A couple of other men rise behind him, all of them chanting the same words. One has his shirt off and is waving it as a surrender flag. Another man climbs out of a ditch carrying a small frightened girl, about five or six. She stares at the Marines in shock. They're all civilians—probably residents of the hamlet reconned by fire.
The Marines lift their rifles high and gesture for the now-homeless villagers to step forward. The men keep chanting.
"Okay, okay!" Fick shouts. He gives them an exaggerated smile, trying to reassure them.
The eldest man approaches, still chanting insanely. Fick pats his arm. The man begins to shout. "George Bush! George Bush!" he says, pronouncing the first name like "Jor." The Marines offer the little girl some candy but she turns away in mute fear.
Fick grabs the old man's shoulder, steadying him. "Yes, George Bush," Fick says. "No problem. Okay?"
The old man finally stops shouting. He stares at Fick, perhaps finally recognizing that this American is not going to kill him. He breaks down sobbing, grabs Pick's face and smothers him in kisses.
By three o'clock in the afternoon of April 9, First Recon and War Pig have come to within about ten kilometers of Baqubah, advancing in two columns spaced several kilometers apart. While Bravo Company clears through the burning hamlets reconned by fire to the west, Alpha Company, led by Patterson, is pushing north on a trail that follows a canal to the east. The canal runs north-south, and the Marines in Alpha are pushed up against the edge of it to their right. Ahead of them is an expanse of bermed fields. Even as they creep forward—eighty Marines in about fifteen Humvees and trucks—shepherds dot the fields around them, tending flocks of sheep.
While the company is halted, a volley of mortars lands in their midst. A blast detonates so close to Capt. Patterson, standing beside his Humvee, that it knocks him against the side of his vehicle and rips up his pack with shrapnel but misses him. Then his column comes under machine-gun fire from a lone hut 200 meters ahead. Beyond the hut, Iraqis concealed in ditches, some fortified with sandbags, begin firing at them with AKs.
The lead Marines in Alpha begin to take fire from heavy, 73mm guns on BMPs—light Iraqi tanks—that seem to be about a kilometer ahead of them. The Marines in Alpha dive for cover. Patterson estimates there are as many as 150 Iraqi soldiers entrenched in the fields. With his unit hemmed in by the canal on the right side and by Iraqis to the left and in front, for the first time of the war, Patterson thinks, as he later tells me, "We are really on the brink here."
Fawcett, whose team is near the front of Alpha's position, takes cover behind a berm. The enemy BMP continues blasting at his men with its main gun, which fires shells about half the size of a Marine heavy artillery round. Fawcett and Sutherby, the sniper, peek up and observe more enemy troops pouring into the fields ahead of them. The Iraqi soldiers are being ferried in aboard military trucks, hopping out, then scrambling behind berms to fire on the Marines, whom they will soon outnumber about three to one.
Battalion forward air controllers contact an Air Force F-15 Strike Eagle in the vicinity to take out the BMPs. Marines are wary of working with jets, especially those flown by the Air Force. The fear is that jet pilots, moving too fast and far removed from Marines on the ground, will end up striking friendly positions. This fear is borne out when the F-15 drops its first 500-pound bomb intended to hit the BMP. The pilot misses by nearly a kilometer. The bomb lands fewer than 200 meters from Fawcett's position. The men are buffeted by the shock wave, and temporarily deafened by the blast, but unharmed.
The pilot drops a second bomb directly on the BMP, destroying it, then moves on to take others farther north. Cobras linger to wipe out enemy machine-gun positions with Hellfire missiles.
Alpha's Marines climb into their Humvees and advance on the Iraqis in the fields ahead. The Iraqis put out a lot of AK fire but seem incapable of hitting the Marines. Many put their rifles over their heads and shoot indiscriminately, without looking. Marine snipers steadily pick them off, while the .50-cal and Mark-19 gunners saturate their positions with lethal fire. The thing that amazes Sutherby is seeing shepherds run onto the field amidst the shooting, to drag off wounded sheep caught in the crossfire.
Alpha's pace quickens. Marine gunners begin competing with one another to cut down the enemy fighters. Over the course of the next two hours, they advance approximately ten kilometers, destroying or routing all hostile forces ahead of them. When I run into Fawcett a short while later, he greets me with a blissed-out, ashram grin. After weeks of complaining about the war, fretting over its moral implications, he enthuses about slaughtering squads of uniformed Iraqi soldiers in the fields with the nearly 250 Mark-19 rounds he fired. "I feel invincible," he tells me. "I had.rounds skipping in the dirt right next me, a BMP shooting straight at us, Cobras lighting stuff up all around, a five-hundred-pound bomb blow up almost on top of us, and nothing hit me. Maybe it's karma."
On its western approach to Baqubah, Bravo Company stops outside a two-story, pale-yellow stucco building that appears to be an abandoned military post. Two hundred meters behind us, Kocher leads his team into the field, advancing just thirty meters into it from the highway. While picking their way through dried brush, waist-high in places, they encounter a group of Marines from Delta Company, the reserve unit. Several of the reservists surround a dead enemy fighter, a young man in a ditch, still clutching his AK, lying with his brains spilled out of his head. While the reservists gawk at the corpse, a man on Kocher's team notices a live, armed Iraqi hiding in a trench nearby
Kocher and his men turn on the armed Iraqi with their weapons ready to fire. They shout at him to drop his AK. It's a tense moment for the Marines. Strictly speaking, this armed Iraqi had gotten the drop on them and could have easily taken them out had he fired. There's gunfire all around, and the Marines are worried more Iraqis are hidden nearby.
But the Iraqi complies, drops his weapon and rises. One of the reservist Marines, First Sergeant Robert Cottle, a thirty-seven-year-old SWAT team instructor with the LAPD, jogs over, takes out a pair of zip cuffs and binds the Iraqi's hands behind his back—so tightly that his arms later develop dark-purple blood streaks all the way to his shoulders.
The prisoner, a low-level Republican Guard volunteer in his late forties, is overweight, dressed in civilian clothes—a sleeveless undershirt and filthy trousers—and has a droopy Saddam mustache. He looks like a guy so out of shape he'd get winded driving a taxicab in rush hour. Surrounded by Marines, the man begins to blubber and cry.
Kocher hands his rifle to another Marine, pulls out his 9mm sidearm and approaches the prisoner. With combat raging around them, this enemy takedown begins in a highly charged manner. Kocher slams the Iraqi to the ground, puts the pistol to his head and shouts, "If you move, I'll blow your fucking head off!" Pinning the guy with his knee in his back, he pulls AK magazines and a military ID out of his pockets. The prisoner starts pleading in English, "I have a family."
Kocher hauls him to his feet and frog-marches him to the highway. In the surrounding fields, enemy mortars continue to boom amidst the crackling of Marine machine guns. Kocher knocks the prisoner over. He falls facedown in the dirt, with his hands still bound behind his back. In Kocher's mind, his aggressiveness firs with his philosophy of handling prisoners. "I try to keep a prisoner off-balance so he knows I'm in control."
The Marines bring Meesh over, and he barks at the man in Arabic, repeatedly asking him where the enemy mortars are positioned. The prisoner begs for his life. They conclude he knows nothing. They tie a sack over his head—a precaution taken since they are on a battlefield and don't want this guy to shout or signal his comrades in any way should he see them—and wait to load him onto a truck.
Cottle, from the reservist unit, walks up to Kocher and shakes his hand, saying, "Thanks for saving my life."
The situation seems pretty much wrapped up when Captain America makes a dramatic appearance, jogging up the road, screaming, with his bayonet out. He brandishes his bayonet toward the prisoner and shouts, "We ought to cut his throat like the Chechnyans in the video." It's a reference to a gore video circulating on the Internet, which many of the troops had seen before the invasion. It consisted of choppy MPEG-file footage that purported to show live Russian soldiers having their throats slashed by Chechnyan guerrillas.
Captain America then jabs the prisoner several times in his ribs and neck with the tip of his bayonet. The man starts screaming through the bag on his head, pleading again about his family. "Shut up!" Captain America yells. "Shut the fuck up!"
Watching this bizarre drama, Kocher orders Redman to step off the Humvee and guard the prisoner. They both figure the move will be a way of calming down Captain America. Redman picks up his M-4 and approaches the prisoner. He says to Captain America, "Dude, I've got him."
Redman stands over the prisoner, placing his boot heel on his neck. Captain America shouts at the guy a few more times, then backs off.
Pick arrives. He exchanges a few words with Captain America, who's now smiling and chuckling nervously, as he often does after a good outburst. Fick has no idea that anything out of the usual just occurred. He loads the prisoner into his Humvee and drives off.
A while later some of the reservist Marines approach Kocher and Redman. Cottle, who'd thanked Kocher a few minutes earlier for saving his life, now says, "You guys abused that prisoner. I should never have let you take custody of him. I ought to kick your fucking ass."
Within twenty-four hours, the reservists file a report charging Kocher, Redman and Captain America with assaulting the prisoner. Captain America is temporarily suspended from command. Kocher is relieved of his job as team leader and ordered to ride with a support unit. Redman, who's allowed to remain on the team, is dismayed. "Dude, when I put my boot on the prisoner's neck, there were people out there still shooting at us. I wanted to control the prisoner and still be able to see what was happening." He adds, "Kocher and I were trying to calm the situation down. I didn't stomp or kick the guy. Dude, we just wanted Captain America to go away."
Even Cottle later confesses, "I feel bad for the enlisted guys. They weren't really the problem. It was the officer." One of Cottle's fellow reservists, a senior enlisted man who also witnessed the events, says, "From what I saw, that officer is sick. There's something wrong with him."
Captain America denies committing a misdeed. He later tells me he simply thinks his accusers in the reserve unit were insufficiently acquainted with the realities of the battlefield. "The prisoner was handled properly, even though they didn't like the way it looked," Captain America says. "They saw the beast that day, and they didn't know how to handle it."
By five o'clock in the afternoon, the Iraqis who had earlier put up determined-though-inept resistance have either fled or been slaughtered. Colbert's team, along with the rest of the platoon, speeds up the road toward the outskirts of Baqubah. Headless corpses—indicating well-aimed shots from high-caliber weapons—are sprawled out in trenches by the road. Others are charred beyond recognition, still sitting at the wheels of burned, skeletized trucks. Some of the smoking wreckage emits the odor of barbecuing chicken—the smell of slow-roasting human corpses inside. An LAV rolling a few meters in front of us stops by a shot-up Toyota pickup truck. A man inside appears to be moving. A Marine jumps out of the LAV, walks over to the pickup truck, sticks his rifle through the passenger window and sprays the inside of the vehicle with machine-gun fire.
Watching this apparent execution unfold, I wonder if shooting the Iraqi in the truck ahead of us was an act of barbarity or a mercy killing along the lines of the one Doc Bryan had tried to perform on the wounded man outside Al Muwaffaqiyah. There's no time to sort this out.
We advance a few more kilometers, and Colbert's team sets up a roadblock. We are now within four kilometers of Baqubah. My first encounter with the enemy prisoner whom Captain America had taunted and abused earlier takes place in the back of Fick's Humvee parked nearby.
The prisoner is squirming on the truck bed, the burlap sack tied over his head, when I approach. A few Marines have gathered around and are taunting him. "What do you think you'd be doing to us if we were your prisoner?" a nineteen-year-old Marine rails at him.
Fick walks over. "Hey, I don't want any war crimes in the back of my truck." He says this lightly, having no idea yet of the brewing controversy surrounding the man's capture. "Untie him and give him some water."
The man's arms are swollen and purple when the Marines cut off the zip cuffs. The angry nineteen-year-old Marine helps give him a bottle of water and a package of MRE pound cake. The prisoner, snuffling his tears away, eyes the offerings suspiciously for a moment, then eats hungrily.
"Just 'cause we're feeding you doesn't mean I don't hate you," the young Marine says, still trying to keep up his edge of hostility. "I hate you. Do you hear me?"
I study the man closely while he eats. He wears a torn, grimy wife-beater undershirt with his fat belly protruding. I look for bleeding or bayonet marks on his body—to see if Captain America penetrated his skin—but see no evidence of this. The worst signs of mistreatment on his body are gruesome bruises on his arms from the zip cuffs. While eating, the man periodically grabs his shoulders and winces in pain. I ask him how badly he hurts. He speaks English reasonably well.
"I need medicine," he says, then bursts into tears, sniffling loudly.
"For your wounds?" I ask.
"No, I need medicine for my heart," he says. "It is bad."
He tells me his name is Ahmed Al-Khizjrgee. Despite his suffering, the more we talk he gives the impression of being both buffoonish and crafty. With his considerable girth, he brings to mind Sergeant Schultz in the old Hogan's Heroes series. He tries to convince me that he is not actually a soldier. "It is your imagination that I am a fighter," he says.
When I point out that he was found with military ID documents, carrying a loaded rifle in an enemy-ambush position, he finally admits, shrugging and stroking his Saddam mustache, "I am a very low soldier."
Al-Khizjrgee says he is forty-seven years old, with two sons and five daughters. He claims he was originally a.shoemaker and joined the Republican Guard late in life. His brother is a cabdriver in Baghdad. He is a peace-loving man. One of the Marines points out that a lot of other Iraqis threw down their weapons and fled. "You were waiting to kill us," the Marine says. "You didn't put your weapon down until we made you."
"It is not true," Al-Khizjrgee protests. "I am afraid. If I put my gun down, the police come and beat us." He says he and the other men in his unit received no outside information on the state of the world. They could be shot for listening to a radio.
I ask him how he thinks the war is going. He tells nie his superiors told him and the other men in the unit that Iraq was winning the war. He says he and the other men holed up in Baqubah had their doubts but kept