By the time we reached the southern bridge, we had opened gaps between vehicles for maneuvering room. Gas pedals were on the floor. I watched Corporal Garza standing at the machine gun in Espera’s Humvee. He was swaying, holding on with both hands to keep from falling into the street. According to the map, there were three and a half kilometers between Nasiriyah’s southern and northern bridges. Less than four minutes. We passed the bridgehead where we’d stopped the day before and began to climb the span across the Euphrates. I felt the anticipation of ratcheting up a roller coaster. We crested it and looked up the length of Ambush Alley. It was the pause at the top of the hill, just before the plunge. We hurtled down into town, speeding past cinderblock buildings and wrecked cars. Whole blocks were in rubble, and stray dogs yelped as we passed.
An infantry battalion manned a picket line in the city, lining Route Moe with amtracs and dismounted infantrymen. I didn’t envy their job, sitting in a hostile city with thousands of nervous, trigger-happy Marines rolling past. Small-arms fire chirped to our front and rear, but I saw nothing to shoot at. Long cross streets stretched into the distance, lined with telephone poles. I expected to see figures darting between alleys, shooting from the hip, but the streets were empty. Fighting holes pocked the ground, and I waited for a scarf-wrapped head to pop up and shoulder an RPG. None did.
What we saw was the detritus of earlier combat. An amtrac sat in the road with its roof peeled back like a sardine can. Packs and sleeping bags littered the ground, and I saw lumps covered with ponchos. Dead Marines. It must have been bad for the dead to be lying where they fell the day before. I drove past knowing that each Marine in my platoon was seeing his fallen comrades. We saw Iraqis, too. A truck full of antiaircraft guns sat in the southbound lanes, with the driver’s bullet-riddled corpse hanging from the cab by his feet. His head nearly touched the ground. Another man lay in the street, where dozens of tracked vehicles had smashed him nearly flat. His torso spread across the pavement in a red smear. The Marines referred to him afterward as “tomato crate man.”
At the northern end of Ambush Alley, we crossed another bridge and turned left at an intersection. LAVs lurched through the fields next to the road, blasting away at assailants unseen. I was grateful for their covering fire and kept our speed up. A right turn put us on Highway 7, which we would follow all the way north to Al Kut, on the Tigris River.
The two-hundred-kilometer stretch of highway between Nasiriyah and Al Kut would take us ten days to travel. While the Third Infantry Division, RCT-5, and RCT-7 swung wide to the west through open desert, RCT-1 and First Recon battled through every town on Highway 7 in the ancient “land between the two rivers.” Our mission was to engage Iraqi units and keep them from falling back to defend Baghdad. The Army and the other RCTs would pay their dues farther north when they led the charge into the capital, but for the next ten days, much of the fighting would take place along this highway.
We started north from Nasiriyah trying to figure out if we were the lead American unit on the highway. Two battalions had crossed the Euphrates bridge ahead of us, but they were garrisoned along Ambush Alley and at the intersection. That put us at the front. Our conclusion was confirmed by reports of an Iraqi BM-21 rocket launcher in the road just ahead. We stopped while a jet rolled in and blew it up.
I knelt next to the Humvee while we halted. Stopped vehicles are magnets for RPGs, and I, like every infantryman, always felt better with my boots in the dirt. Looking around, I saw an industrial slum of junk-yards, machine shops, and trash piles. Green and black flags drooped from buildings in the morning heat, and yellow-eyed dogs stared at the invaders. We scanned the alleys and windows for human movement but saw nothing. Stopping like this invited trouble. I didn’t yet appreciate the awesome firepower of a Marine platoon in a tight circle.
Shadowy human forms danced in my peripheral vision. I never turned in time to see them fully. A man in a window. Another dodging from one building to the next. A third peeking over a distant berm. After Nasiriyah, I kept an earplug in my right ear, my shooting ear. It amplified the sound of the blood whooshing through my head. I wanted to blaze away with the machine guns and level everything around us. Clear fields of fire would make us safe. But we couldn’t do that. We could only sit and wait and watch with flickering eyes.
The highway passed into a flat and featureless countryside. It was elevated a few feet above the surrounding fields. Dikes and ditches crisscrossed them, but there wasn’t any cultivation. The wind blew across barren squares of brown mud. Walled houses lined the road at broad intervals. The image of harmless, depressed farm country broke down when we began to pass fighting holes, blown-up trucks, and bodies. Marine aircraft had swept the road clear ahead of our advance, and the remains burned along both shoulders. Piles of RPGs, pickup truck “technicals” with antiaircraft guns mounted in the back, tanks blackened and flipped on their sides. We didn’t see a single live soldier.
After three hours of driving, the battalion pulled off the highway in a herringbone formation so we could shoot to our flanks and cover one another. Marines climbed down and walked in front of their vehicles for security. I waded into neck-high scrub, silencing each step as I looked left and right over my rifle barrel. Branches screeched along my trousers, and each broken twig sounded like a rifle shot. I climbed slowly over a small berm and stopped. Below me was a fighting hole. Blankets lined it, and a kettle still hung over a fire. Untouched food was neatly dished onto two plates. Footprints in the dust disappeared into the brush.
“Christeson, Stafford, get over here.”
The two Marines came running and began walking a double helix along the footprints, cutting back and forth like dogs on a scent. But the hole’s occupants were gone. I imagined two guys, probably my age, told to sit in their hole and shoot at the Americans when they came. They would be protecting their village, their mothers and sisters, from the infidels. Even if they died, they would enter heaven as martyrs to live in eternity with their ninety-nine virgins. It probably sounded like a pretty good plan until they saw a column of Marines stop in front of them.
We had halted so the commanders could plan our next move. I was called forward to receive an operations order for the rest of the day. Spreading my map on a Humvee hood, I listened and scribbled notes. RCT-1 would be advancing on Highway 7, and First Recon would move east of the highway to patrol through the farmland five to ten kilometers from the road. Our mission was to screen the RCT’s flank and provide early warning of attacks from that direction. With a blue marker, I traced our proposed route along dirt roads and irrigation dikes. Bravo Company would lead the battalion, with my platoon leading Bravo.
Screening was a good reconnaissance mission, and this task was simple, with a clear purpose. Best of all, as Sergeant Lovell pointed out, “We’ll be in the countryside, where we can fight, instead of in the towns, where we just have to bend over and take it.”
We started driving again, with Sergeant Colbert’s Humvee on point. Sergeant Espera followed him, then Gunny and me, and behind us Patrick and Lovell. We left the pavement near a small village called Jahar and bumped slowly east on a narrow, dusty track. A body sprawled in a ditch at the turn, torn apart, it seemed, by helicopter fire.
The road twisted through fields broken by dry ditches. We wound between palms and stands of reeds, farther and farther from the highway and into greener and greener country. Mud huts lined the irrigation canals, lush and cool in the shade of the sheltering trees. The roads were built for donkey carts and foot traffic, not for three-ton Humvees. Dirt slid from under the tires into the ditches, the sides threatening to collapse and throw us down into the stagnant water. We inched across a narrow bridge and found ourselves in a yard without exit. I stopped and called a warning back to the company. Our sister platoon, Hitman Three, turned away from the bridge and took the lead for the battalion. We watched as the rest of the column inched past, then we fell in at the rear. Now we were the last vehicles in the battalion column. Patric
k and Lovell swung their machine guns around to cover our backs.
Word of mouth outpaced our tortuous progress, and soon people lined the trail as we approached. Most were friendly, smiling and cheering, but it registered that they knew where we would be before we arrived. There was only one passable route through the canals. The road turned gradually north, paralleling Highway 7 beyond sight to our left. I enjoyed the shade and the greenery, the water and crops and glimpse of survival in the fabled southern marshes. This Shia way of life was vanishing, and I wished we could enjoy it without the taint of war.
Two little girls came sprinting from a house, yellow dresses flapping. They skidded down a steep ditch between us and their home, then hopped daintily across the water, causing two basking turtles to duck under. The girls clawed and clambered up the near side of the canal and ran into the road directly in front of my Humvee, smiling and waving to the Marines in Espera’s team. The Humvee stopped. Garza elevated the machine gun away from the girls and leaned down with two humrats in his gloved hand. Tenderly, he placed them in the girls’ outstretched arms. I fumbled for my camera but missed the moment. The girls, shrieking in glee, tumbled back down across the ditch and ran home, where their father took the rations and waved solemnly to us.
Slowly but perceptibly, the atmosphere changed. Our path angled slightly back toward the highway, toward a small town we planned to approach before veering east again on another trail to continue our screen. I never acquired a sixth sense in combat, but my original five became more finely tuned. We began to notice danger signs. People watched impassively as we passed. I made eye contact with a man my father’s age. He drew his finger slowly across his throat. Farther on, women with wrapped bundles on their backs walked south, opposite the direction we drove. They clutched their children and stole glances at us. One man chugged along in a tractor dragging a trailer filled with kids and household goods. This couldn’t be normal. They were fleeing from something.
“Hitman Two, we’re about to get hit. Lots of civilians around. Shoot only discrete targets.”
My warning was unnecessary. The Marines could read the signs as well as I could. They knew our contact drills and rules of engagement. But it made me feel better. I had formally cocked the pistol. Now we just pointed it around and waited for someone to make us pull the trigger.
As if on cue, gunfire cracked to the front, and the column halted. Instinctively, we knelt in the dirt next to the vehicles, hating to be caged inside.
“Alpha Company’s in contact. Stand by.” Alpha was leading the formation.
Just as we stopped, the wind picked up. Swirling dust cut our visibility to a few hundred yards. It stung my eyes, forcing me to drop goggles across my face, further blocking my sight. These shamals, or sand-storms, blew in without warning. They filled everything with sand — Humvee air filters, machine gun chambers, mouths and eyes. We sat in a small depression, which gave us a little protection from the wind and enemy fire. On the radio, I learned that Alpha was calling in artillery to break up whatever resistance they had run into. We heard the occasional staccato of small arms, punctuated by the deeper roar of a machine gun. With the distance and the wind, I couldn’t tell whether the fire was ours or theirs.
We waited tensely for fifteen minutes. The Marines scanned the fields and trees around us, looking for anything to shoot at. All we saw were villagers continuing their frightened exodus. Gunny Wynn and I lay on our stomachs on the side of a berm. He scanned a tree line through the scope of his sniper rifle while I kept my ear to the radio.
“It’s that town up ahead,” he said. “Every time we get near a town, they’ll hit us. Luckily, it looks like we’re just skirting this one, and then we’ll be back out in open country. At least we’re learning.”
I agreed with him. The last thing I wanted to do was repeat Nasiriyah, and I suspected our commanders felt the same way. Then the radio beeped.
“Hitman Two, stand by to move. The screening mission is over. We’ll be proceeding west to the highway through the center of this town.”
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COLBERT ACCELERATED AHEAD of me, turning hard to the left at the entrance to the town. Espera, faithful teammate, followed close behind him. The teams’ gunners stood in their turrets, fully exposed. Wynn floored the gas pedal, and I clung to the windshield strut to keep from being thrown sideways out the door as we made the turn. To the right, a row of three-story buildings fronted the street. The dark recesses of doors and windows hid behind wrought iron balconies and cracked shutters. Sparkling muzzle flashes blinked in each black rectangle.
Sensory overload paralyzed me. I saw mud buildings set many meters back from the road. Beyond the turn, the buildings were concrete and seemed to tower above the road on both sides, trapping us in an urban canyon. Flashes of incoming fire surrounded us, but I didn’t hear it, and I couldn’t tell whether my platoon was shooting back. There was no fear, but no bravado either. I felt nothing. I was a passive observer watching this ambush unfold on a movie screen.
When Gunny Wynn yanked the wheel straight, I snapped back to the present. My hearing returned all at once: roaring machine guns, Humvee engine shrieking. I saw the street, the fedayeen positions, and my platoon in a fight. Fire poured from the buildings on both sides. Wisps of smoke swirled in the wake of each bullet. We drag-raced down the street, but it felt like a crawl. I lifted off my seat as we crashed through potholes and over missing slabs of pavement. Colbert darted left around a wrecked car smoking in the middle of the road. Wynn followed, and we jumped the median, swerved past a light pole, and picked up speed. Muddy water and sewage sprayed in rooster tails from the Humvees’ tires.
“This is Hitman Two, in contact. Taking small arms, left and right. We’re engaging.” I couldn’t even see the rest of the battalion ahead of us.
“Roger, Two,” headquarters replied. “We took some on our way through, too. Just keep pushing.”
Survival and command tugged me in different directions. A normal human survival reaction would be to curl up on the Humvee floorboards and close my eyes. This is precisely the reaction Marine Corps training is designed to overcome. And it worked. After the initial shock of the ambush, I felt calm and completely self-possessed. The Marines looked the same. They were aiming their shots, calling out targets, and moving as one.
For a platoon commander, the job was simple. Haul balls through town, shoot enough to keep the bad guys from aiming, and hope to get everybody out the other side. My biggest fear was that a driver would be shot or a Humvee blown up and we’d have to stop to pick up survivors. Stopping meant dying, and I stayed on the radio with Team Three at the back of our column, just to make sure they were still there.
“Two-Three, how you doin’ back there?”
“Two-Three’s up. Runnin’ and gunnin’.”
My best concession to the survival instinct, at this point, was to shoot. The first lesson every young infantry officer learns at Quantico is that your job when being shot at is to shoot back. “Gain and maintain fire superiority” is how the Marine Corps describes it. There were only twenty-three of us, so every gun counted. There was no artillery to call, no updates to give my commander. I was just another shooter. I leaned into my M-16 and began firing into windows and doors. The rifle’s sharp reports were deafening inside the Humvee. With the radio handset pressed to my left ear, my right ear rang from the gunshots. I realized my earplug had fallen out, and I irrationally reached down to find it. I needed both hands on the rifle, though, in the bouncing Humvee.
My magazine held all tracer rounds to mark targets for the platoon, and I could see that I wasn’t hitting anything. All the jarring made it hard to aim. My rifle had an M203 grenade launcher slung beneath the barrel. Close is good enough with grenades, so I reached into a bag of 203 rounds hanging from the roof of the cab. Pumping the breach of the grenade launcher, I fired as fast as I could reload.
Aside from insects and plants, I’d killed one living thing in my life. While mowing my parent
s’ lawn as a teenager, I’d accidentally wounded a chipmunk with the mower blade. Gritting my teeth, I’d cut off its head with a shovel. Even this mercy killing had bothered me. I’d never been hunting and had no desire to go. Now, shooting grenades at strangers in an unnamed town, I was kind of enjoying myself.
The long-sought hyperclarity had kicked in. I saw a young man crouching in an alley. He wore dark trousers and a blue shirt. His silver belt buckle gleamed. He bent forward on one knee, bracing his upper body against the wall of a building. He held an AK-47 and sighted down its barrel as he fired at us. The rifle jumped in his hands, and little spurts of flame flashed from the muzzle. He seemed very small to me, although he could not have been more than thirty meters away. I lobbed a grenade at him and the round exploded against the wall just above his head. I watched him fall over the rifle. We flashed past the alley, and I reloaded, firing more grenades into windows and open doors.
My chest slammed against the dashboard as Wynn stood on the brakes. Ahead of us, the Iraqis dropped an overhead power line onto Colbert’s vehicle, knocking Corporal Walt Hasser from the turret. He sprawled backward across the roof. I watched a pair of hands reach up and pull him upright. For an eternity of two or three seconds, we sat almost motionless. In the lull, I heard a Mark-19 roaring behind me as Corporal Jacks tore a building in half. He was bellowing as he fired, yelling at us not to stop moving. When enemy fire erupted from a mud-brick building to our left, Jacks stitched it with dozens of grenades, collapsing three stories into two and silencing the fedayeen guns. When Hasser sat up, we jumped forward again.
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