My notebook from March 30, 2003, records a conversation I did not include in Generation Kill. That morning I was standing on a berm with Lieutenant Fick and several Marines from Bravo Two surveying the rolling Martian landscape by the airfield at Qalat Sukar. We were pulling out, and the place suddenly looked beautiful in that way something does when you know you will never see it again. I was sure none of us would ever be back, at least not in combat. Maybe some of us would return for the rebuilding of Iraq, which some Marines already were talking about and believed was right around the corner. The sun was rising. The war in Iraq was entering its eleventh day. A Marine standing near me asked, "Can you believe they did this shit in Vietnam for like a year at a time?"
Another asked, "What about World War II? Can you imagine fighting a war for five years?"
As I wrote in my notebook that morning, "The general feeling is this war will last for three months."
There is nothing like a war to prove how wrong you are about everything.
Some people I was with in Iraq in those earliest days possessed clarity bordering on prescience about the emerging challenges. Little more than a week into the war Lieutenant Colonel Ferrando told his officers that he believed the U.S. military was making a mistake by racing through the big cities into the south, decapitating the leadership, then leaving without establishing order. As he said to his men at the time, "For us to bypass this mess will create in the minds of civilians more mistrust and uncertainty of our intentions. The townspeople are pretty much going to bet on the winning horse. We're not going to get support from townspeople until it looks like we're winning. Right now, we don't look like the winning horse." Ferrando was partially correct. He believed the Marines were going to return to those cities and begin establishing order even before pressing on to Baghdad. On that count he was dead wrong. As I write this today, the U.S. is entering its sixth year of trying to look like the winning horse in Iraq.
A few months prior to the invasion of Iraq in January 2003 when I left my home in Los Angeles for the Middle East, the surge of patriotism that had begun after the 9/11 attacks was still cresting. The tiny American flags that had sprouted on cars across the city seemingly overnight after the terrorist attacks were flying. Toby Keith's song "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)," the paean to American soldiers putting a boot in bad guys' asses across the globe—because, as he sang, "It's the American way"—was in heavy rotation on the radio. The New York Times, led by Judith Miller's spurious reporting on Iraq's WMD threat and Thomas Friedman's editorials arguing that the road to peace in the Middle East was through Baghdad, presented a formidable case for war, much as it was based on lies and nonsense.
On the eve of the invasion, public opinion polls indicated that between 60 and 70 percent of the American public supported war with Iraq. In a Gallup-CNN poll of public sentiment 65 percent of those questioned said they felt "proud" on hearing the news that America had begun the invasion. Those who didn't support the war turned out by the millions to protest. Even before I left in January 2003, small groups of protesters had begun appearing in front of the West Los Angeles Federal Building. The nation was not fully united behind the looming war, but Iraq did have its complete attention.
Earlier I'd interviewed director Oliver Stone about the nation's turn to militarism. Stone's well-known antiwar views were based in part on his skeptical reading of the American public's ability to sustain the rigors of a long conflict. "War is the equivalent of sleeplessness to a degree," he told me. "Can we do it? Are we a crybaby nation? Has Oprah so Oprahfied us that we suffer a little bit and everyone needs to call an anxiety disorder clinic and talk to a psychologist? You wonder if we have the guts to fight a war."
Today, there are few flags being waved near my home in Los Angeles, even fewer protesters. Most people, it seems, have checked out, moved on to the next issue—the economy, global warming, celebrity meltdowns.
I still wonder what happened to all those people driving around Los Angeles with the little flags attached to their windows. Did they all move— leave the city one night in a caravan of flag-festooned cars, blaring the "Angry American" from their radios one final time?
Notwithstanding shifting public sentiment about the war, the troops are still at it. The generals change. The policies change. But the troops are out there getting bombed, shot at, ambushed, maimed, and killed like it's still 2003. While the public perceives important differences between Iraq and Afghanistan, for the troops, there's not a huge difference between getting blown up in Afghanistan or in Iraq. On a transactional level, war is war. Someone asked me recently if there was a war film that shed light on the experiences of soldiers fighting today. I suggested Groundhog Day, the film in which Bill Murray is trapped in the same day of his life again and again.
Among the troops, there are many who* question their command or the justifications or ends of the wars they are fighting. Many who support the wars are nevertheless bitter about the personal sacrifices they are called on to make, while the general public makes few or none. What intrigues me is that so many continue to serve. When I first met the members of Bravo Two in 2003 about a third of them had already fought in Afghanistan. As I write this today, about a third of Bravo Two's troops profiled in Generation Kill remain in the military. Most of these have just returned from combat deployments, such as Brad Colbert in late 2007, or are on their way to the next one. Among these are Lilley, Garza, Baptista, "Manimal" Jacks and "Pappy" Patrick.
After Doc Bryan returned from his second tour in Iraq during which he again carried a gun and a medicine bag (using both frequently), I asked him why he had gone back. After all, he'd been one of the harshest critics of poor command decisions, of the loss of innocent life, of the destruction visited on the country. He answered, "If it's a choice between me looking through that gun sight and deciding whether or not to pull the trigger, or some jackass, I'd rather be the one on that gun."
Some of the history of First Recon's Bravo Two during its second deployment to Iraq in 2004 deserves to be told. Bravo Two returned with several of the original Humvees they had driven to Baghdad a year earlier, including Colbert's beloved Team One vehicle.
Team One was now commanded by Eric Kocher (who had previously served under Captain America in Bravo Three). None of the personnel in Team One carried over from Colbert's day. There was no reporter. What had been my seat on the right rear side of the vehicle was now occupied by Corporal Eddie Wright (no relation to me).
Team Three still had Stinetorf on the Humvee's .50 cal. The vehicle's previous driver, Baptista, was now the team leader. The team now included "Q-tip" Stafford, who formerly rode on Pick's truck, and Lilley, previously Espera's driver. "Mammal" Jacks was now the driver of the fourth Humvee in the platoon.
As in 2003, Bravo Two was again used to drive through suspected ambush areas. This time, however, they were deployed to Falluja. On April 7, 2004, Bravo Two was sent on a highway toward a known ambush point. Similar as this was to the previous year's missions, there were variations. Notably, the enemy ambushers had acquired better marksmanship skills than the previous generation. The first volleys of RPGs they fired did not fly wildly over the vehicles as they had in 2003. One RPG scored a direct hit on Colbert's former Humvee. It detonated in the arms of Corporal Wright, blowing off his hands and tearing open his leg by his femoral artery. It blew off much of the flesh from Kocher's right arm, and shattered his bones from his elbow to the tip of his trigger finger. Kocher was also rendered deaf in one ear from the blast. The vehicle's turret gunner was knocked out, bleeding from his legs. All the Marines in the vehicle had penny-size pieces of shrapnel studding their faces and other areas of exposed flesh.
Corporal Wright had the worst injuries. There was very little bleeding from his arms, because the stumps had been cauterized in the blast. The main problem was his severed femoral artery. Every time his heart beat it looked like, as he later told me, "about a half glass of Coca Cola was pouring out" from the hole in his leg. With no hands, all he could do was look on helplessly as his life drained out.
Wright's fellow Marines, injured and in shock, initially were of little help. Lance Corporal Aaron Mazon, seated beside him, applied a tourne-quet to his leg, but it continued to bleed. Kocher, after tourniqueting his right arm with a bungee cord, nearly passed out when he turned to check on Wright. "All I could see was meat all over the back of the Humvee," he later told me. Kocher believes it was Wright's "retarded" humor that pulled his mind back from the brink and helped him focus. Wright nodded to his stumps and said, "Man, I don't look too good, do I?"
It was enough to snap Kocher and the driver, Sergeant Michael Music, into action. Music drove forward several hundred meters. Kocher and Mazon got out, went to Wright's door and reapplied a tournequet to his leg. When they came under fire from ambushers hiding in a nearby house, Kocher braced himself on the hood and engaged the enemy positions, operating his rifle with his left arm.
Second Platoon had a new platoon commander. Fick had been replaced with Captain Brent Morel. As Fick had done in the ambush at Muwafakiya, Morel exited his Humvee with no regard for his own safety and attempted to extricate his men from danger. Morel chose to lead several Marines in a direct assault through enemy positions. Morel sprinted across an open plain, scaled a ten-foot berm under heavy fire, while engaging enemy forces with his rifle. About this time, the number two vehicle in the convoy (formerly Espera's) was destroyed by a direct hit from either a mortar or RPG, wounding the main gunner but not killing him.
Morel continued his charge, leading Sergeant Willie Copeland toward a canal, beyond which lay the main enemy machine gun positions. A frontal assault on such emplacements was contrary to Marine Corps tactics, which call for a flanking movement to attack entrenched positions from the side or rear. One Marine in the unit later termed Morel's actions "John Wayne shit."
Given the intricacy of the terrain, the large number of attackers (estimated to be between forty and sixty) and the multiple directions they seemed to be firing from, it's possible Morel actually thought he was flanking the enemy, and not climbing directly into their machine guns, as he in fact was.
Upon wading into the canal, Morel looked back to assess the progress of Copeland who was behind him, and took a bullet beneath his arm, which traversed his chest cavity. Copeland and the other Marines from his team, under withering enemy attack, now set about pulling Morel from the direct line of fire and administering first aid.
Disastrous and foolishly brave as some considered Morel's move, Kocher insists, "Whatever people say, he acted quickly to orient the enemy's fire away from my vehicle. I believe he saved the life of my team."
Gunny Wynn was no longer platoon sergeant for Bravo Two. "Casey Kasem," the company ops chief blamed (he insists unfairly so) for critical shortages of LSA gun lubricant during the 2003 invasion, had been made platoon sergeant prior to the deployment in 2004. He rode in a vehicle driven by "Manimal" Jacks. With the platoon partially destroyed, Casey Kasem took command. He ordered Baptista's Team Three to flank the enemy as per the orthodox immediate-action drill. At the same time, they provided suppressive fire to the Marines dragging the gravely wounded Morel from the berms.
Baptista dismounted Lilley and Stafford and led them toward the enemy's fortified machine-gun emplacements. They moved in from the sides and behind the entrenched enemy gunners. Stinetorf provided covering fire. As in 2003 a heavy weapon jammed at a critical moment. Stine-torf's .50 cal failed after twenty rounds. Stinetorf resumed fire with his SAW.
In the trenches, Baptista's team attacked the enemy at close quarters. A grenade thrown by one insurgent rolled back on him, cutting his torso off at the legs. Lilley knows it sounds implausible but he's pretty certain the torso kept crawling toward him using its arms. He didn't stop, Lilley believes (and nobody else who was with him disbelieves), until Stafford fired several rounds into his head. Stafford led the way over another berm under heavy fire and killed two more enemy at close quarters. Behind them, when Stinetorf ran through all of his SAW ammunition, he dismounted and grabbed an RPK machine gun from an insurgent he had just shot and used it to resume fire.
Casey Kasem and Jacks had also moved into the berms for close-quarters combat with the enemy. Stinetorf still marvels at the change in his assessment of Casey Kasem. "It was weird. In OIF 11 hated him. But as soon as he became our platoon sergeant, it was clear that tactically he knew his shit, he trained us really well, and he was definitely not afraid to fight. I really like the guy," Stinetorf says.
As Gunny Wynn is fond of saying, "Anybody can have a good day, or bad day, but in the Marine Corps one day can change everything."
In the ambush of April 7, Casey Kasem reversed his reputation among the men in Bravo Two. Captain Morel, twenty-seven years old, married, father of two, died. Kocher, who waited to be medevaced with him, watched Morel fade out. "Captain Morel was a redhead," Kocher later told me. "When he bled out, his lips chapped, and his skin turned white, and I swear when he died his hair had turned white, even though I know that's impossible."
Twenty-six attackers .were killed. No prisoners were taken. The medals flew like shrapnel. Morel was posthumously awarded a Navy Cross, the tenth handed out since the invasion of Iraq. President Bush met with his widow prior to the award ceremony. Sergeant Copeland also received the Navy Cross. Baptista, Lilley, and Stafford each received Silver Stars. Bronze Stars were given to five others in the platoon, including Kocher.
In late April I spent a few days with Kocher and his then Marine-reservist, body-builder wife, Jaime, at their home in Oceanside, California. He'd lost forty pounds during his first few days of hospitalization in Germany. His right arm was wired together from his shoulder to the tip of his trigger finger. Kocher was already going to the gym, "the Semper Fit" fitness center at Camp Pendleton hoping to speed his recovery.