by Evan Wright
If you were to look at it from the air, you’d see a segmented column of American invasion vehicles—Marines in various units—stretching for several kilometers along the highway. Despite all its disparate elements, the column functions like a single machine, pulverizing anything in its path that appears to be a threat. The cogs that make up this machine are the individual teams in hundreds of vehicles, several thousand Marines scrutinizing every hut, civilian car and berm for weapons or muzzle flashes. The invasion all comes down to a bunch of extremely tense young men in their late teens and twenties, with their fingers on the triggers of rifles and machine guns.
We bump up against Amtracs 150 meters ahead pouring machine-gun fire into some huts. “They’re schwacking some guys with RPGs,” Colbert says.
Wild dogs run past.
“We ought to shoot some of these dogs,” Trombley says, eyeing the surrounding fields over the top of his SAW.
“We don’t shoot dogs,” Colbert says.
“I’m afraid of dogs,” Trombley mumbles.
I ask him if he was ever attacked by a dog when he was little.
“No,” he answers. “My dad was once. The dog bit him, and my dad jammed his hand down the dog’s throat and ripped up his stomach. I did have a dog lunge at me once on the sidewalk. I just threw it on its side, knocked the wind out of him. My aunt had a little dog. I was playing with it with one of those laser lights. The dog chased it into the street and got hit by a car. I didn’t mean to kill it.”
“Where did we find this guy?” Person asks.
We drive on.
“I like cats,” Trombley offers. “I had a cat that lived to be sixteen. One time he ripped a dog’s eye out with his claw.”
We pass dead bodies in the road again, men with RPG tubes by their sides, then more than a dozen trucks and cars burned and smoking. You find most torched vehicles have charred corpses nearby, occupants who crawled out and made it a few meters before expiring, with their grasping hands still smoldering. We pass another car with a small, mangled body outside it. It’s another child, facedown, and the clothes are too ripped to determine the gender. Seeing this is almost no longer a big deal. Since the shooting started in Nasiriyah forty-eight hours ago, firing weapons and seeing dead people has become almost routine.
“Whoa!” Trombley says. “That guy in that car was shot through the stomach. He just looked at me, then raised his arm, like he was asking for help. He looked at me right there,” Trombley says, pointing to his inflamed eye.
I see the car Trombley’s talking about, a bullet-riddled sedan by the road, doors hanging open, with at least one body in it.
“He was unarmed,” Trombley says. “So I didn’t shoot him.”
I imagine that man in the car, an entire life lived, and the last thing in the world he sees is the face of an eager nineteen-year-old with a red, infected eye looking at him down the barrel of a SAW.
LATE IN THE MORNING Colbert’s team reaches the outskirts of the first big town we are passing through: Ash Shatrah. We pull even with Marine artillery guns pounding away, their snouts blazing flames and smoke. One of the guns has the words BOB MARLEY stenciled along the barrel, a somewhat incongruous tribute to the bard of Jah Love and reefer.
“Thump ’em, boys,” Colbert says darkly as he watches them fire. They’re striking targets in and around Ash Shatrah, prepping it for our drive through. We wait for several minutes, then go.
The battalion’s plan is to sprint past the town as fast as possible. With Colbert’s vehicle in the lead, we speed up to about forty-five miles an hour. While driving, Person reaches around and hands me his M-4.
“Put it out the window,” he says.
I look at him.
“What do you think? You’re just gonna eat all our food, drink all our water for free?”
I place the rifle on my lap but find it distracting. All I can think about are images of Geraldo Rivera waving his pistol around in reports he filed from Afghanistan, bragging about how he hoped to cap Osama. While rolling into Ash Shatrah, my biggest fear isn’t enemy fire, it’s that some reporter’s going to see me holding an M-4 and I’ll look like a jackass.
The town is set far back from the road. No fire comes from it. The most overwhelming impression Ash Shatrah makes is that it is one of the smelliest places I have ever encountered. From 200 meters away the town stinks like the inside of a garbage can. We drive four kilometers through it, and I pass the M-4 back to Person. I hand it to him barrel first, with a round in the chamber and the safety off, causing him to rethink his policy of arming the reporter.
OUTSIDE OF ASH SHATRAH we link up with a unit of Amtracs and other armored Marine vehicles parked near a rural hamlet. It’s a cluster of three or four buildings 400 meters off the road, nestled in green pastures, with some palm trees behind them. Marines in the Amtracs stopped because they thought they took shots from one of the houses.
Now Marines are out on berms watching the house through binoculars and scopes. Several sniper teams in Bravo join them. Kocher in Third Platoon observes a “mom with two kids hiding in the back of the house, nervously peeping out.”
The Marines study the house for forty minutes. Surrounded by verdant fields, with the rare quiet of all the Humvee engines having been shut off, the morning feels peaceful.
Then a 25mm Bushmaster on one of the armored vehicles up the road begins pouring rounds into the house. The women and children Recon Marines had been observing through their optics disappear in a cloud of dust, as the Bushmaster rounds blast the adobe walls.
Colbert jumps out of the Humvee. “What are they shooting at?”
“There’s civilians in there!” several Recon observers yell at once.
Colbert picks up his radio handset and shouts, “Tell those guys to cease fire! They’re shooting civilians.” But it’s a fruitless effort. Even though the vehicle doing most of the firing is only 100 meters or so ahead, First Recon Battalion has no ability to reach it on the radio.
Now a dozen or more rifles and machine guns in the nearby armored units come alive, crackling and sending red streaks of tracer rounds into the entire hamlet.
Marines with mortars jump off a tracked vehicle in front of us, yelling and cursing. They’re in such a rush to attack the village, one Marine falls off the vehicle, landing on his ass. They launch a volley of 60mm mortars, which fall short, exploding in the field immediately in front of us.
Colbert throws down his radio headset and stands outside his Humvee, screaming, “Cease fire!” The Marines shooting into the village 100 meters up from us continue unabated.
Then, behind us, Encino Man races up in his Humvee. He jumps out, so eager to get in the fight, it seems, he forgets to unplug his radio headset, which jerks his head back as the cord, still attached to the dash unit, tightens.
“Jesus Christ! There’s fucking civilians in that house! Cease fire!” Colbert says.
Encino Man pops off a 203 grenade that falls wildly short of the house. Colbert, like other Marines in Bravo, is furious. Not only do they believe Encino Man is firing on civilians, but the guy doesn’t even know how to range his 203.
Colbert gets back in the Humvee, trying to rationalize the events outside that have spiraled beyond his control: “Everyone’s just tense. Some Marine took a shot, and everyone has just followed suit.”
Outside, Marines’ heavy 81mm mortars begin to land on the homes. They make a sort of crunching sound as they detonate, sending black plumes over the huts.
“They finally got good effects on target,” Kocher says, watching them obliterate the hamlet.
THERE’S NO TIME to sit around contemplating the destruction of the little village. First Recon is ordered north again toward a town called Ar Rifa. We pass forty or fifty refugees streaming south, some on bicycles. A massive fire about a kilometer up the road sends flames and black smoke 100 meters or more into the sky. The day is chilly and gray. There’s no wind, but the air is heavy with dust particles. They coat the windshield
like frost. If you wipe your finger on it, a few minutes later the mark is covered over again with powder. Through this fog we hear AK rifles cracking off rounds ahead. The convoy bumps to a halt. We are several hundred meters south of Ar Rifa.
The two Marines who ride in the back of Fick’s Humvee, which is configured sort of like a pickup truck with a canvas top over the back, stand by the tailgate singing Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” over and over.
One of the combat-stress reactions not discussed in their training is singing. A lot of Marines, when waiting for minutes or hours in a position where they expect an ambush or other trouble, will get a song stuck in their heads. Often they’ll sing it or chant the words almost as if they are saying Hail Marys.
The Marines’ choice of a Nelly song in the back of Fick’s vehicle shows the hip-hop influence of Q-tip Stafford. He rides there with nineteen-year-old Private First Class John Christeson, the newest guy in the platoon. The two of them spend twelve to twenty hours a day bouncing around in the back of the truck. Neither is sure when they both hit upon “Hot in Herre” as their combat song, but they were singing it yesterday while rolling into the ambush at Al Gharraf.
Now waiting on the ground by Fick’s truck outside of Ar Rifa, Christeson observes a house 500 meters in the distance, barely discernible across the haze and scrub brush. He’s chanting the lyrics, “Cuz I feel like bustin’ loose and I feel like touchin you/And can’t nobody stop the juice so baby… ,” when he spots three to four men moving low. They’re at least 300 meters away, moving closer to the Humvee, using the vegetation for cover. One seems to be carrying an RPG tube.
Other than a family cruise through the Caribbean, this is Christeson’s first trip out of the United States. He grew up in Lebanon, Illinois, with parents still married—a dad who works for the state college and a mom who works at a title loan company. Even though he was shot at yesterday in Al Gharraf, the whole place seems unreal to him. It’s the mud huts. He can’t believe people in the twenty-first century actually live in huts with goats and sheep all around. Christeson grew up with computers, playing Doom, a game that to him is almost ancient history. After high school he received an appointment to go to the Naval Academy at Annapolis, but in the wake of 9/11 he decided to become a grunt Marine to do something for his country—and to get in on the action. Up until the invasion, his closest brush with history was the day Jared Fogle, the guy who lost 300 pounds on the Subway Diet, came to his town, and Christeson got to meet him in person. “I thought if I punched him in the face I would be on TV,” he says, recalling the historic encounter. “But he wasn’t as big as I thought he’d be, for someone you see all the time on TV.”
Now, he’s watching Fedayeen stalk his vehicle. “I think they’ve got an RPG,” he says, trying to get a line on them through the sights of his SAW.
“Screwby,” Stafford replies.
“Gunny!” Christeson shouts to Gunny Wynn. “Those men might have an RPG.”
Gunny Wynn runs up, raises his binoculars and sees what looks to be a man setting up an RPG in some scrub. “Light ’em up!”
Christeson is so excited he’s not sure he heard Gunny Wynn right. Even though he fired several dozen rounds into Al Gharraf, all he saw was buildings, dark spots and muzzle flashes. He’s never before pulled the trigger on humans like this, cold.
Gunny Wynn repeats: “Light ’em the fuck up. They have RPGs.”
Christeson hugs his SAW and squeezes off a fifteen- to twenty-round burst at the closest of the three men. They run south, one of them limping, heading toward a line of palm trees. Christeson rips out another burst.
Fick runs up to his side. “Keep shooting,” he says.
Christeson blazes away.
“You’re shooting too high,” Fick says, calmly now, like he’s teaching a kid how to cast a fishing rod. Christeson is still firing bursts toward the tree line where the men in the field took cover when the platoon is ordered forward. He jumps in the truck, while Stafford provides covering fire with his 203 and M-4. As they bounce onto the road, Christeson fires the last of nearly 200 rounds toward the RPG team.
The war is suddenly real to him. “You know what?” he says to Stafford. “We were just fighting actual guerrillas.”
“Screwby.”
THE CONVOY HALTS just 200 meters up from where Fick’s crew engaged the RPG team. That huge fire we saw earlier was an electrical substation. It’s now a hundred meters in front of Colbert’s vehicle. The flames have subsided; now it spews an acrid smoke that hangs over the area.
We are just fifty meters from the edge of a large, grim town. The outer buildings form a wall on the other side of the highway. There’s a broad street into the city, but defenders have cut down palm trees, dragged the trunks across it and piled it with rubble, making barricades. Rifles and machine guns crackle intermittently from within.
But directly across from Colbert’s vehicle, no one sees any muzzle flashes. All we see are hundreds of doors and windows, dark gaps in the stucco buildings, places for bad guys to hide.
“Get out of the vehicle,” Colbert says.
Everyone takes cover on the ground, setting up their weapons. The whole platoon is out in the open here, high on the elevated road, with a hostile town on one side and fields on the other where there is believed to have been at least one RPG team operating. “I don’t know what the fuck we’re doing here,” Colbert says.
Fick trots over, keeping his head low, staying behind Humvees as much as he can to avoid the intermittent sniper fire. Colbert asks him what the orders are.
“I don’t fucking know either. He just told us to pull over,” Fick says, referring to his commander, Encino Man.
In a combat zone, military convoys aren’t supposed to just aimlessly pull over. When they stop, someone is supposed to issue orders—tell the men where to orient their vehicles, their weapons, whether to turn their engines off or keep them running. All of these details are supposed to flow down from command.
But right now command in Bravo Company is in a state of confusion. A few moments ago, Fick radioed Encino Man about contact with a possible RPG team. Encino Man immediately ordered everyone to pull over, without issuing any further directions.
Encino Man and Casey Kasem are now huddled by Doc Bryan’s Humvee, trying to figure out what do about the RPG team. Even though Christeson is sure he wounded at least one of the guys, and his fire did push them back into a tree line, Encino Man and Casey Kasem have become obsessed with the possibility of the RPG team reappearing and attacking the company.
Fick runs up to Encino Man and asks him, “What are we doing here?”
Fick’s concern is that the company is spread out willy-nilly along the highway directly across from a town of about 75,000, some of whose occupants are now shooting at his Marines.
Encino Man ignores him. He and Casey Kasem are poring over a map, studying coordinates to call in an artillery strike on the suspected position of the suspected RPG team.
Doc Bryan is growing alarmed. “Sir, I don’t like this,” he says to Fick. Nodding toward Encino Man and Casey Kasem, he adds, “When those two put their heads together it’s fucking dangerous.”
Ever since Casey Kasem almost shot Doc Bryan a few nights earlier, he and the other Recon Marines have grown extremely wary of the man. And today the memory of seeing Encino Man trying to fire a grenade into a house with civilians in it is still fresh in the Marines’ minds.
“Sir,” Doc Bryan says to Fick, “we’re fifty meters from a hostile city, and those two jackasses are worrying about a possible guy with an RPG three hundred meters from here.”
Fick confronts Encino Man. “If you don’t tell us what we’re doing here, we should get the fuck out now.”
“I’m calling in a fire mission,” Encino Man says, still not explaining what he wants Fick’s platoon to do on the highway.
Part of the reason Encino Man is so preoccupied with calling in the artillery fire mission is he’s never done this before in combat.
Now he tells the men the exact coordinates he’s planning to bring the artillery down on.
Doc Bryan and Lovell use a laser designator to measure the distance from their Humvee to the spot where Encino Man intends to direct the artillery strike, and it’s just over 200 meters distant.
Yesterday, when Capt. Patterson called in a danger-close artillery strike near his Marines, the distance was 300 meters, his men were behind berms and walls, and they were at the time under heavy enemy machine-gun fire.
Right now, Doc Bryan’s team and the rest of the platoon are on an open road, with nothing between them and the place where the artillery, if called, will splash down. They see no enemy where Encino Man is trying to call in the fire mission, and on top of this, they are taking fire, but it’s coming from the other side of the road. Doc Bryan can’t stand it any longer. He runs up to Encino Man and shouts, “You can’t do this. That’s a danger-close strike.”
“What’s ‘danger close’?” Encino Man asks.
Lovell, a few meters away, cites from a military manual he keeps in his Humvee. “Danger close is an artillery strike within six hundred meters of friendly forces.”
“You dumb motherfucker,” one of the enlisted men shouts. “The most boot-fucking Marine knows danger close!”
Fick grabs the radio handset from Encino Man in an attempt to stop him from calling in the strike. Gunny Wynn now tries to intercede. “Sir, this is fucked up. Let’s forget about the fire mission and get the platoons in a defensive perimeter. Then we can worry about the RPG team.”
One thing about Encino Man is that he’s stubborn. Having lost face in front of the men, he digs in deeper. He takes the handset back from Fick and attempts to call in the strike. But it never happens. There are protocols for calling in a Marine artillery strike, and Encino Man, it turns out, doesn’t know them. When the officer on the end of the line receives Encino Man’s confused request, he turns it down.