by Evan Wright
A few vehicles down the line from Colbert’s, Doc Bryan is nearly shot by a nervous Marine, a senior enlisted man. Doc Bryan rides with Lovell’s Team Three. He is crouching by his team’s vehicle, observing the village on the other side, when he feels a burning sensation in his eyeball. It takes him a moment to figure out: Someone is pointing an infrared-laser aiming device from a rifle into the side of his eye. The laser’s invisible, but he feels its heat. Just as Doc Bryan turns, a senior enlisted Marine tramps out of the darkness, aiming his rifle at him, cursing. “Jesus, I thought you guys were enemy,” the senior enlisted man says. “I almost shot you.”
The senior enlisted man, a company operations chief, tells Doc Bryan he had trained his weapon on him and almost fired, believing he was an enemy infiltrator.
In the layers of incompetence Recon Marines feel they labor under in the battalion, this company ops chief is nearly at the top with Captain America and Encino Man. They call him “Casey Kasem,” because of his warm, gravelly voice, which over the radios sounds like that of the old rock DJ.
In his late thirties, lean and dark-haired, Casey Kasem usually rides with Encino Man. Casey Kasem’s job is to ensure that the Marines have enough supplies—fuel, water and batteries for their night optics. Like Encino Man, he’s one of those rear-echelon men in a support position, who ordinarily wouldn’t have deployed with the Recon Marines.
One of the things that burn everyone up about Casey Kasem is the fact that he failed to bring enough batteries or adequate rechargers to operate the platoon’s only PAS-13 thermal-imaging device. Unlike their NVGs, which amplify existing light, the PAS-13 uses heat and can see through dust and foliage. The PAS-13 gives the platoon a critical advantage and means of survival in night operations, but largely because of a supply snafu they blame on Casey Kasem, the platoon only has enough batteries to operate the PAS-13 for a couple of hours each night. Within a few days, when they are at the height of their operations in ambush country, the men will sometimes go whole nights without any batteries at all for their PAS-13, and in at least one instance, this deficiency will nearly kill them.
Adding insult to injury, while Casey Kasem apparently failed to bring enough batteries for the Marines’ critical night-fighting gear, he did have the presence of mind to bring along a personal video camera. He is constantly sticking it in everyone’s face as part of his effort to make a war documentary that he hopes to sell after the invasion. “He’s just another king-size jackass making life more dangerous for us,” Doc Bryan says.
Tonight Casey Kasem is highly agitated because he and Encino Man have concluded that “enemy infiltrators” have moved into the Marines’ position and are preparing an attack.
“Over there. Enemy infiltrators,” he tells Doc Bryan, pointing toward the village he and others on the team have been watching.
While Doc Bryan is not technically a Marine, he is a product of the Navy’s most elite special-warfare training and could have chosen to have been placed with either Navy SEALs or a Marine Recon unit. Doc Bryan, who arguably has better combat training than many Recon Marines, is supremely confident of his judgment. “That’s a village,” Doc Bryan says.
“No. Over there,” Casey Kasem whispers excitedly, pointing along the canal. “Looks like a squad-size group of Iraqis, maybe an RPG hunter-killer team observing us.”
“Those are fucking rocks,” Doc Bryan says. “They’re not moving.”
“Not moving,” Casey Kasem says, “because those are the most disciplined Iraqis we’ve seen so far.”
Casey Kasem sounds the alert up and down the line. Marines are pushed out with weapons and optics to observe the Iraqi “squad.” Only at first light do the Marines definitively prove to Casey Kasem that the “disciplined Iraqis” are indeed rocks.
Through the heightened alert, Colbert spends the night calming his team. When Garza takes the watch on the Humvee’s Mark-19, Colbert tells him, “Garza, please make sure you don’t shoot the civilians on the other side of the canal. We are the invading army. We must be magnanimous.”
“Magna-nous?” Garza asks. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“Lofty and kinglike,” Colbert tells him.
“Sure,” Garza says after a moment’s consideration. “I’m a nice guy.”
EIGHT
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THE MARINES ARE ALMOST EUPHORIC the next morning, March 23, when Fick briefs them on the next leg of the invasion. He doesn’t know for sure yet where they are going, but higher-ups in the battalion have insisted that today is the day all men must shave off their mustaches. “Given the Battalion Commander’s previous order regarding mustaches, I think we can all take this as a clear indication that we’re crossing the Euphrates soon,” he tells his men just after sunrise.
Later, after they’ve refueled the Humvees, Fick issues specific orders. “Our objective is a town called Nasiriyah, a crossing point on the Euphrates. The word is the Army passed through it twenty-four hours ago and declared it ‘secure.’”
At the time Fick is delivering his sunny assessment on conditions at Nasiriyah, an Army maintenance unit has just been ambushed outside of town, about four hours earlier, sustaining numerous casualties.
(Fick later speculates that the optimistic assessment he was given on the state of Nasiriyah stemmed from a foul-up fairly typical of military communications, which can take on the aspect of a game of telephone. “The Marine Corps had been expecting the Iraqis to blow the bridges in Nasiriyah,” he explains. “Someone probably reported that the bridges were ‘intact,’ and this got changed to ‘the bridges are secure,’ to ‘the whole town is secure.’”)
Colbert’s team pulls back from the canal with the rest of the battalion and drops onto a freeway, bound for Nasiriyah. They join several thousand U.S. military vehicles driving north at forty-five miles per hour, which in military convoys is lightning speed. “Look at this, gents,” Colbert says. “The First Marine Division out of Camp Pendleton rolling with impunity on Saddam’s highways.”
It’s a bright, clear day. No dust at all. Several hundred Iraqi children line the highway, shouting gleefully. “Yes, we are the conquering heroes,” Colbert says.
Everyone’s spirits are up. Colbert seems to have gotten over his disappointment at the scrubbing of his team’s bridge mission. The sense is that this campaign is unfolding like the last Gulf War, an Iraqi rout in battle followed by an American race to gobble up abandoned territory as swiftly as possible.
“As soon as we capture Baghdad,” Person says, “Lee Greenwood is going to parachute in singing ‘I’m Proud to Be an American.’”
“Watch it,” Colbert says. “You know the rule.”
One of the cardinal rules of Colbert’s Humvee is that no one is permitted to make any references to country music. He claims that the mere mention of country, which he deems “the Special Olympics of music,” makes him physically ill.
Along the highway, they pass columns of tanks and other vehicles emblazoned with American flags or moto slogans such as “Angry American” or “Get Some.” Person spots a Humvee with the 9/11 catchphrase “Let’s Roll!” stenciled on the side.
“I hate that cheesy patriotic bullshit,” Person says. He mentions Aaron Tippin’s “Where the Stars and Stripes and the Eagles Fly,” then scoffs, “Like how he sings those country white-trash images. ‘Where eagles fly.’ Fuck! They fly in Canada, too. Like they don’t fly there? My mom tried to play me that song when I came home from Afghanistan. I was like, ‘Fuck, no, Mom. I’m a Marine. I don’t need to fly a little flag on my car to show I’m patriotic.’”
“That song is straight homosexual country music, Special Olympics–gay,” Colbert says.
By noon the battalion cuts off the freeway to Route 7, a two-lane blacktop road leading into Nasiriyah. Within an hour Colbert’s team is mired in a massive traffic jam. We stop about twenty kilometers south of Nasiriyah, amidst several thousand Marine vehicles bunched up on the highway. We are parked beside approximately 200 t
ractor-trailers hauling bulldozers, pontoon sections and other equipment for building bridges. Among these are numerous dump trucks hauling gravel. One has to marvel at the might—or hubris—of a military force that invades a sand- and rock-strewn country but brings its own gravel.
UNBEKNOWNST TO THE MARINES stopped on the highway on this lazy afternoon, twenty kilometers ahead of them the American military is experiencing its first setback of the war. Marine units are bogged down in a series of firefights in and around Nasiriyah. A city of about 400,000, Nasiriyah lies just north of a key bridge over the Euphrates. (The bridge First Recon originally planned to seize is located in a remote area far east of Nasiriyah; that mission was called off in part because planners erroneously believed the bridge over Nasiriyah was wide open for the taking.) Several hundred Marines from a unit dubbed “Task Force Tarawa” attempted to cross the bridge into the city earlier in the day, and are now pinned down by several thousand Fedayeen guerrilla fighters around the bridge and inside the city.
Nasiriyah marks the spot where the terrain in Iraq changes dramatically. At Nasiriyah, the desert land, watered by the Euphrates, turns almost tropical in places. There are dense palm groves, fields of tall grass, even rice paddies. These predominate south of the bridge, where Marines from Task Force Tarawa are dug in taking heavy machine-gun, mortar, artillery, RPG and AK fire.
The fighting in Nasiriyah started at about three in the morning after an Army maintenance convoy that had been rolling on the superhighway far south of the city took a wrong turn onto Route 7 and drove toward the town. The soldiers in this unit, including most famously Private First Class Jessica Lynch, had no navigation equipment and poor maps. They were ambushed a few kilometers outside Nasiriyah, with eleven killed, six captured and five missing.
A few hours later, after dawn, the Marines from Task Force Tarawa, which includes a total of about 5,000 troops, arrived. Their original mission had been to secure the bridge and the route through Nasiriyah for other Marine forces, which would then move through the city and continue north. But having received word of the ambushed soldiers—and seeing with their own eyes the blown-up, burned Army vehicles from the maintenance units smoldering by the side of the road—the Marines from Task Force Tarawa began a search-and-rescue mission. They pushed up to within a kilometer of the bridge aboard lightly armored vehicles and dismounted into the surrounding fields—a patchwork of dried mudflats, berms, grass and palm trees. While the Marines called out, yelling for any American soldiers to show themselves, they started to take rifle and machine-gun fire from surrounding huts and berms. They also heard American voices calling out to them. They found nine soldiers, several of them wounded, from the lost convoy hiding in the foliage, and rescued them.
Still taking sporadic enemy fire, the Marines in Task Force Tarawa regrouped on the highway and prepared to roll onto the bridge into Nasiriyah. They started before noon, about the time First Recon pushed up Route 7 and became mired in the military traffic jam twenty kilometers south of them.
The lead Marines in Task Force Tarawa crossed onto the bridge into Nasiriyah aboard tanks and Amtracs. Amtracs are ungainly, tracked vehicles designed to swim over the ocean as well as drive on land, but are not really designed for heavy combat. Each holds roughly twenty Marines. About a dozen vehicles made it across the bridge, then cut east, hoping to find a route bypassing the center of Nasiriyah.
But the tanks quickly ran into one of the worst features of Iraqi cities: unpaved streets running with open sewer water. They bogged down in the muck, unable to move any farther.
More Amtracs, containing a total of about 150 Marines, raced across the bridge and drove straight into the heart of the city. Central Nasiriyah is a warren of two- to four-story brick and concrete structures, most of them surrounded by walls. As the Marines sped into the center of the town, they began to take hostile fire. Iraqis dressed in civilian clothes, hiding behind walls and windows of the buildings lining both sides of the streets, fired AK rifles, machine guns and RPGs into the Amtracs. The Marines continued on and had made it three kilometers into the heart of Nasiriyah when an Amtrac was hit by an RPG, wounding several. The column pressed ahead to seize a canal bridge on the north side of the city.
Additional Amtracs attempted to cross the Euphrates but were attacked by Iraqis dug in on all sides. Marines jumped out and fanned into the surrounding terrain to fight them. Some tried to call in fire support from Marine mortar units, but their radios went down. Three Marines were killed and four wounded in the first moments of fighting.
Then Army A-10 attack jets, sent in to support them, appeared in the sky, swooped down and began strafing Marines. How the A-10 pilots, flying low, mistook Marines for hostile forces is one of those mysteries of battle. The A-10s’ strafing runs shredded Amtracs and killed as many as ten Marines.
As the firefight intensified by the bridge, Task Force Tarawa pushed more Amtracs forward to evacuate the wounded. One was blown to pieces when an enemy round penetrated the armor and detonated the stocks of ammunition inside, killing the Marines in the rear of the vehicle.
By the end of the afternoon on March 23, pockets of Marines from Task Force Tarawa are cut off along several kilometers of the route into and through Nasiriyah. Eighteen Marines are dead, four are missing and more than seventy are wounded.
TWENTY KILOMETERS SOUTH of the fighting, the mood on the highway is almost festive. It’s a clear, warm afternoon, with dazzling blue skies. No one knows about the firefights ahead or the Marines dying. Though all afternoon we’ve seen Cobras and “casevac”—casualty evacuation—helicopters shuttling back and forth toward Nasiriyah. Marines who haven’t slept or stopped moving in days loll about in the shade of Humvees and trucks stopped on the road, dozing with their flak jackets off. Others lie in the sun, MOPP suits partially opened, heads back, trying to soak up rays.
There are nearly 10,000 Marines parked on the road, as well as a sprinkling of British troops who appear to be lost. Everyone defecates and pisses out in the open beside the highway. Taking a shit is always a big production in a war zone. There’s the MOPP suit to contend with, and no one wants to walk too far from the road for fear of stepping on a land mine, since these are known to be scattered haphazardly beside Iraqi highways. In the civilian world, of course, utmost care is taken to perform bodily functions in private. Public defecation is an act of shame, or even insanity. In a war zone, it’s the opposite. You don’t want to wander off by yourself. You could get shot by enemy snipers, or by Marines when you’re coming back into friendly lines. So everyone just squats in the open a few meters from the road, often perching on empty wooden grenade crates used as portable “shitters.” Trash from thousands of discarded MRE packs litters the area. With everyone lounging around, eating, sleeping, sunning, pooping, it looks like some weird combat version of an outdoor rock festival.
Shepherds, undaunted by the American military might amassed on the highway, walk through the lines. Flocks of sheep and herds of goats zigzag between the rows of tanks, trucks and Marines. Only a few Marines notice. They point at the animals and laugh. Collectively, they seem lulled into a sense of security by the sheer volume of troops and equipment jumbled on the road. No one is up on the vehicle guns. Few, if any, are on watch.
Colbert returns from taking a dump, and Trombley, whom Colbert has relentlessly pestered about drinking enough water to maintain clear urine, turns the tables on him.
“Have a good dump, Sergeant?” Trombley asks.
“Excellent,” Colbert answers. “Shit my brains out. Not too hard, not too runny.”
“That sucks when it’s runny and you have to wipe fifty times,” Trombley says conversationally.
“I’m not talking about that.” Colbert assumes his stern teacher’s voice. “If it’s too hard or too soft, something’s not right. You might have a problem.”
“It should be a little acid,” Person says, offering his own medical opinion. “And burn a little when it comes out.”
�
�Maybe on your little bitch asshole from all the cock that’s been stuffed up it,” Colbert snaps.
Hearing this exchange, another Marine in the platoon says, “Man, the Marines are so homoerotic. That’s all we talk about. Have you guys ever realized how homoerotic this whole thing is?”
Just before sundown, Marine artillery batteries, dug in a few kilometers ahead, begin to pound the city. As darkness falls, Colbert’s team excavates Ranger graves by the Humvee. The ground trembles as a column of massive M1A1 tanks rolls past, a few feet from where the Marines are resting. Out of the darkness, someone shouts, “Hey, if you lay down with your cock on the ground, it feels good.”
I WAKE UP AT DAWN on March 24 to the sound of a pickax thudding into the ground near my sleeping hole. Near me, a sergeant in Second Platoon named Antonio Espera excavates a pit, sweat rolling off his face even though it’s a chilly morning. “I’m fucking ashamed, dog,” he says, huffing as he swings the pickax. “When we left Afghanistan we didn’t leave a speck of Americana behind.”
Espera gestures to the trash-strewn road. “I was trained Marines don’t litter.”
His rage at the garbage—thousands of brown plastic wrappers and green foil pouches from MREs lying along the highway—has made him irrational. He’s digging a trash pit, when there are half a dozen sleeping holes, soon to be vacated, which could serve the same purpose. But he continues digging at a furious pace.
With his shaved head and deep-set eyes, Espera is one of the scariest-looking Marines in the platoon. Technically, he serves as Colbert’s assistant team leader, though in actuality he commands a separate Humvee. Espera’s crew of four Marines always rolls directly behind or beside Colbert’s, and he is one of Colbert’s closest friends in the platoon. The two men could hardly be more opposite. Espera, thirty, grew up in Riverside, California, and was, by his own account, truly a “bad motherfucker”—participating in all the violent pastimes available to a young Latino from a broken home and raised partially in state facilities. He was serving in an infantry platoon when he and Colbert met a few years earlier. Somehow they struck up a friendship, which on the face of it is odd. Colbert, with his Nordic features and upper-middle-class background, is also among those who frequently engage in routine racial humor, referring to the Spanish language as “dirty spic talk.” Espera, who’s part Native American, part Mexican and a quarter German, frequently rails about the dominance of America’s “white masters” and the genocide of his Indian ancestors. But describing his friendship with Colbert, Espera says, “Inside we’re both the same: violent warriors. Only he fights with his mind, and I fight with my strength.” For his part, Colbert says that when he met Espera he was impressed by his “maturity, dedication and toughness.” Even though Espera is not yet a Recon Marine, Colbert pulled strings to bring him into the elite battalion to serve as his assistant team leader.
