by Evan Wright
Ever since the shepherd-shooting incident, Colbert’s demeanor has changed toward civilians, especially children. When he sees them now, he’s prone to uninhibited displays of sentimentality.
“How adorable,” Colbert gushes as the girls laugh playfully a few meters outside his window. “They’re so cute.”
He orders Trombley to dig out the last remaining humanitarian rations, hoarded by the Marines to supplement their one-MRE-a-day diet. Colbert steps out of the vehicle, holding the fluorescent-yellow humrat packs. Espera walks up, hunched over his weapon, scowling from his deep-set eyes, perspiring heavily. “Dog, I don’t like being stopped here.”
“Poke,” Colbert says, calling him by his nickname. “Give these to the kids. I’ve got your back.”
It’s not that Colbert is afraid to walk across the yard. For some reason, he wants Espera to participate in this act of generosity. “Go on. You’ll feel good,” Colbert urges him.
Espera stalks up to the girls and hands them the packs. They run, squealing, back to the hut to show off their prizes to a woman in black standing outside.
“See, Poke,” Colbert says. “They’re happy.”
In Iraq Espera spends his free moments reminiscing about his wife and eight-year-old daughter back home in Los Angeles. Outside of the Marine Corps, his family is the center of his life. He spent his final night before deploying to the Middle East camping with his daughter in a tree fort he’d built for her in his backyard. But out here, Espera doesn’t seem to want to connect with civilians in any way. Most of all, he doesn’t even want to look at the children. While Colbert continues to wave at the kids now opening the humrats by the hut, Espera breaks the Kodak moment. “Fuck it, dog. You think handing out some rice and candy bars is gonna change anything? It don’t change nothing.”
A FEW HUNDRED METERS up from Colbert’s team, Meesh meets with villagers, who warn the Marines against trying to enter Al Muwaffaqiyah. They give Meesh detailed information about paramilitary forces that are setting up an ambush on the main bridge leading into the town.
When this report is passed over the radio to Colbert’s team, Person speculates that the villagers might be helping because they are genuinely on our side.
“They’re not on anybody’s side,” Colbert says. “These are simple people. They don’t care about war. They’d probably tell the Iraqis where we were if they rolled through here. They just want to farm and raise sheep.”
Because of the villagers’ warnings, First Recon’s commander orders the battalion to leave the trail and set up in a wadi—a dry riverbed—four kilometers back from the bridge, where the ambush is supposedly being planned for them.
The Marines dig Ranger graves and set up a defensive perimeter. The battalion orders an artillery strike on the area around the bridge, then a couple of hours before sunset, RCT-1 sends Marines in several light armored vehicles (LAVs) to try to cross the bridge. They are turned back by heavy enemy gunfire. When the LAVs return down the road past the wadi we’re in, Gunny Wynn spots one moving slowly with its rear hatch open and a wounded Marine in the back. “Guess the locals were right about that bridge,” he says.
The Marines are told to prepare to stay here for the night. Despite the civilian deaths they’ve witnessed or caused in the past twenty-four hours, most Marines are still on a high from seizing the bridge the night before. Being told they’re going to stay in one place for the next twelve hours or so adds to the morale boost.
The men spend the remaining hours of daylight partially stripping out of their MOPPs and washing up. Reyes breaks out an espresso pot, which he fills with Starbucks coffee, luxury items packed in his gear for special occasions. While brewing it, he accosts Pappy, his team leader, who’s just finished shaving. “Pappy, you missed a spot.”
Reyes takes his razor and cleans up around the edge of Pappy’s sideburns. “Sometimes before a big meeting with the boss, I have to clean him up a little,” Reyes explains.
“The battalion commander thinks I’m a bum,” Pappy says, tilting his head slightly.
“Brother, that’s ’cause he don’t know what a true warrior be,” Reyes says, clowning.
The close relationship shared by Reyes and Pappy is between two men who are complete opposites. While Reyes has so much bubbly effervescence that he manages to be flamboyant even in his MOPP suit, Pappy is a rangy, quintessentially laconic Southern man raised in a churchgoing, Baptist family in Lincolntown, North Carolina, a mountain town of a few thousand souls. Pappy jokingly describes himself as “your normal North Carolina loser,” and says he’d barely ever met a Mexican before joining the Corps. Now Reyes is not just one of his best friends but his assistant team leader, his spotter when sniping, his second in battle. Reyes quips that their relationship is like that of “husband and wife.” After Reyes finishes shaving him, he nudges Pappy’s head to the side for a close inspection and pronounces, “Looking like a warrior, Pappy.”
Everyone sits around enjoying the waning moments of daylight, as artillery booms into Al Muwaffaqiyah. One of the senior men in the platoon walks up and announces, “Looks like there’s a big meeting going on with the battalion commander. I just hope he isn’t coming up with some stupid-ass plan.”
TWENTY-FOUR
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AT ABOUT EIGHT O’CLOCK that night, Fick returns from his meeting with his superiors and gathers his team leaders for a briefing. “The bad news is, we won’t get much sleep tonight,” he says. “The good news is, we get to kill people.”
It’s rare for Fick to sound so “moto,” regaling his men with enthusiastic talk of killing. He goes on to present Lt. Col. Ferrando’s ambitious last-minute plan to cross the bridge into Al Muwaffaqiyah, push north of the town and set up ambushes on a road believed to be heavily travelled by Fedayeen. “The goal is to terrorize the Fedayeen,” he says, looking around, smiling expectantly.
His men are skeptical. They’re all aware that when Marines approached the bridge a few hours ago in LAVs, they were hammered by enemy ambushers. Pappy repeatedly questions Fick about the enemy situation on the bridge. “It’s been pounded all day by artillery,” Fick answers, waving off his objections, sounding almost glib, like a salesman—all of this unusual for him. “I think the chances of a serious threat are low.”
Fick walks a delicate line with his men. A good officer should be eager to take calculated risks. Despite the men’s complaints against Ferrando for ordering them into an ambush at Al Gharraf, the fact is, only one Marine was injured, and the enemy’s plans to halt the Marines’ advance were thwarted. Fick privately admits that there have been times when he’s actually resisted sending his troops on missions because, as he says, “I care a lot about these guys, and I don’t like the idea of sending them into something where somebody isn’t going to come back.” While acting on these sentiments might make him a good person, they perhaps make him a less good officer. Tonight he seems uncharacteristically on edge, as if he’s fighting his tendencies to be overly protective. He admonishes his team leaders, saying, “I’m not hearing the aggressiveness I’d like to.” His voice sounds hollow, like he’s not convinced himself.
The men, who ultimately have no choice in the matter, reluctantly voice their support of Fick’s orders—ones that he has no choice but to follow, either. After he goes off, Pappy says, “The people running this can fuck things up all they want. But as long as we keep getting lucky and making it through alive, they’ll just keep repeating the same mistakes.”
What galls the men is the fact that they are situated just a few kilometers from the bridge. To them, it seems like a no-brainer to send a foot patrol out and observe the bridge before driving onto it. “Reconnaissance,” Doc Bryan points out, “is what Recon Marines do.”
Confidence is not bolstered when an Iraqi artillery unit—thought to have been wiped out by this point—sends numerous rounds kabooming into the surrounding mudflats. The men break up their discussion. However beautiful artillery might look when it’s arcing across the sky onto enem
y positions, when it’s aimed at you, it sounds like somebody’s hurling freight trains at your head. Everyone runs for the nearest hole and takes cover.
Following the Iraqi strike, we watch Marine batteries pour about 100 DPICM rounds onto the town side of the bridge four kilometers distant. Each DPICM round, loaded with either 66 or 89 submunitions, produces spectacular starbursts as it explodes over the city.
FOR TONIGHT’S MISSION, Colbert’s team wins the honor of driving the lead vehicle onto the bridge. The team climbs into the Humvee just before eleven o’clock, some gobbling ephedra for what’s expected to be an all-night mission. Colbert is not especially sanguine about the condition of the team’s equipment. Due to the shortage of LSA lubricant, his vehicle’s Mark-19 keeps going down. On top of this, on a night when they are going to be rolling through a hostile town, then setting up ambushes on back roads, there’s almost no moon, which makes the operation of NVGs less than ideal. Ordinarily, the team would turn on its PAS-13 thermal-imaging scope, but tonight they have no batteries for it. (Fick does not hide his anger toward Casey Kasem for failing to keep the teams supplied with these items. “That guy’s either running around with his video camera shooting his war documentary or sitting in his hole reading Maxim, while my men don’t get what they need,” he complained earlier.) Even though the team will be moving with impaired night-vision and a faulty main gun, Colbert tries to put a good spin on things. “We’ll be okay,” he says as they start the engine. “Just make sure you look sharp through those NVGs, Person.”
We roll onto the darkened road, heading toward the bridge at about twenty-five miles per hour. Far up ahead, we see headlights from a lone vehicle moving down perpendicular to the road we’re on. It reaches the approximate location of the bridge and the lights go off. Colbert is watching this, debating its meaning: Some farmer driving at night toward a bridge that’s been pounded with artillery for several hours? Fedayeen sending up reinforcements or using the headlights to signal someone?
The team ceases its speculation when Cobras thump overhead. They fire multiple volleys of zuni rockets, striping the sky in front of us with white burn trails that culminate in multiple explosions near the bridge. We make out trees—not palms but spiky eucalyptus trees—silhouetted in the light of the bursting rockets.
Cobra pilots radio down to Maj. Shoup that their thermal-imagining devices are picking up “blobs”—possible heat signatures of people—hiding amidst the eucalyptus trees by the foot of the bridge. The pilots tried hitting them with their zunis, but the rockets overshot the trees. Now they’re concerned about firing any more for fear of hitting the Marines approaching on the ground. Due to a comms error in the battalion, none of this information is passed to Colbert, Fick or anyone else in the platoon.
Colbert orders Person to continue driving into the direction of the explosions. Everyone’s life depends on Person. He’s the only one inside the Humvee with NVGs on, allowing him to see the road ahead. He hunches forward over the steering wheel, his face obscured by the apparatus. The NVGs give their wearer a bright gray-green view of the night and offer a limited, tunnel-vision perspective but no depth perception. Person is having trouble finding the bridge. It’s not quite where the map indicated it would be. Colbert radios this news to Fick.
He radios back, “Not good. Not good.”
Then Person figures out that reaching the bridge requires a sharper right turn than he’d thought. He makes it. “There’s an obstacle on the bridge,” Person says in a dull monotone that nevertheless manages to sound urgent.
“What?” asks Colbert. He has night-vision capabilities on his rifle scope but in the cramped Humvee can’t turn it forward to see what Person is looking at.
“It’s like a shipping container,” Person says. “In the middle of the road.”
It’s actually a blown-up truck turned sideways on the road several meters before the entrance to the bridge. We stop about twenty meters in front of it. To the left is that stand of tall eucalyptus trees. They’re about five meters from the edge of the road. Behind us, there’s a large segment of drainpipe that’s been dragged across part of the road.
Person drove around the pipe a moment ago. Through his NVGs it had appeared to be a small trench in the road—what he’d thought was the result of natural erosion. Now the team behind us is radioing, “You guys just drove around a pipe.”
It’s becoming clear to the team that this is not random debris. The pipe and the ruined truck in front of us were deliberately placed where they are in order to channel the vehicle into what is known in military terms as a “kill zone.” We are sitting in the middle of it.
Everyone in the Humvee (except me) has figured this out. The men remain extremely calm. “Turn the vehicle around,” Colbert says softly. The problem is, the rest of the convoy has continued pushing into the kill zone behind us. All five Humvees in the platoon are bunched together, with twenty more pressing from behind. Person gets the Humvee partially turned around; the eucalyptus trees are now on our immediate right. But the pipe, which was behind us, now prevents the Humvee from moving forward.
Person guns the engine, starting into a sharp turn, intending to cut around the pipe by going off the road.
“Halt! Stop it,” Colbert says. “Don’t go off the road. It could be mined. We’ve got to go out the way we came in.”
Colbert radios the rest of the platoon, telling them to back the fuck up, while simultaneously peering out his window through his night-vision rifle scope.
“There are people in the trees,” he says, no trace of alarm in his voice. He repeats the message over his radio, hunches more tightly over his rifle and begins shooting.
His first shot kicks off an explosion of gunfire. There are between five and ten enemy fighters crouched beneath the trees—just five meters from the edge of our Humvee. There are several more across the bridge in bunkers, manning a belt-fed machine gun and other weapons, and still more ambushers on the other side of the road with RPGs. They have the Marines surrounded on three sides, raking the kill zone with rifle and machine-gun fire and RPGs.
Why they did not start shooting first is a mystery. Colbert believes, he later tells me, that they simply didn’t understand the capabilities of American night-vision optics. The Marine rifles have night-vision scopes wedded to laser target designators—a little infrared beam that goes out and lights up the spot where the bullet will hit. Since it’s infrared, the dot can only be seen through a night-vision scope or NVGs. What each Marine sees is not only his own laser dot lighting up a target, but those emitted by his buddies’ weapons as well. The effect is sort of like a one-sided game of laser tag.
Now, in the kill zone, Marines looking through their scopes are seeing the heads and torsos of enemy fighters lit up by two or three laser dots at once, as they pick them off tag-team style, carefully transitioning from target to target. The Marines have to be careful. Their advantage in night optics is precarious. Bunched up as they are together, if they start shooting wildly, they risk killing one another. The other problem is, while the Marines are getting in good shots, their vehicles are so jammed up, no one’s able to move out.
Fick can feel his truck jolting as enemy rounds rip through the sheet-metal sides. Through his window, he sees muzzles spitting flames in the darkness like a bunch of camera flashes going off at once. Then he sees an RPG streak right over the rear hatch of Colbert’s Humvee and explode. He decides to jump out of his vehicle and try to direct the Humvees out of the kill zone. Fick’s own coping mechanism for combat is what he calls the “Dead Man Walking Method.” Instead of reassuring himself, as some do, that he’s invincible or that his fate is in God’s hands (which wouldn’t work for him since he leans toward agnosticism), he operates on the assumption that he’s already a dead man, so getting shot makes no difference. This is the mode he’s in when he hops out of his Humvee, armed only with his 9mm pistol, and strides into the melee. Marines on Humvees shoot past his head while low-enfilade rounds from the
enemy machine gun across the bridge skip past his feet. To the Marines seeing him approach, their lieutenant almost appears to be dancing. Fick later says he felt like he was in a shoot-out from The Matrix.
In our vehicle, Colbert seems to have entered a private realm. He fires bursts and, for some inexplicable reason, hums “Sundown,” the depressing 1970s Gordon Lightfoot anthem. His M-4 jams repeatedly, but each time he calmly clears the chamber and resumes firing, while mumbling the chorus: “Sometimes I think it’s a sin/When I feel like I’m winnin’ when I’m losin’ again.”
Meanwhile, Person, frustrated by the traffic jam, opens his door and, with shots crackling all around, shouts, “Would you back the fuck up!” In the heat of battle, his Missouri accent comes out extra hick. He repeats himself and climbs back in, his movements almost lackadaisical.
Two Marines are hit in the first couple of minutes of shooting. Q-tip Stafford is knocked down in the back of Fick’s truck by a piece of shrapnel to his leg. He ties his leg off with a tourniquet, gets back up and continues firing.
Pappy has a bullet rip through his foot and come out the other side, his torn boot gushing blood from both holes. He tourniquets the wound, resumes firing, gets on the radio and says, “Team Two has a man hit.” He speaks of himself in the third person, he says, because he doesn’t want to panic the rest of the platoon. Beside him in the driver’s seat, Reyes, often teased for being the platoon’s pretty boy, narrowly escapes a bullet that shatters the windshield and passes within an inch of his beautiful head. But Reyes feels oddly calm. He later says, “Wearing NVGs blocks your peripheral vision. You feel cocooned in this tunnel. It gives a false feeling of safety.” He concentrates on executing a three-point turn, surrounded by four other Humvees all trying to do the same, each with Marines on top blazing away. But one of Reyes’s tires is shot out. Driving on rims makes the Humvee wobble like a circus clown car. Pappy, riding beside him and shooting out his door, with his wounded foot elevated over the dashboard, repeatedly shouts, “You’re going off the damn road!”