“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.
We pulled off into a field where irrigation dikes provided some natural cover, then set up in a square we could defend in all directions. Beyond us, a field of waist-high green grass waved in the
morning breeze. The sky overhead shone blue, and sunlight glimmered on the river in the distance. It was the most beautiful spot I’d seen in Iraq. Marines not on security lounged in the grass, smelling the sweet, wet summery heat. The spot seemed quintessentially American. I expected two boys in overalls to come strolling down the road with fishing rods over their shoulders and a golden retriever trailing behind.
The yellow truck was the bucolic picture’s only blemish. It had been pushed down the embankment to clear the road. Bloody handprints covered the doors to the cab. Two bodies lay at unnatural angles on the ground, flies buzzing around them. The warm sun, which felt so good on our arms and faces, drew out their stench.
When the battalion joined us, we packed up our scopes, radios, drying boots, and half-eaten lunches to drive north again along the river. We were told that the Al Hayy attack had been canceled because the fedayeen had fled. I took a turn at the wheel, while Gunny Wynn rode shotgun, alternately fingering his grenade launcher and looking at the map. There was no radio chatter.
“Gunny, where’s this road taking us?”
“There’s a town on the river about ten klicks up called Muwaffiqiya. Captain just said we’ll be swinging around it to the east. Looks like open farmland.”
Third Platoon raced past us to recon a route around the town. I concentrated on driving while Wynn kept track of the map and radio. Driving in Iraq, even on a pretty day as part of a large American force, demanded full concentration. Berms collapsed, rolling Humvees onto their sides. Roadside bombs were not yet endemic, as they would become later in the occupation, but we worried about land mines and booby traps. I studied the tires of the Humvee ahead of me and tried to stay right in its tracks.
We slowly climbed away from the river, passing through planted fields lined with stone walls. Far in the distance, I saw the smudgy outline of Muwaffiqiya, a collection of buildings and a towering water tank on the banks of the Al Gharraf River. Wynn looked content. “We’re finally learning to go around the towns,” he said.
30
I LEANED AGAINST the Humvee door in the fading light, spooning applesauce from a field ration pouch and watching two ants fight for a dropped grain of rice. It had been days since I’d seen a mirror, but my blackened hands looked no better than those of the gaunt and sunken-eyed Marines around me.
The evening was quiet. We were parked in a field just off a narrow country road, hemmed in by stone walls and hedgerows that looked more like Connecticut than central Iraq. I had double-checked the placement of the platoon’s machine guns and hacked a sleeping hole from the soft earth before sitting down to eat dinner and breathe. I dared to hope we’d spend the night in one place, and the field seemed indulgently comfortable.
“Sir, the captain wants all commanders at his truck,” Christeson called from the cab of the Humvee, where he was monitoring the radio and cleaning his rifle. I pocketed my dinner and set off to see what bad news was about to shatter our evening.
When the captain finished his brief, I called the team leaders on the radio. “Hitman Two-One, Two-Two, and Two-Three, actuals to my vehicle. Naptime’s over.”
Walking back across the field, I saw Sergeants Colbert, Patrick, and Lovell converging on the platoon headquarters Humvee. They carried map boards and rifles and looked as if they already knew what I was about to tell them. A Humvee hood doubles as a decent map table, so we held platoon briefings around its ten square feet of dusty fiberglass. They joined Gunny Wynn, chatting together as I walked up.
Colbert grinned and said, “Sir, I don’t like that look in your eye.”
“Yeah, well, we’re saddling up and rolling out of here at 2200 local to move through that town to our west and set up ambushes on the other side to interdict the fedayeen moving toward Highway 7.” After a week of being sniped at, shot at, and mortared, we were going to set the agenda. As the Marine Corps puts it, we were going to take the fight to the enemy.
“Ambushes?” Sergeant Patrick snorted. Clearly, this plan did not excite him. Only ten days before, I had listened as Patrick had cautioned his team with one of his countless southern aphorisms: “Never pet a burning dog.”
“Yeah. We’ll roll through the town as a battalion, then split off as platoons and move to our sectors to set up and watch for fedayeen traffic. At dawn, we’ll pull out and move north to link up with everyone else. We have the chance to hunt here rather than be hunted.”
“I understand that, sir, but moving into our ambush site in unfamiliar territory in the dark is bad business.” Patrick spoke slowly for emphasis. “And then, how are we supposed to identify who’s fedayeen and who’s not? We can’t just walk up to them and ask. Not out there all alone as a platoon.”
Patrick was right about the mission. But contrary to what the platoon sometimes seemed to think, I wasn’t the ultimate decision maker. That was the mission we were given, and that was the mission we would execute. Our job was to figure out the best way to do it, and we had only two hours.
Gunny Wynn’s priority as platoon sergeant, first and always, was the safety of his men. Mine, as platoon commander, was accomplishing our mission. True, each of us cared about both responsibilities, but when the bullets were flying, one goal had to take precedence. Leadership instructors who said naively that the two could coexist had never been in a gunfight. Each of us, on his own, would probably have fallen victim to his natural impulses. Together, though, we had a symbiosis that combined my aggressiveness with his wisdom. And so the debate began.
Around the hood of the Humvee that evening, we ran through different options for executing the mission within the framework of our commander’s intent. He could tell us what to do, but we would decide how to do it. Gunny Wynn and the team leaders systematically strengthened the plan, pointing out weaknesses and suggesting improvements. It is a simple fact of human nature that people will more willingly go into danger when they have a say in crafting their fate. In the end, we agreed that our first and greatest problem would be passing through the town of Muwaffiqiya. It would prove a prescient analysis.
Muwaffiqiya was a medium-size collection of three- and four-story concrete buildings on the west bank of the Al Gharraf River. A platoon of Marine LAVs had approached the bridge earlier in the afternoon. We heard a few bursts of gunfire and watched as an LAV raced past with a wounded Marine in the back. While we gathered around the map plotting our next move, Marine artillery boomed from the south, and the western horizon flickered and flashed as 155 mm high-explosive rounds exploded into Muwaffiqiya. So much for peaceful evenings. After cobbling together a plan we could all live with, the team leaders returned to their positions to brief their men while I cleaned my rifle and tried to sleep for an hour.
Artillery explosions, gunfire, and low-flying jets roared in the dark, but I was too tired to care. Curled up on the ground beneath a poncho liner, I woke at 2130 to Christeson shaking my shoulder. I stood to shrug on my gear before doing radio checks with the teams and lining up the Humvees. We would be on point for the battalion, with Sergeant Colbert first, followed by Sergeant Espera, Gunny Wynn and me in the middle, and Sergeants Patrick and Lovell behind.
We rolled slowly into the darkness, the night warm and silent and blowing through our open doors. The plan called for us to move to the near side of the bridge into town and set up a support-by-fire position on the north side of the road. Third Platoon would follow behind and set up a similar position on the road’s south side. Once both platoons were set to cover the battalion, it would cross the bridge into Muwaffiqiya, and we would fall in behind. It was a classic example of overwatch, a tactic practiced by Marines in the woods and fields of Quantico, Parris Island, Camp Pendleton, and Camp Lejeune.
There had been murmurs about why we hadn’t pushed teams out on foot to recon the bridge earlier in the evening. It was an obvious chokepoint, a logical place for an ambush. Apparently, there just hadn’t been time. Countering these fears were a pair of Cobras sweeping in front of us no more than a hundred feet ab
ove the road. The pilots reported heat signatures that might be people and fired a couple of rockets at suspected bunkers on the far side of the river. I held a radio handset to each ear but instinctively reached down and pulled back the charging handle on my rifle to make sure a round was chambered. We kept driving.
“OK, we’re set.” Colbert radioed that he was in place on the north side of the approach to the bridge.
“Negative. I still can’t see the bridge. Keep moving.” Our mission was to secure the bridge for the battalion’s crossing, and I still couldn’t even see it. I saw only a thin stand of trees on the left and a few mud-brick buildings on the right, fifty meters from the road. The Cobras orbited behind us, and the night was again quiet. Everything glowed green and grainy in my night vision goggles.
“Roger,” Colbert said, and we crept forward again.
Colbert’s nickname was the Iceman because he never lost his cool. That’s why I had him on point for the platoon on a night when the platoon was on point for the battalion and the battalion was on point for almost the whole Marine Corps. The next thing I heard through my headset radio was his warning: “There’s an obstacle on the bridge.” Colbert’s voice was measured but taut, the way an airline pilot would tell his passengers about an engine fire. Then I saw it, too — what looked like a Dumpster full of scrap metal pulled out into the road. Large-diameter pipes lay scattered on both sides of it. There was only one explanation.
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