shoulder. Everybody on the roof did the same and stared into the night. A crazy
It was a sure kill, but then things went psycho. A roar of rifle fire thundered around us, machine guns joined in, and more and more bullets thunked into and around the corpse on the bridge as fire discipline broke down among the tired and edgy Marines, who had just endured a full day of intense combat. In about two seconds, at least twenty-five bullets peppered the poor bastard, and I heard a splash as whatever he had carried fell into the river.
That breakdown in discipline was not good, but I was too tired to worry about it. In fact, I was totally exhausted. There were plenty of people on the rooftop now to stand guard, so I wiped the man I had just killed from my mind, turned over on my back, laid my rifle on my chest, and went to sleep to a lullaby of artillery rounds that rumbled overhead and detonated dully along the far bank.
The horizon was already yellow with the first light of a rising sun on April 6, the eighteenth day of the war, when I awoke to a discordant devil’s chorus of war noise. Individual Marines pumped rifle shots across the canal, a couple of tanks were booming with their 120 mm cannon, and artillery and mortars thumped out a steady harassment barrage. Enemy small-arms fire, RPGs, and mortars were still rattling back at us. Combat reveille for another day in the Corps.
I rubbed my overworked eyes, which still burned from all the sweat of yesterday, then bitched at the boys for letting me sleep so long, although I was privately grateful that they had done so. I felt rested, safe and cozy in my little corner of the world. The skeletal bridge across the canal remained empty but for the bullet-riddled body of the foolish Iraqi who had tried to sneak up on us last night. While I slept, someone had bestowed the macabre name of “Ach-dead” on the corpse on the bridge. Over in the forbidden zone, a car burned like a torch, and a curtain of thick dust and smoke swirled above the buildings.
Looking around, I realized that something was different. Overnight, permission had been given to change out of the filthy MOPP outfits that we had not taken off for three straight weeks, and everybody but the guys with me on the roof was walking around in brown-patterned desert camouflage battle dress. Good Lord, did they look comfortable. An attack by chemical or biological weapons was unlikely this close to Baghdad, and a real problem had developed with heat exhaustion among the troops working in the heavy suits beneath the blazingly hot sun. Changing clothes had never sounded so good, so the Panda and I climbed down from the guard shack and headed over to where the Kilo Company headquarters track was parked in a broad courtyard, safely out of the line of direct fire from the Iraqis on the other side of the river.
The walk was only about twenty yards, but for the first time, I noticed the dreadful condition of the city through which we had fought. Yesterday, I had been much too busy to register any impressions, and the fight had unfolded in a sameness of monochrome brown. Now it looked like some scene out of a Hollywood war epic, only this was for real. Garbage littered the street, the acrid taste of smoke and cordite hung in the air, and because food was rotting in the shops and nearby homes, the city smelled like a barnyard. The bodies of animals and enemy soldiers decomposing in the heat added to the awful odor. Bullets had carved crude holes and scars in the walls, and broken glass crunched beneath my boots.
I found Lieutenant Colonel McCoy standing beside his Humvee, where he had been having a frontline conference with the regimental boss, Colonel Steve Hummer, and Major General James N. Mattis, the commander of the 1st Marine Division. A single lucky Iraqi artillery shell could have decapitated our leadership, but the day’s mission was of such importance that the big boys had come down to eyeball it.
When Mattis and Hummer went off to talk to some of the troops who would make the river crossing, McCoy gave me a quick information dump and said there would be no repeat of what happened the previous day, when at Officer Bob’s direction I had missed the opening of the fight. No lollygagging behind the line today. He told me to take my snipers across with the assault troops and set up shop on the far side of the river. He looked at his watch and said we would begin in twenty minutes. That gave me just enough time to get out of the MOPP suit and back to the shack.
As we spoke, Casey had driven up with our trucks, which contained our clothes, and parked only about fifty yards away. Panda and I were soon peeling away the squishy MOPP suits that clung to us like a crude fungus. The simple act of putting on clean desert cammies gave us the feeling of being reborn, and I felt as though I were donning an Armani suit.
We joked with Casey and some of the other guys as we changed, and they assembled packs with enough ammunition and supplies to keep us going for another full day. Meanwhile, the tempo of Marine artillery and mortars firing in support of the coming mission increased, switching from sporadic harassment fire to a thorough preparation barrage of the area that we were about to attack. Huge shells tore through the sky with the sound of ripping linen and exploded among the buildings and the palm grove beyond the bridge.
The volleys of artillery suddenly drew return fire from some hidden Iraqi guns, a salvo that reportedly was triggered by an order from an Iraqi general using a cell phone. Everything changed in an instant. The Iraqi artillery, which had been quiet all night, was shooting back. That made me finish changing my clothes boot-camp fast. I was snapping on my flak jacket when three shells came down toward us and someone yelled, “Incoming!”
There was no time to react, other than to realize that this was going to be close. To this day, no one has been able to explain whether the devastating artillery rounds came from enemy or friendly guns.
A thunderous explosion created a powerful rush of air that darkened the area, shrapnel slashed and rang about, and the concussion hammered the surrounding buildings. Marines were knocked down like rows of dominoes as a column of fire flew out of the rear of the Amtrac, along with the ripped bodies of the two guys who had been inside, smashed radios, maps, packs, and debris colored by a spray of burning oil and hot blood. All of us who had felt safe within the high walls of the compound now felt like mice trapped in a box, with nowhere to hide.
A thick overhead power line snapped with whiplash force and cracked Casey on the arm and sent him sprawling, stunned, into the dirt. He shook it off, caught his breath in the swirling dark smoke, and, unsure of what had knocked him to the ground, slapped his hands across his body, searching for the gooey sensation of blood. There was none, and he got back on his feet and roared off in his Humvee to bring up an ambulance and emergency medical teams.
The Panda Bear and I had ducked away from the blast and, shielded by the tall sides of our armored Humvee, were unharmed other than being thoroughly rattled and disoriented. Screams of wounded men mixed with calls for “Corpsman up!” When I looked over at the smoking ruin of the Kilo command track, I thought Colonel McCoy was dead. We had been standing right beside it, talking, only a moment before.
Through the smoke, fire, and chaos, my pal Gunnery Sergeant Jean-Paul Courville, the Ragin’ Cajun, came across the courtyard. He stands a shade under six feet tall, his blond hair is cut short, and his 175 pounds are nothing but solid, lean muscle. When we had first met several months ago, Courville had just finished a stint as a basic training drill instructor and looked like a Marine television commercial. “Hello, Gunny,” I had said. “It’s ‘Gunnery Sergeant,’ ” he corrected. “Fuck you,” I replied. After that we got along fine.
After seeing the devastating explosion, Courville, in an astonishing display of calmness and courage amid mayhem and confusion, already was getting things under control. He got corpsmen busy treating the wounded, assigned priorities on who was to be evacuated, then personally ducked into the still-burning Amtrac and hauled out live ammunition, rockets and bullets that were in danger of exploding from the heat. My personal negative feelings about everything French do not extend to Courville, who is without question a ripped stud of a gunnery sergeant. Anyway, he’s from Louisiana, not Paris.
Then I heard a shout-McCoy’s voice! He had walked to the other side of a wall just before the shell hit and had survived the explosion. Two of his Marines were dead and three had been wounded, but the colonel yelled, “This doesn’t change anything!”
