good morning. happy thanksgiving. this is the day you ve been waiting for. carol costello, thursday, november 24th. ali and christina have the day off. so glad you re with us. i have all of the fattening stuff laid out for me already here. it s already here. they ordered in thanksgiving dinner for us at 3:00 a.m. the turkey is crusty now. still edible. the stuffing is quite good actually. first up this morning, one thing we re very thankful for, our brave men and women in the military serving here and overseas. we have about 20,000 troops in iraq right now but the forces are flooding out as a december deadline for withdrawal approaches. thousan thousands sent to kuwait waiting to be reassigned or sent back home. happy thanksgiving, martin. reporter: good morning, carol. happy thanksgiving to you. it is a happy thanksgiving especially for those soldiers gathered here at camp virginia. let me tell you why. we re located about 20 kilometers south of the border with iraq.
the rest of the unit joins in, shooting wildly. they come under fire. [ gun fire ] an ambulance is hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. they and we are caught in the open. a pot shot. something in the distance. fightered opened up and there was some return fire. cnn producer was hit. i ve been shot. down, down. down. go, go, go! get down! right side. go to the right side of everything. go, go! that s it. good. other way. we start to check his injury. looks like there is a piece of shrapnel inside. you can feel it? i could feel it. when he was moving around, i could feel it inside. reporter: at a nearby field hospital, medics help ian. while dealing with their own grief. a colleague of these men was killed in the same attack just meters away from where the rpg, we think, hit the ambulance that was near us. what was his name? and how old was he? about 27, 28. reporter: tell me about him. about 9:00 he wake up me in my bed and we he came to tus and he s like
it s got to be stopped and i know better than most. and that s it, the south carolina republican forum hosted by senator jim demint. we want to welcome our viewers. i wolf blitzer in the situation room. donna brazill is with us. let s get immediate reaction to what we heard from the five republican candidates over the past two hours. donna, let me start with you. you re a good democrat. you heard from the five republicans. they re pretty much on most of the issues on the same page. a page being very different than the page that the president of the united states is on. south carolina will hold the first primary in the deep south next february. it s a very important state for the republicans. what you saw today is michelle bachmann, mitt romney, newt gingrich, ron paul, of course, and her main cain present the ideas to jim demint. he s a heavyweight, he s a tea party favorite, and what they were running today for was not president of theite, but president of the tea part