April 8, 2003   
"Critter" Crittenden

I had fallen asleep to the sound of sporadic tank fire up surrounding streets, but when I woke around 0400, it was because of the din of a great deal of sustained fire up where the Assassins had spent the night, inside the palace complex about a half mile northeast of us. I climbed up on top of the 113 to see if Howison knew what was going on. But he had switched his radio over from Assassins net to Cyclone the day before, and now he couldn’t find Assassins.

I wanted to go there, but the 113 didn’t have orders, and the idea of walking through pitch dark toward a firefight, unarmed, without night vision, and with no clue which way the fight was oriented, was a non-starter. So we sat, paced, smoked, ate MREs, and listened to the mounting fire. ...

At 10:45 a.m., Wolford passed on the word that an Iraqi radio had been captured. The Arabic-speaking counter-intelligence officers were listening to it a forward observer’s chatter. ...

Conflicting information started coming in about the suspected Iraqi forward observer. ...

In the middle of our conversation, Tomlinson, who was listening to the radio on his headphones while we talked, told me one of the tanks up on the bridge had spotted someone with binoculars talking into a telephone in a tall building downstream, and they were getting ready to fire.

The tall building was the Hotel Palestine, a name I didn’t know at that time although I had laid eyes on it when we rode along the river the day before. The TV cameras up there, which Sgt. Shawn Gibson says he never saw, famously recorded his turret turning, his 120 mm main gun elevating, and then the flash. On the 15th floor of the hotel, Taras Protsyuk, a Ukrainian cameraman for Reuters, and Jose Cuoso of Spanish Television, were killed by the blast. ...