by Evan Wright
TWENTY-SEVEN
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EVEN THOUGH THE IRAQIS have been beaten in Al Kut, they’re still dropping mortars around First Recon’s encampment, where it has remained through the morning of April 3. In the opinion of the Marines, Iraqis don’t fight very hard, but the men are beginning to notice that Iraqis never really seem to completely surrender, either.
“Damn,” Person says after another blast. “Didn’t RCT-1 already kick their ass once today?”
Everyone is waiting for orders to begin the march to Baghdad to join the final assault. It’s grown into a hot day. Earlier, Marines were ordered into their rubber MOPP boots in case of a gas attack. Still, nobody minds the added hardship too much. The platoon was resupplied with food today. Colbert’s team sits around their Humvee in the mud, gorging themselves on MREs.
Hasser is still not talking. He leans against the front wheel, writing an after-action summary on the shooting of the man in the blue car, which Fick told him to hand in in case there’s an investigation. Person walks over to him and starts dry-humping his shoulder like a dog.
“How you doing, Walt?”
“Get out of here.”
Fick walks up. “Walt, when you finish that, we’re going to see if there’s a better way to stop these cars.”
“Walt’s got a great way to stop cars,” Person says. “Shoot the driver.” Behind Hasser’s back, his buddies all talk about him in worried, hushed tones, trying to figure out if he’s okay. To his face, they tease him unmercifully. For the Marines, this is their attempt at therapy.
Espera comes to Hasser’s defense. “Maybe you were a hair too aggressive yesterday, but these motherfuckers are trying to kill us. We can’t get soft now because of a few mistakes. I’m lighting up any motherfucker who comes within one hundred meters.”
SIGNS OF THE REGIME’S unraveling greet the Marines as they pull south, away from Al Kut, later in the afternoon. We drive on a straight, narrow asphalt road through an utterly flat, thinly populated area of croplands. On the way, we pass a truck full of naked Iraqi men, waving underwear as surrender flags. They say they were robbed of their clothes by fleeing soldiers. Farther along there’s a car with two fatally shot men in it. A guy cowering by the road tells a translator the men were killed by rampaging Iraqi soldiers, who in defeat have become bandits.
First Recon sets up a camp twenty kilometers south of Al Kut. The next morning, April 4, the men confront a new, ugly side of war. Refugees begin streaming up to their roadblock on the northern end of the highway.
Second Platoon is tasked with escorting the refugees through First Recon’s lines, along a three-kilometer stretch between their roadblocks on the highway. About fifty refugees are gathered by the roadblock when Colbert’s team rolls up.
Many of the refugees have been on the road for three days now, walking and hitchhiking all the way from Baghdad, about 250 kilometers from here. The men wear Western clothes—dusty suits and sleek loafers, shredded from three days of walking. The women, mostly in black, carry infants and are surrounded by small children. Many carry sacks of grain, bags of clothing and other household possessions. There’s one little boy, maybe six, in a black and gold-lamé suit with a bow tie that makes him look like a miniature Las Vegas lounge singer. It was probably the most expensive thing he owned, and his family had likely dressed him up in it as a means of transporting it out of Baghdad. He smiles at the Marines, almost self-consciously proud to be greeting them in his finest suit. They laugh and give him candy—unlucky Charms, of course.
When the men begin to escort the first group, with the Marines on foot and in Humvees creeping behind, the little cavalcade has an almost carefree air. There’s an extremely beautiful woman among the refugees, who wears a bright green scarf. In her later twenties, she’s a biologist from Baghdad who speaks fluent English. Her name is Manal, and her beauty isn’t something that’s entirely objective. In the squalor of her current circumstances, she radiates calm and high spirits that seem almost mischievous. She accosts one of the Marine escorts with a beguiling smile and asks, “Why did you Americans come here?”
“We want to help you, ma’am,” the Marine answers.
“I love my city very much,” Manal says, referring to Baghdad. “You are bombing it, and it will be worse.”
“Why do you think we came here?” the Marine asks.
“Our country is very rich, and our president is very stupid,” Manal says. “Maybe you came for the liberation. I am not so sure.”
The exchange is cut short when the Marine notices one of the babies being carried by another woman has blood streaming out of its mouth. A little horror has returned to the war.
“Can you ask her what’s wrong?” the Marine says to Manal.
She turns to the woman, who’s shushing the bleeding baby even though it isn’t crying. She and the baby’s mother exchange a few words. Then Manal reports. “Her baby is sick.” She scolds the Marine. “All the mothers have been walking for a long time with no water or food.”
Colbert comes over to help. He instructs the mother with the bleeding baby to sit by the road, and summons a corpsman over. The bleeding, the corpsman believes, is a result of dehydration. Several other mothers come over with their sick babies. It’s already in the low nineties. Colbert dabs the infants with water, trying to cool them down. Soon, more mothers are handing him their babies, perhaps thinking he’s a doctor. One baby has chicken pox. Colbert takes the infant, kneels down and rocks him. “Is there anything we can do?” he asks the corpsman.
“Nothing, man,” he answers. “They just need lots of water.”
Colbert now wears an expression that I’ve come to see more frequently. He looks helpless. When confronted with these small human tragedies up close, some Marines shut down. Their faces go blank. Despite his Iceman reputation, Colbert doesn’t hide his feelings very well. In combat he looks almost ecstatic; now he appears overwhelmed, though still trying to deal with this situation. He hands the baby back to the mother, along with a water bottle. “Put water on the little one,” he says, speaking English into the mother’s uncomprehending face. She nods gratefully, perhaps thinking he’s done more than he actually has to help. Despite the water the Marines hand out, Doc Bryan estimates that a quarter of the infants may die in the next twenty-four hours.
In the space of an hour, two to three hundred refugees show up at the northern roadblock. Marines, who initially vowed to keep their distance, now load rotund old ladies in black robes into the backs of their Humvees and drive them the three kilometers through their lines. Others carry sacks of rice and bedrolls on their heads and shoulders. One of the men on Espera’s team, twenty-three-year-old Lance Corporal Nathan Christopher, walks down the road, crying, while carrying a baby. He later tells me what got to him was seeing the mother, weakened from days of walking, almost drop the infant. Despite bawling his eyes out, Christopher tells me helping the refugees has afforded him his best moment in Iraq. “After driving here from Kuwait, shooting every house, person, dog in our path, we finally get to do something decent.”
Lt. Col. Ferrando makes an appearance by the northern roadblock. Greater numbers of refugees are flowing in. “We’re going to have a fucking humanitarian disaster on our hands if we stay here,” he says. “We don’t have enough food and water for ourselves.”
An hour later, First Recon clears out of its position. Ferrando has finally received orders. First Recon Battalion is instructed to hightail it to Baghdad for the final assault. To get there, the Marines will backtrack down Route 7, then cut west on a circuitous path that covers nearly 300 kilometers.
THE BATTALION SPENDS two days on the road. Huge, cheering crowds turn out in towns Marines smashed through just days ago. Kids run around in muddy lots beside the road, playing soccer, screaming “Bush! Bush! Bush!” or “America! America!” It’s the Marines’ moment to be hailed as conquerors, or liberators or heroes. No one’s really sure what they are. Adoring as the crowds are, Marines know that a
t any moment seriously bad things can happen. As we drive past the insanely chanting mobs, Colbert waves at them, repeating in a mechanical voice, “You’re free now. Good luck. Time for us to go home.”
During the two-day journey the men continue to wrestle with the issue of deadly roadblocks. Marines in Alpha Company have also instituted what they hope will be a less lethal approach to warding off traffic by firing smoke grenades. In one of their early attempts to employ the new technique, a team in Alpha successfully stops a civilian passenger by launching a smoke grenade. Before they can call the effort a success, however, the Marines watch in horror as a second smoke grenade fired by the team skips off the pavement and, against all odds, slams into the face of an Arab walking by the road carrying a white flag. He goes down hard, dropping from their view. The men are ordered forward without having a chance to examine the guy or render aid. Later, men in the unit are told by their superiors that the man they hit in the face with the smoke grenade was okay and was even observed eating a meal when they left him. After hearing this good news, one of the Marines says, “That probably just means someone threw an MRE next to the guy’s body as we drove past.”
FIRST RECON REACHES the outskirts of Baghdad early in the morning of April 6. Hastily erected oil pipelines zigzag along the highway. They were built by Saddam to flood adjacent trenches with oil so they could be set ablaze. As a result, smoke hangs everywhere. Saddam intended these flaming oil trenches as some sort of half-assed defense, but their only effect is to add to the general state of pollution and despair. The dust storm caused by thousands of vehicles rolling past has coated all of the wrecked buildings with a thick layer of tan powder. Even the dogs running through the ruins are the color of dust.
Dead cows, bloated to twice their normal size, lie in ditches. Human corpses are scattered about as well. It’s the now familiar horrorscape of a country at war. Just before reaching the final Marine camp outside Baghdad, Espera’s vehicle swerves to avoid running over a human head lying in the road. When the vehicle turns, he looks up to see a dog eating a human corpse. “Can it get any sicker than this?” he asks.
Person, however, has an entirely different reaction. Set back from the highway, gleaming like some sort of religious shrine, there is a modern-looking glass structure with bright plastic signs in front. It’s an Iraqi version of a 7-Eleven. Though looted and smashed, it gives Person hope. “Damn!” he says. “It looks almost half-civilized here.”
BY THE EARLY HOURS of April 6, some 20,000 Marines have begun gathering on the outskirts of the city for their assault. The Army has already begun breaking off pieces of Baghdad to the south and west. Two days earlier, elements of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division seized Baghdad Airport, fifteen kilometers south of the city. The Marines, now moving to within about ten kilometers of the eastern edge of Baghdad, are gearing up for their assault to begin within the next forty-eight hours.
First Recon settles into a field of tall grass next to some blown-up industrial buildings. Marines stretch out in the greenery, resting after their two days of nonstop movement. American artillery booms continuously, a distant, throbbing rhythm. Towers of smoke rise over Baghdad in the distance. Following this last stretch of the journey, where everyone had seen the wild dogs chewing on the entrails of dead humans and livestock alike, Marines now discuss their rechristening of Iraq. They call it “Dog Land.”
Reyes explains, “For the wild dogs, war is a feast.”
It’s a feast for some commanders as well. Later in the day, after the teams have set up their positions on the perimeter and dug their holes, Ferrando circulates among the men. He drops in on Colbert’s team and offers rare praise. “They’re speaking pretty highly of First Recon at division headquarters,” Ferrando says. “The general thinks we’re slaying dragons.”
“I’m pleased to hear it, sir,” Colbert says.
Ferrando turns to leave, then hesitates. He has something to confide in Colbert, one of his top team leaders.
“Ferrando thinks tanks are going to lead the way into Baghdad,” he says, reverting to a habit he has of speaking of himself in the third person. “But we want to get in the game, too. That’s the million-dollar question. How do we get into Baghdad?”
Ferrando walks off, working on this puzzle.
After he leaves, Espera offers his own assessment of the battalion’s performance thus far in the war. “Do you realize the shit we’ve done here, the people we’ve killed? Back home in the civilian world, if we did this, we would go to prison.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
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THE MEN SLEEP WELL outside of Baghdad. It is late in the morning of April 7, and Colbert is sitting in the sun behind his Humvee, staring at the grass, which in the center of the encampment is more than a meter tall. Like everyone else, Colbert is required to wear his helmet and flak vest at all times, unless he is underneath the cammie nets by his Humvee. There are times like today—when the sky is clear, the sun is shining and enemy mortars are only falling about once every couple hours—that the requirement to always wear a helmet and flak vest seems a crime. Some Marines routinely flout the rule, but not Colbert. Suddenly, he stands up, throwing his helmet down, ripping off his flak vest and stripping down to his T-shirt. “You know what?” he announces. “I’m going to run through that field waving my arms like I’m an airplane.”
Colbert runs through the grass, making jet sounds, banks into a loose turn and flies back to his Humvee. He quickly dons his gear. “Better now,” he says, strapping his helmet on again.
The men don’t have any orders today. Lt. Col. Ferrando is still working on his plan to get the battalion in on the final assault on Baghdad. Colbert, however, assembles his team for a special briefing beside his Humvee.
“There’s something I’ve been keeping from you,” Colbert says. “I wasn’t sure we were going to live to share this moment.” He produces a dusty plastic bag, reaches in and pulls out several cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli, one for each man on the team. “To celebrate,” he says.
“What the fuck is that?” Person says, spotting something else in the bag.
“Easy there, partner,” Colbert says, sliding out a virgin copy of Juggs magazine, still in its shrink-wrap.
“Fuck!” Person says. “How the fuck did you hide that from me?” Person tries to grab it.
Colbert yanks it away. “Not yet,” Colbert says. “I need some time with this alone. Just calm down. You’ll get your sloppy seconds.”
They cook the Chef Boyardee on a C-4 fire, in the cans, cutting them open with Ka-Bar knives. The team is more closely knit than it’s ever been. Even Trombley has found acceptance. In the wake of the incident in which he accidentally machine-gunned the shepherds, the men have honored him with a nickname: “Whopper.” I don’t get it when they first reveal it to me. “We call him the Whopper,” one of them explains, “because they’re sold at Burger King.” When I look up, still not understanding, the nearby Marines shake their heads at my ignorance. “Like, Whoppers, Burger King, BK—Baby Killer,” one of them says, spelling it out. “Trombley’s our little Whopper BK.”
They call him this to his face, and Trombley laughs appreciatively. He admits, “When I shot those kids I felt the same way as when I shoot a deer. I felt lucky, like I got the Easter egg.” Then adds, “I wanted to look at the kid I shot. It felt weird.”
Lilley nudges him affectionately. “That’s because you’re the Whopper, our little BK Baby Killer.”
Person, sitting shirtless partway underneath the cammie netting, slurps the ravioli juice from the jagged can and starts babbling about his NAMBLA-conspiracy theories behind the war.
Hasser, who has maintained his distant silence for days since shooting the man in the blue car, breaks into laughter. “Look at you, Ray,” he says, pointing at Person. “You’re a fucking mess, man.”
Person’s face is smeared with ravioli sauce, fluorescent orange in the sunlight. More of it’s splattered down his pale white chest, with drippings
on his toes. “What?” Person asks, perplexed.
“You’re a fucking messed-up hick who can’t even eat ravioli.” Hasser doubles over, facedown in the grass, laughing.
LATER THAT DAY, the Marines in Bravo are reunited with an old friend, Gunnery Sergeant Jason Swarr. A thirty-two-year-old Recon Marine who works as the battalion’s parachute rigger, Swarr nearly missed the war. He only arrived outside Baghdad a couple of days ago. Now, he comes over to Colbert’s position with a tale of his strange odyssey through Iraq and his remarkable first experience of combat.
Swarr is one of the more eccentric characters in the battalion. Tall and square-jawed, he looks like your average Marine, but in his off-hours Swarr is an artist who writes and directs ultra-low-budget videos. “I’m like the Ed Wood of my generation,” he says. “My goal in life is, people will go in the video store and find my movies in the Cult Film section by Toxic Avenger.”
Swarr is also a warrior. He served in Somalia, and when this war came along, he vowed he wasn’t going to miss it. But the battalion had other plans. When the invasion began, Swarr and two other Marines from First Recon were ordered to remain behind at the Al Jabar airfield in Kuwait to serve as liaisons to the Marine Corps Air Wing. Within a few days, he and his two comrades figured out their assignment was a bullshit job. “They didn’t give a fuck about us at Jabar,” Gunny Swarr says. “There was nothing to do.”
They pulled some strings, got permission to leave and hitchhiked up to Camp Mathilda with some Pakistani laborers. The battalion had already left for the invasion, but Swarr and his cohorts found out there was a company of reservist Recon Marines still in the camp, who were getting ready to enter Iraq and link up with the battalion in a few days. Swarr and the others figured they’d get a ride with the reservists.
