On the morning of March 25, the men in First Recon, most of whom have been up all night in anticipation of entering the hostile city, are finally told to start their engines. Colbert's Humvee rolls toward the bridge at about six-thirty in the morning. The smoke has cleared, but it's an overcast day. Just before the causeway onto the bridge, we pass Marines in gas masks standing by the side of the road. They gesture for us to don our masks, indicating there's a gas attack.
"You have got to be kidding me," Colbert says. He points out the window. "There's birds flying. Fuck it. We're not putting on our masks."
We drive onto the bridge. The guardrails on either side are bent and tattered. There are piles of empty brass shell casings and discarded steel ammo boxes on both sides. But aside from these signs of combat, it just looks like your average concrete bridge. I'm amazed that with all the gunfire—especially mortars and artillery—it wasn't hit. The Euphrates below is a flat ribbon of gray.
On the other side we pass several blown-up Amtracs. Marine rucksacks are scattered on the road, with clothes, bedrolls, and bloody scraps of battle dressing. Nearby are puddles of fluorescent pink engine coolant from destroyed vehicles.
The city ahead is about six kilometers across, a sprawling metropolis of mud brick and cinder block. Smoke curls from collapsed structures. Homes facing the road are pockmarked and cratered. Cobras fly overhead, spitting machine-gun fire into buildings on both sides of us. We see no civilians, just dogs roaming the ruins.
Nobody talks in Colbert's vehicle. Reports fly over the radio that other vehicles in First Recon's convoy are coming under fire. Then we halt on the northern end of Nasiriyah. We are surrounded by shattered gray buildings, set back about fifty meters on either side of the road. The things you look at are the thousands of gaps everywhere—windows, alleys, doorways, parapets on the roofs—to see if there are any muzzle flashes. You seldom see the guys actually doing the shooting. They hide behind walls, sticking the gun barrels over the edges to fire. All you see is a little flame spouting from the shadows. Colbert leans into his rifle scope, scanning the buildings. "Stay frosty, gents," he says.
We are stopped because Alpha Company has halted in order to pick up a wounded Marine from Task Force Tarawa with a bullet in his leg. The best they can do is put the Marine's stretcher on top of the Humvee. While attempting to load him, snipers in rubbled buildings on both sides of the road begin firing into the convoy. They concentrate their fire on Recon's support trucks. The driver of one takes a bullet in the chest, but it's stopped by his interceptor vest. An RPG round zooms over the nose of another support truck and explodes nearby. The Marines in the support trucks, derisively referred to as POGs (People Other than Grunts) by Colbert and others in the frontline units, begin launching Mark-19 grenades into a nearby building. Then a Cobra slices low and fires its machine gun directly over the heads of the men on the trucks.
Some in the battalion are glad to come under fire and have a chance to shoot back. Few more so than the battalion's executive officer (XO), Major Todd Eckloff. Thirty-five years old, he grew up in Enumclaw, Washington, about an hour outside Seattle. He decided to become a Marine at the age of five. He says, "My grandmother was big on patriotism and military books and songs." She helped raise him, and Eckloff grew up singing the Marines' Hymn the way other kids do nursery rhymes. When he was just a toddler, his grandmother participated in an adopt-a-soldier program, serving dinners for Vietnam vets in their home. Eckloff still remembers the first time he met a Marine. "I was with my grandmother at the South Center Mall, and coming toward us was a Marine in his dress blues. That's when I knew what I wanted to be. I was a dork about becoming a Marine." Eckloff adds, "In high school I had a license plate that said 'First Recon.'" "
But since graduating from Virginia Military Institute and joining the Marines more than a decade ago, Eckloff has never had a chance to enjoy combat. He was deployed late to the Gulf War and simply "guarded shit/' then served uneventfully in the Balkans. Finally in his dream unit, First Recon, Eckloff nevertheless has one of the most frustrating billets. "As XO, my job is really to do nothing but take over if the battalion commander is shot."
Now under fire in the convoy, he at last has his opportunity to taste combat. He rides in a supply truck, but in his mind, as he later tells me, "It's cool, because I'm able to shoot my weapon out of the window."
Eckloff carries a Benelli automatic twelve-gauge shotgun. As rounds pop off outside, he slides it out the window and blasts an Iraqi fifteen meters away in an alley. He sees him disappear in a "big cloud of pink." The next instant he spots another guy running on a balcony area and gives him several blasts. Eckloff is certain he hit him. "My aim is good," he says.
Later, after I interview him and others riding in the support units, I tally that these Marines claim altogether to have killed between five and fifteen Iraqis during several minutes of shooting in Nasiriyah. It's a high number given the fact that during six hours of sometimes extremely heavy gun battle by the bridge yesterday the commander of Alpha Company believes his unit of eighty Marines got somewhere between ten and twenty kills.
Kocher, the team leader in Bravo's Third Platoon, doubts there was much of a gun battle through Nasiriyah. "A lot of this was just some officers and POGs who think it's cool to be out here shooting up buildings," he says.
Kocher tells me this just after we've cleared Nasiriyah's outer limits. Initially, I dismiss his opinion as Recon Marine snobbery. The fact is, Recon's Support and Headquarters elements did come under fire in Nasiriyah. At the same time, there are some in the battalion—a very small number of men—who seem to develop a penchant for driving through towns and countryside firing wildly out of their vehicles.
First Recon remains on Route 7 after leaving Nasiriyah. The Marines will take this road, two lanes of unmarked asphalt, all the way to Al Kut. Aside from the berms rippling a meter or two above the surface of the land, central Iraq tends to be as flat as Kansas. Route 7 parallels the Gharraf River (which the Marines refer to as a "canal") connecting the Euphrates in the south with the Tigris in the north.
While traveling on paved roads, First Recon rolls in a single-file convoy, vehicles spaced roughly twenty-five meters apart. The average convoy speed out of Nasiriyah is about twenty miles an hour, though we tend to stop every ten minutes or so. Currently, other units from RCT-1, convoys of fifty to two hundred, are advancing on the same road, or pulled off beside it, with Marines dismounted in fields firing at targets—huts or berms—in the distance. These forces, along with First Recon, are the first Americans to invade this portion of Iraq.
Just north of Nasiriyah, we pass through a light industrial zone of cement factories, machine shops and yards full of tractors and excavating equipment. It almost looks like the outskirts of a Midwestern farm town, except for all the dead bodies. Corpses are scattered along the edges of the road. Most are men, enemy fighters, some with RPG launchers still in their hands, rounds scattered nearby. A few hours earlier, just before dawn, while the Light Armored Reconnaissance (LAR) units Col. Dowdy sent through the city the previous afternoon had been parked out here waiting for First Recon and the rest of the RCT-1 to clear Nasiriyah and catch up with them, waves of two- and three-man RPG teams had come out of the surrounding fields and industrial buildings to attack them. Few ever got off a shot.
LAR units ride in eight-wheeled amphibious, black-armored vehicles that resemble upside-down bathtubs. Each has a Bushmaster 25mm rapid-fire canon mounted in a top turret. Unlike the open turret in a Humvee, which requires a man standing in it to fire the weapon, the Bushmasters are fully enclosed. They resemble small tank guns and are operated by a crewman sitting below inside the vehicle, controlling the weapon with a sort of joystick. Not only do the Bushmasters lay down devastating fire— hundreds of explosive, armor-penetrating rounds per minute—but the guns are also linked to Forward-Looking Infrared Radar scopes, which combine both thermal imaging and light amplification to easily pick out targets 1,000 meters distant in the darkness, well beyond the effective range of Iraqi RPGs and AKs. When the Iraqi RPG teams attempted to assault them in the hours before dawn on the road north of Nasiriyah, the LAR units decimated them, killing an estimated 400 to 500. Because it was dark, many of the Iraqis kept coming out of the fields, apparently unaware that their comrades were being cut to pieces all around them.
Corpses of the Iraqi attackers who fell in the road have been run over repeatedly by tracked vehicles. They are flattened, with their entrails squished out. Marines in First Recon nickname one corpse Tomato Man, because from a distance he looks like a smashed crate of tomatoes in the road. There are shot-up cars and trucks with bodies hanging over the edges. We pass a bus, smashed and burned, with charred human remains sitting upright in some windows. There's a man in the road with no head and a dead little girl, too, about three or four, lying on her back. She's wearing a dress and has no legs.
Twenty-one-year-old Lance Corporal Jeffrey Carazales from Cuero, Texas, has a profound realization as he cruises through the destruction at the wheel of a Humvee in Bravo's Third Platoon. '"Everything in life is overrated except death. All that shit goes out the window—college, nice cars, pussy. I just don't want to end up looking like that dude who looks like a box of smashed tomatoes."
Colbert has his own problems. His radio is on the same network with Bravo's Third Platoon under the command of Captain America. All morning Captain America has been tying up the network shouting that his vehicle is coming under fire. "I am so sick of him spazzing out," Colbert yells, throwing down his headset. "He's running over rocks and reporting it's enemy fire."
The enlisted Marines riding with Captain America are becoming alarmed. Several days ago, back at the railroad tracks, he picked up weapons discarded by the surrendering Iraqis, among them a small East German machine gun. Now, rolling north of Nasiriyah, he's begun firing out the window of his Humvee, even when nobody else in his platoon sees any enemy threats.
While driving past an Iraqi home with an unoccupied Chevy Suburban parked in front, he sprays it with machine-gun fire.
One of the enlisted men in his vehicle challenges him. "What are you shooting at?" he asks him.
"The enemy uses SUVs all the time," he answers. "Any chance to take one out, I will."
The Marines don't necessarily disagree with his logic. It's the random unexpectedness of his firing. They are trained to call in targets over the radio, not just to verify them but to alert everyone else. Marines aren't just supposed to run around the countryside shooting guns out the window. One of the Marines who ride in the Humvee with him concludes, "The guy is not right in the head."
But whatever faults emerge among some commanders and enlisted Marines, everything about racing up a highway in a country you're invading is baffling. You pass three dead men by the road, surrounded by weapons, then shepherds in the field behind them waving and smiling. There's a car with a dead woman shot in the backseat—no hint why Marines or helicopters shot her—followed by a burned-up SUV packed with AAA guns in the rear. Many houses we pass have white flags hanging over their front doors, which Marines take to be surrender flags. Then we pass homes with black flags on them. The radios up and down the battalion come to life. Everyone wants to know, are these special flags used to signal enemy fighters? Marines train their weapons on homes flying black flags until word is passed down the net that these are flown by Shia households.
Marines in Alpha Company spot a BM-21, an Iraqi mobile rocket launcher, moving toward First Recon's convoy. The battalion halts and calls in an air strike on it.
While they're waiting, two men pop up from a berm in the field beside Colbert's vehicle and take off running. Marines train their guns in on them to shoot, but neither of them have weapons, so they let them go.
Gunny Wynn spots two men lying down in another berm about 300 meters distant. One seems to be holding something in his hands that glints— binoculars or a gun sight. Pappy and Reyes, who serve as one of the platoon's sniper teams, set up by the road, with Reyes spotting.
They observe the two men for about ten minutes. An object continues to glint in one of the men's hands. Pappy is cleared hot to take him out and fires a single shot. Pappy doesn't dwell much on the details of his kill. When I ask him about it a short while later, he says, "The man dropped down and did not come up."
For his part in the killing, Reyes says, "I pray I'm making the right decisions. My fate is all in the Tao I've tried to live by."
While we remain halted, waiting for the air strike on the Iraqi rocket launcher, Corporal Michael Saucier from First Recon's Charlie Company is helping pull road security on the convoy. Saucier, a twenty-year-old from Savage, Minnesota, operates a .50-caliber heavy machine gun and is one of several young Christians in the battalion. In bull sessions with other Recon Marines, he freely talks about his belief in "God, Jesus, the whole nine yards." At the same time, he's not really a big Bible-thumper. He counts among his closest friends one of the most profane nonbelievers in the battalion, and plans, when he gets out of the Corps, to go with him on a "Fear and Loathing" tour of Europe. Despite his relaxed attitudes about doctrine—Saucier believes "Christianity should be about sincerity, not a bunch of rules and denominations"—he's come to war covered in kick-ass
Christian tattoos. There's a cross on his back, a dove on one leg, and the face of Jesus adorns his chest.
When the convoy stops for a "short halt"—typically one expected to last less than twenty minutes—the vehicles split into two columns. They park on both sides of the road, with the rear wheels of the Humvees in the dirt, the front wheels on the pavement, all of them facing the road at a forty-five-degree angle. The parking maneuver is called a "herringbone." At both ends of the herringboned convoy, two Humvees pull ahead of the others, park side by side in each lane of the road and face out, orienting their main guns forward to stop traffic from approaching. The procedure for stopping vehicles is for the .50-cal gunners on the Humvees to cart their weapons up and fire warning shots high over approaching cars.