But before he can take any action, three mortars explode nearby on the western side of the structure. The Iraqi disappears as Scott and his men take cover. Then rounds slam into the ground all around them. Scott's men try shooting. His M-4 jams on a double feed—two rounds stuck in the chamber—and a SAW gunner's weapon also malfunctions, popping off just one round at a time. Another gunner on his team succeeds in laying down a steady bead of fire.
About this time they notice that all the red tracers streaming in at them are coming from the west, where Marines from Task Force Tarawa are hunkered down. The mini-firefight is Marines shooting at Marines.
Scott's men stop shooting, as do the Marines firing at them in the distance. In his diary that night, Scott writes a considerably more concise and less florid entry than his previous ones: "Combat was not what I expected. How we all made it out without a scratch is beyond me."
In addition to the problem of friendly fire, Patterson's Alpha Company snipers on the riverfront are dealing with the ambiguities of guerrilla war, not covered in the Marine Rules of Engagement. The ROE under which the Marines operate are quite naturally based on the assumption that legitimate targets are people armed with weapons. The problem is Iraqis dressed in civilian clothes who are armed not with guns but with cell phones, walkie-talkies and binoculars. These men, it is believed by the Marines, are serving as forward observers for the mortars being dropped into their positions.
Mortars are a weapon of choice for the Iraqis. A mortar is a rocket-propelled bomb that is launched from a tube that's about a meter long. The mortar rocket itself is about the size and shape of a bowling pin. It fires out of the tube almost straight up, then arcs down and explodes—anywhere from one to six kilometers away. Even the smaller mortars used by the Iraqis will, when they hit, scoop out about a meter-wide hole in the ground and spray shrapnel for twenty-five meters in all directions. A direct hit from a mortar can disable the biggest American tank, or blow the fuck out of a Humvee.
Since mortars are small and light, they can be moved around easily and fired from rooftops, trenches, alleys, even from the backs of pickup trucks. Even better from the enemy's standpoint, you can't tell which direction they're being fired from. They might be five kilometers away in a trench behind a house or an apartment block.
But since mortar crews are so far away and usually out of sight, they rely on forward observers. These characters tend to hang out near Marine positions with binoculars, cell phones or radios. They watch where the mortars are landing and call back to the guys shooting them to tell them how to adjust their fire. Those who appear to be observers in Nasiriyah are unarmed, dressed in civilian clothes and blend in with the population.
During the first hour by the river, Marine snipers had to request permission up the chain of command to get "cleared hot" to shoot suspected forward observers. Killing unarmed civilians is a dicey issue, but eventually the Marine snipers are given permission to take out Iraqis with binoculars or cell phones on the other side of the river.
Marine snipers work in two-man teams, a shooter and a spotter. One of the best teams in Alpha Company is led by thirty-nine-year-old Sergeant Ken Sutherby, originally from Michigan. Sutherby looks and talks exactly the way you'd expect a Marine sniper to. He is tall and gaunt, with unblinking, pale-blue eyes, and speaks in a dry, almost airless voice. His laconic mannerisms are no doubt reinforced by the fact that Sutherby is slightly hearing impaired. He carefully scrutinizes anyone speaking to him in case he misses a word. When you get to know him, he emerges as something of a character, like a vaguely improbable figure in an Elmore Leonard crime novel.
Sutherby has been in and out of the Marine Corps since the age of nineteen. Between his years as a rifleman and sniper, he's worked as a car repo man in his hometown of Detroit, as a bodyguard for members of the Saudi royal family in Beverly Hills, and most recently, again as a bodyguard, this time for Suge Knight, the hip-hop mogul and convicted felon behind Death Row Records. Sutherby rejoined the Marines this last time because "it's more stable than working in the civilian world."
Beneath it all, Sutherby is basically a family man. He and his wife have four kids of their own and provide foster care to as many abused and neglected children. "I enjoy my family," he says. In fact, he calls his M-40 sniper rifle "Lila," which stands for "Little Angel," his nickname for his youngest daughter.
Sutherby and Lila get their first kill at about three o'clock in the afternoon. While nearby Marines in Alpha pour fire into buildings and windows across the river, where they think there are enemy gunmen, Sutherby and his spotter observe an Iraqi man in what they describe as "black pajamas," behaving suspiciously in an alley. He's about 400 yards distant (for some reason, while the rest of the Corps is metric, snipers still do everything in yards), and he seems to be watching the Marines through a pair of binoculars.
Sutherby and his spotter crouch behind a low brick wall. He props Lila on a sandbag for stabilization and watches the Iraqi in black pajamas for a good ten minutes. Every time mortars boom on the Marines' side of the river, the Iraqi steps out in the alley. On his last trip out, Sutherby takes a chest shot.
Sutherby seldom gets to see the results of his work. As soon as he takes the shot, the recoil jiggles his scope, blurring his vision. But his spotter, a twenty-two-year-old, Corporal David Raby from Nashville, Tennessee, sees the man go down. A minute later another Iraqi steps into the same alley with a pair of binoculars, perhaps even those from the man Sutherby just shot. He takes out the second guy with another chest shot.
After another hour, Sutherby and Raby see a man in an alley who has binoculars and a cell phone or radio. He is 500 yards away, and more careful than the first two. He appears every fifteen minutes or so, popping his head out from around a corner. Sutherby and Raby are forced to wait half an hour until the guy lingers long enough to get a clean shot. By this time, Sutherby's eyes are fatigued. He rests on Lila's stock, with his eyelids closed, until Raby says, "Sutherby! You see him?"
Sutherby opens his eyes and kills the man. It's a perfect head shot. In fact, Sutherby has the rare satisfaction of seeing the kill. The man's hands jerk up to his face while he tumbles forward.
Sutherby doesn't think about much in the way of philosophical or spiritual matters when he's killing people. The only things going through his mind are "shot geometry, yardage, wind." After his third kill, however, he does take pleasure in noting a marked decline in enemy mortar fire.
By four in the afternoon, the smoke and dust are so thick, our position by the bridge at Nasiriyah is engulfed in a sort of permanent twilight. Finally, after being absent for the past two hours, helicopter gunships—both Cobras and Hueys—show up. They nose down over a palm grove across the road, taking passes with rockets and machine guns, spitting out white smoke trails and red tracer streaks. Fireballs bloom from the trees below. The 20mm machine guns fired by the Cobras are beyond loud—you can feel the buzzing sound they make deep in your chest. The Hueys, which are shaped like tadpoles, fire lighter machine guns operated by door gunners. You've seen Hueys in just about every Vietnam War movie ever made, as they were a staple of the U.S. military in that conflict. Seeing them now, flying over the flaming palm grove, it suddenly feels like we've stumbled onto the set of Apocalypse Now.
As if on cue, Person leans out the window of his Humvee and starts singing a Creedence Clearwater Revival song, a Vietnam anthem. Then he stops abruptly. "This war will need its own theme music," he tells me. "That fag Justin Timberlake will make a soundtrack for it," he says. Then adds with disgust, "I just read that all these pussy faggot pop stars like Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears were going to make an antiwar song. When I become a pop star, I'm just going to make pro-war songs."
One of the helicopters fires a TOW missile. Flames splash up from the trees. For the first time today, Marines in First Recon punch their fists into the sky and scream "Get some!" The helicopters continue to vomit destruction.
Even Pappy, grim all day, smiles watching the helicopters. "I used to get a kind of semi-chubb when Cobras went past," he says. "After today, seeing those birds overhead makes me so hard I could hammer nails."
In the midst of this, I look up and see a shivering, dazed dog wandering through the smoke on the road. A red rag is tied around his neck, indicating that he must belong to someone.
Fick still has no word on RCT-l's pending assault through the city.
Enemy gunfire has dropped off. All we hear now is the continued booming of Marine artillery. Military ambulances are now parked across the street, picking up wounded from the field. A Humvee with loudspeakers crawls through the gloom along the edge of the palm grove, blaring surrender messages in Arabic. In the field there's a lone captured enemy fighter, dressed in rags, sitting on his knees, hands bound behind his back. A half dozen Marines stand around him with their rifles pointed at his chest.
Colbert's team pulls back to a reed fence, edging the field to the south. We dig holes. As I labor over mine, "Fruity Rudy" Reyes comes up behind me and pats my shoulder. The guy is so strong his fingertips feel like ball-peen hammers drumming into me. "Work it, brother," he says. "All it takes is a little consistency every day to build those muscles."
Reyes is relentlessly cheerful and bright in a way that brings to mind the host of a morning talk show. Adding to this impression, he is the platoon's unofficial fitness guru, always ready with a helpful bromide. As I continue to huff and wheeze, he adds, "You know what the best workout machine is? The human body."
Later, as we sit in the mud eating more MREs, a dirt-covered Marine from Task Force Tarawa walks out from the field. He stops in front of us, looking vaguely shell-shocked.
"How's it going, buddy?" Colbert asks.
"They shot one of my Marines in the stomach out there." He gestures toward the field. "We fired back. Blew a donkey's head off. We didn't see nothing else."
"Buddy, you need anything—food, water?" Colbert asks.
"It's all good, bro." He wanders off.
At sunset First Recon remains at the bridge. The whole reason the battalion came here was to serve as a quick-reaction force when RCT-l's massive convoy crossed the bridge and entered the city. But RCT-l's commander, Col. Dowdy, who has been flip-flopping for the past thirty hours on how and when to enter the city, continues wrestling with indecision. Instead of sending the whole convoy through in the afternoon as he'd planned, a couple of hours earlier he sent a small force of Marines dashing through the city in special, high-speed armored vehicles. They reported meeting almost no resistance as they sped through to the other side of the city, where they are now waiting.
Despite some reports of light resistance in Nasiriyah, the Marines in Task Force Tarawa who entered the city the day before remain in their original positions, still under enemy attack. Their situation is so tenuous, they haven't yet retrieved the dead Marines still lying in shot-up Amtracs. Still taking heavy fire, their commander is asking Dowdy to loan him fourteen M1A1 tanks to reinforce their positions. It's a situation common in combat: Two different sets of Marines operating in the same city a couple of kilometers apart are reporting radically different conditions.
After receiving a visit from Lieutenant General James Conway (Maj. Gen. Mattis's boss, commander of the entire First Marine Expeditionary Force in the Middle East), who urges him to take action, Dowdy finally decides he will send RCT-1 through Nasiriyah at midnight. First Recon is ordered back from the bridge. Their mission to serve as a quick-reaction force has been scrubbed. The six hours they spent at the bridge under fire was basically a waste of time (though Marines in Alpha and Charlie did take out perhaps two dozen or more hostile fighters, as well as the AAA battery). First Recon will now roll through Nasiriyah sometime after midnight, simply as part of the convoy with RCT-1.
It's after dark and growing cold when First Recon pulls back from the bridge at the Euphrates River on the evening of March 24. Its convoy of seventy vehicles rolls south four kilometers from the bridge. They stop on the highway and maneuver into the single-file marching order they will take into the city. Everybody turns off their engines and waits.
When I get out of Colbert's vehicle, I smell the town trash dump we noticed earlier in the day. A bombed oil-tank storage facility blazes in the night sky about 300 meters in front of us. Marines wander out of the vehicles in high spirits. No one says so, but I think everyone's pretty happy they didn't have to do the reaction-force mission into the city.
First Recon's Alpha Company Marines killed, by their most conservative estimates, at least ten Iraqis across the river. Some of these killer Marines come up to Colbert's vehicle to regale his team with exploits of their slaughter, bragging about one kill in particular, a fat Fedayeen in a bright orange shirt. He was one of those guys with a cell phone or radio. He kept stepping out the front door of a building directly across the river, then popping back inside. More than a dozen Marines, armed with an assortment of rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers, had been watching him, waiting to get cleared hot to shoot. When they finally did and the fat man stepped out his front door again, he was literally blown to pieces. "We shredded him," one of Colbert's Marine buddies says. "We fucking redecorated downtown Nasiriyah."
It's not just bragging. When Marines talk about the violence they wreak, there's an almost giddy shame, an uneasy exultation in having committed society's ultimate taboo and having done it with state sanction.
"Well, good on you," Colbert says to his friends.
Person shares an observation about his own reaction to combat. He stands by the road, pissing. "Man, I pulled my trousers down and it smells like hot dick," he says. "That sweaty hot-cock smell. I kind of smell like I just had sex."
The lighthearted mood is broken when headlights appear in the darkness. It's now about nine o'clock at night. Three civilian vans, coming from the direction of Nasiriyah, bear down on First Recon's position on the road. Initially, Marines just sit around gabbing and joking, paying them no mind.
By now, rumors have swirled through the ranks that yesterday in Nasiriyah Iraqi forces faked surrendering—came out with white flags, then opened up on the Marines. These stories are passed by officers and picked up by the media. Later, some units that were supposedly attacked in this manner deny this ever happened. But the legends of these devious tactics, along with tales of Jessica Lynch's alleged mutilation and rape, gain wide credence.
Despite these fears, nobody lifts a finger to stop the approaching vans. It's extremely difficult to maintain a combat mind-set twenty-four hours a day. After being under fire for six hours at the bridge, Marines just want to goof off and revel in the triumphs of having killed and survived.
Fick runs up to remind them they are invaders in a hostile land. "Stop these fucking vehicles!" he yells.
Marines leap up, weapons clattering, and surround the vans.
The dome lights are on in the rear van. I see a man curled over in the backseat in a fetal position. He's covered in blood-soaked rags.
A translator is brought up. He speaks to the driver of one of the vans, then tells Fick that the vans are filled with doctors and wounded civilians. They can't get to hospitals in Nasiriyah, so they're driving south looking for one.
Fick radios the battalion requesting permission to send the vans south down the highway. Permission is granted, but it's a futile exercise. The Marine convoy these vans are attempting to drive through stretches for twenty or more kilometers. Since all the units are on different comms, it's impossible to pass word to them to allow these vans through. In the best-case scenario, the vans will be repeatedly stopped and won't reach a hospital for a day or two. In the worst case, they will be shot up by nervous Marines.
"It sucks," Fick says as we watch the vans creep off south through the Marine convoy. "This is what happens in war. For all we know, those wounded were the same guys shooting at us all day. They can't use the hospital up the road, because Iraqis were using it to fire on Marines."
But Fick has other concerns. In a couple of hours his men will roll through the city. Marines have dubbed the route through Nasiriyah "sniper alley," though within a few weeks the same nickname will apply to any street in an Iraqi town.
Colbert briefs his team inside the Humvee. "The last friendly units that went through there were taking RPGs from the rooftops," he says. "I want the Mark-19 ranged high. Trombley, anything that moves on the left that looks like a weapon, shoot it."
"Gee, I hope I get to run over somebody at least," Person says, growing petulant. As the driver, he doesn't have easy access to his weapon. This fact bugs him. "I'm one of the best marksmen here. I can shoot people, too."
Colbert tells him to shut up. "Look," he tells his team. "There's nothing to worry about. Everyone just do your job. We're going to have a lot of ass rolling in front of us."
"Ass" in the Marine Corps refers to heavily armed units, such as tanks. The Marines have been told that some armored elements of RCT-1 will move through the city ahead of them.
Espera, who drives behind Colbert with his team in a Humvee with no roof or doors on it, is worried. "I can understand a mission to assault a city, but to run a gauntlet through it?" he says, leaning into Colbert's window. "I hope these generals know what they're doing."
At midnight, Espera and I share a last cigarette. Marines, unable to sleep, stand around by their Humvees wrapped in ponchos to ward off the bitter cold, some of them jumping in place to warm up. Espera and I climb under a Humvee to conceal the light of the cigarette and lie on our backs, passing it back and forth.
Espera reenlisted in the Marines on his way back from Afghanistan. While there, he and his squad of Marines spent forty-five days living in a three-meter-deep hole somewhere in the desert. The only action they saw occurred on the night their perimeter was overrun by camels. Espera and his men opened up on them with machine guns. "After three weeks out there, no sleep, living in those holes, I was fucking hallucinating," he explains. "We thought those camels were fucking Hajjis coming over the wire. When we lit those motherfuckers up, it was fucking raining camel meat. It was a mess, dog. Motherfuckers even did a story on it in the L.A. Times."
Now Espera admits he sometimes regrets reenlisting. "To come to this motherfucker?" He adds, "I've been so up and down today. I guess this is how a woman feels."
Though Espera takes pride in being a "violent warrior/' the philosophical implications weigh on him. "I asked a priest if it's okay to kill people in war," he tells me. "He said it's okay as long as you don't enjoy it. Before we crossed into Iraq, I fucking hated Arabs. I don't know why. I never saw too many in Afghanistan. But as soon as we got here, it's just gone. I just feel sorry for them. I miss my little girl. Dog, I don't want to kill nobody's children."
No one's sleeping in Colbert's Humvee, either. When I get back in, Trombley once again talks about his hopes of having a son with his new young bride when he returns home.
"Never have kids, Corporal," Colbert lectures. "One kid will cost you three hundred thousand dollars. You should never have gotten married. It's always a mistake." Colbert often proclaims the futility of marriage. "Women will always cost you money, but marriage is the most expensive way to go. If you want to pay for it, Trombley, go to Australia. For a hundred bucks, you can order a whore over the phone. Half an hour later, she arrives at your door, fresh and hot, like a pizza."
Despite his bitter proclamations about women, if you catch Colbert during an unguarded moment, he'll admit that he once loved a girl who jilted him, a junior-high-school sweetheart whom he dated on and off for ten years and was even engaged to until she left him to marry one of his closest buddies. "And we're still all friends," he says, sounding almost mad about it. "They're one of those couples that likes to takes pictures of themselves doing all the fun things they do and hang them up all over their goddamn house. Sometimes I just go over there and look at the pictures of my ex-fiancee doing all those fun things I used to do with her. It's nice having friends."
I watch the artillery streak through the sky toward Nasiriyah. Marine howitzers have been pounding the city for about thirty-six hours now. Each 155mm projectile they fire weighs about 100 pounds. There are several different types, but two are most commonly employed in Iraq: high-explosive (HE) rounds to blast through steel and concrete; and dual-purpose improved conventional munitions (DPICM) rounds, which burst overhead, dispersing dozens of grenade-size bomblets intended to shred people below.
The bulk of those flying into Nasiriyah are HE rounds. A single HE round can knock down a small building, send a car flying ten meters into the air, or blast a four-meter-wide crater in the ground. They spray shrapnel in a burst that's considered lethal within a fifty-meter radius and has a high probability of maiming anyone within an additional 150 meters.
The Marines' artillery guns have a range of thirty kilometers. But even in the best of circumstances, artillery fire is an imprecise art. Rounds can veer off by twenty meters or more, as we witnessed today when one burst overhead. Despite the improvements in munitions and the use of computers and radar to help target them, the basic principles of artillery haven't changed much since Napoleon's time.
For some reason reporters and antiwar groups concerned about collateral damage in war seldom pay much attention to artillery. The beauty of
aircraft, coupled with their high-tech destructive power, captures the imagination. From a news standpoint, jets flying through the sky make for much more dramatic footage than images of cannons parked in the mud, intermittently belching puffs of smoke.
But the fact is, the Marines rely much more on artillery bombardment than on aircraft dropping precision-guided munitions. During our thirty-six hours outside Nasiriyah they have already lobbed an estimated 2,000 rounds into the city. The impact of this shelling on its 400,000 residents must be devastating.
It's not the first time the citizens of Nasiriyah have been screwed by the Americans. On February 15,1991, during the first Gulf War, George H. W. Bush gave a speech at the UN in which he urged "the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside." The U.S. military also dropped thousands of leaflets on the country, urging the same. Few heeded this call more than the citizens of Nasiriyah. While the Iraqi army was routed in Kuwait, the mostly Shia populace of Nasiriyah led a coup against Baathist leaders controlling the city. When Saddam's armed forces subsequently came in to put down the uprising, they did so with the tacit approval of the Americans, who allowed them to use helicopters against the rebels. (The American administration at the time didn't want to see Iraq torn apart by rebellion; Bush's call for an overthrow of the government had merely been a ploy to tie up Iraq's armed forces while the U.S. military prepared to battle them in Kuwait.) After the resistance was quashed in Nasiriyah, months of bloody reprisals followed, in which thousands of its citizens are believed to have been killed.
In this war Marine intelligence analysts will later estimate that their advance into Nasiriyah was stopped by between 3,000 and 5,000 Saddam loyalists. Despite America's dazzling high-tech capabilities—the Marines move through Nasiriyah by blasting it to hell.
As a reporter watching this bombardment from Colbert's Humvee, knowing we will be rolling through Nasiriyah soon, I feel relief every time I see another round burning through the sky. Each one, I imagine, ups the odds of surviving.
At three in the morning, Gunny Wynn pokes his head in Colbert's window. We were supposed to move a couple of hours ago. But things are always delayed. "We're going at dawn," he says.
"That's fucking asinine," Colbert says. "Moving under cover of darkness is our primary advantage."
Gunny Wynn attempts to reassure him. "One thing we saw in Somalia was no matter how hard the fighting, gunmen usually sleep between four and eight. They just conk out, like clockwork. So we should be okay."
Colbert spends his final sleepless moments in the darkness, fantasizing about all the custom gear he should have brought for his Humvee—extra power inverters to charge the batteries of his thermal nightscope, a better shortwave radio to tune in the BBC, a CD player.
"We could hook up speakers and play music to fuck with the Iraqis," Person says.
"We could drive through Nasiriyah playing Metallica," Trombley adds.
"Fuck that," Person says. "We'd play GG Allin.
"Who the fuck is GG Allin?" Colbert asks.
"Like, this original punk-rock dude," Person says. "He believes murder should be legalized. You should be able to kill people you hate. He's fucking cool."
No one points out that this concept already seems to be the prevailing one in greater Nasiriyah.