by David Hearne
The cry of “All clear,” echoed up and down the convoy and sweat streaked faces emerged from behind masks. Some looked shaken, some angry, some relieved and some oddly exhilarated with their experience with the darkness and savagery of war.
Kat tore off the mask and took a deep breath of the tepid Iraqi air. The smell of smoke, sweat, exhaust and a panoply of other odors engaged her senses. Off in the distance a herd of camels bellowed and bleated as they enjoyed the hot afternoon totally oblivious to the evil embracing the desert. Kat wiped the sweat from her face and savored the warm breeze caressing her face.
Their convoy finally stopped north of Basra and Katherine was able to stretch her legs or at least one of her legs. She was tired, drained from the heat and her legs ached from being cramped in the Humvee for so long. Katherine met up with her aide, Paul Shermer, and realizing how pathetic she looked, joked, “What do you think the chances are of taking a shower tonight?”
“The closest thing to a shower you’re going to get tonight is handy wipes and maybe some drips from a bottle of water, unless it rains.” Paul quipped. The attempt at humor was welcomed because the fear of a potential gas attack was still paramount in her mind. She worried what would happen if she was asleep, sick, or going to the bathroom and a scud attacked occurred. She knew she would be nervously studying the actions of troops and no longer simply relying on hearing the ominous cry of “Gas Attack” to warn her of danger.
She was adapting to the rigors of war and to the same discomforts experienced by the troops waging the battles. She had learned to accept that sand and the sun were inescapable perils that could easily incapacitate or kill. The tepid air was always infused with sand that entered the nose, ears, filled your pores, dried your face and abraded the eyes. Even wearing goggles would not completely protect the eyes from the sand. When it did enter an eye, its sharp jagged edges felt like flecks of broken glass, scraping and scratching, impairing vision and sometime causing extreme pain. On days when swirling sand thickened the air, your lungs would ache and spasm with retching coughs. And then there was the sun. It beats down on you incessantly, devouring your strength and sucking the moisture from you like an omnipotent vampire. Your tongue thickens in your saliva-less mouth and your throat becomes raw from the heat and grit.
Katherine feared not so much the suns damage to her body, but more its debilitating effects within her mind. The blistering sun could invade the brain and elusively alter its mental state. If you were one of the unlucky, it could fill your mind with hallucinations, confusion, disorientation and bizarre visions that virtually incapacitated you. For some, the sun’s sapping strength would make them nauseous and drop them to their knees vomiting and defecating uncontrollably. These basic elements of existence in Iraq could be as deadly as the actions of the Republican Guard, Fedayeen or other armed Iraqis.
The whirlwind of events and the relentlessness of the Marines awed Senator Laforge. The 1st Marine Expeditionary Force pressed forward up Highway 7 toward An Nasiriyah leaving the besieged city of Basra in the hands of the British troops. Iraq roiled with battles. The port city of Umm Qasr was still showing resistance to the British and even though 8 thousand Iraqi troops surrendered, the Fedayeen and other irregular military elements continued to mount pitched battles against the Coalition. A primary goal in the Basra area and Al Faw peninsula was to prevent the destruction of the oil fields. Major General Mathis, the 1st Division Commander was given this mission and his troops quickly seized Az Zubayr Oil fields and others that dotted the landscape around Basra. Only a handful were set on fire by the Iraqi military before the Coalition troops took full control of them. It was only the third day of the war and the Coalition troops had met little resistance to their blitzkrieg into Iraq.
March 23, 2003
In the early morning calmness of March 23, 2003, Senator Laforge sipped coffee and munched on a chocolate-covered oatmeal cookie from her MRE as they called the dehydrated Meal-Ready-to-Eat. She listened to the chatter coming from the radio and the distant echoing of muezzins chanting from the minarets of mosques calling believers to Morning Prayer. Anytime you are near a town or city and the weather is calm, the early morning or evening call to prayer can be clearly heard in the quiet desert. It becomes as expected and natural as the rising and setting of the sun.
The atmosphere was tense this morning. Something was different than the normal minutiae of survival of scanning the surrounding for hostilities and checking equipment for readiness. Senator Laforge asked Lance Corporal Parkers, “What’s going on?”
He said that some army unit has been ambushed up ahead in An Nasiriyah and a rescue attempt was in process, but things were very sketchy. They had assigned their Task Force Tarawa to the mission of aiding the army unit and securing An Nasiriyah.
Senator Laforge asked a Captain for more details of what had happened. The Captain was intently monitoring radio transmissions from the units engaging the enemy at the ambush site.
She caught bits and pieces of the transmission and from it; she discerned that it was a supply convoy from the 507th Maintenance Company that had made a disastrous wrong turn.
Thirty-three soldiers and 18 vehicles led by Captain King mistakenly missed a left turn at an intersection and continued across a bridge spanning the Euphrates River. They entered An Nasiriyah, a city of 400,000 swarming with Fedayeen and Iraqi irregulars. As the Army unit tried to retreat out of the city, they were attacked by heavily armed Iraqis. An innocent wrong turn brought them to the mouth of Hell. A virtual hail of bullets rained down on the unit as it desperately tried to maneuver through the morning shadows and dusty streets of An Nasiriyah back to the bridge. The bloody chaos fragmented the convoy even more as the soldiers fought back against Iraqis firing at them from all directions. Some of the soldiers were hit by the torrent of bullets. Rivulets of sweat streaked the pale ashen faces of the wounded, as they fended off darkening thoughts of dying. Survival was the only thing that mattered now. They fought on with no time to tend the wounded or mourn the fallen. Stark fear of a waiting death drove them on.
The casualties increased quickly as the vehicles weaved through the gauntlet of barricades, exploding RPGs, the hail of bullets, menacing tanks and truckloads of attacking Fedayeens. Vehicles crashed into obstacles, some exploded from RPG hits and some were crippled from the withering firepower of the Iraqi force. The unit continued to fight and miraculously the three lead vehicles led by Captain King finally escaped the city. They drove south of the city and encountered the Marine’s 8th Tank Battalion, Task Force Tarawa. Once briefed of the situation, the marines immediately dispatched an element up Highway 8 to reinforce the remaining 27 soldiers. The marines first came upon a group of ten soldiers of the 507th, firing from behind five of the disabled vehicles at an advancing Iraqi element. The men led by SGT Rose were a ghastly sight with blood caked hands and eyes blazing from death’s beckoning. The Tarawa unit joined the fight and quickly routed the enemy. SGT Rose’s element had half of its men wounded, some hit multiple times. They had escaped the labyrinth of hell with their life, but its horror would surely haunt them forever. Seventeen more of the soldiers were still fighting with Iraqis on the streets of An Nasiriyah. Before the marines could reach them, they were killed or captured by the enemy. The entire battle had gone on for around an hour. At the end, only sixteen soldiers escaped the day’s carnage. Eleven soldiers were killed in the battle and another seven captured by the Iraqis. Many of those that did escape were severely wounded.
Senator Laforge was sickened by the news of the event. She bit down on her parched lips to stem their quivering. Her emotions had to stay hidden. If a tear glistened in her eye, over an event like this, the media would pounce on her like hyenas as an indication of her weakness.
The simple accidental turn by the supply unit had sparked euphoria for the Iraqi forces. For the Iraqis, the battle had become a rallying point. The dark event provided a tsunami of optimism for war skeptics and was celebrated by war protesters
with the enthusiasm of zealous cheerleaders.
The three women from the supply unit, the battle and its aftermath became media fodder for days. For Katherine, March 23 dragged on as units from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade and Marine Task Force Tarawa pushed deeper into An Nasiriyah. Their mission was to secure two bridges that would help the Coalition troops cross the Euphrates River on their march to Baghdad. Heavy resistance confronted them as they entered an Nasiriyah and it became the bloodiest battle of the campaign.
After digesting the grim news of the battle in An Nasiriyah, Colonel Joe W. Dowdy, commander of Regimental Command Team 1 of the 1st Marine Division considered his alternatives. With the new problem of pouring rain and the resulting sludge filled streets in many of the side roads, there were few choices. Colonel Dowdy decided to rip through the center of An Nasiriyah, on a dangerous stretch of road nicknamed, “Ambush Alley,” after the infamous 1993 deadly firefight in Mogadishu.
Katherine was nervous about charging through An Nasiriyah, to say the least. Paul informed her of Colonel Dowdy’s decision and then helped Kat gather her belongings. Gathering her things wasn’t the hard part for Kat - she only had a few notebooks and pens aside from her rucksack of essentials. Suddenly, she was thinking about her family, about Lyndsey and Ira. She realized that she was now – in effect – going in to combat. Not only was she traveling around Iraq with Marines, she might actually now be shot at. She also realized that there were thousands of women and children now in harms way in the town of An Nasriyah. She felt a bit selfish worrying about herself, but before she could ponder it further, Kat was whisked off in an armored Humvee, and they were on their way to, and hopefully through, An Nasiriyah.
Everyone deals with fear differently. Some block it out by talking to others about inane subjects, their favorite singer, TV Show or sexual conquests. Then there are the quiets ones who sit and sort of hallucinate about the impending battle. They envision their death in horrible permutations. They see their limbs ripped off and lying on the ground with white bone protruding from the carrion. Grotesque visions of their entrails bursting from their abdomen and blood spurting from severed arteries play out in their mind. Even the shrieks of their own pain vividly echo in their minds. Katherine, luckily, had not been fully exposed to the horrors of war to be plagued with these demons.
The first part of the battle Senator Laforge witnessed was the bombardment of An Nasiriyah. The attack was intense. Thousands of rounds, like specters swarming to their prey, streaked northward toward the city of four hundred thousand, their incessant wavering whine reminded all of their ominous mission. Kat could hear the constant whine of the projectiles zooming high overhead and their distant thud as they slammed into their targets.
As she drove by a battery of artillery, she watched the howitzers spastically jerk and belch out tongues of flame as they spat out their lethal packages. The stillness of the afternoon air and the intensity of the firing produced a thick gray fog that shrouded the howitzers. Wispy tentacles of smoke gave the illusion of some ethereal veil embracing the men manning the guns as they faded in and out like dull gray apparitions.
As they approached the city, its stench bespoke its years of neglect under Saddam’s regime. Fecal odors rose up from the oozing puddles of sewage that flooded the city’s main intersections. Rows of one and two story mud huts and cinder block houses dotted a landscape filled with miles of dirt roads. Dowdy led them through the bowels of the city. However, he didn’t take any chances. The possibility of plain-clothed Fedayeen insurgents attacking as they passed through the city was a dilemma he wanted to prevent. At strategic points in the city, Dowdy had Marines dismount to watch out for surprise attacks. Scattered shots rang out from over the cement rooftops, and the Marines quickly returned fire and put down any resistance. It disheartened Senator Laforge and the Marines to pass through the city and see bodies of civilians and fellow Marines strewn about in charred heaps along the dusty road. For safe measure, the Marines fired rocket-assisted projectiles, or RAP rounds, into the heart of the town.
The Fedayeen, Saddam’s loyalists, used tactics that defied our military rules of engagement. Iraqi militiamen would wave white flags of surrender, then as U.S. forces approached, suddenly open fire. Other Iraqi guerillas dressed as civilians would hide behind women and children as they fired knowing that U. S. Marines would not dare fire back into crowds of civilians.
The massive convoy of amphibious assault vehicles, medvacs, army tractors, trailers and Humvees came to a grinding halt. There was confusion about unconfirmed firefights ahead. A wounded Marine was in bandages, still awaiting a medvac that was supposed to come and take him away. As questions arose, Iraqi citizens came out from behind their small shops, houses, and narrow, dingy alleys to view the monolith that was the convoy of RCT-1, standing in the middle of the road like an elephant in a nomad’s tent. Some of the men laughed, pointed and gawked. A Marine stood atop an Amtrac (amphibious assault vehicle) and pointed his M-16 at a group of men to warn them from getting too close. Finally, word broke that the medvac had arrived, and after it whisked the wounded Marine away, the convoy resumed its trek.
The images of the battle in An Nasiriyah were still vivid in Kat’s mind when they finally arrived at their next resting point. She had seen Amtracs ripped apart from large explosions with Marines inside, and bloodied uniforms littering the road. She recalled a lieutenant from Lima company dismount his vehicle and placed a white cloth over the body of a fallen soldier. Katherine wondered if that soldier was married and how devastated his wife would be. How soon would she hear the grim news of his death from a military official expressing his regrets? Katherine considered the possible scenario for just a moment and shook her head to try to rid herself of the morbid picture. She knew she would forever remember the price of war, and revere the men and woman who were willing to pay that price.
A few miles out of An Nasiriyah the convoy was greeted by smiling farmers and children lining the road waving. A man stooped with his spine bent into a permanent calcified arch shook his cane at the convoy and striking young women hiding behind swaying trees waved demurely at the marines. The last hours had been a trip into madness. It started with running a gauntlet through a city of 400,000 as an invisible enemy fired RPGs and bullets into the convoy hoping to kill Americans. But now just a few miles outside the city, it was as if they were part of the rose bowl parade. In the new calm of this trek she felt safe and weariness overtook her. Her eyes glazed over, flickered a few times and her mind shut down.
Katherine’s head bobbed about as she dozed in the backseat of the Humvee. Suddenly, she awoke as the vehicle violently bounced about. The noise of the convoy echoed in her ears as she squinted into the glare of the late morning sun. Through her obscured vision a surreal image emerged. Outside, the road was strewn with mangled remains of Iraqi fighters. Some were indistinguishable as humans; just reddish lumps of carrion oozing onto the asphalt. Many corpses had been mashed by 70-ton tanks that had found the road impassable without running over them. On either side of the highway, the landscape was blanketed with bodies sprawled in every direction. Between some of the bodies were shimmering puddles of a thick bloody stew congealing in the sun. Swirling around the corpses were black swarms of flies enjoying their bounty of carrion.
She strained to hear, above the rumble of the convoy, the expected crack of enemy fire, but heard only the occasional chirps of birds. The battleground maintained an eerie reverent silence for the fallen Iraqi soldiers.
Katherine looked out into the madness and felt fear and a burning sensation deep in her stomach. Bakr observed her confusion and pulled out his bottle of arrack and offered it to her. Katherine omitted a simple “Jesus yes” and grasped the bottle, quickly taking a drink of the liquor. The mind and soul lack the capacity to process the emotions to deal with horror of this magnitude. Demonic visions like these warp and muffle sensibilities like the distorted rattling of a speaker as it tries to output sound beyond its abil
ity. The nightmarish spectacle reminded Katherine of the scene from “Hotel Rwanda” where Paul Rusesabagina finds himself driving over the hacked to death bodies of his fellow Tutsi on a foggy dark night as he tried to return to his hotel.
Katherine handed the bottle of arrack back to Bakr and thanked him.
“Evil rises up from the dead.” He said. “What did you say?” Katherine asked.
Bakr repeated himself, “Evil rises up from the dead. The families and friends of those five hundred soldiers will seek revenge and more will die. It is the way things are here in Iraq.”
“It is the way we all are.” Katherine replied.
“Maybe, but here we forget and forgive very slowly.”
Lush trees lined the road outside and the nightmarish scene disappeared as if someone had flipped a channel from a horror movie to an exotic travel show. But the blood-streaked tires on the vehicles were vivid reminders of the carnage they had just driven through.
“I am afraid that America is about to find that freedom in Iraq is like opening the gates to a lion’s cage. We are a country of caged people and without the fear of Saddam and the Baath party, Iraq will go insane.”
“I would think Iraq has leaders that will take over once Saddam is gone.”
Bakr’s voice was quiet and sad, “Saddam kept the criminals off the street, and he outlawed radical religious groups. Now Iran and Syria will operate freely inside our country.”
