A group of prisoners huddled beside the narrow road and watched us work. They had not been searched since giving up and were not really guarded, except for being under the gun of every passing Marine. When I took out the machine gunner, they probably thought they had made the right decision in surrendering. The thunder of the overall battle-tanks and missiles and artillery-had not diminished, but that was not my concern. My scope did not move, and the edge of the building remained so sharp that I could have counted the bugs crawling on it.
“He got away clean, boss,” said the Panda, keeping his binos on the same spot. “He ain’t coming back.”
“Oh, he’s still up there, Bear. Curiosity kills.” I increased the pressure on the trigger, taking up about two of the three pounds needed to fire, and slowed my breathing, confident that another of Saddam’s soldiers was about to make an appearance. I felt, more than saw, the picture in my scope change, as if a cushion of air were being displaced, and a man’s head came slowly around the corner. Ear, cheek, eye, nose. I fired, and his head snapped back sharply as he was blown off the building.
Game over. With those two shots, the ambush of the Main was done.
We had been in Iraq less than a day and it already seemed like a lifetime, for no one had gotten any real rest since leaving Camp Ripper. The night before, a Hellfire missile zoomed in and exploded against an Abrams tank, wounding several crewmen-our first casualties of the war-and no one slept after that. The sleep deprivation combined with the exhaustion of battle was pushing us to a ragged edge, and I was getting surly.
In combat, my sole purpose is to kill the enemy, and I will not tolerate half measures on a battlefield. Violent supremacy works just fine for me. This was the first time that Casey and most of my other Marines had seen me with my real war face on, and they were startled by the sharp change in my attitude, which was totally focused and almost unreasoningly critical.
My mood was not improved when I heard a strange exchange of words on the Tac-1 radio net. The commanding officer of the Bravo Tanks Company that had been attached to our battalion was talking to Colonel McCoy, who had expected those tanks to be at a certain spot on the map. They had not shown up.
“Bravo Six. Darkside Six. What’s taking you so long?” McCoy wanted to know.
“We’ve got some infantry trying to decide if they want to surrender,” responded Captain Bryan Lewis, Bravo Six.
“What do you mean?” McCoy sounded as confused as I was.
“We’re seeing if they want to surrender.”
I was ready to go find Lewis’s tank and kick his ass. We were here to kill the Iraqi soldiers, not let them take their time deciding whether or not to fight! Thousands of leaflets had been dropped onto Iraqi troop positions that had been very specific about exactly how they should capitulate: drop their guns, put their hands up, and walk toward us. In my opinion, if they did not do it exactly that way, then fuck them, and boom, boom, boom, for they remained a threat. This captain of our tankers had some Iraqi soldiers in his sights but was not shooting them. I told Casey that there are no second chances in combat and wondered aloud if Lewis had the right stuff. “The guy’s a fucking coward if he won’t engage,” I growled.
“Jeez, Jack, give him a chance,” Casey told me. “You’re not up there with Tanks, and you don’t know what’s going on.”
Of course he was right, but I was in no mood to cut anybody slack, particularly officers, even if they had been in ferocious combat most of the day. Most of my anger had nothing to do with Lewis or his tanks, and, in fact, I grew to admire Lewis’s skill as a warrior. I was mad because I wasn’t in the fight.
9
Few things are more mind-numbing and worrisome than a strike of “friendly fire,” in which your own troops or noncombatants somehow become the targets of fire from your own side. The trigger in such incidents is never pulled to inflict such harm, but war scrambles reality, and at the end of Day 1, March 20, 2003,1 almost killed a whole bunch of people by accident, then almost got killed myself in a separate incident. On either end, friendly fire is never fun.
The invasion of Iraq was roaring ahead with astonishing speed, and our 5th Marines and British Royal Marines captured the Rumaylah oil fields virtually intact. A few rolling columns of red and orange fire rose out of the wrecked metal of the destroyed wells and sent thick black smoke ballooning into the sky, but the defending Iraqis somehow had been caught so off guard that they were able to blow up only nine wells before they were killed or ran away. There would be no repeat of the ecological disaster of the 1991 war, and the backbone of the Iraqi economy, the second-largest oil reserves in the world, was in Coalition hands.
With McCoy pushing hard, our battalion secured bridges into Basra and was maneuvering to take the Basra International Airport. The trade-off for the brisk advance was that everyone was exhausted by the continual effort. About an hour before dusk, Casey and I and our boys came upon an abandoned “Roland,” an antitank missile launcher mounted on something that looked like a golf cart. The enemy weapon had been forsaken by its operators but was still in usable condition, so we had to destroy it.
Casey took station with his Humvee about a hundred yards to the left, and I was on the ground, looking to the right down a road that made a turn about fifty yards away. I saw that everything was clear and told the Panda to arm an AT4 rocket launcher. He hefted it to his shoulder, aimed, and waited for my command to fire. I was just about to give the order when Luis Castillo, up in the turret of our Humvee, and therefore with a better view, alerted me that shooting the Roland right now might scare “the enemy prisoners.” I thought he meant a group that I knew was safely behind us. “Fuck ’em,” I said.
The normally quiet Castillo persisted. “Boss, they’re gonna get hit by this.”
“No way, they’re out of the danger zone.” I was ready to let Panda take the shot when some unexpected motion down the road caught my eye, and a line of Iraqi prisoners under guard by an escort of Marines came around the curve, moving straight toward the Roland that was our target. When they saw Panda aiming a rocket launcher right at them, the prisoners and Marine guards alike stopped in their tracks. I yelled quickly for everybody to stand down, but coming so close to fucking up royally had left my heart pounding hard. Had I given the order for the Panda Bear to shoot, a lot of people would have died because I had made a stupid mistake.
After we let the astonished prisoners and guards file safely past, I called in some engineers to blow up the Roland. I had seen enough of that damned gun on a golf cart.
Snipers are trained to endure extreme fatigue, but it attacks your critical thinking like a live thing, and I cursed myself for carelessness. My body was working faster than my mind, and I recognized that I might be reaching my physical limit. But as the poet Robert Frost wrote, we had miles to go before we slept.
Rest was not in the cards, and it was not long before I was on the other side of a friendly fire incident, which was no more fun than the first one. The skies were filled with hundreds of warplanes flying attack missions from bases as far away as Missouri and Guam, and low-flying Tomahawk cruise missiles growled in from warships out in the Gulf. Explosions decorated the horizon, and a major fight loomed at the airport. Who could sleep? Who would even want to sleep at such a time?
While McCoy zipped around the battlefield in his Humvee to oversee the tactical situation, I was up to the brim of my Kevlar helmet helping set up the Main headquarters about three miles from the airport, the sniper rifle at rest while I attended to my other job as company gunny. We created an instant office by parking two command Amtracs back-to-back, flopping down their rear ramps, and throwing a lightproof cover over them, since night had fallen. Radios crackled, maps were unfurled, computers were booted up, and the battalion brain trust got to work in their mobile, claustrophobic dungeon, figuring out what had to happen next to keep this drive alive. We had done severe damage to the 51st Mech, which had been our primary foe, but remnants of the division were still around and were still dangerous. The British were coming up right behind us to take over this space, freeing us to push on up the road, and we were handing over responsibility while fighting was still under way nearby. The planners had a big chore ahead.
Ragged streaks of bright fire flashed into the darkness all around as our artillery batteries pumped out rounds in
