Eventually we are all hugging one another, and telling one another that we love each other and pledging faiths of battlefield devotion that need not be spoken but when spoken make us all sound wise and brave and American and young and ready to die.
The final deadline for the total withdrawal of Iraqi troops from occupied Kuwait is nearly expired, and we know that the men we’re hugging might within days or hours become corpses—we believe that we will either be a corpse or one day in the future take a trip to a Texas or Iowa or Minnesota or California town to tell someone’s mother what a fine marine and man her son was just before he died, alive and brave just before he died, even if this requires stretching the truth or lying.
It’s the next afternoon and the entire battalion and all of the First Marine Division combat units—about thirty thousand men and hundreds of tanks and artillery pieces—are mounted in a massive offensive posture, waiting for the word Go or No.
We’re sitting on our rucks in the desert as the nearby oil fires burn black against the sky. Earlier, we spent half an hour taking platoon and team photos. We moved from frame to frame the way a family does at a large reunion, Sergeant Dunn playing the gruff old uncle who calls in the generations and relations in the order he prefers.
Dusk is coming and time is running out. I look at the sky and the petrol rain falling on my uniform. I want the oil in and on me. I open my mouth. I want to taste it, to understand this viscous liquid. What does it mean?
Kuehn says, “Swoff, you better close your mouth. That shit’s poison.”
I keep my mouth open, and drops of oil hit my tongue like a light rain. The crude tastes like the earth, like foul dirt, the dense core of something I’ll never understand. I don’t swallow the oil, it sits on my tongue. When I can no longer stand the taste, I wipe my tongue on the sleeve of my blouse.
Fountain has the division freqs dialed on his radio, and we hear over the band that the order to fight has been issued. The word passes around the battalion perimeter like a wave, and when it comes back to us, we might be crushed by the excitement, the pure rage. But we aren’t crushed, nor are we excited, even though we know that we’re making history, that never before in modern times have so many fighters been massed on a border, waiting for the order to invade after spending nearly seven months training in the same region.
We stand and throw on our rucks and check each other’s gear to make sure we’re tactical.
Staff Sergeant Siek joins us and says, “The other sniper teams saw some Iraqis come across the minefield and surrender to recon guys. They’ve got the potential lanes marked through the obstacle belts. Combat engineers are going to blow the way and then we’ll cross on trucks and by foot.”
On the northern side of the Berm we hook up with the other sniper teams. During their mission they called for fire on an OP and armor positions. Their bombs fell mostly on target and their targets were annihilated and they were happy there wasn’t a captain nearby to steal the handset from them. And they tell us about the surrendering Iraqis, twenty or so. The Iraqis looked dirty and defeated, and they clutched propaganda pamphlets in their fists, as though the charred paper were stamped with gold.
The battalion forms in a column behind us. There’s little work for us to do other than watch the engineers blow the place to hell and hope they detonate all of the land mines. We hear a call over the freq for a squad of grunts to manually clear a minefield. Now, this is much worse than shitter detail, and no way you can buy your way out of a spot on the mine-prober squad. I consider myself extremely lucky to be in STA Platoon and out of the draw for such poor duty.
The next morning, on foot, we lead the battalion through the cleared approaches. The passages have been cleared with zero friendly casualties.
My battalion is one of four marine task forces from the First Marine Division crossing into Kuwait today. We’re Task Force Grizzly, in concert with Taro, Ripper, and Papa Bear. Grizzly and Taro, foot and truck infantry, are in flanking positions, Grizzly to the west, Taro to the east, so that Ripper and Papa Bear, the mechanized units, can motor their way north, first destination, Ahmed Al Jaber Airfield for Ripper and the Burqan oil fields for Papa Bear.
Our forward assault is halted for half an hour while Harriers drop bombs on artillery and troop positions to our front, softening them for our coming assault. Word over the freqs says that many of the Iraqi positions that were supposed to be filled with infantrymen ready to fight are actually abandoned or full only with corpses or squads of men who prefer surrender to combat. We consider this good news.
We also consider the Harriers flying constantly overhead with bombs and the big artillery guns shooting more rounds than we’ve ever heard good news. In our static position, Johnny tells us to dig shallow shelters into the deck.
Our team has been ordered to the point of the battalion because the staff sergeant and the captain and the colonel have faith in our leadership, but this does not matter. What matters is that the rounds might hit us first. Kuehn complains more than usual, about the heat and all that wasted oil burning up and disappearing in the air. Doc John calls us crazy jarheads and quizzes us on inserting breathing tubes, treating sucking-chest wounds, and administering IVs. Dettmann says something about missing his Harley, Martinez says he wishes he was in Corpus—
—and only feet above our heads the sky splits open as a round passes over. The sound is like a thousand bolts of lightning striking at once.
Kuehn yells, “What the fuck was that?”
Martinez says, “I thought we got their goddamn tanks.”
“Stay down!” Johnny yells. “Swoffie, get me visual!”
Rounds pass directly over our heads while I retrieve my spotter’s scope from my ruck. As they pass over, it’s as though all sound and time and space in their path are sucked into the rounds. A five-ton truck blows one hundred yards behind us. Its water buffalo also blows, into a large bloom of five hundred gallons of water. And another five-ton takes a hit.
I gain visual. The tanks shooting at us are M-60A1s, friendlies.
I yell to Johnny, “It’s our own tanks!”
He gets belly-down on the deck and looks through my scope and yells, “It’s Ripper!”
The Task Force Ripper tanks are northeast of our position, and even with their naked eyeballs two grand out, they should’ve known we were friendly. Unlike the minor enemy assaults with artillery and rockets we’ve experienced over the days prior, we know that our own guys will not stop until the entire convoy and all nearby personnel are annihilated, because that is the way of the Marine Corps. We are fighting ourselves but we can’t shoot back.
It’s true that we’ve moved into a flat that an hour before had been a fortified enemy position, but that is no excuse, an hour at war is a lifetime, as a few supply convoy marines have discovered. More rounds pass over.
Johnny dials the Ripper executive officer and asks, Who the fuck do your tanks think they’re shooting at to their southwest, it’s fucking friendlies! It’s fucking friendlies! It’s me, it’s my team you’re shooting at and our battalion and the goddamn supply convoy, you motherfuckers! You lousy dicks! And Johnny continues to scream at the man, and I hear in his voice astonishment and rage, because of all the things that Johnny believes in, the superiority of the sniper and the importance of the small unit, first he believes in the Marine Corps and that the Marine Corps takes care of its own, as in doesn’t kill its own, and even though he knows different, just like the rest of us he’s never experienced the horribly sublime reality of Marine Corps tanks shooting at you and hitting your very own supply convoy, and strangely enough, hearing the loud, screeching friendly fire rounds rip overhead, the rounds pulling all time and space with them, is more mysterious and thrilling and terrifying than taking the fire from the enemy, because the enemy fire made sense but the friendly fire makes no sense—no matter the numbers and statistics that the professors at the military colleges will put up on transparency, friendly fire is fucked fire and it makes n
o sense and cannot be told in numbers.
Word is that only two men died and six were injured at the hands of the trigger-happy and blind tankers. I don’t believe this, because the damage is extreme, three five-tons and a Humvee are burning and marines are swarming around the vehicles. The carnage is only one hundred yards behind me, but it might as well be ten thousand yards away and many years past. I want to run back to the vehicles and make my own body count, but I cannot. I know my job is to forget what I’ve just seen. Lieutenants and sergeants are yelling up and down the ranks for us to get off our asses and start moving forward, there’s still a goddamn war here that we need to win.
For dialing Ripper on the radio and stopping the friendly assault, Johnny will later receive a Bronze Star. Sometimes I’ll think that for yelling, Tell those motherfuckers, Johnny, tell those motherfuckers they just hit our water buffalo and murdered someone, I too deserved an award, but I would have plenty on my chest anyway and none of it worth even a few dead shadows floating through the mirage.
Because the surrendering enemy soldiers are clogging our line of approach through the minefields, the attack plan has fallen behind by a few hours. Over the radio we hear of an occasional Iraqi tank squad making the poor decision to fight rather than surrender. Some of the tank battles last less than five minutes, as long as it takes the marine gunner to sight, aim, and send that hell downrange.
Task Force Grizzly remains on foot, a two-mile-long, two-column stretch of ground infantry who feel naked and alone and rather worthless. The Fog of War isn’t a fog but a Buzz, a good high fueled by surrendering enemy and their poorly trained and equipped brothers who decided to fight and so died, and the word up and down the columns is that soon we too will fight, that ahead of us two or three klicks we’ll encounter firmly entrenched infantry and finally get ours with rifles red-glaring and bayonets fixed for death.
Occasionally an artillery round lands between our columns, but we don’t perform immediate action due to the well-established inaccuracy of the enemy fire—you are more likely to walk into one of their rounds than have one of the rounds hit you due to precision fire. We are not only better equipped but we seem also to have the combat luck, an abstract currency you can neither buy nor steal but that you might lose if you’re not careful and grateful.
Over concern that the inaccurate artillery rounds might be used to deliver chemical weapons, MOPP level 2 is ordered, the level at which the MOPP suit must be worn loosely, but the gas mask and overboots need not yet be donned. We were supposed to have received desert camouflage MOPP gear before the ground assault started, but this didn’t happen. So we look like mulberry bushes marching through the desert. I imagine that before calling in his imprecise rounds an enemy observer might be shocked to see such a bold display of poor camouflage.
We’re marching with the overgarment unzipped, and this helps with the heat, but not much, and we sweat and sweat and become exhausted.
In or attached to my ruck, or in my hands, I carry an extra pair of boots and extra fatigues, six MREs, six quarts of water, a disassembled M16, a 9mm pistol, the M40A1 snipe rifle, one hundred rounds of boat-tail ammunition for the sniper rifle, thirty rounds of 9mm ammunition, five hundred M16 rounds, four M67 fragmentation grenades, two smoke grenades, three green star clusters, two replacement sets of gas mask filters, a map and a patrol-order book inside a map case, a compass, and a GPS system. My gas mask is secured to my hip. Sometimes this gear feels like one hundred pounds, sometimes it feels like fifty, depending on how much farther we’re told we must march and how often Gas is called.
The trucks never do retrieve us, and we will walk twenty miles, and the only enemy we see are those who surrendered, gathered now in concertina-wire circles, and their dead friends in trenches and burnt vehicles, men who might’ve surrendered, or probably would’ve surrendered, but in order to coax a withdrawal or surrender you must first prove your might, everyone knows, and you prove your might by destroying weapons and equipment and humans. I’ve never seen such destruction. The scene is too real not to be real. Every fifty to one hundred feet a burnt-out and bombed-out enemy vehicle lies disabled on the unimproved surface road, bodies dead in the vehicles or blown from them. Dozens, hundreds, of vehicles, with bodies inside or out. Perhaps those two burnt men, one missing both arms, perhaps they were thinking they might make it back to Baghdad and their families for a picnic; and that man crushed under the upended T62 turret, he was running from God knows what to God knows what and of all the godfuckingunlucky space in the desert he stopped and paused right where the turret landed; and he with half a head remaining and maggots tasting through what’s left was a staff officer down from Kuwait City to inspect and instruct the troops, to offer morale and support and welfare.
This is war, I think. I’m walking through what my father and his father walked through—the epic results of American bombing, American might. The filth is on my boots. I am one of a few thousand people who will walk this valley today. I am history making. Whether I live or die, the United States will win this war. I know that the United States will win any war it fights, against any country. If colonialism weren’t out of style, I’m sure we’d take over the entire Middle East, not only safeguard the oil reserves, but take the oil reserves: We are here to announce that you no longer own your country, thank you for your cooperation, more details will follow.
Our rucks are heavy with equipment and ammunition but even heavier with the burdens of history, and each step we take, the burdens increase.
The sky is a dead gray from the oil fires billowing to the north. We hump and hump and look at one another with blank, amazed faces. Is this what we’ve done? What will I tell my mother?
Troy says to me, “I feel sorry for these poor bastards. They didn’t have a chance.”
We stop for a water break. A few feet behind me a bombed jeep sits on the road. A corpse is at the wheel, sitting erect, looking serious, seeming almost to squint at the devastation, the corpse’s face not unlike our faces—what has happened? Bombs, bombs, big bombs and small bombs, all of them filled with explosives meant to kill you! On either side of the jeep, more corpses, two near me, one not, all belly to the desert, as if they were running from the bomb—as if running would’ve helped. The back sides of the corpses are charred and decaying, the bottom halves buried in the sand, the sand wind-smeared like cake icing against the bodies, and I wonder if the bottom halves of the men are still living, buried by the mirage, unaware that death lurks above. Maybe the men are screaming into the earth, living their half lives, hoping to be heard. What would they tell me? Run.
I assume the men were screaming before the A-10 or A-6 dropped its bombs. But maybe they were on their way to Kuwait City for supplies, and it was evening and the men neither saw nor heard the plane that dropped on them. Perhaps one of the men was telling a dirty joke or repeating a rumor he’d heard about the major’s wife. But they must have been screaming. I hear them now.
We continue walking. Cortes is having trouble. He’s complaining, asking how much farther until we get there, is it over yet, where are the trucks? He still doesn’t understand that this is war, not boot camp. As a recruit you can cry about your blisters and occasionally convince a sergeant that even though you are a worthless malingerer and you need a truck to carry you the rest of the way this time, you’ll make the next hump. I want to say to Cortes, “This might be the last hump you’re ever on, you might die soon. Don’t you want to hump hard and long and make all of us proud of you for finally carrying yourself?” But I know that inverse logic could just as easily be applied, and probably is being applied, by Cortes: “This might be my last hump ever, I might die soon, so why not ask for a truck? I’d rather take a ride to my death than be forced to walk my way there.” I will not be surprised if Cortes sits down during the next water break and refuses to continue.
My body is sore. My feet are burning, though I will not blister because, as though my feet were made for the Marine Corps grunts, I never
do; in the past I have walked forty miles straight without a blister. But my shoulders feel as though fires have been lit on them. My crotch is sweaty and rancid and bleeding. I can feel sand working into the wound. My knees are sore and my back and even my toes hurt, but I will not stop until I’m told to. The sniper rifle, fourteen pounds, is heavy in my fists. I think of the M16 broken down in my ruck, 7.78 pounds, and I again run through a gear manifest in my head, making sure that everything in my ruck is absolutely necessary. Along the road jarheads have discarded pairs of boots and socks and cammies, porn magazines they didn’t throw away before, when ordered to, a white-gas stove, a shaving-gear bag. Jettison it if it will not save you.
We stop for chow. I eat the powdered cocoa and dehydrated pears from my MRE and give the main meal, spaghetti, to Dettmann. I put my crackers in my cargo pocket, saving them for later when I will need salt. We are in a slight draw, and I walk up the rise in order to shit in private.
On the other side of the rise, bodies and vehicles are everywhere. The wind blows. I assume this is what remains of an Iraqi convoy that had stopped for the night. Twelve vehicles—eight troop carriers and four supply trucks—are in a circle. Men are gathered dead around what must have been their morning or evening fire. This is disturbing, not knowing what meal they were eating. I am looking at an exhibit in a war museum. But there are no curators, no docents, no benefactors with their names chiseled into marble. The benefactors wish to remain anonymous.
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