One Bullet Away

by Nathaniel Fick

  A radio call warned that our helicopter escort, our eyes and big fists, was leaving in five minutes to get more fuel. They’d be gone for at least an hour, leaving us alone on the road, where we couldn’t see, with a Republican Guard armored brigade lurking nearby. The muscles got tighter. “When the aircraft leave, you are instructed to return to the last intersection and proceed north on the eastern fork. How copy?”

  We stopped on the roadside to wait for the LAVs to make their lumbering ten-point turns on the narrow road. I took advantage of the stop to talk with the team leaders. They were doing a great job, and I wanted to let them know that. As I stood near Colbert’s window, two Marines raised their rifles, aiming past me and clicking the safeties off. I spun around. Two men walked out from behind a berm less than twenty meters away. A little girl, perhaps five years old, stumbled along between them, holding hands with each. The men forced smiles and waved, but I was focused on the little girl.

  Her eyes stared vacantly, looking at nothing even as she picked her way across the uneven ground. She was filthy. Dirt caked her face, and her sweatpants, once pink, were a sickly shade of gray. I knelt down to touch her shoulder, and she shrank back, terrified.

  “Food and water — now,” I called over my shoulder to the platoon. “Doc, check her out.” For some reason, I felt a sense of urgency and responsibility for this girl that I hadn’t felt before. Part of it was her small size. Mostly, though, I think I was touched by the contrast between her apparent physical health and her psychological pain. She was far too young to be so afraid. I thought of the Cobras rocketing the palm groves and lighting homes on fire. I remembered the jets dropping bombs and the roar of our own machine guns. Even for armed and trained Marines, there was a lot to be afraid of in Ba‘quba. I tried to imagine what the afternoon must have looked like through the eyes of a child.

  “Sir, she seems fine physically, just a little dehydrated,” Doc reported. “It’s like she’s shell-shocked.” He handed her a bottle of water. The two men, overjoyed that we recognized their plight, laughed and hugged us.

  Through Mish, the older of the two men began to speak. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, looking dignified and relaxed.

  “He says tanks and soldiers are at a dam on the river. He says they are keeping people away from the place because chemical bombs are hidden there, maybe buried in the ground.”

  Two independent reports of chemical weapons nearby. In addition to all our daily missions, we had general tasks that were continuous on every mission. One of the most important was safeguarding any evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. I picked up the radio and asked for Godfather, the battalion commander himself. Colonel Ferrando answered with understandable annoyance over a mere platoon commander interrupting him in the middle of a fight. I hurried to exonerate myself by explaining the two reports of chemical weapons at the dam.

  “Copy all, Hitman Two. I’ll pass it up to division myself,” he said.

  Our report became a national collection priority, but no chemical weapons were found.

  I regretted leaving the little girl to her uncertain fate, but the helicopters were gone, the LAVs out of sight, and I had orders to turn back. We passed the last intersection and looped north on the eastern fork of the highway. Our mission was to set up a blocking position while Alpha Company did the same on other highways and Charlie entered Ba‘quba to investigate the Republican Guard headquarters building.

  Scanning the mud-brick houses to our right, I saw something that made me stop. Most of the battalion had already traveled past this point, but an Iraqi military truck was parked behind one of the buildings.

  “Gunny, stop the Humvee,” I said. Half the platoon advanced slowly on the house. The Marines communicated by hand signals, splitting into teams to come at the building from three directions. Just as that pre-firefight tension swelled to the point of bursting, the front door opened and a swarm of children ran out.

  “America! America! Good! Good! Good!”

  Rifles dropped.

  A middle-aged Iraqi man, dressed in Western clothes and dutifully sporting a Saddam mustache, followed the children into the yard.

  “Hi, guys, I’m Hassan.” He spoke with almost no accent. As if to answer our unspoken question, he explained that he had been an English professor at Baghdad University. The twelve girls and boys, running circles around the Marines and trading funny faces with them, were his children.

  He said the Republican Guard had visited his house the night before. Eight antiaircraft guns were piled in the back of the Russian-made ZIL cargo truck. Hassan was terrified that the Americans would bomb it and destroy his home in the process. With a mental bow and flourish, I told him we would be happy to remove the cause of his concern.

  The prospect of doing something good for regular Iraqi citizens (and the chance to blow up a truck) galvanized the Marines to action. We hitched the truck to a Humvee and dragged it a safe distance from the house. There Colbert and others built a charge from C-4 and detonation cord. They wrapped the guns and the truck’s engine, being sure to include the fuel tanks to help amplify the blast. We gathered the kids and explained what was about to happen. Then we all crouched down together and watched the truck disappear in a fireball. Hassan invited us to stay for dinner and looked a little relieved when I declined, telling him we had unfinished business in Ba‘quba.

  I picked an open stretch of highway for our blocking position, with good fields of fire in all directions. Flat, open highway would give Iraqi drivers the best chance to see and avoid us. It gave us the best chance of not having to kill anyone. We placed our looted Iraqi stop sign three hundred meters down the highway, along with a large piece of a cardboard MRE box on which Mish had written “Turn around” in Arabic. We all hoped we were learning fast enough to avoid repeating earlier mistakes.

  Pausing for the first time all day, I remembered the prisoner in the back of the Humvee. He sprawled face-down on the truck bed with his hands tightly zip-cuffed behind him. Christeson stood over him with a rifle.

  “Cut him free and give him some food and water,” I said. Christeson looked at me as if I’d suggested letting the lions run amok in the San Diego Zoo, but he cut the cuffs off. The man sat up slowly, rubbing his wrists and whimpering. He looked at me mournfully, his long mustache twitching, and I handed him a bottle of water.

  “Thank you.”

  “You speak English?” I was surprised. Judging from his dumpy appearance, I guessed he was a low-level conscript.

  “A little, yes. My heart hurts.” He put his hand to his chest, and the mustache twitched again.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ahmed al-Khirzgee. I am good man.”

  “What unit are you from?”

  “I am not a soldier,” he said with a face like a basset hound’s.

  “Then why are you wearing a military uniform, and why were you shooting at us with a military rifle?”

  “I am only a very low soldier from Al Quds militia. I do not want to shoot at you.”

  “But you did shoot at us. We almost killed you.”

  “I have five daughters. Ba’ath Party took them from me and told me to fight the Americans, or my daughters would be killed. What would you do?”

  I didn’t know whether to believe him, but he had struck a nerve. Al-Khirzgee was about my father’s age. His clothes were filthy and torn. He looked as exhausted as we were. I remembered my field interrogation at SERE school and thought that, for al-Khirzgee, this was real. He was afraid we would kill him. “Ahmed, I’d probably do exactly what you did,” I said. He stared at his lap before meeting my eyes again. “Drink this water and eat some food. Do what we say, and you won’t be harmed. If you fight or try to get away, this Marine will shoot you.” I turned to wink at Christeson and mouthed “Don’t shoot him.” Christeson nodded and fixed his sternest guard face on our prisoner.

  Across the highway, Sergeant Lovell led his team on a foot patrol into a palm grove. It
was too close to our position to leave unchecked. When they returned, Lovell made a beeline for me.

  “Sir, I need to show you something,” he said. “Just cross the road here, and you’ll be able to see.”

  Two long trailers sat in a clearing. They were painted desert tan, with air-conditioning units on their roofs. They were windowless, and padlocks secured the doors. Everything we had seen in Iraq was filthy, ruined by dust and years of neglect. The trailers gleamed. I knew what Lovell was thinking: mobile biological weapons labs. We had both listened to Secretary of State Colin Powell’s testimony before the U.N. and to countless classified briefs on Iraq’s weapons program. The trailers matched the descriptions perfectly.

  “Take your bolt cutters and MOPP gear,” I said. “I’ll report it up the chain after you get back to me with details on what’s inside.”

  Team Three headed off at a trot as I got a radio update on the battalion’s progress. Charlie Company was in the city. Alpha had blown up at least one Iraqi T-72 tank with an AT4 missile — no small feat. We could hear muffled explosions and the occasional chatter of machine guns.

  Gunny Wynn had the shortwave tuned to the BBC. We listened as the anchor described Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square being pulled down by Marines in front of cheering crowds. The war, she said, was over.

  “Damn,” Wynn said, slapping his knee. “I wish they knew that up here.” M4s barked in the distance, trading shots with throatier AKs.

  “What about the prisoner?” Wynn nodded toward the Humvee, where al-Khirzgee happily ate MRE pound cake while Christeson stood over him.

  “It’s a Geneva violation to leave him here,” I said. “We have to take him with us. Seems sort of dumb. It’d be easier for everyone, him included, to give him some food and let him walk home. But those are the rules we have to play by.”

  Lovell’s team recrossed the highway. They had cut the lock on the first trailer and carefully climbed through the door. Stainless steel equipment and digital displays lined the walls. Most of the writing was in Cyrillic. They thought we’d struck a jackpot until they began opening the cabinets and drawers. Baking trays, mixing bowls, and measuring spoons fell out. Our mobile weapons lab was a field kitchen for the Iraqi army. We laughed about it, but there was an underlying lesson. The illusions of “dual-use” technology are deceptive, and sometimes a satellite is no substitute for a team of Marines with bolt cutters.

  Just before sunset, Charlie Company roared past, waving the captured standard of the Republican Guard armored brigade from the window of their lead Humvee. We cheered as if the whole day of combat had been a game of capture the flag. War Pig led the drive south, and I settled in for the two-hour ride. Gunny Wynn asked the question I was thinking.

  “You think they’ll hit us again as we drive by?”

  “No way. You heard the BBC. The war’s over.”

  Two minutes later came the radio call: “War Pig in contact five kilometers ahead.”

  We had five thousand meters to think about the fire we were heading into, to watch the tracers swishing through the darkness. I squirmed to put as many vital organs as possible behind the bulletproof ceramic plates in my flak jacket. Wynn floored the accelerator when the vehicles in front of us sped up. Shots rang past the Humvee as we flashed by. I thought of al-Khirzgee and the ironic terror of being shot at by comrades. It made me smile. As we passed back into dark and quiet fields, the illuminated face of the GPS showed that we were crossing the 14 northing. Baghdad glowed on the horizon. For the first time in a month, it lit the sky with electric light instead of firelight.

  34

  DOWNTOWN. After three weeks with the city in our sights, we drove into Baghdad early the next morning, April 10. The platoon had returned to division headquarters from Ba‘quba around midnight. While we waited in line for gas until nearly sunrise, al-Khirzgee slept in the back of the Humvee. I gently shook him awake and said it was time to go.

  A warehouse near the gas pumps was being used by the military police to hold Iraqi prisoners. A sergeant sat behind a desk inside the door. His belt held a pistol, handcuffs, a club, and a bottle of pepper spray.

  “Lieutenant Fick. First Recon. We picked this guy up near Ba‘quba a few hours ago. His name’s Ahmed al-Khirzgee.”

  The sergeant jumped up. “Jesus, sir, that’s a prisoner? I thought he was your translator or something.” His hand went to the pistol.

  “Relax. He’s been with me all night.”

  Two Marines stepped from the shadows and grabbed al-Khirzgee by the upper arms. As they led him down a dark hallway into the warehouse, he looked back at me.

  “Salaam alaikum, Ahmed. I hope you find your daughters.”

  Baghdad was smoldering when we crossed a pontoon bridge over the Diyala River. The mud-colored Diyala runs lazily between banks often thirty or forty feet high. No bridge large enough for our vehicles had survived the fighting, so Army reservists threw out the mobile bridge, and we crossed slowly, one at a time.

  Oily smoke poured from a refinery near the river, and other black pillars rose from all across the city. We drove through a hodgepodge of war and peace. Mark-19s thumped in the distance, while a herd of water buffalo wallowed in the muddy riverbank under the watchful eyes of a boy. He waved as we passed. Near him, on the road, three corpses in green Iraqi army uniforms rotted in the sun. Women carried water from the river in plastic jugs atop their heads. One of them stopped to rest, placing her jug on the hull of an abandoned T-72 tank.

  A dirt dike angled away from the river. It separated a canal from a field piled with household trash and wrecked cars. We drove on it to avoid the pools of sewage on either side. Slummy housing blocks alternated with palm groves, giving the place a suburban feel, although Baghdad’s concrete high-rises were only a mile away. The architecture was Stalinist in its brute simplicity and uniformity, but instead of gray, everything was brown.

  People watched as we passed. Most waved and cheered. Others went about the daily tasks of their hardscrabble lives, as if the Marines in the neighborhood were just another show of force by just another power beyond their control. Four boys perched high on a donkey cart passed us, going in the opposite direction along the dike. They sat atop a pile of looted goods — furniture, televisions, car tires, and buckets of brass shell casings. Down an alleyway, a boy led a donkey dragging a Jet Ski through the dust.

  By the time we dropped off the dike onto a paved thoroughfare leading deeper into the city, the platoon had relaxed. Baghdad was not another Stalingrad, not even a bigger An Nasiriyah. It looked like the shooting war was really over. Gunfire echoed in the distance, and helicopter gunships flew low over the rooftops, but life around us plodded along as normal. Produce sellers hawked food from open stalls. Men in kaffiyehs sat at open-air cafés, drinking tea from tiny glasses. Other men smoked and fingered prayer beads, holding our gaze as we passed. We glided along with the traffic, swinging through roundabouts and stopping for traffic signals, jostling for space with trucks, buses, and taxis. A day before, I would have been apoplectic with so many people so close. But in another tribute to the human mind’s quest for equilibrium, frustration with traffic replaced fear of an ambush.

  Our destination was Saddam City, a sprawling Shia slum in the northern part of Baghdad. We had been briefed that the de facto mayor of the neighborhood was a cleric named Moqtada al-Sadr. We hadn’t heard of him and didn’t much care. After all, the Shia were supposed to be our friends. I first questioned that assumption on the drive into Baghdad. Walls, adorned a week before with likenesses of Saddam Hussein, had been defaced. As in the Roman practice of damnatio memoriae (condemnation of one’s memory), every trace of the former dictator was destroyed. Posters were torn, murals painted over, and statues toppled. Most of Iraq seemed to wait expectantly for whatever symbols would represent a new regime.

  But power knew no vacuum in Saddam City. Less than one day after the old regime’s collapse, images of bearded, turbaned clerics covered nearly every vertical surfac
e along the sides of the road. U.S.-sanctioned damnatio memoriae had begun immediately and contributed to the change. The Americans trumpeted the renaming of Saddam International Airport as Baghdad International Airport and the redesignation of Saddam City as Sadr City. The wisdom of the latter change eluded us.

  “That guy’s gonna come back and fuck us, sir,” Espera told me. “We just gave the fucker the golden key. Compare his shit-hole neighborhood to the rest of Baghdad. Anyone who doesn’t think the Shia want revenge needs to spend some time outside his air-conditioned office.”

  We rejoiced in our new home. Painted in English on the side of the building was a sign: IRAQI STATE TOBACCO COMPANY. The factory grounds included a tall office tower and four warehouses. Fire raged through all but one of the warehouses, releasing clouds of sickly sweet smoke as thousands of bales of tobacco and millions of cigarettes burned. After three weeks of stress-induced smoking and dipping, the Marines rummaged through the one remaining warehouse, gleefully piling cartons of cigarettes in the back of the Humvees.

  A concrete wall topped with concertina wire surrounded the compound. Inside the wall grew trees and a small garden. The parking lots were newly paved, and a triple-tiered concrete fountain decorated the lawn in front of the office building. Saddam’s sons had run the tobacco company, accounting for its prosperous feel in a sea of third world desperation. Inside the wall were hundreds of Marines in an orderly camp. Outside the wall were five million Iraqis in an anarchic city. The only human interaction across the barrier was provided by Navy SEAL snipers on the roof of the office building. They had orders to shoot any Iraqi with a weapon. They fired every few minutes throughout the afternoon and into the night.

  We were supposed to begin patrolling Sadr City the next day. In the cavernous room where the battalion set up its operations center, I unfolded my new map of Baghdad on the concrete floor. The city sprawled across four hundred square kilometers, with a population of more than five million. It was bigger than Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, or Dallas. I carefully outlined the battalion’s zone in blue marker. The area covered twenty blocks square on the north side of the Tigris. It was the most densely populated part of the city. Other units’ zones abutted ours, so it looked as if all of Baghdad had been carved into manageable chunks.