by Evan Wright
Still, some of the men are deeply disappointed by the apparent cancellation of the bridge mission. “No mission?” Garza asks. He steps down from the Humvee turret after spending approximately eighteen hours there—through the night and much of the day under a blazing sun. “I’ll be mad if we don’t get in this war.”
“Missions are always getting fragged,” Colbert says, resigned. “The mission isn’t important. Just doing your job is.”
His team spends forty minutes digging Ranger graves about 800 meters from the elevated train tracks. The desert pan is so hard here, where a few inches beneath the sandy topsoil it’s interlaced with vestigial coral from the era when this was underwater (specifically, as part of the Persian Gulf, which used to be a sea covering all of Kuwait and southern Iraq), that every inch has to be hacked away with pickaxes, the blades sparking with each blow to the stoney crust. As soon as we are finished, the battalion orders everyone to move forward to within thirty meters of the tracks.
“The dirt will be better where we’re going,” Colbert reassures his weary men.
But the dirt is the same. We chop a new set of graves as oil fires some twenty-five kilometers distant compete with the sunset. With the sun dropping, the temperature plummets and sweat-drenched MOPPs now feel like they’re lined with ice, not merely hard plastic. The Marines cover the Humvee in cammie nets. Half the Marines go on watch; the other half settle in for two hours of sleep.
Sleep is a sketchy proposition. Marines are not permitted to take their MOPP suits or boots off, even at night. They crawl into the Ranger graves fully dressed, with their weapons and gas masks at their sides. Some wrap themselves in ponchos. Others sleep inside “bivy sacks”—zippered pouches that have an uncanny resemblance to body bags.
After dark, the oil fires make the night sky flicker like it’s illuminated by a broken fluorescent light. American planes fly overhead, too high to be seen, but they throw out flares to repel missiles, which flash like lightning. One thing about war I’ve learned: It produces amazingly colorful night skies.
Trombley, now on watch, spots wild dogs. “I’m going to leave some food out by my hole tonight,” he says. “I’m going to shoot me a dog.”
“No, you’re not, Trombley,” Colbert says, his voice rising from his Ranger grave. “No one’s shooting any dogs in Iraq.”
IT RAINS AFTER MIDNIGHT, turning my Ranger grave into a mud pit. Temperatures have dropped into the forties. Everyone is awake, shivering cold but excited. Clumps of Iraqi soldiers—six to twenty at a time—walk along the elevated tracks in front of us. The railroad line runs from Basra to Nasiriyah. The soldiers, we later find out, are deserters who’ve apparently walked from Basra, about seventy kilometers east of this position, and are heading toward Nasiriyah, the next-nearest sizable city, about a hundred kilometers northwest of here.
The Marines watch the Iraqis through NVGs and night-vision rifle scopes. “Nobody shoot,” Colbert says. “They’re not here to fight.”
Sergeant Steven Lovell, one of Colbert’s fellow team leaders in the platoon, walks over to consult with him. Lovell, a twenty-six-year-old who grew up on a dairy farm outside Williamsport, Pennsylvania, has a bowlegged farmer’s gait and a sly, rural wit. Before joining the Corps he attended college to study chemical engineering, but found he didn’t like being around the “eggheads” on campus. “See how they’re walking all jacked-up, sore foot?” he says, pointing at the Iraqis. “They’re in a bad way.”
After sunrise, Bravo Company’s two platoons are sent over the tracks to snatch groups of surrendering Iraqis. By nine o’clock, it’s already becoming a hot day. The work of stopping and searching all the enemy soldiers is stressful and tedious.
The Iraqis stream along the tracks and a canal that runs behind them. The Marines set up positions to intercept them, and the Iraqis walk right into them with their arms up. Then the Marines herd them into groups, put them on the ground and search them. Quite a few of the Iraqis carry miniature Tabasco bottles and candies—from MREs—which means they’ve already been captured, fed and let go by other American forces. Most seem eager to surrender again, hoping to get more food and water. They’re dressed in a combination of military uniforms and civilian clothes. Behind them there’s a trail of discarded Iraqi fatigues and AK rifles.
Over the course of the morning, the Marines grab about 200 of them, putting them down and searching each one. There are so many Iraqis coming, the Marines wave off dozens, perhaps hundreds more, who cut a wide swath around them and continue on their way.
Through a Marine translator, the Iraqis say they’ve come from units in Basra and started fleeing two days ago as soon as the American bombardment began. They say because they surrendered, they are being hunted and executed by Fedayeen death squads east of here, and ask for protection. Many carry colorful slips of paper dropped by American planes promising them safety in return for surrendering.
Several of the men claim they worked in special units in charge of launching chemical-filled missiles. They say they were moving these missiles just a few days ago, getting ready to launch them. These men have atropine injectors, used to counteract nerve agents, which normally would be carried by those handling such chemicals. One of the more baffling aspects of the invasion is that the Marines will encounter numerous Iraqis, both soldiers and civilians, who claim to have firsthand knowledge of chemical weapons. At times, Marines will speculate that Iraqis are fabricating these stories in an attempt to curry favor by telling the Americans what they want to hear. But farther north, they will encounter village elders who seem quite sincere, pleading with the Marines to remove weapons stocks they believe Saddam’s military buried near their farms, which they fear are poisoning their water. Given the fact that no such weapons have been found, you get the idea Saddam or someone in his government created the myth to keep the people and the military in awe of his power.
The surrendered soldiers are a wretched lot. While most are in their early twenties and look decently fed, quite a few don’t have shoes and have swollen, bleeding feet. Doc Bryan, the corpsman, treats more than a dozen who have infected sores, dysentery and fevers. Even the healthiest are severely dehydrated. Some are old men. As a group, they seem dazed and numb as they accept the water and humanitarian rations the Marines hand out. A couple of them are crying. I walk among rows of them, offering anyone who wants one a Marlboro Red. Quite a few decline, patting their chests and coughing. Some say in halting English, “I’m sick.” Apparently, the continual dust of southern Iraq gets to them, too.
Several Marines pass around a photo pulled from the wallet of a surrendered Iraqi. Most of the Iraqis have ordinary pictures of families—children, wives, parents. But one guy has a picture of himself holding hands with another man. Both wear gaudy, effeminate-looking Western shirts, and one seems to have makeup on. The Marines can’t believe they’ve captured a gay Iraqi soldier.
But the funny thing is, most of the Marines passing the photo around aren’t making the homo jokes they usually make among themselves. Some of them just look at it, shaking their heads. After spending several hours with the surrendered Iraqis, the Marines seem taken aback, almost depressed by their misery. A Marine staff sergeant can’t get over the fact that so many are attempting to make a 170-kilometer trek through the open desert with rags tied to their feet and antifreeze jugs filled with water. “I knew from the first war they’d surrender,” he says. “But I didn’t expect how beaten down they’d be. I wish we could do more for them, give them more water.”
“We’re not the Red Crescent society,” Colbert says. “We barely have enough for ourselves.”
ON WHAT IS ONLY their second day in Iraq, the Marines in Bravo Company’s Third Platoon have concluded that their platoon commander has lost his mind. The men in Bravo’s Second and Third platoons are extremely close. Not only did they share the same tent in Kuwait, but here in the field the two platoons are usually right next to each other. Unlike the men in Second Platoon who universally
respect, if not adore their commander, Lt. Fick, the men in Third Platoon view their platoon commander as a buffoon. While he is a highly rated Marine Corps officer, with stellar fitness reports and no signs in his record that he is mentally unstable or incompetent, some of his men have mockingly nicknamed him “Captain America.”
When you first meet Captain America, he’s a likable enough guy. At Camp Mathilda, when he still had a mustache, he bore an uncanny resemblance to Matt Dillon’s roguishly charming con-artist character in There’s Something About Mary. Captain America is thirty-one years old, married, and has a somewhat colorful past of having worked as a bodyguard for rock stars when he was in college. If he corners you, he’ll talk your ear off about all the wild times he had doing security for bands like U2, Depeche Mode and Duran Duran. His men feel he uses these stories as a pathetic attempt to impress them, and besides, half of them have never heard of Duran Duran.
Twenty-four hours ago, when the invasion started, Captain America revealed another side of himself, which further eroded his standing among his men. He’s prone to hysterics. Before crossing the border, he ran up to his men’s Humvees parked in the staging area and began shouting, “We’re in the shit now! It’s war!” All morning since the Iraqi army deserters first appeared by the railroad tracks, Captain America has been getting on the radio, shouting, “Enemy! Enemy! Enemy!”
While it’s perfectly fine for officers to shout dramatically in movies, in the Marines it’s frowned upon. As First Recon’s commander, Lt. Col. Ferrando, will later say in an apparent reference to Captain America, “An officer’s job is to throw water on a fire, not gasoline.”
One of Captain America’s team leaders, twenty-three-year-old Sergeant John Moreno, says, “Something twisted in him the night we crossed into Iraq. He gets on the radio and starts shouting about how we’re going to take on Iraqi tanks. We didn’t see any tanks. It’s like he just wants to exaggerate everything so he’s a bigger hero. It’s embarrassing for us.”
While rolling up to the train tracks yesterday, Captain America provoked Colbert’s wrath for leading his men on a treasure hunt for discarded Iraqi helmets. “We’re in an area suspected to have mines, and the most obvious thing to booby-trap is a helmet lying on the ground,” Colbert fumed. “It’s completely unprofessional.”
Now, while the Marines search and interrogate the surrendered Iraqis, Captain America draws the ire of his top team leader, Kocher. The sergeant and his men are guarding several Iraqis not far from Colbert’s team when a wild dog pops over a berm, barking and snarling. Behind them, Captain America races up, shouting, “Wild dog! Shoot it!”
Kocher quietly tells his men, “Don’t shoot.” Instead, they open up a beef-and-mushroom MRE dinner and lure the dog, who gratefully eats and is soon allowing the Marines to pet him. It’s a small act, but by making it, Kocher directly contradicts his commander. “I don’t care who he is,” says Kocher. “The guy turns the smallest situation into chaos. We’re surrounded by Iraqis, some with weapons nearby. Some we haven’t grabbed yet. If my men start lighting up a dog, the Iraqis might panic, other Marines might open fire. Anything could happen.”
Before First Recon’s campaign is over, Captain America will lose control of his platoon when he is temporarily relieved of command. Already, some of his men are beginning to fantasize about his death. “All it takes is one dumb guy in charge to ruin everything,” says one of them. “Every time he steps out of the vehicle, I pray he gets shot.”
A WHILE AFTER THIRD PLATOON’S dog incident, First Recon’s commander orders the Marines to begin releasing the Iraqis. Prior to the war, Maj. Gen. Mattis had told reporters that surrendered enemy prisoners “will be funneled to the rear as soon as possible. Some people get their heart back after surrendering and want to fight again, so we want to get them out of the way as quickly as possible.”
But First Recon doesn’t have the resources to ship the hundreds of Iraqis surrendering by the tracks back to rear units. The battalion’s support company trucks only have room to transport about seventy of them.
Under the Geneva Convention (articles 13 and 20), once you’ve accepted the surrender of enemy forces you are obligated to provide food, water and medical attention, and to take “all suitable precautions to ensure their safety during evacuation.” Here, those provisions are dispensed with through a simple expedient. The Iraqis taken by the Marines are unsurrendered and sent packing.
Unfortunately for the Iraqis, First Recon’s commander orders his Marines to tell these men who have just walked some seventy kilometers from Basra to go back the way they came. (From the American standpoint, a wise order, given the fact that these Iraqi soldiers had been heading to Nasiriyah, where in a few days the Marines will first confront urban war.) The prisoners are unhappy with this news. They have been saying all morning that Fedayeen death squads where they have come from have been capping their friends. And the Marines have dismantled and tossed all of their weapons into a nearby canal so they can’t defend themselves. Several wave the slips of paper promising safe passage if they surrendered. But most are too exhausted to protest and start the trek back toward the Fedayeen death squads.
Person and I sit in the Humvee, eating cheese Combo snacks, watching the Iraqis limp back along the tracks.
“That’s fucked,” Person says. “Isn’t it weird to look at those Iraqis and know that some of them are probably going to die in the next few hours?”
SEVEN
°
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON on March 22, First Recon leaves the railroad tracks at Burayyat An Rataw and pushes northwest to take up a new position along a canal. Fewer than forty-eight hours have elapsed since the invaders blew through the breaches at the border. After a few light skirmishes, Marine and British forces have captured the key oil facilities around Basra. Now, approximately 20,000 Marines in the First Division are heading west, then north onto highways that will take them into central Iraq.
First Recon’s job this early evening is to move about fifteen kilometers north of the route on which the bulk of the First Division will be rolling. The battalion is to set up along a waterway and watch for Iraqi forces to make sure that they don’t drop down unexpectedly and attack the First Division on the highway.
Colbert’s team drives along a winding canal, watching for enemy forces, while Person discusses the band he formed after high school, Me or Society. A heavy-metal rap group, his band once opened for Limp Bizkit at a show in Kansas City. “We sucked, but so did they,” Person says. “The only difference is, they became famous right after we played together. I became a Marine.”
Colbert brings up a mutual friend in the battalion who listens to death metal and hangs out in vampire clubs in Hollywood.
“You remember that time he went out dressed in diapers and a gas mask?” Person says, laughing appreciatively.
Trombley, who seldom jumps into conversations between Colbert and Person, can’t hide his disgust. “That’s sick. Can you believe we’re defending people’s freedom to do that?”
Colbert corrects him, delivering a sharp civics lesson. “No, Trombley. That’s good that people have the freedom to do that. We’re even defending people like Corporal Person, too.”
The land is fertile along the canal. There are scruffy pastures, as well as little hamlets, each consisting of two or three mud huts bunched together. “Keep your eyes on the swivel,” Colbert reminds his chatty team. “This is backcountry.”
But villagers who come out by the trail greet the Marines with smiles. A teenage boy and girl walk ahead on the trail, holding hands.
“Kind of cute,” Colbert observes. “Don’t shoot them, Garza,” he adds.
As they roll past the hand-holding teens, Colbert and Person wave at them and start singing the South Park version of “Loving You,” with the lyrics “Loving you is easy ’cause you’re bare-chested.”
We bump onto a set of rail tracks and follow them toward a narrow bridge across the canal. The battalion has chosen a
train bridge as its crossing point over the canal. According to Colbert, spy planes have observed the train bridge for several days, and everyone is reasonably sure that no freight trains will appear around the bend on the other side. The Humvee jiggles so intensely on the railroad ties, it feels like someone is sawing my teeth. We pull onto the bridge. It’s about seventy-five meters long and just wide enough for the Humvee. I look out my window and see pebbles kicked up by the tires tumble into the water five meters below.
“Just think how easy it would be to drive off the edge right now,” Person says.
“Yeah,” Colbert says. “You could have an epileptic fit, a bee could sting you or one of your zits could explode.”
“That’s why I popped them all this morning, so we would be safe.”
WE REACH THE OBSERVATION POSITION by the canal after dark. Lights twinkle from a town several kilometers west. Obviously, electricity still works in parts of Iraq. When the Humvee stops, we hear crickets and frogs. The place seems untouched by war. Colbert’s team sets up in line with the platoon along a low berm running in front of the canal. The men prepare for another chilly, sleepless night. Through their night optics they observe villagers moving around huts a few hundred meters away on the other side of the canal. Iraqi armored forces are suspected of being on the move somewhere beyond the villages. At about nine o’clock, orange flashes burst on the horizon several kilometers northeast of the canal. U.S. warplanes are bombing targets.
Greater numbers of Iraqis appear on the other side of the canal—bunches of them moving—and the Marines judge them to be military deserters fleeing the American bombing. But some Marines grow edgy.