unethical tactics. Take it all in stride. Be the hunter, not the hunted: never allow your unit to be caught with its guard down. Use good judgment and act in the best interests of our Nation.
You are part of the world’s most feared and trusted force. Engage your brain before you engage your weapon. Share your courage with each other as we enter the uncertain terrain north of the Line of Departure. Keep faith in your comrades on your left and right and Marine Air overhead. Fight with a happy heart and strong spirit.
For the mission’s sake, our country’s sake, and the sake of the men who carried the Division’s colors in past battles — who fought for life and never lost their nerve — carry out your mission and keep your honor clean. Demonstrate to the world that there is “No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy” than a U.S. Marine.
From the silence I gathered that the war was beginning to feel real to the platoon. It certainly was to me. There wasn’t much else to say, so Gunny Wynn and I dismissed the men to return to the lines. Hitman Two was ready to go.
We sat there all day cleaning and recleaning weapons, checking and re-checking maps, saying and resaying prayers. At six P.M., as predicted, a rushed radio call warned us to be ready to move in fifteen minutes. We tore down camouflage nets and did final radio checks. Vehicles were started and warmed, rumbling and humming as Marines added oil and cinched hoses with extra zip ties. Every maintenance problem that had been on our “maybe” list for days was fixed in those fifteen minutes.
Sergeant Colbert pulled me aside. “Sir, can you please tell me what our company commander has done to his Humvee?” He nodded toward the CO’s headquarters vehicle, which had black duct tape covering all the windows except the windshield.
Earlier in the day, I had asked the captain the same question. He said he wanted to be able to read his maps by flashlight at night and not have the light visible outside the vehicle. When I pointed out to him that he wouldn’t be able to see outside the Humvee, he shrugged it off, as if situational awareness was what he had recon teams for.
“Sergeant Colbert, you know better than to ask me a question like that.”
Colbert smiled. “Roger that.”
Behind him, Corporal Person sat in the driver’s seat of Colbert’s Humvee. He drummed his fingers on the armor door, singing a Tupac song about dying in a gunfight. Person caught me watching him and explained, “Moto music, sir. Brings out my inner psycho.”
The last thing I did was tie down a pink air panel on the hood and mount a firefly high on the Humvee’s whip antenna. During daylight, the air panels would identify us as Americans to pilots overhead. Fireflies were small, flashing infrared lights that ran on a nine-volt battery. They were invisible to the naked eye but showed up like so many real fireflies when viewed through night vision goggles. In Iraq, they would be our primary means of recognizing friendly vehicles in the dark. Looking around through my goggles, I saw little lights winking reassuringly from each team’s Humvee.
The battalion stretched into a line and slowly started out across the desert. As the sky darkened, I saw columns of winking lights on every horizon, all converging on the same two points. Marine engineers would blow two breaches in the fence and berms along the Iraqi border. Our orders sent us to the western breach. Farther to the west, I knew the Army’s Third Infantry Division was flowing toward its own breach near the border with Saudi Arabia. To our east, I saw flashes as Marine artillery pounded Safwan Hill, the only high ground along the border. Another Marine platoon would soon drop onto Safwan to kill any survivors at the Iraqi observation post there.
I passed radio reports on to the teams: change of plans — we would use the eastern breach; change again — back to the western breach; Iraqi tanks and armored personnel carriers spotted near the border; Iraqi soldiers near the border laying mines; trenches of oil ignited to decrease our visibility. We drove this way for five hours. Stop and go, fifty trucks and Humvees bumping through the dark across an uneven desert, our only reference points the infrared flashes on the vehicles we followed. I was disoriented, trusting the map and GPS but unable to get a good intuitive feel for what they told me. I knew the lieutenant whose platoon was in the lead. He would be on point for the battalion all the way up to the bridges. I had watched him labor over the route for weeks at Camp Matilda. While other officers had watched movies and written letters, he had huddled over his maps and laptop, plotting and replotting, memorizing every turn and landmark on the route. I trusted him and relaxed a bit.
We approached the breach around midnight and stopped to wait our turn in the flow through the narrow channel. To our right, an artillery battery blasted volley after volley northward. The howitzers belched huge fireballs into the night, illuminating the faces around me as if we were sitting by a campfire. In the distance, across the Iraqi border, a fire burned. We cocked our heads, listening for jets overhead — our surest salvation — but heard nothing. Some Marines took advantage of the pause to stretch out on the ground and sleep for a few minutes. I wandered among the platoon, trying to read the Marines and looking for vehicle problems.
Major Whitmer ran past me, on his way to the rear of the column. He stopped to say there were reports of Iraqi tanks moving just ahead of us. Laughing, he said he hoped my platoon’s AT4s were within easy reach. I laughed also, and felt for a few seconds the irrational excitement of heading into battle. We hugged each other awkwardly, slapping backs and clanking weapons together. The good cheer faded when Major Whitmer disappeared into the darkness. Tanks.
I sat down on the hood of my Humvee. Artillery still rattled my teeth every couple of minutes, but between shots the night was quiet. That feeling I’d had during my last dinner at Jay’s was back. I stood at the brink of something unknown and unknowable. Throughout my life, I’d always had some sense of what was coming next. People build continuity into their lives — places, friends, goals. We go to work on Monday with plans for Friday night, enroll as freshmen intending to be seniors, and save money for retirement. We try to control what comes next and shape it to meet our will. This was too big for me to shape. I was absolved of responsibility for my future. It was replaced with responsibility for twenty-two other futures. Nothing in my history seemed to matter beyond that line on the map. I didn’t know what to expect, could not even imagine what might come next. Strangely, I tried to conjure up images of what I might see and how I might react, but all was blank. I hoped this was only the effect of standing at the crease. I told myself that once we crossed the border, I would again be able to guess at my future.
As dawn approached, we linked up with a light-armored reconnaissance company and moved toward the breach. The LAVs would escort us through the berm before breaking off to do their own mission. Their extra firepower was especially welcome here, at the one point where the Iraqis knew we would be. Gunny Wynn drove as we spun toward the breach through deep sand. We had driven along the border at night during previous weeks, but I had never seen it up close. On the Kuwaiti side, a chainlink fence ran to the eastern and western horizons. Bulldozers or tanks had punched a gap in it a hundred yards wide. The next obstruction was a tall sand berm, followed by a ditch, then a road on which the United Nations had patrolled, followed by another fence, another berm, and a final ditch. When we climbed up out of the second ditch, we were in Iraq. It was five o’clock in the morning, Friday, March 21. H-hour. D-day.
According to my compass, we advanced due north. After twisting through scrubby plants and past rusting tanks, reminders of the war twelve years before, we started across a flat, sandy plain. I deployed the platoon in a wedge formation, with Colbert and Espera at the front and Lovell and Patrick at either flank. This maximized our firepower to the front by allowing each team to shoot forward, rather than being masked behind one another. I was struck by the sight of Sergeant Lovell’s team racing through the desert a few hundred meters to my left, their Humvee throwing a tail of dust into the sky behind it. It was a scene of pure aggression.
We passed desolate homes, where families eked out a living with goats and emaciated cattle. Our first Iraqis. We trained binoculars and machine guns on them, but they only waved. We waved back, thankful for their welcome, and continued pushing north at forty miles per hour. According to our intelligence, this was Iraq’s empty quarter, a vast and sparsely populated desert. By noon, we’d seen more people than I had seen in all my time in Afghanistan. It was our first clue that the civilian population of Iraq would be a major factor in the war.
With vehicles shimmering in the midday sun, we drove across a gravel sea. Some high power lines allowed me to pinpoint our location on the map. It showed a cluster of buildings to our front. As I strained to see them, antennas rose on the horizon, and we stopped a few kilometers south of a walled compound. Through my scope, I saw black human dots at the gate. The battalion called for Cobra attack helicopters, which clattered up from the
