more diverse, some Kurds, some Shia, but mostly Sunni area. And these people, especially the teachers, you would go into their homes and we'd be searching for weapons or something like that. And sometimes they'd offer us tea and be very, you know,
his hospitable, just like most Arab people are. And they would say, you must stay. Please tell President Bush, tell your commanders you have to stay because you're the only thing that's keeping us from these former regime elements who are pretty much in control of the area. And then other people on the street would openly shout vulgarities in English, a lot of, you know, a lot of real hostile anti-American, anti-Semitic graffiti downtown. So it runs the gamut even in a place like Ramadi. But by and large, my feeling from the people in Ramadi where they didn't want us there and the people that did were afraid to say it in the open because of, again, because of that intimidation campaign at the end. Ben Flanders, what was your experience on that score? Well, I didn't have that much interaction with the Iraqi people. But I think the most interesting thing was the interpreter that lived inside of our company compound.
And I sort of talked to him about, what about this occupation period? And he became somewhat angry with that term occupation. He's like, what are you guys taking? All you do is give. I mean, he sees the headlines. He sees how much money we're sending into Iraq. And, you know, he doesn't see it as us robbing them so that we can take the land or we can take the oil and things like that. So he was very appreciative of our presence there. If I may interrupt, I think people like that at least in the area I was in were definitely in a minority. Most of the people that we kind of interacted with were very displeased because when we came into Ramadi and set up, we took all the best facilities. We took both of the palaces that were in that area. We had already shut down the local factory, the only glass factory in Ramadi, the only real economic engine in the whole city. And they saw us, the people I interacted with, saw us very much as takers instead of givers. They saw us as being responsible for the water being off,
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