The firing had slackened. Lovell’s team was the last to turn around. They lingered in the kill zone to spray the trees with machine gun fire while the rest of the platoon retreated back into the darkness. On the battalion’s order, Rudy raced off with a bullet-riddled windshield and two shredded tires to evacuate Sergeant Patrick to the field we had started from. No one outside the platoon had even fired a shot.
I pulled the rest of the Marines back about two kilometers from the bridge, and we herringboned off the road to check on damage, injuries, and ammo counts. The mood was somber. A few gunmen had just stopped a Marine battalion, and we knew it. I also knew I’d lost one of my best Marines to the tactical error of not reconning the bridge. Finally, I feared the order from the battalion would be to move forward and try again to enter Muwaffiqiya. Tanks and LAVs idled a few miles up the road while we tried to enter this town in open Humvees. From an armchair in Iowa, it would have seemed foolish. From a dark roadside in Iraq, its lunacy ate away at our confidence. The mission had become, in grunt parlance, a goat-fuck.
My CO called with an update: “We’re waiting here for thirty mikes while the helos refuel. Then we’ll bring up tanks and LAVs and move forward again.”
Finally. “Two copies all.”
Third Platoon would be on point for the next push to the bridge, with company headquarters in its two Humvees behind them and my platoon in the rear. Team Two still wasn’t back from evacuating Sergeant Patrick, so we were too small to lead the movement. Frankly, that was fine with me.
I moved from vehicle to vehicle, checking damage and talking with the guys. Doc Bryan wrapped a bandage around Stafford’s leg. Stafford was adamant about staying with the platoon, and Bryan gave his tentative approval. I consented. We’d need every gun we had. The Marines were cleaning and reloading the heavy machine guns, changing night vision goggle batteries, and eating. They were silent. There was none of the euphoric banter that typically followed a firefight. No joking, no stories, no tall tales. This one had been too close, and it wasn’t over yet. The focus was still on the mission.
From behind came the distinctive clanking of treads on pavement, and we moved our Humvees off the road to allow the seventy-ton behemoths to pass. Two M1A1 Abram tanks were followed by eight LAV-25s, each armed with a 25 mm Bushmaster cannon. For a grunt, working with tanks is like having jets overhead or being in the bottom of a deep fighting hole. It just feels good. In an embarrassment of riches, two Cobras reappeared from the east, thumping overhead without lights: lethal, menacing, utterly reassuring.
The lead platoon commander radioed that he was moving. A kilometer ahead, the tanks and LAVs fanned off the road, forming a line along the riverbank, pointing their guns toward the town. With a flash of light and a deafening roar, they fired their first salvo. Then another, and another, and another. When a tank fires its main gun in the dark, a tongue of flame shoots ahead, and the flash and bang of the shot is quickly followed by the flash and bang of the impact. The LAVs pumped chain gun rounds in burst after burst. They sounded like paper being torn, or a long guttural belch. From overhead, the Cobras fired Zuni rockets and Hellfire missiles. Each impact sent up a column of liquid fire. We drove forward into this storm, with smoke swirling through the doors and cordite filling our nostrils. As we drew abreast of the tanks, they ceased fire, and we moved forward to the bridge alone.
I planned to put my platoon on the north side to cover Third Platoon as they crossed into Muwaffiqiya. Once across, they would sit in place on the far side of the bridge and cover our crossing. The tanks and LAVs were too heavy to cross with us. I watched through my goggles as Third Platoon’s five vehicles crept around the Dumpster and across the narrow concrete span onto the riverfront street. Company headquarters followed behind them. Suddenly, the command vehicle, towing a trailer filled with supplies, lurched and settled, as if about to plunge into the river.
“We’re stuck on the bridge,” the captain reported. Considering his situation, he sounded calm. Two Cobras hovered over the river, firing rockets into the alleyways on the far side. The Marines in company headquarters were out of their Humvee, trying to rock the trailer from a hole in the deck of the bridge. As much as any firefight we were in, this one typified the strange distance of combat. Third Platoon was trapped in the hostile town, alone, with no way to be reinforced or to fall back. Company headquarters struggled at the center of the bridge, as if spotlighted on a stage. Only fifty meters from them, we could do nothing. I held the platoon in place on the near side of the bridge, as much for moral support as anything else. In the darkness and smoke, we couldn’t safely fire close to the other Marines. We pushed out security to the flanks and rear and watched the drama unfold.
An hour later, with dawn approaching, headquarters managed to free the trailer. They reversed across the bridge and halted in front of our position. In the gray light, I watched Third Platoon’s Humvees rumble out of the demolished town, one by one, and cross to safety. As they drove past, the Marines looked like caricatures, pale with dark, sunken eyes. Throughout the night, the rest of the battalion had remained behind us, out of the fight. Now a few headquarters officers rushed forward and, as my Marines manned security positions in the fields along the road, eagerly clustered around the men we’d killed. I watched in disbelief as camera flashes popped in the dim light and senior officers laughed and strutted around.
I had kept my cool through almost seven hours of nonstop combat, through killing men so close I could hear them breathe, through evacuating my wounded brothers, through thinking I wouldn’t live to see the sunrise. Finally, I lost control. Running up the road, I was in a rage.
“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted. “You stupid motherfuckers. Taking pictures? You make me sick.”
A headquarters captain grabbed my shoulder and told me to calm down. I shook free. Major Benelli looked at me with disdain, as if it were in poor taste for me to ruin the victory celebration.
Headquarters began to trickle away; my explosion had not been entirely without effect. I looked at the dead bodies sprawled in the trees. Six or seven of them, young men like us, clean-shaven and dressed meticulously in pleated trousers, button-down shirts, and brown loafers. Their silver belt buckles gleamed. They looked more like computer programmers than Islamic fighters. AK-47s surrounded the bodies, along with RPG launchers and piles of grenades.
Clutched in the death grip of one of the men were two hand grenades, seconds from being thrown. Another corpse stood almost upright, stapled to a tree trunk by .50-caliber machine gun rounds. A third fighter looked as if he’d died the cliched death by a thousand cuts. One of the Cobra’s flechette rockets had hit next to him, sending thousands of tiny metal slivers into every inch of his body. There was no blood, only razor-thin cuts. We started picking through their pockets for information.
“Holy shit, these guys are Syrians!” Each man carried a Syrian passport, complete with official Iraqi entry visas. The visas were stamped in red ink with blank lines for the date, place, and reason of entry to be written in by hand. Each of the dead men had entered Iraq during the first week of the war at a crossing point on the Syrian border. Their written reasons were all the same: jihad.
I found no joy in looking at the men we’d killed, no satisfaction, no sense of victory or accomplishment. But I wasn’t disturbed either. I fell back on an almost clinical detachment. The men were adults who chose to be here. I was an adult who chose to be here. They shot at us and missed. We shot at them and didn’t miss. The fight was fair. All the same, I was happy my platoon wasn’t here to see what they’d wrought. Sometimes it’s better not knowing.
As I walked away, I heard a shout behind me. “We got a live one over here!”
Far behind the trees, a groaning man lay in the grass, one of his legs nearly severed by machine gun fire. The grass around him was slick with blood. For a second, the Marines looked at me, eyes flashing between my face and my pistol. I think they thought I’d walk up and shoot him in the head, like a lame horse or a shark on a fishing charter. Colonel Ferrando elected to treat and evacuate the wounded man. I felt relieved. Two Marines slid him onto a stretcher and into the back of a Humvee, and he was whisked down the road to our staging area from the night before.
I collected the platoon, and we withdrew back down the highway, the last ones out just as we’d been the first ones in. The teams took their places in the defensive perimeter while Gunny Wynn and I searched for Sergeant Patrick. On our way across the field, neither of us said anything. We were preoccupied with the loss of one of our team leaders for the rest of the war, wondering at the stupidity of the mission that had nearly cost us our lives, and just plain exhausted from massive adrenaline overload. The sun had cleared the horizon, and it was a gorgeous morning. Dew on the grass sparkled in the light and reminded me of early-morning practice on the playing fields in high school.
