Sergeant Patrick's rifle cracked. Rudy, staring through the spotting scope, watched the bullet's vapor trail as it streaked toward the target. "Low." He saw the round enter the center of the driver's door. Patrick racked the rifle and prepared for another shot before the target could move. He fired again. "On target." Rudy saw the round break the glass of the driver's window. The man in the car crumpled out of sight.
"Good shooting, Sergeant Patrick. Nice call, Rudy. Let's hope the mortars stop," I said.
"Vehicle from the rear!" Someone sounded a warning as an orange-and-white taxi raced around the corner from our south. Seeing the barrels of two machine guns, the driver stopped, and three men bailed out of the cab.
"Hold your fire! Hold your fire!" I shouted at Jacks and Stinetorf. An officer's job isn't only to inspire his men to action but also to rein them in when fear and adrenaline threaten to carry them away. Unless the Iraqis were armed or came running at us, we'd try to avoid shooting them. Wisely, they ran back to the south, abandoning their car. Less than a minute later, a second cab sped around the corner, and we repeated the drill. Two more men jumped out and ran back to the south.
Something wasn't right. Mortars exploding, helicopters shooting, and these guys were driving right up into our convoy? Not once but twice, and the second cab must have passed right by the first group of men running south. I walked down to the cabs and slashed their tires with my knife. That would prevent them from following us and perhaps attacking us up the road.
By then, the Cobras had destroyed the AAA gun and were sweeping in front of us, searching for targets. No more mortar rounds fell. We had gotten the right man. The battalion, eager to cover ground before the helicopters needed fuel, called for us to move out.
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WE STAYED AT THE BACK of the formation, passing the turquoise mosque and entering the grove where the AAA gun had been. It was dark and smoky beneath the trees' canopy. Brushfires burned under palm trees split in two, their fronds black and crackling. We saw empty fighting holes and a pile of discarded RPG rounds. Once again, the Iraqis' impatience and tactical incompetence had saved us. It chilled me to think that they could have waited to unleash the antiaircraft shells on us at close range. A few shots rang out from the front of the column as Marines reported men moving in the trees. Our speed picked up. We raced down a sunken dirt road between two thick stands of bamboo. I couldn't see more than five feet into the underbrush. Clicking my rifle safety off, I braced my foot on the doorjamb to steady my aim. I expected a burst of fire to rip into us at any moment.
We broke out from the trees and turned right onto a masonry bridge across the small river we'd been paralleling. On the other side sprawled the largest town we'd seen since Nasiriyah. Al Hayy stretched as far as I could see to the south. No one walked in the streets, and the windows were closed and shuttered. A dead city. The sky hung dark and dusky over the rooftops, even though sunset was still two hours away. All through Iraq, the weather seemed to move in lockstep with our tactical situation. The sun shone in safe places, while it was dark, misty, and dusty in ominous ones. A Mark-19 roared ahead of us, and Alpha Company reported sporadic incoming fire. Grenades exploded with rhythmic flashes across the face of a concrete building next to the road. I tried to duck inside my Kevlar helmet and braced for the gauntlet we were about to run. Someone up ahead had a hot mike, his radio transmit button stuck open. "Get some, motherfucker! Get some!" Explosions thumped behind the voice.
We paralleled Al Hayy, continuing north along the river. At the edge of town, we turned east and raced across an empty lot. Trash piles and abandoned cars dotted the ground. Still, no one moved. I waited for a volley of RPGs to streak from behind the walls, but none came. Al Hayy was way too quiet.
Our objective was Highway 7, along which RCT-1 still advanced to our south. First Recon was the northernmost Marine unit in Iraq, with a city of forty or fifty thousand people between us and the other Americans. To our north lay Al Kut and Baghdad, with their Republican Guard armored divisions of tanks and artillery. Even surrounded by three hundred armed Marines, I had rarely felt so alone. Our mission, as passed over the radio, was to set up a blocking position on the highway. In the morning, RCT-1 would attack into Al Hayy from the south, and we would stop the flood of fedayeen escaping north to fortify the next town along our path to Baghdad. We'd successfully flanked the city and were deep in the fedayeen's rear. I felt aggressive, almost euphoric, and saw the same feeling on the Marines' faces. For a week, we had plodded predictably up the same highway, getting ambushed and getting lucky. That afternoon outside Al Hayy, for the first time in the war, we had the initiative. We would do the ambushing. We were the hunters.
After climbing up an embankment onto the highway, the battalion sped off to the north to find a position for the night. My platoon was left behind to set up a hasty roadblock to protect the battalion while it searched. We stopped at the northern end of a modern bridge that swept up from Al Hayy and spanned the dirt lot we'd driven through. I put three Humvees abreast across the highway, with their guns pointed south. Anyone choosing to attack us would have to cross the bridge and face the massed firepower of our machine guns when they were up on the span with nowhere to hide. We had a good position, exposed atop the elevated roadway but also easily defended and identifiable to pilots overhead in case we needed air support.
"Espera, put a strand of wire two hundred meters down the highway and tie some red chem lights to it," I said. I wanted to avoid a close-quarters firefight all alone there on the darkening highway at the city's edge. Drivers would see the lights on the wire, and I hoped they would turn around.
"Roger that, sir." He and two Marines jogged down the road, dragging a coil of concertina wire that Gunny Wynn and I had carried strapped to the hood of our Humvee. They tied three red chem lights to it and turned to run back to the platoon. Over the sound of our idling engines, I heard a vehicle motor droning closer. Two dim headlights popped over the crest of the bridge. Twenty rifles and machine guns zeroed in on them as Espera and his guys slipped back into our lines.
Wynn took control, saying, "Relax, gents. Wait till he gets to the wire and give him a chance to stop. If he comes through the wire, waste him." Gunny Wynn was always at his best when our situation was at its worst. He exerted a natural calming influence on the platoon.
I slid the charging handle of my rifle back to check that I had a round in the chamber, then banged the forward assist to be sure it would fire when I pulled the trigger. One of my secret terrors was that I'd try to shoot in a firefight and hear only the hollow click of a firing pin striking empty air. I joined the rest of the platoon and watched the headlights growing larger.
Suddenly, it seemed as if the wire wasn't nearly far enough away, and I chided myself for not putting it three hundred meters down the highway. If a car hit that wire doing sixty miles per hour, we'd have six seconds to react. On the radio, I learned that we had no air support and that the battalion was still searching for a place to set up for the night. Our instructions remained to stop any traffic approaching from the south.
I exhaled as brakes groaned and the headlights slowed. The beams swung around and were replaced by two red taillights receding back down the bridge. Wire and chem lights had been a good idea. The Iraqi driver had seen them, heeded them, and saved his life. The Marines stood up and stepped out from behind guardrails and armored doors. Smiles, jokes, and backslapping all around. A fight averted is second in exhilaration only to a fight won.
"Lieutenant, check out all that traffic to the west," Sergeant Lovell said, pointing back toward the bridge we'd crossed earlier. A stream of headlights bobbed north along the river.
"Goddammit, they're flanking us," I said. I called the battalion and told them what we saw. It seemed as if our presence on the highway was well known and the fedayeen were either escaping to regroup somewhere to the north or were moving along our flank to attack us from another direction. Major Whitmer requested clarification of the vehicles
' exact location and number.
We peered hard through the dusk. Location was no problem—there was only one road over there, and they were clearly on it. We could see six or eight pairs of headlights at any given time, but they continuously came into view and then disappeared again behind the trees. Clearly, there were dozens of vehicles in all. They looked like open-bed trucks full of men—figures clustered together in the back, standing shoulder to shoulder. This was consistent with what we'd seen the fedayeen doing in other towns. Confident that we had a legitimate target, Major Whitmer called an artillery fire mission to the batteries south of Al Hayy, and we watched as rounds began flashing along the distant road. It would be great to kill some fedayeen, but pinpointing artillery onto individual moving trucks was nearly impossible, so we settled for making that escape route less attractive and perhaps keeping some of the bad guys bottled up in town for the next morning's battle.
Our attention snapped back from the distant road to another pair of headlights rushing toward us on the bridge. Unlike the previous pair, these were high off the ground—a truck. I heard mashing gears as it accelerated over the crest of the bridge. It was moving fast, with no sign of slowing down. Maybe the driver couldn't see us.
"Headlights." We'd kept our lights off to avoid being easy targets, but if the truck didn't see the red chem lights, surely he'd see three sets of headlights stretched across the width of the highway facing him. The Marines pulled their knobs, and bright white light illuminated the pavement all the way out past the barbed wire. The truck barreled on, getting louder. It was a yellow tractor-trailer, ten feet high and fifty feet long. Come on, come on, come on, I thought, willing the driver to stop and turn around.
The truck's size and speed could carry it into us even after we opened fire. I remembered General Conway's instruction back in Kuwait: "Your first obligation as an officer is the defense of your men." This truck could be full of wounded children, but if I allowed it to crash into our position, we'd surely lose at least three vehicles and their heavy machine guns, along with most of our ammunition, food, medical supplies, fuel, and water. We'd also lose Marines. I knew these guys—they'd die shooting rather than jump to safety to save themselves. The truck raced toward the wire, so close that the driver was either in a panic or intent on killing us.
"Light him up!" The last word was still on my lips when every gun in the platoon opened fire. In slow motion, I watched .50-caliber tracers and Mark-19 rounds arcing over the truck. It closed the gap on the gunners faster than they could lower their guns. For a second, I thought he'd run right into us. The gunners corrected, and grenades exploded against the grille and windshield as armor-piercing incendiary machine gun rounds ripped the cab apart. Only every fifth round was a tracer, but a steady stream of red streaks poured into the cab.
Still the truck rushed closer. Headlights bounced toward us, carving light through the smoke. I dropped the radio handset. It was usually my most lethal weapon, but worthless as the truck closed the last hundred meters toward the platoon. Around me, the Marines were on knees or braced against doors, aiming, firing, changing magazines. I jammed the rifle stock into my shoulder and flipped the selector lever to "burst." The M-16 shoots either semiautomatic single shots or three-round bursts. Bursts are usually a waste of ammo since the muzzle rises after the first shot and the next two pass over the target. But this was a truck, a close truck. It was the proverbial broad side of a barn. I aimed low, at the middle of the grille, knowing the shots would float upward toward the windshield. The rifle stuttered, three little kicks at a time.
The truck drifted right before jackknifing hard left. It skidded to a halt thirty feet from us as the platoon's guns fell silent. There was a pause while everyone waited to see what would happen next. Almost unbelievably, two men jumped out of the cab and ran for the embankment on the side of the highway. If only they'd raised their hands in surrender, they could have survived. Instead, Sergeant Espera took aim with his M4 and dropped them with well-placed shots to the chest. Both men crumpled to the ground and lay still in the full glow of our headlights.
"Hitman Two, proceed north and rejoin Godfather," the radio squawked. Without a glance back at the carnage we'd inflicted, we loaded the Humvees and drove north. I chose to leave the wire in the road, hoping that it, a wrecked truck, and a pair of bullet-riddled corpses would warn other drivers that the highway north of Al Hayy was closed for the night.
We spent the night in ranger graves carved from slick clay. Bravo Company faced south, Charlie faced north, and Alpha guarded the flanks in between. Throughout the night, bursts of tracer fire arced from Charlie's position toward approaching vehicles. The firing always followed the same pattern: a short warning burst aimed high, followed by a longer and more insistent warning burst aimed closer, and finally a frantic drilling rattle as the gunners abandoned persuasion for force. The road north of their position looked like a used-car lot of shattered windshields and blood pooled on the pavement. No cars came toward us from the south, and I was silently grateful for the deterrent value of the bullet-stitched truck. Killing once had saved us from killing repeatedly.
In the dark hours of the early morning, I walked the lines to check our defenses and visit with Sergeant Espera and his Marines. They had done most of the shooting at the roadblock, and I wanted to see how they were handling it. It was easy, on a night like this, for things to look bleak. We had been eating only one MRE a day because the truck carrying our extra food had been blown up by fedayeen near Qalat Sukkar and our resupply priorities were fuel, water, and ammo. I was too hungry to sleep. Low, scudding clouds spat cold rain, turning the clay of our holes into glue. With no moon or stars visible, the night was dark. I slipped and slid through the mud to Espera's position next to the highway. He had ordered his team to dig deep in case another truck tried to blow through our lines. Four Marines huddled together in a chest-deep fighting hole as I approached. I saw the outlines of their helmeted heads and the dim green glow of their night vision goggles as they scanned the highway. They had removed the .50-caliber machine gun from their Humvee and placed it on a tripod in front of the hole, pointed south toward Al Hayy.
"Halt. Who goes there?" they said, challenging my approach.
I froze, thinking of the trip my TBS class had taken to the battlefield at Chancellorsville, where Stonewall Jackson had been mistakenly shot and killed in the dark by his own men. "Lieutenant Fick, looking for Sergeant Espera."
"Howdy, sir. How you doin' this evening?" Espera said.
"Never better. Tired, cold, wet, hungry. I feel like a Marine."
I slid into the hole with the team so we could whisper together and share body heat. Espera smiled. "Last time I saw you in a cold hole, LT, was in Afghanistan. Makes me feel like an old campaigner."
"Regular warhorse, Espera. Just wait. Next year it'll be Syria, then North Korea, and who knows where after that. We'll never have to train again. Just war, war, war."
Before I could bring up the real reason for my visit, Sergeant Espera beat me to it. "Sir, what do you think was in that truck we lit up earlier tonight?"
I had a canned answer ready for him, but it sounded hollow even as it left my lips. "I don't know. What I do know is that each of us has an obligation to protect our men. You had a team to look out for. I gave the order to shoot that truck. The responsibility is mine. If you hadn't fired, it would have destroyed most of our gear and maybe killed Marines. You did the right thing."
"Yeah." Espera nodded, looking unconvinced. I ached for him. No one knows the costs of war better than the grunts. I guessed the television news that night was full of reports of collateral damage and civilian casualties. I wished people could see how much we agonized over our decisions and prayed they were the right ones. These choices didn't always translate into hesitation on the trigger or racking self-doubt, but sometimes it was enough to sit awake in the cold rain just thinking about them.
Shortly after sunrise, the captain called me to his Humvee. "Nate,
we're heading back toward Al Hayy in a few hours to support the attack. I want you to take your platoon down there right now and observe this intersection." He jabbed his finger at a point on the map near where we'd shot up the truck the previous evening. "Send back any useful information. Don't get decisively engaged. If you get into trouble, call for help or fall back to us here."
I nodded, happy to be getting out on my own for a while. The platoon eyed me as I walked back to where they filled holes and oiled machine guns. "We're heading down south to recon an intersection. Stay awake—we're all alone. Weapons tight—let's not start something we can't finish."
I saw in the platoon a glimmer of something I was starting to feel in myself: excitement. The adrenaline rush of combat and the heady thrill of being the law were addicting us. This was becoming a game. I was starting to look forward to missions and firefights in the way I might savor pickup football or playing baseball. There was excitement, teamwork, common purpose, and the chance to demonstrate skill. I didn't have the luxury of much time for reflection, but I was aware enough to be concerned that I was starting to enjoy it.
Our five vehicles rolled south on a clear, sunny morning. I sat in the passenger seat while Gunny Wynn drove, munching a granola bar and watching A-10 attack jets loop and wheel over Al Hayy. White phosphorous artillery rounds burst in the air above the city, raining their burning explosives into the streets below. All sound was carried away on the wind as we watched the silent movie of destruction.
"Hitman Two, this is Two-Two," Sergeant Patrick's team called on the radio. "We've got eyes on armed men in the field to our left. Looks like two guys with AKs, watching us and running behind that berm."
"Roger, Two-Two. Cleared hot." I turned from the air show over Al Hayy and watched Jacks lob a string of grenades over the berm next to the road. Two robed figures with rifles ran at a stoop. The grenades exploded with a sequence of thumps muffled by the mud, and the men disappeared. I finished my granola bar as we neared the intersection.
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