With most of the Marine Corps and Army converging on Baghdad, there would be a lot of U.S. power in the city. If each small unit took control of a neighborhood and maintained a continuous presence in it, we could accomplish a lot. I envisioned meeting with a town council, maybe sharing tea with the elders, and having the autonomy to address their most pressing needs. Judging by what we’d already seen, I suspected that money, fresh water, and medical supplies would go a long way toward creating goodwill. The key, though, would be continuity. We had to develop personal relationships and deliver on our promises. We had to be in the same places day after day, learning the routines, learning names and faces, and learning to sense when something was amiss. When I finally refolded the map and left the operations center, I felt a new confidence and sense of purpose. The night was warm. As I crawled into my sleeping bag on the pavement, a firefight raged outside the wall. Tracers arced through the dark sky, and I wondered where all the bullets would land.
The next morning, our patrol was canceled. We would be leaving the cigarette factory the following day for another part of the city. First Recon’s zone had already changed. My faith in the postwar planning cracked just a bit. I rationalized that it was a mammoth operation and there would be a short adjustment period as all the units settled into place. But two days after the end of the shooting war, looters and criminals owned the city. U.S. patrols kept an uneasy peace during the day, but the Marines were ordered back inside their bases by sunset. At night, a tide of revenge killings ebbed and flowed across Baghdad as running gun battles consumed whole neighborhoods. We were forbidden to intervene. The consensus among many Marine commanders was that revenge would settle into a natural equilibrium. Instead, it seemed to beget more revenge. A finite supply of goodwill toward the Americans evaporated with the passing of each anarchic day. I briefed the platoon on our impending departure from the cigarette factory and already saw the doubt in their eyes.
We drove north from Baghdad to our new headquarters in a children’s hospital a few kilometers outside the city. Traffic gridlocked the highway’s southbound lanes. Mobs of jubilant people partied their way home after having fled Baghdad weeks earlier to avoid the bombing. Iraqis waved from the beds of dump trucks and the roofs of cars. Marines returned the honks and waves. I marveled at the sheer size of the city, the number of people.
“Can you imagine what it would have been like if these people had actually decided to fight us?” I asked.
“Just wait a few months till we don’t live up to their expectations and they do decide to fight,” Gunny Wynn said, looking grim.
We pulled into the children’s hospital a few minutes after noon. Like most facilities in Iraq, regardless of their intended purpose, it had an air of military order. A gated guardhouse opened to a long, tree-lined road leading to half a dozen whitewashed buildings. Guard towers dotted a sand berm bulldozed up around the compound. Each company moved into its own building of patient rooms, with battalion headquarters settling into what were once the hospital’s administrative offices. The entire place had been looted. Smashed bottles, syringes, and piles of paper covered the floor of each room. No furniture remained; even the light fixtures and switch plates had been ripped from the walls. I sat down to eat lunch with the platoon.
“So, sir, what do you think is going to happen?” Jacks asked the question, but he spoke for the others, and all eyes settled on me. Sitting around and talking with the platoon was my favorite pastime in Iraq. Sometimes I’d come up with new topics just because I didn’t want the conversations to end.
“It’s too soon to say, but I’ll tell you what I hope will happen,” I said. “I hope we’ll stop moving around and be assigned a sector. I hope we’ll patrol in that sector day after day. These people don’t give a fuck about democracy right now. They need clean water. They need to know they won’t get shot in the middle of the night. People put their money on the horse that looks like a winner. We need to convince them that we’re the winner.”
“But what are the odds of that happening, sir?” Corporal Chaffin asked, as he scrubbed a rifle balanced on his knees. “I bet we keep moving around, making promises we can’t keep, and then the normal people will start to see us as occupiers instead of liberators.” Chaffin was fair-skinned with reddish hair. His complexion darkened as he spoke. “Pretty soon, no one will want us here, and then the fucking liberals at home will start to bitch, and pretty soon we’ll be back in Vietnam. Only instead of reading about it in a book, we’ll be living it.”
“I guess I’m more optimistic than that,” I answered. “This isn’t Vietnam — the guys we’re fighting have no superpower support, no sanctuary next door.”
“Sir, I’m gonna pull your punk card,” Espera interrupted. “With all due respect, I think you’re wrong.” He leaned close and pointed his thin cigar. “Guerrilla wars aren’t fought from sanctuaries with support from sugar mama countries. That’s political scientist bullshit. They’re fought from the mind.” He tapped his temple with the cigar. “If these people don’t want for themselves what we want for them, then this will be Vietnam. We’ll get our pride and our credibility involved, and then we’ll keep throwing money and men down the pit long after everybody else knows we’re fucked. We’ll leave, and Iraq will be even worse than the shit hole it was a month ago when we kicked down the door.”
“Who’ll give us the most trouble?” I asked.
“Guys our age,” Espera said. “They hate us. They want to kill us. I can see it in their eyes.”
I agreed with him. During the first week of the war, there were definite trends in the welcome we received. Everyone under eighteen was happy to see us. The women all cheered for us. The older men, over fifty-five or so, flashed the thumbs-up. But the young men, the guys in their twenties and thirties, stared silently.
“Why is that, Espera?” I asked. For evaluating motivations on the street, my sixteen years of school weren’t worth two weeks as a repo man in L.A., and I knew it.
“Shit, sir, we emasculated them. Cut off their balls and held ’em up for their wives and kids to see. We did for them what they know they should have done for themselves.”
“But they had twelve years to do it.”
“Don’t go getting all academic on me, sir. I’m explaining why they feel that way. I’m not saying they’re right.”
Colbert cut in. He lay on his back on the concrete floor, scrubbing M203 grenades with a toothbrush. “What about the fact that the young guys have the most to lose with the old regime coming down? They had the power, and now they’re going to lose it.”
“That’s what the eggheads on TV will say, sure. But they’re wrong,” Espera said, jabbing his cigar with each word. “You think all the mass graves are full of little kids and old men? These young guys got hosed by the regime just as much as everyone else. Saddam was an equal opportunity murderer. Kids, old guys, women. He killed his own daughters’ husbands.”
The Marines fell silent. The only sound was Colbert’s toothbrush swishing back and forth across a grenade.
The next morning, we made our third move in four days, traveling north and west to the Menin al Quds power plant near the Tigris. Its transformers and warehouses sat in cultivated fields a couple of miles off a main highway north of Baghdad. Just past the entrance gate stood a bronze statue of Saddam Hussein, dressed in a tie and fedora and holding a rifle above him. Some previous visitor had left a pile of feces on his head. Our mission there was twofold: we would provide security for the power plant while workers labored to undo years of neglect, and we would use it as a staging base to patrol the northeastern quadrant of Baghdad. Having heard similar plans twice in as many days, I kept my doubts to myself.
Bravo Company moved into a warehouse at the compound’s edge. Gunfire had ruptured an oil tank, and a film of sticky petroleum covered the ground outside. It stuck to our tires and the soles of our boots. The smell made me lightheaded. Inside the warehouse was a cargo bay, and upstairs a hall of offices we
turned into sleeping spaces. The bleak building’s best feature was a gravity-fed pump of frigid water that allowed us to shower for the first time in more than a month. We wore flip-flops because broken glass covered the ground, and the water pressure almost tore the horseshoe from my neck. But the shower was worth it. As darkness fell and tracers again rose from the city, the Marines of Bravo Company shrieked and shouted beneath the welcome deluge of cold, fresh water.
After showering, I put my filthy cammies back on and walked over to the recon operations center for another of the seemingly infinite briefs and planning cells for upcoming missions, both real and imagined. The Marine Corps has an institutional culture of doing more with less, and that includes not only less money and less equipment but also less time, less certainty, less guidance, and less supervision. What makes it all possible is more planning and more preparation. While the Marines took advantage of a much-deserved rest, the battalion’s officers and staff NCOs debriefed past missions, tracked current missions, and planned future missions. Those who needed rest the most, the decision makers, frequently got the least. I was nearly stumbling with fatigue as I passed a roaring generator and entered the ROC.
The generator powered a row of overhead lights illuminating maps spread across two walls. Little flags marked the last updated position of each of the battalion’s patrols. A third wall held a status board, showing the composition, call sign, location, and activity of each team or platoon on patrol. Three Marines manned a bank of radios, whose wires snaked across the floor and out an open window to a small forest of antennas on the roof. Amid the squawks and static, they kept open the vital lifeline linking patrols in the field to aircraft, artillery, and all other forms of salvation. I always entered the ROC with some trepidation. Seeing competent Marines doing their jobs well made me feel more confident when I was the one on the other end of the radio. But I always had a nagging fear that I’d find the radio operators asleep, the map positions hours out of date, and the staff playing cards while a platoon was chewed apart. I knew that the fear was irrational, but I felt it every time.
That night, the ROC thrummed like the generators outside. Marines spoke on the radio in clipped tones, shuttled back and forth with messages from the platoons in the field, and constantly updated the status board and the maps. Major Whitmer sat in the corner, reading reports. He wasn’t in my chain of command, but we’d known each other for almost four years, and I trusted him.
“Good evening, sir. May I join you for a minute?”
“Please, Nate. Pull up a chair.”
“Sir, you’re looking pretty tired. I thought field-grades got eight hours each night.”
He laughed, indulging my jab. “You look pretty rough, too.”
“Yeah, well, I better get over it. I’m taking the platoon out in the morning for forty-eight hours. We’re supposed to patrol south of here along the Tigris. Wanted to see if you could add any insight or special advice.” I laid out the patrol plan for him on the map behind us.
“Remember, Nate, we were still fighting less than a week ago. That means three things. People’s lives are a wreck, and they’ll expect a lot from you — don’t overcommit us. Also expect to see some revenge killing — don’t get sucked into a fight not of your choosing. Third, the bad guys melted away last week instead of dying in the fight — they may or may not still be bad, but they’re out there, so be careful.”
35
“ GODFATHER, THIS IS HITMAN TWO, requesting permission to depart friendly lines with five Humvees, one Marine officer, twenty Marine enlisted, one Navy enlisted, and two civilians. Patrol route is as briefed; ETR forty-eight hours from now.”
With this call, the power plant gate swung open, and the platoon, with Mish and Evan Wright riding along, rumbled down the dirt road toward Baghdad. Fedayeen had been operating in the area, and intelligence indicated they were working from an amusement park near the Tigris. Our mission was to spread goodwill to the local populace while also collecting information on the fedayeen and inflicting whatever damage we could on them. For the next two days, my platoon would be the only American presence in a sixty-square-kilometer swath north of Baghdad. On the map, it was a mix of palm groves, farms, villages, and some of the city’s northern sprawl. We were about to find out how the map stacked up against reality.
The platoon hummed. We were on our own, free to make decisions, to run missions the way we saw fit. For the next two days, the buck stopped with me and Gunny Wynn. Everyone was rested after sleeping in the relative comfort of the power plant, and mail had arrived the night before. We’d gorged ourselves on homemade cookies, beef jerky, trail mix, and all the other delicacies we had lived without for a month. Three days without missions had left us all with a sense of withdrawal. I craved action. We believed that we could bring order to our little slice of Iraq, that we could be examples of freedom and tolerance and generosity. And if anyone opposed us, at least a firefight was more exciting than lying around on a warehouse floor. I needed a fix.
Our first stop looked like a nice American subdevelopment. According to the map, its name was Qalat Abd al Jasadi. It was a small neighborhood, only three blocks square. Large, well-kept houses peeked from behind walls of manicured shrubbery. Children played ball in the street while adults did lawn work and tinkered with cars. The orderly homes had caught my attention from the highway. I reasoned that only Ba’ath Party members or supporters would have lived in such comfort under the Hussein regime. If our mission was to stabilize the city and root out unsavory elements, a Ba’ath stronghold seemed as good a place as any to start. And so I made the natural choice for a Marine platoon commander desensitized by three weeks of war and invigorated by three days of rest: I decided to provoke them.
We drove into the quiet neighborhood, snorting diesel fumes and brandishing weapons. Instead of icy stares, we found open arms. Kids ran to us, and adults gathered around to ask questions in halting English.
“Finally, America come! Iraq a nice country, yes?”
An older man elbowed through the crowd. Hard eyes bored from his deeply tanned and lined face. His white robe glared in the midday sun. I sensed that he was the neighborhood elder, the man who would speak with us on behalf of the others. He looked angry. As I climbed from the Humvee, Mish came to my side. I glanced at Wynn to make sure he was picking up the same vibe I was. He cradled a rifle in his lap, face placid, body tense. Then the older Iraqi broke into a smile and grasped my hand.
“Hallo, hallo. Thank you. Welcome.” He explained that most of the neighborhood’s residents were physicians and engineers, respected professionals even under Saddam Hussein. “But we are glad Saddam is gone.” He complained that unexploded bombs and rockets littered the streets and fields, leftovers from the battles of the week before. The community maintained a neighborhood watch to guard against looters and any fedayeen who might bring American reprisals down on them. With ample electricity and fresh water, their only concern was the unexploded ordnance.
In my triage of worries, ordnance ranked a distant third, behind security and basic services such as water and power. I urged him to keep children away from the explosives and promised that we would return the next day, but I was anxious to see as much of our zone as possible before dark. We drove away to the cheers and shouts of the townspeople. “Tomorrow, America, tomorrow!”
I wanted to see the amusement park in daylight so we could better put it under surveillance after sunset. Doing so would be a lot easier and more effective if we knew the ground. We drove west along a raised irrigation dike, hoping to follow it all the way to the Tigris, where we could drive up a paved road to the gates of the park. No plan survives its first brush with reality. The dike dropped precipitously into a ditch, too deep and steep even for Humvees. Corporal Person was willing to buckle his seat belt and give it a try, but I couldn’t afford to roll a vehicle. We backed up and plunged off the side of the berm into a forest of palms.
The grove reminded me of an old-growth pine forest. The
trees, spaced widely apart, blotted out the sun. There was no underbrush. We wove between the trunks, sometimes following a dirt track and sometimes allowing the GPS to lead us more directly toward the amusement park. Birds flitted through the fronds high above, and white flowers bloomed in the sunny meadows.
Colbert keyed his handset and whistled. “We just found the Garden of Eden.”
Weaving through the trees cut us to a walking pace, and visibility was frequently under a hundred yards. It should have alarmed me. We couldn’t see, couldn’t maneuver, and couldn’t communicate because the trees distorted our radio reception. But there was no malice in the air. Combat had honed our powers of observation — we knew a threat when we saw it. There was no threat in those palms, and we enjoyed the incongruous beauty of our detour.
It was nearly dark when we emerged from the trees onto a paved road paralleling the Tigris. Three men with rifles stood in the road. A concrete barrier and stacked tires stood next to them, preventing traffic from passing. Instinctively, the platoon swung into tactical formation. Espera drew abreast of Colbert to put more firepower to the front. Reyes and Lovell took up positions to the flanks and rear. I rolled one radio over to the battalion’s frequency, ready to report that we were in contact.
Colbert and Espera stopped less than fifty meters from the men. They still stood in the road, rifles at their sides. Any advantage the men had was gone. The platoon was cocked, ready to fight, and waiting only for a shot or an order to engage. The standoff seemed to last for minutes, but it could only have been a few seconds before one of the men shouted to us in Arabic.
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