Hometown America watches in horror

The Pentagon told them war would be swift and painless. Now the truth is invading their living rooms and the grim images are of people they love

by Ed Helmore
Sunday March 30, 2003 The Observer

Claude Johnson was flicking through TV channels to find cartoons for his granddaughter when a news bulletin mentioned that his daughter Shoshana had been captured by the Iraqis. 'I heard her name but I wasn't sure. Then I got on the internet,' he said. Six hours later, a US military official called to confirm that she was indeed now a prisoner of war.

Soon after that, the Iraqis broadcast footage of Johnson and four other members of the US Army's 507th Maintenance Company captured with her, looking terrified, confused and in some cases injured. That helped bring home to the American public the lesson they have been learning painfully over the past few days: the conflict will not be nearly as quick, straightforward or light on US casualties as Pentagon planners originally believed.

Johnson, a cook, was stationed at Fort Bliss, a sprawling military base of the outskirts of El Paso in Texas, George W. Bush's home state, near the Mexican border.

For many Americans this huge military facility has come to encapsulate the repercussions of going to war. In a single incident last weekend half a company of cooks, welders, drivers and mechanics that took a wrong turn near the city of Nasiriyah, blundered into a firefight and were lost.

Johnson, a 30-year-old single mother with a two-year-old daughter, Janelle, had not even been trained for combat her father said: 'She can defend a perimeter or something like that, but her primary mission is to cook for the company. She can cook anything - chicken enchiladas, cakes. Why was she so close to a firefight?' She was taken during an Iraqi attack on coalition supply lines, a tactic the Americans had not anticipated.

Last week Pentagon officials said that two 507th Maintenance Company personnel are dead, eight missing presumed dead, four wounded and five others taken prisoner. In addition, two Apache helicopter pilots have been captured and 12 Marines are listed as missing in action.

Pictures of a petrified-looking Johnson have revived fears over the fate of personnel captured in previous conflicts. There is also growing concern about the fate of two other missing women from the 507th, privates Jessica Lynch and Lori Piestewa, after reports that two uniforms belonging to female soldiers had been found in a hospital in Nasiriyah, apparently with the dog tags and US flags torn from them. Debate rages about the proper place of the 200,000 females in the American military.

The fate of the members of the 507th in the face of Iraqi resistance has caused a shift in public opinion of the war towards realism: 70 per cent of Americans now believe it could go on for months. Shocking film of dead soldiers, broadcast by al-Jazeera and in sanitised form by US networks, has contributed. Some appeared to have been shot in the head, prompting Pentagon claims that up to seven troops had been executed.

The focus on the PoWs has also given the public a clearer picture of who the troops in the Gulf are. Johnson joined up to learn to cook, Piestewa is a Native American from a Navajo reservation, and captured welder Private Patrick Miller, who told his captors on TV that he was only in Iraq to 'fix broke stuff', enlisted last summer to help pay student loans - all of which has fuelled criticism that the military is weighted towards minorities and poor whites.

Questions are also being asked about Sergeant Asan Akbar, the Marine who last Sunday night turned on his fellow soldiers in Kuwait, throwing grenades into tents where his colleagues slept, killing a captain instantly and injuring 15 other members of the 101st Airborne Division, one of whom later died. He is now in a military jail in Germany, set to be charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Eugene Fidell, a Washington lawyer, said the crime could warrant the death penalty.

Military criminal investigators have said that the 36-year-old, a member of a mine-clearing battalion, had an 'attitude problem' and had been reprimanded for insubordination and told he would not be joining his unit's push into Iraq. But the fact that he shouted 'You're here to kill our mothers and daughters!' when he was captured, and his Muslim faith, have prompted his family to deny that he is a terrorist.

His stepfather and younger brother, Ishmael Mustafa Bilal, who live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, maintain he cracked under the pressure not so much of being in the Gulf but of being an African-American and a Muslim in the US Army in the wake of 11 September. Bilal says that is more than just a theory. He was the only Muslim in his squadron, but recently left the Air Force with an honourable discharge, with the help of his Congressman, after citing the same pressure.

Akbar was not allowed to take part in the first Gulf War because of his religion, said his mother, Quran Bilal. 'He said "Mama, when I get there I have the feeling they are going to arrest me just because of my name",' she said. 'He wouldn't try to take nobody's life. He said the only thing he was going to do was blow up the bridges.'