the same thing. The weather had improved, supplies were flowing, and the ground attack was rolling inexorably forward beneath a sky owned by Coalition warplanes. The Army’s 3rd Infantry Division finally was coming out of the desert through the narrow Karbala Gap and was within sight of the Euphrates River, while the 101st Airborne was finishing off the stubborn resistance in the strategic city of Najaf. On our side of the war, the 5th Marine Regiment was rushing up Highway 1, with our 7th Marines right behind them, and we formed a mighty column of tanks and trucks that stretched for miles over the horizon. It was time-consuming, but we had to reach the enemy before we could kill them.
The two Marine regiments made a sharp right turn off of Route 1 and onto an intersecting highway, Route 27, and caught the Iraqis flat-footed when we rolled up on the city of An Numaniyah and its important bridges across the Tigris River. Once on the other bank, we would link up with Task Force Tarawa and unify the combat power of the entire 1st Marine Division into a single powerful fist for the final push on Baghdad.
The steady movement was bringing all of us into the Red Zone, the area around Baghdad in which intelligence analysts predicted Saddam Hussein was most likely to slime us with his chemical and biological weapons. We were aware of the possibility but would not even think of stopping.
We drove all day, and as I sat and rocked and bumped along in the passenger seat of my Humvee, my thoughts drifted to how wheels were making just the sort of difference I had long envisioned for snipers. Once relegated to stationary hides and holes in the ground, we were now part of a mobile force. Shoot somebody in one town, saddle up, move on to another town, and shoot somebody else. Have gun, will travel.
Toward evening, Casey and I added a couple of CAATs for extra security to our advance quartering party, broke away from the main column, and raced ahead to find a spot where the battalion could settle down for the night near An Numaniyah. The sounds of a mighty battle, a steady drumbeat of gunfire and explosions that rolled across the desert, greeted us as we approached the first bridge and pulled to the side. Then we received startling new orders from regimental planners who wanted our handful of Humvees and CAATs to drive right through the firefight that was raging around the embattled bridge, cross it, dash through the hostile, uncleared city, and set up camp on the other side of the Tigris. It was a recipe for a suicidal disaster.
Fortunately, as we were trying to figure out some way to carry out the order without getting everyone killed, our battalion began pulling in, and McCoy was soon standing beside us. He chewed on his big cigar as we gave him the briefing, and he grew quite unhappy to hear how we were supposed to go through a ferocious battle, then drive through a totally unsecured city, and do it in the dark. The colonel grabbed his radio and laid some sharp, unkind words on headquarters about planners who did not take into account the reality of the battlefield.
At least three times, McCoy said, “I won’t have a
Somehow, Casey squeezed the battalion into an overnight position in a scrubby field about two football fields square, only about 20 percent of the space that normally was required, and I took out a security patrol. Our discoveries underlined the potential enemy strength in the area and confirmed that trying to carry out that idiotic run-for-the-bridge order could have gotten a lot of Marines killed.
First, there was an L-shaped bunker complex on the perimeter that was packed with weapons of all kinds, including antiaircraft guns. The Iraqis had left in such a hurry that the little stoves they used to cook food were still burning. We collected and stacked about seventy AK-47s, fifteen light machine guns, four heavy machine guns, thirty-five RPG launchers, and four 90 mm antitank recoilless rifles. Once the pile was arranged, an Amtrac rolled over the weapons to crush them.
Then we found pastures of antipersonnel and antitank mines that had been planted around the area in which we had set up camp. The danger from the mines was so great that the Marines who had been in their vehicles all day could not even get out and walk around to stretch their legs. Our vehicles were tightly coiled inside the circle of mines so they protected us instead of the guys who laid them in the first place.
But the major cause of nerves that night was the knowledge that we at last had hit the Red Zone and were facing the threat of WMDs. Headquarters said that if we were hit, the new conditions “would make the advance significantly more difficult.” No shit.
Sure enough, word was flashed to us that night that our intel boys had intercepted an Iraqi radio transmission ordering commanders in our area to release chemical weapons. That got our attention in a hurry, and I quickly checked our brood of caged pigeons. Little Bastard and Botulism had not yet keeled over dead, but this was no time to take chances. It wasn’t a drill.
We expected the real thing to be dumped on us at any moment, so we buttoned up our MOPP suits and scrambled to wiggle our feet into those terrible rubber boots. If the worst happened and we received incoming rounds, we would pull on the matching rubber gloves and the bug-eyed masks and be 100 percent protected from chemical munitions.
The boots were awful and quickly raised blisters on our feet. After sweating it out for thirty minutes while trying to work, I checked the pigeons again. They were still strutting, so the air was good. Colonel McCoy, who was just as clumsy in his boots as the rest of us, finally let us take them off rather than stumble around like a bunch of drunks. The full MOPP gear impeded our ability to fight, so we chose to live with the threat and carry on as usual. If hit, we would scramble to suit up. Meanwhile, if we died, we died.
We fell asleep to the sound of gunfire at the bridge, awoke to barking volleys of artillery, and rolled out though the carpet of debris left behind by the 5th Marines’ fight for the bridge. Dead Iraqi defenders lay about in grotesque positions as we drove cautiously through the city, where shifting columns of dark smoke from burning buildings darkened the morning sky. Our little quartering party never would have survived that fight alone.
A few miles from the Tigris River, we dropped our light-skinned vehicles and gathered the armor to head south and attack Al Kut, a port and market center that was the site of another important bridge. The intel guys warned us that the enemy had a significant number of well-trained and well-equipped troops in the city, including elements of the Baghdad Division of the Republican Guard, so we had a green light to be “liberal” in our application of firepower.
That put it mildly, because we were about to pound the hell out of them, using everything but brass knuckles and switchblade knives. As we bore down on the city along one side of the Tigris, another battalion shadowed us on the far side, and Task Force Tarawa was pushing up from the south. The combination locked the paramilitaries and Republican Guard troops into defensive positions, so we battened down the hatches and jumped on the bad guys in what developed into our biggest firefight of the war thus far.
American planes slashed in overhead and smashed Iraqi tanks, armored vehicles, artillery and antiaircraft guns, and about a company’s worth of infantrymen who were hidden in a thick grove of trees northeast of our position. The deafening explosions of bombs weighing a thousand pounds shook the ground as if giants were running around, and debris, trees, and dirt were flung into the air. A staccato of secondary explosions followed and lasted for twenty minutes. When the dust settled, a major threat to our flank had been obliterated.
Our Bravo tanks charged over the bridge and into a fight with more Iraqi tanks, cannons blazing only twenty yards apart, as we penetrated deeper into the western outskirts of the town. Enemy tanks and armored vehicles were hidden behind corners and would pop out to take easy shots and quickly pull back. Bravo kept attacking, and the grunts of Kilo Company piled out of their Amtracs and dove into a sprawling grove of date palms, where enemy bullets chipped trees around the ears of the advancing Marines. The CAATs swept out north and south to add their missiles and machine guns to the fray, while India Company hit clusters of buildings the Bravo tanks had bypassed.
Casey and I brought in the Tac and Main headquarters, and I watched with breathtaking eagerness as heavy fire slashed out from the palm grove where the enemy troops were dug in. The radio blurted calls for assistance from the battle commanders, and I grabbed my sniper rifle but Officer Bob suddenly appeared and refused to let me leave. “I need you back here,” he insisted.
“I’m not your personal fucking bodyguard!” I shouted, but I got no response.
There was a war erupting just up the road. Up there, the big guns of the tanks were hammering away, heavy machine guns were stuttering, Marine grunts were yelling and running and shooting, tankers were calling for more infantry support, enemy fire was astonishingly heavy. Down here, Officer Bob strolled back and forth, safe behind
