Colbert gets back in the Humvee, trying to rationalize the events outside that have spiraled beyond his control: "Everyone's just tense. Some Marine took a shot, and everyone has just followed suit."
Outside, Marines' heavy 81mm mortars begin to land on the homes. They make a sort of crunching sound as they detonate, sending black plumes over the huts.
"They finally got good effects on target," Kocher says, watching them obliterate the hamlet.
There's no time to sit around contemplating the destruction of the little village. First Recon is ordered north again toward a town called Ar Rifa. We pass forty or fifty refugees streaming south, some on bicycles. A massive fire about a kilometer up the road sends flames and black smoke 100 meters or more into the sky. The day is chilly and gray..There's no wind, but the air is heavy with dust particles. They coat the windshield like frost. If you wipe your finger on it, a few minutes later the mark is covered over again with powder. Through this fog we hear AK rifles cracking off rounds ahead. The convoy bumps to a halt. We are several hundred meters south of Ar Rifa.
The two Marines who ride in the back of Fick's Humvee, which is configured sort of like a pickup truck with a canvas top over the back, stand by the tailgate singing Nelly's "Hot in Herre" over and over.
One of the combat-stress reactions not discussed in their training is singing. A lot of Marines, when waiting for minutes or hours in a position where they expect an ambush or other trouble, will get a song stuck in their heads. Often they'll sing it or chant the words almost as if they are saying Hail Marys.
The Marines' choice of a Nelly song in the back of Fick's vehicle shows the hip-hop influence of Q-tip Stafford. He rides there with nineteen-year-old Private First Class John Christeson, the newest guy in the platoon. The two of them spend twelve to twenty hours a day bouncing around in the back of the truck. Neither is sure when they both hit upon "Hot in Herre" as their combat song, but they were singing it yesterday while rolling into the ambush at Al Gharraf.
Now waiting on the ground by Fick's truck outside of Ar Rifa, Christeson observes a house 500 meters in the distance, barely discernible across the haze and scrub brush. He's chanting the lyrics, "Cuz I feel like bustin' loose and I feel like touchin you/And can't nobody stop the juice so baby . . .," when he spots three to four men moving low. They're at least 300 meters away, moving closer to the Humvee, using the vegetation for cover. One seems to be carrying an RPG tube.
Other than a family cruise through the Caribbean, this is Christeson's first trip out of the United States. He grew up in Lebanon, Illinois, with parents still married—a dad who works for the state college and a mom who works at a title loan company. Even though he was shot at yesterday in Al Gharraf, the whole place seems unreal to him. It's the mud huts. He can't believe people in the twenty-first century actually live in huts with goats and sheep all around. Christeson grew up with computers, playing Doom, a game that to him is almost ancient history. After high school he received an appointment to go to the Naval Academy at Annapolis, but in the wake of 9/11 he decided to become a grunt Marine to do something for his country—and to get in on the action. Up until the invasion, his closest brush with history was the day Jared Fogle, the guy who lost 300 pounds on the Subway Diet, came to his town, and Christeson got to meet him in person. "I thought if I punched him in the face I would be on TV," he says, recalling the historic encounter. "But he wasn't as big as I thought he'd be, for someone you see all the time on TV."
Now, he's watching Fedayeen stalk his vehicle. "I think they've got an RPG," he says, trying to get a line on them through the sights of his SAW.
"Screwby," Stafford replies.
"Gunny!" Christeson shouts to Gunny Wynn. "Those men might have an RPG."
Gunny Wynn runs up, raises his binoculars and sees what looks to be a man setting up an RPG in some scrub. "Light 'em up!"
Christeson is so excited he's not sure he heard Gunny Wynn right. Even though he fired several dozen rounds into Al Gharraf, all he saw was buildings, dark spots and muzzle flashes. He's never before pulled the trigger on humans like this, cold.
Gunny Wynn repeats: "Light 'em the fuck up. They have RPGs."
Christeson hugs his SAW and squeezes off a fifteen- to twenty-round burst at the closest of the three men. They run south, one of them limping, heading toward a line of palm trees. Christeson rips out another burst.
Pick runs up to his side. "Keep shooting," he says.
Christeson blazes away.
"You're shooting too high," Fick says, calmly now, like he's teaching a kid how to cast a fishing rod. Christeson is still firing bursts toward the tree line where the men in the field took cover when the platoon is ordered forward. He jumps in the truck, while Stafford provides covering fire with his 203 and M-4. As they bounce onto the road, Christeson fires the last of nearly 200 rounds toward the RPG team.
The war is suddenly real to him. "You know what?" he says to Stafford. "We were just fighting actual guerrillas."
"Screwby."
The convoy halts just 200 meters up from where Fick's crew engaged the RPG team. That huge fire we saw earlier was an electrical substation. It's now a hundred meters in front of Colbert's vehicle. The flames have subsided; now it spews an acrid smoke that hangs over the area.
We are just fifty meters from the edge of a large, grim town. The outer buildings form a wall on the other side of the highway. There's a broad street into the city, but defenders have cut down palm trees, dragged the trunks across it and piled it with rubble, making barricades. Rifles and machine guns crackle intermittently from within.
But directly across from Colbert's vehicle, no one sees any muzzle flashes. All we see are hundreds of doors and windows, dark gaps in the stucco buildings, places for bad guys to hide.
"Get out of the vehicle," Colbert says.
Everyone takes cover on the ground, setting up their weapons. The whole platoon is out in the open here, high on the elevated road, with a hostile town on one side and fields on the other where there is believed to have been at least one RPG team operating. "I don't know what the fuck we're doing here," Colbert says.
Fick trots over, keeping his head low, staying behind Humvees as much as he can to avoid the intermittent sniper fire. Colbert asks him what the orders are.
"I don't fucking know either. He just told us to pull over," Fick says, referring to his commander, Encino Man.
In a combat zone, military convoys aren't supposed to just aimlessly pull over. When they stop, someone is supposed to issue orders—tell the men where to orient their vehicles, their weapons, whether to turn their engines off or keep them running. All of these details are supposed to flow down from command.
But right now command in Bravo Company is in a state of confusion. A few moments ago, Fick radioed Encino Man about contact with a possible RPG team. Encino Man immediately ordered everyone to pull over, without issuing any further directions.
Encino Man and Casey Kasem are now huddled by Doc Bryan's Hum-vee, trying to figure out what do about the RPG team. Even though Chris-teson is sure he wounded at least one of the guys, and his fire did push them back into a tree line, Encino Man and Casey Kasem have become obsessed with the possibility of the RPG team reappearing and attacking the company.
Fick runs up to Encino Man and asks him, "What are we doing here?"
Fick's concern is that the company is spread out willy-nilly along the highway directly across from a town of about 75,000, some of whose occupants are now shooting at his Marines.
Encino Man ignores him. He and Casey Kasem are poring over a map, studying coordinates to call in an artillery strike on the suspected position of the suspected RPG team.
Doc Bryan is growing alarmed. "Sir, I don't like this," he says to Fick. Nodding toward Encino Man and Casey Kasem, he adds, "When those two put their heads together it's fucking dangerous."
Ever since Casey Kasem almost shot Doc Bryan a few nights earlier, he and the other Recon Marines have grown extremely wary of the man. And today the memory of seeing Encino Man trying to fire a grenade into a house with civilians in it is still fresh in the Marines' minds.
"Sir," Doc Bryan says to Fick, "we're fifty meters from a hostile city, and those two jackasses are worrying about a possible guy with an RPG three hundred meters from here."
Fick confronts Encino Man. "If you don't tell us what we're doing here, we should get the fuck out now."
"I'm calling in a fire mission," Encino Man says, still not explaining what he wants Fick's platoon to do on the highway.
Part of the reason Encino Man is so preoccupied with calling in the artillery fire mission is he's never done this before in combat. Now he tells the men the exact coordinates he's planning to bring the artillery down on.
Doc Bryan and Lovell use a laser designator to measure the distance from their Humvee to the spot where Encino Man intends to direct the artillery strike, and it's just over 200 meters distant.
Yesterday, when Capt. Patterson called in a danger-close artillery strike near his Marines, the distance was 300 meters, his men were behind berms and walls, and they were at the time under heavy enemy machine-gun fire.
Right now, Doc Bryan's team and the rest of the platoon are on an open road, with nothing between them and the place where the artillery, if called, will splash down. They see no enemy where Encino Man is trying to call
in the fire mission, and on top of this, they are taking fire, but it's coming from the other side of the road. Doc Bryan can't stand it any longer. He runs up to Encino Man and shouts, "You can't do this. That's a danger-close strike."
"What's 'danger close'?" Encino Man asks.
Lovell, a few meters away, cites from a military manual he keeps in his Humvee. "Danger close is an artillery strike within six hundred meters of friendly forces."
"You dumb motherfucker," one of the enlisted men shouts. "The most boot-fucking Marine knows danger close!"
Fick grabs the radio handset from Encino Man in an attempt to stop him from calling in the strike. Gunny Wynn now tries to intercede. "Sir, this is fucked up. Let's forget about the fire mission and get the platoons in a defensive perimeter. Then we can-worry about the RPG team."
One thing about Encino Man is that he's stubborn. Having lost face in front of the men, he digs in deeper. He takes the handset back from Fick and attempts to call in the strike. But it never happens. There are protocols for calling in a Marine artillery strike, and Encino Man, it turns out, doesn't know them. When the officer on the end of the line receives Encino Man's confused request, he turns it down.
"For once," Doc Bryan observes, "we were saved by the man's incompetence."
After the artillery strike is scratched, Encino Man finally issues orders. The Marines are to remain by the road—on the south end of Ar Rifa—and form defensive lines as best they can in this vulnerable place. Their job is to prevent enemy forces from advancing from the town and attacking RCT-l's convoys now rolling past on Route 7.
Enemy fighters in the town continue to take potshots. Person is manning the SAW set up outside the Humvee when he spots muzzle flashes coming from a window, fortified with barbed wire and sandbags, seventy-five meters away. He shoots into it, and Marines up the road join in. They saturate it with Mark-19 rounds, bringing down a wall of the building.
"Damn sucka!" Person says, watching dust rise from the partially destroyed structure.
Wild dogs run out from a gap in the town's walls. Women and children stand in an alley beside the building the Marines just hit. A rooster starts to cockledoodledo even though it's afternoon. There are several loud bangs behind us. Marine snipers set up facing the fields to the rear have no idea what caused the explosions.
Fick approaches, sprinting to the Humvee, low to the ground to avoid enemy snipers, and smiles when he reaches me behind Colbert's vehicle. Both he and Gunny Wynn are being threatened with disciplinary action because of the incident with Encino Man an hour ago. Fick has been told he might be relieved of his command for "disobeying orders." (The Marine who actually called the commander a "dumb motherfucker" never receives reprimand.)
Nevertheless, Fick has grown suddenly gabby. He crouches behind a Humvee tire beside me and says, "This truly illustrates how safety is entirely relative." Then, while machine guns rip and sniper rifles bang up and down the line, he launches into a discussion more appropriate for an all-night cram session at the Dartmouth library than for a low-intensity firefight.
"Most people in America right now probably think Iraq is a dangerous country." He gestures to a patch of dirt in the open, two meters from the Humvee. "Now, if I were to stand up there, I would probably get killed. But to us, behind this Humvee it's pretty safe. So relatively speaking, to us Iraq is a safe country right here behind this tire. I feel pretty safe here. Do you feel safe?"
"Pretty safe, I guess."
"See!" He laughs. "If you were to call somebody at home right now and say, 'Hey, I'm in Iraq right now. I'm with a handful of Marines. We're isolated on the south end of a hostile city, and there are people shooting at us on both sides, but I feel pretty safe right now because I'm on this patch of dirt behind a Humvee/ they'd think you were nuts." He laughs. "People don't understand how relative everything is on the battlefield." He laughs again. "Or it could be we invent this relativism in our minds to comfort ourselves." He taps the wheel well. "Because we both know this Humvee isn't going to stop an RPG or any number of other very bad things that could happen here at any moment."
Espera crawls up. "Sir, my men are all worried about the people in that ville organizing mass RPG volleys against us, like they did to those Am-tracs we saw blown on the way up here."
"Just keep your men dispersed from the vehicles," Fick says.
"Roger that, sir," Espera says. "But we're still worried, sir."