by Evan Wright
The procedure when you’re getting shot at by rifles or machine guns is pretty straightforward. The Marines all hunt for muzzle flashes. If a gun is pointed toward you, even if the shooter is concealed behind a wall or berm, its flash will generally be visible. Every time an enemy gunman takes a shot, he momentarily reveals his position.
The men in Alpha and Charlie companies spot muzzle flashes coming from windows of apartments 250 meters or so across the river. But in their first twenty minutes at the riverfront, the Marines fire very few shots. There are civilians moving about in the streets of the city. Even during this low-intensity gun battle, some even stand still, trying to observe the Marines aiming at them.
The strangest, most unsettling spectacle Marines see, however, is that of armed men who dart across alleys, moving from building to building, clutching women in front of them for cover. The first time it happens, Marines shout, “Man with a weapon!”
Despite the newly aggressive ROEs, Marines down the line shout, “I’m not shooting! There’s women.”
One of the Marines witnessing this is the commander of Alpha Company, Captain Bryan Patterson, whose Humvee command post is set fifty meters back from the riverfront. Patterson, thirty-two, is from Indianapolis, Indiana, and is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. With his medium build and dark hair he tends to keep a tad longer than regulation, he looks not a day over twenty-four.
Until this afternoon Patterson has always wondered how he would react under fire. Though he’s been in the Marines his entire adult life and before joining First Recon he commanded an infantry platoon, he’s never been in combat.
Now several mortars impact within 150 meters of his position. Patterson gets on his radio and calls the battalion. His fear is that these might actually be “friendly” mortars dropped by Marines, not aware that First Recon has moved up to the western side of the bridge. Several minutes later, the battalion radios back that these are definitely not Marine mortars.
While Patterson stands there out in the open by his Humvee, talking on the radio, the area around him is raked with enemy gunfire. Marines taking cover behind surrounding berms look up to see if their commander is hit and burst into laughter. Patterson seems oblivious to the shooting and keeps talking on the radio, periodically tilting his head back, gulping down Skittles from an MRE.
Whatever indefinable qualities make a good commanding officer, Patterson has them. Unlike Encino Man and Captain America in Bravo Company, Patterson’s men speak of him in the highest terms. Patterson hardly fits the image of the swaggering, barrel-chested Marine Corps officer. He is one of the most unassuming characters you could ever meet, almost shy. He admits, “I can’t give gladiatorial speeches to my men.” His reasons for going to the Naval Academy and becoming a Marine couldn’t be more prosaic. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life,” he says. His view of being an officer is devoid of romance. “As company commander, I’m like a midlevel manager at any corporation.”
His views on the war are equally temperate. “There is not a good thing that comes out of war,” he tells me later on. “I’m not going to pretend I’m this great American savior in Iraq. We didn’t come here to liberate. We came to look out for our interests. That we are here is good. But if to liberate them means putting a Starbucks and a McDonald’s on every street corner, is that liberation? But I have to justify this to myself. It’s Saddam’s fault.” Still, he says, “the protestors have a lot of valid points. War sucks.”
The reason his men look up to him is probably very simple. Aside from the fact that he’s calm and articulate, Patterson respects them. His Marines came to the Middle East on a ship, and behind the backs of his men, Patterson often says, “I could have fallen overboard and they would do fine without me.”
Now, he and his men come under increasing fire at the riverbank. His Marines spot an anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) battery shooting at them from across the river. AAA guns fire large-caliber rounds from multiple barrels, like extremely high-powered machine guns. They are designed to shred aircraft flying thousands of meters overhead, but in Iraq, gunmen point the barrels down and aim them at ground targets, such as Marines. Their fire is devastating, and this one, about a kilometer and a half down the riverbank, is beyond the effective range of the heaviest weapons possessed by the Marines in First Recon.
Patterson and his men notice some Marines from Task Force Tarawa a couple hundred meters away. Among them is a Javelin team.
The Javelin is basically a big, honking, shoulder-fired missile for blowing up tanks. Patterson brings the Javelin crew forward. Within minutes they fire a missile into the AAA battery across the river. Patterson watches through his binoculars as a direct hit from the Javelin blows up the AAA battery, setting off numerous secondary explosions as nearby stocks of munitions cook off. He estimates the one strike takes out three to five Iraqis who’d been manning the AAA guns. “It felt good to get revenge for the Marines from Task Force Tarawa killed in Nasiriyah,” Patterson later admits.
Now, directly across the river, every Iraqi with an AK or machine gun seems to open up on First Recon’s position. Apparently, the Javelin strike alerted everyone in the city with a gun to the Marines’ presence here. Taking concentrated enemy fire, the men in Alpha and Charlie lose their inhibitions about possibly shooting women in the city. Up and down the line, just about every rifle, machine gun and grenade launcher roars to life. For about sixty seconds they savage the city, pouring thousands of rounds into it. Patterson later says of this first burst of wild, fairly indiscriminate fire, “They all had to pop their cherries.”
IN THE STORM OF SHOOTING set off by Alpha’s attack on the AAA gun, enemy fire rakes the area around Colbert’s Humvee, seventy-five meters back from the riverfront. Bravo Second Platoon occupies slightly elevated ground behind Alpha’s position, but luckily most of the Iraqi fire seems to be wildly high. A row of palm trees between us and the riverbank shivers as rounds rip through fronds and send puffs of smoke off the trunks. Incoming rounds, I notice as I crouch down to the ground beside Colbert’s vehicle, make a zinging sound, just as they do in Bugs Bunny cartoons.
Initially, Marines in Bravo stand outside their vehicles, milling around with stupid smiles on their faces. Several are giggling. It’s like everyone just stepped onto the set of a war movie. One of First Recon’s seniormost enlisted men struts past, shouting, “Gotta love this shit! We’re in the middle of it now, boys!” He sounds like the emcee at a pro-wrestling smackdown. “It is on!”
This senior enlisted man, in his mid-forties, is one of those thickly built, slightly overweight guys whose fat just makes him look like an even bigger bully than he is. His job is to be the grand enforcer of discipline within the enlisted ranks, to be sort of a professional dickhead. Fairly or unfairly, the Marines’ nickname for him is the “Coward of Khafji.”
Khafji, a small Saudi Arabian town south of the Kuwait border, was the setting of one of the earliest battles of the first Gulf War. In the official version, Iraqi mechanized units, probing for American weaknesses, dropped into Khafji, surprising advance Marine units occupying the town, kicking off a forty-eight-hour battle to extricate the Americans.
According to several enlisted men and officers in First Recon, the battle of Khafji was actually triggered by several Marines who veered into the town to make phone calls to their families and girlfriends at home. As incredible as this sounds, it’s true that in the current war, Marines, such as Colbert, carry international calling codes, which can be used on Iraqi land-lines to dial out to Marine satellite phones. Recon units are trained, if they’re cut off behind enemy lines and their radios are down, to break into Iraqi homes or offices and dial their units’ satellite phones.
In the legend circulating through First Recon, the senior enlisted man they’ve nicknamed the “Coward of Khafji,” then a sergeant in another unit, was among those who led the charge on Khafji’s available phones. Marines were frantically dialing home when several noticed a sizable force
of Iraqi soldiers occupying a nearby building. As the story goes, the “Coward of Khafji” jumped into a Humvee and fled the town, leaving behind his buddies. He later told his fellow troops he had fled in the interest of saving a “water bull” (storage tank) attached to the rear of his Humvee and preventing it from falling into Iraqi hands. (When I ask him about the veracity of this story, he denies it happened that way but refuses to provide any details.) Whatever the truth, the Coward of Khafji name has stuck.
Now, as the Coward of Khafji walks past Colbert’s vehicle amid the rising gunfire, Person leans out the window and shouts, “Hey, where’s your Humvee? Isn’t it time for you to get out of here?”
Luckily for Person, the gunfire is increasing. The Coward of Khafji, who possesses a mighty authority to punish men within the battalion, doesn’t hear him.
A volley of enemy mortars explodes in the surrounding fields. Machine-gun fire, which previously seemed to be only coming in from the north—the direction of the city—now erupts on all sides. Currently, Second Platoon faces the river to the north. The Humvees in the platoon are pushed up beside the elevated causeway leading onto the bridge. Around us are open, dried mudflats. These extend fifty to seventy meters north toward the river, and to the west and south of us. Beyond the mudflats are fields of dry, bent grass. Several dozen Marines from Task Force Tarawa are spread out in these fields, lying prone on the ground, firing at Iraqis and outlying buildings.
Several hundred additional Marines from Task Force Tarawa are also directly across the roadway from us in a sunken field to the east. This field, perhaps a kilometer square, has high-tension power lines running through it and is bounded by a thick forest of palms and a scattering of buildings. One of these buildings, a small two-story hospital, contains Fedayeen, who have been targeting Marines in the field all afternoon. More Fedayeen have been shooting from the palm grove.
In the past few moments, heavy fire from First Recon’s Marines in Alpha and Charlie has been joined by shooting from the thousand or so Marines in Task Force Tarawa to our east, west and south. It sounds as if dozens of weapons are now firing on all sides. It’s as loud, and nearly as steady, as the sound of a river rushing over a dam. One thing you can say about intense weapons fire, it sounds like it ought to. It’s an extremely angry noise.
When I jump down, face-first into the dirt, I twist my head to the side and see the palm trees overhead shiver from multiple rounds hitting them. I also see that the grass in the field to my left is waving from the effects of low, grazing machine-gun fire. The fire is outbound, and though I can’t see the weapon, I can see a ghost of black smoke rising above what is probably the barrel. It’s my hope that most of the fire I’m hearing is outbound, from Marines. I would hate to think it’s from Iraqis massing to overrun our position.
But in my first experience at being in the midst of heavy gunfire—from machine guns to mortars to Marine artillery still slamming into the city over our heads—I feel surprisingly calm. While the Marines might possess that “adolescent sense of invulnerability,” I have the more adult handicap of having always lived in denial. It’s a problem for which I’ve attended therapy sessions and self-help groups in an effort to overcome, originally at the urging of a now ex-wife. But I find that in a pitched firefight, denial serves one very well. I simply refuse to believe anyone’s going to shoot me.
This is not to say I’m not scared. In fact, I’m so scared I feel not completely in my body. It’s become a thing—heavy and cumbersome—I’m keeping as close to the ground as possible, trying to take care of it as best I can, even though I don’t feel all the way in it. As I squeeze flat against the earth, so do the Marines around me in Second Platoon. Guys who’d been laughing and joking a few moments earlier drop down and embrace the earth. I look up and see Espera five meters in front of me, cursing and wiggling, trying to pull down his MOPP suit. Espera makes no show of trying to laugh off his fear. He’s wrestling his penis out of his pants so he can take a leak while lying on his side. “I don’t want to fucking piss on myself,” he grunts.
The Marines took a combat-stress class before the war. An instructor told them that 25 percent of them can expect to lose control of their bladders or bowels when they take fire. Fearing one of these embarrassing accidents, when the bullets start flying they piss and shit frantically whenever they can.
The guy on my other side is Pappy, the team leader they all look up to as “the coldest killer in the battalion.” Since my arrival with the platoon, he’s been one of the most hesitant to talk to me. Early on at Camp Mathilda, he had said in his polite, North Carolina accent, “It’s nothing personal, but I just don’t have good feelings about reporters.”
Now he catches my eye and flashes a smile. He seems neither giddy, as are some of the others, nor terrified. But he looks a lot older, suddenly, as if the lines around his eyes have deepened in the hour since we drove up here.
“How are you doing?” I ask.
“I’m not like some of these younger Marines, eager to get some,” Pappy says. “I’d be just as happy if they ordered us to turn around right now and we drove back to Mathilda. Just the same, I want to be with these guys so I can do what I can to help them live.”
I ask him what the hell we’re doing here waiting around by the entrance to the bridge while the bombs fall. I can’t figure out why Bravo company is up high by the road, where the men are exposed, yet can’t fire their weapons for fear of hitting Marines in surrounding fields.
Pappy’s response is sobering. “Our job is to kamikaze into the city and collect casualties,” he says. “We’re just waiting for the order to go.”
“How many casualties are there?” I ask.
“Casualties?” he says. “They’re not there yet. We’re the reaction force for an attack that’s coming across the bridge. RCT-1 is going to be moving up here any minute and crossing the bridge. We’re going in during the fight to pick up the wounded.”
It’s the first time anyone has told me anything about this mission that I’m accompanying them on. I don’t know why, but the idea of waiting around for casualties that don’t exist yet strikes me as more macabre than the idea of actual casualties.
Yet despite how much it sucks here, it’s kind of exciting, too. I had almost looked down on the Marines’ shows of moto, the way they shouted Get some! and acted so excited about being in a fight. But the fact is, there’s a definite sense of exhilaration every time there’s an explosion and you’re still there afterward. There’s another kind of exhilaration, too. Everyone is side by side, facing the same big fear: death. Usually, death is pushed to the fringes in the civilian world. Most people face their end pretty much alone, with a few family members if they are lucky. Here, the Marines face death together, in their youth. If anyone dies, he will do so surrounded by the very best friends he believes he will ever have.
As mortars continue to explode around us, I watch Garza pick through an MRE. He takes out a packet of Charms candies and hurls it into the gunfire. Marines view Charms as almost infernal talismans. A few days earlier, in the Humvee, Garza saw me pull Charms out of my MRE pack. His eyes lighted up and he offered me a highly prized bag of Combos cheese pretzels for my candies. He didn’t explain why. I thought he just really liked Charms until he threw the pack he’d just traded me out the window. “We don’t allow Charms anywhere in our Humvee,” Person said in a rare show of absolute seriousness. “That’s right,” Colbert said, cinching it. “They’re fucking bad luck.”
The heavy gunfire tapers off. Mortars still explode every couple of minutes, but everyone rises from the ground. Lying in the dirt becomes tedious. In a way it also becomes more terrifying because you can’t see what’s going on around you.
Now when there’s a boom, most people just drop to one knee. One Marine in another platoon has developed a fierce stutter. “P-p-p-pass m-my b-b-binoculars,” he spits out. His buddies exchange looks but say nothing to him. Not far away, an officer who took cover beneath a Humvee won’
t come out. Marines don’t laugh at this, either. (Some are disturbed by this act of perceived cowardice in one of their leaders and later seek counselling.)
Colbert seems to blossom under extreme duress. He goes into full Iceman mode, becoming extra calm, alert and focused even when everyone’s just standing around waiting for another blast.
Marines tear into their MREs. They eat a lot during lulls in firefights. Most just squeeze main meals—like the pressed, crumbly steaks and chicken patties—directly from the foil pouches into their mouths.
Then a new sound erupts nearby—a rapid-fire thunking. Everyone drops to the ground except Colbert. He remains upright, eating. “Those are ours, gents,” he says between bites. Colbert informs the Marines flattened in the dirt that the “thunking” was unmistakably the sound of Marine Bushmaster weapons. No need to worry.
F-18 fighter-attack jets rip through the sky and drop low just 200 meters or so over our heads. Marines call these “moto passes.” The jets fly too high and too fast to be much help hunting down small human targets on the ground, but their dramatic appearances are intended to boost morale.
While we sit around eating, there’s a massive explosion overhead just on the other side of the causeway. Cables from high-tension electric towers snap and bounce above us, struck by a friendly artillery round, intended for Nasiriyah. It happens too quickly for anyone to duck. Shrapnel bangs into Pappy’s Humvee, but no one is hit.
Marines thirty meters across the road from us are not so lucky. We hear screams of “Corpsman!” I stand up and see one injured Marine staggering in circles. The errant round sprayed six Marines from another unit with shrapnel. Two are later reported to have been killed from wounds sustained in this incident.