by Evan Wright
Unlike earlier in the day, when Marines rolled back during close encounters with enemy mortars, Lt. Col. Ferrando doesn’t want to lose his momentum. Now, having the benefit of robust air support, he’s divided his Marines into two columns a few kilometers apart. His plan is to rush toward Baqubah as quickly as possible, while conditions remain favorable.
When Fick passes the word that the men in Second Platoon are to remain in place, Espera turns to his men in the next Humvee over from ours and says, “Stand by to die, gents.”
The twenty-two Marines in the platoon sit in their vehicles, engines running, as per their orders, while blasts shake the ground beneath them. Everyone watches the sky. A mortar lands ten meters from Espera’s open-top Humvee, blowing a four-foot-wide hole in the ground. It’s so close, I see the column of black smoke jetting up from the blast area before I hear the boom. I look out and see Espera hunched over his weapon, his eyes darting beneath the brim of his helmet, watching for the next hit. His men appear frozen in the vehicle as the smoke rises beside them.
Before leaving on this mission, many of the men in Colbert’s platoon had said good-bye to one another by shaking hands or even by hugging. The formal farewells seemed odd considering that everyone was going to be shoulder-to-shoulder in the cramped Humvees. The good-byes almost seemed an acknowledgment of the transformations that take place in combat. Friends who lolled around together during free time talking about bands, stupid Marine Corps rules and girlfriends’ fine asses aren’t really the same people anymore once they enter the battlefield.
In combat, the change seems physical at first. Adrenaline begins to flood your system the moment the first bullet is fired. But unlike adrenaline rushes in the civilian world—a car accident or bungee jump, where the surge lasts only a few minutes—in combat, the rush can go on for hours. In time, your body seems to burn out from it, or maybe the adrenaline just runs out. Whatever the case, after a while you begin to almost lose the physical capacity for fear. Explosions go off. You cease to jump or flinch. In this moment now, everyone sits still, numbly watching the mortars thump down nearby. The only things moving are the pupils of their eyes.
This is not to say the terror goes away. It simply moves out from the twitching muscles and nerves in your body and takes up residence in your mind. If you feed it with morbid thoughts of all the terrible ways you could be maimed or die, it gets worse. It also gets worse if you think about pleasant things. Good memories or plans for the future just remind you how much you don’t want to die or get hurt. It’s best to shut down, to block everything out. But to reach that state, you have to almost give up being yourself. This is why, I believe, everyone said good-bye to each other yesterday before leaving on this mission. They would still be together, but they wouldn’t really be seeing one another for a while, since each man would, in his own way, be sort of gone.
After the platoon holds its position under close mortar fire for about fifteen minutes, the attacks cease. The platoon is ordered to move a couple more kilometers north, toward an intersection where locals have warned of an ambush.
We drive to within a kilometer of the intersection and stop. There’s a cluster of barracks-like structures, a water tower and high-tension power lines ahead where the road forks into a Y. To the left there’s a thick stand of palm trees extending west for about a kilometer. Several minutes earlier, Cobras had come under AAA fire from the buildings near the intersection. They and other aircraft decide to prep the area before the Marines roll through on the ground.
We sit back and watch them bomb and strafe the intersection for about ten minutes. Colbert tunes in the Air Wing’s radio channels. We listen as the pilots call in intended targets—from Iraqi military personnel hiding behind garden walls and in berms to trucks and armored vehicles—then watch as the aircraft nose down and destroy them. Orange rosettes flash ahead of us from powerful bombs dropped by jets.
“We’ve never had this much air,” Colbert says, eyes gleaming, pleased with all the destruction we are witnessing. “It’s all about having some air and LAV escorts,” he concludes with a grand smile.
Pilots over the radio now discuss their next move, doing a “recon by fire” on the palm grove to the left of the intersection. The pilots can’t see what’s in the palm grove, nor have they taken any hostile fire from positions inside it. Nevertheless, they request permission to do a recon by fire, which simply means they’re going to rocket and machine-gun the fuck out of it and see if anything shoots back. The battalion’s forward air controller on the ground approves the plan. Helicopters skim low over the trees, stitching the ground with machine guns, setting off a storm of white fire with their rockets. It’s a real Apocalypse Now moment.
Colbert’s team and the rest of the platoon are ordered to drive up to the intersection, take the Y left and enter the palm grove while it’s still burning.
We drive into a bank of smoke, glimpsing a succession of small horrors. There’s a truckful of shot-up cows in the field, nearby several slaughtered sheep, their guts smeared out around them. Two charred human corpses by the road are still smoking. There’s a dog with his head buried up to his ears in the stomach of a cow he’s eating. We are again in Dog Land.
We come alongside the palm grove on our left. Fences made of dried reeds crackle and burn outside the vehicle. We continue on, pull upwind of the smoke and now see there’s a hamlet nestled between the trees—a series of farmhouses, interconnected by walls, animal pens and grape arbors. Thatched roofs and fences burn. These are what were reconned by fire.
“I hope there’s no people in there,” Colbert says. The gleam that had been in his eyes moments earlier during the bombing has been replaced with his worried, helpless look.
Republican Guard berets, uniforms and other pieces of military gear are scattered by the road across from the palm grove. Iraqi forces—legitimate military targets—have obviously been in the area. Colbert stops the Humvee. He and other Marines get out. Iraqi military communications lines—cables from field phones—lie by the side of the road. Colbert’s men cut them apart with their Leatherman tools.
While standing outside, we hear a babble of voices. Men whom we can’t see are chanting something. Their voices come from ditches by the road across from the burning hamlet. An old man now rises from behind a berm ten meters away. His hands are up. His eyes are wild and his face covered with tears as he shrieks, “No Saddam! No Saddam!”
A couple of other men rise behind him, all of them chanting the same words. One has his shirt off and is waving it as a surrender flag. Another man climbs out of a ditch carrying a small frightened girl, about five or six. She stares at the Marines in shock. They’re all civilians—probably residents of the hamlet reconned by fire.
The Marines lift their rifles high and gesture for the now-homeless villagers to step forward. The men keep chanting.
“Okay, okay!” Fick shouts. He gives them an exaggerated smile, trying to reassure them.
The eldest man approaches, still chanting insanely. Fick pats his arm. The man begins to shout. “George Bush! George Bush!” he says, pronouncing the first name like “Jor.” The Marines offer the little girl some candy but she turns away in mute fear.
Fick grabs the old man’s shoulder, steadying him. “Yes, George Bush,” Fick says. “No problem. Okay?”
The old man finally stops shouting. He stares at Fick, perhaps finally recognizing that this American is not going to kill him. He breaks down sobbing, grabs Fick’s face and smothers him in kisses.
THIRTY-ONE
°
BY THREE O’CLOCK in the afternoon of April 9, First Recon and War Pig have come to within about ten kilometers of Baqubah, advancing in two columns spaced several kilometers apart. While Bravo Company clears through the burning hamlets reconned by fire to the west, Alpha Company, led by Patterson, is pushing north on a trail that follows a canal to the east. The canal runs north-south, and the Marines in Alpha are pushed up against the edge of it to their right. A
head of them is an expanse of bermed fields. Even as they creep forward—eighty Marines in about fifteen Humvees and trucks—shepherds dot the fields around them, tending flocks of sheep.
While the company is halted, a volley of mortars lands in their midst. A blast detonates so close to Capt. Patterson, standing beside his Humvee, that it knocks him against the side of his vehicle and rips up his pack with shrapnel but misses him. Then his column comes under machine-gun fire from a lone hut 200 meters ahead. Beyond the hut, Iraqis concealed in ditches, some fortified with sandbags, begin firing at them with AKs.
The lead Marines in Alpha begin to take fire from heavy, 73mm guns on BMPs—light Iraqi tanks—that seem to be about a kilometer ahead of them. The Marines in Alpha dive for cover. Patterson estimates there are as many as 150 Iraqi soldiers entrenched in the fields. With his unit hemmed in by the canal on the right side and by Iraqis to the left and in front, for the first time of the war, Patterson thinks, as he later tells me, “We are really on the brink here.”
Fawcett, whose team is near the front of Alpha’s position, takes cover behind a berm. The enemy BMP continues blasting at his men with its main gun, which fires shells about half the size of a Marine heavy artillery round. Fawcett and Sutherby, the sniper, peek up and observe more enemy troops pouring into the fields ahead of them. The Iraqi soldiers are being ferried in aboard military trucks, hopping out, then scrambling behind berms to fire on the Marines, whom they will soon outnumber about three to one.
Battalion forward air controllers contact an Air Force F-15 Strike Eagle in the vicinity to take out the BMPs. Marines are wary of working with jets, especially those flown by the Air Force. The fear is that jet pilots, moving too fast and far removed from Marines on the ground, will end up striking friendly positions. This fear is borne out when the F-15 drops its first 500-pound bomb intended to hit the BMP. The pilot misses by nearly a kilometer. The bomb lands fewer than 200 meters from Fawcett’s position. The men are buffeted by the shock wave, and temporarily deafened by the blast, but unharmed.
The pilot drops a second bomb directly on the BMP, destroying it, then moves on to take others farther north. Cobras linger to wipe out enemy machine-gun positions with Hellfire missiles.
Alpha’s Marines climb into their Humvees and advance on the Iraqis in the fields ahead. The Iraqis put out a lot of AK fire but seem incapable of hitting the Marines. Many put their rifles over their heads and shoot indiscriminately, without looking. Marine snipers steadily pick them off, while the .50-cal and Mark-19 gunners saturate their positions with lethal fire. The thing that amazes Sutherby is seeing shepherds run onto the field amidst the shooting, to drag off wounded sheep caught in the crossfire.
Alpha’s pace quickens. Marine gunners begin competing with one another to cut down the enemy fighters. Over the course of the next two hours, they advance approximately ten kilometers, destroying or routing all hostile forces ahead of them. When I run into Fawcett a short while later, he greets me with a blissed-out, ashram grin. After weeks of complaining about the war, fretting over its moral implications, he enthuses about slaughtering squads of uniformed Iraqi soldiers in the fields with the nearly 250 Mark-19 rounds he fired. “I feel invincible,” he tells me. “I had rounds skipping in the dirt right next me, a BMP shooting straight at us, Cobras lighting stuff up all around, a five-hundred-pound bomb blow up almost on top of us, and nothing hit me. Maybe it’s karma.”
On its western approach to Baqubah, Bravo Company stops outside a two-story, pale-yellow stucco building that appears to be an abandoned military post. Two hundred meters behind us, Kocher leads his team into the field, advancing just thirty meters into it from the highway. While picking their way through dried brush, waist-high in places, they encounter a group of Marines from Delta Company, the reserve unit. Several of the reservists surround a dead enemy fighter, a young man in a ditch, still clutching his AK, lying with his brains spilled out of his head. While the reservists gawk at the corpse, a man on Kocher’s team notices a live, armed Iraqi hiding in a trench nearby.
Kocher and his men turn on the armed Iraqi with their weapons ready to fire. They shout at him to drop his AK. It’s a tense moment for the Marines. Strictly speaking, this armed Iraqi had gotten the drop on them and could have easily taken them out had he fired. There’s gunfire all around, and the Marines are worried more Iraqis are hidden nearby.
But the Iraqi complies, drops his weapon and rises. One of the reservist Marines, First Sergeant Robert Cottle, a thirty-seven-year-old SWAT team instructor with the LAPD, jogs over, takes out a pair of zip cuffs and binds the Iraqi’s hands behind his back—so tightly that his arms later develop dark-purple blood streaks all the way to his shoulders.
The prisoner, a low-level Republican Guard volunteer in his late forties, is overweight, dressed in civilian clothes—a sleeveless undershirt and filthy trousers—and has a droopy Saddam mustache. He looks like a guy so out of shape he’d get winded driving a taxicab in rush hour. Surrounded by Marines, the man begins to blubber and cry.
Kocher hands his rifle to another Marine, pulls out his 9mm sidearm and approaches the prisoner. With combat raging around them, this enemy takedown begins in a highly charged manner. Kocher slams the Iraqi to the ground, puts the pistol to his head and shouts, “If you move, I’ll blow your fucking head off!” Pinning the guy with his knee in his back, he pulls AK magazines and a military ID out of his pockets. The prisoner starts pleading in English, “I have a family.”
Kocher hauls him to his feet and frog-marches him to the highway. In the surrounding fields, enemy mortars continue to boom amidst the crackling of Marine machine guns. Kocher knocks the prisoner over. He falls facedown in the dirt, with his hands still bound behind his back. In Kocher’s mind, his aggressiveness fits with his philosophy of handling prisoners. “I try to keep a prisoner off-balance so he knows I’m in control.”
The Marines bring Meesh over, and he barks at the man in Arabic, repeatedly asking him where the enemy mortars are positioned. The prisoner begs for his life. They conclude he knows nothing. They tie a sack over his head—a precaution taken since they are on a battlefield and don’t want this guy to shout or signal his comrades in any way should he see them—and wait to load him onto a truck.
Cottle, from the reservist unit, walks up to Kocher and shakes his hand, saying, “Thanks for saving my life.”
The situation seems pretty much wrapped up when Captain America makes a dramatic appearance, jogging up the road, screaming, with his bayonet out. He brandishes his bayonet toward the prisoner and shouts, “We ought to cut his throat like the Chechnyans in the video.” It’s a reference to a gore video circulating on the Internet, which many of the troops had seen before the invasion. It consisted of choppy MPEG-file footage that purported to show live Russian soldiers having their throats slashed by Chechnyan guerrillas.
Captain America then jabs the prisoner several times in his ribs and neck with the tip of his bayonet. The man starts screaming through the bag on his head, pleading again about his family. “Shut up!” Captain America yells. “Shut the fuck up!”
Watching this bizarre drama, Kocher orders Redman to step off the Humvee and guard the prisoner. They both figure the move will be a way of calming down Captain America. Redman picks up his M-4 and approaches the prisoner. He says to Captain America, “Dude, I’ve got him.”
Redman stands over the prisoner, placing his boot heel on his neck. Captain America shouts at the guy a few more times, then backs off.
Fick arrives. He exchanges a few words with Captain America, who’s now smiling and chuckling nervously, as he often does after a good outburst. Fick has no idea that anything out of the usual just occurred. He loads the prisoner into his Humvee and drives off.
A while later some of the reservist Marines approach Kocher and Redman. Cottle, who’d thanked Kocher a few minutes earlier for saving his life, now says, “You guys abused that prisoner. I should never have let you take custody of him. I ough
t to kick your fucking ass.”
Within twenty-four hours, the reservists file a report charging Kocher, Redman and Captain America with assaulting the prisoner. Captain America is temporarily suspended from command. Kocher is relieved of his job as team leader and ordered to ride with a support unit. Redman, who’s allowed to remain on the team, is dismayed. “Dude, when I put my boot on the prisoner’s neck, there were people out there still shooting at us. I wanted to control the prisoner and still be able to see what was happening.” He adds, “Kocher and I were trying to calm the situation down. I didn’t stomp or kick the guy. Dude, we just wanted Captain America to go away.”
Even Cottle later confesses, “I feel bad for the enlisted guys. They weren’t really the problem. It was the officer.” One of Cottle’s fellow reservists, a senior enlisted man who also witnessed the events, says, “From what I saw, that officer is sick. There’s something wrong with him.”
Captain America denies committing a misdeed. He later tells me he simply thinks his accusers in the reserve unit were insufficiently acquainted with the realities of the battlefield. “The prisoner was handled properly, even though they didn’t like the way it looked,” Captain America says. “They saw the beast that day, and they didn’t know how to handle it.”
BY FIVE O’CLOCK in the afternoon, the Iraqis who had earlier put up determined-though-inept resistance have either fled or been slaughtered. Colbert’s team, along with the rest of the platoon, speeds up the road toward the outskirts of Baqubah. Headless corpses—indicating well-aimed shots from high-caliber weapons—are sprawled out in trenches by the road. Others are charred beyond recognition, still sitting at the wheels of burned, skeletized trucks. Some of the smoking wreckage emits the odor of barbecuing chicken—the smell of slow-roasting human corpses inside. An LAV rolling a few meters in front of us stops by a shot-up Toyota pickup truck. A man inside appears to be moving. A Marine jumps out of the LAV, walks over to the pickup truck, sticks his rifle through the passenger window and sprays the inside of the vehicle with machine-gun fire.