by Evan Wright
Watching this apparent execution unfold, I wonder if shooting the Iraqi in the truck ahead of us was an act of barbarity or a mercy killing along the lines of the one Doc Bryan had tried to perform on the wounded man outside Al Muwaffaqiyah. There’s no time to sort this out.
We advance a few more kilometers, and Colbert’s team sets up a roadblock. We are now within four kilometers of Baqubah. My first encounter with the enemy prisoner whom Captain America had taunted and abused earlier takes place in the back of Fick’s Humvee parked nearby.
The prisoner is squirming on the truck bed, the burlap sack tied over his head, when I approach. A few Marines have gathered around and are taunting him. “What do you think you’d be doing to us if we were your prisoner?” a nineteen-year-old Marine rails at him.
Fick walks over. “Hey, I don’t want any war crimes in the back of my truck.” He says this lightly, having no idea yet of the brewing controversy surrounding the man’s capture. “Untie him and give him some water.”
The man’s arms are swollen and purple when the Marines cut off the zip cuffs. The angry nineteen-year-old Marine helps give him a bottle of water and a package of MRE pound cake. The prisoner, snuffling his tears away, eyes the offerings suspiciously for a moment, then eats hungrily.
“Just ’cause we’re feeding you doesn’t mean I don’t hate you,” the young Marine says, still trying to keep up his edge of hostility. “I hate you. Do you hear me?”
I study the man closely while he eats. He wears a torn, grimy wife-beater undershirt with his fat belly protruding. I look for bleeding or bayonet marks on his body—to see if Captain America penetrated his skin—but see no evidence of this. The worst signs of mistreatment on his body are gruesome bruises on his arms from the zip cuffs. While eating, the man periodically grabs his shoulders and winces in pain. I ask him how badly he hurts. He speaks English reasonably well.
“I need medicine,” he says, then bursts into tears, sniffling loudly.
“For your wounds?” I ask.
“No, I need medicine for my heart,” he says. “It is bad.”
He tells me his name is Ahmed Al-Khizjrgee. Despite his suffering, the more we talk he gives the impression of being both buffoonish and crafty. With his considerable girth, he brings to mind Sergeant Schultz in the old Hogan’s Heroes series. He tries to convince me that he is not actually a soldier. “It is your imagination that I am a fighter,” he says.
When I point out that he was found with military ID documents, carrying a loaded rifle in an enemy-ambush position, he finally admits, shrugging and stroking his Saddam mustache, “I am a very low soldier.”
Al-Khizjrgee says he is forty-seven years old, with two sons and five daughters. He claims he was originally a shoemaker and joined the Republican Guard late in life. His brother is a cabdriver in Baghdad. He is a peace-loving man. One of the Marines points out that a lot of other Iraqis threw down their weapons and fled. “You were waiting to kill us,” the Marine says. “You didn’t put your weapon down until we made you.”
“It is not true,” Al-Khizjrgee protests. “I am afraid. If I put my gun down, the police come and beat us.” He says he and the other men in his unit received no outside information on the state of the world. They could be shot for listening to a radio.
I ask him how he thinks the war is going. He tells me his superiors told him and the other men in the unit that Iraq was winning the war. He says he and the other men holed up in Baqubah had their doubts but kept these to themselves. “Everybody under Saddam is silent,” he says. “If Saddam say we have war with America, we say, ‘Good!’ If he say no war, we say, ‘Good!’”
The Marines, who were so angry with the man a moment ago, have now warmed up to him. One of them says, “We can’t put our weapons down, either.”
“He was just doing his job,” another Marine adds, now sounding almost impressed with the guy’s tenacity in hanging on to his rifle.
The Marines smile at him and feed him more pound cake.
Al-Khizjrgee fails to catch on to the newly festive atmosphere. He leans forward and confides in me that he is desperately afraid. “How can I go home now? What if my sergeant finds me? He will know I did not fight.”
About half an hour earlier, Colbert tuned in the BBC and picked up the report that Baghdad had fallen. I pass this information on to Al-Khizjrgee. “There is no Saddam. There is no Iraqi army. You have no sergeant anymore.”
Al-Khizjrgee stares in disbelief. “It’s true,” I tell him.
He begins to cry again, only now he smiles. “I am so happy!”
The news is only getting better for Al-Khizjrgee.
Fick walks up and tells Al-Khizjrgee he will be driving him to a detention facility near Baghdad tonight.
“For free?” he asks, as if unable to believe his good fortune.
THE BATTALION’S final enemy contact outside Baqubah occurs an hour before sunset, when the men in Alpha’s Second Platoon spot a T-72 tank near their roadblock south of the city. T-72s are the most formidable tanks in the Iraqi arsenal. As soon as the Marines call it in to their platoon commander, he orders them to attack it with an AT-4 missile. Ordinarily, Marines would call in an air strike on a T-72, but no aircraft are immediately available, and Second Platoon’s commander wants this tank stopped now. One T-72 could wreak havoc on the whole battalion.
Burris, whose team led the way through the ambush at Al Gharraf, volunteers to lead the AT-4 strike on the tank. It’s potentially a highly risky mission. The shoulder-fired AT-4 missile isn’t really designed to defeat a T-72. At best, Marines believe an AT-4 can score a “mobility kill”—blowing a track off the tank—and to do this Burris will have to get in close to the tank, within 150 meters.
Nearly every engagement Burris has been in since the invasion started has somehow turned into his own personal, comic mishap. From the time he tripped on his rifle stock at Nasiriyah, giving himself a shiner, to the ambush at Al Gharraf, where he was sprayed from head to toe with human excrement when his Humvee plowed into the town’s open sewer puddle, Burris has concluded almost every firefight he’s been in knocked on his ass, laughing.
Now he approaches the T-72, with several Marines and his platoon commander by his side. They reach the stepping-off point, where Burris will continue on alone to get in close to his target, and his platoon commander, Capt. Kintzley, slaps him on the back. “Burris,” he says. “Don’t miss.”
Burris ducks down, runs across the road, dives into a berm and creeps up behind the tank. He gets even closer to the monster T-72 than his superiors had ordered him to go, crawling to within 125 meters. He sees an auxiliary fuel pod on the back of the tank and aims for it, figuring it will multiply the effects of his relatively puny AT-4 missile. He fires the missile.
Initially, Burris sees only a small flash where the missile hits. He’s worried that perhaps the missile glanced off the armor (believed to be nearly invincible on the T-72) and berates himself for not aiming at the track. An instant later, it feels like a giant fist comes out of the sky and pounds Burris on his back, slamming him to the ground. The tank erupts in a massive explosion.
Down the road, his platoon commander can actually see individual pieces of the tank—flywheels and gears—flying overhead. Several hundred kilometers farther back from the blast, twenty-three-year-old Corporal Steven Kelsaw, standing by a headquarters vehicle, is struck in the helmet by a piece of the tank and knocked down. It feels to him like someone just hurled a bowling ball at him. His Kevlar helmet is partially shattered, but all he suffers is a bad headache.
Burris’s hit on the T-72 produces one of the biggest explosions many Marines have seen in the entire war.
When Burris walks back to rejoin his team, Capt. Patterson, his company commander, walks up to congratulate him. Patterson wants to commend “this kid”—as he refers to each of his Marines—for going out there all by himself against the T-72. But as soon as he sees Burris’s dirty face and his dazed, somewhat confused-lookin
g smile, Patterson is seized by a fit of laughter. Finally, he manages to say, “Burris, I was worried sick about you.”
“Sir, what’s so funny?” Burris asks, still shaken up, his ears still ringing from the explosion.
“Nothing, Burris,” Patterson says. “Good job.”
AFTER THE DESTRUCTION of the T-72 tank, ten Humvees from Charlie Company race into Baqubah, with A-10s flying overhead as escorts. The roads are blockaded with rubble and concertina wire. Abandoned Iraqi military positions are everywhere. The Humvees snake through the barricades and make their way toward two military command centers—headquarters for a Republican Guard division and a brigade. The division headquarters is in ruins from repeated American airstrikes. The brigade headquarters is still partially standing. A team of Recon Marines speeds up to the building. They jump out, run inside and steal the Iraqi “colors”—the enemy’s flag.
The Marines have reclaimed, in part, their honor, sullied after the loss of their own colors in their truck burned outside Ar Rifa. The Americans hightail it out of the city, and the battalion prepares to drive back to Baghdad. With hundreds of Iraqis killed or wounded during the operation, the most serious injury sustained among Marines in First Recon is Kelsaw’s headache. For the Marines it feels as if the entire mission to Baqubah has ended as an extremely bloody game of capture the flag. Weeks later, Baqubah emerges as a key center in the “Sunni Triangle” insurgency against the American occupation. But for the Marines pulling out, the mission stands as one of their more clear-cut triumphs. They seized forty kilometers of highway, probably killed more soldiers than civilians and captured the enemy’s flag.
We drive back to Baghdad in darkness. Person, at the wheel, navigating with NVGs on his helmet, begins to sing, “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.”
“Hold on, buddy!” Colbert shouts. “No goddamn country music.”
“That’s not country,” Person insists. “It’s a cowboy song.”
“I hate to break it to you, but there are no cowboys,” Colbert says.
“Yeah, there are,” Person says, his voice simultaneously flat yet defiant. “There’s tons of cowboys.”
“A cowboy isn’t some dipshit with a ten-gallon hat and a dinner plate on his belt,” Colbert says. “There haven’t been any real cowboys for almost a hundred years. Horse raising is a science now. Cattle raising is an industry.”
A report comes over the radio of enemy fire on the column. “Hold on,” Colbert says, reluctantly putting the argument aside. “I’d like to hear about this firefight.”
War Pig, driving ahead of us on the same highway the battalion fought its way up earlier, is again taking fire from both sides of the road. Tracers stream through the night sky. We drive into the gunfire. Enemy muzzle flashes jet toward us from the right side of the road no more than five meters from my window. Colbert opens up on the position, his rifle clattering. Spent shell casings ejected from the side of his M-4 rain down inside the Humvee. If his past performances in these types of situations are any guide, there’s a strong likelihood he hit his target. I picture an enemy fighter bleeding in a cold, dark ditch and feel no remorse—at this time.
We drive the next ten kilometers in near silence, while the Marines search for additional targets, until we leave the ambush zone. Colbert pulls his weapon back in from the window and resumes his discussion with Person. “The point is, Josh, people that sing about cowboys are annoying and stupid.”
THIRTY-TWO
°
BY THE NIGHT OF APRIL 9, offensive U.S. military operations in Baghdad have ceased. The city is taken. Crowds have toppled Saddam statues. American military units are pouring into the city to begin the occupation.
We reach the outskirts of Baghdad at about eleven o’clock, having driven straight from Baqubah. We arrive in the same industrial suburbs we passed through the day before. The looters are gone, the streets are empty, the city is black. A few fires rage in the distance, sending columns of flame over Baghdad, but given the level of destruction Marines have witnessed recently, the place seems relatively tranquil. The American artillery that was pounding continuously for the past several days is silent. We pass construction sites where military bulldozers, with floodlights mounted on them, are laboring in the night. The military machine that crushes everything in its path is quickly followed by armies of worker-ant battalions, who’ve already marched up and begun smoothing out the rubble and building infrastructure. We drive into a sprawling supply depot and fueling station erected in the past several hours to service thousands of American vehicles. There’s a sense in the air tonight that Baghdad is pacified, the Americans are now quietly, efficiently in control. It’s perhaps the only time things will ever appear this way to the men in First Recon.
FIRST RECON enters central Baghdad on April 10, at about three in the afternoon. Colbert’s team drives with Hasser at the wheel, singing the hobo classic “King of the Road.” We approach the city from the east. The striking thing about the outskirts of Baghdad is how green everything is. We pass through a wealthy neighborhood of spacious stucco homes perched atop small hills, shaded beneath palms, sycamores and eucalyptus trees. Occupants of some homes sit outside in gardens, watching convoys belonging to the American invaders rumble past on streets below.
We cut down a dirt embankment and approach a temporary pontoon bridge over the Diyala River, the eastern crossing point into the city. When we reach the other side, Fick reports over the radio that American forces in Baghdad are experiencing “intermittent sniper fire and attacks from Fedayeen in trucks.”
The eastern side of Baghdad is a shantytown. We drive on dirt roads past corrugated tin and mud-brick huts jumbled together amidst a patchwork of open spaces, with cows and chickens roaming everywhere. We round a corner and two enormous bulls, each seeming more powerful than the Humvee we’re in, stand in the road. Hasser gingerly veers around them.
We pass donkey carts pulled over on the side of the road, intermixed with Toyotas, ancient Chevys and BMWs. Barefoot, scruffy kids line the edges of the shantytown. Some shout, “Go! Go! Go!” while pointing toward the city center and dancing like cheerleaders. One kid we pass comes right to the point: “Money! Money! Money!” he chants.
The battalion drives onto a massive berm, about five meters wide by five meters high. The Marines laugh. There are berms even in Baghdad. The battalion stops. Marines get out. The berm offers a commanding view of the city—a sprawl of low-slung apartment blocks, homes, offices, avenues, canals, freeways that stretch beyond the vanishing point. It spreads across nearly 800 square kilometers and has a population of about six million people.
“Jesus Christ!” Colbert says. “That’s a lot of city.”
Gunny Wynn walks over to Colbert’s vehicle. The two of them study maps and detailed satellite images of the city, marveling at the thousands of streets and alleyways. Gunny Wynn shakes his head. “And we thought those little towns a kilometer long were tough. I don’t know how we’re going to control this.”
Person stands by the Humvee, urinating on the berm. “Hey!” He calls out triumphantly. “I wrote U.S.A. with my piss.”
FIRST RECON’S DESTINATION in Baghdad is a working-class slum called Saddam City (since renamed Sadr City). More than two million Iraqis live here in an expanse of vaguely Stalinist-looking apartment blocks spread out over several kilometers. We drive down the main road that edges Saddam City and are greeted with a blend of enthusiasm tinged with violence. Thousands of people line the street, pressing up against the sides of Colbert’s Humvee. Sniper rounds periodically crack in the air. The side streets into Saddam City are barricaded with rubble, trunks of palm trees and scorched cars.
When Colbert’s Humvee momentarily stops, along with the rest of First Recon’s convoy, we’re swamped by young men in threadbare clothes who zombie-shuffle up to the windows. Many smile, but their faces have a hungry, vacant look. They resemble a crowd from Night of the Living Dead. Several grab at the Marines’ gear ha
nging off the sides of the Humvee—canteens, shovels and rucksacks. Colbert pushes his door open, jumps out and cows the crowd of perhaps 300 people into backing away from the vehicle. He paces from side to side, weapon out, establishing his territory.
Colbert is ordered back into the vehicle. The convoy circles around, driving over some traffic islands, and snakes into a gated industrial complex across from Saddam City. Inside, vast warehouses are spread across several acres. Most of them are bomb-smashed, with smoke and flames curling out of missing roofs. Piles of bright silver paper flutter on the ground like leaves. A familiar aroma wafts from the smoldering warehouses: tobacco. Someone in the Humvee figures out the silver paper on the ground is from cigarette packs. We have rolled into Iraq’s central cigarette factory. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of burning cigarettes fill the air with what is likely the world’s biggest-ever cloud of secondhand smoke.
The convoy stops by a loading dock next to a warehouse untouched by bombs, the battalion’s first camp in Baghdad. Nicotine-addict Marines immediately loot the nearby structure. Inside, cases of Iraq’s “Sumer” brand of filter cigarettes are stacked ten meters high. Marines emerge with cartons of them, then lie back by their Humvees and smoke the spoils of conquest.
Gunny Wynn paces uneasily up to Fick. “Do you realize how fucking weird this is?” he says. “When we set up in Mogadishu, we spent our first night in a cigarette factory. I hope this turns out better.”
There’s a ten-story glass-and-steel office tower on the west side of the complex, perhaps 500 meters from the warehouse where we’ve stopped. Every few minutes, loud bangs emanate from the upper floors of the office tower. Navy SEAL snipers occupy the top of the building, and are busy taking out targets across the city. Judging by the pace of their shooting, they’re killing Iraqis at a rate of about one every five to ten minutes. We on the ground below them have no idea who they’re shooting at. Only later do we discover there are Iraqis spread out around this complex, taking random shots at American troops, and the SEALs are attempting to eliminate them.
