it was a human head, slightly charred and staring placidly at the sky. A short distance away, dogs tore at the body.
Wynn and I were momentarily chastened but then had to laugh. “Can you believe this place?” he said. “Heads in the road. Dogs eating bodies. People at home bitch about cigarette butts on the beach.”
We drove through dusk and into the night before stopping along the edge of the road. The GPS told me where we were, but that was less important than what was out there. Nothing could tell me what was in the fields and palm groves just beyond our little circle. We had moved so quickly that there was no front anymore. Good guys and bad guys were all mixed up. I had slept three hours in three days.
“Gunny, I can’t think straight. I need a couple of hours in the bag,” I said. At that point, sleep wasn’t pleasant, just a mechanical necessity, like putting gas in a car.
To our left, a five-story factory burned in the dark. Flames leaped high into the sky. The fire didn’t crackle; it roared, sucking oxygen from the air around it. I wrapped myself in a poncho and lay on the gravel near the front tire to shield myself from the flickering light.
It was the sleep of the damned. I floated in a netherworld of dreams, memories, and sudden starts. Briefing the platoon. Fireballs. Ragged breathing. Take the shot. Blue cars. Tanks nearby. And the fire, burning, roaring, casting shadows across the palms.
Christeson shook me awake. “It’s been three hours, sir. The patrol’s on its way back in.”
I sat up and rubbed my head, shaking gravel from my hair. “What patrol?”
“Team Three, sir. They went to check out that tank.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Down the road, near the platoon’s last Humvee, Sergeant Lovell and Doc Bryan were swearing softly in the darkness. Around them, the team sat on the pavement, stripping out of soaked, muddy boots and trousers. They looked as if they’d been wading in waist-deep water.
Stinetorf glanced up at me. “That fucking thing has probably been there ten years, sir. Couldn’t drive it out through that swamp if they wanted to.”
Slowly, I understood. Some of my dreams had not been dreams. The company operations chief, a senior enlisted man outside the platoon, had come to me and asked to send Lovell’s team out to investigate an Iraqi tank that had been spotted in a nearby palm grove. I pulled Sergeant Lovell aside and asked him what had happened.
“Ops chief came and told us to go look at some fucking tank out there in the grove. I told him half the fucking division rolled past it already and I only take orders from you and Gunny Wynn.”
I nodded, seeing where this was going.
“So he left and came back a couple minutes later. Said he talked to you and you OK’ed it. We mounted up and went out.”
I had given the order without even realizing it. “Sergeant Lovell, he came to me, but I was delirious and thought I was dreaming. I’m sorry.”
Gunny Wynn was sitting by the radio when I returned to the Humvee. “I’m losing my mind, Mike. Losing my fucking mind.”
32
THE CHAPLAIN’S VOICE DRONED, but I paid no attention. I was focused on the dusty pair of combat boots flanking an M4 stuck muzzle-first in the dirt. Horsehead was dead. We’d heard rumors earlier in the day of Fifth Marines getting in a firefight. Horsehead had been wounded, badly wounded, or evacuated, with no further details. But he couldn’t have been killed. First sergeants don’t die in combat; that’s for corporals and lieutenants to do. Besides, Smith was a common last name. There must have been hundreds of Smiths in the Marine Corps, probably even a bunch of First Sergeant Smiths. But no. First Sergeant Edward Smith, Horsehead, a recon legend doing a tour in the grunts before retiring, was dead.
I joined many other recon Marines at a dusk memorial service in a field on the southeastern outskirts of Baghdad. Around us, the entire First Marine Division was massing its combat power. Marines sprawled everywhere, sleeping. Others turned wrenches on Humvees, cleaned weapons, or huddled over huge map sheets with their corners held down by bricks. We hadn’t all been together since leaving Kuwait. After almost three weeks moving across Iraq like individual rivulets of water, the division was pooling, preparing to flood the enemy capital. It was a pause, not a stop. In the distance, Baghdad’s minarets rose above the palms.
We took turns saying what a great Marine Horsehead had been, what a great husband, father, and man. We bowed our heads in silence and sang a song I cannot remember. I was staring at the boots. When a man wakes up in the morning, he puts on his boots. He laces them up and ties them. He expects to take them off again that evening. Horsehead went through the day without knowing he’d put on his boots for the last time. Maybe I’d already put on my boots for the last time, too. When the service ended, I walked slowly back to the platoon, grateful for my time alone in the dark. Faint strings of tracers climbed into the sky, too far off to hear.
Colonel Ferrando summoned his officers to battalion headquarters the following afternoon, April 8, for a mission brief. We’d spent the morning listening to the BBC and watching columns of smoke rise from Baghdad. The Army had launched an audacious “thunder run” from Saddam International Airport into the heart of the city, and resistance was lighter than feared. The Marines were preparing to unleash their own offensive across the Diyala River and into the city from the southeast. The news reports had an unreal quality to them. Part of me thought we’d never reach that point. American tanks would never roll into one of the great cities of the Middle East. I had laughed in Kuwait when General Mattis talked about using recon as dismounted shock troops during the final urban assault. Hyperbole for the lance corporals, I’d thought then. Never gonna happen. Well, it was happening. I leaned closer to learn our role in the war’s climax.
“Gentlemen, as most of you know, the assault on Baghdad has begun,” Ferrando said. As he elaborated on the American seizure of Iraq’s capital, I marveled at his uniform. It looked pressed. His clean-shaven face shone in the sunlight, and his hair was neatly combed. I, in comparison, looked as if I had come to the meeting straight from my cardboard box beneath an overpass. Days of sweat and grime stiffened my uniform. My fingernails were black, and I could feel my toes squishing in my socks. I slept at night with my head out of the sleeping bag because I couldn’t bear the stench of my own body.
The colonel confirmed that the division would attack across the Diyala River into the city. General Mattis had one overriding concern. The forty-first Armored Brigade of the Al Nida Republican Guard Division was headquartered in Ba‘quba, only fifty kilometers northeast of Baghdad. Its tanks could hit the First Marine Division’s flank less than an hour after leaving their base. And that’s where we came in.
Major Whitmer read the mission statement: “At fourteen hundred Zulu, First Recon Battalion will attack north to Ba‘quba, locating and identifying enemy forces in order to help the division develop its situation. Be prepared to engage targets of opportunity. We’ll link up with LAR at the zero-zero northing and then continue up to the three-zero northing.”
While Colonel Ferrando and Major Whitmer continued the briefing, directed mainly at the company commanders, I studied my maps. The 00 northing was a line on the map about twenty-five kilometers to our north. That meant fifteen miles of unescorted driving up to the LAR company, whose call sign was War Pig. They straddled the road at the northernmost limit of the American advance, which happened to be right at the 00 northing. We would link up with them and attack north for another thirty kilometers into the town of Ba‘quba. The map showed a highway split south of town. The left fork swung around to the west and paralleled a river on the western side of Ba‘quba. The right fork continued straight north on the eastern side of the city. In the months to come, this town would be a corner of the area called “the Sunni Triangle,” with connotations of RPG-toting insurgents and blown-up American Humvees. On April 8, 2003, it was still just Ba‘quba, a small town north of Baghdad, whose Republican Guard outpost had yet to feel the brunt of American ground power. First Recon was going to change that.
Fourteen hundred Zulu translated to five o’clock local time, a few hours before sunset. I lined the platoon up an hour early on the dirt road that led out of the division’s headquarters compound. Our ritualistic “combat prep”
