Midnight passed, the night grew colder, and family members began to leave. Still we waited. Finally, around two A.M., the headlights of the white school buses slowly approached the camp. Marines tossed packs and seabags aboard two tractor-trailers and, with much counting and re-counting, climbed onto the buses like so many third graders. Armed sentries, called "Guardian Angels," were posted on each bus in case Saddam or al Qaeda decided to keep us off their turf by launching an attack along I-15 between San Diego and March Air Reserve Base near Riverside. This precaution proved unnecessary, and we rolled onto the base just before dawn.
We lined up our bags for loading aboard the Air Force C-5 Galaxy cargo plane that would be carrying us to the Middle East, then claimed patches of space on the acres of concrete hangar floor. The Red Cross provided coffee, hamburgers, and a large television tuned to CNN. We watched as NASA lost contact with the space shuttle Columbia and, as the morning progressed, smoldering pieces were collected from fields across Texas.
"Fuck," Sergeant Espera said. "We couldn't read a worse omen if we spilled a goat's entrails right here on the floor." Espera had come to recon with Captain Whitmer and me. Now he was Sergeant Colbert's assistant team leader.
In true military fashion, our flight was delayed, and then delayed again. We passed a precious Saturday stewing on the floor, watching cars whiz past on the highway just a few hundred yards away. I pretended to read. There was too much time to think. I watched my Marines talking and sleeping, and thought about their wives, children, and parents. Each of their lives touched so many other lives. Each of those lives relied, at least a little, on my doing my job well. Our generation was often portrayed as one without consequences, without responsibility. Now, I thought, we were making up for it.
I drifted to sleep on the hangar floor with boots on and a rifle by my side, the first of many such nights. At three A.M., I woke to the rustle of Marines rising, stretching, and throwing on gear. Our flight had been called. Out on the tarmac, the slate-gray C-5 was nearly invisible in the darkness. A white light on its tail was so high that it seemed to blend with the starry sky. We shuffled across the ramp, weighed down with flak jackets, helmets, weapons, and packs. Our Humvees had already been loaded—twelve of them in two rows stretching the length of the immense cargo bay. Chained in the glare of the fluorescent lights, they looked like animals in a zoo, out of place and forlorn.
Passengers in a C-5 sit in rows of airline-style seats perched high above the cargo bay. We climbed a spiral ladder to this passenger capsule and wedged ourselves into place among the piles of gear. The flight attendant, a grizzled Air Force technical sergeant, gave a quick brief. Flying time to Morón, Spain, would be twelve hours, with midair refueling over Greenland. In-flight meals were MREs, and there wouldn't be a movie. The plane had no windows, so I relied on my imagination as we rumbled down the runway and climbed smoothly to cross the country, above my sleeping family, and out over the Atlantic.
I passed time writing in my journal before being jolted awake as the wheels touched down in Spain. It was midnight, and we hurried to board buses and eat a meal before catching our next flight. Base rules required us to put our weapons in the armory before heading to the chow hall. Why Marines en route to a war couldn't be trusted to carry their unloaded weapons around a military base was a mystery to us. So we stood in line for an hour at the armory, shivering in the cold. Finally, we arrived for what we expected would be our last real meal. I felt the stares of the Spanish employees behind the serving counters. Our desert camouflage gave away our destination.
I sat at a table with the other platoon commanders and platoon sergeants. Talk turned to the last Gulf War and the memories of the Marines who had been there twelve years before.
"I remember the artillery," one Marine recalled. "You'd try to bury yourself in the sand as rounds shrieked in over your head. There was always a second or two between first hearing it and knowing where it was going to hit. That was the worst part—that second or two of not knowing, thinking maybe your number was up."
General reminiscing began. "I remember the fires. The whole damn country was on fire. You couldn't see, couldn't breathe, never knew what was going to pop out at you from a cloud of smoke."
"What about all the POWs? Remember them? Pitiful little fuckers. Walking around holding hands. What a worthless fucking adversary."
"Yeah, but Saddam's got a lot of weapons. Doesn't take a stud to push the button on a Scud, and it'll kill you just as dead."
The battalion commander stood to leave, and the conversation trailed off. We rose to follow him, dumping our trash with a last wistful glance at the dessert case.
We left Morón in darkness, flying east. The big C-5 carried us across Europe and the Mediterranean before dropping quickly into Kuwait City International Airport. As we screamed down to land, I lurched forward, held in place only by a taut seat belt, floating two inches above the seat. My ears popped, and the wind whistled past the fuselage. The combat descent was our first hint that we'd arrived in a different world.
We sat in the plane for an hour, waiting for it to park on the crowded ramp. A long line of aircraft disgorged pallets and people. Another line of planes waited to take off in a cloud of shimmering exhaust. Trucks raced back and forth, honking at disoriented newcomers looking for a sign, a guide, anything. A group of soldiers in a pickup truck finally met us. They scanned our military ID cards with a handheld computer, recording our arrival for Central Command's nightly news briefing about the size of the force opposing Saddam. The soldiers herded us aboard a bus, and we pressed our faces to the windows as we rolled past the terminal toward a gate. Sandbagged bunkers sat at every corner, manned by soldiers with machine guns. Roving patrols of Humvees cruised slowly along the airport's access roads, weaving among the Jersey barriers in front of checkpoints protected by razor wire. Beyond the fence, a gravel plain stretched into the distance, broken by a highway and piles of whitewashed buildings.
Outside the airport, we had to draw the curtains on the bus. Angry Kuwaitis, seeing armed Americans flooding into their country, might have been tempted to spray us with rifle fire. It had already happened twice to other groups. Through cracks in the drapes, I tracked our progress, noting that we picked up armored Humvee escorts that took positions around the bus. We traveled west through the suburb of Jahra before turning north. Our destination was Commando Camp, the temporary headquarters of the First Marine Expeditionary Force. It sat about twenty miles north of Kuwait City, at the base of Mutla Ridge, the only significant topographical feature in Kuwait. Commando had been a Kuwaiti military camp and was now teeming with Americans. Rumors promised showers, hot food, and tents with bunks. Even if these were true, we knew that the pleasures would be short-lived. Commando was home to rear-echelon pogues, support troops whose derisive name came from the acronym for "persons other than grunts." Combat forces were slated to move into Spartan camps in the northern Kuwaiti desert, where we could train, shoot, and flex our muscles along the Iraqi border.
We beat our jet lag at Commando with long runs every afternoon, around and around the inside of the camp's fence. The rules required us to carry gas masks everywhere in case of an Iraqi attack. It was a pointless regulation because without chemical protection suits and gloves, the gas would simply seep through our skin and kill us anyway. But we'dutifully ran with the masks chafing against our hips.
On our second, blistering afternoon at Commando, I went out with three of the platoon's hard-core athletes: Sergeant Rudy Reyes, now serving as Sergeant Patrick's assistant team leader in Team Two; Corporal Anthony Jacks, Team Two's heavy machine gunner; and Corporal Mike Stinetorf ("Stine"), Team Three's heavy machine gunner. Because of the military's hierarchy, I spent most of my time with Gunny Wynn and the Marines one step above or below me in the chain of command—my CO and the team leaders. I was glad of this chance to get out and talk with other guys in the platoon.
By our second lap, there wasn't much talking. Reyes was in the lead
. Stine, powerfully built, followed close behind. Jacks and I worked to keep up, shoes pounding rhythmically on the pavement. As we turned a corner in the farthest part of the compound, a mechanical whine slowly built to a shriek. The gas attack alarm. Incoming missile. We stopped and pulled our gas masks from their canvas carrying cases. I was still breathing heavily as I slipped it over my head, and the sweat on my face steamed the eyepieces. Under the best circumstances, wearing a gas mask is like breathing through a straw. I felt ready to collapse.
Rudy started off again at a trot. We fell in behind him as a voice over the camp loudspeaker announced that the alarm had been only a test. But wearing the masks had become a test, and we kept them on. By the next day, the whole platoon was running in gas masks. It forced the Marines to get comfortable with them. Iraq's chemical threat was our biggest concern, but those runs convinced us that we could fight through a chemical attack. We could survive. We could, in fact, win.
After dinner on our third night at Commando, Colonel Ferrando gathered the team leaders, platoon sergeants, and platoon commanders for a brief on the Iraqis' order of battle and the First Marine Division's scheme of maneuver. The order of battle was what units and equipment the enemy had and where, and the scheme of maneuver was how we planned to defeat them. It was our first glimpse at the official plan for the war.
The brief was held in the officers' tent. Sentries patrolled outside to keep eavesdroppers away from the thin canvas. The battalion's intelligence officer hung maps from the walls, lit by bare bulbs high in the tent's peak. Marines crowded around, seated on MRE boxes, ammo crates, and campstools. I sat with Gunny Wynn and our team leaders, Sergeants Colbert, Patrick, and Lovell. We shared a Michelin map of Iraq I had bought at Barnes & Noble before leaving San Diego.
The intel officer started with an overview of the forces we would face. Southern Iraq was guarded by the Iraqi army's Third Corps, composed of three divisions: the Fifty-first Mechanized, near Basra; the Sixth Armored, north of Basra; and the Eleventh Infantry, strung along the Euphrates River east of Nasiriyah. Together, this force included more than thirty thousand men and three hundred tanks. It had faced the First Marine Expeditionary Force before, in 1991, and likely remembered its brutal whipping. The morale of Iraq's Third Corps was assessed as low, and an intense psychological campaign was under way to persuade its soldiers not to fight. The message was "Surrender—and live to be part of the new Iraq." The bottom line was that we could expect no serious military resistance before reaching Republican Guard–controlled territory much farther north. "These poor guys don't even have enough food, let alone bullets, trained leaders, or the will to fight," the intel officer concluded.
He offered one huge caveat to this assessment: weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was thought to have chemical and biological weapons, and the means to hit our forces with them. They would be fired in missiles, mainly the notorious Scuds and lesser-known Frog 7s, and in artillery shells. The United States believed that there were "trigger lines" in place for Saddam to use chemical weapons. Unfortunately, no one knew what the triggers were. We saw ourselves as a vise with the White House turning the crank to tighten it. Sending us here was a turn of the screw. Crossing the border would be another. Crossing the Euphrates. Engaging the Republican Guard. Right up to kicking down the door of a presidential palace and cutting Saddam's throat. Each step put mounting pressure on him. When would he make a last stand? Artillery and missiles were the first targeting priority for coalition aircraft. All we could do was trust in our gas masks and chemical suits, move quickly on the ground, and stay unpredictable.
Colonel Ferrando followed the enemy update with an overview of how the Americans planned to start the campaign. Ideally, there would be three fronts: the Army's Fifth Corps from the southwest, the First Marine Expeditionary Force from the southeast, and the Army's Fourth Infantry Division from the north, through Turkey. The Turks were still balking, though, and Ferrando warned that all the forces might have to come through Kuwait. Within the Marines' zone, Regimental Combat Team 7 (RCT-7), built around the Seventh Marine Regiment, would be farthest east. They would isolate Basra and destroy the Fifty-first Mechanized Infantry Division. Just to their west, RCT-5, composed of the Fifth Marine Regiment with reinforcements, would seize the Rumaila oil fields to prevent their destruction by Iraqi forces. This not only would prevent an environmental catastrophe but also would guarantee the economic vitality of postwar Iraq. The First Marine Regiment, known as RCT-1, and Task Force Tarawa, a force of six thousand men built around the Second Marine Regiment from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, would pass Rumaila to the west and secure bridges across the Euphrates.
Ferrando paused to let the rush of information sink in. A team leader in the back stood up and asked about First Recon's role in all this. The colonel admitted that our mission was still evolving but suggested that it might include forward reconnaissance for the division, screening missions along the flanks of larger units, controlling air strikes to destroy enemy armored formations, and finding alternative crossing points on the Euphrates in case the Iraqis blew up the major highway bridges.
"You'll be killing something, gents," he said. "That's the only thing I know for sure."
20
TWO DAYS LATER, we left Commando. Our Humvees had arrived from the airport, so we were spared the caged indignity of the closed-curtain buses. Starting north on Highway 80, we climbed the Mutla Ridge, where, in 1991, the Second Marine Division caught up with the Republican Guard as it fled from Kuwait. This was the infamous "Highway of Death," where American jets had destroyed hundreds of Iraqi vehicles. Columns of power lines marched to the horizon over a modern highway of new asphalt, but I thought only about black acres of smoldering trucks. The CNN images had been seared into my memory in the eighth grade. I was surprised no trace remained.
We joined a procession of other convoys rumbling north. British "Desert Rats," their faces wrapped in cloaks, steered tanks under flapping Union Jacks. They looked surprised to be driving toward the Iraqi border. U.S. Army convoys hauled past in the fast lanes, knowing what was over the next rise. After thirteen years here, this land was practically theirs.
We traveled in the slow lane at a sedate fifty miles per hour. Every few minutes, a cruise ship–size Mercedes with shimmering hubcaps flashed past, giving us a fleeting glimpse of the driver—always male, always robed in white, and always disdainful of more than the difference in speed. Twice our progress slowed to allow camel herds to clear the pavement. Boys with sticks walked behind them, slapping their flanks. We passed a fluorescent green sign that read, GOD BLESS U.S. TROOPS—certainly the only one of its kind in the Arab world.
All along the desert that stretches fifty miles from the Mutla Ridge to the Iraqi border, dirt trails led off the highway. Military convoys peeled east and west on these innocuous-looking tracks, passing behind privacy berms and entering whole cities hidden in the sand. Kuwait's government had declared the northern third of the country a military exclusion zone and relocated the local populace, mainly Bedouin tribes, to grazing land farther south until the end of the hostilities.
We turned left off Highway 80 and passed through a checkpoint rimmed with razor wire. The road snaked two kilometers into the desert before twisting around a rock outcropping and leading straight into the center of a new metropolis: Camp Matilda. The reference was to the Australian song "Waltzing Matilda," which became associated with the First Marine Division when it moved to Australia following the retaking of Guadalcanal in 1943. Despite its charming name, Matilda was a bleak, unfinished camp. Dozens of white tents stood in rows. No electricity, no hot food, and no showers for at least another week. We stood outside the tents, bemoaning our loss of Commando's comforts, when an F-16 fighter jet screamed overhead waggling its wings. The jet was returning from a patrol over Iraq's southern no-fly zone, and the pilot decided to motivate us. It worked. We started carving out a place for ourselves at Matilda and planning our training for the coming weeks.
I woke up early one morning a week later, enjoying the silence in the tent. The platoon lived together in its own tent, while Gunny Wynn lived separately with the other staff NCOs, and I lived with the junior officers. My sleeping bag was in the corner, a coveted spot that gave me a tad more privacy than those in the middle. A slight breeze blew cool air through the tent flap near my feet. I reached over and tuned my shortwave radio to the BBC, hoping to catch the hourly news.
"It's two o'clock GMT and this is the BBC World Service from London. Holes have been reported in the fence on the Iraqi border with Kuwait, and armed men in the DMZ identified themselves as U.S. Marines. More on this story now from Kuwait City."
Forty miles from the border in a camp full of Marines, I got my local news from London. The radio had been a gift from my parents, and it was one of my most prized possessions. I listened for another ten minutes before slipping out of my bag and getting dressed. I ducked through the tent flap with my toothbrush and a bottle of water to scrub and spit on the sand beneath the pink sky. Two tents down, another figure was doing the same thing. After brushing his teeth, he poured water onto his hair and began to slap his face and shake his head. I recognized Gunny Wynn's distinctive morning ritual and called out to him. "Hey, Gunny, want to go to breakfast when you're done primping?"
"Mornin'. Yeah, give me two more minutes." The shaking and scrubbing continued.
As we walked across the camp to the chow tent, Wynn and I returned to the topic that occupied most of our idle planning time—tweaking our roster to maximize efficiency and combat power. We were that rare thing, a fully staffed Marine platoon. Twenty-one Marines, from private first class to gunnery sergeant, one Navy medical corpsman, and one officer. Ordinarily, these twenty-three men would be divided into three recon teams of six men apiece, each led by a sergeant, and a headquarters section of five: platoon commander, platoon sergeant, corps-man, communications specialist, and a designated "special equipment NCO" to care for the parachutes and diving rigs we had not brought to Kuwait.
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