south a few minutes later. They flew low over the buildings, dropping their noses menacingly at the men loafing outside. Under cover of the Cobras’ cannons, we sent a translator toward the compound. The Iraqis told him that they had been ordered to guard this communications site against the Americans, but all they wanted to do was go home. We bypassed them as the guards smiled and waved.
Minutes later, Marines in the lead Humvee spotted three land mines poking up from the rocky soil. Either they were old and had been exposed by the constant wind, or they had been lazily buried. While Colbert marked them on the Blue Force Tracker, we shifted our formation to single file, and each driver steered carefully to stay in the tracks of the Humvee in front. I was sweating in the tenth vehicle and could only sympathize with the guys up front. Soon we climbed up onto a paved road and raced along it for several miles before turning north across a trackless waste of gravelly desert.
As sunset approached, we slowed. Highway 8 cut across our path a few kilometers ahead. It was a modern highway — six lanes with guardrails and a wide median — running from Basra to Nasiriyah and then on to Baghdad. No American forces had yet crossed north of it. In recon terms, a road like this was a linear danger area — an obstacle to be dealt with most carefully. We would be exposed while crossing the highway and couldn’t know whether Iraqi tanks lurked nearby. American airpower was superb, but with so many ground units moving, we couldn’t expect complete coverage all the time. I knew only what I could see.
We crept up to the highway, planning to send vehicles down it to the east and west to guard the flanks of the crossing point. Just as we left the comparative safety of the desert and committed ourselves to crossing, two trucks came up over a rise to the east, traveling quickly toward us on the pavement. I raised my binoculars. They looked like Toyota Land Cruisers, painted desert brown and filled with people. Classic Iraqi military. A few days later, those trucks would have disappeared in a fireball anywhere within a mile of us, but this was the first day of the war. Killing and destroying had not yet become routine. Reconnaissance units train to collect information and report it back to combat commanders, who generally oversee most of the destruction. So when the trucks drove over the hill, the teams fell back on their training: instead of firing, they reported what they saw. I listened to meticulous descriptions of the trucks on the radio and wondered why no one at the front was shooting.
By the time we processed that the Iraqi military was “declared hostile” and could be engaged without provocation, the trucks had stopped, and uniformed men stood next to them with their hands in the air. Half of the battalion was already across the highway, so each passing Humvee simply trained its guns on the bewildered Iraqis and continued north into the desert beyond the road. After all the tough talk, all the doubt, fear, and wonder, our first encounter with Saddam’s army ended with us pretending we hadn’t seen them. I was grateful that we had scraped by without anyone on either side being dumb enough to fire.
We saw plumes of smoke to the east and turned to our best source of information to find out what they were. The BBC suggested that the Army was already nearing Nasiriyah, in the desert to our west, that Marines were working to secure the port city of Umm Qasr to our south, and that a few oil fires were burning in the Rumaila oil fields — the probable source of the smoke around us. They also reported Central Command’s claim that a thousand Tomahawk missiles and a thousand air sorties had been launched the night before. Wynn and I looked at each other and smiled. The more the jets destroyed, the less there would be to oppose us. We continued driving as the desert turned pink and the long shadows cast by our Humvees faded into gray.
Nightfall found us parked along the raised tracks of the Baghdad-Basra railroad. Gunny Wynn and I refueled the teams from our spare fuel cans and then drove a few kilometers back to battalion headquarters to refuel ourselves from a tanker truck. By the time we dug our ranger graves and began a radio watch rotation, rain was falling. It rained through the night, turning the dirt beneath my head into sticky clay. I steamed inside my MOPP suit as my body heated the moisture. When it dried, I wrapped myself with a crinkling space blanket in a futile attempt to keep warm. By morning, I was stiff, tired, and caked with reddish mud. It was H+24, one full day since the start of the invasion.
23
OUR MISSION KEPT CHANGING. Eventually, I expected to move north through the marshes to recon the bridge at Chibayish, but for now our only guidance was to “screen the flank of RCT-1.” The Regimental Combat Team was moving toward Nasiriyah on Highway 8, so presumably we were there to give early warning of a massed Iraqi assault on their northern flank. The only Iraqis we saw, though, were in no shape to attack anything.
Sunrise revealed bands of men moving in the distance. They walked toward us along the elevated railroad tracks, streaming slowly from east to west. Through binoculars, I saw they wore a motley assortment of army uniforms, Western clothes, and traditional robes. Some carried AK-47s. Others lugged duffel bags and what looked like antifreeze bottles full of drinking water. Most limped, and none moved quickly.
The sight of Iraqis, especially soldiers, was still novel, and we moved forward to intercept them. The men in the lead saw us and dropped their weapons. Behind them, the gesture trickled down the line until soon the ground was littered to the horizon with discarded weapons and stripped uniforms. Grown men stood in their underwear, waving and crying. Through Mish, we learned that they were from the Fifty-first Mechanized Infantry Division, based around Basra. Their unit had surrendered and collapsed almost without firing a shot, and now they were walking to their home villages along the Euphrates near Nasiriyah, another hundred kilometers or more across barren desert. They were nearly out of water. One man cried and clutched at me, telling through his sobs of regime-controlled death squads of fedayeen executing soldiers for surrendering or abandoning their posts.
The last thing I wanted to do was get bogged down processing prisoners. Recon was the eyes and ears of the invasion force. We were in a constant race for relevance. If we fell behind the main body of the division, we fell out of the fight. Searching surrendering Iraqis was a job for the military police or another rear-echelon unit; our job was to attack north and keep attacking all the way to Baghdad. In the absence of orders, however, we had to stay there, and we couldn’t stay without at least taking a cursory interest in the hundreds of armed men flooding our position.
“Toss him a humrat,” I said.
“Humrat” was Marine slang for a humanitarian ration, a yellow plastic bag of food about the size of a small- town telephone book. In Afghanistan, the Air Force had dropped hundreds of thousands of humrats across the country, but the infantry had never gotten any. So we’d passed out regular MREs to curry favor and make deals. The hungry Afghans had torn into the meals with little regard for the contents and felt duped after eating non-halal entrees such as pork chow mein. Some people had even eaten the water-triggered chemical heaters, with predictably ugly results. In Iraq, then, each vehicle carried a case of humanitarian rations. They contained crackers, jelly, and simple dishes such as red beans and rice — no pork and no heaters.
The Iraqi soldier crouched on his haunches and watched with wide eyes as Reyes sliced open the yellow bag and held it out to him. It seemed logical that the humrats were a bright and recognizable color so that people could spot them more easily. Unfortunately, certain bombs also were painted yellow — to warn innocent people to stay away from them. Iraqis later told us stories of children confusing the two. But the soldier happily munched a Tootsie Roll, oblivious to the history and controversy surrounding his meal.
Until midafternoon, we repeated the same ritual dozens of times. Approaching Iraqis saw us and got scared. They altered course and tried to move around us. Since we wanted to prevent masses of armed men from converging on the RCT near Nasiriyah, we dispatched Humvees all over the desert, herding the Iraqi soldiers as sheepdogs do sheep. Many men waved American propaganda leaflets above their heads, as if those were guarantees of safe passage. They said that aircraft had dropped millions of leaflets all over their barracks and bases outside Basra. The leaflets promised that American forces would bypass any Iraqi who surrendered but would kill any who chose to fight. Enough of the soldiers remembered the first Gulf War to take the threat seriously. By late afternoon, we had spoken with members of three Iraqi divisions — the Fifty-first Mechanized, Sixth Armored, and Eleventh Infantry — and all told the same story. The psychological campaign in southern Iraq appeared to have been a success.
When we had a large group cornered, we would disarm them, search for anything of intelligence value, pass out humanitarian rations, and refill their water. Many men sobbed when they realized we were feeding them instead of shooting them. A young boy, dressed in military trousers and a T-shirt from the Janesville, Wisconsin, YMCA,
