Colbert calls out, "Walt, are you okay?" Silence. Person turns around, taking his foot off the accelerator.
The vehicle slows and wanders to the left. "Walt?" Person calls.
I grab Hasser's leg by the calf and shake it hard.
"I'm okay!" he says, sounding almost cheerful. He was temporarily knocked unconscious, but isn't hurt. Person has lost his focus on moving the vehicle forward. We slow to a crawl. Person later says that he was worried one of the cables dropped on the vehicle might still have been caught on Hasser. He didn't want to accelerate and somehow leave him hanging from a light pole by his neck in downtown Al Gharraf.
"Drive, Person!" Colbert shouts.
"Walt's okay?" he asks, apparently not having heard him.
"Yes!" Colbert shouts.
"Go, go, go!" Colbert and I both shout in tandem.
Person finally picks up the pace, and there is silence outside. We are still in the town, but no one seems to be shooting at us.
Colbert is beside himself, laughing and shaking his head. His whole face shines, almost like there's a halo around him. I've seldom seen a happier man.
"Before we start congratulating ourselves," Person says, in his unusual role as the voice of sanity, "we're not out of this yet."
Espera, in his Humvee about thirty meters behind ours, sees the first wall on the way into the town light lit up with enemy muzzle flashes. He sees the smoke puffs of their rounds impacting along the roof and doors of Colbert's Humvee, and realizes he will be next. For him, it's all too much stimulus to process. Riding shotgun in a vehicle with no roof or door or armor of any kind, seeing the wall of fire he is about to drive into, his mind goes blank. Muscle memory takes over. He hunches over his M-4 in what he calls the "gangsta curl" and begins shooting. Like most others, he sees very few enemy fighters, just blank walls and muzzle flashes popping like strobe lights.
There are four other Marines in his Humvee. Garza, who had been on our Mark-19, now stands fully upright on the back of Espera's Humvee, manning a .50-cal, which immediately jams. Garza remains at the weapon, frantically trying to recharge it—repeatedly pulling on a lever, pounding it with his fist, squeezing the trigger. Enemy rounds shred through the rucksacks and gear piled on the Humvee and ping off the metal flooring.
Reyes, in the vehicle directly behind them, watches Espera's Humvee getting shot up. Reyes drives for Pappy's team, and beside him Pappy appears calm. As they turn into the fire, Pappy says, sounding almost cavalier, "Here we go, boys."
Because of the tightness of the turn into the town, everyone is going at lazy, parking-lot speeds, maybe ten, fifteen miles an hour. Reyes watches Espera's Humvee veer sharply as gunfire on the right pours into it. Fixating on Garza standing at the broken .50-cal, he marvels at what he later describes as "the expression of fear mixed with determination" on Garza's face as he remains standing, battling the jammed gun.
As soon as they see Hasser knocked down by a cable while on top of Colbert's vehicle, Pappy and Reyes realize they have the only Mark-19 operating to suppress enemy fire. The Mark-19 in their open Humvee is manned by Manimal. Due to the limited training everyone in First Recon has received on this equipment, Manimal has only fired a Mark-19 a few times. He's never done it from a moving Humvee, and it's not easy. Aiming a Mark-19 isn't like a rifle, where you just point it and shoot. The Mark-19 shoots 40mm grenades fed through it on a belt like a machine gun. Each round, about the size of a roll-on deodorant stick, can travel about 2,000 meters (though they're only considered accurate at less than half this range). They can penetrate up to two inches of armor, and when they burst, they spray shrapnel in all directions. Their shrapnel bursts have a "kill radius" of five meters and a "maiming radius" of fifteen. Mark-19 grenade rounds have an elliptical flight path, so after you point it in the proper direction, you then have to tilt the barrel up or down, depending on how far away the target is. This is done with a tiny wheel you have to spin, and doing it from the back of a bouncing Humvee, in a fifty-mile-per-hour dust storm, while people are shooting at you, is about as easy as changing a flat tire on a car parked on a hill during a blizzard. On top of all this, you're not supposed to shoot a Mark-19 (or a single-shot 203, which fires similar rounds) at anything less than seventy-five meters away. The problem is, rounds sometimes bounce back and blow up in your face. But while going into that first turn, Manimal ranges in on targets that are within five to twenty meters distant. He launches more than thirty grenades into the first set of buildings, where enemy forces are concentrated, and collapses the whole side of one of them.
Fick, driving behind Manimal, says later, "I saw all those muzzle flashes along that wall. Then Manimal brought a whole building down. Whatever had been shooting at everyone there wasn't shooting at us. It was just a pile of smoking rubble."
In Colbert's vehicle, as soon as we make the T-turn near the end of the town, we hear gunfire ahead. Set back from the road are several squat cinder-block buildings, forming a small industrial district. White puffs of smoke streak out from the buildings: more enemy fire. Person floors the Humvee. Colbert and Trombley start shooting again.
As we swing under a blown-up telephone pole hanging sideways in the street, Trombley glimpses an Arab in black robes crouching by the road near some sandbags. He sprays him with a long burst. "I got another one!" he shouts. 'I cut him in half!"
A white haze in the distance marks the end of the city. We fly out onto a sandy plain that looks almost like a beach. The Humvee lurches to a stop, sunk up to its doors in sabka. Sabka is a geological phenomenon peculiar to the Middle East. It looks like desert on top, with a hard crust of sand an inch or so thick that a man can walk on, but break through the crust and beneath it's the La Brea Tar Pits, quicksand made of tar.
We jump out, hunching low. The gunfire all around us sounds like trains banging down railroad tracks. There's a row of Humvees and trucks just south of us, pouring everything they have into the city.
Espera's vehicle halts about twenty meters behind ours. His driver can't figure out why we stopped. Gunshots ring out from the town. Then there's a massive explosion off the back tire of Espera's Humvee—an errant
Marine Mark-19 round. Thinking it's enemy fire, a Marine in Espera's vehicle jumps out to take cover in a nearby berm. Espera, "scared as a motherfucker," ponders jumping out and abandoning the Humvee too, but he looks up and sees Garza relentlessly, almost insanely at this point, pulling the slide back and forth on his broken .50-cal, still trying to shoot it. Just before rolling through the town, Garza told Espera, "Whatever happens, just promise me you won't leave me alone."
Espera orders the Marine who jumped out to get back in. They figure out Colbert's vehicle is stuck, and roll around to the right, avoiding the sabka.
Hunched down by Colbert's vehicle, I am so disoriented at this point that I actually think for a moment that the sandy field we are in is a beach. I turn around, looking for the ocean, then hear Colbert repeating, "We're in a goddamn sabka field."
I think he's saying "soccer field." I can't believe Iraqis would play on sand like this. I'm looking around for the goalposts when Trombley grabs my shoulder. "Get behind me and take cover," he says.
The battalion operations chief runs across the sand, shouting at Colbert, "Abandon your Humvee!" He orders him to set it on fire with an incendiary grenade, yelling, "Thermite the radios!"
Colbert pounds the roof of his Humvee, screaming, "I'm not abandoning this vehicle!"
One of Espera's Marines watching the spectacle from a distance glumly observes, "We're going to die because Colbert's in love with his Humvee."
Still taking sporadic fire from the town, Marines in Bravo run up with shovels and pickaxes to dig it out. Meanwhile, Colbert and Trombley dive under the wheel wells with bolt cutters, slicing away the steel cables—a gift of the defenders of Al Gharraf—wrapped around the axle. They try pulling it with a towing cable attached to another Humvee, but it snaps. Finally, a truck full of Marines from the battalion's maintenance unit rolls up. Support Marines—the POGs so often belittled by Colbert and others—jump out under fire, attach chains to the trapped Humvee and yank it out.
We limp to a desert encampment a few kilometers away, the shot-up Humvee making grinding and flapping sounds. When the platoon stops at its resting point in the broad, open desert, Marines jump out and embrace one another. Even Colbert becomes emotional, running across the sand, lunging into Reyes and giving him a bear hug.
All the Humvees in Bravo Company are riddled with bullet holes, but Darnold is the only Marine who was hit. Counting the dozens of rounds that sliced through sheet metal, tires and rucksacks, the men can't believe they made it. In retrospect the whole engagement was like one of those cheesy action movies in which the bad guys fire thousands of rounds that all narrowly miss the hero. While everyone else stands around, slapping backs and laughing about all the buildings they shot up or knocked down, Colbert grows pensive. He confesses to me that he had absolutely no feelings going through the city. He almost seems disturbed by this. "It was just like training," he says. "I just loaded and fired my weapon from muscle memory. I wasn't even aware what my hands were doing."
The shamal grows into one of the worst storms anyone has experienced so far in the Middle East. The sky looks like someone picked up a desert and is now turning it upside down on us. Then it rains, which comes down in globs of mud. To top it off, it starts to hail. A junior officer walks a few meters out into this weather to take a dump and becomes hopelessly lost. A team of Recon Marines is organized to go look for him (and he is eventually found, dazed and sheepish, several hours later).
The nice thing about artillery is that, unlike aircraft, it still works in foul weather. Marine batteries begin bombing the town. Colbert and I sit in the vehicle, watching. Through the blackness of the night, orange puffs of artillery bursts are vaguely discernible over the town. Fick slips into the vehicle with a map, to tell us that the name of the town is Al Gharraf. "Good," Colbert says. "I hope they call it El Pancake when we're through with it." Marine artillery crews fire approximately 1,000 rounds into Al Gharraf and the vicinity during the next twelve hours.
Just before turning in to the hole I've dug outside the Humvee, I smell a sickly-sweet odor. During chemical-weapons training before the war, we were taught that some nerve agents emit unusual, fragrant odors. I put on my gas mask and sit in the dark Humvee for twenty minutes before Person tells me what I'm smelling is a cheap Swisher Sweets cigar that Espera is smoking underneath his Humvee.
Marines awaken in their holes in the desert outside of Al Gharraf at dawn, March 26, to find the shamal has worn itself out, leaving behind a cold, overcast morning. Fick gathers his team leaders for briefing by the hood of his Hiimvee. "The good news," he tells them, "is we will be rolling with a lot of ass today. RCT-1 will be in front of us for most of the day. The bad news is, we're going through four more towns like the one we hit yesterday."
Among the Marines this morning, the euphoria of having survived their run through the town has evaporated. Trombley gets into a dispute with another Marine after borrowing his grenade-box "shitter" and returning it with skid marks down the side.
The shitter belongs to Corporal Evan Stafford. A twenty-year-old from Tampa, Florida, Stafford is a white guy whose hair grows so blond fellow Marines call him "Q-tip." When not in uniform, he dresses like Eminem. He identifies so strongly with black culture, notably the music and philosophies of the late Tupac Shakur, that when other Marines use terms like "Nigger Juice" to describe black coffee, or refer to Arabs as "Dune Coons"—as a couple do—Stafford shakes his head and mutters, "Racist ofay motherfuckers." While the one black guy in the platoon laughs off these slurs as Marine humor, Stafford is always ready to throw down and take on the "oppressors." The few heated arguments that ever take place in the platoon about racism are always between Stafford and another white guy who accuses him of being a "fucking wigger." (The arguments seldom last long, since Stafford and the wigger-hater are also best friends.) When
Stafford isn't standing up for his chosen race, he seldom speaks, other than to say, "Screwby." No one's quite certain what "screwby" means, not even Stafford. "I guess it means, 'this sucks,' or 'kind of cool,' " he tells me.
This morning, as Trombley hands him back his fouled shitter, the usually unflappable Stafford seems on the verge of tears. "You shit on my shitter!" Stafford says, inspecting it at arm's length, being careful not to touch the offending marks.
"Wipe 'em off or something," Trombley says, trying to laugh it off.
"No." Stafford stares at the shit stains, struggling to come to grips with the enormity of.this offense.
Trombley starts to look worried. Stafford is one of the Marines in the platoon guys like Trombley look up to. Not only is he a full-fledged Recon Marine, but Stafford is one of those people who simply project absolute cool, no matter what—except for now.
"This shitter is the only luxury I have out here." He looks at Trombley, deeply saddened.
"I could try to clean it," Trombley offers.
"Whatever, dog." Stafford cold-shoulders past him. "Screwby."
In the final hour before stepping off, other Marines fix up their Hum-vees, test-fire their weapons—nearly half of which jammed yesterday— and question their leadership. "Why the fuck would Ferrando send us through that town?" one Marine in the platoon says, cleaning his M-4. "RCT-1 wouldn't go through there with armor. No doubt Ferrando is basking in the glory of us having made it through. But we only made it because we got lucky."
The lack of information provided to the Marines about their role in the grand scheme of things is beginning to erode morale. They simply don't know that brazenly driving into ambushes is part of the plan.
"I'll tell you why we're being used like this," a Marine in Second Platoon complains. "Our commander is a politician. He'll do anything to kiss the general's ass. The reason Dowdy didn't go through that town yesterday is he probably cares about his men. Ferrando is trying to get promoted on our backs."
On top of this mounting uncertainty, they have to deal with the men in the battalion they view as worthless incompetents. This morning they are paid a visit by Casey Kasem. In addition to not bringing enough batteries for their thermal night optics, another serious omission they blame on him became clear yesterday when the Mark-I9s jammed in the ambush. To operate effectively in a dusty environment, the guns require a specialized lubricant called LSA. The men claim Casey Kasem forgot to bring it on the invasion. Without LSA, the guns jam constantly.
Casey Kasem traipses over and greets the Marines with hearty backslaps. "Outstanding job, gentlemen. The battalion commander thinks we did a stand-up job yesterday. I got some awesome footage outside the town, too," he says, referring to his effort to make a war documentary. Casey Kasem kneels down by Colbert and asks in low, confidential tones, "Are your men having any combat-stress reactions we need to talk about?"
"Nothing that a little LSA wouldn't help," Colbert says.
Casey Kasem frowns. "As you all know, that was out of my hands."
Casey Kasem has made reasonable-sounding arguments to me about why the shortages in the company are a result of matters beyond his control, but the men aren't buying them.
As he walks off, Colbert observes, "People that were just annoying in the rear, out here their stupidity can kill you. It's going to be awkward when we get home. I don't know how I'll be pleasant to these guys when we're all together again back at the office at Pendleton. I'm not going to forget any of this."
We climb into the Humvee. After Person starts the engine, Fick pokes his head in the window, grinning. "Present for you." He passes in a small water bottle, filled with about two inches of amber fluid. "LSA," he says. "I scammed it off some guys in RCT-1."
"Sir, not to get homoerotic about this," Colbert says. "But I could kiss you."
We leave the outskirts of Al Gharraf at about nine in the morning. Two men standing by the road outside the shattered town grin and give us the thumbs-up. "This place gives me the creeps," Colbert says.
The pattern that's emerged—being greeted with enthusiastic cheers and waves by the people you see beside the roads, then shot at by people you don't see behind walls and berms—is beginning to wear on the Marines. "These guys waving at us are probably the same ones who were trying to kill us yesterday," Person says.
We pick up Route 7 and head north on the two-lane blacktop. Other than Fick's vague instructions about passing through more towns like Al Ghar-raf, no one knows what the final goal is for this day, or even why they are in the Fertile Crescent. All they know is they must push north until Fick or somebody else tells them to stop.
The team's only concern is to observe the roughly 1,000 meters on either side of the Humvee to make sure there is nobody with a weapon trying to shoot them. The surrounding landscape is a mix of grasslands and dusty plains rippling with berms. The fields are dotted with shepherds and mud-brick dwellings. Every fifty meters or so on both sides of the road there are trenches and sandbagged machine-gun bunkers—abandoned fortifications.
"RPG fire ahead," Colbert says at about nine-thirty in the morning, passing on the first of many similar reports from the radio.
Colbert's vehicle is the lead for the entire battalion, driving at an average speed of about fifteen miles per hour. Amtracs and other light armored vehicles from RCT-1 are rolling a few hundred meters ahead.
If you were to look at it from the air, you'd see a segmented column of American invasion vehicles—Marines in various units—stretching for several kilometers along the highway. Despite all its disparate elements, the column functions like a single machine, pulverizing anything in its path that appears to be a threat. The cogs that make up this machine are the individual teams in hundreds of vehicles, several thousand Marines scrutinizing every hut, civilian car and berm for weapons or muzzle flashes. The invasion all comes down to a bunch of extremely tense young men in their late teens and twenties, with their fingers on the triggers of rifles and machine guns.
We bump up against Amtracs 150 meters ahead pouring machine-gunfire into some huts. "They're schwacking some guys with RPGs," Colbert says.
Wild dogs run past.
"We ought to shoot some of these dogs," Trombley says, eyeing the surrounding fields over the top of his SAW.
"We don't shoot dogs," Colbert says.
"I'm afraid of dogs," Trombley mumbles.
I ask him if he was ever attacked by a dog when he was little.
"No," he answers. "My dad was once. The dog bit him, and my dad jammed his hand down the dog's throat and ripped up his stomach. I did have a dog lunge at me once on the sidewalk. I just threw it on its side, knocked the wind out of him. My aunt had a little dog. I was playing with it with one of those laser lights. The dog chased it into the street and got hit by a car. I didn't mean to kill it."
"Where did we find this guy?" Person asks.
We drive on.
"I like cats," Trombley offers. "I had a cat that lived to be sixteen. One time he ripped a dog's eye out with his claw."
We pass dead bodies in the road again, men with RPG tubes by their sides, then more than a dozen trucks and cars burned and smoking. You find most torched vehicles have charred corpses nearby, occupants who crawled out and made it a few meters before expiring, with their grasping hands still smoldering. We pass another car with a small, mangled body outside it. It's another child, facedown, and the clothes are too ripped to determine the gender. Seeing this is almost no longer a big deal. Since the shooting started in Nasiriyah forty-eight hours ago, firing weapons and seeing dead people has become almost routine.
"Whoa!" Trombley says. "That guy in that car was shot through the stomach. He just looked at me, then raised his arm, like he was asking for help. He looked at me right there," Trombley says, pointing to his inflamed eye.
I see the car Trombley's talking about, a bullet-riddled sedan by the road, doors hanging open, with at least one body in it.
"He was unarmed," Trombley says. "So I didn't shoot him." I imagine that man in the car, an entire life lived, and the last thing in the world he sees is the face of an eager nineteen-year-old with a red, infected eye looking at him down the barrel of a SAW.
Late in the morning Colbert's team reaches the outskirts of the first big town we are passing through: Ash Shatrah. We pull even with Marine artillery guns pounding away, their snouts blazing flames and smoke. One of the guns has the words bob marley stenciled along the barrel, a somewhat incongruous tribute to the bard of Jah Love and reefer.
"Thump 'em, boys," Colbert says darkly as he watches them fire. They're striking targets in and around Ash Shatrah, prepping it for our drive through. We wait for several minutes, then go.
The battalion's plan is to sprint past the town as fast as possible. With Colbert's vehicle in the lead, we speed up to about forty-five miles an hour. While driving, Person reaches around and hands me his M-4.
"Put it out the window," he says.
I look at him.
"What do you think? You're just gonna eat all our food, drink all our water for free?"
I place the rifle on my lap but find it distracting. All I can think about are images of Geraldo Rivera waving his pistol around in reports he filed from Afghanistan, bragging about how he hoped to cap Osama. While rolling into Ash Shatrah, my biggest fear isn't enemy fire, it's that some reporter's going to see me holding an M-4 and I'll look like a jackass.
The town is set far back from the road. No fire comes from it. The most overwhelming impression Ash Shatrah makes is that it is one of the smelliest places I have ever encountered. From 200 meters away the town stinks like the inside of a garbage can. We drive four kilometers through it, and I pass the M-4 back to Person. I hand it to him barrel first, with a round in the chamber and the safety off, causing him to rethink his policy of arming the reporter.
Outside of Ash Shatrah we link up with a unit of Amtracs and other armored Marine vehicles parked near a rural hamlet. It's a cluster of three or four buildings 400 meters off the road, nestled in green pastures, with some palm trees behind them. Marines in the Amtracs stopped because they thought they took shots from one of the houses.
Now Marines are out on berms watching the house through binoculars and scopes. Several sniper teams in Bravo join them. Kocher in Third Platoon observes a "mom with two kids hiding in the back of the house, nervously peeping out."
The Marines study the house for forty minutes. Surrounded by verdant fields, with the rare quiet of all the Humvee engines having been shut off, the morning feels peaceful.
Then a 25mm Bushmaster on one of the armored vehicles up the road begins pouring rounds into the house. The women and children Recon Marines had been observing through their optics disappear in a cloud of dust, as the Bushmaster rounds blast the adobe walls.
Colbert jumps out of the Humvee. "What are they shooting at?"
"There's civilians in there!" several Recon observers yell at once.
Colbert picks up his radio handset and shouts, "Tell those guys to cease fire! They're shooting civilians." But it's a fruitless effort. Even though the vehicle doing most of the firing is only 100 meters or so ahead, First Recon Battalion has no ability to reach it on the radio.
Now a dozen or more rifles and machine guns in the nearby armored units come alive, crackling and sending red streaks of tracer rounds into the entire hamlet.
Marines with mortars jump off a tracked vehicle in front of us, yelling and cursing. They're in such a rush to attack the village, one Marine falls off the vehicle, landing on his ass. They launch a volley of 60mm mortars, which fall short, exploding in the field immediately in front of us.
Colbert throws down his radio headset and stands outside his Humvee, screaming, "Cease fire!" The Marines shooting into the village 100 meters up from us continue unabated.
Then, behind us, Encino Man races up in his Humvee. He jumps out, so eager to get in the fight, it seems, he forgets to unplug his radio headset, whichjerks his head back as the cord, still attached to the dash unit, tightens.
"Jesus Christ! There's fucking civilians in that house! Cease fire!" Colbert says.
Encino Man pops off a 203 grenade that falls wildly short of the house. Colbert, like other Marines in Bravo, is furious. Not only do they believe Encino Man is firing on civilians, but the guy doesn't even know how to range his 203.