"We're going to be here for a long time," Fick says. "I don't like it. But there's nothing you or I or anyone can do about it."
There are several loud cracks behind us—rounds from enemy snipers.
"Oh, sweet Jesus!" Colbert says, highly annoyed. He's lying on the ground, glassing the city through binoculars, listening to the company radio network on a portable unit. He turns to Fick. "Sir, our great commander," he says, referring to Encino Man, "just had the wherewithal to inform me there seem to be enemy snipers about. He suggests we ought to be on the lookout for them."
Person laughs. "Brad," he says, calling Colbert by his first name. "Check it out, over there." He points to a spot near the barricades into the city.
Colbert turns his binoculars in the direction Person is pointing.
"Person," he asks, "are those ducks... ?"
"Yeah, they're fucking." Person laughs.
Two kilometers up the road a group of townspeople waving white flags climb around the barricades carrying a five- or six-year-old girl with a sucking chest wound. Capt. Patterson's Marines in Alpha Company have been taking sporadic mortar hits all afternoon at their position on the northern end of Ar Rifa. But seeing the townspeople come out carrying the small body with limp, dangling legs, the Marines hold their fire.
Despite all the stories circulating among Marines of Iraqis posing as civilians and using false surrenders to lure them into ambushes, a corpsman and several enlisted Marines race up to the street to treat the wounded girl.
Patterson summons a translator, and the townspeople tell him that the girl was shot by Saddam loyalists. They say there are 1,500 to 2,000 of them in the city, with many of them concentrated around one building. Patterson checks the location of the building on his map. It corresponds with preexisting intelligence that had identified it as a Baath Party headquarters. He calls an artillery strike, with high-explosive (HE) rounds capable of destroying large structures. The first rounds scream in and fall 300 meters short of the target. Landing as they do in a dense urban area, Patterson is pretty certain they caused civilian casualties—and later this suspicion is corroborated when he hears ambulance sirens wailing in the city.
But Patterson's men adjust several more rounds onto the correct target, wiping it out. News that the Americans have destroyed the main Baath headquarters in Ar Rifa appears to spread quickly through the town.
Within several minutes of the final artillery blasts, people fill the streets and rooftops across the city. What appears to be happening is almost a textbook case of liberation. A show of American force, coupled with a somewhat pinpoint hit on a military headquarters, has caused a rout of hostile forces. Shooting on Marine positions ceases almost immediately.
Across from Colbert's position we see the outpouring of people. Initially, Marines who've been hunkered down receiving sniper fire and occasionally shooting up buildings across the street are wary. Old women in black robes rise up on rooftops where previously Marines had been trying to pick off enemy snipers.
"Don't shoot the old ladies," Colbert warns his team.
Then young men waving white flags walk onto the road. Bravo Company sends out its translator to greet them. The translator is a seriously overweight nineteen-year-old Kuwaiti who goes by the nickname "Meesh." I've gotten to know Meesh in the past few days. Beneath his MOPP suit he wears a tie-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirt and has a long ponytail he folds under his helmet. He speaks in colloquial American English and is a heavy dope smoker. The whole invasion he's been bumming because the night before we left Kuwait he got so stoned that, as he says, "Dude, I lost all my chronic in my tent. I'm hurtin'."
Despite his MTV American English, Meesh is Kuwaiti to the core. The first time I try speaking with him he refuses to talk until I bribe him with several packs of Marlboro Reds. The Marine utility vest he wears, designed to carry up to sixty pounds of ammunition, is instead loaded with baksheesh. Meesh hates Iraqis, who he claims killed one of his relatives during their invasion of Kuwait, and every time he interrogates civilians or soldiers on behalf of the Marines, he forces them to hand over any cigarettes, cash, valuable trinkets, liquor or beer they might be carrying. (Under Saddam's secular rule, Iraq operated numerous breweries and distilleries.) Given the fact that Meesh is invariably backed up by heavily armed Marines, Iraqis eagerly shower him with tribute. Meesh carries so many bottles of beer, liquor, cigarettes and other sundries in his vest, he looks like a walking kiosk.
The thing about Meesh that earns him the undying respect of Marines is his total obliviousness to danger. Outside Ar Rifa, he walks alone on the highway to greet the townspeople who've come out with surrender flags. Behind him, Marines tensely watch through their scopes and gun sights, half expecting Meesh to go down in a hail of ambush fire.
But after several minutes in which he stands there, chatting with townspeople, and no one shoots him, several officers join him, among them Fick.
"What did they say?" Fick asks.
Meesh belches. It takes him a long time to answer. Meesh does everything at a sclerotic pace. Even rolling his eyeballs to look at you seems to tax him. He builds up his strength, taking several drags from the Marlboro hanging from his lip, and says, "The people of Ar Rifa are grateful to be liberated and welcome the Americans as friends."
It's the stock answer Meesh always gives after speaking to Iraqis. Meesh claims he works for the CIA—"I got into some trouble in Kuwait, working for a 'party,' which is what we call drug gangs in my country, but I have some friends in the royal family, and they hooked me up with the CIA"— and his translations always seem to conform to a script provided by his handlers.
"That's all they said?" Fick asks. "You spoke to those guys for ten minutes!"
"They say they don't want us to leave the town," Meesh adds. "They're afraid as soon as we go the Baath, dudes are going to come back and kill them."
Ar Rifa is another Shia city that rose up against Saddam after President George H. W. Bush's call to rebellion in 1991. As in Nasiriyah, the uprising was put down, and the citizens were treated to months of bloody reprisals.
Maj. Gen. Mattis's strategy of racing north as fast as possible precludes putting forces inside towns after they've been "liberated." The Marines or the CIA or whoever is actually in charge of this operation at Ar Rifa have come up with a stopgap measure to protect the citizens. Right now, Meesh is the sole agent responsible for executing this plan.
He hands out infrared chemlites to the men who've come out of the town waving white flags. Their job tonight, after the Marines depart, is to put these chemlites on top of buildings and other locations inside the city occupied by Baath Party members or Fedayeen. American aircraft will then fly over the town and bomb any position they see illuminated by the infrared chemlites.
Fick is as intrigued by this plan as I am. After Meesh distributes the chemlites, we both accost him. I bribe him with several more packs of Marlboros, and Fick asks him, "How do you know those guys aren't just going to put those chemlites on the homes of people they owe money to, or have some other grudge against?"
"Believe me," Meesh says. "They're good dudes. We can trust 'em." He proffers a bottle to Fick. "Beer?"
"No thanks, Meesh," Fick says.
"Yeah," Meesh says. "It's not the good shit. It's local brewed."
As.the sun drops, muezzins call the faithful to prayer from minarets and loudspeakers across Ar Rifa. Then the city erupts with celebratory AK fire. We sit inside Colbert's vehicle eating cold MREs in the darkness. In recent days, rations were cut from three to two meals per day. There is a silver lining to having your rations cut. When you eat MREs in abun-
dance, they taste foul. Now, with everyone having a constant edge of hunger, meals that once tasted like dried kitchen sponges in chemical sauce are pretty tasty. Everyone plows through the ratfuck bag, eagerly retrieving meals like Chicken Jambalaya and Vegetarian Alfredo that a week ago no one would have touched.
We are happily eating when, from behind us on the highway, we hear the sound of rolling gunfire. All of us look out into the darkness and see dozens of orange tracer rounds spewing out from both sides of an approaching U.S. military convoy.
"Everybody get down!" Colbert shouts. We dive to the floor of the Humvee. The American trucks pass, mistakenly discharging a torrent of automatic weapons fire toward our Humvee and those in the rest of the company. Tracers skim over the hood. A high-caliber American round slices through the armor plates, penetrating the vehicle behind Trombley and me. The shooting lasts about twenty seconds. "It's fucking friendlies," Colbert says, uncurling himself from the floor.
After dark, the Marine Humvees put out infrared strobe lights invisible to the naked eye. Their rhythmic flashing is designed to be seen through NVGs, to help other drivers locate the position of your vehicle. The problem is, to nervous, inexperienced personnel the infrared strobes look like enemy muzzle flashes. Fick later finds out that we were shot at by Navy reservist surgeons on their way to set up a mobile shock-trauma unit on the road ahead. "Those were fucking doctors who a few weeks ago were doing nose and tit jobs in Santa Fe Springs," Fick tells his men, laughing. "The fucking POGest of the POGs. Luckily, they're not the best sharpshooters."
Several Humvees up the line are hit, but no Marines are injured. Within minutes of the latest near-death episode, Trombley is snoring, sound asleep.
After the friendly-fire incident outside Ar Rifa on the evening of March 26, Fick pokes his head into Colbert's vehicle to inform him that the Marines' night is just getting started. During the next six hours the battalion is going to race across open roads and desert trails, advancing twenty-five to thirty kilometers behind enemy lines, in order to set up observation on an Iraqi military airfield near a town called Qalat Sukhar. All of this has to be done as quickly as possible. A British parachute brigade is planning to seize the airfield at dawn. But reports have come in from U.S. spy planes that the airfield may be defended with AAA batteries and T-72 tanks. First Recon will go there to make sure the way is clear for the British.
The mission is plagued with snafus from the start. A battalion supply truck becomes stuck in the mud outside Ar Rifa. First Recon halts for forty-five minutes, while higher-ups debate whether or not to extract the truck. They decide to leave it and come back for it later. Shortly after we pull out, the truck is looted, hit by at least one RPG and burned to the ground. It had been carrying the battalion's main supply of food rations. As a result of this incident, everyone will be reduced to about one and a half meals per day until we reach Baghdad.
By midnight we have been driving for several hours. For the last forty-five minutes the Humvee has been rocking up and down like a boat. We are in the dark on a field covered in berms, each about a meter high, like waves. Despite Colbert's efforts to track the battalion's route using maps and frequent radio checks with Fick, he has no idea where we are.
"Dude, I am so lost right now," Colbert says. It's a rare admission of helplessness, a function of fatigue setting in after ninety-six hours of little or no sleep since the shooting started at Nasiriyah.
"I see where we're going, don't worry," Person says. His speech is clipped and breathless. He's tweaking on Ripped Fuel tablets, which he's been gobbling for the past several days. "Do you remember the gay dog episode on South Park, when Sparky runs away cause he's, like, humping other dogs and shit?"
"Fuck yeah," Colbert says. He and Person repeat the tagline from the episode: " 'Hello there, little pup. I'm Big Gay Al!' "
"They opened a gay club in the town where I'm from in Michigan," Trombley says. "People trashed it every night. They had to close it after a month."
"Yeah," Person says, a note of belligerence in his voice. "When I get back I'm gonna start a gay club. I'll call it the Men's Room. There will be, like, a big urinal with a two-way mirror everyone pisses against. It will be, like, facing the bar, so when everyone's drinking there will be, like, these big cocks pissing at them."
"Person," Colbert says. "Give it a rest, please."
At three-thirty in the morning on March 27, the battalion reaches the edge of the enemy airfield, stopping about two kilometers from it. The Humvees set up a defensive perimeter. Colbert's team pulls down the cam-mie nets and we dig Ranger graves in the darkness. It's nearly freezing. Most of the Marines are kept up on watch. Two Recon teams are pushed out on foot to observe the airfield for what they have been told is the coming British paratrooper landing. But they are called back at dawn.
Sometime around six in the morning First Recon's commander, Lt. Col. Ferrando, receives a phone call from Maj. Gen. Mattis asking him what's on the airfield. The British are set to begin their air assault at seven-thirty.
The latest reports from American observation planes say there are up to four T-72 tanks on the field and perhaps several batteries of AAA, enough to wreak havoc on the British. Ferrando is forced to tell Mattis he still doesn't know what's on the airfield. His Recon teams were unable to reach it within the allotted time.
Ferrando tells Mattis his battalion will seize the field. It's a bold decision, since Ferrando believes that if reports of armor on the field are true, the mission will result in "tens or hundreds of casualties among my men."
At six-twenty in the morning, Colbert, who'd crawled into his Ranger grave ninety minutes earlier to catch some shut-eye, is awakened by Fick. "We are assaulting the airfield," he tells him. "We have ten minutes to get on the field."
The Marines race around the Humvee, pulling down the cammie nets, throwing gear inside. It's a clear, cold morning. Frost comes out of everyone's mouths as they jump in the vehicle, weapons clattering. Everyone's fumbling around, still trying to wake up and shake off that ache that comes from sleeplessness. In my case, just seeing the morning light hurts. "Well," Colbert tells his team. "We're assaulting an airfield. I know as much about this as any of you do." He laughs, shaking his head. "Person, do we have a map?"
By six twenty-eight the roughly forty vehicles from Alpha, Bravo and Charlie companies begin rolling out of the encampment to assault the airfield.
Still extremely worried about the prospect of his men encountering armor or AAA on the field, Ferrando changes the ROE. He radios his company commanders and tells them, "Everyone on the field is declared hostile."
In Vietnam the U.S. military sometimes designated certain areas "free-fire zones." Because of the large numbers of civilian casualties produced by these, the term fell out of vogue. Ferrando's order amounts to the same
thing. Declaring everyone hostile means the Marines may or should shoot any human they encounter. When Capt. Patterson is issued the order, he says, "There's no fucking way I'm going to pass that to my men." In his mind, he later explains, turning the airfield into a free-fire zone does not help his men. Their problem is physics. AAA guns and tanks outrange and overpower everything they have on the Humvees. If his Marines race onto the field cutting people down, regardless of whether or not they're armed, it's not going to help them battle heavy guns. Besides this, in Patterson's opinion, Ferrando "doesn't have the right to change the Rules of Engagement." Patterson tells his top enlisted man, "Don't pass the word of the changed ROE over the radio. Our guys are smart enough to evaluate the situation within the existing ROE."
In Colbert's vehicle we are getting up to about forty miles per hour when word comes over the radio of the change in the ROE. "Everyone is declared hostile on the field," Colbert shouts. "You see anybody, shoot 'em!" he adds.
Colbert is multitasking like a madman. He's got his weapon out the window, looking for targets. He's on the radio, communicating with Fick and the other teams. They're trying to figure out how to contact the A-10 attack jets overhead. The Marines don't have the right comms to reach them. "I don't want to get schwacked by the A-lOs," Colbert shouts. "They're goddamn Army. They shoot Marines." (As they did three days ago at Nasiriyah.) On top of this, Colbert has maps out, and is trying to figure out where the airfield actually is with respect to the road we are driving down. His maps indicate there are fences around the field. He and Person debate whether to smash through the fences or to stop and cut through them with bolt cutters.
"The bolt cutters are under the seat in the back," Person says. "We can't get at them."
"Smash through the fence, then."
Next to me in the rear seat, Trombley says, "I see men running two hundred meters. Ten o'clock!"
"Are they armed?" Colbert asks.
"There's something," Trombley says. "A white truck."
"Everyone's declared hostile," Colbert says. "Light them the fuck up."
Trombley fires two short bursts from the SAW. "Shooting motherfuckers like it's cool," he says, amused with himself.
A Marine machine gun behind us kicks in.
I look out Trombley's window and see a mud hut and a bunch of camels. The camels are running madly in all directions, some just a couple of meters from our Humvee. I can't figure out what the hell Trombley was shooting at.
Hasser standing in the turret, begins pounding the roof of the Humvee, screaming "Fuck!"
"What is it?" Colbert shouts.
"The Mark-19 is down!" Hasser yells. "Jammed!"
"My Mark-19 is down!" Colbert screams on the radio. Being the lead vehicle of the company, racing onto an airfield to fight tanks and AAA guns without a heavy weapon is a disaster in the making. "I repeat, my Mark-19 is down!"
It's the first time Fick has ever heard Iceman lose control on comms. "Calm the fuck down," Fick orders Colbert. "I'm putting Team Two in front."
Though Marines in Bravo Company have fired only three short machine-gun bursts so far. Captain America, rolling directly behind us, gets on the comms, screaming, "They're shooting everywhere! We are under fire!"
Seemingly caught up in the spirit of the free-fire zone, Captain America sticks his East German AK out the window and begins shooting. Riding in the back of Captain America's Humvee is twenty-one year-old Lance Corporal Andy Crosby. He sees a hut outside with people and animals. "What the fuck are you doing?" he yells at his commander. But Captain America continues blazing away. At one point, ricochets from his weapon ping off scrap metal by the road and zing back toward his men in the Humvee. "We're getting ricochets!" Crosby shouts.
There's no fence at the airfield. It's just long swaths of concrete tarmac concealed behind low berms. We don't even see the airfield until we've nearly driven on top of it. There are weeds growing out of cracks in the tarmac and bomb craters in the middle. There's nothing on it. The Humvees fan out and race into the bermed fields, searching for enemy positions.
"Oh, my God!" Person laughs. "He's got his bayonet out."
Captain America runs across the field ahead of his Humvee, bayonet fixed on his M-16, ready to savage enemy forces. He turns every few paces and dramatically waves his men forward, like an action hero.
"He thinks he's Rambo," Person guffaws. "That retard is in charge of people?"
We stop. Marines observe low huts far in the distance that could be either primitive barracks or homes. Captain America runs up to Kocher's team and shouts, "Engage the buildings!"
Redman, the .50-cal gunner, looks at him, deadpanning to hide his contempt. A veteran of Afghanistan, he's a big, placid guy and talks like a surfer even though he's originally from Phoenix, Arizona. "Dude," Redman says, "that building is four thousand meters away." He adds a remark that pretty much anyone in boot camp knows. "The range on my .50-cal is two thousand meters."
"Well, move into position, then. Engage it." He stalks off.
They roll forward. Kocher observes the building through binoculars. "No, Redman. We're not engaging. There's women and children inside."
We roll back from the field. A-lOs cut down low directly overhead. The British never come. The Marines beat them to the field. It's a beautiful, clear day. In the sunlight—the first we've seen in days—dust, impregnated in everyone's MOPP suits, curls off like cigarette smoke. Everyone looks like they're smoldering. "Gentlemen, we just seized an airfield," Colbert says. "That was pretty ninja."