Mortars continue to fall for the next hour while we slowly bump up the trail. With the rising heat, arid Marines in their MOPP suits bounding across fields, scrambling up walls and kicking in doors, everyone is pouring sweat. Tiny gnats swarm everywhere. They seem to have miniature teeth. Black clouds of them descend, then you feel your neck and eyelids and ears being chewed on.
Colbert slumps against the Humvee, taking a rest, his face throbbing red. "I almost went down in that last village. I'm at my limit." He sucks water from a drinking tube attached to a CamelBak pouch and starts to sing, "I'm Sailing Away!" He stops. "This is dangerous as hell," he says.
There's a shot ahead. Person picks up a report from the radio. "A dog tried to attack a friendly, so he shot him."
"That was needless," Colbert says.
Two mortars explode somewhere.
Captain America struts past with his bayonet out. "Charlie's in the trees!" Colbert calls after him, quoting a line from Platoon.
By three-thirty in the afternoon we have reached a bend in the canal, approximately ten kilometers south of the Marines' objective, Al Hayy. There is a mosque ahead. A few moments earlier, Cobras shot up the fields beside it, pulverizing suspected ambush points, but all is quiet now. The battalion halts while officers plan the final push to Al Hayy.
Everyone remains sitting inside Colbert's Humvee, waiting. After six hours of searching for an elusive enemy on this back trail, the men on Colbert's team are worn down, their nerves frayed. The chatter and happy profanities and inside jokes have ceased. Even Person just stares vacantly out the window.
The silence is broken by an unusual new sound, a series of high-pitched zings. Orange-red tracers streak through the air and slam into the berms in front of and behind the Humvee. Large-caliber rounds are being fired at us from across the canal. You can actually see some bounce and tumble after they strike the ground just a few meters from us. For a moment, we simply watch, mesmerized.
"Person, get out of the vehicle," Colbert orders.
All of us dive out of the left side of the Humvee to avoid the incoming fire on the right. We scramble up and then down a meter-high berm, which shields us from the attack.
Rounds rake across the row of Humvees, making that weird noise—zip zip zing. They sound like the screaming cartoon bullets fired by Yosemite Sam. Up and down the line, Marines jump out of their vehicles and take cover.
Behind our berm, Colbert says, "That's a goddamn Zeus!" Zeus, the nickname for a ZSU, is a powerful, multi-barreled Russian anti-aircraft gun. (Other Marines later posit that the Iraqis were using a slightly different weapon, a ZPU.)
Several Marines in the battalion fire rifles and .50-cal machine guns wildly and ineffectually across the river. But as more Zeus rounds streak in, they dive for cover, too. No one can figure out where the enemy position is located. Marines, who often laugh off other forms of gunfire, now burrow facedown in the nearest comforting patch of mother earth. The entire battalion is pinned down.
The only guy I see poking his head up is Trombley. He had the presence of mind to grab the binoculars when he dove out of the Humvee. Now he scampers to the top of the berm, sits up like a gopher and scans the horizon. He looks around excitedly, eagerly taking in this terrifying new experience. I see him smile.
"That's cool," he says in a low voice as another salvo of Zeus rounds zings past. Then he adds, "I think I see where it is, Sergeant."
Colbert and Person now rise over the berm, somewhat more cautiously than Trombley. Following his initial directions, they spot what they think is the enemy-gun position about a kilometer away. Colbert orders Hasser onto the vehicle's Mark-19 grenade launcher, and with Zeus rounds still screaming in, the team methodically directs fire toward the enemy position.
A Cobra noses down over the field across the canal to join in the hunt. It rears up as AAA fire comes at it from the ground. The enemy rounds miss the helicopter, and it doubles back to renew its attack.
The Cobra strikes a white truck parked in the field with its 20mm
Gatling gun, causing the truck to burst into flames. Then it fires a Hellfire missile at what the pilot thinks is one of several Zeus AAA guns. Low on fuel, the Cobra is forced to break off its attack.
Different perspectives on the ground produce radically different versions of events. Kocher, just 150 meters up from Colbert's position, watches the white truck set on fire by the Cobra and believes this is one of the worst things he's seen so far in the war. He later says, "I saw civilians in that truck, and I watched them burn up alive."
Captain Daniel O'Connor, a First Recon officer also involved with controlling the air strikes that afternoon, later says, "I couldn't prove the white vehicle the Cobra lit up was enemy, but every time it showed up, bad stuff happened. So we were okayed to take it out."
Two columns of inky black smoke rise on the opposite side of the river. We take no more Zeus fire. I ask Trombley why he showed no signs of fear, seemed quite calm in fact, when he sat up on the berm and located the position of the gun that seemed to be terrorizing just about every other Marine in the battalion. "I know this might sound weird," Trombley says, "but deep down inside, I want to know what it feels like to get shot. Not that I want to get shot, but the reality is, I feel more nervous watching a game show on TV at home than I do here in all this."
He tears into his plastic meal-ration bag. "All this gunfighting is making me hungry," he says with a cheerful smile.
"All this stupidity is making me want to kill myself," Person counters grimly, one of his first displays of low spirits in Iraq.
Despite having wiped out several AAA guns with the help of the Cobras, the battalion is again starting to take incoming mortars by the bend in the canal. The Marines are ordered to break contact and roll back two kilometers.
The battalion pulls off the trail into a muddy depression surrounded by berms. The vehicles pull in close together. We wait for the Cobras to refuel in order to accompany the battalion on its final dash into Al Hayy.
Mortar fire grows more steady. With each wave of incoming bombs, the explosions get a little louder, a little closer. The initial volleys land more than a kilometer away, then move to within about five hundred meters of
First Recon's position. The orderly progression of the mortars suggests that an enemy observer is on the ground nearby, directing them. Marine snipers push out to the perimeter and try to spot a man or woman with a radio amidst the shepherds, farmers and other civilians in the surrounding fields.
Colbert's vehicle is parked beside one of the battalion's fuel trucks. I decide I don't like sitting next to 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel during a mortar attack. I walk over to the truck holding the roughly twenty enemy prisoners of war (EPWs) Third Platoon picked up earlier in the day.
They're packed into the rear of the flatbed, sitting on benches along either side. During the Zeus attack, the prisoners, who were left in the truck while their Marine captors dove out and took cover, gnawed through their plastic wrist cuffs.
Marines are retying the Iraqis' hands behind their backs with parachute cord. The EPWs are men in their twenties, wearing jeans or black trousers, striped soccer jerseys, one guy with an Opel car logo on his shirt. But these aren't the docile, defeated EPWs First Recon encountered earlier in the war.
Several of these guys are defiant. They mad-dog the Marines with angry stares and wiggle in their seats, trying to cut the cords binding their wrists. Others turn their backs and squirm away from Marines attempting to retie them. They make exaggerated grimaces and complain loudly in Arabic. Binding EPWs' wrists tightly enough to cut off their circulation and make their skin bleed is a passive way of punishing them. A few Marines I talk to later on will brag of doing this, or of slamming a guy in the face or nuts when no one is looking.
But it's also extremely hard to deal with twenty guys who are resisting being tied up. Americans, of course, are also trained to evade and resist capture, but this doesn't make it any less enraging when the enemy is doing it to them.
"What would these guys be doing to us if they were holding us prisoner?" a Marine shouts nearby. "How do you think we'd be treated?"
"We ought to tie these motherfuckers to the hoods of our Humvees before we drive into the next ambush," another Marine says.
An officer with a shaky knowledge of Arabic steps forward to calm the rising tensions. In halting, polite Arabic, he tells the EPWs they will not be harmed or executed, then asks them to please stop trying to escape, or the Marines will be forced to wrap burlap sacks over their heads. The EPWs immediately calm down. Two guys in the rear of the truck, both of whom have matching Saddam mustaches, start making buffoonish faces, trying to ingratiate themselves to the Americans. One of them repeats in English, "Fuck Saddam!" Each time he says it, his buddy squeals with laughter. Soon, several others join in—howling and making funny faces—and the truck suddenly takes on the character of a small, clown-only travelling circus.
Then a salvo of incoming mortars puts a stop to their antics. They explode about 200 meters away, with columns of smoke rising up from the nearby field. Several of the EPWs try ducking down, but their wrists are bound to the sides of the truck. One EPW squirms ashamedly on the bench. A powerful odor comes from the truck. Apparently, he's just had a classic combat-stress reaction and defecated in his pants.
Pappy and Reyes have pushed out together onto the perimeter as a sniper team, hunkering down behind a berm and setting up their M-40 rifle. They spot a man whom they believe to be a forward observer for the mortars. He's in a white pickup parked nearly 1,200 yards away across the field. With the rules of evidence being somewhat looser in a combat zone than they are back home, the man in the truck earns himself a death sentence for the crime of holding what appear to be binoculars and a radio. Pappy fires three shots, aiming at the man's center mass through the door. After his rifle steadies, Pappy observes his target for a few moments. The man is slumped forward in the truck, apparently dead.
This is Pappy's second sniper kill in Iraq. Returning to his Humvee, he seems to take no satisfaction from it. When some fellow Marines excitedly press him for details of the kill, he doesn't want to talk about it. All he says is, "The man went down." The mortar fire ceases. Evidently, Pappy killed the right man.
Fick gathers his team leaders to explain the final phase of the mission.
In about five minutes the battalion is going to head back up to the bend in the canal, push beyond the mosque, drive through a few kilometers of densely concentrated hamlets, then approach the western edge of Al Hayy. The trickiest part will be entering the town. The convoy will be forced into a series of S-turns while crossing two separate bridges over canals. Then the Marines will race past about two kilometers of built-up urban terrain, reaching an elevated roadway. There, the Marines will drive up an earthen ramp onto the main highway out of the town and seize a key bridge. The goal is to seal off the primary escape route out of Al Hayy, in preparation for RCT-l's assault through the city's center, which is now expected to come in about ten hours, at four in the morning.
After briefing his men, Fick says privately to me, "This is Black Hawk Down shit we are doing." He adds, "The fact that we never initiate contact with the enemy—it's always them on us—is wearing on these guys. In their training as Recon Marines, it's a failure every time they get shot at first. It doesn't matter that we've done well shooting our way out of these engagements. They're supposed to be the ones initiating the contact, not the enemy."
As the convoy moves out from its position in the mudflats and starts rolling, single-file, on the trail toward Al Hayy, Cobra escorts pour rockets and machine-gun fire into a nearby palm grove. Watching the attack, Colbert says, "This country is dirty and nasty, and the sooner we are out of here the better."
Though almost no one ever talks about religion, some Marines silently say their prayers. At a wide spot in the trail just before the mosque, Espera's vehicle pulls up beside Colbert's. Both vehicles are going about twenty-five miles per hour. I glimpse Corporal Jason Lilley, the twenty-three-year-old driver of Espera's vehicle, clenching the wheel, staring ahead unblinking. His lips are moving. He later tells me that although he's not a big Christian, he was saying, "Lord see us through," over and over.
After we pass the mosque, machine guns and small rockets, called "zunis," being fired by the Cobras kick up a massive dust cloud that envelops the convoy. The road sinks down and snakes between tree-lined hamlets. Some of Recon's transport trucks rolling in the middle of the convoy take fire. At least one has its tires shot out but rides on the rims.
We reach the edge of the city and cross the first bridge into an industrial area of low-slung cinder-block buildings, with a dense cluster of apartment blocks to our right. In all the dust kicked up, several of Recon's supply trucks take a wrong turn.
Colbert's team and the rest of his platoon hang back to provide cover while the drivers of the lost team unfuck themselves and turn around. We stop for several minutes, surrounded by walls and windows in the hostile city. We hear AKs and machine guns clattering, but don't see any muzzle flashes.
Charlie Company, which is now crossing the second bridge in the S-turn, is coming under fire from a building seventy-five meters away. Charlie's lead vehicle is commanded by Sergeant Charles Graves, a twenty-six-year-old sniper. An RPG round blows up beside his open-top Humvee. Shrapnel superficially wounds one of his Marines in the leg. Their vehicle is raked with machine-gun fire. One round cuts through a piece of metal inches from Graves's head. His Mark-19 gunner opens up on the building where the enemy shooters are concealed. The building is kind of pretty— a long, pale-blue stucco structure with arches along its second story. Graves's Mark-19 gunner saturates it with thirty-two rounds, blowing giant holes in the front of it, collapsing part of the roof. Watching the destruction as his team speeds past, Graves thinks, he later tells me, "It's fucking beautiful."