One Bullet Away

by Nathaniel C. Fick

  We stopped on the side of the highway to await our orders. At four in the afternoon, they came: leave immediately and drive to the Tigris River bridge at An Numaniyah. Be there by morning. Gunny Wynn and I spread maps on the hood. Sheet after sheet after sheet. I whistled.

  "Christ, that's almost two hundred miles. We have to go south through Al Hayy to Qalat Sukkar, then swing west through Afak and north again all the way to the Tigris. What do you think?"

  "I think we'd better stop dicking around and drive."

  Sometimes I felt like a long-distance trucker, living my life in the cab of the Humvee, talking on the radio, and eating meals on the road. At my feet sat a two-liter water bottle to which I'd added six packets of MRE instant coffee, six creamers, a packet of cocoa powder, and two crushed No-Doz tablets. I had to be careful to sip the brew slowly to avoid peaking and crashing before midnight.

  By sunset, we'd passed through Al Hayy and by the intersection where Iraqi artillery had nearly hit us three nights and several lifetimes earlier. We turned west on Highway 17 and accelerated into the fading twilight on a narrow macadam road. Our speed stayed high as we crested a series of small hills, passing farmhouses set back from the highway. Lights shone in some of them, and again I was struck by the peaceful countryside. A video filmed from my seat that evening would have looked like any one of a thousand hardscrabble farming towns in the American Southwest.

  We raced through Afak without incident and turned north on Highway 1. Its six lanes of pavement had been in our dreams since south of Nasiriyah, when we'd last traveled them before cutting north on Highway 7 with RCT-1. The Army and the other RCTs had remained on Highway 1, swinging west of Iraq's population centers to speed toward Baghdad. Now we joined the pell-mell rush. Traffic on the highway was thick and eclectic—Humvees, Patriot missile batteries, tanks on trucks, tanks clanking along on their own, hundreds of contracted tankers carrying fuel for the invaders. In the southbound lanes, empty trucks roared toward Kuwait for another load. I watched the massive logistical orchestra and thought of all those nights we'd felt so alone, a few teeth far away from this immense tail. We merged into the flow and relaxed, feeling the false safety of numbers.

  Tracking our progress on the maps folded in my lap, I led the platoon off an exit ramp to Highway 27 for the final few miles to An Numaniyah. We arrived in the dead hours between midnight and dawn, joining a queue of Marines assembling to cross the bridge in the morning. I thought a tank might crush me if I slept next to the Humvee, so I crawled beneath it. My eyes closed, but sleep would not come.

  At home, I would have gone downstairs and watched TV. Under the Humvee, all I could do was stare at the oil pan a few inches above my nose. I saw my father leaning against the kitchen counter as I told him of my decision to join the Corps. My girlfriend, sobbing beneath a blanket as I said goodbye in a hotel room in Coronado. Shattered windshields. Blood-spattered pavement. And that relentless voice on the scratchy recording: There's no discharge in the war.

  ***

  After sunrise, we continued our relentless push and crossed the second of Mesopotamia's great rivers. Below the bridge, the Tigris sparkled in the morning sun. Fishermen poled skiffs through the shallows, and crowds gathered along the banks to bathe and draw water. A group of children waved from atop a burned-out Soviet tank. Others clambered onto an artillery cannon and sat, cheering, astride the barrel as if it were a hobbyhorse. Military equipment was everywhere. For the next hundred miles, all the way to the gates of Baghdad, every palm grove hid Iraqi armor, every field an artillery battery, and every alley an antiaircraft gun or surface-to-air missile launcher. But we never fired a shot. We saw the full effect of American airpower: every one of these fearsome weapons was a blackened hulk.

  The division had fought its way through there the day before, and evidence of the battle was everywhere. We passed a Humvee, its windshield frosted with bullet holes. American sleeping bags and packs lay in the road. I wondered what had happened to their owners. Frequently, the pavement itself bore the starburst crater and radiating shrapnel scars of a mortar strike. All along the highway, buildings and underbrush smoldered. Smoke was thick in the air, burning diesel mixing sometimes with sweeter burning flesh. Wynn and I stared at a blackened and abandoned Abrams tank.

  "I thought those things were indestructible," I said. "How the hell did they manage to bag a fucking Abrams?"

  He shook his head. "I don't know, but let's hope whoever did it is already dead."

  "Watch out." I pointed at an object in the road, thinking it was a piece of unexploded ordnance. Then I saw it was a human head, slightly charred and staring placidly at the sky. A short distance away, dogs tore at the body.

  Wynn and I were momentarily chastened but then had to laugh. "Can you believe this place?" he said. "Heads in the road. Dogs eating bodies. People at home bitch about cigarette butts on the beach."

  we'drove through dusk and into the night before stopping along the edge of the road. The GPS told me where we were, but that was less important than what was out there. Nothing could tell me what was in the fields and palm groves just beyond our little circle. We had moved so quickly that there was no front anymore. Good guys and bad guys were all mixed up. I had slept three hours in three days.

  "Gunny, I can't think straight. I need a couple of hours in the bag," I said. At that point, sleep wasn't pleasant, just a mechanical necessity, like putting gas in a car.

  To our left, a five-story factory burned in the dark. Flames leaped high into the sky. The fire didn't crackle; it roared, sucking oxygen from the air around it. I wrapped myself in a poncho and lay on the gravel near the front tire to shield myself from the flickering light.

  It was the sleep of the damned. I floated in a netherworld of dreams, memories, and sudden starts. Briefing the platoon. Fireballs. Ragged breathing. Take the shot. Blue cars. Tanks nearby. And the fire, burning, roaring, casting shadows across the palms.

  Christeson shook me awake. "It's been three hours, sir. The patrol's on its way back in."

  I sat up and rubbed my head, shaking gravel from my hair. "What patrol?"

  "Team Three, sir. They went to check out that tank."

  "What the fuck are you talking about?"

  Down the road, near the platoon's last Humvee, Sergeant Lovell and Doc Bryan were swearing softly in the darkness. Around them, the team sat on the pavement, stripping out of soaked, muddy boots and trousers. They looked as if they'd been wading in waist-deep water.

  Stinetorf glanced up at me. "That fucking thing has probably been there ten years, sir. Couldn't drive it out through that swamp if they wanted to."

  Slowly, I understood. Some of my dreams had not been dreams. The company operations chief, a senior enlisted man outside the platoon, had come to me and asked to send Lovell's team out to investigate an Iraqi tank that had been spotted in a nearby palm grove. I pulled Sergeant Lovell aside and asked him what had happened.

  "Ops chief came and told us to go look at some fucking tank out there in the grove. I told him half the fucking division rolled past it already and I only take orders from you and Gunny Wynn."

  I nodded, seeing where this was going.

  "So he left and came back a couple minutes later. Said he talked to you and you OK'ed it. We mounted up and went out."

  I had given the order without even realizing it. "Sergeant Lovell, he came to me, but I was delirious and thought I was dreaming. I'm sorry."

  Gunny Wynn was sitting by the radio when I returned to the Hum-vee. "I'm losing my mind, Mike. Losing my fucking mind."

  32

  THE CHAPLAIN'S VOICE DRONED, but I paid no attention. I was focused on the dusty pair of combat boots flanking an M4 stuck muzzle-first in the dirt. Horsehead was dead. We'd heard rumors earlier in the day of Fifth Marines getting in a firefight. Horsehead had been wounded, badly wounded, or evacuated, with no further details. But he couldn't have been killed. First sergeants don't die in combat; that's for corporals and lieutenants to d
o. Besides, Smith was a common last name. There must have been hundreds of Smiths in the Marine Corps, probably even a bunch of First Sergeant Smiths. But no. First Sergeant Edward Smith, Horsehead, a recon legend doing a tour in the grunts before retiring, was dead.

  I joined many other recon Marines at a dusk memorial service in a field on the southeastern outskirts of Baghdad. Around us, the entire First Marine Division was massing its combat power. Marines sprawled everywhere, sleeping. Others turned wrenches on Humvees, cleaned weapons, or huddled over huge map sheets with their corners held down by bricks. We hadn't all been together since leaving Kuwait. After almost three weeks moving across Iraq like individual rivulets of water, the division was pooling, preparing to flood the enemy capital. It was a pause, not a stop. In the distance, Baghdad's minarets rose above the palms.

  We took turns saying what a great Marine Horsehead had been, what a great husband, father, and man. We bowed our heads in silence and sang a song I cannot remember. I was staring at the boots. When a man wakes up in the morning, he puts on his boots. He laces them up and ties them. He expects to take them off again that evening. Horsehead went through the day without knowing he'd put on his boots for the last time. Maybe I'd already put on my boots for the last time, too. When the service ended, I walked slowly back to the platoon, grateful for my time alone in the dark. Faint strings of tracers climbed into the sky, too far off to hear.

  Colonel Ferrando summoned his officers to battalion headquarters the following afternoon, April 8, for a mission brief. We'd spent the morning listening to the BBC and watching columns of smoke rise from Baghdad. The Army had launched an audacious "thunder run" from Saddam International Airport into the heart of the city, and resistance was lighter than feared. The Marines were preparing to unleash their own offensive across the Diyala River and into the city from the southeast. The news reports had an unreal quality to them. Part of me thought we'd never reach that point. American tanks would never roll into one of the great cities of the Middle East. I had laughed in Kuwait when General Mattis talked about using recon as dismounted shock troops during the final urban assault. Hyperbole for the lance corporals, I'd thought then. Never gonna happen. Well, it was happening. I leaned closer to learn our role in the war's climax.

  "Gentlemen, as most of you know, the assault on Baghdad has begun," Ferrando said. As he elaborated on the American seizure of Iraq's capital, I marveled at his uniform. It looked pressed. His clean-shaven face shone in the sunlight, and his hair was neatly combed. I, in comparison, looked as if I had come to the meeting straight from my cardboard box beneath an overpass. Days of sweat and grime stiffened my uniform. My fingernails were black, and I could feel my toes squishing in my socks. I slept at night with my head out of the sleeping bag because I couldn't bear the stench of my own body.

  The colonel confirmed that the division would attack across the Diyala River into the city. General Mattis had one overriding concern. The forty-first Armored Brigade of the Al Nida Republican Guard Division was headquartered in Ba'quba, only fifty kilometers northeast of Baghdad. Its tanks could hit the First Marine Division's flank less than an hour after leaving their base. And that's where we came in.

  Major Whitmer read the mission statement: "At fourteen hundred Zulu, First Recon Battalion will attack north to Ba'quba, locating and identifying enemy forces in order to help the division develop its situation. Be prepared to engage targets of opportunity. We'll link up with LAR at the zero-zero northing and then continue up to the three-zero northing."

  While Colonel Ferrando and Major Whitmer continued the briefing, directed mainly at the company commanders, I studied my maps. The 00 northing was a line on the map about twenty-five kilometers to our north. That meant fifteen miles of unescorted driving up to the LAR company, whose call sign was War Pig. They straddled the road at the northernmost limit of the American advance, which happened to be right at the 00 northing. We would link up with them and attack north for another thirty kilometers into the town of Ba'quba. The map showed a highway split south of town. The left fork swung around to the west and paralleled a river on the western side of Ba'quba. The right fork continued straight north on the eastern side of the city. In the months to come, this town would be a corner of the area called "the Sunni Triangle," with connotations of RPG-toting insurgents and blown-up American Humvees. On April 8, 2003, it was still just Ba'quba, a small town north of Baghdad, whose Republican Guard outpost had yet to feel the brunt of American ground power. First Recon was going to change that.

  Fourteen hundred Zulu translated to five o'clock local time, a few hours before sunset. I lined the platoon up an hour early on the dirt road that led out of the division's headquarters compound. Our ritualistic "combat prep" time was important to any successful mission, and I didn't want to rush it. Besides, I had come to enjoy the anticipatory tingle I got whenever we prepared to step outside the wire. Gunny Wynn and 1 walked up and down the line of vehicles. Doc Bryan was mixing a strong coffee to sustain him through the evening, while Stinetorf racked his .50-caliber's charging handles to clean the moving parts for later. Many of the Marines wore calf-length digital-pattern desert cloaks, leftovers from the first Gulf War which provided great protection from the dust, with an added benefit of being almost impossible to see through night vision goggles. I walked up to Colbert's Humvee and leaned down to talk through his open window.

  "OK, point man, back-brief our route to me."

  "Sir, we'll leave the compound here and drive north on the paved road that parallels Route 5. We're not the lead element for that portion, so I just follow in trace. At the zero-zero northing, we link up with LAR, and they'll take the lead. I'll be recon's first vehicle behind them. We'll continue north and see what happens."

  "Good. It'll be nice having some real firepower with us for a change." I turned and walked back to my Humvee without saying what I knew we were both thinking: Why did we have this firepower with us for a change?

  Across the road, the Marines in division headquarters sat in little clumps, eating their MREs. They watched as we prepared to leave, envy and relief mixing on their faces. I was sure my platoon pitied them, knowing that they would be safe and warm here in their sleeping bags.

  I folded the night's maps and tucked them in my Plexiglas map case. It measured about two feet square and allowed me to see thirty or forty kilometers of road at a time without having maps flapping all over the place in the wind. A bandolier of grenades hung from the visor above my head, ready for quick loading in the M203. On the center console sat two GPS receivers, carefully checked to make sure they read the same, and a pile of rifle magazines loaded with all tracers. Stuck to the inside of the windshield in front of my seat were two laminated cards outlining the request procedures for artillery and air support. Stress has a way of banishing even the simplest things from one's mind, so I was reassured to have the cheat sheets in my hour of need. A red-lens flashlight, hand grenades, night vision goggles, smoke grenades, colored flares, IV bags, humrats, a sniper rifle, and four radios completed the ensemble. For all its size, that Humvee would be a tight fit for us this evening.

  Exactly on time, we started the engines and crept slowly from the camp. Out on the road, we entered a different world. Crowds of Iraqis thronged the streets. Most of them paid us little attention; they were preoccupied stealing every movable object in sight. Children drove donkeys towing pieces of scrap metal. A man on a bicycle staggered past with a wooden table balanced precariously on his fender. Behind him, an old woman dragged a plastic jug with one hand and a huge spool of copper wire with the other. We threaded through the crowd, guns elevated in deference to the people but eyes scanning for the signs of trouble we'd learned to look for over the past few weeks: anyone coolly appraising us, cars reappearing, people on radios or cell phones. Soon we escaped into the farmland beyond Baghdad's suburbs, increasing our speed as the shadows lengthened and the sky turned gray.

  We passed dozens of blown-up Iraqi tanks and armored person
nel carriers. Some of them sat in revetments off the road; others were parked on the shoulder. Fire had blackened their desert tan paint jobs, and overpressure had blown their hatches open. I hoped the record of destruction would continue as we got farther north.

  Approaching the 00 northing, we contacted War Pig on the radio. Their hulking LAVs sat in a defensive coil on the west side of the road. A coil is the twenty-first-century version of a wagon train circling up for the night. The LAVs were parked back to back, with their guns pointed outward in a full circle. We pulled to the side of the road and waited as they unlooped themselves and whined slowly up onto the pavement, taking their place at the head of the formation. The dozen LAVs traveled in a staggered column, their guns alternating left and right. Colbert followed behind the last LAV, with the rest of the platoon close at his heels. Behind us, First Recon stretched to the south in a long line. With the confidence of firepower, we accelerated into the darkness, the first Americans to enter that part of Iraq.

  I used an alcohol pen to mark our progress on the map. The 05 northing passed without incident, and then the 10. We had traveled ten kilometers into uncharted territory with no trouble. Twenty kilometers of dark farmland lay between us and Ba'quba. As I inked a little check mark next to the 14 northing on the map, a chain gun sounded its tearing rattle.

  A general warning went out to all vehicles: "War Pig's in contact. Armed dismounts on both sides of the road."