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emmy award acceptance speech
closed captioned transcript:
>> We wanted you to know that this war does not belong to us. It belongs to the marines that fought for 3 1/2 years in ramadi to hold one strip of road and never went anywhere. And if you were to take a map of iraq before the battle for baghdad began, more american blood is soaked into the earth around ramadi than any other place in the kun kri. And when we went to cover this story, just jess and I, he wasn't actually working for "cbs evening news." He was working for "60 minutes." And nobody knew what we were going to do. Nobody assigned us. Nobody sent us. In fact, after about 2 1/2 weeks of radio silence, I was in a fair amount of trouble when I finally called in. But I believed in covering this story because day after day we would sit in baghdad and get press releases about the deaths of american marines and soldiers in ramadi and have no way to shoah they were living through. And a lot is known about how this war is covered, and in a short news piece, you never get to say everything. But I want to leave you with one image of what our time in ramadi was like. When we were there, the whole city was awash with sewage. There was nothing left of the infrastructure. We waded through sewage every day, sometimes literally up to our waists. We had no water to wash or food to eat, and those are the conditions in which the marines are working every single day. It was so dangerous that the army refused to supply them downtown. So, most of them lived on what they had sent over from home. From their families and from their friends. And jeff and I were in the kitchen one day with the marines one day and we were talking. One of them threw away a few pieces of moldy bread. Another kid got up from the table and picked it out of the trash and said, "don't do that, man. We can still eat this." And that is not something that most of the united states of america understands about how the U.S. Military sometimes has to fight this war. So, when I came back from ramadi to edit these pieces in new york, I just looked around me like I was on an alien planet because there's no way you can ever explain what it's really like for the guys who are fighting it, no matter what you think about the war, the suffering on all sides is really a terrible thing to see.
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