news followed: our company commander was on his way to our position to work up a mission to deter those gunmen moving in the trees to our east.
I met the captain when his Humvee pulled into our small circle. “Sir, we took some shots at them, and they seem to have gotten the idea,” I said. “We’re glassing the area but haven’t seen anyone moving.”
“Yeah, but Alpha Company’s up there calling for fire, and I want to call a mission, too.”
I couldn’t believe it. We were going to fire artillery to keep up with Alpha Company. “Sir, I’d rather go on doing what we’re doing. We’ve got things under control.”
“You just keep tabs on your platoon, Lieutenant Fick, and let me work up the mission.” Three minutes later, I listened as he made a botched call for fire to the battalion. I sat on my hands until he called in a target location only two hundred meters from where we stood. Anything inside six hundred meters was considered “danger close” — requiring special care due to its proximity to friendly troops. In this open ground, we’d be showered with shrapnel from our own rounds. I started to intervene.
“Sir, that’s way inside danger close. Cancel the mission,” Gunny Wynn said with growing alarm.
“We’re shooting it. Keep quiet,” he replied.
“It’s an empty field!” I shouted. “We’re watching it. You’re going to hit us with the rounds, and probably RCT-1, too, since we don’t know when they’ll be coming up the road. Cancel the fucking mission.” I reached to take the radio handset from him.
I later found out that Major Whitmer was on the other end of the radio, and he was even angrier than I was. He threw the handset down in disgust, screaming about “that fucking idiot,” whom the battalion staff secretly called “Shitman.” His candor earned him a disapproving look from Colonel Ferrando, since the division chief of staff was within earshot. But he rejected the mission and put a limit on the damage wrought by the captain’s ineptitude. The CO drove off after threatening me for challenging his authority.
In keeping with our tradition of a crisis a minute, Sergeant Espera ran up, crouching low behind the Humvees to thwart any snipers watching us. “Sir, I’ve got a flat tire. We need to change it now so we’re ready to move.”
I considered this, using the framework my Quantico instructors referred to as “turning the map around” — looking at the options from the enemy’s perspective. What would I do, as a fedayeen commander, if I saw a Marine Humvee up on a jack with men frantically changing a flat tire? I’d capitalize on their weakness and attack. At worst, I’d catch them immobile and inflict casualties. At best, I’d force them to withdraw, leaving the Humvee for me to burn as a trophy of American impotence.
“Espera, I can’t let you do that here,” I said. “You have to take your team and drive up to Goodwrench’s position. They have more people and can help you change the tire faster. Sorry. Get your boys together and go now. We could be moving any minute.”
He shot me a glance, half-trusting and half-doubting. Another second’s consideration and Espera nodded, seeing the logic. “Roger that, sir. I’ll call you when we’re en route back here.”
Espera’s open-back Humvee crept out from the drainage ditch and raced up the highway, bumping unevenly on its rim. Watching them go, I felt another pang of responsibility, and of respect.
Three hours after stopping, we still hadn’t seen a single Marine from RCT-1. Watching the sun slide down the sky, I was more and more uncomfortable about sitting in one place. Tactical catastrophes are rarely the outcome of a single poor decision. Small compromises incrementally close off options until a commander is forced into actions he would never choose freely. I didn’t want to become the subject of a case study taught at Quantico, and I certainly didn’t want to be pictured in Dr. Death’s killology slide show.
Although Ar Rifa’s gates and shutters had been closed when we arrived, curious townspeople gradually began to venture outside the walls, peering at us. Some waved, while others drew their fingers across their throats. Up the road, dozens of Iraqis scoured the pavement, scavenging spent brass bullet casings from the earlier shooting. I called battalion headquarters to request a translator. Ten minutes later, a Humvee roared down the road and deposited Mish in the mud next to me.
Mish, a Kuwaiti, despised the Iraqis, who had overrun his country only a decade before. He weighed more than 250 pounds, and he kept his long hair coiled in a pile beneath an American-issue helmet. Even after the Marine Corps concluded that weapons of mass destruction were no longer a threat and allowed us to remove our MOPP suits, Mish could never be found without his chemical suit, gloves, and cumbersome rubber boots. Now he eyed the growing crowd with distaste before ambling across the road to talk.
I watched as the residents shook their fists and spat in Arabic at Mish. He shrugged and listened with heavy-lidded eyes. Three men from Ar Rifa pointed at us, their voices raised and their feet stamping angrily. I told Lovell’s Marines to keep an eye on me and walked out to join Mish.
“What are they saying?”
Mish paused, savoring his importance. “They say they are happy the Marines are here, and they’re grateful to be liberated.”
“Goddammit, Mish, cut the bullshit.”
“They wonder why you are sitting here and are afraid you will attack the town and kill them. They say the fedayeen are at the other end of town, in the old headquarters of the Ba’ath Party. They want to help us kill the bad guys.”
Now we were making progress. “OK, ask them if they can do something for us.” I handed Mish a fistful of infrared chem lights. “Tell them to wait until after dark, then crack these chem lights and put them on the roofs of the buildings where the fedayeen are holed up. American helicopters will be able to see the lights and may destroy the buildings.”
This was a plan we’d been briefed on earlier. I had my doubts about it, given what I’d already seen of Iraqi tribalism. Most of these lights, I expected, would end up on the roofs of people to whom these men owed money. Still, it might work if we could corroborate the identity of the buildings with another source. The men thanked me profusely for the lights as Mish extorted cigarettes from them. Dusk had deepened over Ar Rifa, and we jogged back across no man’s land to the relative safety of the Humvees.
The battalion repeated instructions to stand by and wait for RCT-1, so we settled in for an uneasy night. The Marines attached batteries to our fireflies, and soon the little infrared lights winked comfortingly from each Humvee when viewed through night vision goggles. A few Marines dozed on the ground while their teammates scanned the fields and town for movement. I checked our perimeter security again and stopped at Colbert’s Humvee to use the AN/PAS-13. This black plastic sight was about the size of a tissue box and enabled us to see heat. Traditional night optics amplify ambient light, hence the nickname “star-light scopes.” Thermal optics like the AN/PAS-13 see heat differentials and paint any heat source, such as a human being, as a bright white blob moving against a dark background. Satisfied that we were alone, I walked back to my Humvee to monitor the radio and choke down a cold MRE. A call from headquarters interrupted me.
“Be advised we have a friendly logistics convoy approaching from the south.”
I raised the handset to reply as machine gun fire shattered the night. Red tracers streamed east and west from the highway as trucks rumbled closer. I looked in vain for incoming fire.
“Get down! Everybody down!”
The platoon was already diving from turrets and hoods onto the dirt. I dropped behind the engine block with the side of my head pressed into the mud. Yelling “Cease fire” into the handset, I watched the convoy of trucks racing toward us, still pumping rounds into the trees and buildings along the highway. Not a single tracer round traveled toward them from the darkness. For a moment, I fixed on the irony of waiting to be shot by fellow Marines. Rage followed cynicism as I thought indignantly of how we had spent the entire day sitting in this dangerous spot, making it safe for their passage, and now these pogues were blasting through at fifty miles per hour, shooting everything in sight. My neural tangent circled back to how good it would feel to return fire, knowing we could waste the careless bastards. By then, though, the trucks were nearly abreast of us, and I pushed deeper into the dirt, watching beneath the Humvee as seven-ton trucks and tractor-trailers roared past, spewing tracers in wild streams far above our heads. Thank God they couldn’t aim. I called a warning north to the other platoons before sitting up and leaning back against the tire. Mud caked the side of my face.
Colbert shouted from the darkness, “Fuckers thought our fireflies were muzzle flashes.” Another voice volunteered that support troops should carry clubs instead of guns.
Near midnight, the battalion called to tell us we’d be linking up as a battalion on the north side of Ar Rifa before beginning a long drive north to an airfield near Qalat Sukkar. Gunny Wynn and I huddled beneath a poncho, shining a red-lens flashlight on our maps and trying to figure out how to get there. Qalat Sukkar was the next town
