Our sporadic gunfire died out, and no one moved in the fields around us. The Marines settled into a tense wait, eyeing their watches and damning RCT-1 for being so slow. I stood next to Christeson as he scanned the tree line. As far as I knew, the earlier shooting had been his first at close human targets, and I wanted to feel him out a bit.
"That was good shooting, Christeson."
He looked surprised that I was addressing him. "Thanks, sir." Christeson was the youngest member of the platoon. Normally, in a recon unit full of senior Marines, a private first class would be fresh meat. But Christeson could hold his own. He had received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy to become an officer but had turned it down after 9/11 to enlist as a Marine grunt. I respected him for that.
From the south, artillery boomed. They were shots, not impacts, and Wynn glanced at me with a raised eyebrow. I shook my head. Don't know. The rounds rustled overhead and exploded into the northern end of Ar Rifa. Someone was controlling the fire mission, and the only Americans up there were recon's other companies. I got on the radio. Alpha Company was shooting at the Ba'ath Party headquarters. We wondered about the wisdom of dropping high-explosive artillery shells into a crowded town, regardless of the target's legitimacy. More questionable news followed: our company commander was on his way to our position to work up a mission to deter those gunmen moving in the trees to our east.
I met the captain when his Humvee pulled into our small circle. "Sir, we took some shots at them, and they seem to have gotten the idea," I said. "We're glassing the area but haven't seen anyone moving."
"Yeah, but Alpha Company's up there calling for fire, and I want to call a mission, too."
I couldn't believe it. We were going to fire artillery to keep up with Alpha Company. "Sir, I'd rather go on doing what we're doing. We've got things under control."
"You just keep tabs on your platoon, Lieutenant Fick, and let me work up the mission." Three minutes later, I listened as he made a botched call for fire to the battalion. I sat on my hands until he called in a target location only two hundred meters from where we stood. Anything inside six hundred meters was considered "danger close"—requiring special care due to its proximity to friendly troops. In this open ground, we'd be showered with shrapnel from our own rounds. I started to intervene.
"Sir, that's way inside danger close. Cancel the mission," Gunny Wynn said with growing alarm.
"We're shooting it. Keep quiet," he replied.
"It's an empty field!" I shouted. "We're watching it. You're going to hit us with the rounds, and probably RCT-1, too, since we'don't know when they'll be coming up the road. Cancel the fucking mission." I reached to take the radio handset from him.
I later found out that Major Whitmer was on the other end of the radio, and he was even angrier than I was. He threw the handset down in disgust, screaming about "that fucking idiot," whom the battalion staff secretly called "Shitman." His candor earned him a disapproving look from Colonel Ferrando, since the division chief of staff was within earshot. But he rejected the mission and put a limit on the damage wrought by the captain's ineptitude. The CO drove off after threatening me for challenging his authority.
In keeping with our tradition of a crisis a minute, Sergeant Espera ran up, crouching low behind the Humvees to thwart any snipers watching us. "Sir, I've got a flat tire. We need to change it now so we're ready to move."
I considered this, using the framework my Quantico instructors referred to as "turning the map around"—looking at the options from the enemy's perspective. What would I do, as a fedayeen commander, if I saw a Marine Humvee up on a jack with men frantically changing a flat tire? I'd capitalize on their weakness and attack. At worst, I'd catch them immobile and inflict casualties. At best, I'd force them to withdraw, leaving the Humvee for me to burn as a trophy of American impotence.
"Espera, I can't let you do that here," I said. "You have to take your team and drive up to Goodwrench's position. They have more people and can help you change the tire faster. Sorry. Get your boys together and go now. We could be moving any minute."
He shot me a glance, half-trusting and half-doubting. Another second's consideration and Espera nodded, seeing the logic. "Roger that, sir. I'll call you when we're en route back here."
Espera's open-back Humvee crept out from the drainage ditch and raced up the highway, bumping unevenly on its rim. Watching them go, I felt another pang of responsibility, and of respect.
Three hours after stopping, we still hadn't seen a single Marine from RCT-1. Watching the sun slide down the sky, I was more and more uncomfortable about sitting in one place. Tactical catastrophes are rarely the outcome of a single poor decision. Small compromises incrementally close off options until a commander is forced into actions he would never choose freely. I didn't want to become the subject of a case study taught at Quantico, and I certainly didn't want to be pictured in Dr. Death's killology slide show.
Although Ar Rifa's gates and shutters had been closed when we arrived, curious townspeople gradually began to venture outside the walls, peering at us. Some waved, while others drew their fingers across their throats. Up the road, dozens of Iraqis scoured the pavement, scavenging spent brass bullet casings from the earlier shooting. I called battalion headquarters to request a translator. Ten minutes later, a Humvee roared down the road and deposited Mish in the mud next to me.
Mish, a Kuwaiti, despised the Iraqis, who had overrun his country only a decade before. He weighed more than 250 pounds, and he kept his long hair coiled in a pile beneath an American-issue helmet. Even after the Marine Corps concluded that weapons of mass destruction were no longer a threat and allowed us to remove our MOPP suits, Mish could never be found without his chemical suit, gloves, and cumbersome rubber boots. Now he eyed the growing crowd with distaste before ambling across the road to talk.
I watched as the residents shook their fists and spat in Arabic at Mish. He shrugged and listened with heavy-lidded eyes. Three men from Ar Rifa pointed at us, their voices raised and their feet stamping angrily. I told Lovell's Marines to keep an eye on me and walked out to join Mish.
"What are they saying?"
Mish paused, savoring his importance. "They say they are happy the Marines are here, and they're grateful to be liberated."
"Goddammit, Mish, cut the bullshit."
"They wonder why you are sitting here and are afraid you will attack the town and kill them. They say the fedayeen are at the other end of town, in the old headquarters of the Ba'ath Party. They want to help us kill the bad guys."
Now we were making progress. "OK, ask them if they can do something for us." I handed Mish a fistful of infrared chem lights. "Tell them to wait until after dark, then crack these chem lights and put them on the roofs of the buildings where the fedayeen are holed up. American helicopters will be able to see the lights and may destroy the buildings."
This was a plan we'd been briefed on earlier. I had my doubts about it, given what I'd already seen of Iraqi tribalism. Most of these lights, I expected, would end up on the roofs of people to whom these men owed money. Still, it might work if we could corroborate the identity of the buildings with another source. The men thanked me profusely for the lights as Mish extorted cigarettes from them. Dusk had deepened over Ar Rifa, and we jogged back across no man's land to the relative safety of the Humvees.
The battalion repeated instructions to stand by and wait for RCT-1, so we settled in for an uneasy night. The Marines attached batteries to our fireflies, and soon the little infrared lights winked comfortingly from each Humvee when viewed through night vision goggles. A few Marines dozed on the ground while their teammates scanned the fields and town for movement. I checked our perimeter security again and stopped at Colbert's Humvee to use the AN/PAS-13. This black plastic sight was about the size of a tissue box and enabled us to see heat. Traditional night optics amplify ambient light, hence the nickname "starlight scopes." Thermal optics like the AN/PAS-13 see heat differentials and pa
int any heat source, such as a human being, as a bright white blob moving against a dark background. Satisfied that we were alone, I walked back to my Humvee to monitor the radio and choke down a cold MRE. A call from headquarters interrupted me.
"Be advised we have a friendly logistics convoy approaching from the south."
I raised the handset to reply as machine gun fire shattered the night. Red tracers streamed east and west from the highway as trucks rumbled closer. I looked in vain for incoming fire.
"Get down! Everybody down!"
The platoon was already diving from turrets and hoods onto the dirt. I dropped behind the engine block with the side of my head pressed into the mud. Yelling "Cease fire" into the handset, I watched the convoy of trucks racing toward us, still pumping rounds into the trees and buildings along the highway. Not a single tracer round traveled toward them from the darkness. For a moment, I fixed on the irony of waiting to be shot by fellow Marines. Rage followed cynicism as I thought indignantly of how we had spent the entire day sitting in this dangerous spot, making it safe for their passage, and now these pogues were blasting through at fifty miles per hour, shooting everything in sight. My neural tangent circled back to how good it would feel to return fire, knowing we could waste the careless bastards. By then, though, the trucks were nearly abreast of us, and I pushed deeper into the dirt, watching beneath the Humvee as seven-ton trucks and tractor-trailers roared past, spewing tracers in wild streams far above our heads. Thank God they couldn't aim. I called a warning north to the other platoons before sitting up and leaning back against the tire. Mud caked the side of my face.
Colbert shouted from the darkness, "Fuckers thought our fireflies were muzzle flashes." Another voice volunteered that support troops should carry clubs instead of guns.
Near midnight, the battalion called to tell us we'd be linking up as a battalion on the north side of Ar Rifa before beginning a long drive north to an airfield near Qalat Sukkar. Gunny Wynn and I huddled beneath a poncho, shining a red-lens flashlight on our maps and trying to figure out how to get there. Qalat Sukkar was the next town north on Highway 7, about twenty miles away. The airfield, though, was east of the town on a road labeled Highway 17. It looked like forty or fifty miles of nighttime driving, without headlights, through enemy territory far forward of any American positions.
Wynn turned to me with a resigned look and said, "Being in this battalion is like winning the lottery every fucking day."
27
NORTH OF AR RIFA, we spotted the battalion's fireflies flashing in a field east of the highway and silently rolled into the perimeter. While the platoon prepared for the long drive to Qalat Sukkar, Gunny Wynn and I sat in on a brief of the night's mission. I was reaching a numbed equilibrium where nothing fazed me. In the past twelve hours, I had been shot at by other Marines, overseen the killing of a group of men intent on killing us, watched artillery pour into a crowded town, nearly been killed by my own CO, and now was about to be launched on a long-range mission into enemy territory.
The colonel pulled his officers and staff NCOs into a tight circle and rasped through the plan. The British Parachute Regiment would assault the Iraqi military airfield at Qalat Sukkar the next morning in order to use it as a staging base for the push to Baghdad. We would do reconnaissance on the field before the attack. There were reports of tanks and antiaircraft guns there that posed a significant threat to the British force. No more details were given. We'd be racing sunrise and had to leave immediately to be of any use to the assault force. A platoon commander in the back asked the colonel if he had ever seen a movie called They Were Expendable.
I drove the first leg of the trip, allowing Wynn to catch a bit of much-needed rest. Night vision goggles restricted my sight to two narrow fields of grainy green. Ahead of me, Espera's Humvee wove up the highway, its driver clearly struggling as I was. Colbert and Lovell carried the thermal sights at the front and rear of the platoon. Routine banter crackled back and forth on the radio as possible targets were identified and then dismissed as sheep, goats, or early-rising farmers. We were exhausted. I remembered Shaka's scolding in Afghanistan about officers transferring their own fatigue onto troops who were capable of more than they knew. He was right. But you could only push so hard before something broke.
We left Highway 7 south of Qalat Sukkar to circumvent the town on empty country roads. For two hours, we crept through the darkness. I was taking limited cues—a glimpse of a house or the condition of the road—and building a story around them: population density, terrain, the likelihood of the Iraqi army being nearby. It occurred to me that my impressions could be completely wrong, that I could drive that route in daylight and make entirely different assumptions. Our assumptions governed our responses—whether to attack or withdraw if we got hit, whether to respond with massive force or precision fire, whether to call for reinforcements. I figured I was getting half my assumptions right. The thought was chilling. Fatigue, darkness, stress, and a vague mission conspired to envelop us in a fog. Emotionally, I felt as if we were driving a hundred miles an hour down a highway in a blinding snowstorm.
Each roadside ditch and clump of trees was a potential ambush point, and I caught glimpses of alert Marines in the dim glow of GPS receivers and radio lights. The terrain opened up as we neared the airfield, and the clouds dissipated, unveiling a sky of shining stars. Just before dawn, in the coldest part of the night, we stopped and draped camouflage netting over our vehicles. Everyone but those pulling security collapsed into sleep, and I went in search of company headquarters to ask about our next move. The captain said that two foot patrols would be sent out to look at the airfield, but we were not included. I expected that the patrols would observe the field, confirm or deny the reports of significant defenses, and then pull back as we watched the British attack at first light. There was nothing more for me to do, so I returned to the platoon, inspected the lines, and stretched out in the tall grass to sleep.
Christeson woke me twenty minutes later. "Sir, we're getting ready to move." The eastern sky was already turning pink. Dew had soaked my poncho liner. I threw it in the back of the Humvee. My mouth was dry, and my eyes burned with the irritation of too many hours awake. I felt clumsy and disoriented as I joined the captain for an update.
The patrols were still not in position to see the field, but the division wouldn't authorize the British attack without some idea of Qalat Sukkar's defenses. I had visions of burning British helicopters falling from the sky and nodded in agreement. It would have been easy, I thought, to delay the attack and use the daylight to do a thorough reconnaissance of the airfield. The morning was clear. We could stack aircraft overhead to obliterate anything that threatened us. But the commanders ordered that we, in our light-skinned Humvees and with no preparation time, would attack the airfield immediately. Reconnaissance in force.
I had first felt fear in Iraq on the initial drive into Nasiriyah. The next three days of gunfights had hardly affected me. Hearing that we were about to seize the airfield, I was afraid for the second time. The fear this time was not of Iraqi defenders and my own violent death. Instead, it came from realizing that my commanders also felt the effects of fatigue and stress. Fear filled the little cracks and growing voids in the trust I had placed in them. Remembering General Mattis's insistence that we train to survive the first five days in combat, I thought how ironic it would be to die on this morning of the sixth day.
Coupled with the fear were resignation and helplessness. I was a Marine. I would salute and follow orders. Without knowing the big picture, we had to trust that they made sense. My Marines and I were willing to give our lives, but we preferred not to do so cheaply. The fear was a realization that my exchange rate wasn't the only one being consulted.
Engines were already cranking as I briefed the platoon. My operations order took thirty seconds. We'd rush down the airfield's main access road and crash through the front gate. Once inside, we'd do a starburst, with Bravo Company continuing straight ahead
, Third Platoon on the left, and Second on the right. Alpha and Charlie would break off in different directions. We'd advance across the field and engage any Iraqi forces we found. Consolidation would be on the main runway once we overwhelmed any resistance. Air Force aircraft would be overhead, but their call signs and contact frequencies were unknown. Part of me expected open revolt, but the team leaders nodded, loaded their teams, and formed up to move.
Backlit by the rising sun, we raced down the airfield access road. I looked to my right and saw one of the night's foot patrols facing us with crossed arms raised, our signal for "friendly—don't shoot me." The road was several kilometers long, lined with brush and small trees. It looked as though we were alone.
Gunny Wynn drove, and I juggled my rifle and two radios in the passenger seat. Just seconds before we reached the chainlink fence surrounding the airfield, a warning from company headquarters went out to all vehicles. "All personnel on the airfield are declared hostile. I say again, all personnel on the airfield are declared hostile."
We normally operated within certain constraints. We could respond proportionally in self-defense—"fire if fired upon"—or we could shoot first at obvious military targets. Both categories depended on the target being a clear and present danger. "Declared hostile" meant there were no rules of engagement. It meant shoot first and ask questions later. At Quantico, we had learned about Vietnam's free-fire zones. They had been, it was acknowledged, immoral and counterproductive. Qalat Sukkar was being declared a free-fire zone.
I clicked the transmit button on my radio handset to countermand the order. I wanted to tell the platoon to hold fast to our normal rules of engagement. But I stopped. I thought that maybe the battalion or the company had access to other information they had no time to share. I trusted that making the "declared hostile" call would save my Marines' lives when they ran into that unknown threat by shaving crucial nanoseconds from their response time. I let the order stand and shouldered my rifle, pointing it at the landscape flashing past.
One Bullet Away Page 27