them, but circumstance hadn’t allowed me many options. Besides, feelings and regulations came in a distant second to winning battles and keeping Marines alive. We started moving forward, passing the concrete building without seeing anything amiss.
On the radio, Alpha Company directed jets in on an Iraqi infantry fighting vehicle, called a BMP, that was shooting at them. The jets’ engines screamed as they dove at the target, but I couldn’t see anything through the smoke and haze. Cobras hammered targets to our front, and the LAVs poured fire into buildings and palm groves along the road. The platoon had found its rhythm now — talking, moving, and shooting as one organism.
We did our best to hit discrete targets, but the battlefield is an empty place. With smoke, explosions, and rifle shots all around, it feels as if the whole world is a target. But that feeling evaporates when you look through the gun sight. Threats are everywhere, but targets are nowhere. You cannot just shoot at a tree, or a parked car, or a propane tank, or the air. You need a target. Like it or not, targets are usually human beings. But targets are hard to find, because they hide. Many times, the result was that we drove through an inferno but fired very few rounds. That wasn’t the case in Ba‘quba.
Approaching another crossroads, we passed a field of brilliantly green grass. Two men firing AK-47s popped up from a hole in the field, and a machine gun knocked them right back down. One of the men wore a green shirt and khaki trousers. A .50-caliber bullet, almost as big around as a dime and moving at supersonic speed, blew off the back of his skull. The round hit him so hard that it drove his body backward through the air. It neatly removed a piece of bone bigger than my hand, and as the man fell, his brain spilled onto the dirt. He crumpled five feet from the pool of blood that marked his place of death. I felt the elation you feel at the fair after winning a stuffed animal for popping a balloon with a pellet gun.
A mortar round fell from the sky, seemingly from nowhere. We hadn’t heard it launched, and no others fell with it. It struck the ground next to Espera’s Humvee, spraying his team with dirt and, I thought, shrapnel. When the dust cleared, I was amazed to see the team still frozen in their seats. Mortars are nerve-racking because they’re so random. All you can do is sit there and think about the next one, the one that might be coming for you.
Ordered to stay in place, we looked around. To our right stood a whitewashed building in the center of a dirt parking lot. Red graffiti covered the walls, and I asked Mish to read it.
“Well, the little sign above the door says SCHOOL. The spray-painted stuff says DEATH TO AMERICA, LONG LIVE SADDAM, and WE WILL DIE FOR YOU, O GREAT SADDAM. Lots of others, too, but you get the idea.”
“Lovell, take your team and search that building,” I ordered. We had time, and the fedayeen had a record of using schools.
Leaving one man on the machine gun, Team Three took its bolt cutters and burst through the door. I waited for rifle shots, but none came. A few seconds later, Sergeant Lovell called from the window, “Sir, you ought to come in here.”
I entered a dingy room filled with desks. Children’s drawings covered the walls. The team guarded the doors while Lovell and Doc Bryan picked through an open safe.
“Maps, military IDs, documents, a burlap bag of AK bayonets, and a bolt-action Enfield rifle. But who really cares about that shit? Check this out,” Lovell said. He held up a plastic trash bag. Inside were dozens of pairs of black boot socks. They were new, still attached at the calf by cardboard tags proclaiming them “Made in Jordan.” “Funny how everything in Iraq was made in Jordan, China, and France.”
“Yeah, but I’m not a spiteful consumer,” I replied. I wanted the documents for the intelligence analysts and the socks for the platoon. We gathered what we could and hurried back outside, concerned that the battle would move forward without us. Two Marines from Third Platoon stood over an Iraqi man lying spread-eagle on the ground.
“Sir, this gomer popped out of a fighting hole in the field. His buddy is the one whose brains are sprayed all over the place back there. Can we cuff him and throw him in the back of your Humvee?”
I agreed, because I had more empty space than anyone else. There was no time to deal with him. The lead vehicles were moving again.
One bridge stood between us and the outskirts of Ba‘quba. The countryside was bleak — dusty fields, dusty homes, dusty cars. Dust even coated the palm trees. We started to climb the bridge, but the lead Humvee stopped. I heard a zinging sound and saw strange ripples in the air. The sky above our heads shimmered, miragelike. Large- caliber rounds. Not ours. Incoming. It was another Iraqi armored vehicle.
“BMP on the road, direct front. And he’s firing!” I tried not to yell into the radio.
We backed off the bridge in a hurry and vectored an Air Force F-15 in on the BMP. I never saw the jet, or even heard it. Its bomb materialized from the blue sky. For most Iraqi soldiers, death came without warning. We again climbed the bridge and met no resistance. On the other side, the BMP was little more than a greasy black stain on the pavement and a few scattered pieces of smoking metal.
Again the road forked, and again we went left while the rest of the battalion went right. Fields gave way to dense groves of palm trees filled with homes. The Cobras had launched volleys of rockets into the palms, and everything was on fire. I hated being in the close confines of buildings and trees. Drainage ditches lined the road. Dense thickets grew right up to their edges, cutting our visibility down to only yards. Every muscle in my body tightened. I think the exhaustion following combat is partly chemical — coming down off a massive dose of adrenaline — and partly a physical release after hours in this tightened posture. Wiping sweat from my eyes, I worked to breathe slowly, think clearly, and run through my mental checklists in case we made contact. After three weeks of war, I could tell I’d gotten better at this. Calm had become my natural state. It took something truly extraordinary even to raise my heart rate.
A radio call warned that our helicopter escort, our eyes and big fists, was leaving in five minutes to get more fuel. They’d be gone for at least an hour, leaving us alone on the road, where we couldn’t see, with a Republican Guard armored brigade lurking nearby. The muscles got tighter. “When the aircraft leave, you are instructed to return to the last intersection and proceed north on the eastern fork. How copy?”
We stopped on the roadside to wait for the LAVs to make their lumbering ten-point turns on the narrow road. I took advantage of the stop to talk with the team leaders. They were doing a great job, and I wanted to let them know that. As I stood near Colbert’s window, two Marines raised their rifles, aiming past me and clicking the safeties off. I spun around. Two men walked out from behind a berm less than twenty meters away. A little girl, perhaps five years old, stumbled along between them, holding hands with each. The men forced smiles and waved, but I was focused on the little girl.
Her eyes stared vacantly, looking at nothing even as she picked her way across the uneven ground. She was filthy. Dirt caked her face, and her sweatpants, once pink, were a sickly shade of gray. I knelt down to touch her shoulder, and she shrank back, terrified.
“Food and water — now,” I called over my shoulder to the platoon. “Doc, check her out.” For some reason, I felt a sense of urgency and responsibility for this girl that I hadn’t felt before. Part of it was her small size. Mostly, though, I think I was touched by the contrast between her apparent physical health and her psychological pain. She was far too young to be so afraid. I thought of the Cobras rocketing the palm groves and lighting homes on fire. I remembered the jets dropping bombs and the roar of our own machine guns. Even for armed and trained Marines, there was a lot to be afraid of in Ba‘quba. I tried to imagine what the afternoon must have looked like through the eyes of a child.
“Sir, she seems fine physically, just a little dehydrated,” Doc reported. “It’s like she’s shell-shocked.” He handed her a bottle of water. The two men, overjoyed that we recognized their plight, laughed and hugged us.
Through Mish, the older of the two men began to speak. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, looking dignified and relaxed.
“He says tanks and soldiers are at a dam on the river. He says they are keeping people away from the place because chemical bombs are hidden there, maybe buried in the ground.”
Two independent reports of chemical weapons nearby. In addition to all our daily missions, we had general tasks that were continuous on every mission. One of the most important was safeguarding any evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. I picked up the radio and asked for Godfather, the battalion commander himself. Colonel Ferrando answered with understandable annoyance over a mere platoon commander interrupting him in the middle of a fight. I hurried to exonerate myself by explaining the two reports of chemical weapons at the dam.
“Copy all, Hitman Two. I’ll pass it up to division myself,” he said.
