training out in the 29 Palms desert, Sergeant Arias jumped on them, barking, “Quit whining like little bitches! Get your warrior hat on and get ready to kick some ass. You’re going to be right up front, and you’ve got to protect yourselves.” When Normy speaks, people listen. He is a tough little Filipino with a stocky body sculpted by weight lifting, and his dark eyes can be filled with humor or malice, depending upon what he thinks of you. There is little nuance with Normy, and he can be as intimidating as hell. Iraq would prove that he was exactly right about the dangers, because the country’s long and empty roads became fertile killing grounds for guerrillas who ambushed American convoys with roadside bombs that tore apart both trucks and bodies. We wanted to be sure that our Marines knew how to fight back.
The bureaucracy worked against us, since every hour we had our guys training was exactly equal to an hour taken away from their specialties. A delicate balancing act was necessary to weigh their vital support jobs against the need to polish the skills that would keep them alive long enough to do those jobs. By the time we were done, the 228 Marines of H &S were fully competent trigger pullers.
In the final months of 2002, everyone became familiar with the dreaded term “weapons of mass destruction,” and we stepped up the training needed to meet the threats posed by nuclear, chemical, and biological agents. There was no doubt in my own mind that Hussein, who had used poisons to quell a rebellion among his own people, would also use them against us.
“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” Vice President Dick Cheney told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August. A few weeks later, President Bush challenged the United Nations to confront what he said was a “grave and gathering danger” by giving Hussein a final deadline to abandon his WMDs. If Hussein did not comply, the president warned, the United States was prepared to act, alone if necessary.
Iraq responded by offering to allow UN weapons inspectors unconditional access to suspected weapons sites, but Washington dismissed the offer as merely another stalling “tactic that will fail.” The Bush administration sought quick congressional action on a resolution that authorized U.S. military action against Iraq.
On November 8, the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1441, which demanded that Iraq disarm. In early December, Iraq delivered to the UN a monstrous twelve-thousand-page document that stated the country had no WMDs nor any current programs to develop them. A week later, while the massive document was still being analyzed, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the press, “We said at the very beginning that we approached it with skepticism, and the information I have received so far is that skepticism is well-founded. There are problems with the declaration.”
To me, all of the political crossfire meant only that war was by now a virtual certainty and that it was drawing closer. We received our deployment orders to Kuwait over the Christmas holidays.
Following a leader you do not personally trust in wartime can be as frightening as facing WMDs, so it was too bad that we had a junior staff officer that I shall try to forget for the rest of my life.
I’ll call this guy “Officer Bob,” and his greatest talent seemed to be an ability to get lost, even while using a global satellite-positioning device. This was not someone we wanted leading our convoys across a battlefield, but there he was, talking loud, nodding his head, and constantly needing somebody to hold his hand. We determined that the best way to get things done was to make sure Bob was not involved.
We had to move the battalion from California to the Middle East, which meant solving a logistics equation that would get us to foreign soil, ready to fight. Everything from tanks and missiles to sunglasses and tubes of sunscreen and lip balm was going over, and precise instructions preceded every single item. An identifying dog tag was to be tied into the laces of each soldier’s left boot. Not the right boot, but the left. Private Smith was issued an M-16 with a specific serial number, and there were thousands of privates just like Smith. Overheated computers spat out reams of rosters and lists, and we added little things such as baby wipes, which help clean sand off our faces, among other things, and funnels to prevent life-sustaining water from spilling while being poured.
Our battalion alone had to keep track of some $19 million worth of gear. The one thing McCoy did not want to run short of was bullets, so it was good that a shooting scrape eventually broke out. While training back in the Stumps during that fiscal year, we were about a million bucks over budget on ammunition. War trumps accounting.
Despite the work, getting ready on the professional side of the ledger was easy when compared to saying good-bye to my family. It’s the hardest thing any serviceman or woman has to do, for deep in your mind you know that it may be a real good-bye-you might never see them again.
The evening before I left, I made some special “alone time” with each of my girls. With little Ashley, my younger daughter, who could only comprehend that Daddy was going away again for a while, it was playful and fun. But Cassie had not been immune to the dire news all over the television broadcasts, and although Kim and I tried not to discuss it in front of her, she clearly understood that this time could be different. Cassie knew that I was going to war. She tried to be brave but cried on my shoulder as I held her tightly and promised that everything was going to be fine and that I would be back as soon as I could. Leaving her like that made me feel like shit.
It was difficult for my wife and I to console each other. Our marriage had always been a roller coaster of highs and lows, and this time turned into one of the lowest lows of all. We owned a horse and a pony that we kept stabled outside of town, and she was worried about how my leaving would affect her plan to attend an upcoming horse show. I felt that my wife viewed this war as an inconvenience, not something that might claim the life of her husband.
I woke up at one o’clock in the morning, kissed my sleeping wife and children for a final time, got into my jeep, and drove off to begin still another journey to another war. As the house grew small in my rearview mirror, I began to morph from father and husband into my alter ego of remorseless and cold-blooded Marine sniper.
I joined the advance party and climbed aboard the big birds for the long flight over to Kuwait, which was totally boring and uneventful, other than the grousing about not being able to see the Super Bowl game. We would not be landing to the sound of guns, only to the requirement to get the camp set up for the rest of the troops. When we stepped off the plane, a stiff, chill desert wind whipped us, but other than that, it almost seemed as if we had not really gone anywhere. We lived in a California desert ourselves, so the flat vistas and dry weather were familiar. The weather was only about ten degrees hotter or colder than it was back home.
The Kuwaitis had been busy. Buses took us to a vast plain some thirty miles south of the Iraqi border, where a city of white canvas tents had been erected for us. The land was virtually flat as far as the eye could see, except for the occasional dune and the great fields of pointy-top tents. It looked as if a giant circus had come to town.
The drooping tents were the type Bedouin tribesmen had used for centuries in this hot, sandy region, not crisp military style, only ours had wooden floors instead of Persian carpets. Since I was in charge of assigning spaces for everyone in the battalion, I gave myself one of the best and created a private area, walled off by pallets of bottled water and rations, in one corner.
Everything that had been disassembled back in 29 Palms began arriving and had to be put back together and readied. Once in place, the battalion bulked up with a trade that swapped a company of our riflemen for a company of tanks from the 1st Tanks Battalion. We all watched with awe when the fifteen huge M1A1 battle tanks of Bravo Company rumbled over to live with us. The things are huge! With those and our own assault amphibious vehicles (AAVs), better known as “Amtracs” or just “tracks,” we now had quite an armored punch. Then we added units of engineers, artillery and air-strike spotters, guys who specialized in detecting chemical weapons, the translators and intelligence dudes of the “Human Exploitation Teams,” and miscellaneous other support personnel. All of them came to us eagerly, because getting attached to the 3rd Battalion of the 4th Marines was like being drafted by the New England Patriots. Our job was to move and attack, not hold and pacify, and we had a reputation for getting the job done.
“You’re all gonna die,” called the skeptics. “No,” we corrected. “We’re going to kill people.”
Joining the Bull carried a price for these newcomers, however, because we worked them like dogs. It was not unusual for me to storm into a tent before dawn, yelling, “Get the hell up, you sons of bitches!” I would grab some lazy bastard out of the sack and force him outside for an exhausting physical training exercise in full combat gear. The newbies kept waiting for us to lighten up, but we never did, and slowly they adjusted to life in an elite combat
