At about eight o'clock that night, Fick returns from his meeting with his superiors and gathers his team leaders for a briefing. "The bad news is, we won't get much sleep tonight," he says. "The good news is, we get to kill people."
It's rare for Fick to sound so "moto," regaling his men with enthusiastic talk of killing. He goes on to present Lt. Col. Ferrando's ambitious last-minute plan to cross the bridge into Al Muwaffaqiyah, push north of the town and set up ambushes on a road believed to be heavily travelled by Fe-dayeen. "The goal is to terrorize the Fedayeen," he says, looking around, smiling expectantly.
His men are skeptical. They're all aware that when Marines approached the bridge a few hours ago in LAVs, they were hammered by enemy am-bushers. Pappy repeatedly questions Fick about the enemy situation on the bridge. "It's been pounded all day by artillery," Fick answers, waving off his objections, sounding almost glib, like a salesman—all of this unusual for him. "I think the chances of a serious threat are low."
Fick walks a delicate line with his men. A good officer should be eager to take calculated risks. Despite the men's complaints against Ferrando for ordering them into an ambush at Al Gharraf, the fact is, only one Marine was injured, and the enemy's plans to halt the Marines' advance were thwarted. Fick privately admits that there have been times when he's actually resisted sending his troops on missions because, as he says, "I care a lot about these guys, and I don't like the idea of sending them into something where somebody isn't going to come back." While acting on these sentiments might make him a good person, they perhaps make him a less good officer. Tonight he seems uncharacteristically on edge, as if he's fighting his tendencies to be overly protective. He admonishes his team leaders, saying, "I'm not hearing the aggressiveness I'd like to." His voice sounds hollow, like he's not convinced himself.
The men, who ultimately have no choice in the matter, reluctantly voice their support of Fick's orders—ones that he has no choice but to follow, either. After he goes off, Pappy says, "The people running this can fuck things up all they want. But as long as we keep getting lucky and making it through alive, they'll just keep repeating the same mistakes."
What galls the men is the fact that they are situated just a few kilometers from the bridge. To them, it seems like a no-brainer to send a foot patrol out and observe the bridge before driving onto it. "Reconnaissance," Doc Bryan points out, "is what Recon Marines do."
Confidence is not bolstered when an Iraqi artillery unit—thought to have been wiped out by this point—sends numerous rounds kabooming into the surrounding mudflats. The men break up their discussion. However beautiful artillery might look when it's arcing across the sky onto enemy positions, when it's aimed at you, it sounds like somebody's hurling freight trains at your head. Everyone runs for the nearest hole and takes cover.
Following the Iraqi strike, we watch Marine batteries pour about 100 DPICM rounds onto the town side of the bridge four kilometers distant. Each DPICM round, loaded with either 66 or 89 submunitions, produces spectacular starbursts as it explodes over the city.
For tonight's mission, Colbert's team wins the honor of driving the lead vehicle onto the bridge. The team climbs into the Humvee just before eleven o'clock, some gobbling ephedra for what's expected to be an all-night mission. Colbert is not especially sanguine about the condition of the team's equipment. Due to the shortage of LSA lubricant, his vehicle's Mark-19 keeps going down. On top of this, on a night when they are going to be rolling through a hostile town, then setting up ambushes on back roads, there's almost no moon, which makes the operation of NVGs less than ideal. Ordinarily, the team would turn on its PAS-13 thermal-imaging scope, but tonight they have no batteries for it. (Fick does not hide his anger toward Casey Kasem for failing to keep the teams supplied with these items. "That guy's either running around with his video camera shooting his war documentary or sitting in his hole reading Maxim, while my men don't get what they need," he complained earlier.) Even though the team will be moving with impaired night-vision and a faulty main gun, Colbert tries to put a good spin on things. "We'll be okay," he says as they start the engine. "Just make sure you look sharp through those NVGs, Person."
We roll onto the darkened road, heading toward the bridge at about twenty-five miles per hour. Far up ahead, we see headlights from a lone vehicle moving down perpendicular to the road we're on. It reaches the approximate location of the bridge and the lights go off. Colbert is watching this, debating its meaning: Some farmer driving at night toward a bridge that's been pounded with artillery for several hours? Fedayeen sending up reinforcements or using the headlights to signal someone?
The team ceases its speculation when Cobras thump overhead. They fire multiple volleys of zuni rockets, striping the sky in front of us with white burn trails that culminate in multiple explosions near the bridge. We make out trees—not palms but spiky eucalyptus trees—silhouetted in the light of the bursting rockets.
Cobra pilots radio down to Maj. Shoup that their thermal-imagining devices are picking up "blobs"—possible heat signatures of people—hiding amidst the eucalyptus trees by the foot of the bridge. The pilots tried hitting them with their zunis, but the rockets overshot the trees. Now they're concerned about firing any more for fear of hitting the Marines approaching on the ground. Due to a comms error in the battalion, none of this information is passed to Colbert, Fick or anyone else in the platoon.
Colbert orders Person to continue driving into the direction of the explosions. Everyone's life depends on Person. He's the only one inside the Humvee with NVGs on, allowing him to see the road ahead. He hunches forward over the steering wheel, his face obscured by the apparatus. The NVGs give their wearer a bright gray-green view of the night and offer a limited, tunnel-vision perspective but no depth perception. Person is having trouble finding the bridge. It's not quite where the map indicated it would be. Colbert radios this news to Fick.
He radios back, "Not good. Not good."
Then Person figures out that reaching the bridge requires a sharper right turn than he'd thought. He makes it. "There's an obstacle on the bridge," Person says in a dull monotone that nevertheless manages to sound urgent.
"What?" asks Colbert. He has night-vision capabilities on his rifle scope but in the cramped Humvee can't turn it forward to see what Person is looking at.
"It's like a shipping container," Person says. "In the middle of the road."
It's actually a blown-up truck turned sideways on the road several meters before the entrance to the bridge. We stop about twenty meters in front of it. To the left is that stand of tall eucalyptus trees. They're about five meters from the edge of the road. Behind us, there's a large segment of drainpipe that's been dragged across part of the road.
Person drove around the pipe a moment ago. Through his NVGs it had appeared to be a small trench in the road—what he'd thought was the result of natural erosion. Now the team behind us is radioing, "You guys just drove around a pipe."
It's becoming clear to the team that this is not random debris. The pipe and the ruined truck in front of us were deliberately placed where they are in order to channel the vehicle into what is known in military terms as a "kill zone." We are sitting in the middle of it.
Everyone in the Humvee (except me) has figured this out. The men remain extremely calm. "Turn the vehicle around," Colbert says softly. The problem is, the rest of the convoy has continued pushing into the kill zone behind us. All five Humvees in the platoon are bunched together, with twenty more pressing from behind. Person gets the Humvee partially turned around; the eucalyptus trees are now on our immediate right. But the pipe, which was behind us, now prevents the Humvee from moving forward.
Person guns the engine, starting into a sharp turn, intending to cut around the pipe by going off the road.
"Halt! Stop it," Colbert says. "Don't go off the road. It could be mined. We've got to go out the way we came in."
Colbert radios the rest of the platoon, telling them to back the fuck up, while simultaneously peering out his window through his night-vision rifle scope.
"There are people in the trees," he says, no trace of alarm in his voice. He repeats the message over his radio, hunches more tightly over his rifle and begins shooting.
His first shot kicks off an explosion of gunfire. There are between five and ten enemy fighters crouched beneath the trees—just five meters from the edge of our Humvee. There are several more across the bridge in bunkers, manning a belt-fed machine gun and other weapons, and still more ambushers on the other side of the road with RPGs. They have the Marines surrounded on three sides, raking the kill zone with rifle and machine-gun fire and RPGs.
Why they did not start shooting first is a mystery. Colbert believes, he later tells me, that they simply didn't understand the capabilities of American night-vision optics. The Marine rifles have night-vision scopes wedded to laser target designators—a little infrared beam that goes out and lights up the spot where the bullet will hit. Since it's infrared, the dot can only be seen through a night-vision scope or NVGs. What each Marine sees is not only his own laser dot lighting up a target, but those emitted by his buddies' weapons as well. The effect is sort of like a one-sided game of laser tag.
Now, in the kill zone, Marines looking through their scopes are seeing the heads and torsos of enemy fighters lit up by two or three laser dots at once, as they pick them off tag-team style, carefully transitioning from target to target. The Marines have to be careful. Their advantage in night optics is precarious. Bunched up as they are together, if they start shooting wildly, they risk killing one another. The other problem is, while the Marines are getting in good shots, their vehicles are so jammed up, no one's able to move out.
Fick can feel his truck jolting as enemy rounds rip through the sheet-metal sides. Through his window, he sees muzzles spitting flames in the darkness like a bunch of camera flashes going off at once. Then he sees an RPG streak right over the rear hatch of Colbert's Humvee and explode. He decides to jump out of his vehicle and try to direct the Humvees out of the kill zone. Fick's own coping mechanism for combat is what he calls the "Dead Man Walking Method." Instead of reassuring himself, as some do, that he's invincible or that his fate is in God's hands (which wouldn't work for him since he leans toward agnosticism), he operates on the assumption that he's already a dead man, so getting shot makes no difference. This is the mode he's in when he hops out of his Humvee, armed only with his 9mm pistol, and strides into the melee. Marines on Humvees shoot past his head while low-enfilade rounds from the enemy machine gun across the bridge skip past his feet. To the Marines seeing him approach, their lieutenant almost appears to be dancing. Fick later says he felt like he was in a shoot-out from The Matrix.
In our vehicle, Colbert seems to have entered a private realm. He fires bursts and, for some inexplicable reason, hums "Sundown," the depressing 1970s Gordon Lightfoot anthem. His M-4 jams repeatedly, but each time he calmly clears the chamber and resumes firing, while mumbling the chorus: "Sometimes I think it's a sin/When I feel like I'm winnin' when I'm losin' again."
Meanwhile, Person, frustrated by the traffic jam, opens his door and, with shots crackling all around, shouts, "Would you back the fuck up!" In the heat of battle, his Missouri accent comes out extra hick. He repeats himself and climbs back in, his movements almost lackadaisical.
Two Marines are hit in the first couple of minutes of shooting. Q-tip Stafford is knocked down in the back of Fick's truck by a piece of shrapnel to his leg. He ties his leg off with a tourniquet, gets back up and continues firing.
Pappy has a bullet rip through his foot and come out the other side, his torn boot gushing blood from both holes. He tourniquets the wound, resumes firing, gets on the radio and says, "Team Two has a man hit." He speaks of himself in the third person, he says, because he doesn't want to panic the rest of the platoon. Beside him in the driver's seat, Reyes, often teased for being the platoon's pretty boy, narrowly escapes a bullet that shatters the windshield and passes within an inch of his beautiful head. But Reyes feels oddly calm. He later says, "Wearing NVGs blocks your peripheral vision. You feel cocooned in this tunnel. It gives a false feeling of safety." He concentrates on executing a three-point turn, surrounded by four other Humvees all trying to do the same, each with Marines on top blazing away. But one of Reyes's tires is shot out. Driving on rims makes the Humvee wobble like a circus clown car. Pappy, riding beside him and shooting out his door, with his wounded foot elevated over the dashboard, repeatedly shouts, "You're going off the damn road!"
When Team Three's .50-caliber machine gun opens up over Doc Bryan's head where he's perched on the back of the Humvee, the concussive blasting is so intense that his nose starts bleeding. With his weapon growing sticky with blood and snot, he squeezes off two separate, very effective bursts, getting head shots on a pair of enemy ambushers.
Through it all, Espera fights from his Humvee beside ours while saying Hail Marys. In his NVGs he sees a man cut down in the extremities by a blast from Garza's .50-cal. When he sees the guy attempt to crawl off, Espera fires a burst, clipping the top of his head, and resumes his Hail Marys.
It takes five to ten minutes for the platoon to extricate itself from the kill zone, leaving most of the would-be ambushers either dead or in flight. Doc Bryan counts nine bodies scattered on both sides of the road. Corporal Teren Holsey, a twenty-year-old on Team Three, gets in the platoon's final kill. He rides hanging off the back of the last Humvee to leave the zone. After his vehicle makes it about fifty meters away from the pipe in the road, he looks back to see if anyone is following. He observes a man limping by the road and cuts him down with a burst from his M-4.