will never take any risks, realistic or otherwise.
Ideally, we could have done sniper overwatches and undertaken scouting missions for the Marines all around Nasiriya. We could have been a much bigger part of the Marines’ drive. We might have saved some of their lives.
We wanted to go out at night and hit the next big city or town the Marine Corps was going to pass through. We’d soften the target for them, killing off as many bad guys as we could. We did do a few missions like that, but it was certainly a lot less than we could have done.
Evil
I had never known that much about Islam. Raised as a Christian, obviously I knew there had been religious conflicts for centuries. I knew about the Crusades, and I knew that there had been fighting and atrocities forever.
But I also knew that Christianity had evolved from the Middle Ages. We don’t kill people because they’re a different religion.
The people we were fighting in Iraq, after Saddam’s army fled or was defeated, were fanatics. They hated us because we weren’t Muslim. They wanted to kill us, even though we’d just booted out their dictator, because we practiced a different religion than they did.
Isn’t religion supposed to teach tolerance?
People say you have to distance yourself from your enemy to kill him. If that’s true, in Iraq, the insurgents made it really easy.
The fanatics we fought valued nothing but their twisted interpretation of religion. And half the time they just
Many of the insurgents were cowards. They routinely used drugs to stoke their courage. Without them, alone, they were nothing. I have a tape somewhere showing a father and a girl in a house that was being searched. They were downstairs; for some reason, a flash-bang went off upstairs.
On the video, the father hides behind the girl, afraid that he’s going to be killed and ready to sacrifice his daughter.
Hidden Bodies
They may have been cowards, but they could certainly kill people. The insurgents didn’t worry about ROEs or court-martials. If they had the advantage, they would kill any Westerner they could find, whether they were soldiers or not.
One day we were sent to a house where we had heard there might be U.S. prisoners. We didn’t find anyone in the building. But in the basement, there were obvious signs that the dirt had been disturbed. So we set up lights and started digging.
It wasn’t long before I saw a pants leg, then a body, freshly buried.
An American soldier. Army.
Next to him was another. Then another man, this one wearing Marine camis.
My brother had joined the Marines a little before 9/11. I hadn’t heard from him, and I thought that he had deployed to Iraq.
For some reason, as I helped pull the dead body up, I was sure it was my brother.
It wasn’t. I said a silent prayer and we kept digging.
Another body, another Marine. I bent over and forced myself to look.
Not him.
But now, with each man we pulled out of that grave—and there were a bunch—I was more and more convinced I was going to see my brother. My stomach tightened. I kept digging. I wanted to puke.
Finally, we were done. He wasn’t there.
I felt a moment of relief, even elation—none of them were my brother. Then I felt tremendous sadness for the murdered young men whose bodies we had pulled out.
When I finally heard from my brother, I found out that even though he was in Iraq, he hadn’t been anywhere near where I’d seen those bodies. He’d had his own scares and hard times, I’m sure, but hearing his voice just made me feel a lot better.
I was still big brother, hoping to protect him. Hell, he didn’t need me to watch over him; he was a Marine, and a tough one. But somehow those old instincts never go away.
At another location, we found barrels of chemical material that was intended for use as biochemical weapons. Everyone talks about there being no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but they seem to be referring to completed nuclear bombs, not the many deadly chemical weapons or precursors that Saddam had stockpiled.
Maybe the reason is that the writing on the barrels showed that the chemicals came from France and Germany, our supposed Western allies.
The thing I always wonder about is how much Saddam was able to hide before we actually invaded. We’d given so much warning before we came in, that he surely had time to move and bury tons of material. Where it went, where it will turn up, what it will poison—I think those are pretty good questions that have never been answered.
One day we saw some things in the desert and thought they were buried IEDs. We called the bomb-disposal people and they came out. Lo and behold, what they found wasn’t a bomb—it was an airplane.
Saddam had buried a bunch of his fighters in the desert. He had them covered with plastic and then tried to hide them. Probably he figured we’d come through like we did in Desert Storm, hit quick and then leave.
He was wrong about that.
“We’re Going to Die”
We continued working with the Marines as they marched north. Our missions would typically take us out ahead of their advance, scouting for knots of defenders. Although we had intel that there were some enemy soldiers in the area, there weren’t supposed to be any large units.
By this time, we were working with the entire platoon; all sixteen of us. We came up to a small building compound at the edge of a town. Once we were there, we began taking fire.
The firefight quickly ratcheted up, and within a few minutes we realized we were surrounded, our escape cut off by a force of several hundred Iraqis.
I started killing a lot of Iraqis—we all were—but for everyone we shot, four or five seemed to materialize to take their place. This went on for hours, with the fighting stoking up, then dying down.
Most firefights in Iraq were sporadic. They might be very intense for a few minutes, perhaps even an hour or more, but eventually the Iraqis would withdraw. Or we would.
That didn’t happen here. The fight continued in waves all through the night. The Iraqis knew they had us outnumbered and surrounded and they weren’t quitting. Little by little, they started getting closer and closer, until it
