by Evan Wright
But Fick has other concerns. In a couple of hours his men will roll through the city. Marines have dubbed the route through Nasiriyah “sniper alley,” though within a few weeks the same nickname will apply to any street in an Iraqi town.
Colbert briefs his team inside the Humvee. “The last friendly units that went through there were taking RPGs from the rooftops,” he says. “I want the Mark-19 ranged high. Trombley, anything that moves on the left that looks like a weapon, shoot it.”
“Gee, I hope I get to run over somebody at least,” Person says, growing petulant. As the driver, he doesn’t have easy access to his weapon. This fact bugs him. “I’m one of the best marksmen here. I can shoot people, too.”
Colbert tells him to shut up. “Look,” he tells his team. “There’s nothing to worry about. Everyone just do your job. We’re going to have a lot of ass rolling in front of us.”
“Ass” in the Marine Corps refers to heavily armed units, such as tanks. The Marines have been told that some armored elements of RCT-1 will move through the city ahead of them.
Espera, who drives behind Colbert with his team in a Humvee with no roof or doors on it, is worried. “I can understand a mission to assault a city, but to run a gauntlet through it?” he says, leaning into Colbert’s window. “I hope these generals know what they’re doing.”
AT MIDNIGHT, Espera and I share a last cigarette. Marines, unable to sleep, stand around by their Humvees wrapped in ponchos to ward off the bitter cold, some of them jumping in place to warm up. Espera and I climb under a Humvee to conceal the light of the cigarette and lie on our backs, passing it back and forth.
Espera reenlisted in the Marines on his way back from Afghanistan. While there, he and his squad of Marines spent forty-five days living in a three-meter-deep hole somewhere in the desert. The only action they saw occurred on the night their perimeter was overrun by camels. Espera and his men opened up on them with machine guns. “After three weeks out there, no sleep, living in those holes, I was fucking hallucinating,” he explains. “We thought those camels were fucking Hajjis coming over the wire. When we lit those motherfuckers up, it was fucking raining camel meat. It was a mess, dog. Motherfuckers even did a story on it in the L.A. Times.”
Now Espera admits he sometimes regrets reenlisting. “To come to this motherfucker?” He adds, “I’ve been so up and down today. I guess this is how a woman feels.”
Though Espera takes pride in being a “violent warrior,” the philosophical implications weigh on him. “I asked a priest if it’s okay to kill people in war,” he tells me. “He said it’s okay as long as you don’t enjoy it. Before we crossed into Iraq, I fucking hated Arabs. I don’t know why. I never saw too many in Afghanistan. But as soon as we got here, it’s just gone. I just feel sorry for them. I miss my little girl. Dog, I don’t want to kill nobody’s children.”
NO ONE’S SLEEPING in Colbert’s Humvee, either. When I get back in, Trombley once again talks about his hopes of having a son with his new young bride when he returns home.
“Never have kids, Corporal,” Colbert lectures. “One kid will cost you three hundred thousand dollars. You should never have gotten married. It’s always a mistake.” Colbert often proclaims the futility of marriage. “Women will always cost you money, but marriage is the most expensive way to go. If you want to pay for it, Trombley, go to Australia. For a hundred bucks, you can order a whore over the phone. Half an hour later, she arrives at your door, fresh and hot, like a pizza.”
Despite his bitter proclamations about women, if you catch Colbert during an unguarded moment, he’ll admit that he once loved a girl who jilted him, a junior-high-school sweetheart whom he dated on and off for ten years and was even engaged to until she left him to marry one of his closest buddies. “And we’re still all friends,” he says, sounding almost mad about it. “They’re one of those couples that likes to takes pictures of themselves doing all the fun things they do and hang them up all over their goddamn house. Sometimes I just go over there and look at the pictures of my ex-fiancée doing all those fun things I used to do with her. It’s nice having friends.”
I WATCH THE ARTILLERY streak through the sky toward Nasiriyah. Marine howitzers have been pounding the city for about thirty-six hours now. Each 155mm projectile they fire weighs about 100 pounds. There are several different types, but two are most commonly employed in Iraq: high-explosive (HE) rounds to blast through steel and concrete; and dual-purpose improved conventional munitions (DPICM) rounds, which burst overhead, dispersing dozens of grenade-size bomblets intended to shred people below.
The bulk of those flying into Nasiriyah are HE rounds. A single HE round can knock down a small building, send a car flying ten meters into the air, or blast a four-meter-wide crater in the ground. They spray shrapnel in a burst that’s considered lethal within a fifty-meter radius and has a high probability of maiming anyone within an additional 150 meters.
The Marines’ artillery guns have a range of thirty kilometers. But even in the best of circumstances, artillery fire is an imprecise art. Rounds can veer off by twenty meters or more, as we witnessed today when one burst overhead. Despite the improvements in munitions and the use of computers and radar to help target them, the basic principles of artillery haven’t changed much since Napoleon’s time.
For some reason reporters and antiwar groups concerned about collateral damage in war seldom pay much attention to artillery. The beauty of aircraft, coupled with their high-tech destructive power, captures the imagination. From a news standpoint, jets flying through the sky make for much more dramatic footage than images of cannons parked in the mud, intermittently belching puffs of smoke.
But the fact is, the Marines rely much more on artillery bombardment than on aircraft dropping precision-guided munitions. During our thirty-six hours outside Nasiriyah they have already lobbed an estimated 2,000 rounds into the city. The impact of this shelling on its 400,000 residents must be devastating.
It’s not the first time the citizens of Nasiriyah have been screwed by the Americans. On February 15, 1991, during the first Gulf War, George H. W. Bush gave a speech at the UN in which he urged “the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” The U.S. military also dropped thousands of leaflets on the country, urging the same. Few heeded this call more than the citizens of Nasiriyah. While the Iraqi army was routed in Kuwait, the mostly Shia populace of Nasiriyah led a coup against Baathist leaders controlling the city. When Saddam’s armed forces subsequently came in to put down the uprising, they did so with the tacit approval of the Americans, who allowed them to use helicopters against the rebels. (The American administration at the time didn’t want to see Iraq torn apart by rebellion; Bush’s call for an overthrow of the government had merely been a ploy to tie up Iraq’s armed forces while the U.S. military prepared to battle them in Kuwait.) After the resistance was quashed in Nasiriyah, months of bloody reprisals followed, in which thousands of its citizens are believed to have been killed.
In this war Marine intelligence analysts will later estimate that their advance into Nasiriyah was stopped by between 3,000 and 5,000 Saddam loyalists. Despite America’s dazzling high-tech capabilities—the Marines move through Nasiriyah by blasting it to hell.
As a reporter watching this bombardment from Colbert’s Humvee, knowing we will be rolling through Nasiriyah soon, I feel relief every time I see another round burning through the sky. Each one, I imagine, ups the odds of surviving.
AT THREE IN THE MORNING, Gunny Wynn pokes his head in Colbert’s window. We were supposed to move a couple of hours ago. But things are always delayed. “We’re going at dawn,” he says.
“That’s fucking asinine,” Colbert says. “Moving under cover of darkness is our primary advantage.”
Gunny Wynn attempts to reassure him. “One thing we saw in Somalia was no matter how hard the fighting, gunmen usually sleep between four and eight. They just conk out, like clockwork. S
o we should be okay.”
Colbert spends his final sleepless moments in the darkness, fantasizing about all the custom gear he should have brought for his Humvee—extra power inverters to charge the batteries of his thermal nightscope, a better shortwave radio to tune in the BBC, a CD player.
“We could hook up speakers and play music to fuck with the Iraqis,” Person says.
“We could drive through Nasiriyah playing Metallica,” Trombley adds.
“Fuck that,” Person says. “We’d play GG Allin.
“Who the fuck is GG Allin?” Colbert asks.
“Like, this original punk-rock dude,” Person says. “He believes murder should be legalized. You should be able to kill people you hate. He’s fucking cool.”
No one points out that this concept already seems to be the prevailing one in greater Nasiriyah.
ELEVEN
°
ON THE MORNING of March 25, the men in First Recon, most of whom have been up all night in anticipation of entering the hostile city, are finally told to start their engines. Colbert’s Humvee rolls toward the bridge at about six-thirty in the morning. The smoke has cleared, but it’s an overcast day. Just before the causeway onto the bridge, we pass Marines in gas masks standing by the side of the road. They gesture for us to don our masks, indicating there’s a gas attack.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Colbert says. He points out the window. “There’s birds flying. Fuck it. We’re not putting on our masks.”
We drive onto the bridge. The guardrails on either side are bent and tattered. There are piles of empty brass shell casings and discarded steel ammo boxes on both sides. But aside from these signs of combat, it just looks like your average concrete bridge. I’m amazed that with all the gunfire—especially mortars and artillery—it wasn’t hit. The Euphrates below is a flat ribbon of gray.
On the other side we pass several blown-up Amtracs. Marine rucksacks are scattered on the road, with clothes, bedrolls, and bloody scraps of battle dressing. Nearby are puddles of fluorescent pink engine coolant from destroyed vehicles.
The city ahead is about six kilometers across, a sprawling metropolis of mud brick and cinder block. Smoke curls from collapsed structures. Homes facing the road are pockmarked and cratered. Cobras fly overhead, spitting machine-gun fire into buildings on both sides of us. We see no civilians, just dogs roaming the ruins.
Nobody talks in Colbert’s vehicle. Reports fly over the radio that other vehicles in First Recon’s convoy are coming under fire. Then we halt on the northern end of Nasiriyah. We are surrounded by shattered gray buildings, set back about fifty meters on either side of the road. The things you look at are the thousands of gaps everywhere—windows, alleys, doorways, parapets on the roofs—to see if there are any muzzle flashes. You seldom see the guys actually doing the shooting. They hide behind walls, sticking the gun barrels over the edges to fire. All you see is a little flame spouting from the shadows. Colbert leans into his rifle scope, scanning the buildings. “Stay frosty, gents,” he says.
We are stopped because Alpha Company has halted in order to pick up a wounded Marine from Task Force Tarawa with a bullet in his leg. The best they can do is put the Marine’s stretcher on top of the Humvee. While attempting to load him, snipers in rubbled buildings on both sides of the road begin firing into the convoy. They concentrate their fire on Recon’s support trucks. The driver of one takes a bullet in the chest, but it’s stopped by his interceptor vest. An RPG round zooms over the nose of another support truck and explodes nearby. The Marines in the support trucks, derisively referred to as POGs (People Other than Grunts) by Colbert and others in the frontline units, begin launching Mark-19 grenades into a nearby building. Then a Cobra slices low and fires its machine gun directly over the heads of the men on the trucks.
SOME IN THE BATTALION are glad to come under fire and have a chance to shoot back. Few more so than the battalion’s executive officer (XO), Major Todd Eckloff. Thirty-five years old, he grew up in Enumclaw, Washington, about an hour outside Seattle. He decided to become a Marine at the age of five. He says, “My grandmother was big on patriotism and military books and songs.” She helped raise him, and Eckloff grew up singing the Marines’ Hymn the way other kids do nursery rhymes. When he was just a toddler, his grandmother participated in an adopt-a-soldier program, serving dinners for Vietnam vets in their home. Eckloff still remembers the first time he met a Marine. “I was with my grandmother at the South Center Mall, and coming toward us was a Marine in his dress blues. That’s when I knew what I wanted to be. I was a dork about becoming a Marine.” Eckloff adds, “In high school I had a license plate that said ‘First Recon.’”
But since graduating from Virginia Military Institute and joining the Marines more than a decade ago, Eckloff has never had a chance to enjoy combat. He was deployed late to the Gulf War and simply “guarded shit,” then served uneventfully in the Balkans. Finally in his dream unit, First Recon, Eckloff nevertheless has one of the most frustrating billets. “As XO, my job is really to do nothing but take over if the battalion commander is shot.”
Now under fire in the convoy, he at last has his opportunity to taste combat. He rides in a supply truck, but in his mind, as he later tells me, “It’s cool, because I’m able to shoot my weapon out of the window.”
Eckloff carries a Benelli automatic twelve-gauge shotgun. As rounds pop off outside, he slides it out the window and blasts an Iraqi fifteen meters away in an alley. He sees him disappear in a “big cloud of pink.” The next instant he spots another guy running on a balcony area and gives him several blasts. Eckloff is certain he hit him. “My aim is good,” he says.
Later, after I interview him and others riding in the support units, I tally that these Marines claim altogether to have killed between five and fifteen Iraqis during several minutes of shooting in Nasiriyah. It’s a high number given the fact that during six hours of sometimes extremely heavy gun battle by the bridge yesterday the commander of Alpha Company believes his unit of eighty Marines got somewhere between ten and twenty kills.
Kocher, the team leader in Bravo’s Third Platoon, doubts there was much of a gun battle through Nasiriyah. “A lot of this was just some officers and POGs who think it’s cool to be out here shooting up buildings,” he says.
Kocher tells me this just after we’ve cleared Nasiriyah’s outer limits. Initially, I dismiss his opinion as Recon Marine snobbery. The fact is, Recon’s Support and Headquarters elements did come under fire in Nasiriyah. At the same time, there are some in the battalion—a very small number of men—who seem to develop a penchant for driving through towns and countryside firing wildly out of their vehicles.
FIRST RECON remains on Route 7 after leaving Nasiriyah. The Marines will take this road, two lanes of unmarked asphalt, all the way to Al Kut. Aside from the berms rippling a meter or two above the surface of the land, central Iraq tends to be as flat as Kansas. Route 7 parallels the Gharraf River (which the Marines refer to as a “canal”) connecting the Euphrates in the south with the Tigris in the north.
While traveling on paved roads, First Recon rolls in a single-file convoy, vehicles spaced roughly twenty-five meters apart. The average convoy speed out of Nasiriyah is about twenty miles an hour, though we tend to stop every ten minutes or so. Currently, other units from RCT-1, convoys of fifty to two hundred, are advancing on the same road, or pulled off beside it, with Marines dismounted in fields firing at targets—huts or berms—in the distance. These forces, along with First Recon, are the first Americans to invade this portion of Iraq.
Just north of Nasiriyah, we pass through a light industrial zone of cement factories, machine shops and yards full of tractors and excavating equipment. It almost looks like the outskirts of a Midwestern farm town, except for all the dead bodies. Corpses are scattered along the edges of the road. Most are men, enemy fighters, some with RPG launchers still in their hands, rounds scattered nearby. A few hours earlier, just before dawn, while the Light Armored Re
connaissance (LAR) units Col. Dowdy sent through the city the previous afternoon had been parked out here waiting for First Recon and the rest of the RCT-1 to clear Nasiriyah and catch up with them, waves of two- and three-man RPG teams had come out of the surrounding fields and industrial buildings to attack them. Few ever got off a shot.
LAR units ride in eight-wheeled amphibious, black-armored vehicles that resemble upside-down bathtubs. Each has a Bushmaster 25mm rapid-fire canon mounted in a top turret. Unlike the open turret in a Humvee, which requires a man standing in it to fire the weapon, the Bushmasters are fully enclosed. They resemble small tank guns and are operated by a crewman sitting below inside the vehicle, controlling the weapon with a sort of joystick. Not only do the Bushmasters lay down devastating fire—hundreds of explosive, armor-penetrating rounds per minute—but the guns are also linked to Forward-Looking Infrared Radar scopes, which combine both thermal imaging and light amplification to easily pick out targets 1,000 meters distant in the darkness, well beyond the effective range of Iraqi RPGs and AKs. When the Iraqi RPG teams attempted to assault them in the hours before dawn on the road north of Nasiriyah, the LAR units decimated them, killing an estimated 400 to 500. Because it was dark, many of the Iraqis kept coming out of the fields, apparently unaware that their comrades were being cut to pieces all around them.
Corpses of the Iraqi attackers who fell in the road have been run over repeatedly by tracked vehicles. They are flattened, with their entrails squished out. Marines in First Recon nickname one corpse Tomato Man, because from a distance he looks like a smashed crate of tomatoes in the road. There are shot-up cars and trucks with bodies hanging over the edges. We pass a bus, smashed and burned, with charred human remains sitting upright in some windows. There’s a man in the road with no head and a dead little girl, too, about three or four, lying on her back. She’s wearing a dress and has no legs.
