by Evan Wright
TWENTY-ONE
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A FEW MINUTES BEFORE SUNSET on March 31, First Recon reaches its objective: the bridge that serves as the main road out of Al Hayy. It presents another strange juxtaposition typical of Iraq. After moving all day through primitive hamlets, the Marines now stand at the foot of a span that, with its long, graceful concrete lines, wouldn’t be out of place on the German autobahn. Bravo Company is tasked with setting up the blockade on the highway at the north end of the bridge. The rest of the battalion pushes a kilometer farther north up Route 7.
Colbert’s team and the others in the platoon pull their Humvees up to where the guardrails start at the foot of the bridge. They point their main guns toward the bridge, which rises in a slight crest about 200 meters from their position, where it stretches over a canal. Beyond that, the highway drops out of view, as it descends toward Al Hayy about two kilometers to the south.
Three Marines sprint onto the bridge with a bale of concertina wire, which they stretch across the roadway. They run back to the Humvees in the last minutes of daylight. The area around the highway where the Marines have their blockade is a barren no-man’s-land. The ground is saturated with salts that push up to the surface, forming a white crust on the mud. In the twilight gloom, all you see is the pale whiteness of the salty flats. Fick walks up, grinning. Even loaded down with his vest, flak jacket and bulky chemical-protection suit, he displays his characteristic bouncing stride. Right now it’s more buoyant than usual. “I feel like for the first time we seized the initiative,” he says, surveying the roadblock. Everyone seems to be swaggering.
After nearly two weeks of feeling hunted, the Marines have done what they were supposed to do: They assaulted through resistance and took an objective. Psychologically it’s like a game of king of the hill, and they now occupy the high ground. This small band of young men controls the key exit from a town of 50,000.
First Recon Battalion is completely alone. The Marines are twenty kilometers north of the nearest American unit, RCT-1. They are thirty kilometers south of Al Kut, home to approximately 15,000 Iraqis in a mechanized division. There is nothing between them and those thousands of Iraqis but a straight, narrow highway. Only later will it become clear that most regular Iraqi forces won’t fight; on the night of March 31, that fact is unknown. Adding to their sense of isolation, First Recon has lost communication with its air cover this evening, as the result of a technical glitch. If the battalion is attacked, it will have to fight on its own.
ONE THING THE MARINES haven’t trained for, or really even thought through, is the operation of roadblocks at night. The basic idea is simple enough: Put an obstacle like concertina wire in the road and point guns at it. If a car approaches, fire warning shots. If it keeps coming, shoot it. The question is: Do the Iraqis understand what’s going on? When it gets dark, can Iraqi drivers actually see the concertina wire? Even Marines have been known to drive through concertina wire at night.
The other problem is warning shots. In the dark, warning shots are simply a series of loud bangs and flashes. It’s not like this is the international code for “Stop your vehicle and turn around.” As it turns out, many Iraqis react to warning shots by speeding up. Maybe they just panic. Consequently, a lot of Iraqis die at roadblocks.
The initial killings at First Recon’s roadblock come just after dark. Several cars approach the bridge with their headlights on, coming from the direction of Al Hayy. Bravo’s .50-caliber gunners fire warning bursts. The cars turn around and leave. Then a tractor-trailer appears, its diesel engine growling. The Marines fire warning shots, but the truck keeps coming.
A few seconds after the truck fails to heed the second warning burst, its headlights dip onto Bravo’s position, blinding the Marines. The truck sounds like it must be doing thirty or forty.
“Light it the fuck up!” someone shouts.
Under the ROE, a vehicle that fails to stop at a roadblock is declared hostile, and everyone in it may justifiably be shot. Almost the entire platoon opens fire. But for some reason, these Marines who have previously put down enemy shooters with almost surgical precision are unable to take out even the truck’s headlights after several seconds of heavy fire. Red tracers and white muzzle flashes streak across the bridge. Mark-19 grenades burst all around the truck, but it keeps coming, horn blaring.
Just before reaching the concertina wire, the vehicle jackknifes and screeches. Someone has finally managed to hit the driver, whose head, they later discover, is blown clean off. Meanwhile, three men jump from the cab. Espera, who is wearing night-vision goggles, sees them and fires his M-4 from a crouching position, methodically pumping three-round bursts into the chest of each, as he was trained. Almost as an afterthought, the Marines shoot out the last headlight of the truck.
THERE’S NO TIME to examine the scene of the shooting. The entire battalion pulls back from the bridge, moving a couple of kilometers north to a more defensible position. The triumphant feelings that soared a half hour ago have vanished. It’s suddenly cold, a Humvee becomes stuck in the mud and in Bravo’s Second Platoon, Marines are again dealing with weapons that jammed catastrophically in the engagement with the truck. Next to Colbert’s vehicle, the .50-cal on Lovell’s Humvee had a round explode in the chamber, puffing out the gun’s chassis—a fifty-pound block of forged steel—like a balloon. In the darkness Lovell marvels, “Fellas, we just destroyed a ten-thousand-dollar piece of U.S. government property.” They are lucky the gun didn’t blow up.
In Colbert’s vehicle, the Mark-19 jammed again—as it has in two previous engagements. Hasser, who’s manning the weapon, screams, “Shit! Shit! Shit!” and pounds the roof of the Humvee, trying to unjam it. He lets out a half-crazed scream. “Raaah!”
Colbert shouts up to him, “Walt! You’re losing control of yourself. Shut the fuck up and take a deep breath.”
“This goddamn gun!” Hasser shouts. His voice cracks. “It’s a piece of shit!”
“Walt, you know I like you a lot,” Colbert says, trying to calm him. “But it’s not going to help if you lose control of your emotions. We just don’t have enough LSA to keep it lubed properly. There’s nothing we can do about it.” He adds, “I’m sorry I had to yell at you.”
Colbert’s platoon falls back from the bridge to defend the battalion’s eastern flank along the highway. Everyone digs holes in the darkness. The soil here is a waterlogged mixture of clay and rocks. It’s like chopping through partially hardened concrete. After we finish our Ranger graves, the platoon is ordered to move up the road 300 meters, where we dig a new set.
A string of headlights appears a kilometer or so to the west. It is a stream of vehicles escaping the city on a back road. It could be civilians fleeing. But using night-vision equipment, Marines observe what appear to be trucks with weapons on them.
“They’re fucking flanking us!” Fick says, worried that the enemy fighters are trying to come up and attack the battalion from the side. Marines then observe one truck with its lights off, stopping directly across from their position and unloading men and equipment, possibly guns. Fick requests an artillery strike to take out the vehicles.
Marines in Bravo who are not on watch gather around to eat their meager food rations before crawling into their wet holes to take quick “combat naps.”
“I felt cold-blooded as a motherfucker shooting those guys that popped out of the truck,” Espera says, glumly describing the details of each killing he participated in at the roadblock an hour earlier. Perhaps keeping in mind his priest’s admonishments to not enjoy killing, Espera seems to deliberately wallow in a black, self-flagellating mood. “Dog, whatever last shred of humanity I had before I came here, it’s gone,” he says.
Warning shots erupt at the roadblock manned by Charlie Company a few hundred meters to our north. Tracers light up the sky. We hear a car gunning its engine, apparently still driving toward the blockade. Marines shout. Weapons crackle. We hear the engine still whining, drawing closer, then the screec
hing of tires. In the silence that immediately follows, someone in our group says, “Well, that stopped him.” For some reason, everyone bursts into laughter.
UP THE ROAD FROM where we are laughing, the men in Charlie Company watch as two men run from a car the Marines have just riddled with dozens of rounds. It’s a four-door sedan. Doors are open, lights are on despite the heavy-weapons fire it took from a platoon of Marines. It’s a miracle that these two men, including the driver, have stepped out alive.
The Marines hold their fire as the men, dressed in robes, throw their hands up. They are unarmed. As Marines shout at them, they drop obediently to the side of the road.
Graves, whose team beautifully destroyed the building that shielded the enemy gunmen during the assault through Al Hayy, approaches the car with another Marine. Graves sees a little girl curled up in the backseat. She looks to be about three, the same age as his daughter at home in California. There’s a small amount of blood on the upholstery, but the girl’s eyes are open. She seems to be cowering. Graves reaches in to pick her up—thinking about what medical supplies he might need to treat her, he later says—when the top of her head slides off and her brains fall out. When Graves steps back, he nearly falls over when his boot slips in the girl’s brains. It takes a full minute before Graves can actually talk. The situation is one he can only describe in elemental terms. “I could see her throat from the top of her skull,” he says.
No weapons are found in the car. Meesh asks the father, sitting by the side of the road, why he didn’t heed the warning shots and stop. The father simply repeats, “I’m sorry,” then meekly asks permission to pick up his daughter’s body. The last the Marines see of him, he is walking down the road, carrying her corpse in his arms.
WHEN THEY TALK about this shooting later, the Marines have mixed reactions. Graves is devastated. “This is the event that is going to get to me when I go home,” he says. Prior to this shooting, when his team had passed by all those shot-up corpses on the roads, Graves says, “I felt good about it, like, ‘Yeah! Marines have been fucking shit up!’” He adds, “I cruised into this war thinking my buddy’s going to take a bullet, and I’m going to be the fucking hero pulling him out of harm’s way. Instead, I end up pulling out this little girl we shot, hiding in the backseat of her dad’s car.”
Graves’s buddy, twenty-two-year-old Corporal Ryan Jeschke, who was with him at the car, says, “War is either glamorized—like we kick their ass—or the opposite—look how horrible, we kill all these civilians. None of these people know what it’s like to be there holding that weapon. After Graves and I went up to that dead girl, I was surprised, because honestly, I was indifferent. It’s kind of disturbed me. Now, sometimes, I think, ‘Am I a bad person for feeling nothing?’”
Despite his professed indifference, Jeschke is haunted by the memory of seeing the girl’s father walk down the road, cradling his dead daughter. Jeschke says, “I asked Meesh what he thought the father was going through, and Meesh said Arabs don’t grieve as hard as we do. I don’t really believe him. I can’t see how it would be any different for them.”
After this shooting and the others like it, Marines deal with the stress through black humor. Even guys privately broken up by the shootings circulate jokes, one of them: “What’s the first thing you feel when you shoot a civilian? The recoil of your rifle.”
THE ARTILLERY STRIKE Bravo Company called previously on vehicles fleeing the city finally starts to arrive. Since First Recon is so far north, the artillery gunners can only reach them by using rocket-assisted projectile (RAP) rounds, which give their guns a range of thirty kilometers. After RAP rounds are fired, they flash in the sky and then make a sort of fizzing sound, as a rocket motor mounted on each projectile kicks in and drives it to its target. They make for an even more spectacular show than normal artillery. We lie back in our holes and watch 164 RAP rounds shriek across the sky. Seen from a distance, the fiery explosions are beautiful and hypnotizing, just like any decent Fourth of July display. Any carnage visited on the vehicles, hamlets, farms or people is shrouded from us by the darkness. All we see are the pretty lights of the rockets’ red glare.
TWENTY-TWO
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ON MARCH 30, Capt. Patterson’s Alpha Company was ordered to temporarily detach from First Recon and go on a mission to find the body of the Marine who went missing when his supply convoy was ambushed on Route 7 outside Ash Shatrah. No one knows if rumors of his body’s public mutilation are true, but many Marines inevitably see Alpha’s task to re-cover it as a revenge mission. When Alpha Company had pulled out of First Recon’s camp for Ash Shatrah, men in Bravo had shouted after them, “Fuck the shit out of that town!”
Now, on the morning of March 31, with the rest of the battalion making its way north toward Al Hayy, the eighty Marines in Alpha Company are heading south on Route 7 toward Ash Shatrah. To Sergeant Damon Russell Fawcett, a twenty-six-year-old team leader in Alpha’s Second Platoon, the mission fills him, he later admits, with conflicting emotions. Fair-haired and blue-eyed, Fawcett grew up in Southern California, a “water baby,” surfing and playing water polo. After several semesters in college, he joined the Marines not just for adventure but because he was so “disenchanted with the human factor in society, the emphasis on technology. I came in to see if the better man will dominate.”
For the past eighteen hours since departing on the mission, Fawcett has listened to fellow Marines rage about the motherfuckers in Ash Shatrah, and their plans to get payback once their commanders clear them hot to assault the town. A lot of guys are talking not just about the lost Marine but about rumors now circulating of Iraqis abusing American female POWs. (Within the next twenty-four hours, when the tale of Jessica Lynch’s captivity and rape reaches the men, she becomes the campaign’s unofficial Helen of Troy, a rallying point for generalized anger against Arabs.) Fawcett is particularly disturbed by an acquaintance of his, a sniper, who recently bragged that after being cleared to shoot an armed Iraqi who was taking cover behind a child, the sniper fired at the man through the kid, telling Fawcett, “I just killed a future terrorist.”
Fawcett has a desire for revenge like everyone else, but at the same time he keeps thinking, as he later tells me, “When I get home people will probably ask me to speak at high schools about this. I don’t know how I’m going to explain all the dead women and children I’ve seen, the things we’ve done here.” Now he tells some of the guys he’s with, “If you’re mad about them mutilating a Marine, it’s not like this is the only country on earth with sociopaths. We’ve got people at home in American cities who hurt and degrade people all the time.”
Not only are the men in Alpha thirsting for payback, they’re so hungry that when their convoy pauses on its journey to Ash Shatrah, they jump out and ratfuck trash piles along Route 7. POG supply units passing by in recent days have left mountains of MRE litter beside the road. Marines in Alpha, having endured reduced rations for several days, dig through them, hunting for uneaten Tootsie Roll or peanut butter packets.
Alpha Company’s commander is dealing with a whole different set of problems. The mission has gone through so many permutations in the last several hours that it’s now clear to Capt. Patterson that finding the body of the lost Marine is a distant secondary objective. In fact, Patterson’s orders now verge on the fantastic. His Marines in Alpha, along with a much larger force from RCT-1, will link up outside the city and join a CIA-controlled operation to liberate Ash Shatrah, assisted by an indigenous army of “freedom fighters.”
According to the portions of the plan Patterson has been let in on, the CIA has spent months training and equipping a small army of Iraqi “freedom fighters” in an unnamed foreign country. Now these freedom-loving patriots have been flown into Iraq, where they will face their first test, liberating Ash Shatrah.
The Marines will not be leading this mission. Their role is simply to be there to help out the Iraqi freedom fighters in case they get into a jam. Once the CIA-controll
ed exiles have liberated the city in the name of Free Iraq, the Marines will enter, brave the crowds who some are now predicting will be dancing in the streets, and search for the lost Marine.
Patterson has been careful in the past several hours to try to tone down the mood of his men. He later says, “I didn’t want some dramatic idea of revenge to be motivating everybody.” Even so, as his company rolls up to Ash Shatrah, Patterson experiences what he later describes as a “feeling that there is a heroic aspect to what we’re doing, that we are going to go into this town, getting one of our fallen brothers, and we’re going to be the saviors of everyone.”
IT’S OVERCAST when Alpha Company arrives on the northern outskirts of Ash Shatrah at about six in the morning on March 31. The ground is wet from recent rains, and the place smells like decay. First Recon had passed through Ash Shatrah on March 26 on its thrust up from Nasiriyah, and the town had been exceptionally foul smelling then. This morning, Patterson realizes the odor comes from the corpses of shot-up Iraqi fighters rotting in nearby ditches. Ash Shatrah runs for about two kilometers north down the eastern side of the road. Alpha Company sets up along the north end of the town. Several hundred infantry Marines from RCT-1’s Third Battalion are deployed farther down the road, bolstered with tanks and armored vehicles.
Patterson realizes just how big a deal this mission is when he sees General Kelly, Maj. Gen. Mattis’s personal emissary, arrive by helicopter to consult with high-level Marine officers and the CIA officials running the show. The CIA guys, three young men who look to be in their late twenties, arrive in an armored vehicle, and emerge wearing jumpsuits, flak vests and black caps. The CIA men ratchet up the anticipation level of the mission with exciting new intelligence: One of Saddam’s top henchmen, General Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as “Chemical Ali,” is believed to be holed up in the town.