But it's not just his youth and inexperience that keep Trombley on the outside, it's also his relative immaturity—caressing his weapon and talking to it, wearing his ammo belts around his neck. Other Marines make fun of him for his B-movie antics. They're also suspicious of his tall tales. He claims, for example, that his father was a CIA operative, that most of the men in the Trombley family died mysterious, violent deaths, the details of which are vague and always shifting with each telling. He looks forward to combat as "one of those fantasy things you always hoped would really happen." In December, a month before his deployment, Trombley got married. (His bride's father, he says, couldn't attend the wedding, because he died in a "gunfire incident" a while before.) He spends his idle moments writing down lists of possible names for the sons he hopes to have when he gets home. "It's up to me to carry on the Trombley name," he says.
Despite other Marines' reservations about Trombley, Colbert feels he has the potential to be a good Marine. Colbert is always instructing him— teaching him how to use different communications equipment, how best to keep his gun clean. Trombley is an attentive pupil, almost a teacher's pet at times, and goes out of his way to quietly perforin little favors for the entire team, like refilling everyone's canteens each day.
Through some unspoken arrangement, Trombley has decided that since I am the only civilian in the group, I'm even lower on the totem pole than he is. "Good chance we'll run over a mine," he says in the darkness. "Don't worry, there's ways to survive. Soon as you hear the blast, curl up like a little bitch." He nudges me with his elbow. "You can curl up like a little bitch, can't you?"
First Recon spends several hours halting and starting, zigzagging back and forth just south of the border beneath the fiery, rocket-streaked sky. Light from burning oil facilities set ablaze by Iraqis near Rumaylah begin to create a false dawn. Higher-ups in the division keep ordering First Recon to move toward different breach points in the border. At four in the morning, the battalion finally receives definitive orders about which breach to enter. But the men in Bravo are further delayed when their company commander takes a wrong turn in the darkness. The commander who makes this error is a man the men call "Encino Man," after the movie of the same title about a hapless caveman who thaws out and comes to life in modern-day Southern California. The men nicknamed this officer Encino Man not only because of his Neanderthal features but also because of his perpetual air of tongue-tied befuddlement. A former college football star now in his early thirties, Encino Man is reputed to have a hard time articulating the simplest of orders. Encino Man's thickly browed face often bears a pleasant smile, which makes him well enough liked by the men. But they don't altogether trust him as a commander (he serves as Fick's immediate superior), because he seems to be, in their eyes, something of a dimwit. Encino Man is one of those senior officers who never would have deployed on a traditional Recon mission. Prior to taking command of Bravo Company, he was an intelligence analyst.
Although the Corps rates him as a fit commander and he has an admirable service record, fellow officers have expressed their alarm to me over Encino Man's seeming inability to understand the basics, like reading a map. One officer says to me, "We came out of a briefing once, after we'd been looking at a map for an hour, studying one town on it, and he came up to me and asked, 'What was the name of that place? Can you show me where it is on the map?' I was like, 'What reality was this guy in during the previous briefing?' "
A few hours before the invasion, Encino Man had covered over the side windows of his command vehicle with duct tape. He believed this would mask light seeping out from a computer screen in his vehicle, making it "extratactical"—harder to spot by enemy forces. Unfortunately, the covered windows seem to have diminished his already feeble navigation abilities.
While we sit, pulled over by a desert trail, waiting for the battalion to "unfuck" itself in the wake of Encino Man's blunder, Colbert observes, "The fucking idiot. If the enemy's going to spot you, they'll see the light coming through the windshield. You can't tape that up." He shakes his head. "This is the man leading me into me battle."
"Fucking dumbass," Person agrees.
The sky begins to lighten. We're stopped in a no-man's-land a few kilometers south of the border. Convoys of armored vehicles race past. Having now been up for twenty-four hours, watching others enter Iraq ahead of them sours the mood of Colbert's team.
He and Person spot a Marine, whom they both know and despise, taking a leak outside the Humvee. "That's that fucking pussy," Person says. "He was crying when we left Camp Pendleton." He adds in a pitying baby voice, "He didn't want to go to Iraq."
Colbert looks at him. "When we were at the airport flying out here he lost his gear. He was trying to get out of coming here."
"Yeah," Person says. "He was at the airport on the phones, calling senators and stuff to try to get them to pull strings. Fucking pussy wimp."
"A scared little bitch," Colbert says. He and Person stare together at the Marine they deem cowardly, bonding in their mutual contempt. The judgment of the pack is relentless and unmerciful.
At about seven in the morning on March 21, the battalion is ordered into the breach. The early-morning light glares through the smudged windshield. The earthen berms, seven meters high, loom ahead. Beyond, black smoke from oil fires seems to fold over the horizon like a blanket. We enter the breach zone, small mountains of sand, littered with scraps of metal piled on either side. Beside me, Trombley slumps over his SAW, snoring.
"Wake up, Trombley," Colbert says. "You're missing the invasion."
Colbert's first impression of Iraq is that it looks like "fucking Tijuana." We've pulled onto a two-lane asphalt road rolling through a border town north of the breach. There's a row of shops on one side— cinder-block structures with colorful hand-painted signs and steel shutters pulled over their fronts, with a smashed-up Toyota truck pushed off on the side of the road, probably by a tank. It's ghostville.
All of the major Marine combat forces are racing east or hugging the border, leaving no other friendly combat forces in First Recon's area of operation. The battalion pushes north in a single-file line alone on unpaved trails through what has become open, almost lunar desert, periodically dotted with mud huts, small flocks of sheep and clusters of starved-looking, stick-figure cattle grazing on scrub brush. Once in a while you see wrecked vehicles: burnt-out tanks and car frames, perhaps left over from the first Gulf War. Plumes of smoke clog the horizon to the east from the oil fires in Rumaylah.
At the small-unit level, everyone's survival boils down to simple human observation. Each Marine in the vehicle is charged with watching a specific sector. To my left, Trombley keeps his SAW machine gun trained out his window. In front of me, Colbert rides leaning into the scope of his M-4 pointed out the passenger window on the right. The Humvees are vulnerable to small arms—AK rifles, RPGs and light machine guns from up to about 600 meters distant, and heavier weapons beyond this range. With each vehicle's main gun—the Mark-19 grenade launcher or the .50-cal machine gun—accurate to about 1,000 meters, the goal is to identify and destroy any hostile threats before they come within range of the Humvee.
The Marines chatter constantly, calling out everything they see in the surrounding desert—a pipe 300 meters off that could be the barrel of a gun, a shepherd in the distance whose staff could be an AK—while passing binoculars back and forth, and trading information with the other Humvee teams over the radio.
Berms are the dominant feature of Iraq, whether here in the southern desert or in the greener farmlands north of the Euphrates. Berms are man-made piles of sand or earth, ranging in height from a couple of meters to a couple of stories. They are built on the sides of the dry canals, which are scratched throughout the desert. They are built as walls, to contain pastures, to demarcate grazing lands, as windbreaks or as military fortifications. They go in all directions. People have been digging berms here pretty much continually for the past 5,000 years.
The newest berms, which seem to have been excavated in the past few months, hide deep bulldozed pits called revetments, intended to conceal tanks. Every few hundred meters along the berms in some stretches of the desert there are two-meter-high conical towers capped with sandbags, to serve as machine-gun nests. All fortifications appear to have been abandoned.
Colbert's team passes through them warily. Small groups of hostile forces could be concealed anywhere. In addition, Fick keeps passing down reports he's receiving from higher-ups in the battalion—rumors of stray Iraqi tank units allegedly operating somewhere in the desert. But no one sees any signs of tanks or hostile forces.
Instead, the Marines begin having their first up-close encounters with Iraqis—small groups of shepherds and women in black robes outside square mud huts. A woman with something in her hands pops out from behind one of the huts a hundred meters back from the trail we're on.
Colbert shouts up to Garza on the main gun. "Garza! Woman in black. What's she doing?"
The Mark-19 fills the Humvee with a clattering sound as Garza swivels the gun toward the woman. "She's carrying a bag in her hands," he shouts from the turret. "No weapons."
A moment later Garza shouts. "Hey!"
Colbert tenses on his M-4, pressing his eye against the scope. "Talk to me, Garza. What is it?"
"I just waved at an Iraqi and he waved back at me. That was cool."
"Good, Garza," Colbert says. "Keep making friends. As long they're not doing anything where we have to shoot them."
"Hey, it's ten in the morning!" says Person, yelling at two farmers dressed in robes in the distance. "Don't you think you ought to change out of your pajamas?"
By late afternoon First Recon has pushed fifty kilometers into Iraq, becoming the northernmost Marine unit in the country. Now no one has slept for thirty-six hours. It's in the upper eighties outside, and cramped in the Humvee in plastic-lined MOPPs and rubber boots, everyone's face drips sweat. Between calling out potential targets, Colbert and Person stay awake by screeching pop songs—Avril Lavigne's "I'm with You" and "Skater Boy"—deliberately massacring them at the tops of their lungs.
Marines supplement their diets of caffeine, dip and ephedra (technically banned in the Corps, but liberally consumed) with candy and junk food. Military rations, called "meals ready to eat" (MREs), come in brown plastic bags about three quarters of the size of a phone book. Each contains a main meal like spaghetti, stew or "chunked and formed" meat patties in a foil pouch. You heat these pouches by shoving them inside a plastic bag with chemicals in it. When you add water, the chemicals immediately boil, emitting noxious and (according to warnings on the package) explosive fumes. The main entrees are prepared through a mysterious desiccation process. Even though your meat patty might be swimming in juices, when you bite into it, it's dry and crumbly and brings to mind chewing on a kitchen sponge. In flush times like now, at the start of the invasion, when every Marine is rationed three MREs a day, most push aside the main meals and eat the extras. In addition to entrees, MREs are loaded with junk food—pound cakes, brownies, "Toaster Oven Pastries" (identical to Pop-Tarts), cookies, Skittles, M&M's, Tootsie Rolls, Charms hard candies, Combos cheese-filled pretzels, and powdered grape-drink mix and cocoa powder, which Marines eat straight out of the packages, like the instant coffee.
The process of tearing through an MRE and picking out the goodies is called "ratfucking." Colbert's team maintains a ratfuck bag in their Humvee for all the discarded MRE entrees, saving them for a rainy day.
Though at times throughout the advance north, Colbert's vehicle goes on point for the entire battalion, placing its occupants at the very tip of the Coalition invasion, as the heat and fatigue delirium sets in, the undertaking sometimes feels like a family road trip. Colbert is the stern father figure. Person is like the mom, the communicator, trying to anticipate his needs, keeping spirits up with his cheerful banter. Garza and Trombley are the children, happily munching candy, eager to please their dad.
As team leader, Colbert controls, every aspect of his men's lives, down to their bodily functions.
"Trombley," Colbert shouts, leaning over his rifle, watching his sector. "Are you drinking water?"
"Yes, Sergeant."
"Are you pissing?"
"At our last halt, Sergeant."
"Was it clear?"
"Yes, Sergeant."
"Good."
A couple of hours before sundown, battalion radios explode with chatter. Several teams in our convoy spot a pair of new-looking white SUVs traveling along an adjacent trail at a high rate of speed. The trucks are marked with red circles on the doors and are loaded with clean-shaven young Arab men armed with AK rifles. The Recon Marines request permission to stage a "snatch mission" on the trucks—to go after them, grab the occupants and find out who they are. The request is denied. The vehicles are allowed to pass. The Marines are infuriated. Later, they'll find out the armed men who ride in civilian trucks, especially those with markings on the side, are Fedayeen—paramilitary guerrilla fighters. At this stage in the campaign, top U.S. commanders are concerned only with fighting regular Iraqi forces, defeating them en masse as they did in the first Gulf War. It will take a few days before American commanders realize their most dangerous opponents are the Fedayeen, who are gearing up to fight them in a guerrilla war. So for now, the Marines are ordered to simply let these guys pass right by them.
At this point in the day, the Marines in Colbert's vehicle are pretty much in the dark as to what they're doing. They've been pushing north for hours, but they're not heading in the right direction to begin the mission they have all trained for: seizing the bridge on the Euphrates.
Colbert tries to tune in the BBC during a brief halt. The BBC will emerge as the best source of information on the invasion in which the Marines are participating—even Battalion Commander Lt. Col. Ferrando relies on it. But during this stop, reception is too spotty to pick up any news. "I have no intel, no big picture," Colbert tells his team.
Fick approaches the vehicle and tells Colbert that the battalion isn't going to the bridge tonight. Instead, everyone will be heading to an elevated train track at a place called Burayyat An Rataw. He has no idea why.
The desert leading up to the tracks is littered with industrial trash— shredded tires, old fence posts, wrecked machinery, wild dogs and, every thirty meters it seems, a lone rubber flip-flop. Person calls each one out, " 'Nother flip-flop. 'Nother dude walking around somewhere with one sandal on."
"Shut the fuck up, Person," Colbert says.
"You know what happens when you get out of the Marine Corps," Person continues. "You get your brains back."
"I mean it, Person. Shut your goddamn piehole."
At times, the two of them bicker like an old married couple. Being a rank lower than Colbert, Person can never directly express anger to him, but on occasions when Colbert is too harsh and Person's feelings are hurt, his driving becomes erratic. There are sudden turns, and the brakes are hit for no reason. It will happen even in combat situations, with Colbert suddenly in the role of wooing his driver back with retractions and apologies.
But late this afternoon, nearing the tracks, Colbert doesn't have the patience to play games. He's wrestling with profound disappointment. Since the night I met him he'd been talking about how excited he was to carry out this bridge-seizure mission. His platoon and his team had been slated to lead the way to the bridge for the entire battalion. Colbert was going to be one of the first Americans to reach the Euphrates. Back at Camp Mathilda, he had told me that this task was going to be "the recon mission of a lifetime." But now it's off.
We stop in the chalk-white desert about a kilometer south of the railroad tracks at Burayyat An Rataw. They run east-west along an elevated roadbed that stretches as far as the eye can see. We are now approximately seventy kilometers north of the border. The next-closest American unit is more than thirty kilometers away. First Recon is very much alone here. Earlier in the day, there were some overflights from Cobras, but there's no air cover now.
Like a lot of civilians whose memories of the first Gulf War were shaped by gee-whiz Pentagon camera footage shown on CNN of U.S. bombs and missiles striking Iraqi targets with pinpoint accuracy, I had assumed that American spy planes and satellites could see everything on the ground. But in this war, an intelligence officer in the First Marine Division tells me, "We think we know where about seventy percent of Saddam's armor and weapons are. That still leaves thirty percent that's an unknown, which is a lot." Dust and cloud cover inhibit the ability of spy planes and satellites to see on the ground, as do berms, huts and revetments. "Part of First Recon's job," the intel officer tells me, "is to uncover ground. Despite all the high-tech assets we have, the world is blank until you put people on the ground."
On the ground here, the first and last lines of defense are these Marines, who haven't slept all night. They can spot approaching hostile units from a kilometer or two out, which will only give them a few minutes to prepare. Not much time if it's a sizable force. Colbert's team and the rest in the platoon are ordered to cover their Humvee in cammie nets and dig in facing the tracks. The battalion spreads out in a defensive perimeter across a couple of kilometers. Fick tells the men their job is to observe the tracks tonight, but not even he knows what they're really supposed to be looking for, or why they're doing it.
It amazes me, as the only civilian among them, how little these guys actually know at times about what they're doing or what the future holds. But the more time you spend with a combat unit, the more you realize nobody cares too much about what they're told is going to be happening in the near future because orders change constantly anyway. Besides that, most Marines' minds are occupied with the minutiae of survival in the present, scanning the vista in this land they've just invaded, searching for signs of the enemy.
Still, some of the men are deeply disappointed by the apparent cancellation of the bridge mission. "No mission?" Garza asks. He steps down from the Humvee turret after spending approximately eighteen hours there—through the night and much of the day under a blazing sun. "I'll be mad if we don't get in this war."
"Missions are always getting fragged," Colbert says, resigned. "The mission isn't important. Just doing your job is."
His team spends forty minutes digging Ranger graves about 800 meters from the elevated train tracks. The desert pan is so hard here, where a few inches beneath the sandy topsoil it's interlaced with vestigial coral from the era when this was underwater (specifically, as part of the Persian Gulf, which used to be a sea covering all of Kuwait and southern Iraq), that every inch has to be hacked away with pickaxes, the blades sparking with each blow to the stoney crust. As soon as we are finished, the battalion orders everyone to move forward to within thirty meters of the tracks.
"The dirt will be better where we're going," Colbert reassures his weary men.
But the dirt is the same. We chop a new set of graves as oil fires some twenty-five kilometers distant compete with the sunset. With the sun dropping, the temperature plummets and sweat-drenched MOPPs now feel like they're lined with ice, not merely hard plastic. The Marines cover the Humvee in cammie nets. Half the Marines go on watch; the other half settle in for two hours of sleep.
Sleep is a sketchy proposition. Marines are not permitted to take their MOPP suits or boots off, even at night. They crawl into the Ranger graves fully dressed, with their weapons and gas masks at their sides. Some wrap themselves in ponchos. Others sleep inside "bivy sacks"—zippered pouches that have an uncanny resemblance to body bags.