by Evan Wright
Fick gathers the men for a briefing. “Marines have been here for more than twenty-four hours,” he says. “They’re set up on the other side of this warehouse. They’ve had one killed and one wounded from sniper or mortar fire.” He then adds, “Compared to where we’ve been, I think it’s pretty safe here. We should all get a good rest tonight.”
A few minutes after his pronouncement, the complex is rocked by a powerful explosion. Someone has set off a car bomb outside the main gate. A furious firefight ensues outside, involving Marines from other units. The gun battle is only a couple hundred meters away, but the complex is surrounded by a three-meter-high cement fence so we can’t see anything. We just hear a torrent of shots.
Fick walks up to me and smiles, deeply amused by the crescendo of gunfire. “I was wrong about that good night’s rest,” he says. Moments later, a random bullet falls from the sky and skips onto the concrete, sparking behind Fick’s back. He laughs. “This is definitely not good.”
We both watch a casevac helicopter flying past the complex. Skimming low over rooftops, it suddenly rears up to avoid enemy tracer rounds fired at it from the ground. We watch the life-and-death drama playing out in the sky for several moments. The helicopter escapes. “Not good at all,” Fick says.
But to the men, racking out on pavement—no holes to dig here—surrounded by concrete walls, with all the gunfighting being handled by Marines from other units, this war-torn complex represents five-star luxury. They lie back, eating, talking, smoking. For many, it’s the first time they’ve rested since the mission to Baqubah started seventy-two hours ago.
WHILE MOST GOT TO SLEEP, Espera leans against the wheel of his Humvee parked by Colbert’s, composing a letter to his wife back home in Los Angeles. He uses a red lens flashlight, which emits a dim glow, not easily spotted by potential enemy shooters, to write on a tattered legal pad. Espera’s wife was a sophomore at Loyola Marymount College when they met. At the time, he was a nineteen-year-old laborer with no future. They married shortly after she got pregnant, and much of Espera’s life since has been an effort to better himself in order to meet her high standards. “You see, dog,” he explains, “my wife is smart, but she fucked up big-time when she married me. I was a piece of shit. I remember my wife talking about all the books she’d read, and it hit me there was a whole world I’d missed. Before I met her I used to think, I’ve got a shitload of hand skills—welding, pipefitting—any pussy can read a book. See, I didn’t grow up with no understanding. My mom tried, but my dad is a psycho ex-Marine Vietnam vet.”
Espera uses the term “psycho ex-Marine Vietnam vet” with the utmost respect. He aspires to possess warrior skills equal to those of his father, who won a bronze star in Vietnam, and believes if he’s lucky, he himself will retire one day as a “proud, psycho ex-Marine.” Despite his reverence for his father’s combat valor, the man abandoned him at a young age (after an incident, according to Espera, in which his dad was shot in their home by a jealous girlfriend), and their relationship remains rocky.
Espera bitterly recalls a past incident. Several years ago, when his father tried to patch things up by taking him on a fishing trip, his old man ended up stopping off at porn shop on their way to the lake. While Espera waited outside for his dad to finish his business in the private viewing booths, he got into an altercation with a man he believed was trying to cruise him in the parking lot, and Espera threw a brick through the windshield of the man’s car. “That was our father-son trip,” he says.
Since meeting his wife, Espera has become an avid reader, voraciously consuming everything from military histories to Chinese philosophy to Kurt Vonnegut (his favorite author). In the Middle East, he spends every free moment either reading or writing long letters to his wife, who works at an engineering firm in the San Fernando Valley. Tonight, at the cigarette factory, Espera reads me the beginning of a letter to his wife. “I’ve learned there are two types of people in Iraq,” he reads, “those who are very good and those who are dead. I’m very good. I’ve lost twenty pounds, shaved my head, started smoking, my feet have half rotted off, and I move from filthy hole to filthy hole every night. I see dead children and people everywhere and function in a void of indifference. I keep you and our daughter locked away deep down inside, and I try not to look there.” Espera stops reading and looks up at me. “Do you think that’s too harsh, dog?”
GUN BATTLES RAGE all night long in Baghdad. Marines sleep soundly on either side of me. I watch tracer rounds rising almost gracefully over the city. Some of this is probably just celebratory fire. But every fifteen minutes or so, powerful explosions go off, followed by furious bouts of weapons fire. During the lulls, ambulance sirens wail through the streets.
Occasionally rounds snap into the complex. You hear them zinging, then cracking as they strike nearby buildings.
After one of them hits, I hear a Marine in darkness say, “Is that all you’ve got?”
Ripples of laughter erupt. Between the gun battles and ambulance sirens, we hear singsong Arabic blaring through loudspeakers. It’s either muezzins calling prayers—unlikely after dark—or American psychological operations units trying to calm the people down by playing messages urging them to stop fighting. It’s not doing much good.
At around midnight I decide to use the toilet facilities. About 200 meters from where we sleep, Marines have set up a designated “shitter”—a grenade box perched over the open storm drain that encircles the cigarette factory complex. I creep over to it in the darkness. A solitary Marine is perched on the shitter. I wait a long time. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I finally make out what’s keeping him. His right arm is moving up and down. He’s getting in a late-night combat jack.
I leave him in peace and go over to another section of the storm drain. As I’m about to settle over it, I notice that on this side of the complex the wall separating us from the street is an open-stake fence. Marines had been told the complex was surrounded by a solid concrete wall, but in this corner you can look through to the street and shops just a few meters beyond. I decide to perch down anyway, but as I’m about to do so, a gun battle erupts on the street, maybe ten meters in front of me. Red lines of tracer rounds zoom past, skipping low over the pavement on the street directly before my eyes. You can’t see who’s shooting, how far away they are or what they’re aiming at. I retreat back to the Humvees.
I fall asleep to the sound of pitched street battles in Free Baghdad.
THIRTY-THREE
°
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, April 11, at the cigarette factory, Fick gathers his Marines to brief them on their mission in Baghdad. He reads from the official statement: “First Recon will conduct military operations in and around Saddam City to include patrols establishing the American presence, stop the looting, and restore a sense of security in order to allow critical, life-sustaining functions to take place. The intent is to locate key facilities in our zones, such as schools and hospitals, to collect intelligence on Fedayeen and Baath loyalists who are still at large and to prevent lawlessness and to disarm the populace. The end state is a humble, competent force occupying this area, ensuring security and mutual trust between us and the local populace.”
After reading the official statement, Fick adds, “We have rolled through this country fucking things up. Now we have to show these people what we liberated them from.”
Fick radiates quiet confidence, mixed with purpose. He tells me after the briefing, “What we did up to now was the easy part. This is where the work really begins.” Fick is under the impression that Marines will stay in this cigarette factory for at least a month, maybe longer. They will be given sectors to patrol. They will set up nighttime observation posts in neighborhoods in order to capture or stop looters, paramilitary forces or jihadis who are still active. They will come to know the people in the neighborhoods they patrol, rendering them assistance and serving as liaisons for the nation-builders—engineers, doctors, civil-affairs specialists—who are no doubt on the
ir way.
“This is going to be tough,” Fick tells me. “But I think for my men it will give them a sense of purpose about all the terrible things they’ve seen and been through.”
A SHORT WHILE after Fick’s briefing, he invites his team leaders and me to accompany him on a tour of their new home, the cigarette-factory complex. As soon as we near the open-stake fence I discovered the night before, a crowd of civilians on the other side rushes forward. They stick their faces between the bars and begin shouting at the Marines, several of them in English. “Please, stop the looting,” two of them plead.
Fick approaches the fence, telling them, “Order will be restored very soon.”
More civilians mob the fence, shouting in Arabic, gesticulating. Fick and the others retreat from the babble. We walk into in an open area between looming warehouse structures, cross about fifty meters of barren ground and approach another section of fence—this one with no people on the other side. We’re looking out at the city when there’s a loud cracking sound, followed by a zing. A few more follow. Smoke puffs pop up from the ground a few meters behind us.
“Sniper,” several of the Marines say at once.
Lovell, who’s also an expert sniper, says the rounds are coming from close by, and that we are directly in front of the barrel of whatever gun is shooting at us. I ask him how he knows this. “You can tell by the sound,” he says. He explains that the type of cracking we’re hearing isn’t the gunpowder blast of the bullet being fired but the sonic boom the bullet makes as it crosses the sound barrier. You only hear it so clearly when you’re pretty much directly in front of the barrel. The zinging sound we also hear, he says, is something you only pick up if the bullet’s passing within a few meters of your ears. This is all more information than I wanted.
The five of us have fifty meters of open ground to cross before we can reach cover. We sprint back one at a time under fire from the sniper. For some reason, as I make the dash all I can think of is the scene from the Peter Falk comedy, The In-Laws, in which Falk absurdly urges his sidekick to run in a “serpentine” pattern when they come under fire from a band of guerrillas while stuck in a Central American dictatorship. In my fear, this scene comes to me when I run through the sniper fire. Following Peter Falk’s advice, I zigzag in a serpentine pattern as the shots ring out. It takes me twice as long to reach safety as it takes the Marines. After everyone gathers behind a building, we stand for a moment, panting heavily, collecting ourselves. Finally, Fick looks at his team leaders and they all burst out laughing. Lovell asks me why I was running back and forth. When I tell him, he suggests, “Next time we come under fire, just run in a straight line. You might live longer.”
FIRST RECON BATTALION only launches one patrol on its first full day in Baghdad. The problem is, the battalion has just one translator, Meesh. While looting and burning continues unabated in the city, the Marines, with nothing to do in First Recon’s “occupation force,” kill the day by exploring the factories, warehouses and offices in the complex.
I follow along with several on a mission to ratfuck the main office tower. Marines are hoping to find cool souvenirs to bring home. On the way in, the Marines grab giant crescent wrenches from one of the cigarette-factory buildings to break down doors.
The main office tower has already been claimed by the First Battalion, Fourth Marines. They guard the front entrances, but the ratfuck crew I’m with smashes through some of the side windows with their monkey wrenches and circumvents the sentries. We take stairs up to the eighth floor. Some of the outer offices are occupied by the SEAL sniper teams, still busily shooting Iraqis every few minutes.
We sneak into rooms containing vast rows of low cubicles. The Marines are simultaneously freaked out and disappointed. It looks like any boring American office. You can see some workers have gone to a lot of trouble to decorate the drab cubicle walls with family photos, framed kitschy pictures of peaceful sunsets, beaches, forests, as well Christmas and Valentine’s cards with holiday sentiments written on them in English.
Marines rifle through everything, looking for souvenirs, but all they find are colored pens and coffee mugs. “It’s all stupid crap,” one of them says, slamming his wrench into a computer screen.
The Marines kick down the door to what looks like the boss’s office in the corner. One of them sits behind the expansive wooden desk, punches buttons on the speakerphone and plays boss. “Have my secretary send in my next appointment,” he says in an obnoxiously official voice.
Then he starts smashing the phone and the desk apart with his wrench. The Marines destroy the boss’s office with gleeful vengeance, throwing stuff at the walls, pissing in the corner, all of them maniacally laughing. In a weird way, they’re living out the fantasy Carazales often talks about—in which one day a year the blue-collar man gets to go into rich neighborhoods and smash apart expensive homes.
AFTER TWO DAYS of aimless waiting, the Marines in Second Platoon finally get a mission in Baghdad. Their job is to enter a neighborhood north of Saddam City and drive through the streets. The goals are simple: to talk to locals who’ve never seen Americans before and to not get into any gunfights. Before leaving, Fick briefs his men. “If we take a potshot, don’t open up with a machine gun on a crowd. The days of running and gunning through towns are over.”
His precautionary briefing seems unnecessary when the Marines roll into the neighborhood. Compared to Saddam City, the place they enter seems almost bucolic. Broad, unpaved roads lead to large stucco homes that would not be out of place in San Diego. Lush gardens grow from vacant lots. Young men line the street and greet the Marines in halting, yet formal English. “Good morning, sir,” they say.
The Humvees drive for about 500 meters until a cluster of residents blocks the road. They stream out of their homes bearing jugs of water and hot tea, which they offer the Marines. Small girls emerge carrying roses for the Americans.
The neighborhood men gather around the Humvees, puffing cigarettes and bitching about life under Saddam. Most of their complaints are economic—the lack of jobs, the bribes that had to be paid to get basic services. “We have nothing to do but smoke, talk, play dominoes,” a wiry chain-smoking man in his late thirties tells me. “Saddam was an asshole. Life is very hard.” He asks if the Marines can provide him with Valium. He pleads, “I cannot sleep at night, and the store to buy liquor has been closed since the war started.”
Aside from the complaints of the idle men, the most striking feature of the neighborhood is the hard labor performed by women. Covered in black robes, they squat beneath the sun in the empty-lot gardens, harvesting crops with knives, while children crawl at their feet. Others trudge past carrying sacks of grain on their heads. The division of labor exists even among children. Small boys run around playing soccer while little girls haul water. “Damn, the women are like mules here,” Person observes.
“If we’d have fought these women instead of men,” another Marine comments, “we might have got our asses kicked.”
The other culture shock for the Marines is that several of the men seem to be hitting on them. One asks Garza to lift up his glasses. When he does so, the man leans forward and says, “You have pretty eyes.”
Another of them asks a Marine if he likes boys or girls. When the Marine says, “Girls,” the man makes a face and says, “Girls. Blah!” Then he points to a young man standing nearby, makes an intercourse gesture with his fingers and says, “You go with my friend, you like.”
The Marines are amused. Soon Marines and Iraqis stand around the Humvees in a big, noisy klatch, laughing, trying to communicate through gestures and fractured English. They trade Marine gear, like their soft-cover hats, which Iraqis seem to universally prize, for Muslim prayer beads, which Marines all covet. After worrying that his Marines were going to indiscriminately shoot civilians, Fick has to wade in and break up the party.
The neighborhood is filled with unexploded munitions—mostly mortars and RPGs, fired by Iraqi forces, that failed
to detonate. Fick roams around the area, scrupulously recording the locations of unexploded munitions in a handheld computer for a future removal effort.
Residents assail him with a list of other problems—lack of electricity and running water, broken phone lines, ransacked hospitals, bandits coming in at night and robbing homes, even the dearth of jobs. They expect the Americans, who so handily beat Saddam, will take care of everything. The Marines shake their hands, promise to see them again soon, and drive off, heroes for the day.
They never return to the neighborhood.
THE ORIGINAL PLAN Fick had briefed his men on executing—restoring stability to Baghdad by patrolling specific neighborhoods and rooting out Fedayeen and Baathists—never materializes. Instead, over the next several days, First Recon’s plans shift, as the city plunges further into chaos. The battalion moves from the cigarette factory to a wrecked children’s hospital north of the city to a looted power plant. Each time they change locations, Second Platoon is assigned new sectors to patrol. Within a few days, Fick admits to me the whole endeavor is so haphazard it seems to him at times like a “pointless exercise.”
The basic problem with the American occupation of liberated Baghdad is that the fighting is so heavy at night, most U.S. forces decide not to go out after dark. On their third day in Baghdad, Fick tells his men, “We’re not going out at night. There are too many revenge killings going on in the city. Mostly it’s Shias doing a lot of dirty work, taking out Fedayeen and Sunni Baathists.”
