"AN AWESOME THING"

"It opened my eyes," he said. "What we did was an awesome thing for the Iraqi people."

Zawacki said the people he encountered in Iraq lived in filth with no power and "horrible sanitation."

"These people were living like crap," he said. "Iraq is a wealthy country with all the oil, and he (Saddam) was hoarding everything."

Zawacki said the POWs captured in the south of Iraq did not look like soldiers. Some of the Iraqi military did not have uniforms but wore "robes and sandals," he said, and the ones who had uniforms wore camouflage patterns from the 1991 Gulf War.

Zawacki said some of the prisoners spoke English, and many told him they were forced into the military.

"Saddam was threatening to kill them," he said. "They hated the regime and they've been oppressed for so long."...

Zawacki said his unit did not apprehend every Iraqi soldier they encountered.

"His (the Marine general's) order was if they're leaving let them leave," Zawacki said. "We weren't against the Iraqi people. We were against the regime. If they threw down their arms and left, we weren't messing with them. We were letting them go."

I'm ever amazed how compassionate and how deadly our forces can be at the same time.