We were forbidden to intervene. The consensus among many Marine commanders was that revenge would settle into a natural equilibrium. Instead, it seemed to beget more revenge. A finite supply of goodwill toward the Americans evaporated with the passing of each anarchic day. I briefed the platoon on our impending departure from the cigarette factory and already saw the doubt in their eyes.
We drove north from Baghdad to our new headquarters in a children’s hospital a few kilometers outside the city. Traffic gridlocked the highway’s southbound lanes. Mobs of jubilant people partied their way home after having fled Baghdad weeks earlier to avoid the bombing. Iraqis waved from the beds of dump trucks and the roofs of cars. Marines returned the honks and waves. I marveled at the sheer size of the city, the number of people.
“Can you imagine what it would have been like if these people had actually decided to fight us?” I asked.
“Just wait a few months till we don’t live up to their expectations and they do decide to fight,” Gunny Wynn said, looking grim.
We pulled into the children’s hospital a few minutes after noon. Like most facilities in Iraq, regardless of their intended purpose, it had an air of military order. A gated guardhouse opened to a long, tree-lined road leading to half a dozen whitewashed buildings. Guard towers dotted a sand berm bulldozed up around the compound. Each company moved into its own building of patient rooms, with battalion headquarters settling into what were once the hospital’s administrative offices. The entire place had been looted. Smashed bottles, syringes, and piles of paper covered the floor of each room. No furniture remained; even the light fixtures and switch plates had been ripped from the walls. I sat down to eat lunch with the platoon.
“So, sir, what do you think is going to happen?” Jacks asked the question, but he spoke for the others, and all eyes settled on me. Sitting around and talking with the platoon was my favorite pastime in Iraq. Sometimes I’d come up with new topics just because I didn’t want the conversations to end.
“It’s too soon to say, but I’ll tell you what I hope will happen,” I said. “I hope we’ll stop moving around and be assigned a sector. I hope we’ll patrol in that sector day after day. These people don’t give a fuck about democracy right now. They need clean water. They need to know they won’t get shot in the middle of the night. People put their money on the horse that looks like a winner. We need to convince them that we’re the winner.”
“But what are the odds of that happening, sir?” Corporal Chaffin asked, as he scrubbed a rifle balanced on his knees. “I bet we keep moving around, making promises we can’t keep, and then the normal people will start to see us as occupiers instead of liberators.” Chaffin was fair-skinned with reddish hair. His complexion darkened as he spoke. “Pretty soon, no one will want us here, and then the fucking liberals at home will start to bitch, and pretty soon we’ll be back in Vietnam. Only instead of reading about it in a book, we’ll be living it.”
“I guess I’m more optimistic than that,” I answered. “This isn’t Vietnam — the guys we’re fighting have no superpower support, no sanctuary next door.”
“Sir, I’m gonna pull your punk card,” Espera interrupted. “With all due respect, I think you’re wrong.” He leaned close and pointed his thin cigar. “Guerrilla wars aren’t fought from sanctuaries with support from sugar mama countries. That’s political scientist bullshit. They’re fought from the mind.” He tapped his temple with the cigar. “If these people don’t want for themselves what we want for them, then this will be Vietnam. We’ll get our pride and our credibility involved, and then we’ll keep throwing money and men down the pit long after everybody else knows we’re fucked. We’ll leave, and Iraq will be even worse than the shit hole it was a month ago when we kicked down the door.”
“Who’ll give us the most trouble?” I asked.
“Guys our age,” Espera said. “They hate us. They want to kill us. I can see it in their eyes.”
I agreed with him. During the first week of the war, there were definite trends in the welcome we received. Everyone under eighteen was happy to see us. The women all cheered for us. The older men, over fifty-five or so, flashed the thumbs-up. But the young men, the guys in their twenties and thirties, stared silently.
“Why is that, Espera?” I asked. For evaluating motivations on the street, my sixteen years of school weren’t worth two weeks as a repo man in L.A., and I knew it.
“Shit, sir, we emasculated them. Cut off their balls and held ’em up for their wives and kids to see. We did for them what they know they should have done for themselves.”
“But they had twelve years to do it.”
“Don’t go getting all academic on me, sir. I’m explaining why they feel that way. I’m not saying they’re right.”
Colbert cut in. He lay on his back on the concrete floor, scrubbing M203 grenades with a toothbrush. “What about the fact that the young guys have the most to lose with the old regime coming down? They had the power, and now they’re going to lose it.”
“That’s what the eggheads on TV will say, sure. But they’re wrong,” Espera said, jabbing his cigar with each word. “You think all the mass graves are full of little kids and old men? These young guys got hosed by the regime just as much as everyone else. Saddam was an equal opportunity murderer. Kids, old guys, women. He killed his own daughters’ husbands.”
The Marines fell silent. The only sound was Colbert’s toothbrush swishing back and forth across a grenade.
The next morning, we made our third move in four days, traveling north and west to the Menin al Quds power plant near the Tigris. Its transformers and warehouses sat in cultivated fields a couple of miles off a main highway north of Baghdad. Just past the entrance gate stood a bronze statue of Saddam Hussein, dressed in a tie and fedora and holding a rifle above him. Some previous visitor had left a pile of feces on his head. Our mission there was twofold: we would provide security for the power plant while workers labored to undo years of neglect, and we would use it as a staging base to patrol the northeastern quadrant of Baghdad. Having heard similar plans twice in as many days, I kept my doubts to myself.
Bravo Company moved into a warehouse at the compound’s edge. Gunfire had ruptured an oil tank, and a film of sticky petroleum covered the ground outside. It stuck to our tires and the soles of our boots. The smell made me lightheaded. Inside the warehouse was a cargo bay, and upstairs a hall of offices we turned into sleeping spaces. The bleak building’s best feature was a gravity-fed pump of frigid water that allowed us to shower for the first time in more than a month. We wore flip-flops because broken glass covered the ground, and the water pressure almost tore the horseshoe from my neck. But the shower was worth it. As darkness fell and tracers again rose from the city, the Marines of Bravo Company shrieked and shouted beneath the welcome deluge of cold, fresh water.
After showering, I put my filthy cammies back on and walked over to the recon operations center for another of the seemingly infinite briefs and planning cells for upcoming missions, both real and imagined. The Marine Corps has an institutional culture of doing more with less, and that includes not only less money and less equipment but also less time, less certainty, less guidance, and less supervision. What makes it all possible is more planning and more preparation. While the Marines took advantage of a much-deserved rest, the battalion’s officers and staff NCOs debriefed past missions, tracked current missions, and planned future missions. Those who needed rest the most, the decision makers, frequently got the least. I was nearly stumbling with fatigue as I passed a roaring generator and entered the ROC.
The generator powered a row of overhead lights illuminating maps spread across two walls. Little flags marked the last updated position of each of the battalion’s patrols. A third wall held a status board, showing the composition, call sign, location, and activity of each team or platoon on patrol. Three Marines manned a bank of radios, whose wires snaked across the floor and out an open window to a small forest of antennas on the roof. Amid the squawks and static, they kept open the vital lifeline linking patrols in the field to aircraft, artillery, and all other forms of salvation. I always entered the ROC with some trepidation. Seeing competent Marines doing their jobs well made me feel more confident when I was the one on the other end of the radio. But I always had a nagging fear that I’d find the radio operators asleep, the map positions hours out of date, and the staff playing cards while a platoon was chewed apart. I knew that the fear was irrational, but I felt it every time.
That night, the ROC thrummed like the generators outside. Marines spoke on the radio in clipped tones, shuttled back and forth with messages from the platoons in the field, and constantly updated the status board and the maps. Major Whitmer sat in the corner, reading reports. He wasn’t in my chain of command, but we’d known
