“Instead of telling us what we already know, Sites has done something remarkable, delivering the sort of fresh and insightful human stories…that we seldom hear.” – Columbia Journalism Review
This quote was the last stimulus that pushed me to choose In The Hot Zone in order to carry out this project. Published by Kevin Sites in 2007. The further I was reading into the text, this book acted as a key to reality, a key that has not only opened my eyes, but shown and proved me that what we see on the news is not as close of what really happens in reality.
The book begins with Kevin being sent to coexist for a period of time with a group of Marines at the camp Abu Ghraib, near the camp Falluja (First Marine Expeditionary Force headquarters), while covering the events on that area. He describes to get a long with the Marines, however one specific event given in the war zone would change the path of his career for the next year.
The problematic event titled as “The Mosque Shooting” had taken place when Sites and his designated group of marines enter a small village after having a shooting. The men arrive to a mosque, where an Iraqi wounded insurgent is laying on the ground, and a marine affirms that he is faking his death, suddenly the marine decides to shoot a bullet straight to his head without any questioning. In fact, Sites had all recorded in his video camera, and since he was the owner of the tape, he started to have a moral dilemma regarding what to do with that tape.
He knew that if the NBC reached the tape, he would had been asked to get rid of it, but as a freelancer journalist, his duty is to let the world know about what is really happening in the war zone.
After this event, Kevin Sites accepts a new job offer from Yahoo! and throw himself into a whole new adventure covering more than 20 conflicting countries as a freelancer.