by Evan Wright
AFTER FAWCETT’S TEAM gets into position by the highway at the north end of Ash Shatrah—using the road’s elevation to provide cover—they notice the town is filled with military installations. Just a couple hundred meters away, they spot barracks, artillery pieces, stockpiles of munitions, an obstacle course for training soldiers and, most amazingly, Iraqis in uniform walking around outdoors in broad daylight. Fawcett can’t believe that Marine convoys have been driving up and down this road for nearly a week next to a sizable, heavily armed force of Iraqis. Watching this, he later tells me, makes him wonder “what’s going through the minds of the guys we have planning stuff for us.”
It’s not like the Iraqis don’t have a clue the Americans are coming. The night before, U.S. ships launched several Tomahawk cruise missiles into the town (at a cost to U.S. taxpayers of approximately 1.5 million dollars per Tomahawk). Patterson, who’s told about the cruise missiles when he arrives, is impressed. Comparable Marine operations against small, run-of-the-mill hostile towns like Ash Shatrah haven’t rated the use of such high-tech weaponry. Clearly, this shows the hand of the CIA, sparing no expense in its effort to make the liberation of Ash Shatrah go as smoothly as possible and become a showcase for its handpicked army of Iraqi freedom fighters.
Patterson and his counterpart in the infantry battalion sit down outside the town and coordinate “control measures.” They make sure they know each other’s radio frequencies so they can communicate. They study maps of the town so their men don’t run into each other later on. They rename all the main routes in the city, replacing confusing Arabic names with ones that are easier to remember, like “Sally,” “Jane” and “Mary.” Marines tend to be methodical about things like this, few more so than Patterson. Within forty minutes of these consultations, Patterson is all set to participate in this small, history-making event: the first liberation of a town in central Iraq by Iraqi forces.
There’s just one problem: The freedom fighters have gone missing. Several of them had infiltrated the town the night before, under cover of the Tomahawk strike, in order to find sympathizers among the ranks of the Iraqi soldiers garrisoned there, but they were captured. Apparently, the Baathists who apprehended them had not been impressed by the missile strike, and they were summarily executed. Their comrades waiting outside the town lost heart. Early in the afternoon Patterson’s men are told, “The freedom fighters have fled.” After all their elaborate preparations, the CIA’s army has vanished into the countryside.
BY NOW PATTERSON’S MARINES have started to come under sporadic small-arms fire from the town. They call in a mortar strike on suspected enemy positions. The Marines, who’ve driven all night to carry out what they thought would be a sweet, revenge-fueled version of Saving Private Ryan, grow frustrated.
Very quickly their mission outside Ash Shatrah becomes as confusing as all the others they have participated in. Commanders begin to change the ROE. Initially, Marine snipers are cleared to kill anyone in uniform. They get in a few shots, then word is passed down that soldiers are surrendering and they shouldn’t automatically be shot.
Following this, Marines see a truck filled with soldiers zoom onto a street directly across from their position. The Marines hold their fire. The Iraqi soldiers drive past, waving white flags, then speed off, throwing the flags from the back of the truck. “We’re letting all these soldiers escape,” one of Fawcett’s men complains.
Fawcett requests an artillery strike on a headquarters building 600 meters across from his position. His team has observed Iraqis in green military uniforms coming and going from the front door of this building all morning. Fawcett regrets passing his request up almost immediately.
In Fawcett’s opinion, his platoon commander doesn’t know how to properly call in a strike (a similar complaint men in Bravo Company have about their commander, Encino Man). Fawcett believes the best way to take out the building is to order one or two rounds of artillery, see where they land, and if they don’t hit the building, have the artillerymen adjust their fire. Instead, his commanding officer requests a “fire for effect” strike—four to six rounds of artillery shot all at once, then repeated without any adjustment. “It’s an officer thing,” Fawcett tells his men. “He just wants the glory of calling in a big strike. I can’t go over his head.”
Fawcett and his men watch at least sixteen HE rounds slam into the city and explode pretty much randomly in the streets. When the smoke clears, the only damage to the intended target is that a corner of the building has been clipped off. Fawcett turns to several of his buddies and asks, “Don’t you think if some foreign army came into a small American town and did what we’re doing here, you wouldn’t find some American good old boys eager to string one of them up if they fell into their hands?”
A FEW HOURS BEFORE SUNSET, the Marines are ordered to assault the town. The infantrymen from Third Battalion lead the way in, advancing under heavy machine-gun fire, blowing up buildings in their path with shoulder-fired missiles. They seize several military structures and clear the surrounding houses. Nearly all of the Iraqi soldiers have fled or changed out of their uniforms in order to blend in with the populace. They fire few shots. There’s no sign of Chemical Ali or the body of the missing Marine.
Fawcett’s platoon and another from Alpha drive their Humvees about 500 meters into the town, with Cobras launching Hellfire missiles ahead of them. They move into a water-purification plant, a complex of industrial structures filled with trucks and machinery. The men are ordered to stay here for the night.
By sundown, any thought that this could be a revenge mission completely disappears. Dozens of Iraqi citizens approach Alpha’s hungry Marines on the perimeter, bearing gifts of tea, bowls of rice and flat bread, which Marines refer to as “Hajji tortillas.” Some townspeople, speaking broken English, are eager to point out enemy positions. A few invite the Marines to come into their homes for a proper meal. Patterson is now forced to order his Marines, who hours before had been fantasizing about killing everyone in the town, to stop eating food brought to them by the locals.
After dark Patterson gets the clearest confirmation yet that the Baath Party and Iraqi military forces have abandoned the town. Through his NVGs he observes hundreds of people streaming in and out of government buildings “like ants, carting off everything they can carry—desks, chairs, mattresses.”
Iraqis aren’t the only ones looting. Inside the water-purification plant Fawcett watches fellow Marines “rape the buildings—smashing things up, pissing everywhere, hunting for souvenirs.” The water-purification plant must have been some sort of exemplary public-works project. Much of the equipment is new. Many of the trucks parked inside the buildings haven’t even been driven; they still have plastic on the seats. Marines use Ka-Bar knives to rip apart their interiors for material to reupholster their Humvees and trucks.
After their exciting night at the water plant, the Marines leave Ash Shatrah early in the morning. Locals cheer. To one of Patterson’s officers, “the change in the town was dramatic, like someone pulled a thumb off their backs. We liberated them.”
While the CIA mission failed, the liberation of Ash Shatrah proves to be precedent-setting in another sense. The Marines pull out of the town, leaving behind little or no civil authority, hordes of looters roaming through blown-up, trashed buildings and a scattered army of Baathists, soldiers and other loyalists, many of them still armed and all of them completely unaccounted for. The type of liberation seen at Ash Shatrah will play itself out again and again in other towns across Iraq until the U.S. military reaches Baghdad, where it will do pretty much the same, resulting in a much grander scale of anarchy.
Fawcett’s men don’t hear any word about the missing Marine until they’ve pulled out of the town. They are told that an old man in Ash Shatrah met with officers in the infantry battalion and informed them that the body of the lost Marine had been dragged through the streets and strung up, but was cut down and buried by “good Samaritans.” According to t
he story passed among Marines, the old man claimed that the good Samaritans did their best to give the Marine a Christian burial, then fled the city, fearing reprisals. After hearing this, Fawcett says, “All we’ve been looking for is a corpse. The Marine was gone before we got here.”
The body of this Marine is discovered a week later by other American forces. They find it buried in Ash Shatrah’s trash dump.
TWENTY-THREE
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ON THE MORNING OF APRIL 1, the Marines of First Recon—less Alpha Company, not yet returned from its mission—greet the new day from their wet, muddy holes dug alongside the highway, north of Al Hayy. Few of the troops slept much the night before. After the fatal shooting of the little girl at Charlie Company’s roadblock, the Marines fired warning shots at several more vehicles, and also killed the occupant of one car, a heavyset man in a twenty-year-old Buick, which had failed to stop. Later the Marines came under attack from a BM-21, which saturated a nearby field with bombs, though no one was hit. The destruction continues after sunrise.
Below our position on the highway, slow-moving A-10 jets circle the fringes of Al Hayy, belching out machine-gun fire. The airframe of the A-10 is essentially built around a twenty-one-foot-long, seven-barreled Gattling gun—the largest such weapon in the U.S. arsenal. When it fires, it makes a ripping sound like someone is tearing the sky in half. The A-10s wrap up their performance by dropping four phosphorous bombs on the city. These are chemical-incendiary bombs that burst in the sky, sending long tendrils of white, sparkling flames onto targets below.
The air attacks are part of RCT-1’s advance into Al Hayy from the south. Now, in coordination with that effort, First Recon is ordered to move to a canal on the western side of the town and seal off another escape route.
Civilians line up by the side of the road when First Recon’s convoy assembles for its departure. The morning’s show of American airpower has whipped them into a frenzy. They greet the Marines like visiting celebrities. “Hello, my friend!” some of them shout. “I love you!” It doesn’t seem to matter that these young men have just witnessed portions of their city being destroyed. Or maybe this is the very appeal of the Marines. One of the promises made by the Bush administration before the war started was that the Iraqi populace would be pacified by a “shock and awe” air-bombing campaign. The strange thing is, these people appear to be entertained by it. “They think we’re cool,” says Person, “because we’re so good at blowing shit up.”
First Recon’s convoy pauses on the road by the bridge. Waving and jumping up and down, kids gathered by the tractor-trailer shot up the night before pay no heed to the corpses scattered not far from their feet. Farther on, there’s another shot-up car, with a male corpse next to it in the dirt. More kids dance around the carnage, giving thumbs-up to the Americans, shouting, “Bush! Bush! Bush!”
I walk up to Espera’s vehicle. He gazes out at the grinning, impoverished children with dirty feet and says, “How these people live makes me want to puke.”
Garza, standing at his vehicle’s .50-cal, says, “They live just like Mexicans in Mexico.” He smiles at the children and throws them some candy. His grandmother is from Mexico, and by the way he is grinning, you get the idea that to him living like Mexicans is not all bad.
Espera turns away in disgust. “That’s why I fucking can’t stand Mexico. I hate third-world countries.”
Despite Espera’s harsh critique of the white man—he derides English as the “master’s language”—his worldview reflects his self-avowed role as servant in the white man’s empire, a job he seems to relish with equal parts pride, cynicism and self-loathing. He says, “The U.S. should just go into all these countries, here and in Africa, and set up an American government and infrastructure—with McDonald’s, Starbucks, MTV—then just hand it over. If we have to kill a hundred thousand to save twenty million, it’s worth it.” He lights a cigar. “Hell, the U.S. did it at home for two hundred years—killed Indians, used slaves, exploited immigrant labor to build a system that’s good for everybody today. What does the white man call it? ‘Manifest Destiny.’”
Within a half hour, First Recon’s convoy is again creeping north on an agricultural back road. Colbert’s Humvee passes a tree-shaded hamlet on the left as a series of explosions issues from it. The blasts sounds like mortars being launched, perhaps from inside the village. Ten days ago, being within a couple hundred meters of an enemy position would have sent the entire team into a high state of alert, but this morning nobody says a word. Colbert wearily picks up his radio handset and passes on the location of the suspected enemy position.
Once the initial excitement wears off, invading a country becomes repetitive and stressful, like working on an old industrial assembly line: The task seldom varies, but if your attention wanders, you are liable to get injured or killed. Colbert’s team stops in a grassy field a few hundred meters down from the village. There’s a canal directly across from his Humvee, with a paved road running along it on the other side.
That canal road, another route out of Al Hayy, is the one the battalion is tasked with observing. Marines are to shoot any armed Iraqis fleeing the road.
Despite the lethal mission, the grassy field we stop in is idyllic. Half of Colbert’s team—those who were up all night on watch—take advantage of the tall grass to stretch out and doze. It’s a beautiful day, warm and clear, a bit humid. There’s a stand of palm trees nearby. Birds fill the air with a loud, musical chattering. Trombley counts off ducks and turtles he observes in the canal with his binoculars. “We’re in safari land,” Colbert says.
The spell is broken when a Recon unit 500 meters down the line opens up on a truck leaving the city, putting an end to the birdsong in the trees. In the distance, a man jumps out holding an AK. He jogs through a field on the other side of the canal. We watch lazily from the grass as he’s gunned down by other Marines.
The birds have resumed their singing when the man shot by the Marines reappears across the canal, limping and weaving like a drunk. Nobody shoots him. He’s not holding a gun anymore. The ROE are scrupulously observed. Even so, they cannot mask the sheer brutality of the situation.
A few vehicles down from Colbert’s, Team Three monitors the hamlet from where mortars seemed to have been launched when we rolled in. Doc Bryan and the others on the team have been watching the village through binoculars and sniper scopes for about an hour now. They have seen no signs of enemy activity, just a group of civilians—men, women and children—going about their business outside a small cluster of huts. But it’s possible that rounds were fired from there. The Fedayeen often drive into a town, launch a few mortars and leave.
In any case, the place is quiet when, at about eleven o’clock in the morning, a lone 1,000-pound bomb dropped from an F-18 blows the hamlet to smithereens. The blast is so powerful that Fick jumps over a berm to avoid flying debris and lands on Encino Man. As the shock wave rolls through Colbert’s position, I feel the concussion in my chest as if my internal organs are being picked up and slammed against my rib cage. A perfectly shaped black mushroom cloud rises up where the huts had been.
The only survivor observed by the Marines is a singed dog that runs out of the smoke, making crazy circles—indicative of blown eardrums and a subsequent loss of balance. Team Three’s Corporal Michael Stinetorf, twenty-one, who was watching when the bomb hit, is livid: “I just saw seven people vaporized right before my very eyes!” Behind Team Three’s position, the men observe the commanders who called in the strike smoking cigars and laughing. One of them gripes, “Those fuckheads are celebrating. They’re laughing like it’s a game.”
But as in other bombing and shooting incidents, Marines don’t all agree on what happened. Maj. Shoup, the air officer who helped coordinate the strike, sees it as a good hit. Prior to the bombing, Shoup was communicating with the F-18’s backseater, a friend of his whose call sign is “Curly.” Before releasing the bomb, Shoup says, “Curly reported seeing puffs of smoke coming
from the courtyard of the village. These looked like mortars being launched.” Shoup adds, “You want to improve the morale of Marines? They see that thousand-pound bomb go off, it really improves their morale.”
BY NOON RCT-1 has completed its thrust through Al Hayy, and several thousand of its Marines now occupy positions north of the highway bridge seized by First Recon. RCT-1 met with only light resistance through the city, and its signal teams tasked with picking up enemy radio transmissions overhear Iraqi commanders telling their men, “Retreat north.”
First Recon is moving north as well. The plan is for the battalion to continue pushing ahead of RCT-1 and move into Al Muwaffaqiyah, a town of 5,000 people, about five kilometers north of the field where we spent the morning.
The battalion convoy pulls onto a dirt lane and enters a series of shaded agricultural hamlets. We stop, and the residents pour out from their homes, waving and smiling. To the Marines, the villagers’ warm welcome is confusing, given the fact that less than two kilometers down the road their neighbors were just wiped out by a 1,000-pound bomb dropped by an American F-18.
“They’re probably just glad we’re not blowing up their houses,” Person observes.
We see the tiny heads of children poking around the corner of a small adobe hut. Several girls, maybe eight or nine, run toward us.
