Saucier is on his team's .50-cal, mounted in the center of their open-top Humvee, when he and other Marines see a passenger car about 350 meters down the road "acting funny." The car stops, and four clean-cut young men step out of a nearby field and approach it.
Of all the little clues Marines are hunting for to determine whether the people and objects in this alien environment are hostile or benign, some facts begin to emerge: Fighters tend to be clean-cut or have mustaches, and farmers usually have beards. The four young men Saucier observes walking up to the car are all clean-cut. They get into the car, and it begins to drive toward Saucier's Humvee.
Rules have changed since last night when Marines allowed three civilian vans to roll through their lines unchallenged. Now Marines are under orders to keep all civilian traffic at least 200 meters from their convoy.
Saucier aims his .50-cal high over the passenger car now approaching and thunks off several warning shots, sending bright tracers coursing over it. The car keeps coming.
"Light it up!" Marines shout nearby.
Saucier rips a ten-second burst, riddling the car with 100 armor-piercing incendiary rounds. The vehicle bursts into flames about 150 meters away, then rocks up and down as secondary explosions erupt inside. Nobody gets out.
Saucier and the other team members who also fired have just killed five men. The day before, by the Euphrates, Saucier fired into buildings in the city where he saw muzzle flashes, but he never saw any people. This is the first time he has seen a bunch of guys, then helped kill them.
Saucier stares at the burning car as explosions continue to burst inside, and he is relieved. "It means they must have been carrying weapons in there," he concludes. "Those must have been bad guys."
After Charlie Company destroys the white car, the battalion resumes its advance.
Bravo's Third Platoon pushes in front of us and immediately comes under fire from a sniper hidden somewhere in a gas station. Marines saturate the suspected sniper position with fire and continue north. While they roll, Captain America spots an Iraqi man running through the field outside his window and cuts him down with his East German machine gun.
After being up all night, then experiencing the adrenaline-fueled ride through Nasiriyah, the morning has a dreamy quality. Charred or colorfully mashed-up people along the readjust add to the surreal impression. The mood in Colbert's Humvee is eerily relaxed.
Next to me, Trombley opens up an MRE and furtively pulls out a pack of Charms. "Keep it a secret," he says. In full violation of Colbert's ironclad no-Charms-because-Charms-are-bad-luck policy, he unwraps the candies and stuffs them into his mouth.
By ten in the morning on March 25, First Recon has covered about twenty kilometers since passing through Nasiriyah. Neither Lt. Fick nor the Marines in Second Platoon knows what they are doing here on Route 7. Maj. Gen. Mattis's grand scheme of sending the 6,000-strong RCT-1 from Nasiriyah to Al Kut—now about 165 kilometers north of here—is completely unknown to the men in the platoon.
Right now the only order the men are operating under is to turn off Route 7 onto a dirt trail winding through an area of dry canals. The trail loosely parallels Route 7, runs for about ten kilometers through a series of small villages and ends outside a town called Al Gharraf (named for the canal). At this point most Marines don't even know the name of the town, or if it indeed is their final destination for the day. While the 6,000 troops in RCT-1 will continue on Route 7, the 374 Marines in lightly armed First Recon will be invading this little chunk of Mesopotamia all by themselves.
Another essential piece of information the Marines in the battalion haven't been given is that the purpose of driving onto this trail is to draw enemy fire. Today marks their first day of serving as ambush bait in central Iraq. They will spend most of the next ten days moving north, either on Route 7 or on parallel dirt trails, frequently ten to twenty-five kilometers ahead of RCT-1, trying to scare enemy forces into attacking. The rationale makes sense when it's explained to me by Mattis after the invasion: The small force races up back roads ahead of the big force rolling behind on the main road. The enemy orients their troops and weapons on the small force (not realizing it's the small one), and the big force hits them where they're not looking for it. It's a trick that works best when you're going up against an army like Iraq's, which has no air assets and bad communications and will have a tough time figuring out that the small force is just a decoy. I admire the plan when Mattis and others explain it to me. And in a way, I'm glad I didn't know about it in advance, because it would have been scarier to remain with Second Platoon. Perhaps this is why they didn't tell the Marines in the platoon about this plan either.
Colbert's Humvee is in on point for the company when we make the turn off Route 7. There's a dead man lying in a ditch at the junction. Two hundred meters past the corpse, there's a farmhouse with a family out front, waving as we drive by. At the next house, two old ladies in black whoop and clap. A bunch of bearded men shout, "Good! Good! Good!" The Marines wave back. In the span of a few minutes, they have gone from kill-anyone-that-looks-dangerous mode to smiling and waving as if they're on a float in the Rose Bowl parade.
A kilometer or so onto the trail, we are surrounded by lush fields of grain, then small hamlets nestled beneath palm groves. Rays of sunlight poke through the clouds, turning the dust in the air silver. Fick's impression is that the "whole place tingles." And not in a bad way. More villagers run out from their homes, cheering. Grinning fathers hoist up their babies By one house, teenage girls in maroon dresses sneak out from behind a wall. Defying tradition, their heads are uncovered,-displaying pretty faces and long black hair. They jump up and down, laughing and waving at the Marines.
"Damn! Those girls are hot," Person says.
"Look alert," Colbert warns.
The road dwindles to a single, rutted lane. We crawl along at a couple of miles per hour, then stop. Several boys, about nine or ten, scramble up from a dry creek bed on our right. They come within about five meters of the Humvee and start yelling, "Hello, America!" Some of them put their hands to their mouths, begging for food.
Colbert tries to ignore them. One of the kids, however, stares him down. He makes clownish faces at Colbert, trying to make him laugh.
"Fuck it," Colbert says. "Break out the humrats," he says, referring to humanitarian rations. "Let's feed the ankle-biters."
We throw several bright yellow humrat packs out the window. As kids run up to grab them, Colbert says, "You're welcome. Vote Republican." He gazes at them, now yelling and fighting each other for the humrat packs, and adds, "I really thank God I was born American. I mean, seriously, it's something I lose sleep over."
By now, a shamal dust storm has begun to brew. Obliteration of sunlight in a true shamal, as this one is, is nearly complete. A typical Iraqi shamal produces a dust cloud that extends three to six kilometers from the Earth's surface into the upper atmosphere. The sky turns brown or red or yellow, depending on the complexion of the dust. Our sky is the color of bile— brown tinged with yellow. Winds now gust up to fifty miles an hour. We hear thunder.
First Ream's convoy becomes twisted up on the back trails winding through the hamlets and palm groves. One set of vehicles takes a wrong turn. A bridge indicated on the map turns out not to exist. A couple of the battalion's seven-ton trucks nearly tumble into a dry canal when the roadway gives out. It takes about an hour for the convoy to "unfuck" itself. When it does, Bravo Company, which had been in the lead, ends up at the rear. The battalion convoy is cut in two, with Alpha, Charlie and Headquarters in front, and Bravo a few kilometers back.
Colbert's vehicle creeps forward, hugging the edge of a dry canal. Here the canal is about seven meters deep and an equal distance across. The Humvee is squeezed between a two-meter-high berm on the left and the canal on the right. We're on a donkey path, on the verge of slipping into the canal. We find out from the battalion radio that RCT-1, moving several kilometers west of here on the highway, is in contact with suspected Republican Guard units.
We round a bend. A village directly across from us on the other side of the dry canal looks like something out of a Sergio Leone Western. Tum-bleweed blows past crude adobe huts. One of them has a peaked roof and arches in the entrance, making it resemble a small Spanish church. Villagers stream south (against the direction in which we are moving) on the opposite side of the canal. There are dozens of them—women carrying bundles on their heads, children and old ladies pulling handcarts loaded with household goods. Whereas an hour earlier villagers had been waving and smiling, the demeanor of these people is radically different. Most avoid eye contact with us. Some on the other side of the canal break into a run when they see us approach. Watching them go, Colbert concludes, "These people are fleeing."
On our side of the canal, an Iraqi man walks briskly past Bravo Company's first sergeant and gives him the thumbs-down, indicating trouble ahead. Then a villager tells a Marine translator that they are fleeing because enemy forces are preparing for an attack in the town north of here.
Inside Colbert's vehicle we hear the news of a possible attack over the radio while watching the continued exodus of villagers. Black clouds roll overhead. Lightning flashes. The winds are so strong now, the palm fronds on the surrounding trees have flipped backward. We're riding directly into the wind. Colbert shakes his head, laughing. "Could it look any worse than this? Every sign is telling us something bad is going to happen."
Moments later, gunfire erupts ahead. The five Humvees from Bravo's Third Platoon are directly in front of us, squeezed onto the donkey trail in a single-file column. The weird Spanish-looking village remains beside us across the canal on our right. To the left over a berm, there's a small cluster of two-story adobe huts, with palm trees growing between them. Unseen people inside this mini-hamlet seem to be shooting at Third Platoon.
We stop. More rifle shots crackle.
"There's incoming rounds to our rear," Person says, sounding almost bored as he passes on a report from the radio.
"Damn it," says Colbert. "I have to take a shit."
Instead, Colbert picks up a 40mm grenade, kisses the nose of it and slides it into the 203 launcher on his rifle. He opens the door and climbs up the embankment on the left to observe the homes on the other side. He signals for all the Marines to come out of the vehicle and join him. Marines from other vehicles fire into the hamlet with rifles, machine guns and Mark-19s. There are about forty-five seconds of popping and booming, then it stops.
"They say we're taking fire from those huts," Colbert says, eyeing the hamlet through binoculars. "I see no targets."
"There's people poking their heads out behind a palm tree!" another Marine on the berm shouts.
Trombley lies next to Colbert with his SAW poised to fire. "Should I light 'em up?" he asks Colbert.
"No, not yet, Trombley. Those are civilians."
Alpha and Charlie companies are currently about two kilometers ahead of us on the same trail on the outskirts of the town where locals have warned of an enemy attack. The Marines are surrounded by open fields on the right and a row of huts and two-story houses about 300 meters back from them on the left. As the lead Humvees in Alpha (who are at the front of the battalion) draw alongside these structures, they come under heavy machine-gun and AK fire. Then enemy mortars burst in the fields to the right.
The lead troops in Alpha immediately dismount and take cover behind a meter-high, mud-brick wall on the left side of the road. The fire is coming from the village structures a few hundred meters beyond this wall.
The main road into Al Gharraf is about 300 meters farther ahead of them. Though the sky has darkened from the gathering sandstorm, the cobalt-blue dome of a mosque is visible ahead, rising over the town. It's about the only color that can be seen anywhere.
Behind Alpha on the same trail, the Marines in Charlie Company come under fire. Saucier, the .50-cal gunner with Jesus tattooed on his chest, is among those taking cover. Everyone is crouched low, frantically looking around, trying to figure out where the shooting is coming from. Saucier, however, becomes distracted. A couple hundred meters away there's a woman in black walking through the field. The winds are so powerful she leans into them, her robe billowing behind her. She's using both hands to drag a large child—maybe a six- or seven-year-old boy—across the berms. The kid has obviously been shot or wounded—Saucier thinks from an enemy mortar burst, since several of these hit near where the woman had been walking. He observes her for several seconds, then struggles to turn away and refocus on his own survival. "You can't dwell on this stuff here," he later says. "But I'll definitely take it home with me."
Capt. Patterson believes there are at least two dozen enemy fighters holed up in the huts to the left, firing on his men. The Marines saturate the area with heavy-weapons fire, but they can't silence the enemy machine guns, which have everyone pinned down.
He makes the difficult decision of calling in an artillery strike on the huts. Any artillery strike within 600 meters of your position is called "danger close," given the wide kill radius of artillery shells. With the huts 300 meters away, Patterson is almost calling in a strike on top of his own men. But on their own, they can't get past them.
Since Alpha is spread across a couple hundred meters, not all the men get the word that there is a danger-close artillery strike on its way. Corporal John Burris, a twenty-one-year-old in Alpha Second Platoon, is among those kept in the dark.
Burris is one of those guys who could have done any number of things besides join the Marine Corps. His family owns a construction equipment and supply company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. "My family goes to college and then joins the family business," Burris says. A talented swimmer, he was offered scholarships at several universities, but opted for the Marines. His choice of the military didn't stem from any special patriotic urge. He wanted to buck family tradition, and besides, he was worried he'd party too hard in college. Even in full battle fatigue, toting his rifle, Burris barely looks old enough to drive, an impression that is added to by his perpetually cheerful disposition. For him, the whole campaign so far has been an oddly slapstick affair. Yesterday, by the Euphrates, he was ordered to advance on a suspected enemy gun position and drop a 203 round into it, but when he jumped up and ran toward it, he tripped and cut his face open on his rifle stock. In the midst of all the shooting, his fellow Marines fell over laughing.
Now, as the first danger-close artillery rounds scream in and burst over the nearby field, Burris pops his head over the berm. He thinks it's enemy fire, and his first instinct is to get up and see where it's coming from. A piece of shrapnel thuds into the ground behind him. Someone yells at him to get the fuck down. He rolls over, laughing, while the artillery strike of twelve DPICM cluster munitions saturates enemy positions with nearly 600 mini-bombs. The Iraqi guns are silenced.
As the artillery called in by Alpha booms ahead of us, Colbert and his team remain halted in the canal area. It's about three in the afternoon. We've been stopped for an hour. No more fire has come from the hamlet on the left. Colbert has become obsessed with the little building that looks like a Spanish church 150 meters or so across the dry canal. Colbert spotted someone's head popping up behind the parapet on the roof. Now he's watching through the scope of his M-4 rifle, getting ready to shoot. Person and Trombley crouch by his side with their weapons out, passing binoculars back and forth. Everyone thinks the guy up there is a sniper, and the team is going to take him out next time he shows his face.
"There," Person says.
"Don't shoot!" Colbert shouts. He throws the tip of his barrel up and lets out a sharp breath. "Jesus fucking Christ! It's a kid."
We get back into the Humvee. Trombley roots around in the ratfuck bag for a spaghetti. He sucks it out straight from the foil pouch. "I almost shot him," he says.
"Not yet," Colbert says. "Put your weapon on safety."
"Goddamn kid playing peekaboo." Colbert shakes his head. It's the first time I've seen him rattled.
"What are we doing?" Trombley asks, as more Marine artillery booms by the road ahead.
"The battalion is trying to find a way around that town up ahead, so we can link up with RCT-1 on the other side."
"Why don't we go through it?" Trombley asks.
"It's full of bad guys," Colbert says. "We'd get smoked." He gets out and pisses.