On the morning of March 31, at about nine, Colbert's team and the rest of First Recori, leave their encampment at the intersection of Routes 7 and 17 in central Mesopotamia to begin the next mission. Today's objective is a town of about 50,000 called Al Hayy. It's a Baath Party headquarters and home to a Republican Guard unit of several thousand about thirty kilometers to the north.
RCT-l's force of 6,000 Marines is planning to assault through the center of Al Hayy sometime in the next twenty-four hours. But the Recon Marines will go there first. As it did on its movement to the town of Al Gharraf, the battalion will leave Route 7 and use a dirt trail hugging the edge of a canal. Initially, RCT-1 will parallel First Recon's movement on the other side of the canal. Then First Recon will race ahead, cross a series of canal bridges into Al Hayy, speed north and seize the main highway bridge out of the city in order to block the retreat of enemy forces during RCT-l's attack.
On this mission, First Recon will be an even smaller force than it usually is. Alpha Company has been temporarily detached from the battalion to go on a separate mission in search of the lost Marine believed to have been lynched in an Iraqi town.
We drive across a low, narrow bridge over the canal, and First Recon's reduced force of 290-odd Marines in fifty vehicles again becomes the northernmost unit in central Iraq. It's the first warm morning in several days. Rain clouds blow across the sky, but the sun pokes out and the air is dust-free. The canal flows past us on the right, about thirty meters wide in some places.
The battalion .rolls single-file on a one-lane, unpaved road that passes through the now familiar patchwork of grassy fields, mudflats crisscrossed with trenches and berms, palm groves and small hamlets. Some have walls that come right up to the edge of the road, channeling the Humvees between the villages on the left and the canal on the right. Perfect terrain for ambushes.
We pass farmers in a field to our left. Colbert regards them warily and says, "These are a simple people. These are the people I'm here to liberate."
"Small-arms fire ahead," Person says, passing word from the radio.
We hit a hard bump at about twenty miles per hour. A wild dog appears out of nowhere, lunging and snarling against the windows on the right side of the vehicle. "Jesus Christ!" Colbert jumps, more startled than I have ever seen him.
Despite the fear and stress, Colbert remains an extremely polite invader. When we pass more farmers on the road, he pulls the barrel of his M-4 up, so as not to point it directly at them.
A pair of Cobras drops low to our left. The armored helicopters, which we haven't seen in a few days, soar overhead with the grace of flying sledgehammers. They make a distinctive clattering sound—as ugly and mean as they look. "Cobras spotted a blue Zil"—Russian military truck— "ahead, carrying uniformed Iraqis," Colbert says, passing along a report from the radio. We stop.
A machine gun buzzes somewhere up the road. "Shots fired on our lead vehicle," he says. We remain halted. Colbert gazes longingly at some weeds beside his window. "This would have been the perfect shitting opportunity," he says. "I should have done it when we first stopped." Colbert's initial attempt to clear his bowels this morning was interrupted when the team's mission was unexpectedly moved up by two hours. Now, at ten in the morning, with the gunfire starting, this problem is foremost on his mind.
I've learned a few things about the Marines by now. There are certainties in their world, even in the chaos of war. As soon as a unit sets in for the night and finishes digging its Ranger graves, everyone will be moved to a slightly different position and forced to start all over again. When a team is told to be ready to move out in five minutes, they will sit for several hours. When the order is to remain in position for three hours, their next order will be to roll out in two minutes. Above all, it is a certainty that Colbert will never be able to take a crap in peace.
Fick walks up. "They found RPGs two hundred meters up the road in a ditch. There is a dismounted Iraqi platoon ahead that we know about."
A ripping sound fills the air. Cobras skim low over palm trees about a kilometer ahead, firing machine guns and rockets into a hamlet on the other side of the canal.
"They're smoking some technicals"—civilian trucks with weapons on them—"in a cluster of buildings up ahead," Colbert says.
Directly across the canal from us—on our right about seventy-five meters away—Amtracs from RCT-1 rumble through some scrub brush outside some mud-hut homes. When moving, Amtracs produce an unmistakable sound—sort of like what you'd hear if you went to a Laundromat and filled all the dryers with nuts and bolts and pieces of junk and turned them on high. Driving next to one is deafening. Even creeping at low speed through the weeds across the canal from us, they make a ferocious racket. Then their machine guns start spitting at targets by some huts. Mark-19s boom. We have no idea what they're shooting at. All we see are the gray vehicles rising from the brush, bumping forward a few meters, stopping, then little orange flashes.
Listening to this mini-firefight taking place outside the doors of our Humvee, Colbert leans out his window and peers at the action through his rifle scope. He leans back in his seat and says, annoyed, "I just hope they don't orient their fire onto us."
We wait.
"Fuck it," Colbert says amidst the sporadic machine-gun fire. "I'm gonna do it."
He jumps out into the scrub vegetation beside the vehicle, squats and takes care of business.
Person starts singing Country Joe McDonald's antiwar song, "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die," with the lyrics, "And it's one, two, three/ What are we fighting for?" He's interrupted by an order sent over the radio to move out. He shouts at Colbert, squatting in the field. "Hey! We're moving again!"
Colbert hops in, suspenders from his partially disassembled MOPP flapping. "I made it." He sighs.
As Person drives forward, Colbert says, "I think we're gonna take some fire when we come around the next bend."
Colbert's instincts are money. The first mortar of the day explodes somewhere outside the vehicle as soon as we make the turn. No one can see where it hit, and judging by its muffled sound, it was probably several hundred meters away. We stop. To the left, there's a hamlet: four to six earthen-walled homes. They're clustered together about fifteen meters from the road, nestled beneath low-hanging fig trees. In front there are crude fences made of dried reeds, used as paddocks for sheep and goats. It has the primitive feel of one of those Nativity sets they build in town squares at Christmas. Chickens run about, and a half dozen villagers— older women in black robes, older men in dingy white ones, all of them barefoot—stand gawking at us. Despite the almost biblical look of the place, there are power lines overhead with electric wires feeding into the huts. The Marines get out, take cover behind the hoods and open doors of the Humvees, and scan the rooftops, walls and bermed fields behind the hamlet for enemy shooters.
But after about five minutes of this standoff, the villagers approach. The Marines step out from around their vehicles. A translator is brought up. The villagers say there are no enemy forces in their hamlet. Even as they speak, there are more explosions in the distance. Person, still sitting in the Humvee, hears a report from the radio that other units in First Recon, now spread out along two kilometers or so of this narrow lane, are receiving enemy mortar fire.
A shoeless farmer approaches. His face is narrow and bony from what looks to be a lifetime of starvation. Shaking his fist, speaking in a raspy voice, he says through a translator that he's been waiting for the Americans to come since the first Gulf War. He explains that he used to live in a Shia marshland south of here. Saddam drained the marshes and ruined the farmland to punish the people there for supporting the 1991 rebellion. "Saddam believes if he starves the people we will follow him like slaves. It's terrorism by the system itself."
I ask the farmer why he welcomes Americans invading his country. "We are already living in hell," he says. "If you let us pray and don't interfere with our women, we accept you."
The farmer, with gray hair and his narrow face wrapped in wrinkles, looks to be about sixty, with a lot of those being hard years. I ask him when he was born. 1964.1 tell him we're the same age. He leans toward me, smiling and pointing to his face. "Compared to you, I look like an old man" he says. "This is because of my life under Saddam."
I find his self-awareness unsettling. One of the few comforts I have when looking at images of distant suffering is the hope that the starving child with flies on his face doesn't know how pathetic he is. If all he knows is misery, maybe his suffering isn't as bad. But this farmer has shattered that comforting illusion. He's wretched, and he knows it. Before going off, he warns the translator that we are entering an area where the Baath Party is strong. Then he asks if he can join the Marines and go to Baghdad with them. "I will kill Saddam with my own hands," he says.
About 500 meters ahead of Second Platoon's position by the hamlet, Marines in Third Platoon spot a Zil bouncing through the field. There are about twenty young Iraqi men packed into the rear bed. They're armed but wearing civilian clothes. The truck stops, and the Iraqis attempt to flee by the canal. Marines train their guns on them and they throw their arms up in surrender. The Iraqis insist they are farm laborers who have weapons because they are afraid of bandits. But before being stopped, they tossed bags into the field. The Marines retrieve them. Inside, they find Republican Guard military documents, and uniforms still drenched in sweat. Obviously, these guys just changed out of them. The men in Third Platoon take the Iraqis prisoner, bind their wrists with zip cuffs (sort of a heavy-duty version of the plastic bands used to tie trash bags) and load them into one of the battalion's transport trucks.
The battalion pushes forward a few more kilometers. Cobra machine guns buzz in the distance. Mortars explode every few minutes now, but they're still far off—hundreds of meters away, we guess.
In places the trail is almost like a tunnel bounded by reed fences and overhanging trees. It's the most dangerous terrain to operate in, short of being inside a city. But the weird thing is, it's awfully pretty, and everyone in the vehicle seems to be feeling it. A few days earlier, when the battalion raced into Al Gharraf under fire, there were Marines I talked to afterward who said that when they saw the dazzling blue dome of the mosque by the entrance, they felt peaceful, despite the heavy-weapons fire all around.
Basically, there are things you react to almost automatically, even in times of stress. A tree-lined trail bending past a canal is still pretty, even with hostile forces about. During one halt, Colbert's team is completely distracted by several water buffalo bathing on the banks of the canal. Tromb-ley gets out of the vehicle and walks over to them—even as several mortars boom nearby—and has to be ordered back by Colbert.
Second Platoon reaches another hamlet, a walled cluster of about seven homes. Colbert's team and the others are ordered to dismount and clear this and the next several hamlets, going house-to-house. Higher-ups in the battalion have grown increasingly concerned about the mortar fire. The Cobras overhead haven't been able to find the positions of those launching them. The hope is that by making the Marines more aggressive on the ground, they can scare up better information from the villagers.
Colbert leads his team into the hamlet by bounding toward it in stages, their rifles ready to hre. Several men emerge. Colbert shouts, "Down!" gesturing with his M-4. They drop to their stomachs in the dirt. Marines step toward them, rifles drawn, and force them to interlock their fingers behind their heads. Then about twenty women and children stream out. Espera is tasked with herding them toward the road.
A salvo of three mortars hits a couple hundred meters northwest, sending geysers of dirt and smoke up behind the village. The Marines pay them no heed. A much closer mortar, impacting maybe seventy-five meters to the west, seems to come out of nowhere. When they're this close, you hear a sound—fffftl—just before the boom. Then, as a result of the sharp increase in air pressure, your body feels like it's been zapped with a mild electric charge. But we're stopped here, and there's nothing to do about it. Mortars fall in a totally random pattern. It's not like there's a guy crouched somewhere in a field with a rifle, trying to pick you up in his scope. You're not being individually targeted. You have to take comfort in the randomness of it all.
I walk up to Espera, guarding the hamlet's women and children on the road. An old lady in black screams and shakes her fists at him. "This brings me back to my repo days," Espera says. "Women are always the fiercest. You always have to look out for them. Doesn't matter if it's a black bitch in South Central or some rich white bitch in Beverly Hills. They always come after you screaming. Don't matter if you've got a gun. It's like women think they're protected."
Colbert's team enters the first group of homes. Earthen walls are adorned with bright pictures of flowers and sunsets, artwork clipped from magazines. The day has grown hot—hitting the mid-nineties outside—but the homes are naturally cool. Trombley is impressed. "It'd be pretty neat to live in one of these," he says.
A bedroom in one hut stuns the Marines. Against the bare walls, there's a CD player, a TV with DVD, mirrors, a painting of a horse on velvet, electric lamps and what looks to be a California King bed—chrome and black-lacquered frame with leopard-print covers. It looks like they've stumbled into the crib of an East L.A. drug lord.
Nearby, there's a locked windowless hut. Marines try to kick the door in, but it's padlocked with a chain. They chop it off with bolt cutters and find the village stash: two AK rifles, piles of weed and some bags with white powder that looks like either cocaine or heroin. Colbert confiscates the rifles but leaves the drugs. "We're not here to fuck with their livelihoods," he says.