This morning, despite the ongoing boom of artillery and rumors now spreading among the ranks of a bloody fight taking place up the road, Espera and several other Marines in the platoon seem to be suffering from a low-grade case of invaders' guilt. "Imagine how we must look to these people," he says, disgustedly kicking a pile of trash into his freshly dug pit.
There is a cluster of mud-hut homes about thirty meters across from the platoon's position by the road. Old ladies in black robes and scarves stand in front of the homes, staring at the pale, white ass of a Marine. He's naked from the waist down, taking a dump in their front yard.
A Marine on Espera's team who's helping him pick up the trash gestures toward this odd scene and says, "Can yoti imagine if this was reversed, and some army came into suburbia and was crapping in everyone's front lawns? It's fucking wild."
Colbert tunes in the BBC. The men receive the first hard reports of the heavy fighting in Nasiriyah, of Americans being captured, of mass casualties among the Marines.
None of the younger Marines listening to the reports shows much reaction. But the news hits Gunny Wynn, the platoon sergeant, hard.
"I can't fucking believe it," he says. "How did so many Marines get hit?"
Doc Bryan rants, "Marines are dying up the road, and we're sitting back here with our thumbs up our asses."
Awhile later, Doc Bryan's prayers are answered. At twelve-thirty on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, a somber Fick gathers his team leaders for a briefing. "In approximately one hour, we are going to bust north to the bridge at the Euphrates," he says. "Change in the ROE: Anyone with a weapon is declared hostile. If it's a woman walking away from you with a weapon on her back, shoot her. If there is an armed Iraqi out there, shoot him. I don't care if you hit him with a forty-millimeter grenade in the chest."
When he finishes, Espera says, "Sir, we're going to go home to a mess after we start wasting these villages. People aren't going to like that."
"I know," Fick says. "We now risk losing the PR war. Fighting in urban terrain is exactly what Saddam wanted us to do."
Fick has no clear idea what First Recon will be doing at the bridge. The word he's been given from his commander is that his platoon is going to serve as a quick reaction force to rush into the city and evacuate Marines that are wounded there. But the details he has on this mission are sketchy. He's not even certain of what route they're going to be taking through the city, or even what their destination will be once they get there.
After his briefing, Fick does what he often does in a difficult situation: He turns to Colbert for advice. When I first met Fick and heard him extol the intelligence and character of his men, I had wondered if this was just lip service. But I've found in the past few days of the invasion that whenever there's a problem—a life-and-death one, such as this mission—Fick always turns to his men for guidance. Now he and Colbert and other team leaders spread out maps of Nasiriyah on the hood of his Humvee and try to figure out where in the hell they might be going. There are several routes through the city (which is spread across approximately sixteen square kilometers), and they have no idea which their mission into the city will take.
Meanwhile, Espera gathers men from his team and Colbert's and passes on the briefing Fick just delivered on the change in the ROE. He summarizes Fick's briefing like this: "You see a motherfucker through a window
with an AK, cap his ass." But then he warns the men, "Don't get buck fever like Casey Kasem did the other night at the canal. You cap an old lady sweeping her porch, 'cause you think her broom is a weapon, it's on all of us."
The reason First Recon and all the rest of the Marines have been waiting on the highway south of Nasiriyah for twenty-four hours and now are venturing out with orders that are unclear is that their leaders aren't quite sure what to do. Ever since lead elements of Task Force Tarawa were unexpectedly chewed apart and stopped in their advance through the city yesterday, Marine commanders have been waffling.
The point of taking Nasiriyah and its bridge is clear enough. The city is a gateway into central Iraq. From the start, Maj. Gen. Mattis's invasion plan has hinged on sending a substantial Marine force through central Iraq on a route that stretches for 185 kilometers from Nasiriyah in the south to Al Kut in the north. Al Kut sits on the Tigris and commands key bridges that the invading force will need to cross in order to reach Baghdad.
The land between Nasiriyah and Al Kut is historically known as the Fertile Crescent or Mesopotamia, which is Greek for "land between two rivers"—the Euphrates and the Tigris. Mesopotamia has been inhabited for more than 5,000 years. Its terrain is a starkly contrasting patchwork of barren desert and lush, tropical growth, all interlaced with canals. It was here that humankind first invented the wheel, the written word and algebra. Some biblical scholars believe that Mesopotamia was the site of the Garden of Eden.
Mattis's plan is to invade it with a Regimental Combat Team—designated as RCT-1—a force of about 6,000 Marines. First Recon will serve as RCT-l's advance element. His objectives are twofold: to pin down large numbers of Republican Guard forces in and around Al Kut (thereby preventing them from defending Baghdad to the west), and to secure Al Kut's main bridge over the Tigris.
Meanwhile, Mattis's two other Regimental Combat Teams, totaling about 13,000 Marines, will move toward Baghdad on western highways
through open desert, much as the Army has been doing since crossing the border. By dividing his forces, Mattis hopes that at least one set of them will be able to seize passable bridges over the Tigris (which the western highways also cross). The problem he's facing on March 24 is that for more than a day now, RCT-1 has been hesitating on the outskirts of Nasiriyah.
The Marines of Task Force Tarawa, engaged inside the city and south of it in fields by the bridge over the Euphrates, only pushed into Nasiriyah in order to secure the route for RCT-1 and First Recon to use on their advance north. While the Marines in Task Force Tarawa who entered the city suffered heavy losses the day before, the continual American bombardment of Nasiriyah by artillery, attack jets and helicopters has prevented enemy forces from massing on them. They have not retreated and remain in place in Nasiriyah.
Unfortunately, the commander of RCT-1, Colonel Joe Dowdy, whose forces have been stopped on the highway south of the city, along with First Recon's, for the past twenty-four hours, has been unable to obtain a clear picture of what's going on in the city with Task Force Tarawa. It's another one of those combat situations that's hard for a civilian, who might think of the U.S. military as an all-seeing, all-powerful, high-tech entity, to comprehend. While Dowdy is only a few kilometers south of the bridge and Task Force Tarawa's positions, his radios can't communicate with their radios. Task Force Tarawa, based out of Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, uses different encryption codes from those used by Dowdy's forces, which came from Camp Pendleton. West Coast Marines can't communicate with East Coast Marines.
For the past twenty-four hours, Dowdy has been wavering, alternately planning to send his 6,000 Marines straight through the city or to bypass it and use a distant crossing point, or even to send some through and hold others back. Unlike First Recon's commander, whose obsession with mustaches and the Grooming Standard alienates his men, Dowdy is a wildly popular figure in his regiment. With his burly physique and bulldog face, he fits the image of a Marine Corps commander and delivers rousing speeches peppered with verse from Shakespeare and Kipling. But at Nasiriyah he meets his downfall. He simply can't make up his mind (and within a few days Mattis will take the nearly unprecedented step of removing Dowdy from command, probably as a result of this indecision).
As of noon on March 24, Dowdy's latest scheme is to push First Recon ahead of RCT-1 and have them join elements of Task Force Tarawa still fighting on the southern side of the bridge. After this, he intends to drive RCT-1 through the city and use First Recon as a quick-reaction force to rush into the city and rescue any of his Marines who are wounded in the initial assault.
At one o'clock on the afternoon of March 24, the Marines in First Recon climb into their vehicles and pull them onto the highway south of Nasiriyah. The winds are picking up. Yesterday's clear skies have turned gray. The road is clogged with thousands of military vehicles, but they have pulled to the side, forming a one-lane channel through the congestion.
Colbert's team settles into the Humvee and Person begins punching the dashboard and cursing. Someone higher up in the company changed radio frequencies without telling him, and now he can't use them. It's the first time I've ever seen him lose control in earnest.
Colbert calms him. "It's okay. We'll fix it. Everyone's just nervous because we lost a lot this morning," he says, referring to the news of Marine casualties.
At one-thirty p.m. First Recon's convoy of seventy vehicles starts moving on the highway toward the bridge at Nasiriyah. Given the heavy casualties sustained by Marines at the bridge during the past twenty-four hours, it's a reasonable assessment that everyone in the vehicle has a better-than-average chance of getting killed or injured this afternoon.
It's about twenty kilometers to the bridge. The funny thing I notice between all the vehicles lined up on the road is that all the trash dropped by the Marines in the preceding twenty-four hours, which Espera had been railing about earlier in the morning, has been picked up.
The air is heavy with that fog of fine, powdery dust—familiar from Camp Mathilda but which we hadn't seen a lot of until today. Cobras clatter directly overhead. They circle First Recon's convoy, nosing down through the barren scrubland on either side of the road, hunting for enemy shooters. Before long, we are on our own. The helicopters are called off because fuel is short.
Then we clear the last of the vehicles in RCT-l's convoy. A Marine standing by the road pumps his fist as Colbert's vehicle drives past and shouts, "Get some!"
No one says anything in the vehicle.
We drive into a no-man's-land. A burning fuel depot to our right spews fire and smoke. Garbage is strewn on either side of the road as far as the eye can see. It appears that we're driving straight through the town trash dump, with shredded plastic bags littering the area like confetti after a parade. The convoy slows to a crawl, and the Humvee fills with a black cloud of flies.
"Now, this looks like Tijuana," says Person.
"And this time I get to do what I've always wanted to do in T.J.;" Colbert adds. "Burn it to the ground."
There is a series of thunderous, tooth-rattling explosions directly to the vehicle's right. A Marine artillery battery is set up in a field next to the road, firing into Nasiriyah. The 155mm guns in the row have six-meter-long barrels spouting flames and black smoke with each shot. We draw even with them, then move ahead. It's a strange sensation feeling those massive guns firing behind you. Marines who so scrupulously picked up all their litter this morning are now bombing the shit out of the city.
Up ahead are wrecked U.S. military vehicles, a burned-up Dragon Wagon military transport truck, a mangled Humvee. The windshield is riddled with bullet holes. We pass a few meters from the Humvee, close enough to see pools of brown fluid—probably blood—spilled on the ground by the doors.
We drive into an increasing gloom. The hundreds if not thousands of artillery rounds and bombs poured onto the city in the past twenty-four hours have kicked up a localized dust storm over the road. Visibility drops to a few kilometers.
"Small-arms fire to the rear," Colbert says, passing word from the battalion radio. No one reacts. It's like a weather bulletin.
"Car coming at twelve o'clock!" someone shouts. Weapons clatter as everyone readies to shoot it.
A white Toyota passenger car with orange fenders—the markings of an Iraqi taxicab—zooms out of the black cloud ahead, toward First Recon's convoy, where, no doubt, up and down the line hundreds of Marines take aim to shoot it.
"No weapons! No weapons!" gunners shout in Colbert's Humvee, meaning they don't see any weapons in the cab.
The cab squeezes past Colbert's Humvee and continues down the line. A taxi driving into a convoy of heavily armed Marines during a firefight and artillery bombardment seems insane. The stereotype of the reckless Arab cabdriver in New York City pops into my mind. Later, Marines figure out that cabs are used by Fedayeen to move through their lines and observe or to ferry troops. They're also used by car bombers. And they're used by civilians to evacuate the wounded.
Ever more powerful blasts boom outside the Humvee. We pass a succession of desiccated farmsteads—crude, square huts made of mud, with starved-looking livestock in front. Locals sit outside like spectators lining a parade route. A woman walks by the road with a basket on her head, oblivious to the explosions.
We reach the bridge over the Euphrates. Marines from Task Force Tarawa are spread out on both sides of the road in fields and dense palm groves. Rifles crack intermittently, with occasional bursts from machine guns. They've been dug in here for twenty-four hours now and are still taking fire from Iraqi gunmen farther out in the fields.
The bridge is a long, broad concrete structure. It spans nearly a kilometer and arches up gracefully toward the middle. The guardrails on both sides are twisted and riddled with bullet holes. The dust and smoke is so dense it's like being in a snowstorm. We can't even make out the city on the other side of the bridge. The span simply disappears into a gray cloud bank.
After fifteen minutes of solid tension inside the Humvee, Person cannot repress the urge to make a goofy remark. He turns to Colbert, smiling. "Hey, you think I have enough driving hours now to get my Humvee license?"
First Recon's column cuts off the road at the causeway where the bridge starts. We take a left down a dirt trail and drive below the bridge to the banks of the Euphrates. There we finally glimpse Nasiriyah on the other side. The front of the city is a jumble of irregularly shaped two- and three-story structures. Iraqi towns are characterized by uniform dullness of color, buildings constructed somewhat haphazardly out of mud bricks or from cinder blocks covered in stucco. Everything is the shade of earth, of the dust that hangs in the air. Through the haze, the buildings appear as a series of dim, slanted outlines, like a row of crooked teeth.
To our immediate right, a dozen or so Marines from Task Force Tarawa sit between the bridge pilings beneath the elevated roadway. Some are stretched out, sleeping, despite the steady blasts of Marine artillery landing in the city on the opposite riverbank. One of the Marines sits upright, puffing on a fat cigar. His face is black with grime. He stares expressionlessly at Colbert's Humvee. No moto greeting of Get some! from him.
First Recon's Alpha and Charlie companies set up along the bank of the river, facing the city. Bravo pulls back about seventy-five meters from the river's edge.
The whole maneuver—driving seventy-five meters from the river-bank—takes about fifteen minutes. The ten Humvees in Bravo Company's two platoons run into about twenty trucks from the battalion's Support and Headquarters Company, which are trying to drive into a field farther back from the bridge. The Humvees drive around like clown cars as everyone shouts over the radios or out their windows to direct traffic. Finally, Colbert's Humvee stops next to the road leading onto the bridge. There's no clear order of what Bravo is doing here yet.
Colbert can't get over the lush greenery of the palm groves and fields around us. After two months in the desert, it's jarring to suddenly have arrived in Mesopotamia's fertile surroundings on the outskirts of the Garden of Eden. Even as Marine artillery rounds blow it to smithereens, Colbert keeps repeating, "Look at these fucking trees."
An enemy mortar explodes nearby. A mortar blast is different from artillery. You hear the blast as an artillery shell is fired, then the sound of it whizzing through the sky, followed by the boom as it hits. Mortars come out of nowhere. There's no warning, just a blast, and a column of black smoke where it hits. If they're close you feel a sharp increase in the air pressure. The sonic vibrations make the hairs on your body tingle, and your teeth feel numb for an instant.
Another mortar bangs outside. Person smiles. "You know that feeling before a debate when you gotta piss and you've got that weird feeling in your stomach, then you go in and kick ass?" he says. "I don't have that feeling now."
A machine gun rattles up on the riverbank.
"Stand by for shit to get stupid," Person says, sounding merely annoyed.
Seventy-five meters in front of us are the men in First Recon's Alpha and Charlie companies, spread across the southern banks of the Euphrates. They form a line stretching for nearly a kilometer from the bridge on their eastern side to grassy fields on the west. The men begin taking sporadic sniper fire from Nasiriyah. As enemy shots crackle in the air, the Marines take cover behind low, dried mud berms, then scan the city, which rises one hundred meters distant on the opposite riverbank, through rifle scopes and binoculars. They search the thousands of windows and crevices and alleys for signs of enemy shooters.
The procedure when you're getting shot at by rifles or machine guns is pretty straightforward. The Marines all hunt for muzzle flashes. If a gun is pointed toward you, even if the shooter is concealed behind a wall or berm, its flash will generally be visible. Every time an enemy gunman takes a shot, he momentarily reveals his position.
The men in Alpha and Charlie companies spot muzzle flashes coming from windows of apartments 250 meters or so across the river. But in their first twenty minutes at the riverfront, the Marines fire very few shots. There are civilians moving about in the streets of the city. Even during this low-intensity gun battle, some even stand still, trying to observe the Marines aiming at them.
The strangest, most unsettling spectacle Marines see, however, is that of armed men who dart across alleys, moving from building to building, clutching women in front of them for cover. The first time it happens, Marines shout, "Man with a weapon!"
Despite the newly aggressive ROEs, Marines down the line shout, "I'm not shooting! There's women."
One of the Marines witnessing this is the commander of Alpha Company, Captain Bryan Patterson, whose Humvee command post is set fifty meters back from the riverfront. Patterson, thirty-two, is from Indianapolis, Indiana, and is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. With his medium build and dark hair he tends to keep a tad longer than regulation, he looks not a day over twenty-four.
Until this afternoon Patterson has always wondered how he would react under fire. Though he's been in the Marines his entire adult life and before joining First Recon he commanded an infantry platoon, he's never been in combat.
Now several mortars impact within 150 meters of his position. Patterson gets on his radio and calls the battalion. His fear is that these might actually be "friendly" mortars dropped by Marines, not aware that First Recon has moved up to the western side of the bridge. Several minutes later, the battalion radios back that these are definitely not Marine mortars.
While Patterson stands there out in the open by his Humvee, talking on the radio, the area around him is raked with enemy gunfire. Marines taking cover behind surrounding berms look up to see if their commander is hit and burst into laughter. Patterson seems oblivious to the shooting and keeps talking on the radio, periodically tilting his head back, gulping down Skittles from an MRE.
Whatever indefinable qualities make a good commanding officer, Patterson has them. Unlike Encino Man and Captain America in Bravo Company, Patterson's men speak of him in the highest terms. Patterson hardly fits the image of the swaggering, barrel-chested Marine Corps officer. He is one of the most unassuming characters you could ever meet, almost shy. He admits, "I can't give gladiatorial speeches to my men." His reasons for going to the Naval Academy and becoming a Marine couldn't be more prosaic. "I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life," he says. His view of being an officer is devoid of romance. "As company commander, I'm like a midlevel manager at any corporation."
His views on the war are equally temperate. "There is not a good thing that comes out of war," he tells me later on. "I'm not going to pretend I'm this great American savior in Iraq. We didn't come here to liberate. We came to look out for our interests. That we are here is good. But if to liberate them means putting a Starbucks and a McDonald's on every street corner, is that liberation? But I have to justify this to myself. It's Saddam's fault." Still, he says, "the protestors have a lot of valid points. War sucks."
The reason his men look up to him is probably very simple. Aside from the fact that he's calm and articulate, Patterson respects them. His Marines came to the Middle East on a ship, and behind the backs of his men, Patterson often says, "I could have fallen overboard and they would do fine without me."
Now, he and his men come under increasing fire at the riverbank. His Marines spot an anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) battery shooting at them from across the river. AAA guns fire large-caliber rounds from multiple barrels, like extremely high-powered machine guns. They are designed to shred aircraft flying thousands of meters overhead, but in Iraq, gunmen point the barrels down and aim them at ground targets, such as Marines. Their fire is devastating, and this one, about a kilometer and a half down the riverbank, is beyond the effective range of the heaviest weapons possessed by the Marines in First Recon.
Patterson and his men notice some Marines from Task Force Tarawa a couple hundred meters away. Among them is a Javelin team.
The Javelin is basically a big, honking, shoulder-fired missile for blowing up tanks. Patterson brings the Javelin crew forward. Within minutes they fire a missile into the AAA battery across the river. Patterson watches through his binoculars as a direct hit from the Javelin blows up the AAA battery, setting off numerous secondary explosions as nearby stocks of munitions cook off. He estimates the one strike takes out three to five Iraqis who'd been manning the AAA guns. "It felt good to get revenge for the Marines from Task Force Tarawa killed in Nasiriyah," Patterson later admits.