overhead power line onto Colbert’s vehicle, knocking Corporal Walt Hasser from the turret. He sprawled backward across the roof. I watched a pair of hands reach up and pull him upright. For an eternity of two or three seconds, we sat almost motionless. In the lull, I heard a Mark-19 roaring behind me as Corporal Jacks tore a building in half. He was bellowing as he fired, yelling at us not to stop moving. When enemy fire erupted from a mud-brick building to our left, Jacks stitched it with dozens of grenades, collapsing three stories into two and silencing the fedayeen guns. When Hasser sat up, we jumped forward again.
Colbert’s team made a forty-five-degree turn at high speed, and I saw the Humvee’s outer wheels unweight themselves and threaten to leave the road. Corporal Person corrected, and they kept barreling east. Espera and Wynn followed through the turn, and I was briefly aware of a turquoise-domed mosque surrounded by a masonry wall. Shots rained down from the minaret. I thought, absurdly, that this was against the rules. We were in the home stretch now, approaching the edge of town. On the radio, Team Three assured me they were behind us, following Team Two. I still couldn’t see anyone else from the battalion ahead.
Finally, we flashed through a walled gate. We hit the T intersection with Highway 7 still doing over fifty miles per hour. To the south, herringboned off the road, sat the tanks of RCT-1. Rows of dismounted Marines crouched behind berms, watching in disbelief as our Humvees rocketed out of the town. Colbert was moving too fast to make the turn onto the highway and rumbled down an embankment on the far side. With bullets still whizzing from behind us, we all followed, trying to put some dirt between us and the town.
Colbert turned south on the hard-baked dirt at the bottom of the embankment. There was a hazy tree line a mile away across the open field. Tactically, this was still pretty easy — shoot, move, communicate. Team Three halted behind us, in partial defilade behind the berm so their machine gun could fire back into the town to take some pressure off us. Stinetorf hunched forward with dark goggles over his eyes, blazing away. We had escaped. Then everything went to hell.
With a sickening crunch, Colbert’s heavy-armored Humvee cracked through the field’s dirt crust and sank to its frame in tar. The field was sobka — a huge creme brulee, baked hard on top but deep and soft underneath. We’d all been briefed on Iraq’s sobka fields but had yet to see one. Now we were mired in one and still under fire.
Colbert’s team piled out as we set up a hasty defensive perimeter. Team Three continued to cover our rear, and I sent Espera ahead to give us some visibility across the berm to our front. At that point, my worst nightmare was a wave of angry fedayeen seeing us helpless and streaming across the road to finish the fight. The wind had picked up, and blowing sand turned the sky orange and cut our visibility to a few hundred meters. Patrick crept forward to the edge of the sobka and hooked a winch to the rear of Colbert’s Humvee. Rudy threw the vehicle into reverse, whining, straining, not moving an inch. It was futile. We needed something with more torque and more horsepower.
I called the battalion on the radio and requested Goodwrench, the mechanical support team. The motor transport guys are not recon Marines, and the younger team operators sometimes deride them as pogues. I never heard these disparagements from the older Marines in the platoon. That afternoon, I learned why.
Five minutes after my call for help, Staff Sergeant Brinks came chugging up the highway in his hand-me- down five-ton Army truck, oblivious to the bullets snapping past. He eased down the embankment, where Stinetorf continued to unleash bursts on our assailants. Hopping down from the cab with a grin, Brinks said, “Howdy, sir. What’s up?” I was so strung-out on adrenaline I could hardly speak, and I wasn’t sure if his cheeriness was heroism or folly. In time I would learn it’s simply the best way to get the job done.
Brinks sized up the Humvee with a professional eye and barked some orders to his Marines in the truck. They piled out and quickly attached a chain. With a tug and a pop, Colbert’s Humvee jumped from the sobka, and we were ready to move. We trained our guns on the town to cover Goodwrench’s departure and then followed him in single file. Colbert’s Humvee crabbed along on bent rims, clumps of tar seeming to double the width of its frame. After half a kilometer, we climbed back up onto the highway and accelerated past RCT-1’s dozens of armored vehicles. Why had we, in little more than dune buggies, just charged through a hostile town while tanks and LAVs sat here with their crews dozing in the dirt?
We saw the battalion circled in a field off the highway, and I led the platoon into our place along the perimeter. When halted in open terrain, the three companies formed a big circle, with each one taking a third of the clock — ten o’clock to two o’clock, two to six, and six to ten, with twelve being north. Bravo Company had six to ten, so we faced west across a mile of open field to a distant line of palm trees. Squeezing into a gap in the lines, the whole platoon covered only a hundred meters of frontage. After we pulled to a stop and Gunny Wynn shut off the engine, neither of us got out. For a few minutes, we sat quietly before turning toward each other. Wynn cracked a smile, and we both began to laugh. The laughs were forced, and I noticed he looked pale, the skin of his face drawn tighter than usual across his skull.
When he spoke, Wynn sounded hoarse. “Holy shit, huh? That was crazy.”
“We almost got hosed.” I looked at the map. “Al Gharraf. The name of the town is Al Gharraf.”
I left the platoon to set up our defense and went in search of company headquarters. Stumbling across the uneven field under the weight of my gear and MOPP suit, I saw a cluster of Marines around a figure on the ground. I walked up and heard bits of a story, surely being retold now for the tenth time.
“So Darnold’s driving through that fucking town, rounds zinging in from everywhere, and all of a sudden his arm slams sideways off the steering wheel. He says, ‘I’m hit!’ and Sergeant Kocher leans over to look. Sure enough, Darnold’s bleeding from a hole in his forearm. Well, Kocher, real cool, wraps a tourniquet around it and says, ‘You’re fine. Keep driving.’ Darnold shut up and drove, and we ended up here with everyone else. Goddamn.”
I stared for a moment at First Recon Battalion’s first combat casualty. Darnold looked fine. There was a small red hole in his forearm where the bullet had entered and lodged.
At company headquarters, the captain had no further instructions for me — just settle in for the night and be ready to move in the morning — so I returned to the platoon. By now, the Marines had hacked sleeping holes from the soft dirt and had begun the daily routine of security, cleaning weapons, eating, cleaning feet, and sleeping.
And storytelling. Every fight is refought afterward. Sometimes quietly, sometimes boisterously; sometimes with laughs, sometimes with tears. The telling and retelling are important. Platoons have institutional memory. They learn, and they change. Most of that learning happens after a firefight. Some officers squelched the stories, considering them unprofessional and distracting. I encouraged them, as psychological unburdening and as improvised classrooms where we sharpened our blades for the next fight.
But something about the retelling unnerved me, too. Faith in our senses is what anchors us to sanity. Once, in college, I went cross-country skiing during a snowstorm. As I crossed an open meadow, the blanket of snow on the ground merged with the snow falling from the sky. With no horizon and no depth perception, I got vertigo. A twig poking through the snow near my feet looked the same as another skier hundreds of yards away. My head spun, and I had to sit down.
Combat is a form of vertigo. I was trained to thrive on chaos, but nothing prepared me for the fear of doubting my own senses. Frequently, I found that my memory of a firefight was just that — mine. Afterward, five Marines told five different stories. I remembered turning left off the dirt road onto a paved street running west through Al Gharraf. I saw fire coming from buildings to the right and remembered a drag race of four or five kilometers out to the highway. That was my memory, my accepted truth of what had happened.
But the map showed the distance was only about fifteen hundred meters, less than half of what I’d estimated. Some in the platoon remembered armed men standing to our left as we made the turn; I never saw them. The domed mosque was burned into my memory, but only Colbert and Wright could remember seeing it as I described it. Person was adamant that we had driven across a bridge during our sprint to the highway. Not one other person in the platoon remembered a bridge, but there it was on the map.
Marines manned three of the four machine guns in the late afternoon. They searched the horizon with binoculars, calling out points of interest to one another. The fourth gun lay in pieces across a Humvee hood. Over it, Corporal Jacks labored intently. I watched his big dirty hands cleaning each small part with tenderness, even love. He reassembled the gun and then began to wipe down each individual grenade in the linked belts of Mark-19 ammunition. Watching Jacks clean his gun before eating, sleeping, or cleaning himself, I saw a bit of the essence of the Marine Corps, the spirit that has sustained young Marines in bad places for more than two hundred years. This was no idle patriotic reverie on my part, though. It was the kernel of a growing unwillingness to watch these Marines mistreated or wrongly employed by those with more power than experience. I cautioned myself not to pass judgment too quickly. As a platoon commander, I saw only a tiny piece of the puzzle. But every tactical fiber in my
