Our report became a national collection priority, but no chemical weapons were found.
I regretted leaving the little girl to her uncertain fate, but the helicopters were gone, the LAVs out of sight, and I had orders to turn back. We passed the last intersection and looped north on the eastern fork of the highway. Our mission was to set up a blocking position while Alpha Company did the same on other highways and Charlie entered Ba‘quba to investigate the Republican Guard headquarters building.
Scanning the mud-brick houses to our right, I saw something that made me stop. Most of the battalion had already traveled past this point, but an Iraqi military truck was parked behind one of the buildings.
“Gunny, stop the Humvee,” I said. Half the platoon advanced slowly on the house. The Marines communicated by hand signals, splitting into teams to come at the building from three directions. Just as that pre- firefight tension swelled to the point of bursting, the front door opened and a swarm of children ran out.
“America! America! Good! Good! Good!”
Rifles dropped.
A middle-aged Iraqi man, dressed in Western clothes and dutifully sporting a Saddam mustache, followed the children into the yard.
“Hi, guys, I’m Hassan.” He spoke with almost no accent. As if to answer our unspoken question, he explained that he had been an English professor at Baghdad University. The twelve girls and boys, running circles around the Marines and trading funny faces with them, were his children.
He said the Republican Guard had visited his house the night before. Eight antiaircraft guns were piled in the back of the Russian-made ZIL cargo truck. Hassan was terrified that the Americans would bomb it and destroy his home in the process. With a mental bow and flourish, I told him we would be happy to remove the cause of his concern.
The prospect of doing something good for regular Iraqi citizens (and the chance to blow up a truck) galvanized the Marines to action. We hitched the truck to a Humvee and dragged it a safe distance from the house. There Colbert and others built a charge from C-4 and detonation cord. They wrapped the guns and the truck’s engine, being sure to include the fuel tanks to help amplify the blast. We gathered the kids and explained what was about to happen. Then we all crouched down together and watched the truck disappear in a fireball. Hassan invited us to stay for dinner and looked a little relieved when I declined, telling him we had unfinished business in Ba‘quba.
I picked an open stretch of highway for our blocking position, with good fields of fire in all directions. Flat, open highway would give Iraqi drivers the best chance to see and avoid us. It gave us the best chance of not having to kill anyone. We placed our looted Iraqi stop sign three hundred meters down the highway, along with a large piece of a cardboard MRE box on which Mish had written “Turn around” in Arabic. We all hoped we were learning fast enough to avoid repeating earlier mistakes.
Pausing for the first time all day, I remembered the prisoner in the back of the Humvee. He sprawled face- down on the truck bed with his hands tightly zip-cuffed behind him. Christeson stood over him with a rifle.
“Cut him free and give him some food and water,” I said. Christeson looked at me as if I’d suggested letting the lions run amok in the San Diego Zoo, but he cut the cuffs off. The man sat up slowly, rubbing his wrists and whimpering. He looked at me mournfully, his long mustache twitching, and I handed him a bottle of water.
“Thank you.”
“You speak English?” I was surprised. Judging from his dumpy appearance, I guessed he was a low-level conscript.
“A little, yes. My heart hurts.” He put his hand to his chest, and the mustache twitched again.
“What’s your name?”
“Ahmed al-Khirzgee. I am good man.”
“What unit are you from?”
“I am not a soldier,” he said with a face like a basset hound’s.
“Then why are you wearing a military uniform, and why were you shooting at us with a military rifle?”
“I am only a very low soldier from Al Quds militia. I do not want to shoot at you.”
“But you did shoot at us. We almost killed you.”
“I have five daughters. Ba’ath Party took them from me and told me to fight the Americans, or my daughters would be killed. What would you do?”
I didn’t know whether to believe him, but he had struck a nerve. Al-Khirzgee was about my father’s age. His clothes were filthy and torn. He looked as exhausted as we were. I remembered my field interrogation at SERE school and thought that, for al-Khirzgee, this was real. He was afraid we would kill him. “Ahmed, I’d probably do exactly what you did,” I said. He stared at his lap before meeting my eyes again. “Drink this water and eat some food. Do what we say, and you won’t be harmed. If you fight or try to get away, this Marine will shoot you.” I turned to wink at Christeson and mouthed “Don’t shoot him.” Christeson nodded and fixed his sternest guard face on our prisoner.
Across the highway, Sergeant Lovell led his team on a foot patrol into a palm grove. It was too close to our position to leave unchecked. When they returned, Lovell made a beeline for me.
“Sir, I need to show you something,” he said. “Just cross the road here, and you’ll be able to see.”
Two long trailers sat in a clearing. They were painted desert tan, with air-conditioning units on their roofs. They were windowless, and padlocks secured the doors. Everything we had seen in Iraq was filthy, ruined by dust and years of neglect. The trailers gleamed. I knew what Lovell was thinking: mobile biological weapons labs. We had both listened to Secretary of State Colin Powell’s testimony before the U.N. and to countless classified briefs on Iraq’s weapons program. The trailers matched the descriptions perfectly.
“Take your bolt cutters and MOPP gear,” I said. “I’ll report it up the chain after you get back to me with details on what’s inside.”
Team Three headed off at a trot as I got a radio update on the battalion’s progress. Charlie Company was in the city. Alpha had blown up at least one Iraqi T-72 tank with an AT4 missile — no small feat. We could hear muffled explosions and the occasional chatter of machine guns.
Gunny Wynn had the shortwave tuned to the BBC. We listened as the anchor described Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square being pulled down by Marines in front of cheering crowds. The war, she said, was over.
“Damn,” Wynn said, slapping his knee. “I wish they knew that up here.” M4s barked in the distance, trading shots with throatier AKs.
“What about the prisoner?” Wynn nodded toward the Humvee, where al-Khirzgee happily ate MRE pound cake while Christeson stood over him.
“It’s a Geneva violation to leave him here,” I said. “We have to take him with us. Seems sort of dumb. It’d be easier for everyone, him included, to give him some food and let him walk home. But those are the rules we have to play by.”
Lovell’s team recrossed the highway. They had cut the lock on the first trailer and carefully climbed through the door. Stainless steel equipment and digital displays lined the walls. Most of the writing was in Cyrillic. They thought we’d struck a jackpot until they began opening the cabinets and drawers. Baking trays, mixing bowls, and measuring spoons fell out. Our mobile weapons lab was a field kitchen for the Iraqi army. We laughed about it, but there was an underlying lesson. The illusions of “dual-use” technology are deceptive, and sometimes a satellite is no substitute for a team of Marines with bolt cutters.
Just before sunset, Charlie Company roared past, waving the captured standard of the Republican Guard armored brigade from the window of their lead Humvee. We cheered as if the whole day of combat had been a game of capture the flag. War Pig led the drive south, and I settled in for the two-hour ride. Gunny Wynn asked the question I was thinking.
“You think they’ll hit us again as we drive by?”
“No way. You heard the BBC. The war’s over.”
Two minutes later came the radio call: “War Pig in contact five kilometers ahead.”
We had five thousand meters to think about the fire we were heading into, to watch the tracers swishing through the darkness. I squirmed to put as many vital organs as possible behind the bulletproof ceramic plates in my flak jacket. Wynn floored the accelerator when the vehicles in front of us sped up. Shots rang past the Humvee as we flashed by. I thought of al-Khirzgee and the ironic terror of being shot at by comrades. It made me smile. As
