by Evan Wright
Colbert is excessively cheerful this morning. It’s not like he’s maniacally energized from having escaped death. His satisfaction seems deeper and quieter, as if he’s elated to have been involved in something highly rewarding. It’s as though he’s just finished a difficult crossword puzzle or won at chess.
When Espera comes by to share one of his stinky cigars, he looks as he always does after combat, as though his eyes have sunk deeper into their sockets and the skin on his shaved skull has just tightened an extra notch. He jams the chewed, mashed tip of his cigar in my mouth without asking if I want it, and points to Colbert. “Look at that skinny-ass dude,” he says. “You’d never guess what a bad motherfucker he is.”
Espera felt sorry for Colbert when they met a few years ago. They were in different units but happened to find themselves on leave together in Australia. While other Marines were out drinking and chasing whores, Colbert went off alone to prowl electronics stores. “I thought he had no friends—he was such a loner,” Espera says. “But now that I know him better I figured out he just can’t stand people, even me. I’m only his friend to piss him off. I look up to him because the dude is a straight-up warrior. Getting bombed, shot at don’t phase him a bit. Shit, in the middle of all that madness by the bridge he observes those dudes in the trees waiting to kill us. That’s the Iceman.”
He kneels down and punches Colbert on the shoulder. “You’ve got superhuman powers, Iceman, but it comes with that freakish taint I wouldn’t want to have.”
Colbert ignores the backhanded praise. He’s just opened his one MRE of the day and discovered a horrible mistake. His burrito MRE meal contains a condiment packet of peanut butter instead of jalapeño cheese. “What kind of sadist would put peanut butter in my burrito MRE?” he fumes.
Doc Bryan walks over to make sure everyone’s doing all right. I ask him how he feels about having killed those two men in the ambush.
“It’s a funny paradox,” he says. “I would have done anything to save that shepherd kid. But I couldn’t give a fuck about those guys I just killed. It’s like you’re supposed to feel fucked-up after killing people. I don’t.”
Espera says, “We’ve been brainwashed and trained for combat. We must say ‘Kill!’ three thousand times a day in boot camp. That’s why it’s easy.” But ever mindful of the priest’s admonishment not to enjoy killing, Espera hastily adds, “That dude I saw crawling last night, I shot him in the grape. Saw the top of his head bust off. That didn’t feel good. It makes me sick.”
BY NINEA.M. the weary Marines are again on the move, making life-and-death decisions. The first guy they almost kill is a young man identified by Captain America as a possible Fedayeen. Captain America spots the young man standing in the field several hundred meters back from the road. He thinks the guy is talking on a radio, working as an enemy observer. The convoy stops. Snipers are called out. They report that the “radio” Captain America saw him holding close to his mouth and speaking into is a cigarette that he’s trying to smoke in the wind. They move on without shooting him.
Within a couple of hours, First Recon reaches the alternate route into Muwaffaqiyah. There are farmhouses and bermed fields on either side of the road. The battalion slows to a bump-and-stop crawl, while armored units from RCT-1 move a few kilometers ahead into the town, to clear out the rubble blocking the main road.
While we wait, mortars begin to fall. But the fire is intermittent—one or two concussions every ten minutes—and inaccurate, landing hundreds of meters away in the surrounding fields.
There’s a lot of civilian traffic pulled over by the side of the road. Many of the cars seem to have been surprised by the arrival of the Marine convoy. Parked at careless angles just off the road, the cars seem to have pulled over hastily, perhaps when they saw the Marines rolling up on them in their rearview mirrors. In the space of a few kilometers, we pass more than a dozen such vehicles. Clean-shaven young men in urban apparel, similar to that worn by the Syrian ambushers, stand outside the cars and pickup trucks. They flash nervous smiles or throw their hands up when the Marine vehicles pass by. Others who have their shirts off—indicating they’ve probably just changed out of military uniforms—hide inside the cars. Several of the young men we pass have blue eyes and light or even reddish hair, which are traits not uncommon among Syrians.
The Marines are convinced these guys are foreign jihadi warriors. They’re dying to do “snatch missions”—pull over and grab some of them and find out who they are. But their requests are denied. The Marines’ objective is to enter Al Muwaffaqiyah and push north as soon as possible. They’re at the tip of the spear of Maj. Gen. Mattis’s fast-moving invasion, and they don’t have time to dally. Nevertheless, letting these guys go creates a baffling situation in the minds of the Marines. In their view, these two opposing armies—of Marines and of foreign jihadis—are passing by within meters of each other on the same road.
During one of our stops, Gunny Wynn walks over to Colbert’s vehicle, pissed off. “Isn’t stopping terrorists what this war is supposed to be about? Here we are surrounded by them, and all we’re doing is waving and smiling.”
First Recon’s convoy begins to take increasingly concentrated mortar fire. Unseen enemy snipers take potshots with AKs. Marines in Bravo are ordered to sweep the surrounding berms on foot. They find no armed men but piles of mortars, mortar tubes and RPG rounds pre-positioned in holes on both sides of the road.
In Charlie Company at the front of the convoy, Graves and Jeschke are ordered on a sniper mission. Despite the trauma of their experience a couple of nights ago of pulling the girl out of the car with her brains shot out, they are eager for their new mission. An enemy mortar landed within 150 meters of their vehicle, and Marines notice a man behaving suspiciously in a nearby field. He keeps popping up and down from behind a berm after the mortars hit, watching the Marines. They think he’s an observer, and Graves and Jeschke set up a sniper position by the road to kill him.
With Graves on the M-40 rifle and Jeschke spotting, they see him 175 meters off. They’re not absolutely sure he’s an observer—the man has no radio or weapon visible—but they’ve been cleared hot to hit him. Graves fires a shot. The man drops out of view. Neither is sure if they hit him until a few minutes later when several women file out of a nearby hut and go over to the berm. They are joined by two men dressed like farmers, who drag the man out of the dirt and load him into a pickup truck. In the process, Graves observes an AK rifle tumble out of his victim’s robes. He believes he made a good kill.
Up the road, Saucier isn’t so sure of the military value of his next kill. Saucier is manning the .50-cal for his team on a hasty roadblock when a white car approaches on the highway. Saucier fires high warning shots. The car accelerates. When it comes within 200 meters of his position he lowers his weapon at it and blips off two rounds. Though the .50-cal is an extremely powerful weapon, it’s not the most accurate gun used by Marines. The gun employs old-fashioned iron sights, and the mounts used in Recon’s Humvees are notoriously wobbly. Nevertheless, Saucier’s marks-manship is another testament to Marine Corps training. Of the two rounds he fires into the speeding car, one strikes the head of the driver. The car stops. Three young men jump out. One of them, who had apparently been sitting behind the driver, is covered in gore. They throw themselves down by the road. Marines who examine the driver report that Saucier’s hit was perfect—hitting the guy in the center of his head and scooping it out in a V shape. No weapons are discovered on the young men or in the car. But by the Marines’ roadblock rules, this kill was legit. The car wouldn’t stop.
When I talk to Saucier about this shooting later, he says he never in his life imagined he would be called on to fire on unarmed people. “Words can’t describe how I feel about it,” he says. “When we came over here, I expected we would do what you would read in history books. We would go through the desert and fight armies. But all we’re seeing are random tactics, guys shooting at us with civilians everywhere, wh
ich makes sense from their point of view. Their guerrilla tactics don’t make me feel better about or justify the civilian deaths we’re causing, but these Marines are my brothers. I’ll do anything to defend them. All I try to do is put this bad stuff out of my mind.”
AT ABOUT THREE in the afternoon, Colbert’s team finally creeps into Al Muwaffaqiyah. The rubble has been pushed to the sides of the road by tanks in RCT-1, which entered earlier. A hundred meters back, partially destroyed buildings yawn open. Beds hang off their upper floors. Marines from RCT-1 report seeing an undetermined number of bodies on rooftops—people killed by the DPICM artillery rounds, which spray shrapnel down from the sky. The Marines fired 100 such rounds into the town, saturating it with a total of about 7,000 submunitions. Statistically, about 15 percent of these submunitions fall to the earth without exploding, which means there are approximately 1,000 unexploded bombs scattered throughout the town and buried in the rubble. They are highly unstable and will blow up if stepped on or picked up. The town is a lethal place.
Colbert’s vehicle is ordered to stop part of the way into Al Muwaffaqiyah. We’re within view of the bridge and the eucalyptus trees across the river where we almost got killed the night before. Now, in the glare of the midday sun, the rubbled town looks deserted. Everyone’s nerves are hinky. Colbert leans out the window, observing likely sniper positions through his rifle scope, and starts singing that Gordon Lightfoot song again.
Originally, the Marines in Bravo were told they were going to speed through the town, but there is a delay. While we wait, young adolescent boys trickle out of the deadly ruins. They come to within thirty meters or so of the Humvees and wave. One kid, probably about eleven, stands in the wreckage of a building destroyed by the Marines. He blows kisses and shouts, “I love you, America!”
Colbert’s team is ordered to advance farther into the town. In sections that are not destroyed you can see how it had been a nice place until eighteen hours ago. There are walled gardens with metal gates painted bright colors. To our right there’s a wrecked café, decorated with azure highlights around its smashed windows. Lying along the waterfront of the broad canal, the town almost has the Mediterranean feel of a Greek fishing village.
Colbert orders most of his men out of the Humvee. The Marine Corps has spent years studying the Russian experience in Afghanistan and Chechnya. Among the mistakes they made was to stay inside their vehicles when they entered urban terrain. As Colbert says, “If you cocoon in your vehicle, you get schwacked. Even if it’s a tank, they’ll find a way to blow it up.”
Colbert and his men stalk through the streets, peering over walls and around corners. Even though increasing numbers of civilians are straying out, the Marines are tense. It’s a hot day, and the Marines’ faces—recessed behind puffy MOPP suits, helmets and radio mics—have that throbbing, blotchy look people get after running a marathon.
Colbert stands on the corner by a building, scanning an alley. An old man in brown robes, sitting cross-legged in front of a building, smiles at him. Colbert smiles back, while still mumbling the words “Sometimes I think it’s a sin/When I feel like I’m winnin’ when I’m losin’ again.” He pauses. “I wish I knew the rest of the words.”
WE REMAIN IN AL MUWAFFAQIYAH because engineers attached to First Recon have discovered a large cache of weapons in the town. One of the few public buildings not destroyed by Marine artillery in Al Muwaffaqiyah is the schoolhouse. It’s an L-shaped, two-story brick building with a basketball court in the middle.
The schoolhouse was taken over by the Iraqi military sometime after Valentine’s Day. Marine engineers know this because the walls of one classroom are covered in childish drawings of pink hearts, some with the words “Happy Valentine’s” scrawled in English. The fact that schoolchildren in an Arab dictatorship commemorate Valentine’s Day comes as a surprise to the Marines, but previously, in a rural school south of Al Hayy, they found drawings done by children depicting girls with blue eyes and blond hair—suggesting that somehow Western pop culture and its idealization of blondness had seeped into the minds of kids living in primitive hamlets. You find surprising things about the private life of a country when you invade it. It’s not unlike breaking into someone’s home, ransacking the occupants’ possessions and learning the ordinary secrets of their lives.
Sometime after the schoolchildren of Al Muwaffaqiyah celebrated Valentine’s Day, a battalion-size force of Republican Guard soldiers moved into the town and turned their school into a military headquarters. They shoved all the desks into one room and filled the others with military supplies. Marines find maps, uniforms, gas masks, as well as recently cooked, partially consumed bowls of rice, peanut shells and chicken bones. Apparently, the Republican Guard soldiers stayed back here eating peanuts and chicken while the Syrian jihadis were sent out to the bridge to delay the Americans.
The Marines also find several classrooms piled to the ceilings with weapons and munitions, including 600 mortar shells, 10,000 AK rounds and a couple dozen launchers and rifles. They rig the weapons caches with explosives and prepare to blow the school complex sky-high.
WATCHING THE TOWN’S only school blow up—which we see as a funnel of black smoke jetting up from the western side of the town—comes as a relief to Colbert’s team. Its destruction means they can finally roll north and get out of Al Muwaffaqiyah. The atmosphere in the town has changed markedly. Locals have warned Marines in other teams that foreign jihadis have infiltrated the area and plan to attack the Americans with suicide car bombs. The civilians who’d come out earlier to greet the Marines have fled.
Colbert’s team is ordered to move to the front of the battalion and set up a roadblock at the north end of the town. We stop near a large industrial complex that looks like a cement factory or machine shop. There are some houses beyond that, then open fields.
Espera pulls his vehicle up beside Colbert’s on the road. The two of them orient their guns north. With the battalion and all of RCT-1 behind them, their two Humvees constitute the northernmost Marine unit in central Iraq. Their job is to turn away any cars that come down the road from the north. It’s a little before six in the evening. There are tall, leafy trees to our left casting blue shadows over us in the fading daylight.
In the past few hours Colbert and other team leaders in the battalion have developed what they hope will be less lethal means of stopping cars at roadblocks. Instead of firing warning shots from machine guns, they will launch colored smoke grenades. The hope is that drivers will be more likely to heed billowing clouds of colored smoke blocking the road than warning shots fired over their vehicles. Fick and other commanders had initially opposed this kinder, gentler method to halting traffic, with Fick arguing, “Marines are supposed to be an aggressive force. If our stance is less aggressive, we’re more likely to be challenged by bad guys.” But the enlisted Marines, tired of shooting unarmed civilians, fought to be allowed to use smoke grenades.
Now, when the first vehicle, a white pickup truck, approaches, Colbert strides into the road, ahead of the Humvees.
“Do not engage this truck!” he shouts to his men.
He fires a smoke grenade from his 203 launcher. It makes a plunking sound almost like a champagne cork popping, then bounces into the road, spewing green smoke. Three or four hundred meters down the road, the white pickup truck turns around and drives off.
A couple of cars arrive. The second is a taxi. It speeds up after the launching of the smoke grenade. The Marines by the Humvees hunch lower on their weapons, getting ready to fire.
“Do not engage!” Colbert shouts. He fires another smoke grenade.
The taxi drives through the smoke; then moments before the Marines are about to light it up, the driver cuts a tight, wheel-squealing U-turn. Even on good days, Arab motorists tend to drive like kamikaze pilots. It’s not easy for a Marine to differentiate between run-of-the-mill reckless Arab driving and erratic behavior that would indicate a suicide bomber.
The Marines discuss t
he taxi—debating whether the driver’s nearly fatal game of chicken with them was a result of his poor judgment, or the possibility that he’s a Fedayeen scouting Marine lines. Their conversation distracts them from the next car’s approach.
The blue sedan seems to appear out of nowhere. Perhaps it came from a side street behind the cement factory. In any case, Colbert doesn’t step into the road to launch his first smoke grenade until the car is less than 200 meters away.
“Do not engage!” Colbert repeats.
As soon as Colbert fires his smoke grenade, a Marine SAW roars to life, spitting out a short burst. The car, maybe a hundred meters away now, rolls to a stop, green smoke blowing past it. The windshield is frosted. Two men in white robes jump out. One, who looks to be a young man in his early twenties, has blood streaming from his shoulder. The men run hastily toward a mud-brick house by the road and disappear behind a wall.
Hasser stands to the left of Colbert, with the butt of his SAW pressed to his shoulder. It was his gun that fired.
“That was a wounding shot, motherfucker!” Colbert yells, uncharacteristically pissed. “What the fuck were you doing? I said, ‘Do not engage’!”
Hasser remains frozen on his SAW.
Colbert walks around to him. He lowers his voice. “Walt, you okay?”
Hasser lowers his SAW and stares at the car.
Colbert squeezes his arm. “Walt, talk to me.”
“The car kept coming,” Hasser says, mechanically.
The smoke disperses in the breeze, and Marines make out the outline of a man’s head behind the shattered windshield. He is sitting upright, as if still holding the wheel. Passenger doors on the right side of the car hang open. The driver seems to be alive, rolling his head from side to side.
None of the Marines say anything for a moment. Colbert looks at the car, then down. He breathes deeply, as if struggling to put his emotions aside. Having watched him cry a few days ago after the shooting of the shepherd, I suspect it’s not always easy being the Iceman.
