Mish maintained a running dialogue between the man and me as I handed him two humrats. We mean no harm and offer you this food in thanks for allowing us to travel through your fields. My doctor is happy to look at any children who are ill. Where are the Ba’ath Party and fedayeen? I tried to be open and respectful, but my eyes kept darting to the man’s hands, to the crowd, and to the dark windows behind them. I could feel the Marines’ rifle sights boring past me.
The man launched into a long speech, punctuated with pointing and gestures. His hand swept past the children, and he wiped his eyes. Mish nodded, unusually solemn, and turned to me. “He says these people are his distant family. They came here from Baghdad to avoid the bombing. There are Ba’ath ambushes farther north, maybe five miles, at a crossroads. They use pickup trucks to come down and attack the Americans. He is happy we are here but nervous if we stay too close to his home.”
“Tell him we’ll be gone in a minute, but first I want his help.” I pulled a map from inside my flak jacket and unfolded it on the ground. “Ask him to show me where the crossroads is.”
Mish relayed the question, and the man squatted next to me, peering at the map. He squinted and cocked his head, then stood up. The man couldn’t read a map, but he made up for it by speaking to Mish again.
“He says the road forks about five miles north of here. There are reeds and tall grass at the fork. The Ba’ath have set up in the grass. They are waiting for us.”
On the map, I saw a fork in the highway about eight kilometers north of the village. I thanked the man by placing my hand over my heart. He, in turn, reached across the cultural gulf and shook it. With a wave to the little girls, who hid their smiles behind cupped hands, we started off.
We had moved only two hundred meters when the first mortars hit. Plumes of smoke and dust rose from the field with each sharp crack. They had to be Soviet-era 82 mm rounds, the same as the night before. To men caught in an open field with nowhere to hide, they felt as big as artillery.
“Move two hundred meters east and stay dispered,” I ordered. I wanted to get the platoon away from the village so the people firing the mortars would have no excuse to walk them in on the people there. Looking over my shoulder, I saw the family, already displaced from their home in Baghdad, running to hide. It sickened me to think that we had brought this violence to their peaceful farm.
The mortars were still too inaccurate to cause much concern, but they crept closer by the minute. I radioed the ambush location to the battalion. They confirmed that the same information had come in from another source and ordered me to break contact to the south, away from the mortars. The Marines pumped fists in the air as two Cobras thwacked overhead, prowling up the highway in search of prey. Again I found myself in the position of wishing violent death on other human beings. Burn ’em up with those rockets, and don’t make it clean. Make it hurt.
After the Cobras destroyed a mortar firing position farther up the highway, we climbed into the Humvees again. My platoon was ordered to drive west on the dirt path where we’d blown up the Republican Guard truck. Our mission was to conduct reconnaissance and screen the battalion’s flank as it advanced.
Flies buzzed in the sun, which had burned off all the clouds and now beat down on us relentlessly. I was too hot to eat but drank some Gatorade just to keep from shutting down. The battalion needed a few more minutes to coordinate air support before moving out, so we cleaned weapons and topped off radiator coolant. As I leaned under the Humvee’s hood, an F/A-18 roared down the highway, not much higher than the telephone poles. The pilot racked his jet into a climbing right turn and made another low pass, firing his cannon. I imagined the stream of 20 mm Vulcan rounds tearing up the pavement, cars, and fedayeen positions. Even if he hit nothing, the psychological effect on us was noticeable. The Marines were up and moving, ready to go.
The dirt road twisted through small hills and disappeared over a rise. We followed it at a halting pace. I split the platoon into two elements, with Colbert, Espera, and I moving as one unit and Reyes and Lovell moving as another. One group advanced while the other stopped to cover them.
“Tank! Tank direct front! Back up, back up!” Colbert’s voice on the radio was frantic. His Humvee wheeled around, with Espera close behind. I jumped from my seat to get a better view. Ahead of us, the dirt road ended at an intersection. Beyond the intersection ran a dirt berm. Pointing over it and directly at us was a beige barrel with a yawning black opening. I expected it to turn Colbert’s Humvee to cinders at any second. Over the radio, I asked for backup from an LAV armed with antitank missiles.
From behind us, in the overwatch position, Sergeant Lovell’s laconic voice cut through our fear.
“Hey, fellas, is the tank to the left or right of that irrigation pipe?”
Irrigation pipe? I looked again. Our “tank barrel” was a farmer’s water pipe. Time froze for a second. Humvees stopped spinning around. Marines abandoned their mad scrambles for AT4 missiles. We stared at the pipe, then looked at each other. I collapsed in the seat and closed my eyes. Would I have made this mistake three weeks ago? Was it heat, dehydration, fatigue, or frayed nerves? The only reason we hadn’t blown that pipe away was that we didn’t have any weapons that wouldn’t bounce right off a tank. What if there had been kids around, or innocent villagers? Not shooting hadn’t been discipline; it had been unpreparedness. I looked at Gunny Wynn.
“Hey, don’t worry about it. No harm done,” he said. I needed the boost.
After self-consciously telling the battalion that the antitank missiles weren’t needed, I set the platoon up in a checkpoint at the intersection. The road we had come in on dead-ended there, and the other dirt path ran roughly north-south, paralleling the highway the battalion was on. A white sedan drove up, and the passengers looked startled to see our armed Humvees. Mish and I stood by the driver’s window. Before we could say anything, a man in the back seat began speaking rapidly. I waited for Mish to translate.
“He says you are the first Americans they have seen here. Ba’ath people are waiting for you at an intersection up this road. He says about five miles, where this road meets the highway.”
“That sounds like what the other guy told us.”
“He also says there is a dam near Ba‘quba. Many soldiers are at the dam, and they have buried chemical bombs in the ground there.”
“No shit? He said ‘chemical bombs’? You think he could show it to me on the map?”
“These guys don’t read maps.”
While I reported the information about the dam to the battalion, Mish continued talking with the men in the car. They kept glancing between him and me. Finally, one of them forked over three packs of cigarettes, and they drove off, looking back at us through the rear window.
“What the hell, Mish? We should be giving them smokes as thanks for helping us.”
“Yeah, but I’m out. I told them to hand over some cigarettes, or you’d kill them.”
“Mish, you can’t do that. Pretty soon we’ll be fighting the whole goddamn country.”
33
WE CAUGHT UP with the battalion just south of the intersection where we’d been told to expect an ambush. Aircraft had pounded it. A brushfire crackled in the tall grass, revealing a mortar pit and a twisted machine gun. RPG launchers and unfired rounds carpeted the pavement. We weaved carefully to avoid hitting them. Across the road, a car had suffered a direct hit from an aerial bomb. Its metal frame crinkled in the heat the way a piece of cellophane does over a match. The driver had escaped, but not far. He lay in the dirt, frozen in a lunge with his arms stretched out before him. His whole body was toasted to a deep almond brown, except for one hand. That hand wasn’t burned at all. Its white palm was open, waving at us.
The Marines heaped abuse on the dead Iraqi as we passed.
“Hey, check it out. Beef jerky man.”
“Shoulda worn sunscreen, motherfucker.”
Immense concrete pipes were stacked along the sides of the road.
It looked like the town road crew had planned to install a new sewer system before the war changed everyone’s priorities. Fighters had been living in the pipes. Their blankets, water jugs, and piles of food were stashed inside. We sat at the intersection while another platoon rummaged through the wreckage and the fighting holes looking for anything of intelligence value. At the crossroads stood an enormous stop sign, more than three feet across. It was the customary red octagon, but the word STOP was written in Arabic. I thought it would be perfect for our roadblocks; it might even keep us from killing someone.
“Christeson, cut that stop sign down and put it in the back of the truck.” He looked at me in disbelief. An officer had never before ordered him to commit vandalism.
Alpha and Charlie companies took the right fork in the road, while Bravo and LAR went left. The two roads diverged and then ran roughly parallel about a kilometer apart. By attacking on two axes, we could throw Ba‘quba’s defenders off balance but still support each other. We spent the next four hours in constant contact with the enemy.
The running firefight started badly. A large concrete building stood in a field between the two roads on which the battalion was moving. LAR halted three hundred meters south of the building to observe it before moving forward. Sporadic rifle shots cracked toward us. As we sat there, engines idling, the captain called me over. “Nate, I want your platoon to dismount and move through this field to clear that building,” he said.
I looked at him for a long moment, trying to gauge his reasoning. “Sir, are you nuts? You want me to leave my firepower behind and move across three football fields of open ground toward a fortified position, when we can just drive right up to it with all this armor? I’ll be halfway there, and the rest of the battalion will be five miles farther north.”
“This isn’t the time for debate,” he said. I could see his resolve wavering. His orders were experiments to see which ones would stick.
“Sir, is this your idea or a battalion order?” I had so completely lost faith in my commander that I couldn’t follow his orders. If the plan had come from Major Whitmer or Colonel Ferrando, however, I would execute it without hesitation.
“I see what needs to be done here. Don’t worry — I’ll have the LAVs line up behind you to provide overhead machine gun fire.” My anger was starting to boil over. Typically, when an infantry attack is supported by machine guns, the guns are displaced ninety degrees from the objective so they can shoot in front of the advancing attackers. He planned to put the machine guns directly behind us to shoot over our heads at the buildings as we moved toward them. We would block the LAVs from firing. These basic tactics are taught during the first few weeks of an infantry officer’s training. The captain commanding the LAVs looked at me sympathetically and rolled his eyes.
Command relationships are built on trust. My CO was right about one thing: this wasn’t the time for debate. It was the time for my trust in him to override my questions and concerns. It was the time for that trust to translate into instant obedience to orders. But I had no trust, not in him. His poor decision making since before the start of the war had sapped every bit of the natural trust Marines are taught to have in their chain of command. He was a nice, hard-working guy but tactically incompetent, and that’s all that mattered.
“Sir, that’s a fucked plan, and I can’t do it. I’m not worried about getting hosed. If the fedayeen were in that building, they would have opened up on us by now. I’m worried that we’ll get way out there in the field for no reason, and then the whole battalion’s attack will lose momentum and bog down. Look over there.” I pointed through a far-off tree line where Alpha’s and Charlie’s Humvees continued the attack to the north. “They’re moving. We have to be moving.”
He shot me a glance without saying anything, and I walked back to my Humvee. I was upset that some of my Marines had been within earshot of the argument. It was unprofessional to discredit the captain in front of them, but circumstance hadn’t allowed me many options. Besides, feelings and regulations came in a distant second to winning battles and keeping Marines alive. We started moving forward, passing the concrete building without seeing anything amiss.
On the radio, Alpha Company directed jets in on an Iraqi infantry fighting vehicle, called a BMP, that was shooting at them. The jets’ engines screamed as they dove at the target, but I couldn’t see anything through the smoke and haze. Cobras hammered targets to our front, and the LAVs poured fire into buildings and palm groves along the road. The platoon had found its rhythm now — talking, moving, and shooting as one organism.
We did our best to hit discrete targets, but the battlefield is an empty place. With smoke, explosions, and rifle shots all around, it feels as if the whole world is a target. But that feeling evaporates when you look through the gun sight. Threats are everywhere, but targets are nowhere. You cannot just shoot at a tree, or a parked car, or a propane tank, or the air. You need a target. Like it or not, targets are usually human beings. But targets are hard to find, because they hide. Many times, the result was that we drove through an inferno but fired very few rounds. That wasn’t the case in Ba‘quba.
Approaching another crossroads, we passed a field of brilliantly green grass. Two men firing AK-47s popped up from a hole in the field, and a machine gun knocked them right back down. One of the men wore a green shirt and khaki trousers. A .50-caliber bullet, almost as big around as a dime and moving at supersonic speed, blew off the back of his skull. The round hit him so hard that it drove his body backward through the air. It neatly removed a piece of bone bigger than my hand, and as the man fell, his brain spilled onto the dirt. He crumpled five feet from the pool of blood that marked his place of death. I felt the elation you feel at the fair after winning a stuffed animal for popping a balloon with a pellet gun.
A mortar round fell from the sky, seemingly from nowhere. We hadn’t heard it launched, and no others fell with it. It struck the ground next to Espera’s Humvee, spraying his team with dirt and, I thought, shrapnel. When the dust cleared, I was amazed to see the team still frozen in their seats. Mortars are nerve-racking because they’re so random. All you can do is sit there and think about the next one, the one that might be coming for you.
Ordered to stay in place, we looked around. To our right stood a whitewashed building in the center of a dirt parking lot. Red graffiti covered the walls, and I asked Mish to read it.
“Well, the little sign above the door says SCHOOL. The spray-painted stuff says DEATH TO AMERICA, LONG LIVE SADDAM, and WE WILL DIE FOR YOU, O GREAT SADDAM. Lots of others, too, but you get the idea.”
“Lovell, take your team and search that building,” I ordered. We had time, and the fedayeen had a record of using schools.
Leaving one man on the machine gun, Team Three took its bolt cutters and burst through the door. I waited for rifle shots, but none came. A few seconds later, Sergeant Lovell called from the window, “Sir, you ought to come in here.”
I entered a dingy room filled with desks. Children’s drawings covered the walls. The team guarded the doors while Lovell and Doc Bryan picked through an open safe.
“Maps, military IDs, documents, a burlap bag of AK bayonets, and a bolt-action Enfield rifle. But who really cares about that shit? Check this out,” Lovell said. He held up a plastic trash bag. Inside were dozens of pairs of black boot socks. They were new, still attached at the calf by cardboard tags proclaiming them “Made in Jordan.” “Funny how everything in Iraq was made in Jordan, China, and France.”
“Yeah, but I’m not a spiteful consumer,” I replied. I wanted the documents for the intelligence analysts and the socks for the platoon. We gathered what we could and hurried back outside, concerned that the battle would move forward without us. Two Marines from Third Platoon stood over an Iraqi man lying spread-eagle on the ground.
“Sir, this gomer popped out of a fighting hole in the field. His buddy is the one whose brains are sprayed all over the place back there. Can we cuff him and throw him in t
he back of your Humvee?”
I agreed, because I had more empty space than anyone else. There was no time to deal with him. The lead vehicles were moving again.
One bridge stood between us and the outskirts of Ba‘quba. The countryside was bleak — dusty fields, dusty homes, dusty cars. Dust even coated the palm trees. We started to climb the bridge, but the lead Humvee stopped. I heard a zinging sound and saw strange ripples in the air. The sky above our heads shimmered, miragelike. Large-caliber rounds. Not ours. Incoming. It was another Iraqi armored vehicle.
“BMP on the road, direct front. And he’s firing!” I tried not to yell into the radio.
We backed off the bridge in a hurry and vectored an Air Force F-15 in on the BMP. I never saw the jet, or even heard it. Its bomb materialized from the blue sky. For most Iraqi soldiers, death came without warning. We again climbed the bridge and met no resistance. On the other side, the BMP was little more than a greasy black stain on the pavement and a few scattered pieces of smoking metal.
Again the road forked, and again we went left while the rest of the battalion went right. Fields gave way to dense groves of palm trees filled with homes. The Cobras had launched volleys of rockets into the palms, and everything was on fire. I hated being in the close confines of buildings and trees. Drainage ditches lined the road. Dense thickets grew right up to their edges, cutting our visibility down to only yards. Every muscle in my body tightened. I think the exhaustion following combat is partly chemical — coming down off a massive dose of adrenaline — and partly a physical release after hours in this tightened posture. Wiping sweat from my eyes, I worked to breathe slowly, think clearly, and run through my mental checklists in case we made contact. After three weeks of war, I could tell I’d gotten better at this. Calm had become my natural state. It took something truly extraordinary even to raise my heart rate.
One Bullet Away Page 36