Shooter

comfortably over us. Finally, we had come to the place where we were being welcomed as liberators.

“One minute the Marines are creeping along shot-up neighborhoods, looking to fight Iraqi militia or fedayeen guerrilla fighters,” wrote John Koopman of the San Francisco Chronicle, our embedded reporter, who had become our friend, too. “The next minute they’re in downtown Baghdad, being greeted as conquering heroes. What a difference an hour makes.”

We repositioned the Humvees and moved to support the grunts from India who were prowling through the Palestine Hotel. We tried to stay focused as jubilant Iraqis surged around us, patting us on the back, hugging and kissing us and handing us small flowers, some of them thanking us in fractured English. Beyond the screen of welcoming Iraqis, more people were running around, looters who were hauling away furniture and everything else imaginable. If it wasn’t nailed down, they stole it. There were no longer any police or law enforcement officers to be found in Baghdad, or anywhere else in Iraq, and that wasn’t our job. We were still looking for the bad guys with guns and explosives.

Out of the crowd emerged a small group of people who appeared to be European, judging by their white skin, thick accents, and styles of clothing. They were shouting insults at us like “baby-killer” and “murderers” and “assassins.” Venom spilled in a twisted wave of hatred from the so-called human shields, who had entered Iraq to place themselves between the mean American military and the glorious soldiers of Saddam Hussein.

A middle-aged woman thrust a calendar containing photographs of dead children into my face and screamed, “Look what you did! How could you kill all these innocent children?”

“And what kind of sick bastard makes a calendar out of them?” I snapped back. She will never know how close I was to punching her, because she triggered memories of the ugly scene back at the bridge. But I pointed out instead that those pictures could not have come from this war, because it had only started three weeks ago, hardly time enough to whip up a best-selling little antiwar calendar. Things started to get volatile.

Up came a surly group of Iraqi men, some of whom spoke good English, and they surrounded the protesters who were surrounding Casey and me. One man explained that they did not care for these rude people and that he and his friends had decided to beat them to death.

Now I had to protect the antiwar nutcases, so I tried to give the Iraqi mob a lesson in democracy. “In America, this sort of complaining is called free speech,” I said. “They have a right to say whatever they want to say and should not be punished for expressing their beliefs.”

“Yes,” said the gang leader. “Yes, America. President Boosh. We will kill them.”

I looked at him and said, “You don’t understand. This is part of democracy, and you’re going to have to live with it. You can’t go around killing people just because you disagree with their political views. You get to say what you want, and they get to say what they want.”

The men did not strike anyone, but the intimidated antiwar protesters decided to move along. The peace activists had been saved by a U.S. Marine, one of the very people they hated, from a brutal death at the hands of ordinary Iraqi citizens, whom they thought they were there to defend. Nobody ever said this had to make any sense. I realized that a rational discussion of democracy might be a long way off in Iraq.

The hotels were pronounced clear, and the fedayeen had not sprung an anticipated ambush, so things slowly came under control from a military point of view, and we relaxed a bit. Maybe I wouldn’t have to kill anybody else today after all. The crowd in the square surged over to that big statue of Saddam Hussein, a monument to a man who no longer mattered. It had been erected only a year earlier to mark the sixty-fifth birthday of the tyrant, and Iraqi families had been prudent to pose for photographs before the statue. It was now the target of their revenge. They didn’t have the man, but they had his likeness, bigger than life, arrogant even in cast bronze, and were no longer going to let it stand there to dominate their capital. Shoes were thrown at it, and then the clang of rocks hitting metal reverberated off the weathered bronze as the crowd moved closer, yelling and gesturing.

Reporters and cameramen followed the crowd, and live televised pictures of the action in the square were beamed up to satellites and down to viewers around the world-from the White House, where President Bush watched with Secretary of State Colin Powell, to the tea shops of the Arab world, where viewers sipped afternoon tea in small shops and tuned in the Al Jazeera network. The Washington Post would later observe that what happened next was “either splendid luck or brilliant planning on the part of the military.”

Iraqi men shook the statue, beat on it with their fists, and even attacked the base with sledgehammers, but it would not budge. Saddam’s right arm remained defiantly raised over the enraged crowd. Some pieces of metal were gouged out, but the thing remained firmly attached to the high pedestal. The Bravo tankers contributed a rope, and young men climbed up and looped it around the neck of the statue, and the cheering escalated. This was a bit unsettling, but we decided to let it ride and see what happened.

Suddenly a shot cracked out, and Casey and I dove through the crowd, forcing a path through the uncomprehending civilians, yelling for them to move aside. We were thinking, Ambush! and the idea of a firefight in the park with so many civilians caught between the warring sides was horrific. But the discharged round had been fired accidentally by a Marine, not a fedayeen. We took deep, relieved breaths and made our way back to our trucks, which were parked with the tactical command post.

While we were gone, an older British gentleman had come up to Jerry Marsh and the Panda, who were guarding our vehicles, and identified himself as a former member of the Special Air Services, an elite arm of the British military. He was in Baghdad working as a news reporter and explained that a few Iraqis had gotten a bit too aggressive with him earlier in the day. This fellow handed Marsh a small Walther pistol and sheepishly mentioned that he had shot the unruly buggers. The day kept getting crazier.

The damned statue was still there, missing a few chips and pieces but irritatingly insulting everyone by defying all efforts to pull it down. It was time for the Marines to get involved.

Captain Bryan Lewis, the CO of Bravo Tanks, came over to me, and we pounded each other on the back, spreading the giddiness of the moment. Three weeks ago, I had expressed some doubts about Lewis, but his combat actions and steady leadership had changed my mind so much that now I thought he could probably walk on water. He told me the statue was about to come down, not by muscle power but through the brawn of a massive M88 tank recovery vehicle called a “Hercules.” The irony was enough to make us giggle: A strong machine named Hercules, for the son of Zeus, was going to rip down the statue of the deposed ruler in Baghdad, the home of another ancient civilization. History could be made of worse stuff than a duel of legends.

The seventy-ton M88 crunched its way to the statue and stretched out a long boom from which a braided steel cable could be attached. The crowd cheered even more, and the world watched.

Then, in a shocking and totally unexpected development that John Koopman of the Chronicle called a “less than diplomatic move,” a young Marine scampered up the boom and wrapped a bright American flag around the face of Saddam Hussein. The cheers stopped instantly, and an ominous silence dropped over us, followed by a great moan of despair. It was as if buckets of cold water had been thrown onto the crowd.

Casey was in midgulp, drinking water from his canteen, when he heard the audible sigh of disappointment arise from the crowd, and he turned around and saw the red, white, and blue American flag up where it wasn’t supposed to be. There is always somebody who doesn’t get the word, he thought. Few things would paint us as “conquerors” faster than a Marine putting the Stars and Stripes on Saddam’s head in the middle of Baghdad, under the gaze of an international television audience.

A pudgy Arab woman reporter wearing a flak vest and Kevlar helmet accosted Casey before he could wipe off his chin. “Take down that flag in the name of Allah and for the Iraqi people!” she shouted.

Casey paused for only a moment, then spun around, jumped into his truck, burrowed into his pack, and pulled out the rolled-up flag he had liberated as a souvenir a few days before. He leaped back out of the Humvee and was a blur in brown cammies moving fast into the crowd toward the statue, unfurling the Iraqi banner as he went. The colors seemed to glow in the afternoon sunshine.

Colonel McCoy was exasperated. He had a radio receiver at his ear and was listening to people yell at him about the American flag that had appeared out of nowhere, threatening to unravel the image that had been so carefully cultivated in the past three weeks. He was already under criticism for the episode at the bridge, and now