In briefly reflective comments, he recalled for them the first of some dozen trips to Iraq as defense secretary, in December 2006, when violence was raging and he held a news conference at a nearby base while a firefight went on in the background.
The US Marines and the resident British infantry unit, the Queen's Company of the Grenadier Guards, went out on a mission nearby where a serious firefight went on with Taliban fighters.
Fires were burning, the smell was overpowering, there were live firefights going on in the streets — even while the commanding generals were being briefed at one of Saddam's palaces by Col. Perkins (the reason for our mission in the first place).
In a television interview on PBS on Tuesday, Leon E. Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., said, "There were some firefights that were going on as these guys were making their way up the staircase of that compound".
Repeatedly, the government's two lead witnesses today testified about the difficulty of knowing or even seeing what exactly was going on in the firefight that took place at a compound near Khost, Afghanistan on July 27 , 2002- the firefight that led to the death of the U.S. soldier who Khadr is accused of killing.
"A few suicide bombers attacked the Safi Landmark hotel, and there is still a firefight between them and our security forces going on," said Gen. Sayed Ghafar, the chief of the Criminal Investigations Department for the police in Kabul, the capital.
It was impossible to know precisely what was going on inside the two hotels, except that intense firefights occurred between security forces and an apparently audacious band of gunmen.
It took us three hours to make it two miles--in the dark, with our night-vision on and we could hear the firefight going all the time as we walked.
When they realized what they had done, they ran into the middle of the intersection — with the firefight still going on — to rescue the survivors.
