Michael Yon's latest report

Check out Michael Yon's latest dispatch from Baqubah. He addresses several issues in this report. He reveals what a terribly dangerous job it is for our guys to be going into this area that Al Qaeda had controlled and booby-trapped to protect against our assault.

After years of experience, the terrorists had prepared Baqubah to an extent greater than either Fallujah or Ramadi had been. During one of the briefings Saturday, General Petraeus mentioned that Baqubah was probably the most rigged city of the entire war. Another officer at the briefing said there is so much explosives residue in Baqubah that the bomb dogs get confused.

Since the beginning of Arrowhead Ripper—with the loss of one 3-2 SBCT soldier killed in action—troops found more than 130 bombs planted in ambush, about two dozen buildings rigged to explode, and more than half a dozen car bombs. (That’s only the beginning.) Yet street by street, house by house, step by step, the infantry soldiers cleared most of Baqubah, working under intensely stressful conditions. They cleared block by block, no place to sleep but the ground, no showers to wash away the sweaty grit of war. This combat-experienced brigade outsmarted the enemy.

Then he addresses doubts about his previous report about how Al Qaeda, to intimidate the people of the area, had baked a boy and served him to his parents for lunch, an atrocity so depraved that the only parallels that Victor Davis Hanson could find come from Greek mythology.. Although he interviewed another witness who was willing to go on record verifying that that story was true, Yon still doesn't know for sure if it was true, but he knows enough about Al Qaeda in Iraq to find it credible.

In the more than two years since that awful day in May 2005, I’ve witnessed innumerable instances of the work of terrorists of many stripes. One clear indicator of just how bad a terrorist group is, is when battle-hardened soldiers—and writers like me who travel with them—don’t find it hard to believe a story which purports that al Qaeda had baked a child and set his roasted body out as the main course at a lunch for his parents.

Yon also addresses the question of why other journalists haven't reported on the massacre that he told us about. He reveals his conversation with a stringer reporter for the Associated Press who clearly knew about the massacre and had interviewed doctors who had examined the bodies. He says that he told the AP about what he'd found, yet so far the story hadn't found its way into AP story.

And finally, don't miss the story of what David Petraeus did for the young soldier who had, years earlier, tripped and discharged his gun into Petraeus's chest nearly killing him.