Sergeant Colbert first, followed by Sergeant Espera, Gunny Wynn and me in the middle, and Sergeants Patrick and Lovell behind.
We rolled slowly into the darkness, the night warm and silent and blowing through our open doors. The plan called for us to move to the near side of the bridge into town and set up a support-by-fire position on the north side of the road. Third Platoon would follow behind and set up a similar position on the road’s south side. Once both platoons were set to cover the battalion, it would cross the bridge into Muwaffiqiya, and we would fall in behind. It was a classic example of overwatch, a tactic practiced by Marines in the woods and fields of Quantico, Parris Island, Camp Pendleton, and Camp Lejeune.
There had been murmurs about why we hadn’t pushed teams out on foot to recon the bridge earlier in the evening. It was an obvious chokepoint, a logical place for an ambush. Apparently, there just hadn’t been time. Countering these fears were a pair of Cobras sweeping in front of us no more than a hundred feet above the road. The pilots reported heat signatures that might be people and fired a couple of rockets at suspected bunkers on the far side of the river. I held a radio handset to each ear but instinctively reached down and pulled back the charging handle on my rifle to make sure a round was chambered. We kept driving.
“OK, we’re set.” Colbert radioed that he was in place on the north side of the approach to the bridge.
“Negative. I still can’t see the bridge. Keep moving.” Our mission was to secure the bridge for the battalion’s crossing, and I still couldn’t even see it. I saw only a thin stand of trees on the left and a few mud-brick buildings on the right, fifty meters from the road. The Cobras orbited behind us, and the night was again quiet. Everything glowed green and grainy in my night vision goggles.
“Roger,” Colbert said, and we crept forward again.
Colbert’s nickname was the Iceman because he never lost his cool. That’s why I had him on point for the platoon on a night when the platoon was on point for the battalion and the battalion was on point for almost the whole Marine Corps. The next thing I heard through my headset radio was his warning: “There’s an obstacle on the bridge.” Colbert’s voice was measured but taut, the way an airline pilot would tell his passengers about an engine fire. Then I saw it, too — what looked like a Dumpster full of scrap metal pulled out into the road. Large-diameter pipes lay scattered on both sides of it. There was only one explanation.
“Back up, back up, back the fuck up.” The fear was palpable. You could hear it and feel it and even taste it, like a penny under your tongue. But the Marines stayed calm. We were jammed together with trees to our left, buildings to our right, an obstacle in front of us, and the rest of the battalion pressing in from behind.
We had driven into an ambush. I knew it and wondered, for a fleeting second, when the shooting would start. I ducked my head and tried to pull my arms into my bulletproof vest while still holding the radios and my rifle. Marines call it “turtling.”
I gave the order to turn around and got a terse, “Roger, wilco,” from Colbert. As his Humvee began its turn to the left, toward the trees, Colbert radioed, “There are men in the trees,” and opened fire.
The staccato chatter of his M4 sounded distant and tinny, but then the Mark-19 began to roar, spitting grenades into the trees in quick bursts. The other teams opened up with rifles, the second Mark-19, and the two .50-caliber machine guns. Our volume of outgoing fire was immense. Tracers burned across the sky, and muzzle flashes washed out my goggles, replacing green definition with indistinguishable white blobs. I flipped them up on my helmet and tried to figure out what was going on.
Fear passes quickly. Once the shooting started, I was busy directing the platoon, talking on the radio, and shooting back. It wasn’t courage so much as task saturation. Streams of incoming tracers skipped and ricocheted down the road from across the bridge. Passing bullets buzzed and whined, just as they do in cartoons. The enemy machine gunner was shooting low, and his rounds sparked as they caromed off the pavement into our vehicles. Impacts jolted my Humvee.
More enemy fire chattered from the trees. Small arms. Single shots and short bursts. I watched an RPG flash from the right, from somewhere back in the maze of mud buildings. When it blew up in front of me, a shower of sparks burned into my vision and lingered there after the blast faded.
Enemy to our left, right, and straight ahead. This assessment process took only seconds, and I was on the radio requesting air support. I made a conscious effort to be calm and speak slowly, but my request was a shouted, garbled mess all the same. The Cobras roared back, cleared hot to attack anything on the far side of the river or more than twenty-five meters off the road. They poured machine gun fire over our heads, and the whoosh of their rockets blotted out the distant voices in my ear asking for updates.
We had to get the platoon out of the kill zone. Gunfire and shouting rendered our radios almost useless, so dropping my rifle and drawing my pistol, I told Gunny Wynn to turn the truck around while I went out to guide the teams.
“What?”
“Turn the Humvee around, break contact to the rear, and I’ll be right back.” Rarely did I do anything against his advice, but this would be one of those times.
Ducking meaninglessly, since the enemy machine gun fire was at knee level, I ran forward to where Colbert was still frozen in the middle of his turn. My immediate concern was being shot by my own men. They were intent on their firing and couldn’t see me running up from their periphery. Each M4 was equipped with a laser, visible only through night vision goggles. Put the red dot on your target and you’ll hit it every time. Laser dots converged together on shadowy figures in the trees, wavered as the Marines shook and rattled in the moving Humvees, and then disappeared as the figure dropped and they moved to settle on the next target. It was an oddly beautiful and well-choreographed dance.
Time was expanding and compressing like a Slinky. I crouched behind the rear bumper of Colbert’s Humvee, aware of each rivet in the tan armor. But I had no recollection of getting there. Above me, Corporal Hasser fired the Mark-19. Tongues of flame shot from the muzzle, but the deafening weapon seemed silent to me. I was shouting instructions to the two lead drivers and trying to avoid being shot or run over when a calm voice on the radio cut through the gunfire.
“Team Two has a man down.”
Then Gunny Wynn’s voice. “Headquarters has a man down.”
This was every commander’s nightmare. Ambushed and taking casualties. Ironically, I remembered Colonel Ferrando’s words from a briefing the day before: “You can’t volunteer to go to war and then bitch about getting shot at.”
The Marine Recon Mission Essential Task List, that group of skills deemed vital to the job, fills a book. Patrolling, navigation, calling in air strikes, communications, parachuting, diving, shooting, swimming, driving boats, hand-to-hand combat, and so on, seemingly without end. Medical training tended to fall through the cracks, with mock casualties fairy-dusted back to life before they seriously impeded other objectives on any training exercise. I was lucky to have a corpsman who refused to accept that. Doc Bryan was a Special Amphibious Reconnaissance Corpsman, or SARC, one of the most highly trained field medics in the U.S. military.
After joining the platoon a few months before deploying to the Middle East, he’d drilled each man on basic trauma care. In Kuwait, he’d put together blowout kits for the whole platoon. The kits contained the essentials to keep a wounded Marine alive — saline IV bag, battle dressings, and QuikClot, a chemical compound to cauterize arterial bleeds. He’d also led the platoon in making tourniquets, to be worn loosely around the neck for easy access, and threatened to pummel any man caught without his. Doc’s final contribution was not material but tactical. He stressed that the job of any Marine wounded in a firefight was to keep shooting until his team or the platoon was out of danger. Wounded men don’t have the luxury of giving up the fight. Doc Bryan’s gifts became real on the road outside Muwaffiqiya.
When the shooting started, Sergeant Patrick felt his vehicle shudder and his foot slam sideways. He looked down to see blood gushing from his boot, and Doc’s training took over. He cinched a tourniquet around his leg; told his team, “I’m hit in the foot — I’m OK, though”; and resumed firing. Perched on the back of the headquarters Humvee, Corporal Stafford, the platoon radioman, had a similar experience. A bullet fragment from one of the ricocheting machine gun rounds tore into his calf, knocking him down. He, too, tied off his tourniquet and got back in the fight.
