Al Gharraf, the town lying just ahead of First Recon, is about two kilometers from end to end, a dense mass of two- and three-story houses and apartment blocks, like Nasiriyah, though with a much smaller population: around 20,000 inhabitants. By three-thirty in the afternoon, with First Recon's leading elements in Alpha perched on the eastern side of Al Gharraf, RCT-1 has reached the western side of the town. Col. Dowdy, the commander of RCT-1, halts his forces outside of Al Gharraf when one of his companies is ambushed on the outskirts. His Marines sustain several casualties and kill between twenty and thirty attackers. Originally, Dowdy had contemplated entering Al Gharraf with tanks and other armored vehicles. But as he did at Nasiriyah, Dowdy pulls his forces back—this time into an open desert at the northern fringes of the town—and hesitates. Because of the shamal now peaking with its impenetrable dust cloud, helicopters are unable to fly over the town to see what's inside. Just three days earlier, Task Force Tarawa had suffered approximately 100 casualties, with eighteen dead, when its commanders had sent a small force of Marines into Nasiriyah. Dowdy apparently doesn't want to make the same mistake.
First Recon's commander, Lt. Col. Ferrando, has no such compunctions. Initially, when his units came under intense fire on the eastern outskirts of the town, Ferrando contemplated circumventing it and finding another route to link up with RCT-1 on the other side. But by four in the afternoon, he decides to send the whole battalion straight through the town. While
Ferrando might seem to his men like a martinet, obsessed with mustaches and the Grooming Standard, as a commander, he possesses a bold streak verging on recklessness. When I later ask him why he sent his lightly armed battalion through a hostile town—one that a better-equipped force dared not enter—he says, "I thought we'd cause some problems for those motherfuckers in that town."
When the Marines in Alpha are told to jump in their vehicles and get ready to drive through the town, they are incredulous. Capt. Patterson, who's found what looks to be a viable route around the town on his maps, attempts to debate the issue with Ferrando over the radio. Ferrando cuts him off: "Patterson, you have your orders. Do you understand?"
Burris, who several minutes ago had nearly been hit by friendly shrapnel, learns of the mission when Patterson approaches his vehicle commander with a map of the town. Burris's team will be in the lead Humvee. Patterson spreads out the map, puts his finger on the entrance to the town, slides it to the other side and tells Burris and the other men, "Get me from here to there as fast as you can."
Burris says, "That's insane, but okay." He and his fellow Marines climb into their Humvee. They are ordered to start driving immediately. Ferrando and others in charge figure the effects of their artillery strike might wear off, and enemy shooters might regroup if given too much time.
Burris's team, in the lead of Alpha and the entire battalion, race their Humvee up to about forty miles per hour as they make the final approach toward the town. Its dominant feature is the mosque, with its stunning, blue dome rising on the edge. To enter the town, Marines speed past high stucco walls on the left. Straight ahead there's a three-story building with a row of tall, thin windows on the upper floor. It almost looks like the road goes straight into this structure, but instead it turns abruptly left, forcing the driver in Burris's Humvee to hit the brakes as they cut into the town.
The street that had been a narrow lane on the outskirts becomes a broad, straight avenue, only now it's filled with rubble, burned vehicles and downed telephone poles from Marine artillery strikes. The main thoroughfare, like a lot of others in Iraqi towns, has a claustrophobic feel, since it's hemmed in on both sides with either high stucco walls or building
fronts. The sky and the whole town before them are almost yellow from the dust storm. Wind blasts through the streets—and Burris's open Humvee—at fifty miles per hour.
Burris hears shots, but it's tough to see anything. The shamal winds sandpaper the lenses of the goggles the Marines wear. Some men remove the fogged goggles, but their eyes fill with tears from the dust. Burris glimpses three armed men in an alley and fires a 203 round in their direction. He has no idea if he hits them. Then Burris's team hits a river of "crap water" running through the middle of the town—the result of a blown sewer main or, just as likely, the natural state of things in this impoverished place. Sewage sprays all over his face. Then he hears his Humvee's driver and another Marine shouting, "Left or right?"—repeating it urgently.
There's a T intersection ahead, and no one can figure out which way to go. They have the map out, ripping and flapping in the wind, and are trying to study it. "Left! Left!" one of them shouts, finally solving the puzzle.
They sideswipe a partially downed telephone pole, then, two to three minutes after entering Al Gharraf, they arrive on the western edge of the town, where Burris has his most terrifying moment of the invasion. Hundreds of Marines from RCT-1 are dug in, facing them with rifles, machine guns and Javelin, AT-4 and TOW missiles. Burris watches in horror as dozens of Marines drop their heads onto their sights, getting ready to open fire on his Humvee. He ducks, expecting a hail of bullets and missiles, but all he hears is the wind. Given the shaky communications between different Marine units, nobody in First Recon was completely confident the guys in RCT-1 waiting on the other side of the town would know they were coming. But the Marines in RCT-1—some of whom later say they were stunned when they saw First Recon's Humvees careening out of the town they considered impassable—hold their fire.
First Recon's headquarters and support units—many in lumbering, five- and seven-ton trucks—roll through Al Gharraf after Alpha Company. Enemy fire on the trucks remains intermittent, more on the level of pot shots, but one Marine officer riding in the convoy is amazed by the sheer chaos of it. Until several weeks earlier Major Michael Shoup, thirty-five, was working at the Pentagon as a budget analyst. Prior to that, Shoup was an F-18 "backseater"—weapons officer—and flew several combat missions over Kosovo. He volunteered to join First Recon as a forward air controller, responsible for calling in air strikes to assist the battalion. Today, with the Marine Air Wing grounded from the shamal, he has nothing to do but ride in a truck. What sticks out in his mind is not the intermittent enemy fire but something which is, in the scheme of things, almost trivial. Shoup sees an Arab standing in a doorway near where his vehicle is passing. The man is tall, well dressed in a brown suit, and has a close-cropped beard. He's smiling. Then Shoup sees a Marine officer he knows stick the barrel of his Benelli twelve-gauge automatic shotgun out the window of his vehicle and blast away at the man in the brown suit. Shoup can't be sure it wasn't a legitimate kill—perhaps he failed to notice a weapon on the Arab—but all he recalls seeing is the man's smile before he was gunned down.
About twenty minutes elapse from the time Alpha Company hits Al Gharraf until Bravo Company is ordered into the town. Bravo's Third Platoon is the first to enter. By now, the attackers have set up several ambush positions in the town. Kocher's team sees six different muzzle flashes as they make the first turn by the mosque. Most come from gaps in the walls or windows in the buildings on the right side. This is a good spot to start the ambush, since the Humvees have to slow down while rounding the initial corner.
At the wheel of Kocher's Humvee is a twenty-two-year-old corporal named Trevor Darnold. He grew up in Plummer, Idaho, and says the biggest influence on his joining the Marines was watching G.L Joe on the Cartoon Network when he was a kid. He's a relatively small guy, quiet, and usually has a placid smile that gives him the face of a dreamer. He seems to spend most of his free time thinking about his wife, who gave birth to their first child, a daughter, shortly before he flew to Kuwait for the invasion. Now, while straightening the wheel after that first turn, Darnold's left arm suddenly feels like it has grown about ten sizes. It's numb and throbbing. "I'm hit!" he yells.
"Shut the fuck up!" Kocher shouts. "You haven't been hit." Kocher can see just by the way he's holding his arm that he is hit. But he wants him to believe he isn't so he'll focus on driving. For a moment, Kocher's power of suggestion works so well, Darnold not only keeps driving, he continues simultaneously firing his M-4 rifle out the side of the Humvee.
Then Darnold wavers. "I am hit!" he insists.
"Okay, you're hit, Darnold," Kocher concedes. "We're gonna fix it. Keep driving."
Enemy fire is now coming at the Humvee from both sides of the street, but the vehicle's primary gunner, Corporal Dan Redman, a twenty-year-old who stands on the .50-cal mount, decides he'll try to bandage Darnold. Redman rips out a dressing pack, and the white bandages immediately flutter away in the wind.
Kocher, who's pumping 203 grenades at muzzle flashes he sees in alleys and windows on both sides of the street, feels the Humvee weaving, then sees Redman's bandages flying from his hands.
"Get your weapon up!" Kocher shouts at Redman. Then Kocher climbs over the roll bar to get at Darnold's left arm. While hanging onto the roll bar, with the vehicle now careening half out of control and Redman's .50-cal blasting inches over his head, Kocher ties off Darnold's arm with a tourniquet (Recon Marines all carry tourniquets on their chest rigs).
Darnold still has his foot on the gas, but his head is turned down, watching the blood soak through the sleeve of his MOPP suit.
"You watch the fucking road!" Kocher shouts. "I'll watch your arm."
They bump out of the town, and twelve hours later Darnold is mede-vaced to a Kuwait hospital, with a small-caliber bullet lodged between the bones of his forearm. They let the bullet stay where it is, and a couple weeks later they give Darnold the option of going home or rejoining Kocher's team in Baghdad. He goes to Baghdad.
By the time Colbert's men start off toward Al Gharraf, reports fly over the radio telling us that we are about to drive into an ambush. "Make sure your weapons are red con one," Colbert says, instructing his team members to have their weapons loaded and safeties off. Everyone's guns rattle as they check and recheck them. It's a two-kilometer drive to the entrance of the town. The five Humvees in Bravo Second Platoon are the last to enter. Ours is in the lead. "Gentlemen," Colbert says, turning around and smiling. "You're now going to have to earn your stories."
It's the corniest line I've ever heard. But maybe the humor of it was intended to relax everyone. It works. The weirdest thing about a situation like this is that you actually want to turn the first corner—and not just to get it over with as fast as possible. You want to see what's going to happen next.
We come alongside the walls of the town. Just as Person makes the first turn, a machine gun clatters. It's coming from the high building with long, narrow windows ahead of us. Then, as we complete the turn into town, I see muzzle flashes spitting out from buildings, or gaps in the walls just two meters to our right. While the guns firing at us are set back from the road and we can't see the shooters, the barrels must be extremely close. Their muzzle flashes appear to be floating in front of us, like sparklers. We drive right into them.
Bullets striking the Humvee sound like whips cracking on the roof. Nearly two dozen rounds slam into it almost right away. As the lead vehicle of the platoon, Colbert's is the only one with doors, a roof and light armor. Even so, the windows are open and there are gaps in the shielding. A bullet flies past Colbert's head and smacks into the pillar behind Person. Several more slice through the edges of the door frames.
The shooting continues on both sides. Less than half an hour before, Colbert had been talking about stress reactions in combat. In addition to the embarrassing loss of bodily control that 25 percent of all soldiers experience, other symptoms include time dilation, a sense of time slowing down or speeding up; vividness, a starkly heightened awareness of detail; random
thoughts, the mind fixating on unimportant sequences; memory loss; and, of course, your basic feelings of sheer terror.
In my case, hearing and sight become almost disconnected. I see more muzzle flashes next to the vehicle but don't hear them. In the seat beside me, Trombley fires 300 rounds from his machine gun. Ordinarily, if someone were firing a machine gun that close to you, it would be deafening. His gun seems to whisper.
The look on Colbert's face is almost serene. He's hunched over his weapon, leaning out the window, intently studying the walls of the buildings, firing bursts from his M-4 and grenades from the 203 tube underneath the main barrel. I watch him pump in a fresh grenade, and I think, I bet Colbert's really happy to be finally shooting a 203 round in combat. I remember him kissing the grenade earlier. Random thoughts.
I study Person's face for signs of panic, fear or death. My worry is he'll get shot or freak out and we'll be stuck on this street. But Person seems fine. He's slouched over the wheel, looking through the windshield, an almost blank expression on his face. The only thing different about him is he's not babbling his opinions on Justin Timberlake or some other pussy faggot retard who bothers him.
Trombley turns, smiling gleefully, his red-infected eye shining brightly, and he shouts, "I got one, Sergeant!"
I can't believe that he is so eager to get approval from the team that he is choosing this moment to take credit for his kills.
Colbert ignores him. Trombley eagerly goes back to shooting at people out his window. A gray object zooms toward the windshield and smacks into the roof. My hearing comes back as the Humvee fills with a metal-on-metal scraping sound. Yesterday Colbert had traded out Garza for a Mark-19 gunner from a different team. The guy's name is Corporal Walt Hasser, twenty-three, from Taylorstown, Virginia. He bangs into the roof of the Humvee. Now his legs hang down from the turret, twisted sideways. He's been hit by a steel cable that attackers have stretched across the street to knock down turret gunners. Another cable swipes across the roof.