CRAIG WHITE, CAMERAMAN, NBC
Originally Broadcast on Sunday, November 23 2003
READ THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW
Craig White was traveling in an army embedded unit with NBC Correspondent David Bloom.
Only a few days from Baghdad, Bloom developed muscle pain in his leg. Thinking it was a pulled muscle, the crew carried on. Early one morning White was on the phone with his wife when he realized something was terribly wrong.
"When I turned around out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone prone in the dirt. And I realized right away it was David. He looked semi-conscious like he had fainted and was coming to. He had these big blues eyes and something didn't look right so I called for a medic. We thought it was a heat injury so they started an IV on him. And as I looked at him, his pupils just dilated and fixed and I knew right then that he probably passed."
The medics evacuated Bloom to an Army field hospital but it was too late. A clot that had formed in his leg days ago had broken free and killed him. In hindsight, there was nothing that anybody could have done to save him.
His crew decided that David would have wanted them to continue and within an hour they were in the middle of a battle.
"Word came down that he was pronounced dead by a doctor. I remember looking up in the sky and I see a single hawk just spiraling towards the sun and I thought there is David's spirit."
The scene at Objective Curly, as filmed by
Craig White.
The next day White found himself surrounded in a horrific battle for Baghdad. He was trapped beneath a highway underpass - nicknamed objective Curly - when the fighting became fierce.
"There was smoke everywhere. There were vehicles around us burning everywhere. The chaplain of the unit that I was with picked up an automatic weapon and started firing back. Medics were starting to fire back. I thought about it quite seriously myself."
They were surrounded by hundreds of Syrian fighters. Several American soldiers died that day.
"I was not allowed to show what happens to an American soldier when they get killed in that way. But I can say that war is a horrible thing. And with large caliber weapons, people don't just get red spots and collapse, they come apart, pieces all over the place."
White did film the parts of the battle and when he fed the tape to the network in New York, NBC's producers were stunned. They had never seen battle footage like it.
"I didn't want that piece of tape to end up on the trash heap of history. And through some coaxing on my part, we showed some of the tape, which included badly burned and blown up bodies. So often we don't show those things on television. But I remember saying that if it wasn't appropriate for broadcast at that time of day then we shouldn't be fighting wars at that time of day. Not to show it is a lie."
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