When we had a large group cornered, we would disarm them, search for anything of intelligence value, pass out humanitarian rations, and refill their water. Many men sobbed when they realized we were feeding them instead of shooting them. A young boy, dressed in military trousers and a T-shirt from the Janesville, Wisconsin, YMCA, laughed and smiled, shouting, “I make love George Bush.”
Many of the men carried gas masks. After trekking across the desert, they had discarded all they could do without, but they clung to their rifles, their water, and their gas masks. I noticed one man standing quietly to the side. He was clean-shaven and wore a dress shirt. His head turned to follow conversations as if he understood English. I introduced myself, and we shook hands. He was a battalion commander, a colonel, and most of these were his men. He thanked me for our kindness, and I replied that we, as soldiers, had more in common with each other than we did with many people in our own societies. I asked about the gas masks and whether he thought the Americans were going to use chemical weapons against Iraq.
“No,” he replied. “We think Saddam will use them against you and we will be caught in the middle.”
By midafternoon, we had searched dozens of Iraqis, and hundreds more were visible in the distance. They were mainly enlisted conscripts from the regular army. Most were Shia, and none would shed a tear at the death of the Hussein regime. This wasn’t our enemy. The Marines were getting impatient. Finally, around three o’clock, we got the order to move. Our instructions were to drive west and resume our reconnaissance to the north into the marshes toward Chibayish.
We hurtled across the desert at over sixty miles per hour. I bounced all over my seat and watched artillery pieces being hauled by trucks on the highway south of us. A race for relevance. We were already too far to the rear. Soon we curved to the right, and the highway fell out of sight. We were alone again. In the dusk, we wended our way through a ravine of sandstone bluffs. A narrow gravel road clung to the hillside, which fell off below to a canal. The dappled water flowed slowly and reflected what little light remained in the sky. I squinted at my map to find the waterway’s name: the Mother of All Battles Canal.
Ahead of us, I watched the lead Humvee bump uncertainly up onto the Ar Ratawi railroad bridge and creep out over the canal. The driver seemed to lose his nerve midspan, because the Humvee accelerated suddenly and dropped off on the far side to set up security for those of us behind. When Gunny Wynn pulled us out onto the bridge, with our wheels straddling the train tracks, I leaned sideways from my seat and looked straight down to the water below. Perhaps six inches of bridge extended on either side of our tires.
Reassuring darkness enveloped us on the other side as we stopped along the banks of the Saddam Canal and set up for the night. Our mission was simply to look north across the canal and give early warning of any Iraqi movement against RCT-1 to our south and west. After looking with satisfaction at the winking fireflies up and down the riverbank, I swung my entrenching tool to dig a ranger grave in the soft ground. Sitting with Sergeant Reyes by the radios, we watched bursts of antiaircraft fire climb into the dark sky north of us. Nearly every string of bobbing tracers was followed by a flash as the jet overhead responded with a bomb. Our heads moved left and right to follow the fire, and we cheered in hushed voices as if it were a tennis match. The night passed quietly on the canal, and when the sun rose, I dumped all our captured AK-47s into the water and watched them bubble down out of sight.
Our mission changed completely on March 23. During planning in Kuwait, and during the first few days of the war, we repeatedly made the same mistake: assuming that the Iraqi military would do what we would have done in their situation. If a foreign army were attacking Washington from the south, any American officer in any hypothetical war game would recommend blowing the bridges over the Potomac, thus turning the river into a natural obstacle between the enemy and his objective. We thought the Iraqis would do the same with the Euphrates. This expectation that the major highway bridges in Nasiriyah would be blown up is what launched First Recon on its mission through the marshes to investigate other, smaller bridges at more remote points on the river. On that Sunday morning, we learned that the bridges in Nasiriyah were intact. We backtracked to the south, happy at our good fortune and never suspecting, at least at my level, that the Iraqis might actually want us to use the bridges in Nasiriyah.
At dawn, we recrossed the Mother of All Battles Canal and merged into the westward-flowing stream of war machines on Highway 8. Marine tanks and amtracs mixed with boxy British trucks and the Polish army’s Soviet-made armored vehicles. The Poles always startled us because the Iraqi army used the same equipment. The traffic jam rolled along at thirty or forty miles per hour, making Highway 8 look something like the Santa Monica Freeway at Armageddon. Gunny Wynn and I were amused to see traveler rest areas every few miles — picnic tables with multicolored umbrellas and big plastic highway maps of Iraq. Farmers and their families lined the pavement, sometimes waving but mostly begging for food. Piles of MREs bespoke the generosity of those who had passed before us. Twice, children darted into the road to retrieve poorly thrown pieces of candy and were nearly smashed beneath the wheels of our Humvees. I passed an order over the radio forbidding any more handouts. Besides, we might need that food ourselves in the days to come.
Three hours later, the whole column slowed to a halt about thirty kilometers south of Nasiriyah. Stopped traffic stretched ahead and behind as far as I could see. We sat in the yard of a few small huts, with no idea how long we would be stopped. For the first hour, the Marines stayed in their seats, ready to move again. Slowly, they migrated into clumps near the vehicles, then sat on the roadside, and finally formed a defensive perimeter with coffeepots boiling and weapons torn apart for cleaning. I heard firing to our front. Artillery. Sitting on a roadside, heading toward the sound of guns, reminded me of stories about World War I. I recalled that those stories usually turned ugly once the narrator reached the source of the firing.
Throughout the afternoon, helicopters ferried overhead. Marine CH-46s and Army Black Hawks flew north and then disappeared back to the south before flying north again. Back and forth. Back and forth. Through the afternoon, dusk, and darkness, the helicopters never stopped. We knew what they were doing. The Marine helicopters were painted an anonymous slate gray, but each Black Hawk bore large red crosses on its nose and sides. Casevac. They were casualty evacuation aircraft, flying dead and wounded Marines from the battlefield back to aid stations in the rear. Marines just like me were on those helicopters, and I was moving inexorably toward the place that put them there, just another cog in the machine. It was a helpless feeling, a powerless feeling, but not a self-pitying feeling. Just the opposite. I began to see a quiet resolve in the Marines around me, and I felt it myself. The platoon recleaned weapons and rechecked maps. Each passing helicopter bled energy into the Marines beneath it. We prided ourselves on being professionals, on thinking clearly with the world evaporating before our eyes. We could turn the violence on and off. But emotion began to creep in. I was angry. I wanted revenge. For the first time, my blood was up.
We spent the night there on the roadside, under the stars and the crisscrossing helicopters. The intel officer passed out aerial photographs of Nasiriyah for each platoon, paper blankets four feet wide that showed each alley and house in clear detail. The town sprawled about five kilometers square, bounded on the south by the Euphrates River and on the north by a canal. Highway 7 stretched northward on the western side of town, and Highway 8 paralleled it to the east. South of the Euphrates, Nasiriyah’s outskirts gave way gradually to palm groves and farmland — our current location. The Marines had decided to use Highway 8, calling it Route Moe, but already it was known simply as “Ambush Alley.”
I gathered the team leaders under my Humvee’s tarp, and together we studied the picture. The battalion’s mission on Monday would be to drive into Nasiriyah and join Second Battalion, Eighth Marines on the south side of the eastern bridge
over the Euphrates, the southern end of Ambush Alley. We knew little about what had already happened in Nasiriyah. The BBC reported dozens of American casualties but offered few details. We heard vague reports that an Army maintenance unit had mistakenly entered the town on Sunday and been ambushed by fedayeen. Task Force Tarawa entered the town to rescue survivors and open the bridges for RCT-1 to pass over on its blitz to Baghdad. Now it looked as though the Marines were stopped and engaged in heavy fighting. We were about to join them.
We started north slowly on Monday, March 24, driving through fields next to the road in order to bypass all the supply trucks waiting for Nasiriyah to be secured. The casevac helicopters continued their morbid rounds. We passed the head of the traffic jam and continued alone. I jumped in my seat as a well-camouflaged Marine artillery battery fired a salvo from its howitzers just as we drew abreast of them. Fields gave way to concrete block buildings and metal warehouses. Men stood along the sides of the road, some jeering, some watching impassively, all menacing. To our right, an oil storage tank burned, throwing flames and a black plume high into the sky. We crossed a bridge over railroad tracks and looked down on the burned hulks of Iraqi tanks still sitting in their revetments.
Over the past four days, we had seen dozens of wrecked Iraqi vehicles. Tanks hit by American jets, trucks and antiaircraft guns blown up on the roadsides. Now we saw more wreckage in the southbound lanes. But something was different. I stared.
“Holy shit, Gunny. Those are Humvees.”
Bloody hands had pawed at the doors, leaving plaintive prints. Bullet holes frosted the windshields. Congealed blood, more blood than I thought a human body could hold, pooled around the flattened front tires. These were the sad remnants of the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company, which had blundered into Nasiriyah after making a wrong turn and was all but wiped out by fedayeen militiamen. At least nine soldiers had been killed and six captured, including Private First Class Jessica Lynch. All we knew that afternoon, though, was that Americans had been in those Humvees, and it looked like those Americans had died.
We were only three kilometers south of the bridge. Every tree, every wall, and every building looked hostile. I was afraid for the first time in Iraq. Against the white noise of the blood rushing through my head, I heard my feet tapping involuntarily on the Humvee floor. My knees stitched up and down like a sewing machine. My mouth felt dry and gummy. Everything seemed to pass in a blur. I thought of war stories that talked about hyperclarity in combat, seeing every blade of grass and feeling colors more intensely than ever before. But for me, whole city blocks faded into a gray fuzz. I feared I was processing information too slowly, seeing only one of every ten things I should. I felt short-changed. I wanted hyperclarity, too.
24
MACHINE GUNS RATTLED somewhere to our front. Mortar rounds thumped into fields off the sides of the road, leaving brown columns of dust hanging in the air. Wreckage blocked half the highway. We sped up, careening over the curbed median to drive north in the southbound lanes.
“How’d we go from quiet fields to this in half an hour?” Wynn asked, steering with his left hand while aiming a rifle out the open door with his right.
I’d been asking myself the same question. “Southernmost city on the way to Baghdad. We’re right where they want us.”
Radio reports of gunshots and suspicious activity stopped as we entered a maelstrom of shooting and moving. There was too much to call in. Forward of the artillery batteries and support troops, but still behind the infantry units up at the bridges, we took small-arms fire from palm groves along the road, which meant the grunts ahead were surrounded. Finally, we passed Marine vehicles herringboned on the highway and saw infantrymen strung out in the fields in shallow holes. At the southern end of the bridge leading to Ambush Alley, we swung to the left and pulled into the defilade of a small dirt lot surrounded by palm trees.
My first reaction was to laugh. We had stumbled onto the set of a Vietnam War movie. Dense green palms encircled us, and a fence of dried fronds lined the side of the clearing. Gunfire echoed everywhere, and Marines darted back and forth, hunched low. Cobras thumped overhead, launching rockets into buildings along the far side of the river. I half-expected the notes of “Fortunate Son” to come drifting through the trees.
An artillery round crashed into the field across the road. It sliced through power lines, which sprung back and whipped through the air like angry snakes, spitting sparks. Wounded Marines fell, and calls of “Corpsman!” rose above the fire.
Alpha and Charlie companies moved forward to the riverbank, and we listened to a deafening roar of outgoing fire as they lit into enemy positions on the far banks. Bravo Company remained in the lot, waiting for instructions. I jogged over to the palm frond fence and slipped through it to talk with Marines dug in on the far side. They were facing south and west, guarding our flanks. A water buffalo rotted on its side in front of them, a victim of the crossfire. I found their platoon commander hunkered down in a hole with a rifle and a radio. He said the platoon was from Fox Company 2/8. They had been under fire all day, and he warned me about walking around like I was.
“They’re in the trees, man. They’re fucking everywhere, and the fuckers can shoot, too.”
Vietnam.
I went back to the lot and got orders to strip all nonessential equipment from my Humvees. When Task Force Tarawa attacked across the bridge into Nasiriyah, my platoon would race in after them to evacuate casualties. There were too many RPGs in the air for helicopters to fly over the city, so all casevac would be on the ground. It was morbid, planning to evacuate Marines who were now walking around, talking with their buddies, and preparing for the attack. While we worked to dump excess fuel and add extra stretchers and medical supplies to the Humvees, mortars exploded into the dirt across the road, showering the pavement with clods of clay and clattering pebbles. I stood talking with Sergeant Patrick when a metal object sailed over the guardrail and clanged into the back of his Humvee, bouncing through the bed.
“Grenade!” The call went out, and we dove to the ground, waiting for the blast. Waiting and waiting. Finally, Patrick and I stood and peeked into the back of the vehicle. A jagged piece of shrapnel sat inside, not quite harmless, but no grenade either. We laughed. Combat slides emotions so far up the scale that amusing events become hilarious. Sometimes, in mid-firefight, I would see Marines laughing maniacally.
Helicopters continued strafing the city blocks across the river. Marines cheered as a Huey did a slow pass, raking the riverfront with its door-mounted Gatling gun. Chunks of masonry fell from buildings. Cobras swooped in fast, rockets streaking from their pods, before pulling off at crazy angles and rushing back toward ground held by the Marines. An F/A-18 Hornet thundered low over the river, all intimidation. I saw the pilot’s head in the cockpit as the gray dart slashed past. He pulled up in a rolling turn, followed by smoke puffs and strings of tracers. So much for intimidation.
Dusk settled over Nasiriyah. For us, that meant only that the tracers were easier to see. The promised attack across the bridge hadn’t happened, and we prepared to spend the night there at the bridgehead. I divided the platoon in half to provide security and dig fighting holes. No sooner had we begun to dig than word trickled down to drive three kilometers south and join RCT-1 for a nighttime mad dash through Ambush Alley.
We drove back the way we had come. Smoldering fires along the road lit our windshield with flickering light. South. I couldn’t believe we were giving up ground, even if only to regroup and rush north again. We had been told for months that most Iraqis wouldn’t fight, that any resistance this far south would be sporadic and ineffective. But we heard reports that the Saddam Fedayeen, Saddam’s “Men of Sacrifice,” were assembling for a fight in Nasiriyah. Before the war, the fedayeen had specialized in torture and executions. It looked as if they had two Marine regiments stopped in their tracks.
Hundreds of vehicles were stacked along both sides of the road. Tanks, amtracs, Humvees, and
support trucks idled in the darkness. We found our place in line — right atop the railroad bridge, where we were fully backlit by an oil tank burning in a field east of the road. Any twelve-year-old with a hunting rifle could have hit the silhouettes we made in the fiery glow. I jogged up the road to the company commander’s Humvee and asked to move a hundred meters forward or backward to a better position.
“I can’t give you permission,” he replied, “without checking with the battalion.”
“So check with the battalion.”
“Bothering the battalion about something this minor will make us look bad.” He said it with exaggerated patience. “Besides, we’ll be moving soon.”
Six hours later, after alternately dozing under the Humvee, listening to radio chatter, and counting the artillery salvos sailing north into Nasiriyah, we still hadn’t moved.
I passed some of the time pacing in the road and ran into a classmate from Quantico. He looked exhausted, with dark eyes sunken in a face glowing white in the reflected firelight. I asked how he was doing.
“Hell of a day. We had some Iraqis surrendering earlier. Marines walked up to them, and the hajis dropped their white flag and pulled AKs out from under their robes. Ten minutes later, some fucker was shooting at us with a rifle in one hand and a little girl in the other. My guys are trying to do the right thing, but I don’t want to get them fucking killed in the process. There’s a bunch of dead Marines on the road in town. You’ll see ’em when we roll through.”
“What happened?”
“Depends who you ask. RPG ambush. Friendly fire from an A-10. Hell if I know.”
We had spent the day making veterans. Most of the Marine Corps had gone ten years without a real fight. I hoped we were up the steep part of the learning curve already. General Mattis had told us to survive the first five days in combat, the most dangerous days. That left four more. Just a day before, Marines talked about this being a repeat of the hundred-hour war. The greatest fear was that it might end without us firing a shot. Surrounded by fires, I sat on the hood of the Humvee and watched the horizon flash as artillery shells crashed into Nasiriyah. Near dawn, we started the engines.
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