The Killer Elite (Part I)

The true story of bullets, bombs and a Marine platoon at

war in Iraq

By Evan Wright (Rolling Stone Magazine).

The invaders drive north through the Iraqi desert in a

Humvee, eating candy, dipping tobacco and singing songs.
Oil fires burn on the horizon, set during skirmishes between
American forces and pockets of die-hard Iraqi soldiers. The
four Marines crammed into this vehicle -- among the very
first American troops who crossed the border into Iraq --
are wired on a combination of caffeine, sleep deprivation,
excitement and tedium. While watching for enemy fire and
simultaneously belting out Avril Lavigne?s ?I?m With You,?
the twenty-two-year-old driver, Cpl. Joshua Ray Person,
and the vehicle team leader, twenty-eight-year-old Sgt.
Brad Colbert -- both Afghan War veterans -- have already
reached a profound conclusion about this campaign: that
the battlefield that is Iraq is filled with ?fucking retards."
There?s the retard commander in their battalion who took a
wrong turn near the border, delaying the invasion by at
least an hour. There?s another officer, a classic retard, who
has already begun chasing through the desert to pick up
souvenirs thrown down by fleeing Iraqi soldiers: helmets,
Republican Guard caps, rifles. There are the hopeless
retards in the battalion-support sections who screwed up
the radios and didn?t bring enough batteries to operate the
Marines? thermal-imaging devices. But in their eyes, one
retard reigns supreme: Saddam Hussein -- ?We already
kicked his ass once," says Person, spitting a thick stream of
tobacco juice out his window. ?Then we let him go, and he
spends the next twelve years pissing us off even more. We
don?t want to be in this shit-hole country. We don?t want
to invade it. What a fucking retard."

The war began twenty-four hours ago as a series of

explosions that rumbled across the Kuwaiti desert
beginning at about six in the morning on March 20th.
Marines sleeping in holes dug into the sand twenty miles
south of the border with Iraq sat up and gazed into the
empty expanse, their faces blank as they listened to the
distant rumblings. There were 374 men camped out in the
remote desert staging area, all members of the First
Reconnaissance Battalion, which would lead the way during
considerable portions of the invasion of Iraq, often
operating behind enemy lines. These Marines had been
eagerly anticipating this day since leaving their base at
Camp Pendleton, California, more than six weeks before.
Spirits couldn?t have been higher. Later that first day,
when a pair of Cobra helicopter gunships thumped
overhead, flying north, presumably on their way to battle,
Marines pumped their fists in the air and screamed, ?Yeah!
Get some!"

?Get some!? is the unofficial Marine Corps cheer. It?s

shouted when a brother Marine is struggling to beat his
personal best in a fitness run. It punctuates stories told at
night about getting laid in whorehouses in Thailand and
Australia. It?s the cry of exhilaration after firing a burst
from a .50-caliber machine gun. Get some! expresses in
two simple words the excitement, fear, feelings of power
and the erotic-tinged thrill that come from confronting the
extreme physical and emotional challenges posed by death,
which is, of course, what war is all about. Nearly every
Marine I?ve met is hoping this war with Iraq will be his
chance to get some.

Marines call exaggerated displays of enthusiasm -- from

shouting ?Get some!? to waving American flags to covering
their bodies with Marine Corps tattoos -- ?moto." You won?t
ever catch Sgt. Brad Colbert, one of the most respected
Marines in First Recon and the team leader I would spend
the war with, engaging in any moto displays. They call
Colbert the Iceman. Wiry and fair-haired, he makes
sarcastic pronouncements in a nasal whine that sounds a
lot like David Spade. Though he considers himself a ?Marine
Corps killer,? he?s also a nerd who listens to Barry Manilow,
Air Supply and practically all the music of the 1980s except
rap. He is passionate about gadgets -- he collects vintage
video-game consoles and wears a massive wristwatch that
can only properly be ?configured" by plugging it into his PC.
He is the last guy you would picture at the tip of the spear
of the invasion of Iraq.

The vast majority of the troops will get to Baghdad by

swinging west onto a modern superhighway built by
Hussein as a monument to himself and driving, largely
unopposed, until they reach the outskirts of the Iraqi
capital. Colbert's team in First Recon will reach Baghdad by
fighting its way through some of the crummiest, most
treacherous parts of Iraq. Their job will be to screen the
advance of a Marine battle force, the 7,000-strong
Regimental Combat Team One (RCT 1), through a 115-
mile- long agricultural-and-urban corridor that runs
between the cities of An Nasiriyah and Al Kut filled with
thousands of well-armed fedayeen guerrilla fighters.
Through much of this advance, First Recon, mounted in a
combination of seventy lightly armored and open-top
Humvees and trucks, will race ahead of RCT 1, uncovering
enemy positions and ambush points by literally driving right
into them. After this phase of the operation is over, the unit
will move west and continue its role as ambush hunters
during the assault on Baghdad.

Reconnaissance Marines are considered among the best

trained and toughest in the Corps. Maj. Gen. James Mattis,
commander of the Marine ground forces in Iraq, calls those
in First Recon "cocky, arrogant bastards." They go through
much of the same training as do Navy SEALS and Army
Special Forces. They are physical prodigies who can run
twelve miles loaded with 150-pound packs, then jump in
the ocean and swim several more miles, still wearing their
boots, fatigues and carrying their weapons and packs. They
are trained to parachute, scuba dive, snowshoe, mountain
climb and rappel from helicopters. Many of them are
graduates of Survival Evasion Resistance Escape School, a
secretive training facility where Recon Marines, fighter
pilots, Navy SEALs and other military personnel in high-risk
jobs are put through a simulated prisoner-of-war camp with
student inmates locked in cages, beaten (within prescribed
limits) and subjected to psychological torture overseen by
military psychiatrists -- all with the intent of training them
to resist enemy captivity.

Paradoxically, despite all the combat courses Recon Marines

are put through (it takes a couple of years for them to cycle
through every required school), almost none are trained to
drive Humvees and fight in them as a unit. Traditionally,
their job is to sneak behind enemy lines in small teams,
observe from afar and avoid contact with the enemy. What
they are doing in Iraq -- seeking out ambushes and fighting
through them -- is something they only started training for
around Christmas, a month before being deployed to
Kuwait. Cpl. Person, the team's primary driver, doesn't
even have a military operator's license for a Humvee and
has only practiced driving in a convoy at night a handful of
times.

Gen. Mattis, who had other armored-reconnaissance units

available to him -- ones trained and equipped to fight
through enemy ambushes in specialized, armored vehicles -
- says he choose First Recon for one of the most dangerous
roles of the campaign because "what I look for in the
people I want on the battlefield are not specific job titles
but courage and initiative." By the time the war is declared
over, Mattis will praise First Recon for having been "critical
to the success of the entire campaign." The Recon Marines
will face death nearly every day for a month, and they will
kill a lot of people, a few of whose deaths Sgt. Colbert and
his fellow Marines will no doubt think about and perhaps
even regret for the rest of their lives.
Colbert's first impression of Iraq is that it looks like "fucking
Tijuana." It's a few hours after his team's dawn crossing
into Iraq. We are driving through a desert trash heap,
periodically dotted with mud huts, small flocks of sheep and
clusters of starved-looking, stick-figure cattle grazing on
scrub brush. Once in a while you see wrecked vehicles:
burnt-out car frames, perhaps left over from the first Gulf
War, a wheel-less Toyota truck resting on its axles.
Occasionally there are people, barefoot Iraqi men in robes.
Some stand by the road, staring. A few wave. "Hey, it's ten
in the morning!" says Person, yelling in the direction of one
of the Iraqis we pass. "Don't you think you ought to change
out of your pajamas?"

Person has a squarish head and blue eyes so wide apart his
Marine buddies call him Hammerhead or Goldfish. He's from
Nevada, Missouri, a small town where "NASCAR is sort of
like a state religion." He speaks with an accent that's not
quite Southern, just rural, and he was proudly raised
working-poor by his mother. "We lived in a trailer for a few
years on my grandpa's farm, and I'd get one pair of shoes
a year from Wal-Mart." Person was a pudgy kid in high
school who didn't play sports, was on the debate team and
played any musical instrument -- from guitar to saxophone
to piano -- he could get his hands on.

Becoming a Marine was a 180-degree turn for him. "I'd

planned to go to Vanderbilt on a scholarship and study
philosophy," he says. "But I had an epiphany one day. I
wanted to do my life for a while, rather than think it." It
often seems like the driving force behind this formerly
pudgy, nonathletic kid's decision to enter the Corps and to
join one of its most elite, macho units was so he could
mock it, and everything around him. A few days before
moving out of its desert camp in Kuwait to begin the
invasion, his unit was handed letters sent by schoolchildren
back home. Person opened one from a girl who wrote that
she was praying for peace. "Hey, little tyke," Person
shouted. "What does this say on my shirt? 'U.S. Marine!' I
wasn't born on some hippie-faggot commune. I'm a death-
dealing killer. In my free time I do push-ups until my
knuckles bleed. Then I sharpen my knife."

As the convoy charges north into the desert, Person sings A

Flock of Seagulls' "I Ran (So Far Away)." He says, "When I
get out" -- he's leaving the Marines in November -- "I'm
going to get a Flock of Seagulls haircut, then I'm going to
become a rock star."

"Shut up, Person," Colbert says, peering intently at the

dust-blown expanse, his M-4 rifle pointed out the window.
Colbert and Person get along like an old married couple.
Being a rank lower than Colbert, Person can never directly
express anger to him, but on occasions when Colbert is too
harsh and Person's feelings are hurt, the driving of the
Humvee suddenly becomes erratic. There are sudden turns,
and the brakes are hit for no reason. It will happen even in
combat situations, with Colbert suddenly in the role of
wooing his driver back with retractions and apologies. But
generally, they seem to really like and respect each other.
Colbert praises Person, whose job specialty is to keep the
radios running -- a surprisingly complex and vital job for
the team -- calling him "one of the best radio operators in
Recon."

Obtaining Colbert's respect is no small feat. He maintains

high standards of personal and professional conduct and
expects the same from those around him. This year he was
selected as team leader of the year in First Recon. Last
year he was awarded a Navy Commendation for helping to
take out an enemy missile battery in Afghanistan, where he
led one of the first teams of Marines on the ground.
Everything about him is neat, orderly and crisp. He grew up
in an ultramodern house designed by his father, an
architect. There was shag carpet in a conversation pit. One
of his fondest memories, he tells me, was that before
parties, his parents would let him prepare the carpet with a
special rake. Colbert is a walking encyclopedia of radio
frequencies and encryption protocols and can tell you the
exact details of just about any weapon in the U.S. or Iraqi
arsenal. He once nearly purchased a surplus British tank,
even arranged a loan through his credit union, but backed
out only when he realized just parking it might run afoul of
zoning laws in his home state, the "communist republic of
California."

But there is another side to his personality. His back is a

garish wash of heavy-metal tattoos. He pays nearly $5,000
a year in auto-motorcycle insurance due to outrageous
speeding tickets; he routinely drives his Yamaha R1 racing
bike at 130 miles per hour. He admits to a deep-rooted but
controlled rebellious streak that was responsible for his
parents sending him to military academy when he was in
high school. His life, he says, is driven by a simple
philosophy: "You don't want to ever show fear or back
down, because you don't want to be embarrassed in front
of the pack."

With Colbert located in the front passenger seat, providing

security off the right side of the vehicle, left-side security is
provided by Cpl. Harold Trombley, a nineteen-year-old who
mans the SAW machine gun in the rear passenger seat.
Trombley is a thin, dark-haired and slightly pale kid from
Farwell, Michigan. He speaks in a soft yet deeply resonant
voice that doesn't quite fit his boyish face. One of his eyes
is bright red from an infection caused by the continual dust
storms. He has spent the past couple of days trying to hide
it so he doesn't get pulled from the team.

Technically, he is a "paper Recon Marine," because he has

not yet completed Basic Reconnaissance course. But it's not
just his youth and inexperience that keep Trombley on the
outside, it's also his relative immaturity. He caresses his
weapon and says things like, "I hope I get to use her soon."
Other Marines make fun of him for using such B-movie war
dialogue. They're also suspicious of his tall tales. He claims,
for example, that his father was a CIA operative, that most
of the men in the Trombley family died mysterious, violent
deaths -- the details of which are vague and always shifting
with each telling. He looks forward to combat as "one of
those fantasy things you always hoped would really
happen." In December, a month before his deployment,
Trombley got married. (His bride's father, he says, couldn't
attend the wedding, because he died in a "gunfire incident"
a while before.) He spends his idle moments writing down
lists of possible names for the sons he hopes to have when
he gets home. "It's up to me to carry on the Trombley
name," he says.

Despite some of the other Marines' reservations about

Trombley, Colbert feels he has the potential to be a good
Marine. Colbert is always instructing him - teaching him
how to use different communications equipment, how best
to keep his gun clean. Trombley is an attentive pupil,
almost a teacher's pet at times, and goes out of his way to
quietly perform little favors for the entire team, like refilling
everyone's canteens each day.

The other team member in the vehicle is Cpl. Gabriel

Garza, a twenty-one-year-old from Sebastian, Texas. He
stands half out of the vehicle, his body extending from the
waist up through a turret hatch. He mans the Mark-19
automatic grenade gun, the vehicle's most powerful
weapon, mounted on top of the Humvee. His job is perhaps
the team's most dangerous and demanding. Sometimes on
his feet for as long as twenty hours at a time, he has to
constantly scan the horizon for threats. Garza doesn't look
it, but the other Marines credit him with being one of the
strongest men in the battalion, and physical strength rates
high among them. He modestly explains his reputation for
uncanny strength by joking, "Yeah, I'm strong. I've got
retard strength."

Colbert's team is part of a twenty-three-man platoon in

Bravo Company. Along with First Recon's other two line
companies -- Alpha and Charlie -- as well as its support
units, the battalion's job is to hunt the desert for Iraqi
armor, while other Marines seize oil fields to the east.
During the first forty-eight hours of the invasion, Colbert's
team finds no tanks and encounters hundreds of
surrendering Iraqi soldiers -- whom Colbert does his best to
avoid, so as not to be saddled with the burden of searching,
feeding and detaining them, which his unit is ill-equipped to
do. Fleeing soldiers, some of them still carrying weapons,
as well as groups of civilian families stream past Colbert's
vehicle parked by a canal on his team's second night in
Iraq. Colbert delivers instructions to Garza, who is keeping
watch on the Mark-19: "Make sure you don't shoot the
civilians. We are an invading army. We must be
magnanimous."

"Magna-nous?" Garza asks. "What the fuck does that

mean?"

"Lofty and kinglike," Colbert answers.

Garza considers this information. "Sure," he says. "I'm a

nice guy." Colbert and Person mostly pass the time
monitoring the sins committed by a Recon officer they
nickname Captain America. Colbert and other Marines in
the unit accuse Captain America of leading the men on
wild-goose chases, disguised as legitimate missions.
Captain America is a likable enough guy. If he corners you,
he'll talk your ear off about all the wild times he had in
college, working as a bodyguard for rock bands such as U2,
Depeche Mode and Duran Duran. His men feel he uses
these stories as a pathetic attempt to impress them, and
besides, half of them have never heard of Duran Duran.

Before First Recon's campaign is over, Captain America will

lose control of his unit and be investigated for leading his
men into committing war crimes against enemy prisoners of
war. A battalion inquiry will clear him, but here in the field,
some of his men fantasize about his death. "All it takes is
one dumb guy in charge to ruin everything," says one.
"Every time he steps out of the vehicle, I pray he gets
shot."

Aside from Captain America's antics, there's an inescapable

sense among Colbert's team that this is going to be a dull
war. All that changes when they reach Nasiriyah on their
third day in Iraq.

On March 23rd, Colbert's team, in a convoy with the entire

First Recon Battalion, cuts off from the backcountry desert
trails and heads northwest to Nasiriyah, a city of about
300,000 on the Euphrates River. By late afternoon, the
battalion becomes mired in a massive traffic jam of Marine
vehicles about thirty kilometers south of the city. The
Marines are given no word about what's happening ahead,
though they get some clue when, before sundown, they
begin to notice a steady flow of casualty-evacuation
helicopters flying back and forth from Nasiriyah. Eventually,
traffic grinds to a halt. The Marines turn off their engines
and wait. During the past four days, no one on the team
has slept for more than two hours a night, nor has anyone
had a chance to remove his boots.

Everyone wears bulky chemical-warfare protection suits

and carries gas masks. When they do sleep, in holes dug at
each stop, they are required to keep their boots on and
wear their protective suits. They live on MREs (meals ready
to eat), which come in plastic bags about half the size of a
phone book. Inside there are about half a dozen foil
packets containing a meat or vegetarian entree, such as
meatloaf or pasta. More than half the calories in an MRE
come from candy and junk food such as cheese pretzels
and toaster pastries. Many Marines supplement this diet
with massive amounts of freeze-dried coffee -- they often
just eat the crystals straight from the packet -- chewing
tobacco and over-the-counter stimulants including ephedra.

Colbert constantly harps on his men to drink water and to

take naps whenever there is a chance, even questioning
them on whether their pee is yellow or clear. When he
comes back from taking a shit, Trombley turns the tables
on him.

"Have a good dump, Sergeant?" he asks.

"Excellent," Colbert answers. "Shit my brains out. Not too

hard, not too runny."

"That sucks when it's runny and you have to wipe fifty
times," Trombley says conversationally.
"I'm not talking about that." Colbert assumes his stern
teacher's voice. "If it's too hard or too soft, something's not
right. You might have a problem."

"It should be a little acid," Person says, offering his own

medical observation. "And burn a little when it comes out."

"Maybe on your little bitch asshole from all the cock that's
been stuffed up it," Colbert snaps.

Hearing this exchange, another Marine in the unit says,

"Man, the Marines are so homoerotic. That's all we talk
about."

Another big topic is music. Colbert attempts to ban any

references to country music in his vehicle. He claims that
the mere mention of country, which he deems "the Special
Olympics of music," makes him physically ill. The Marines
mock the fact that many of the tanks and Humvees stopped
along the road are emblazoned with American flags or moto
slogans such as "Angry American" or "Get Some." Person
spots a Humvee with the 9/11 catchphrase "Let's Roll!"
stenciled on the side.

"I hate that cheesy patriotic bullshit," Person says. He

mentions Aaron Tippin's "Where the Stars and Stripes and
Eagles Fly." "Like how he sings those country white-trash
images. 'Where eagles fly.' Fuck! They fly in Canada, too.
Like they don't fly there? My mom tried to play me that
song when I came home from Afghanistan. I was like,
'Fuck, no, Mom. I'm a Marine. I don't need to fly a little flag
on my car to show I'm patriotic.' " "That song is straight
homosexual country music, Special Olympics-gay," Colbert
says.

Colbert's team spends the night by the highway. Late in the

night, we hear artillery booming up ahead in the direction
of Nasiriyah. The ground trembles as a column of massive
M1A1 tanks rolls past, a few feet from where the Marines
are resting. Out of the darkness, someone shouts, "Hey, if
you lay down with your cock on the ground, it feels good."
A couple of hours after sunrise on the 24th, they tune in to
the BBC on a shortwave radio that Colbert carries in the
Humvee and hear the first word of fighting up the road in
Nasiriyah. A while later, Colbert's platoon commander, Lt.
Nathan Fick, holds a briefing for the three other team
leaders in the twenty-three-man platoon. Fick, who's
twenty-five, has the pleasant good looks of a former altar
boy, which he is. The son of a successful Baltimore
attorney, he went through Officer Candidate School after
graduating from Dartmouth. This is his second deployment
in a war. He commanded a Marine infantry platoon in
Afghanistan. But like Colbert and the six other Marines in
the platoon who also served in Afghanistan, he saw very
little shooting.

Fick tells his men that the Marines have been taking heavy
casualties in Nasiriyah. Yesterday, the town was declared
secure. But then an Army supply unit traveling near the city
came under attack from an Iraqi guerrilla unit of Saddam
Hussein loyalists called fedayeen. These fighters, Fick says,
wear civilian clothes and set up positions in the city among
the general populace, firing mortars, rocket-propelled
grenades (RPGs) and machine guns from rooftops,
apartments and alleys. They killed or captured twelve
soldiers from the Army supply unit, including a woman.
Overnight, a Marine combat team from Task Force Tarawa
attempted to move into the city across the main bridge
over the Euphrates. Nine Marines lost their lives, and
seventy more were injured.

First Recon has been ordered to the bridge to support Task

Force Tarawa, which barely controls its southern approach.
Fick can't tell his men exactly what they're going to do
when they get to the bridge, as the plans are still being
drawn up at a higher level. What he does tell the men is
that their rules of engagement have changed. Until now,
they've let armed Iraqis pass, sometimes even handing
them food rations. Now, Fick says, "Anyone with a weapon
is declared hostile. If it's a woman walking away from you
with a weapon on her back, shoot her."
At 1:30 p.m., the 374 Marines of First Recon form up on
the road and start rolling north toward the city. Given the
news of heavy casualties during the past twenty-four hours,
it's a reasonable assessment that everyone in the vehicle
has a better than average chance of getting killed or
injured in Nasiriyah.

The air is heavy with a fine, powdery dust that hangs like
dense fog. Cobras clatter directly overhead, swooping low
with the grace of flying sledgehammers. They circle First
Recon's convoy, nosing down through the barren scrubland
on either side of the road, hunting for enemy shooters.
Before long, we are on our own. The helicopters are called
off because fuel is short. The bulk of the Marine convoy is
held back until the Iraqi forces ahead are put down. One of
the last Marines we see standing by the road pumps his fist
as Colbert's vehicle drives past and shouts, "Get some!"

We drive into a no man's land. A burning fuel depot spews

fire and smoke. Garbage is strewn on either side of the
road as far as the eye can see. The convoy slows to a
crawl, and the Humvee fills with a black cloud of flies.

"Now, this looks like Tijuana," says Person.

"And this time I get to do what I've always wanted to do in

T.J.," Colbert answers. "Burn it to the ground."

There is a series of thunderous, tooth-rattling explosions

directly to the vehicle's right. We are even with a Marine
heavy-artillery battery set up next to the road, firing into
Nasiriyah, a few kilometers ahead. There's a mangled
Humvee in the road. The windshield is riddled with bullet
holes. Nearby are the twisted hulks of U.S. military-
transport trucks, then a blown-up Marine armored vehicle.
Marine rucksacks are scattered on the road, clothes and
bedrolls spilling out.

We pass a succession of desiccated farmsteads -- crude,

square huts made of mud, with starving livestock in front.
The locals sit outside like spectators. A woman walks past
with a basket on her head, oblivious to the explosions. No
one has spoken for ten minutes, and Person cannot repress
the urge to make a goofy remark. He turns to Colbert,
smiling. "Hey, you think I have enough driving hours now
to get my Humvee license?"

We reach the bridge over the Euphrates. It is a long, broad

concrete structure. It spans nearly a kilometer and arches
up gracefully toward the middle. On the opposite bank, we
glimpse Nasiriyah. The front of the city is a jumble of
irregularly shaped two- and three-story structures. Through
the haze, the buildings appear as a series of dim, slanted
outlines, like a row of crooked tombstones.

Nasiriyah is the gateway to ancient Mesopotamia, the

Fertile Crescent lying between the Euphrates, just above
us, and the Tigris, a hundred kilometers north. This land
has been continuously inhabited for 5,000 years. It was
here that humankind first invented the wheel, the written
word and algebra. Scholars believe that Mesopotamia was
the site of the Garden of Eden. After three days in the
desert, the Marines are amazed to find themselves in this
pocket of tropical vegetation. There are lush groves of palm
trees all around, as well as fields where tall grasses are
growing. As Marine artillery rounds explode around us,
Colbert keeps repeating, "Look at these fucking trees."

While two First Recon companies are instructed to set up

positions on the banks of the Euphrates, Bravo Company
waits at the foot of the bridge, about 200 meters away
from the river's edge. No sooner are we settled than
machine-gun fire begins to rake the area. Incoming rounds
make a zinging sound, just like they do in Bugs Bunny
cartoons. They hit palm trees nearby, shredding the fronds,
sending puffs of smoke off the trunks. Marines from Task
Force Tarawa to our right and to our left open up with
machine guns. First Recon's Alpha and Charlie companies
begin blasting targets in the city with their heavy guns.

Enemy mortars start to explode on both sides of Colbert's

vehicle, about 150 meters distant. "Stand by for shit to get
stupid," Person says, sounding merely annoyed. He adds,
"You know that feeling before a debate when you gotta piss
and you've got that weird feeling in your stomach, then you
go in and kick ass?" He smiles. "I don't have that feeling
now."

Marine helicopters fly low over a palm grove across the

street, firing rockets and machine guns. It looks like we've
driven into a Vietnam War movie. As if on cue, Person
starts singing a Creedence Clearwater Revival song. This
war will need its own theme music, he tells me. "That fag
Justin Timberlake will make a soundtrack for it," he says,
adding with disgust, "I just read that all these pussy faggot
pop stars like Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears were
going to make an anti-war song. When I become a pop
star, I'm just going to make pro-war songs."

While Person talks, there's a massive explosion nearby. An

errant Marine artillery round hits a power line and
detonates overhead, sending shrapnel into a vehicle ahead
of ours. A group of six Marines is also hit. Two are killed
immediately; the four others are injured. Through the
smoke, we can hear them screaming for a medic. Everyone
takes cover in the dirt. I lie as flat on the ground as
possible. I look up and see a Marine cursing and wiggling,
trying to pull down his chemical-protection suit. The pants
don't have zippers in the front. You have to unhook
suspenders and wrestle them down, especially tough when
you're lying sideways. It's a Marine in Colbert's platoon,
one of his closest friends, Sgt. Antonio Espera, 30.

Espera grew up in Riverside, California, and was, by his

own account, truly a "bad motherfucker" -- participating in
all the violent pastimes available to a young Latino from a
broken home and raised partially in state facilities. With his
shaved head and deep-set eyes, he's one of the scariest-
looking Marines in the platoon, but Espera makes no show
of trying to laugh off his fear. He's wrestling his penis out of
his pants so he can take a leak while lying on his side. "I
don't want to fucking piss on myself," he grunts.
The Marines took a combat-stress class before the war. An
instructor told them that twenty-five percent of them can
expect to lose control of their bladders or bowels when they
take fire. Before the war started, many in First Recon tried
to get Depend diapers -- not just for embarrassing combat
accidents, but in case they have to wear their chemical-
warfare protection suits for twenty-four to forty-eight hours
after an actual attack. These never arrived, so they piss
and shit frantically whenever they can.

The guy on my other side is another Bravo team leader,

Sgt. Larry Sean Patrick, 28, of Lincolntown, North Carolina,
and he's looked up to about as much as Colbert is. I ask
him what the hell we're doing just waiting around while the
bombs fall. His response is sobering. He tells me the
platoon is about to be sent on a suicide mission. "Our job is
to kamikaze into the city and collect casualties," he says.

"How many casualties are there?" I ask.

"Casualties?" he says. "They're not there yet. We're the

reaction force for an attack that's coming across the bridge.
We go in during the fight to pick up the wounded."

I don't know why, but the idea of waiting around for

casualties that don't exist yet strikes me as more macabre
than the idea of actual casualties. Yet despite how much it
sucks here -- by this bridge, taking heavy fire -- it's kind of
exciting, too. I had almost looked down on the Marines'
shows of moto, the way they shouted "get some" and acted
all excited about being in a fight. But the fact is, there's a
definite sense of exhilaration every time there's an
explosion and you're still there afterward. There's another
kind of exhilaration, too. Everyone is side by side facing the
same big fear: death. Usually, death is pushed to the
fringes of things you do in the civilian world. Most people
face their end pretty much alone, with a few family
members if they are lucky. Here, the Marines face death
together, in their youth. If anyone dies, he will do so
surrounded by the very best friends he believes he will ever
have.
As mortars continue to explode around us, I watch Garza
pick through an MRE. He takes out a packet of Charms
candies and hurls it into the gunfire. Marines view Charms
as almost infernal talismans. A few days earlier, in the
Humvee, Garza saw me pull Charms out of my MRE pack.
His eyes lighted up and he offered me a highly prized bag
of cheese pretzels for my candies. He didn't explain why. I
thought he just really liked Charms until he threw the pack
he'd just traded me out the window. "We don't allow
Charms anywhere in our Humvee," Person said, in a rare
show of absolute seriousness. "That's right," Colbert said,
cinching it. "They're fucking bad luck."

A fresh pair of Marine gunships flies overhead, firing

rockets into a nearby grove of palm trees. Bravo Marines
leap up after one of the helicopters fires a TOW missile that
sends up a large orange fireball from the trees. "Get some!"
the Marines shout.

For nearly six hours, we are pinned down, waiting, we

think, to storm into Nasiriyah. But after sunset, plans are
changed, and First Recon is called back from the bridge to a
position four kilometers into the trash-strewn wastelands
south of the city. When the convoy stops in relative safety,
away from the bridge, Marines wander out of the vehicles in
high spirits. First Recon's Alpha Company killed at least ten
Iraqis across the river from our position. They come up to
Colbert's vehicle to regale his team with exploits of their
slaughter, bragging about one kill in particular, a fat
fedayeen in a bright-orange shirt. "We shredded him with
our .50-cals," one says.

It's not just bragging. When Marines talk about the violence
they wreak, there's an almost giddy shame, an uneasy
exultation in having committed society's ultimate taboo,
and doing it with state sanction.

"Well, good on you," Colbert says to his friend.

Person stands by the road pissing. "Man, I pulled my

trousers down, and it smells like hot dick. That sweaty hot-
cock smell. I kind of smell like I just had sex." Despite the
cold, Bravo's Sgt. Rudy Reyes, 31, from Kansas City,
Missouri, has stripped off his shirt and is washing his chest
with baby wipes, every muscle gleaming in the flickering
light of a nearby oil fire. Reyes doesn't quite fit the image
of the macho brute. He reads Oprah's magazine and waxes
his legs and chest. Other members of the unit call him
"fruity Rudy" because he is so beautiful. "It doesn't mean
you're gay if you think Rudy's hot. He's just so beautiful,"
Person tells me. "We all think he's hot."

The Recon Marines are told they will be pushing north

through Nasiriyah at dawn, along a route they've deemed
"sniper alley." At midnight, Espera and I share a last
cigarette. We climb under a Humvee for cover and lie on
our backs, passing it back and forth.

"I've been so up and down today," Espera says. "I guess

this is how a woman feels." He's extremely worried about
driving through Nasiriyah in a few hours and even admits to
having second thoughts about coming to Iraq at all. "I
asked a priest if it's OK to kill people in war," he tells me.
"He said it's OK as long as you don't enjoy it. Before we
crossed into Iraq, I fucking hated Arabs. I don't know why.
But as soon as we got here, it's just gone. I just feel sorry
for them. I miss my little girl. I don't want to kill anybody's
children."

Past midnight, Marine artillery booms into the city. Back in

the Humvee, Trombley once again talks about his hopes of
having a son with his new young bride when he returns
home.

"Never have kids, Corporal," Colbert lectures. "One kid will

cost you $300,000. You should never have gotten married.
It's always a mistake." Colbert often proclaims the futility of
marriage. "Women will always cost you money, but
marriage is the most expensive way to go. If you want to
pay for it, Trombley, go to Australia. For a hundred bucks,
you can order a whore over the phone. Half an hour later,
she arrives at your door, fresh and hot, like a pizza."
Despite his bitter proclamations about women, if you catch
Colbert during an unguarded moment, he'll admit that he
once loved one girl who jilted him, a junior-high-school
sweetheart whom he dated on and off for ten years and
was even engaged to until she left him to marry one of his
closest buddies. "And we're still all friends," he says,
sounding almost mad about it. "They're one of those
couples that likes to takes pictures of themselves doing all
the fun things they do and hang them up all over their
goddamn house. Sometimes I just go over there and look
at the pictures of my ex-fiancée doing all those fun things I
used to do with her. It's nice having friends."

Just after sunrise, First Recon's seventy-vehicle convoy rolls

over the bridge on the Euphrates and enters Nasiriyah. It's
one of those sprawling Third World mud-brick-and-cinder-
block cities that probably looks pretty badly rubbled even
on a good day. This morning, smoke curls from collapsed
structures. Most buildings facing the road are pockmarked
and cratered. Cobras fly overhead spitting machine-gun
fire. Dogs roam the ruins.

The convoy stops to pick up a Marine from another unit

who is wounded in the leg. A few vehicles come under
machine-gun and RPG fire. The Recon Marines return fire
and redecorate an apartment building with about a dozen
grenades fired from a Mark-19. In an hour, we clear the
outer limits of the city and start to head north. Dead bodies
are scattered along the edges of the road. Most are men,
enemy fighters, some with weapons still in their hands. The
Marines nickname one corpse Tomato Man, because from a
distance he looks like a smashed crate of tomatoes in the
road. There are shot-up cars and trucks with bodies
hanging over the edges. We pass a bus, smashed and
burned, with charred human remains sitting upright in
some windows. There's a man with no head in the road and
a dead little girl, too, about three or four, lying on her back.
She's wearing a dress and has no legs.

We drive on, pausing a few kilometers ahead for the

battalion to call in an airstrike on an Iraqi armored vehicle
up the road. Next to me, Trombley opens up an MRE and
furtively pulls out a pack of Charms. "Keep it a secret," he
says. He unwraps the candies and stuffs them into his
mouth.

At ten in the morning, first Recon is ordered off Highway 7,

the main road heading north out of Nasiriyah, and onto a
narrow dirt trail, to guard the main Marine fighting force's
flanks. There's a dead man lying in a ditch where we turn
off the highway. Two hundred meters past the corpse,
there's a farmhouse with a family out front, waving as we
drive by. At the next house, two old ladies in black jump up
and down, whooping and clapping. A bunch of bearded men
shout, "Good! Good! Good!" The Marines wave back. In the
span of a few minutes, they have gone from kill-anyone-
that-looks-dangerous mode to smiling and waving as if
they're on a float in the Rose Bowl parade.

"Stay frosty, gents," Colbert warns. "No matter what you

see, we're in backcountry now, and we're all alone."
The road has dwindled down to a single narrow lane. We
crawl along at a couple of miles per hour. There are
farmhouses every few hundred meters. The Marines stop
and toss bright-yellow humanitarian food packages at
clusters of civilians. As kids run out to grab them, Colbert
waves: "You're welcome. Vote Republican." He gazes at the
"ankle biters" running after the food rations and says, "I
really thank God I was born American. I mean, seriously,
it's something I lose sleep over." The demeanor of the
civilians we pass has suddenly changed. They've stopped
waving. Many avoid eye contact with us altogether. Over
the radio, we hear that RCT 1 is in contact with enemy
forces at a town a few kilometers to the north. As we
continue along the road, we begin to notice that villagers
on the other bank of the canal are fleeing in the opposite
direction. Two villagers approach a Humvee behind
Colbert's and warn the Marines through hand gestures that
something bad lies ahead. The convoy stops. We are at a
bend in the road, with a five-foot-high berm to the left.
Shots are fired directly ahead of us. "Incoming rounds,"
Person announces.
"Damn it," says Colbert. "I have to take a shit."

Instead, Colbert picks up a 203 round -- an RPG -- kisses

the nose of it and slides it into the lower chamber of his
gun. He opens the door and climbs up the embankment to
observe a small cluster of homes on the other side. He
signals for all the Marines to come out of the vehicle and
join him on the berm. Marines from another platoon fire
into the hamlet with rifles, machine guns and Mark-19s.
But Colbert does not clear his team to fire. He can't discern
any targets. About two kilometers up the road, where First
Recon's Alpha Company is stopped, suspected fedayeen
open up with machine guns and mortars. Alpha takes no
casualties. The battalion calls in an artillery strike on the
fedayeen positions.

The team gets back in the Humvee. Trombley sits in the

back seat eating spaghetti directly out of a foil MRE pack,
squeezing it into his mouth from a hole in the corner. "I
almost shot that man," he says excitedly, referring to a
farmer in the hamlet on the other side of the berm.

"Not yet," Colbert says. "Put your weapon on safety."

Nobody speaks for a solid ten minutes. A vicious sandstorm

is kicking up. Fifty- to sixty-mile-per-hour winds buffet the
side of the vehicle. Visibility drops, and the air fills with
yellow dust. The battalion is hemmed in on narrow back
roads with enemy shooters in the vicinity.

RCT 1 is now waiting outside a town about six kilometers

ahead. Its commander has reported taking fire from the
town, and First Recon plans to bypass it. Colbert explains
the situation to his men.

"Why can't we just go through the town?" Trombley asks.

"I think we'd get smoked," Colbert says.

Fifteen minutes later, we start moving north. Everyone in

Colbert's vehicle believes we are taking a route that
bypasses the hostile town, Al Gharraf. Then word comes
over the radio of a change in plan. We are driving straight
through.

Colbert's vehicle comes alongside the walls of the town,

which looks like a smaller version of Nasiriyah. The street
we are on, now paved, bears left. As Person makes the
turn, the wall of a house directly to my right and no more
than three meters from my window erupts with muzzle
flashes and the clatter of machine-gun fire. The vehicle
takes twenty-two bullets, five of them in my door. The light
armor that covers much of the Humvee (eighth-inch steel
plates riveted over the doors) stops most of them, but the
windows are open and there are gaps in the armor. A bullet
flies past Colbert's head and smacks into the frame behind
Person's. Another round comes partially through my door.

We have barely entered the city, and it's a two-kilometer

drive through it. Ahead of us, a Bravo Marine driving in an
open Humvee takes a bullet in his arm.

The shooting continues on both sides. Less than half an

hour before, Colbert had been talking about stress
reactions in combat. In addition to the embarrassing losses
of bodily control that twenty-five percent of all soldiers
experience, other symptoms include time dilation, i.e., time
slowing down or speeding up; vividness, a starkly
heightened awareness of detail; random thoughts, the mind
fixating on unimportant sequences; memory loss; and, of
course, your basic feelings of sheer terror. In my case,
hearing and sight become almost disconnected. I see more
muzzle flashes next to the vehicle but don't hear them. In
the seat beside me, Trombley fires 300 rounds from his
machine gun. Ordinarily, if someone was firing a machine
gun that close to you, it would be deafening. His gun seems
to whisper.

The look on Colbert's face is almost serene. He's hunched

over his weapon, leaning out the window, intently studying
the walls of the buildings, firing bursts from his M-4 and
grenades from the 203 tube underneath the main barrel. I
watch him pump in a fresh grenade, and I think, "I bet
Colbert's really happy to be finally shooting a 203 round in
combat." I remember him kissing the grenade earlier.
Random thoughts. I study Person's face for signs of panic,
fear or death. My fear is he'll get shot or freak out, and
we'll get stuck on this street. But Person seems fine. He's
slouched over the wheel, looking through the windshield,
an almost blank expression on his face. The only thing
different about him is he's not babbling his opinions on
Justin Timberlake or some other pussy faggot retard who
bothers him.

Trombley pauses from shooting out his window and turns

around with a triumphant grin. "I got one, Sergeant!" he
shouts.

Colbert ignores him. Trombley eagerly goes back to

shooting at people out his window. A gray object zooms
toward the windshield and smacks into the roof. The
Humvee fills with a metal-on-metal scraping sound, which I
do hear. Earlier that day Colbert had traded out Garza for a
Mark-19 gunner from a different unit. The guy's name is
Cpl. Walt Hasser, 23, from Taylorstown, Virginia. Hasser's
legs twist sideways. A steel cable has fallen or been
dropped over the vehicle. Another one falls on it and
scrapes across the roof.

Colbert calls out, "Walt, are you OK?" There's silence.

Person turns around, taking his foot off the gas pedal.

The vehicle slows and wanders slightly to the left. "Walt?"

Person calls.

"I'm OK!" he says, sounding almost cheerful. Person has

lost his focus on moving the vehicle forward. We slow to a
crawl. Person later says that he was worried one of the
cables dropped on the vehicle might have been caught on
Hasser. He didn't want to accelerate and somehow leave
him hanging from a light pole by his neck in downtown
Gharraf.

"Drive, Person!" Colbert shouts.

Person picks up the pace, and there is silence outside. We
are still in the town, but no one seems to be shooting at us.

"Holy shit! Did you see that? We got fucking lit up!" Colbert
is beside himself, laughing and shaking his head. "Holy
shit!"

Trombley turns to Colbert, again seeking recognition. "I got

one, Sergeant. His knee exploded, then I cut him in half!"

"You cut him in half?" Colbert asks. "That's great,

Trombley!"

"Before we start congratulating ourselves," Person says,

"we're not out of this yet."

We pass a mangled, burned car on the right, then Person

makes a left into more gunfire. Set back from the road are
several squat cinder-block buildings, like an industrial
district. I see what looks like white puffs of smoke streaking
out from them: more enemy fire. Person floors the
Humvee. Colbert and Trombley start shooting again.

"I got another one!" Trombley shouts.

There's a white haze in the distance: the end of the city.

We fly out onto a sandy field that looks almost like a beach.
There's so much sand blowing in the air - winds are still at
about sixty miles per hour -- it's tough to see anything.
There's gunfire all around. The Humvee drives about twenty
meters into the sand, then sinks into it. Person floors the
engine, and the wheels spin. The Humvee has sunk up to
the door frames in tar. It's a sobka field. Sobka is a
geological phenomenon peculiar to the Middle East. It looks
like desert on top, with a hard crust of sand an inch or so
thick, which a man could possibly walk on, but break
through the crust and beneath it's the La Brea tar pits,
quicksand made of tar.

Colbert jumps out and runs to the other Recon vehicles,

lined up now, shooting into the city. He runs down the lines
of guns, shouting, "Cease fire! Assess the situation!"
Back at Colbert's Humvee, one of his superiors pounds on
the roof and shouts, "Abandon the Humvee!" He adds,
"Thermite the radios!" He is referring to a kind of intense-
heat grenade used to destroy sensitive military equipment
before abandoning it.

Colbert jumps up behind him. "Fuck, no! I'm not thermiting

anything. We're driving this out of here!"

He dives under the wheel wells with bolt cutters, slicing

away the steel cables, a gift of the defenders of Gharraf,
wrapped around the axle. A five-ton support truck backs
up, its driver taking fire, and Marines attach towing cables
to our axle. Within half an hour, Colbert's vehicle is freed
and limping to Recon's camp, a few kilometers distant, for
the night.

The Bravo Marines spend half an hour recounting every

moment of the ambush. Aside from the driver in the other
platoon who was shot in the arm, no one was hit. They
laugh uproariously about all the buildings they blew up.
Privately, Colbert confesses to me that he had absolutely
no feelings going through the city. He almost seems
disturbed by this. "It was just like training," he says. "I just
loaded and fired my weapon from muscle memory. I wasn't
even aware what my hands were doing."

That night we are rewarded with the worst sandstorm we

have experienced in Iraq. Under a pitch-black sky, sand
and pebbles kicked up by sixty-mile-per-hour winds pelt
sleeping bags like hail. Then it rains. Lightning flashes
intermingle with Marine artillery rounds sailing into the city.
Just before turning in, I smell a sickly-sweet odor. During
chemical-weapons training before the war, we were taught
that some nerve agents emit unusual, fragrant odors. I put
on my gas mask and sit in the dark Humvee for twenty
minutes before Person tells me what I'm smelling is a
cheap Swisher Sweet cigar that Espera is smoking
underneath his Humvee.

The next morning at dawn, Lt. Fick tells his Marines, "The
good news is, we will be rolling with a lot of ass today. RCT
1 will be in front of us for most of the day. The bad news is,
we're going through four more towns like the one we hit
yesterday."

There are wild dogs everywhere along the highway. "We

ought to shoot some of these dogs," Trombley says.

"We don't shoot dogs," Colbert says.

"I'm afraid of dogs," Trombley mumbles.

I ask him if he was ever attacked by a dog when he was

little.

"No," he answers. "My dad was once. The dog bit him, and
my dad jammed his hand down his throat and ripped up his
stomach. I did have a dog lunge at me once on the
sidewalk. I just threw it on its side, knocked the wind out of
him."

"Where did we find this guy?" Person asks.

We drive on.

"I like cats," Trombley offers. "I had a cat that lived to be
sixteen. One time he ripped a dog's eye out with his claw."

We pass dead bodies in the road again, men with weapons

by their sides, then more than a dozen trucks and cars
burned and smoking by the road. Many have a burned
corpse or two of Iraqi soldiers who died after crawling five
or ten meters away from the vehicle before they expired,
hands still grasping forward on the pavement. Just north of
here, at another stop, Marines in Fick's vehicle machine-
gun four men in a field who appear to be stalking us. It's no
big deal. Since the shooting started in Nasiriyah forty-eight
hours ago, firing weapons and seeing dead people has
become almost routine.

We stop next to a green field with a small house set back

from the road. Marines from a different unit suspect that
gunshots came from the house. A Bravo Marine sniper
observes the house for forty-five minutes. He sees women
and children inside, nobody with guns. For some reason, a
handful of Marines from the other unit opens fire on the
house. Soon, Marines down the line join in with heavy
weapons.

One of Recon's own officers, whom the Marines have

nicknamed Encino Man because of his apelike appearance,
steps out of his command vehicle. He is so eager to get in
the fight, it seems, he forgets to unplug his radio headset,
which jerks his head back as the cord, still attached to the
dash unit, tightens. Colbert, who believes the house
contains only noncombatants, starts screaming, "Jesus
Christ! There's fucking civilians in that house! Cease fire!"

Encino Man pops off a 203 grenade that falls wildly short of
the house. Colbert, like other Marines in Bravo, is furious.
Not only do they believe this Recon officer is firing on
civilians, but the guy also doesn't even know how to range
his 203.

Colbert sits in the Humvee, trying to rationalize the events

outside that have spiraled beyond his control: "Everyone's
just tense. Some Marine took a shot, and everyone has just
followed suit."

Before this event can be fully resolved -- some Marines

insist gunshots did come from the house -- First Recon is
sent several kilometers up the road to the edge of another
town, Ar Rifa. Colbert's team stops thirty meters from the
town's outer walls. The winds have died down, but dust is
so thick in the air that it looks like twilight at noon. An
electrical substation is on fire next to Colbert's vehicle,
adding its own acrid smoke. Shots come from the town,
and Colbert's team fires back.

But a different crisis is brewing a few vehicles down. Encino

Man, who an hour ago attempted to fire on the house
Colbert believed contained civilians, commits what his men
believe is a more dangerous blunder. Operating under the
belief that a team of fedayeen is nearby, Encino Man
attempts to call in an artillery strike almost directly on top
of Bravo's position. A few enlisted Marines in Bravo confront
the officer. One calls Encino Man a "dumb motherfucker" to
his face.

Fick attempts to intervene on the side of the enlisted

Marines, and the officer threatens him with disciplinary
action. The artillery strike never occurs. But the incident
aggravates growing tensions between First Recon's officers
and its enlisted men, who are beginning to fear that some
of their leaders are dangerously incompetent.

After night falls outside of Rifa, another bad day in Iraq

ends with a new twist: a friendly-fire incident. A U.S.
military convoy moving up the road in complete darkness
mistakenly opens fire on First Recon's vehicles. Inside his
Humvee, Sgt. Colbert sees the "friendly" red tracer rounds
coming from the approaching convoy and orders everyone
down. One round slices through the rear of the Humvee,
behind the seat where Trombley and I are sitting.

Later, we find out from Fick that we were shot up by Navy

Reservist surgeons on their way to set up a mobile shock-
trauma unit on the road ahead. "Those were fucking
doctors who do nose and tit jobs," Fick tells the men.

A half-hour after the friendly-fire incident, First Recon is

ordered to immediately drive forty kilometers through back
roads to the Qal'at Sukkar airfield, deep behind enemy
lines. "Well, I guess we won't be sleeping tonight," Colbert
says.

The drive takes about three hours. On the way, the men
are informed that they will be setting up an observation
post on the field to prepare for a parachute assault that
British forces are going to execute at dawn. But plans
change again at sunrise. At 6:20, after the Bravo Marines
have slept for about ninety minutes, Colbert is awakened
and told his men have ten minutes to race onto the airfield,
six kilometers away, and assault it. At 6:28, Colbert's team
is in the Humvee driving with thirty other Recon vehicles
down a road they've never even studied on a map. They're
told over the radio they will face enemy tanks.
"Everything and everyone on the airfield is hostile," Colbert
says, passing on a direct order from his commander.

Next to me in the rear seat, Trombley says, "I see men

running."

"Are they armed?" Colbert asks.

"There's something," Trombley says.

I look out Trombley's window and see a bunch of camels.

"Everyone's declared hostile," Colbert says. "Light them

up."

Trombley fires a burst or two from his SAW. "Shooting

motherfuckers like it's cool," he says, amused with himself.

The Humvees race onto the airfield and discover it's

abandoned, nothing but crater-pocked airstrips.
Nevertheless, they've beaten the British to it. The landing is
called off.

"Gentlemen, we just seized an airfield," Colbert says. "That

was pretty ninja."

An hour later, the Marines have set up a camp off the edge
of the airfield. They are told they will stay here for a day or
longer. This morning, the sun shines and there's no dust in
the air. For the first time in a week, many of the Marines
take their boots and socks off. They unfurl camo nets for
shade and lounge beside their Humvees. A couple of Recon
Marines walk over to Trombley and tease him about
shooting camels.

"I think I got one of those Iraqis, too. I saw him go down."

"Yeah, but you killed a camel, too, and wounded another

one."

The Marines seem to have touched a nerve.

"I didn't mean to," Trombley says defensively. "They're
innocent."

A couple of hours later, two Bedouin women arrive at the

edge of Bravo's perimeter. Bedouins are nomadic
tribespeople who roam the desert, living in tents, herding
sheep and camels. One of the women is dressed in a purple
robe and appears to be in her thirties. She is pulling a
heavy object wrapped in a blanket and is accompanied by
an old woman with blue tribal tattoos on her wrinkled face.
They stop on top of a berm about twenty meters away and
start waving. Robert Timothy Bryan, a Navy Corpsman who
functions as the platoon's medic, walks over to them.

Later, he'll say that he's not sure why he even walked up to
the women. In recent days, Marines have grown weary of
Iraqi civilians, who have begun accosting them, begging for
food, cigarettes, sometimes even chanting the one English
word they all seem to be learning: "Money, money,
money." When he reaches them, he notices that the
younger woman seems highly distraught, gesturing and
moving her mouth, but no words come out. Her breasts are
exposed, her robes having fallen open while she was
dragging her bundle across the fields. As Bryan approaches,
she frantically unrolls its contents, revealing what appears
to be a youth's bloody corpse. The boy looks about
fourteen. Then he opens his eyes. Bryan kneels down.
There are four small holes, two on each side of his
stomach.

Bryan begins treating him immediately. In the field, several

men appear walking a seventeen-year-old with blood
streaming down his right leg. The two Bedouin boys were
shot with rounds from a Marine SAW. Trombley is the only
Marine who fired his SAW that morning. There were no
other Marines in the area for twenty kilometers.

Bryan assesses the boys' condition, cursing loudly as other

Marines approach. "These fucking jackasses," he says.
"Trigger-happy motherfuckers."
The woman in purple, the mother, kneels, putting her
hands in the air, still talking with no sounds coming out.
The old lady, who turns out to be the grandmother, stands
up, cigarette dangling from her lips, and covers her
daughter's breasts as more Marines walk up. None of the
Bedouins -- there are about eight sitting around watching
Bryan examine the boy -- seems the least bit angry. When
I walk over, the grandmother offers me a cigarette.

The younger boy's name is Naif. His brother, still hobbling

around on his bloody shot leg, is Latif. The boys had gone
out to the family's herd of camels, which had been
frightened by the Marine Humvees and started running. The
boys were chasing after them when they were shot. One
was carrying a stick.

Each of the four holes in Naif's body is an entry wound,

meaning the four bullets zoomed around inside his slender
stomach and chest cavity, ripping apart his organs.

Bryan continues cursing his fellow Marines. "We're Recon

Marines," he says. "We're paid to observe. We don't shoot
unarmed children." Bravo Marines are now milling around,
trying to help. They hold up ponchos over the two wounded
boys, shielding them from the sun. But there's not much
else to do. Bryan determines that the younger boy has
hours to live unless he can be medevacked. But Lt. Col.
Steve Ferrando, the battalion commander, has sent a
Marine bearing news that the request has been denied. Just
then, an unmanned spy plane flies low overhead. "We can
afford to fly fucking Predators," Bryan says, "but we can't
take care of this kid?"

Just then, Colbert comes up the hill. He sees the mother,

the kid, the brother with the bloody leg, the family, the
Marines holding up the ponchos.

"This is what Trombley did," Bryan says. A Marine at the

front of the convoy says he passed the same shepherds and
it was obvious to him that they were not hostile. "Twenty
Marines drove past those kids and didn't shoot," he says.
"Don't say that," Colbert says. "Don't put this on Trombley.
I'm responsible for this. It was my orders."

Colbert kneels down over the kid and starts crying. He

doesn't lose control or anything dramatic. His eyes just
water, and he says, "What can I do here?"

"Apparently fucking nothing," Bryan says.

Within a couple of minutes, the Recon Marines have come

up with a plan. They load the boy onto a stretcher to carry
him into the camp. With Colbert and Bryan carrying the
front of the stretcher, they lead the entire entourage of
Marines and Bedouin tribespeople underneath the
camouflage nets of the battalion headquarters. "What the
hell is going on here?" Sgt. Maj. John Sixta, First Recon's
highest-ranking enlisted man, walks up, veins pulsing on
his head as he confronts what seems to be a mutinous
breakdown of military order.

"We brought him here to die," Bryan says defiantly.

"Get him the fuck out of here," the sergeant major bellows.

Ten minutes after they carry the Bedouin boy off, Ferrando
has a change of heart. He orders his men to bring the
Bedouins to the shock-trauma unit, twenty kilometers
south. Some Marines believe Ferrando reversed himself to
heal the growing rift between the officers and enlisted men
in the battalion. As Bryan climbs onto the back of an open
truck with the wounded boys and most of their clan, a
Marine walks up to him and says, "Hey, Doc. Get some."

Colbert walks off, privately inconsolable. "I'm going to have

to bring this home with me and live with it," he says. "Pilots
don't see what they do when they drop bombs. We do." He
goes back to the Humvee, sits Trombley down and tells him
he is not responsible for what happened: "You were
following my orders." Already there are rumors spreading
of a possible judicial inquiry into the shooting. "Is this going
to be OK, I mean with the investigation?" Trombley asks
Colbert.
"You'll be fine, Trombley."

"No. I mean for you, Sergeant." Trombley grins. "I don't

care what happens, really. I'm out in a couple of years. I
mean for you. This is your career."

"I'll be fine." Colbert stares at him. "No worries."

(After an inquiry, Trombley and Bravo Company are cleared

of any wrongdoing.)

Something's been bothering me about Trombley for a day

or two, and I can't help thinking about it now. I was never
quite sure if I should believe his claim that he cut up those
two Iraqis in Gharraf. But he hit those two shepherds, one
of whom was extremely small, at more than 200 meters,
from a Humvee bouncing down a rough road at forty miles
per hour. However horrible the results, his work was
textbook machine-gun shooting, and the fact is, from now
on, every time I ride with Colbert's team, I feel a lot better
when Trombley is by my side with the SAW.

(RS 925, June 13, 2003)

The Killer Elite (part II)

From Hell to Baghdad

By Evan Wright (Rolling Stone Magazine)

It's not a good day for god in Iraq. Lt. Cmdr. Christopher
Bodley, chaplain for the First Reconnaissance Battalion, is
trying to minister to fighting Marines, now resting for the
first time since the invasion of Iraq began more than a
week ago. They have set up a defensive camp by the
airfield they seized near Qal'at Sukkar, in central Iraq. After
their initiation into urban-guerrilla warfare in An Nasiriyah
to the south, followed by three days of continual fighting
against an enemy they seldom actually saw, the 374
Marines of the elite battalion have been given forty-eight
hours of downtime to recuperate. Their camp is spread
across two kilometers of what looks like a fantasy Martian
landscape of dried-out, reddish mud flats and empty
canals. Each four - to six - man team lives in holes dug
beneath camouflage nets placed around its Humvee.
Throughout the day, Bodley walks around the camp and
attempts to minister to his flock of heavily armed young
men. Although the Marines in First Recon have already
killed dozens, accidentally wounded civilians and taken one
casualty of their own (a driver shot in the arm), the
chaplain encounters few troubled by war itself. "A lot of the
young men I talk to can compartmentalize the terrible
things they've seen," he says. "But many of them feel bad
because they haven't had a chance to fire their weapons.
They worry that they haven't done their jobs as Marines."

Bodley is new to First Recon, and he confesses that he finds

these Marines tough to counsel. "The zeal these young men
have for killing surprises me," he admits. "When I first
heard them talk so easily about taking human lives, using
such profane language, it instilled in me a sense of disbelief
and rage. People here think Jesus is a doormat."

Over by Sgt. Brad Colbert's Humvee, the Marines lounge

under the camouflage netting, enjoying a few idle hours on
a hot afternoon. Cpl. Joshua Person, the team's driver,
lounges with his shirt off, trying to roast the "chacne" --
chest zits -- off his skin in the harsh Iraqi sun. Gunnery
Sgt. Michael Wynn, the senior enlisted man in Bravo
Company's Second Platoon, stops by to pass the latest
gossip. "Word is," he says in a mild Texas accent, "we
might go to the Iranian border to interdict smugglers."

"Fuck, no!" Person says. "I want to go to Baghdad and kill

people."

A couple of men pass the time naming illustrious former

Marines -- Oliver North, Captain Kangaroo and John Wayne
Bobbit. "After they sewed his dick back on, didn't he make
porn movies where he fucked a midget?" someone asks.

Wynn, who's thirty-five and is almost a father figure to

many in the platoon, who are ten to fifteen years younger,
beams with pride. "Yeah, he probably did. A Marine will
fuck anything."

It took these Marines nearly a week to reach this airfield,

and they are less than halfway to their destination: the city
of Al Kut, sixty miles to the north and headquarters of a
Republican Guard division. The Marines are also fighting
their way into uncharted moral terrain, hunting an enemy
that has remained hidden -- dressed in civilian clothes,
shooting at them from within populated areas. At times, the
slaughter of unarmed civilians will almost seem to exceed
that of actual combatants.
It's an adage among officers that "a bitching Marine is a
happy Marine." By this standard, no officer makes the
Marines in First Recon happier than their commander, Lt.
Col. Steve Ferrando. They blame Ferrando for staffing the
officer corps with men they feel are incompetent, such as
the platoon commander the Marines have derisively
nicknamed Captain America -- who will shortly come under
suspicion for mistreating enemy prisoners of war. They
blame Ferrando for leading them into the ambush two days
ago at Al Gharraf, where one Marine was wounded and
many others narrowly, even miraculously, escaped death.
They blame Ferrando for sending them on the last-minute
assault on the Qal'at Sukkar airfield, during which Cpl.
Harold Trombley, on Colbert's team, mistakenly wounded
two young shepherds. They hate Ferrando for his relentless
obsession with what he calls "the grooming standard" -- his
insistence that even in combat his troops maintain
regulation haircuts, proper shaves and meticulously neat
uniforms.

In their most paranoid moments, a few Marines believe

their commander is trying to get them killed. "In some
morbid realm," says Sgt. Christopher Wasik, "it may be a
possibility that the commander wants some of us to die, so
when he sits around with other leaders, they don't snicker
at him and ask what kind of shit he got into. Yeah, that's
the suspicion around here." (Asked about these sentiments,
Ferrando says, "It's unfortunate some of them feel that
way. When you sign up for war, you get shot at.")

It often seems as if bitching about Ferrando serves as a

release valve for all the frustrations the Marines don't
complain about. None of them has slept more than three
hours straight since leaving Kuwait last week. Even worse,
their diet has been reduced to about one and a half meals a
day (following an incident in which one of their supply
trucks carrying rations was blown up by Iraqis). Nor do
they complain about their water, also in short supply, which
smells and tastes, in the opinion of Colbert, like "dirty ass."
Many Marines who took their boots off for the first time in a
week when they set up the camp discovered the skin on
their feet was rotting off in pale white strips like tapeworms
as a result of fungal infections. They don't complain about
the flies that infest the camp; their constant coughing,
runny noses and weeping, swollen eyes caused by continual
dust storms; or the cases of vomiting and diarrhea that
afflict about a quarter of them. Instead of bitching about
these miseries, the Marines laugh.

A few of them will admit to deeper misgivings, not to

mention outright fear. "This is all the tough-guy shit I
need," says Sgt. Antonio Espera. "I don't like nothing about
combat. I don't like the shooting. I don't like the action."

Espera, like a lot of others, joined the Marines to prove

something. He grew up in a turbulent home in a sketchy
area outside Los Angeles and scraped by for four years in
his early twenties as a car-repo man in South Central.
While working a job he hated, he watched his friends and
one close family member go to prison for violent crimes,
which were fairly routine in his world. Though he is one-
quarter Anglo on his mother's side, Espera is predominantly
Latino and American Indian, and he says he grew up hating
the white man.

At one point a few years ago, he claims, he deliberately

avoided earning his community-college degree, though he
was just a couple of credits short of receiving it, because,
he says, "I didn't want some piece of paper from the white
master saying I was qualified to function in his world." But
after four years of repossessing cars in L.A.'s poorest
neighborhoods, Espera had an epiphany: "I was getting
shot at, making chump change, so I could protect the
assets of a bunch of rich white bankers." So he enlisted in
the Marines. He might be serving the white man, he
reasoned, but he'd be doing so with "purity and honor."

Espera was among the first Marines on the ground in

Afghanistan and spent forty-five days living in a hole there,
but in that war he was hardly shot at. Now, he says, he
regrets having re-enlisted after Afghanistan. "What was I
thinking, dawg?" he asks. "Every morning I think I'm going
to die. For what? So some colonel can make general by
throwing us into another firefight?"

The next night, a spy plane reports a potential Iraqi

armored column moving toward First Recon's perimeter,
and Marines near Colbert's position claim to have counted
as many as 140 Iraqi vehicles, headlights inexplicably on.
Colbert, who also observes the lights, scoffs at the report.
"Those are the lights of a village," he tells his men.

His opinion is not shared by others. At high levels within

the division, the alarm is sounded that First Recon is about
to be hammered by a sizable Iraqi armored force. U.S.
military doctrine is pretty straightforward in situations like
this: If there even appears to be an imminent threat, bomb
the shit out of it. One of First Recon's officers, Capt.
Stephen Kintzley, puts it this way: "We get a few random
shots, and we fire back with such overwhelming force that
we stomp them. I call it disciplining the Hajjis," he says,
using a nickname for Iraqis common among U.S. military
personnel.

In the next few hours, wave after wave of attack jets and
bombers drop an estimated 8,000 pounds of ordnance
around the camp. The next day, Recon sends out a foot
patrol to do bomb-damage assessment. They see lots of
craters outside a village, but no sign of any armor. Sgt.
Damon Fawcett of First Recon's Alpha Company, which led
one of the patrols, says, "We could have gone farther.
Bombs fell in areas we didn't get to see, but I believe they
didn't want us to investigate too much and find out possibly
that we'd hit homes or civilians. Or just nothing at all."

On March 30th, first recon pulls back from the airfield and
joins up with the main Marine battle force in central Iraq,
Regimental Combat Team One, camped out by Highway 7,
the main road between An Nasiriyah and Al Kut. Comprising
approximately 7,000 Marines, RCT 1 is about twenty times
larger than First Recon and, with nearly 200 tanks and
armored vehicles, much better armed. Evidently feeling
secure with so much armor in the vicinity, battalion
command allows the men to go to sleep without digging the
usual holes that protect them from shrapnel in case of an
attack.

At about midnight, I awaken as a series of explosions turns

the field across the battalion's row of Humvees into what
looks like a sea of molten orange and blue liquid. In my
effort to roll underneath the Humvee for protection, I slam
into Person, sleeping next to me. "Don't worry about that,"
he says over the roar. "That's our artillery. It's just danger-
close." Then he goes back to sleep.

The next morning, the men are informed that they are
lucky to be alive -- they were nearly bombarded by Iraqi
artillery, not "danger-close" American rounds. Lt. Nathan
Fick, commander of Bravo Second Platoon, delivers the
news with a grimly amused smile: "That Iraqi rocket
system kills everything in an entire grid square" -- a square
kilometer. "They knew our coordinates and came within a
few hundred meters of us. We got lucky, again."

Fick also tells the men that the battalion is resuming its
drive north. "We're following the Al Gharraf canal, doing a
movement to contact." He offers another grimly amused
smile. This means the battalion will be rolling in the open
toward expected ambush points, trying to flush out the
enemy. First Recon will take the west side of the canal and
move ahead of RCT 1, which will be on the opposite bank.
First Recon's objective is Al Hayy, a town of about 40,000.
It's a Ba'ath Party headquarters and home to a large
Republican Guard unit.

At about eight o'clock, I set out with Colbert's team, back in

the Humvee with Trombley on the SAW machine gun to my
left, Cpl. Walt Hasser on the Mark-19 grenade launcher in
the turret, Person at the wheel and Colbert in command in
the front passenger seat. The battalion is moving in a
single-file convoy on a winding route that passes through
small, walled villages, grassy fields, palm groves and dried
mud flats sliced with trenches -- excellent cover for enemy
shooters. Within twenty minutes of crossing the canal and
turning onto a narrow dirt trail, the Marines begin to take
sporadic fire from small arms, machine guns and mortars,
but no one is able to spot the enemy positions. Despite the
intermittent gunfire, shepherds, women and children flock
out of their houses, waving and smiling.

By midmorning, the Marines stop a truck racing across a

field. The truck carries about twenty Iraqi men who are
dressed in civilian clothes but are armed. They insist they
are farm laborers and have weapons because they are
afraid of bandits. But while being chased, several threw
bags out of the truck. When the Marines retrieve the bags,
they find Republican Guard military documents and
uniforms, still drenched in sweat. They take the Iraqis
prisoner, binding their wrists with plastic zip cuffs and
loading them into one of the battalion's transport trucks.

Still taking occasional small-arms and mortar fire yet

unable to find a single shooter, the Marines dismount and
clear hamlets, moving house to house. Colbert leads his
team through one walled cluster of about seven homes,
while Espera keeps the villagers under guard. The men are
forced to lie on their stomachs with their fingers interlocked
over their heads, as about twenty women and children are
herded toward the road. Mortar rounds begin to hit
extremely close by -- when they come within about fifty
meters, the explosions cause a temporary surge in the
surrounding air pressure, which makes the hair on your
body feel like it's standing on end, as if you've been zapped
with a mild electric jolt. An old woman in black begins
screaming and shaking her fists at the Marines guarding
her. "This brings me back to my repo days," Espera says.
"Women are always the fiercest. Doesn't matter if it's a
black bitch in South Central or a rich white bitch in Beverly
Hills. They always come after you screaming."

After about six hours of searching for an elusive enemy, the

men in Colbert's Humvee are worn down, their nerves
frayed. The chatter and profanity and inside jokes have
ceased. Even Person -- who started off the morning
repeating the chorus of Country Joe McDonald's anti-war
song: "One, two, three, what are we fighting for?" -- just
stares vacantly out the window. The silence is broken by an
unusual new sound, a series of high-pitched zings. Orange-
red tracers streak through the air and slam into a dirt berm
in front of and behind the Humvee.

"Person, get out of the vehicle," Colbert orders.

Everybody dives out of the Humvee and takes cover behind

a berm. Marines from the forty other vehicles follow suit.
"That's a goddamn ZPU!" Colbert says, referring to a type
of powerful multibarreled Russian anti-aircraft gun. No one
can figure out where it's located. These men, who usually
laugh off other forms of gunfire, now burrow facedown in
the nearest comforting patch of mother earth -- all of them
except Trombley, who jumps out of the vehicle with a pair
of binoculars and scampers up the berm like a gopher,
scanning the horizon. He's sitting up high, looking around
excitedly, eagerly taking in this terrifying new experience.

"That's cool," he says in a low voice as another salvo of

ZPU rounds zings past. "I think I see it, Sergeant."

Colbert and Person now rise over the berm, somewhat

more cautiously than Trombley. Following his initial
directions, they spot the enemy-gun position about a
kilometer away. Colbert orders Hasser onto the Mark-19
grenade launcher, and with the ZPU still firing, the team
methodically directs fire at it. Cobra attack helicopters join
in the effort and hit a nearby pickup with men inside, who
appear to burn up. The fire from the ZPU ceases.

I later ask Trombley why he showed no signs of fear,

seemed quite calm in fact, when he sat up on the berm and
located the position of the gun that seemed to be
terrorizing just about every other Marine in the battalion. "I
know this might sound weird," Trombley says, "but deep
down inside I want to know what it feels like to get shot.
Not that I want to get shot, but the reality is, I feel more
nervous watching a game show on TV at home than I do
here in all this."
He tears into his plastic meal-ration bag and grins. "All this
gunfighting is making me hungry," he says with a cheerful
smile.

"All this stupidity is making me want to kill myself," Person

counters grimly, one of his first displays of low spirits in
Iraq.

Despite the triumph of taking out the ZPU, the forty-vehicle

battalion is still taking mortar fire. Mortars, fired in three-
to six-round volleys about five minutes apart, each drawing
closer, follow the convoy's movements. The orderly
progression of the shelling suggests that an enemy
observer is on the ground following the battalion and
directing the mortars. Whoever is shooting the mortars is
probably four to eight kilometers away, aided by an
observer who is likely within a kilometer. The Marines push
out to the surrounding berms and look for anyone with a
radio hidden among the shepherds and farmers in the
surrounding fields.

The twenty prisoners of war that First Recon picked up

earlier in the day -- suspected Republican Guard soldiers --
are packed into the rear of a flatbed transport truck, sitting
on benches. Marines are tying the Iraqis' wrists with
parachute cord. Left in the truck during the attack from the
ZPU while their Marine captors dived behind the nearby
berms for cover, the prisoners had gnawed through their
plastic wrist cuffs like rats. The Iraqis jostle in their seats,
hands bound behind their backs. They are like a small
clown-only traveling circus. Some make exaggerated
grimaces indicating that their bindings are painfully tight.
Some mad-dog the Americans with spiteful stares. Others
make faces, trying to ingratiate themselves to the
Americans with humor. One grinning Iraqi, hoping to curry
favor, shouts, "Fuck Saddam!" repeatedly.

Sgt. Larry Sean Patrick, a team leader and sniper in

Colbert's platoon, has spotted an Iraqi several hundred
meters away, parked in a white pickup. He seems to be an
observer. The rules of evidence are somewhat looser in a
combat zone than they are back home - which means that
he earns himself a death sentence for the crime of
appearing to be holding binoculars and a radio. Patrick fires
one shot, watches for a few moments through his scope
and says, "The man went down."

This is Patrick's second sniper kill in Iraq. Another sniper in

First Recon, who calls his rifle Lila, short for Little Angel --
the pet name for his daughter -- can describe in vivid detail
the gory circumstances of each kill he's bagged. Patrick
doesn't say much about his kills. He doesn't seem to take
much pleasure in them. The sergeant says he'd eagerly
leave the war if somehow magically given the chance, but
adds, "Just the same, I want to be with these guys so I can
do what I can to help them live."

No more mortars are fired after Patrick's shot. Evidently, he

killed the right man. Fick says the battalion is now going to
execute the final stage of today's mission: to drive along
the western side of Al Hayy, then cut across a bridge into
the city, skirt its northern edge and seize the main highway
bridge out of town. The whole point is to seal off the
northern escape route from the city before RCT 1 assaults
at dawn. Given the past eight hours of harassing fire south
of the city, Fick is less than cheerful about the prospect of
driving into Al Hayy -- First Recon now has fewer than 300
Marines going into a city of 40,000. After briefing his men,
he says privately to me, "This is Black Hawk Down shit we
are doing."

As the convoy starts rolling, Cobra escorts pour rockets and

machine-gun fire into a palm grove directly across the
river, and Colbert says, "This country is dirty and nasty,
and the sooner we are out of here, the better."

Though almost no one ever talks religion, some Marines

silently repeat prayers. Cpl. Jason Lilley, the driver of the
Humvee just behind Colbert's, clenches the wheel. He's
staring ahead, unblinking, lips moving. He later tells me
that although he's not a big Christian or anything, he was
just saying, "Lord, see us through," over and over.
From an ambush standpoint, we drive through the worst
terrain imaginable. The road sinks down and snakes
between tree-lined hamlets, whose walls extend right up to
the edge of the Humvees. Some of Recon's transport trucks
take fire. One has two of its tires shot out, but it rides on
its rims. We cross the first bridge into a sort of industrial
area of low-slung cinder-block buildings at the edge of Al
Hayy. A Humvee in Charlie Company comes under heavy
machine-gun fire. Marines ahead of us pelt the building
where the hostile fire is coming from with about thirty
Mark-19 grenades, blowing off large chunks of its facade
and suppressing the enemy fire. As we roll by the
destruction, Person shouts, "Damn, sucka!"

Across from the building, a live Arab lies in the road. He's in
a dingy white robe, squeezed between piles of rubble. The
man is only about five feet from where our wheels pass, on
his back with both hands covering his eyes. After being
subjected to hostile fire all day, there's a kind of sick,
triumphant rush in seeing another human being, perhaps
an enemy fighter, now on his back, helplessly cowering. It's
empowering in a way that is also depressing. All the
Marines who drive past the man train their guns on him but
don't shoot. He's not a threat, childishly trying to protect
his face with his hands.

A few minutes later, First Recon reaches its objective: the

highway bridge that leads over a small canal and out of the
city. The bridge presents another strange juxtaposition
typical of Iraq. After moving all day through clusters of
mud-brick houses and surrounded by thatched-reed fences
evocative of biblical times, the Marines now stand on a
span that could be on a German autobahn. It's a long,
graceful concrete structure. Marines run out to the center
and set up concertina wire. Colbert's team, as well as
Espera's and the other two Humvees in the platoon, park at
the crest of the bridge and wait.

Fick walks up, grinning. Even loaded down with his vest,
flak jacket and bulky chemical-protection suit, as he is now,
he always has a sort of loping, bouncing, adolescent stride.
Today it's even more buoyant. "I feel like for the first time
we seized the initiative," he says, surveying the roadblock.
Everyone seems to be swaggering as they walk around the
bridge. After nearly two weeks of feeling hunted, the
Marines have done what they were supposed to do: They
assaulted through resistance and took an objective.This
small band, now about twenty kilometers from any friendly
American forces, controls the key exit from a town of
40,000.

But the one thing the Marines haven't trained for, or really
even thought through, is the operation of roadblocks. The
basic idea is simple enough: Put an obstacle like concertina
wire in the road and point guns at it. If a car approaches,
fire warning shots. If it keeps coming, shoot it. The
question is: Do the Iraqis understand what's going on?
When it gets dark, can Iraqi drivers actually see the
concertina wire? Even Marines have been known to drive
through concertina wire at night. The other problem is
warning shots. In the dark, a warning shot is simply a
series of loud bangs and orange flashes. It's not like this is
the international code for "Stop your vehicle and turn
around." As it turns out, many Iraqis react to warning shots
by speeding up. Maybe they just panic. Consequently, a lot
of Iraqis die at roadblocks.

The first killings come just after dark. Several cars

approach the bridge with their headlights on. Bravo's .50-
caliber gunners, at the top of the bridge, fire warning
bursts. The cars turn around. Then a tractor-trailer
appears, its diesel engine grumbling. The Marines fire
warning shots, but the truck keeps coming.

At this point, no one is completely sure it's a semi. It

sounds like one, but it could also be Iraqi armor or
fedayeen who have commandeered a civilian truck and
loaded it with weapons and soldiers. What the men do
know is that they are completely alone here in the dark.
First Recon is the northernmost unit in central Iraq, and
there is nothing between its position on this bridge and a
mechanized division of 20,000 Iraqis based twenty
kilometers north. Only later will it become clear that most
regular Iraqi forces won't fight; on the night of March 31st,
that fact is an unknown. Even worse, through the result of
a technical glitch, First Recon has lost communication with
its air cover. If the battalion is attacked, it will have to fight
on its own.

A few seconds after the truck fails to respond to the second

warning burst, its headlights dip onto Bravo's position,
blinding the Marines. The truck sounds like it must be doing
thirty or forty.

"Light it the fuck up!" someone shouts.

Under the rules of engagement, a vehicle that fails to stop

at a roadblock is declared hostile, and everyone in it may
justifiably be shot. Almost the entire platoon opens fire. But
for some reason, these Marines who have put down enemy
shooters with almost surgical precision are unable to take
out even the truck's headlights after several seconds of
heavy fire. Red and white tracers and muzzle flashes
stream toward the truck. Mark-19 grenades explode all
around it. The truck keeps coming, blaring its horn.

Just before reaching the concertina wire, the vehicle

jackknifes and screeches. The driver's head has been blown
clean off. Meanwhile, three men jump from the cab. Espera,
who is wearing night-vision goggles, sees them and fires
his M-4 from a crouching position, methodically pumping
three-round bursts into the chest of each. Almost as an
afterthought, the Marines shoot out the last headlight of the
truck, still shining at an off-kilter angle.

There's no time to examine the scene of the shooting. The

battalion pulls back a couple of kilometers to a more
defensible position. Triumphal feelings that soared a half-
hour ago have vanished. It's suddenly cold, a Humvee is
stuck in the mud, and a string of headlights has appeared a
kilometer or so to the west. Using night-vision equipment,
Marines observe what appears to be trucks with weapons
on them moving along an alternate route out of the city.
"They're fucking flanking us!" Fick says. One truck is seen
stopping across from First Recon's position and unloading
men and equipment, possibly guns. First Recon requests an
artillery strike to take out the vehicles.

Colbert's platoon falls back to defend the eastern edge of

First Recon's position, digging several sets of sleeping holes
in hard, claylike earth that is nevertheless water-logged.
Before nodding off for quick "combat naps," several Marines
from Bravo gather by their wet holes to eat their meager
food rations in the darkness. "I felt cold-blooded as a
motherfucker shooting those guys that popped out of the
truck," Espera says, glumly describing the details of each
killing. "Whatever last shred of humanity I had before I
came here, it's gone."

Warning shots continually erupt at the roadblock manned

by Recon's Charlie Company a kilometer to the north. We
hear one volley, then the sound of a car engine racing.
Marines shout orders to fire, and a massive burst of
weapons fire follows. The sound of the engine draws closer
in the darkness. Guns fire, then there's a protracted
screeching of tires. In the immediate silence, someone
says, "Well, that stopped him." For some reason, everyone
bursts into laughter.

The Marines on the roadblock watch as men run from the

car, waving their hands. They are unarmed. As Marines
shout at them, they drop obediently to the side of the road.

Two Marines cautiously approach the car. It is shot

up, its doors wide open, lights still on. Sgt. Charles
Graves sees a small girl of about three curled up in
the back seat. There's a small amount of blood on the
upholstery, but the girl's eyes are open. Graves
reaches in to pick her up -- thinking about what
medical supplies he might need to treat her, he later
says -- then the top of her head slides off and her
brains drop out. When Graves steps back, he nearly
falls over when his boot slips in the girl's brains. It
takes a full minute before Graves can actually talk.
The situation is one he can only describe in elemental
terms. "I could see her throat from the top of her
skull," he says.

No weapons are found in the car. A translator asks

the father, sitting by the side of the road, why he
didn't heed the warning shots and stop it. He simply
repeats, "I'm sorry," then meekly asks permission to
pick up his daughter's body. The last the Marines see
of him, he is walking down the road carrying her
corpse in his arms.

Meanwhile, rounds from the artillery strike ordered by

Bravo Company forty-five minutes earlier begin to land on
the highway to the west -- where vehicles had been
observed fleeing the city. The 155 mm rounds are fired
from Marine howitzers dug in perhaps sixteen to twenty-
five kilometers to the south. You can follow their orange
trails arcing across the sky. Seen from a distance, the fiery
explosions are beautiful and hypnotizing, just like any
decent Fourth of July display. The artillery gunners drop
164 rounds along the highway, but any carnage visited on
the vehicles, hamlets and farms along the route is invisible
in the darkness.

The destruction continues after sunrise. Slow-moving A-10

Thunderbolt jets circle the northern fringes of Al Hayy,
belching machine-gun fire. The airframe of the A-10 is
essentially built around a twenty-one-foot-long seven-
barrel machine gun -- one of the largest of its type. When it
fires, it makes a ripping sound like someone is tearing the
sky in half. The A-10s wrap up their performance by
dropping four phosphorus bombs on the city, chemical
incendiary devices that burst in the sky, sending long
tendrils of white, sparkling flames onto targets below.

Civilians line up by the side of the road when First Recon's

convoy assembles that morning. The battalion is heading
south, back to Al Hayy, then north on a different route to
the next town, Al Muwaffaqiyah. Most of the crowd are
boys, twelve to fifteen. The morning's show of American air
power has whipped them into a frenzy. They greet the
Marines like they are rock stars. "Hello, my friend!" some of
them shout. "I love you!" It doesn't seem to matter that
these young men have just witnessed portions of their city
being destroyed. Or maybe this is the very appeal of the
Marines. One of the promises made by the Bush
administration before the war started was that the Iraqi
populace would be pacified by a "shock and awe" air-
bombing campaign. The strange thing is, these people
appear to be entertained by it. "They think we're cool,"
says Person, "because we're so good at blowing shit up."

First Recon's convoy pauses on the road by the bridge.

Waving and jumping up and down, kids gathered by the
tractor-trailer shot up the night before pay no heed to the
corpses of its occupants scattered by their feet. Further on,
there's another shot-up car, with a male corpse next to it in
the dirt. More kids dance around the carnage, giving
thumbs-up to the Americans, shouting, "Bush! Bush! Bush!"

I stop by Espera's vehicle, an open-top Humvee. He gazes

out at the grinning, impoverished children with dirty feet
and says, "How these people live makes me want to puke."
Cpl. Gabriel Garza, standing at his vehicle's 50-cal, says,
"They live just like Mexicans in Mexico." Garza smiles at the
children and throws them some candy. His grandmother is
from Mexico, and by the way he is grinning, you get the
idea that living like Mexicans is not all bad.

Espera turns away in disgust. "That's why I fucking can't

stand Mexico. I hate Third World countries."

Despite Espera's harsh critique of the white man -- he

derides English as "the master's language" -- his worldview
reflects his self-avowed role as servant in the white man's
empire. It's a job he seems to relish with equal parts pride
and cynicism. "These people live like hell," he says. "The
U.S. should just go into all these countries here and in
Africa, and set up a U.S. government and infrastructure --
with McDonald's, Starbucks, MTV -- then just hand it over.
If we have to kill 100,000 to save 20 million, it's worth it."
He lights a cigar. "Hell, the U.S. did it at home for 200
years -- killed Indians, used slaves, exploited immigrant
labor to build a system that's good for everybody today.
What does the white man call it? Manifest Destiny."

Within a half-hour, First Recon's convoy is again creeping

north on an agricultural back road. Colbert's Humvee
passes a tree-shaded hamlet on the left as a series of
explosions issues from its direction. It sounds like mortars
being launched, perhaps from inside the village. Whereas
ten days ago being within a couple of hundred meters of an
enemy position would have sent the entire team into a high
state of alert, this morning nobody says a word. Colbert
wearily picks up his radio handset and passes on the
location of the suspected enemy position.

Once the initial excitement wears off, invading a country

becomes repetitive and stressful, like working on an old-
school industrial assembly line: The task seldom varies, but
if your attention wanders, you are liable to get injured or
killed. The team pauses in a field by a canal a few hundred
meters down from the village. The battalion's job this
morning is to observe a highway across from the waterway.
It's another route out of Al Hayy, and First Recon is to
shoot any armed Iraqis fleeing the city. RCT 1 is currently
rolling into the town.

Half of Colbert's team stretches out in the grass and dozes.

It's beautiful. There's a stand of palm trees nearby with
bright-blue and bright-green birds that fill the air with a
loud, musical chattering. Trombley counts off ducks and
turtles he observes in the canal with his binoculars. "We're
in safari land," Colbert says.

The spell is broken when a Recon unit 500 meters down the
line opens up on a truck leaving the city. In the distance, a
man jumps out holding an AK. He jogs through a field on
the other side of the canal. We watch lazily from the grass
as he's gunned down by other Marines.

The birds are singing again when the man across the canal
reappears, limping and weaving like a drunk. Nobody
shoots him. He's not holding a gun anymore. The rules of
engagement are scrupulously observed. Even so, they
cannot mask the sheer brutality of the situation.

A few vehicles down from Colbert's, another team in the

platoon monitors the area where mortars had seemed to be
fired from about an hour earlier. This team, led by Sgt.
Steven Lovell, a sniper, has been watching the village
through binoculars and sniper scopes. They have seen no
signs of enemy activity, just a group of civilians -- men,
women and children -- going about their business outside a
cluster of three huts. But it's possible that rounds were
fired from there -- the fedayeen often drive into a town,
launch a few mortars and leave.
In any case, the place is quiet when, at about eleven
o'clock, a lone 1,000-pound bomb dropped from an F-18
blows it to smithereens. The blast is so powerful that Fick
jumps over a berm to avoid flying debris and lands on his
superior officer. A perfectly shaped black mushroom cloud
rises up where the huts had been, and a singed dog runs
out of the smoke, making crazy circles. Lovell, who was
watching when the bomb hit, is livid: "I just saw seven
people vaporized right before my very eyes!" Down the line
of Humvees, the commanders who called in the strike
smoke cigars and laugh. Later, they tell me that mortar fire
was definitely coming from the hamlet.

By noon, First Recon is back on the move, heading toward

Muwaffaqiyah, a town of about 5,000. Several kilometers
south of the town, the convoy stops in an agricultural
village, where locals warn that an ambush is being set up
by the bridge into Muwaffaqiyah. It's another confusing
scene. Villagers greet the Marines enthusiastically -- fathers
hoist babies on their shoulders, teenage girls flout religious
code by running out with their heads uncovered, giggling
and waving. But only a short way up the road, their
neighbors have just been wiped out by a 1,000-pound
bomb.

First Recon sets up a camp four kilometers east of the

bridge. Before sundown, a light-armored reconnaissance
company from RCT 1 attempts to cross the bridge and
meets stiff resistance. It takes at least one casualty and
rolls back. Artillery strikes are called in on suspected enemy
positions.

At about eight o'clock that night, Fick holds a briefing for

his platoon's team leaders. "The bad news is, we won't get
much sleep tonight," he says. "The good news is, we get to
kill people." It's rare for Fick to sound so "moto" -- regaling
his men with enthusiastic talk of killing. He goes on to
present the battalion commander's ambitious last-minute
plan to go north of Muwaffaqiyah and set up ambushes on a
road believed to be heavily traveled by fedayeen. "The goal
is to terrorize the fedayeen," he says, looking around,
smiling expectantly.

His men are skeptical. Sgt. Patrick repeatedly questions

Fick about the enemy situation on the bridge. "It's been
pounded all day by artillery," Fick answers, waving off his
objections, sounding almost glib, like a salesman. "I think
the chances of a serious threat are low."

Fick walks a delicate line with his men. A good officer

should be eager to take calculated risks. Despite the men's
complaints against Col. Ferrando for ordering them into an
ambush at Al Gharraf, the fact is, only one Marine was
injured, and the enemy's plans to halt the Marines' advance
were thwarted. Fick privately admits that there have been
times when he's actually resisted sending his troops on
missions, because, as he says, "I care a lot about these
guys, and I don't like the idea of sending them into
something where somebody isn't going to come back."
While acting on these sentiments might make him a good
person, they perhaps make him a less-good officer. Tonight
he seems uncharacteristically on edge, as if he's fighting
against his tendencies to be overly protective. He
admonishes his team leaders, saying, "I'm not hearing the
aggressiveness I'd like to." His voice sounds hollow, like
he's not convinced himself.

The men, who ultimately have no choice in the matter,

reluctantly voice their support of Fick's orders. After he
goes off, Patrick says, "The people running this can fuck
things up all they want. But as long as we keep getting
lucky and making it through alive, they'll just keep
repeating the same mistakes."

Confidence is not bolstered when an Iraqi artillery unit --

thought to have been wiped out by this point -- sends
several rounds slamming into a nearby field. However
beautiful artillery might look when it's arcing across the sky
onto enemy positions, when it's aimed at you, it sounds like
somebody hurling freight trains at your head. The Marines
run for the nearest holes and take cover.

For tonight's mission, Colbert's team wins the honor of

driving the lead vehicle onto the bridge. We roll out at
about eleven, in total darkness. There's almost no moon,
which makes the operation of night-vision goggles less than
ideal, and the battalion has run out of the specialized
batteries that power the thermal-imaging devices, a key
tool for spotting enemy positions in the dark. Cobra pilots
flying overhead spot armed men hiding beneath trees to
the left of the foot of the bridge. But communication breaks
down, and this word is never passed to Colbert's team.

We see the Cobras fire rockets across the bridge a few

hundred meters in front of Colbert's vehicle. The explosions
light up the sky. But no one in the vehicle even knows what
the Cobras are shooting at. Colbert orders Person to keep
driving toward the bridge and the explosions.

Everyone's life depends on Person. He hunches forward

over the steering wheel, his face obscured by the night-
vision apparatus hanging over his helmet. The NVGs
resemble an optometrist's scope. Two lenses over each eye
attach to a single barrel that sticks out about five inches.
The goggles give their wearer a bright-gray-green view of
the night but offer a limited, tunnel-vision perspective and
no depth perception. It requires a great deal of
concentration to drive with them. "There's an obstacle on
the bridge," Person says in a dull monotone that
nevertheless manages to sound urgent.
There's a blown-up truck turned sideways at the entrance
to the bridge. We stop about twenty meters in front it. To
the left is a stand of tall eucalyptus trees about five meters
from the edge of the road. Behind us, there's a large
segment of drain pipe. Person drove around the pipe a
moment ago, believing it to be a piece of random debris,
but now it's becoming clear that the pipe and the ruined
truck in front were deliberately placed to channel the
vehicle into what is known in military terms as a "kill zone."
We are sitting in the middle of an ambush box.

Everyone in the Humvee -- except me -- has figured this

out. They remain extremely calm. "Turn the vehicle
around," Colbert says softly. The problem is the rest of the
convoy has continued pushing into the kill zone. All five
Humvees in the platoon are bunched together, with twenty
more pressing from behind. Person gets the Humvee
partially turned around; the eucalyptus trees are now on
our immediate right. But the pipe prevents the Humvee
from moving forward. We stop as Colbert radios to the rest
of the platoon, telling them to back the fuck up.

He simultaneously peers out his window through his night-

vision gun scope. "There are people in the trees," he says
and repeats the message to alert the rest of the platoon.
Then he leans into his rifle scope and opens fire.

There are between five and ten enemy fighters crouched

beneath the trees. There are several more across the
bridge, manning a machine gun, and still more on the other
side of the road. They have the Marines surrounded on
three sides. Why they did not start shooting first is a
mystery. Colbert believes they simply didn't understand the
capabilities of American night-vision optics.

But the Marines' advantage is precarious. As soon as

Colbert opens up, the enemy sprays the kill zone with rifle
and machine-gun fire. They also launch at least one RPG
that flies across the hood of our Humvee. Two Marines in
the platoon -- Patrick and Cpl. Evan Stafford -- are shot
almost immediately. Stafford is knocked down, hit in the
leg, and Patrick is shot in the foot. Both tie tourniquets
(which Recon Marines carry on their vests) onto their
wounds and resume shooting.

They cannot fire indiscriminately with their Humvees so

close together. Each carefully picks his targets. Robert
Bryan, team medic, in a Humvee behind Colbert's, takes
out two men with head shots. When the .50-caliber
machine gun opens up overhead, the concussive blasting is
so intense that Bryan's nose starts gushing blood. Espera
sees an enemy combatant, already shot in the chest and
trying to crawl away, and drops him with an M-4 burst into
his head. Sgt. Rudy Reyes, often teased for being the
platoon's pretty boy, narrowly escapes a bullet that
shatters his windshield and passes within an inch of his
beautiful head. Fick jumps out of his vehicle and runs into
the center of the melee in order to direct the Humvees, still
jammed up in the kill zone, to safety. With his 9 mm pistol
raised in one hand, Fick almost appears to be dancing on
the pavement as streams of enemy machine-gun fire skip
past his feet. He later says he felt like he was in a shootout
from The Matrix.

In our vehicle, Colbert seems to have entered a realm of

his own. He stares intently out the window, firing bursts
from his weapon and, for some inexplicable reason,
humming "Sundown," the depressing 1970s Gordon
Lightfoot anthem. Meanwhile, Person, frustrated by the
traffic jam, opens his door and, with shots crackling all
around, shouts, "Would you back the fuck up!" In the heat
of battle, his Missouri accent comes out extra hick. He
repeats himself and climbs back in, his movements seeming
almost lackadaisical.

It takes five to ten minutes for the platoon to extricate

itself from the kill zone, leaving most of the would-be
ambushers either dead or in flight. The next five hours are
spent pushing back to the bridge and assaulting it again
with tanks and more helicopters. On the other side, about
three square blocks of Muwaffaqiyah are completely leveled
before the bridge is declared secure, though in the process
of taking the bridge, the Marines blow a massive hole in it,
rendering the span nearly impassable.

At sunrise, the marines seem to be in a near hypnotic

state. After six hours of combat -- their second straight
night without sleep -- they are given a couple of hours' rest
before moving out. They park their Humvees in a dried mud
field a few kilometers back from the bridge. Several gather
around Colbert's vehicle, drinking water, tearing into their
food rations and cleaning and reloading the weapons they
will likely be using again later in the day.

Everyone has radically different ways of dealing with the

stress of combat. During lulls in the action, Colbert
becomes excessively cheerful. This morning he's pointing at
birds flying overhead, exclaiming, "Look! How pretty!" It's
not like he's maniacally energized from having escaped
death. His satisfaction seems deeper and quieter, as if he's
elated to have been involved in something highly
rewarding. It's as though he's just finished a difficult
crossword puzzle or won at chess.

When Espera comes by to share one of his stinky cigars, he

gestures to Colbert and says, "Look at that skinny-ass
dude. You'd never guess what a bad motherfucker he is."
When they met a few years ago, Espera says he felt sorry
for Colbert. "I thought he had no friends - he's such a
loner," he says. "But he just can't stand people, even me.
I'm only his friend to piss him off. But the dude is a
straight-up warrior."

Trombley seems interested in combat only during its

intense moments -- when the bullets are coming directly at
us. After that, he often snaps into deep sleeps. During the
team's second assault on the bridge, while rolling toward
the firefight, flanked by tanks and armored vehicles with
weapons thundering, Trombley was slumped over his
machine gun, snoring, and had to be jiggled awake.

I react to fear in a more traditional manner. After the most

recent ambush, my entire body was trembling so badly
when we rolled back from the bridge that my feet were
bouncing off the floor of the Humvee, and my teeth were
chattering. Bryan later tells me this was likely a physical
reaction to excessive adrenalin, which cuts the flow of blood
to the extremities, resulting in severe cold. Person affects
no discernible change. "When I am in these ambushes," he
asserts confidently, "I don't feel like I'm going to die."

Espera, who, after combat, always looks as though his eyes

have sunk deeper into their sockets and the skin on his
shaved skull has just tightened an extra notch, says,
"We've been brainwashed and trained for combat. We must
say 'Kill!' 3,000 times a day in boot camp. That's why it's
easy." Then he adds, "That dude I saw crawling last night, I
shot him in the grape. Saw the top of his head bust off.
That didn't feel good. It makes me sick." Bryan, with his
two confirmed kills in the ambush, says he feels nothing
about having taken human lives. "It's a funny paradox," he
says, bringing up his frantic effort a few days earlier to
save the life of a civilian wounded by a Marine. "I would
have done anything to save that kid. But I couldn't give a
fuck about those guys I just killed. It's like, you're
supposed to feel fucked after killing people. I don't."

Fick, who saw Patrick med-evacked off with his shot foot,
appears to be in a morbid state of self-reflection. He walks
among his Marines saying almost nothing. They've set up
again a few kilometers back from the bridge and gather in
small groups around their Humvees going over every detail
of the previous night's actions. Several of them slap Fick on
the back, laughing about the courage he displayed by
walking through the kill zone to direct the Humvees out at
the height of the ambush. Fick sloughs off their praise,
saying, "I merely had a lack of situational awareness." He
tells me, "We should never be in a position like this again.
That was bad tactics."

Captain America, the platoon commander who is almost

universally disrespected by the enlisted men, seems to deal
with the stress by rising to a state of jabbering
incoherence. Up by the bridge there are four enemy dead
scattered under the eucalyptus trees, along with piles of
munitions -- RPGs, AKs and hand grenades. Captain
America runs back and forth, picking up their weapons,
hurling them into the nearby canal and screaming at the
top of his lungs. No one knows what he's screaming about
or why, but as another officer who came upon this scene
later concluded, "Whatever he was doing, he was not being
in command."

The four killed are the first combatants the Marines in First
Recon have ever seen up close. The dead wear pleated
slacks, loafers and leather jackets. An officer leans down
and picks up the hand of one. Between his thumb and index
finger, there are words tattooed on his skin in English: i
love you. The officer reads it aloud for the benefit of the
other Marines nearby and says, "These guys look like
foreign university students in New York."

The biggest revelation is the discovery of Syrian passports

on the dead fighters. Not one of them is an Iraqi. Sgt. Eric
Kocher, 23, a team leader in Captain America's platoon, is
one of the first Marines to notice a fifth enemy fighter,
wounded but still alive, lifting his head up and watching the
Americans.

Kocher kneels over him and pats him down for weapons.
The man howls in pain. He's shot in the right arm and has a
two-inch chunk of his right leg missing. He carries a Syrian
passport that bears the name Ahmed Shahada. He's
twenty-six years old, and his place of address in Iraq is
listed as the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, by local standards
one of the better hotels, catering to foreign journalists and
European aid workers. He's carrying 500 Syrian pounds, a
packet of prescription painkillers in his shirt pocket and an
entry visa to Iraq dated March 23rd. He arrived barely more
than a week ago. Handwritten in the section of his visa that
asks the purpose of his visit to Iraq is one word: "Jihad."

When news spreads of the foreign identities of the enemy

combatants, the Marines are excited. "We just fought actual
terrorists," Bryan says. After nearly two weeks of never
knowing who was shooting at them, the Marines can finally
put a face to the enemy. Intelligence officers in the Marine
First Division later estimate that between fifty and seventy-
five percent of all enemy combatants in central Iraq were
foreigners -- primarily young Palestinian men bearing
Syrian or Egyptian passports. "Saddam offered these men
land, money and wives to come and fight for him," says an
intelligence officer.

As it turns out, the war for the future of this country is

largely being fought between two armies of interlopers.

Just before midnight on april 2nd, the battalion reaches the

outskirts of Al Kut. Located 110 miles north of Nasiriyah, Al
Kut is the largest city in north-central Iraq. More important,
it is headquarters of a Republican Guard division. But the
anticipated showdown in Al Kut never happens. Soon after
reaching the edge of the city, the battalion is ordered to
head to Baghdad. Seizing Al Kut itself was never an actual
goal.

This entire campaign has been a feint -- a false movement

designed to convince the Iraqi leadership that the main
U.S. invasion was coming through central Iraq. The
strategy has been a success. The Iraqis left a key division
and other forces in and around Al Kut in order to fight off a
Marine advance that never actually came. With so many
Iraqi forces tied down near there, Baghdad was left
relatively undefended for the combined Army and Marine
assault to come. Gen. James Mattis, commander of the
First Marine Division, a key architect of this diversion, later
boasts to me, "The Iraqis expected us to go all the way
through Al Kut -- that the 'dumb Marines' would fight their
way through the worst terrain to Baghdad." While the plan
worked brilliantly, Mattis adds, with characteristic modesty,
"I'm not a great general. I was just up against other
generals who don't know shit."

It takes two days to reach the outskirts of Baghdad. Hastily

erected oil pipelines zigzag along the highway to the city,
built by Saddam to flood adjacent trenches with oil that was
then set on fire. As a result, smoke hangs everywhere.
Saddam intended these flaming oil trenches to be some
sort of half-assed defense, but their only effect is to add to
the general state of pollution and despair. Dead cows
bloated to twice their normal size lie near some ditches.
Smoke curls up from bombed buildings. Artillery rumbles in
the distance. Human corpses are scattered in small clusters
every few kilometers. It's the usual 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."

First Recon sets up in a field of tall grass next to some

blown-up industrial buildings. Baghdad is too far away to
see but close enough to hear as U.S. bombs and artillery
pound it steadily around the clock. The bombardment
sounds like the steady rhythm of a car with a bass-booster
stereo parked outside your window.

On my first afternoon here, I sit down with Captain

America. Back in Kuwait, when Captain America still had a
mustache, he bore an uncanny resemblance to Matt Dillon's
goofy con-artist charmer in There's Something About Mary.
He comes off as one of the more thoughtful and articulate
men in the battalion, and I begin to wonder if the enlisted
men have read him all wrong. He's very likable, but with an
unfocused intensity that's both charismatic and draining.
When he stares at you, he doesn't blink; his pupils almost
seem to vibrate. He mixes acute and surprising political
observation -- "This part of the world would be better off
without us" -- with Nietzschean speculation on the deadly
nature of battle. "Right now, at any time, we could die," he
says, leaning forward. "It almost makes you lose your
sanity. The fear of dying will make you lose your sanity."
He adds, "But to remain calm and stay in a place where you
think you will die, that is the definition of insane, too. You
must become insane to survive in combat."

When I bring up one of the complaints his men make

against him -- his proclivity for leading them on childish but
also dangerous treasure hunts for Iraqi military souvenirs --
he launches into a detailed description of the relative merits
of Iraqi and U.S. arms, freely admitting to taking Iraqi AKs.
He even boasts of killing an enemy fighter with one. "These
are good, up-close weapons for firing from a vehicle," he
says, sounding perfectly reasonable.

Sgt. Kocher, one of Captain America's men, spots me

talking to him and later approaches to tell me something
that's troubling him. Kocher is a veteran of Afghanistan,
where he served on the same team with Colbert. Like
Colbert, Kocher prides himself on his extreme
professionalism. He grew up "running around in the
backwoods of Pennsylvania" and is powerfully built. When
he gets out of the Marine Corps, he plans to become a
professional bodybuilder. Where Captain America has a
scattered presence, Kocher's is one of pure focus. He now
leads his own Recon team, and three nights ago while
patrolling outside Al Kut, he claims Captain America
attempted to stab an enemy prisoner of war with a
bayonet. According to Kocher, his team was operating in
total darkness with NVGs when it encountered an enemy
fighter kneeling in a ditch, trying to hide from them. He and
two Marines approached the Iraqi, weapons drawn. "The
truth is," says Kocher, "We were all pissed because
Sergeant Patrick had just been shot, and I wanted to shoot
that guy. But that would have given away our position."
Kocher and his two men disarmed the Iraqi, with Kocher
grabbing him and putting him in a crushing armlock. Then,
according to Kocher, Captain America came charging
through the darkness with his bayonet drawn. (Long before
this incident, I had heard enlisted men belittle Captain
America for strutting around with a bayonet, something no
other Marine in the battalion did regularly. "He just wants
to overdramatize everything, so he feels like more of a
hero," says one Marine.) Kocher says, "He jumps over me
and jams him in chest with his bayonet. He turned the
situation into chaos."

According to Kocher, the prisoner had rifle magazines

clipped to his chest that deflected Captain America's
bayonet. Kocher, Captain America and the man tumbled
over. It took several moments of struggling to regain
control of the prisoner. Kocher says that as soon as he
restrained him, with his arms pinned behind his back,
Captain America rushed forward again, this time to kick the
enemy in the stomach. "He hits me in the stomach
instead," Kocher says.

The sergeant keeps a written log. "I call it my 'bitter

journal,' " he says. "If something happens to me, I want
my wife to know the truth. Because of guys like Captain
America, we've fought retarded."

Captain America disputes Kocher's version of events. He

says the prisoner was not under control when he arrived. In
his version, he brandished his bayonet when the man
resisted being captured. "I jabbed him with my bayonet,"
Captain America says. "If I'd wanted to kill him, I would
have shot him. By stabbing him, I saved his life."

In this case, the details seem too murky to draw any firm
conclusions. What will soon become clear, though, is that
this incident ominously foreshadows one of the more
controversial episodes of the campaign, when, a few days
later, outside Baghdad, Captain America and his bayonet
make another dramatic appearance during a prisoner
capture. And this time, ironically, Kocher and another
enlisted man critical of Captain America will be involved.

On this night, all is looking good. Ferrando visits Colbert's

team and offers rare praise. "I've heard they're speaking
pretty highly of First Recon at division headquarters,"
Ferrando says. "The general thinks we're slaying dragons."
After he leaves, Espera offers his own assessment. "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."

(RS 926, July 10, 2003)

The Killer Elite (part III)

The Battle for Bagdhad

By Evan Wright (Rolling Stone Magazine)

Horsehead is dead. The beloved former First Sergeant in

the Marine First Reconnaissance Battalion, a powerfully
built 230-pound African-American named Edward Smith,
was felled by an enemy mortar or artillery blast while riding
atop an armored vehicle outside Baghdad on April 4th. He
died in a military hospital the next day. Horsehead, 38, had
transferred out of First Recon to an infantry unit before the
war started. News of his death hits the Recon battalion
hard. Sgt. Rudy Reyes is one of the first to hear of it. He
moves along the camp's perimeter just outside Baghdad,
spreading the word. "Hey, brother," he says softly, "I just
came by to tell you Horsehead died last night."

Now, a couple of days later, following a brief sundown

memorial around an M-4 rifle planted upright in the dirt in
honor of their fallen comrade -- Marines in Bravo
Company's Second Platoon gather under their camouflage
nets trading Horsehead stories. Reyes repeats a phrase
Horsehead always used back home at Camp Pendleton in
San Diego. Before loaning anyone his truck, which had an
extensive sound-equalizer system, he'd say, "You can drive
my truck. But don't fuck with my volumes." For some
reason, repeating the phrase makes Reyes laugh almost to
the verge of tears.

It's April 8th. Army and Marine units began their final
assault on Baghdad several hours ago. First Recon,
however, will not be heading into the Iraqi capital just yet.
It's feared that Iraqi Republican Guard units may be
massing for a counterattack in a town called Ba'qubah, fifty
kilometers north of Baghdad. First Recon receives orders to
head north and attack these forces. Sgt. Brad Colbert,
whose team I am riding with, and the rest of the Marines
stop reminiscing about Horsehead and load their Humvees.

About two hundred Recon Marines are slated for this

mission. If the worst-case fears of their commanders are
true, they will be confronting several thousand Iraqis in
tanks. In the best-case scenario, they will merely be
assaulting through about thirty kilometers of known
ambush points along the route to Ba'qubah. "Once again,
we will be at the absolute tippity-tip of the spear, going into
the unknown," says Lt. Nathaniel Fick, briefing his men just
before the mission. Most of the Marines are in high spirits.
"It beats sitting around doing nothing while everybody else
gets to have fun attacking Baghdad," says Cpl. Joshua
Person before taking his position in the driver's seat of
Colbert's Humvee. Colbert, however, just stares out his
window at the fading light and mumbles something I can't
quite make out. I ask him to repeat it, and he waves it off.
"It was nothing," he says. "I was just thinking about
Horsehead."

Taking the lead of First Recon's fifty- vehicle column,

Colbert's Humvee drives out past the camp's concertina
wire and into the eastern outskirts of Baghdad. We pass
newly liberated Iraqis in the throes of celebration. Though
the city center will not fall for another twenty-four hours,
freedom fills the air, along with the stench of uncollected
garbage and overflowing sewers. Trash piles and pools of
fetid water line the edges of the road. Iraqis stream
through the smoky haze hauling random looted goods --
ceiling fans, pieces of machinery, fluorescent lights,
mismatched filing-cabinet drawers.

The bedlam continues until First Recon moves north of the

city and links up with a light-armored reconnaissance
company that is joining in the assault on Ba'qubah. The call
sign of this adjoining company, which consists of about a
hundred Marines mounted in twenty-four light-armored
vehicles, is War Pig. LAVs are noisy, black-armored eight-
wheel vehicles shaped like upside-down bathtubs with
rapid-fire cannons mounted on top. Iraqis call them "the
Great Destroyers."

Despite the fact that Colbert's team has been driving into
ambushes on an almost daily basis for more than two
weeks, this is the first time these Marines have started a
mission with an armored escort. "Damn! That's fucking
awesome," Person says. "We've got the Great Destroyers
with us."

"No, the escort is not awesome," Colbert says. "This just

tells us how bad they're expecting this to be." As we pull
out, Colbert's mood shifts from darkly brooding to grimly
cheerful. "Once more into the great good night," he says in
a mock stage voice, then quotes a line from Julius Caesar.
"Cry 'havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war."

Hunched over the wheel, head weighted down with a night-

vision device, Person says, "Man, when I get home, I'm
gonna eat the fuck out of my girlfriend's pussy."

"Enemy contact," Colbert says, passing on word from his

headset radio. "LAVs report enemy contact ahead."

War Pig is spread out on the highway, with its closest

vehicle about a hundred meters directly in front of Colbert's
and its farthest about three kilometers ahead. Automatic
cannons send out tracer rounds that look like orange ropes.
They stream out in all directions, orange lines bouncing and
quivering over the landscape. Other, thinner orange lines,
representing enemy machine guns, stream in toward the
LAVs.
Iraqi Republican Guard troops have dug into trenches along
both sides of the road. The enemy fighters are armed with
every conceivable type of portable weapon -- from machine
guns to mortars to rocket-propelled grenades. The convoy
stops as War Pig and the Iraqis shoot it out ahead. Enemy
mortars explode nearby, falling from the sky in a random
pattern. The Recon company behind Colbert's platoon
opens up with everything it has. These Marines belong to a
reservist unit, just arrived in Baghdad and only linked up
with First Recon a few days earlier. They're older -- a lot of
them are beat cops or Drug Enforcement Administration
agents in civilian life. This is their first significant enemy
contact, and their wild firing -- some of it in the direction of
Colbert's Humvee -- seems panicked.

"I have no targets! I have no targets!" Colbert repeats over

the gunfire, but Cpl. Walt Hasser, the gunner in the turret
who operates the Mark-19 grenade launcher, begins
lobbing rounds toward a nearby village.

"Cease fire!" Colbert shouts. "Easy there, buddy. You're

shooting a village. We've got women and children there."

The reservists behind us have already poured at least a

hundred grenades onto the small clusters of houses by the
side of the road. In the window of one dwelling, a lantern
glows. Through his night-vision scope, Colbert can just
make out a group of what appears to be women and
children taking cover behind a wall.

"We're not shooting the village, OK?" he says. In times like

this, Colbert often assumes the tone of a schoolteacher
calling a timeout during a frenzied playground scuffle.
Mortars are exploding so close you feel the overpressure
punching down on the Humvee. But Colbert will not allow
his team to give in to the frenzy and shoot unless it finds
clear targets or enemy muzzle flashes.

The voice of Captain America comes over the battalion

radio, quavering and cracking as he excitedly calls in
reports of more incoming fire. This Recon officer -- who
earned his derisive nickname because of what many of his
men view as his overzealous antics -- sounds over the radio
like his voice is breaking. "Oh, my God!" Person says. "Is
he crying?"

"No, he's not," Colbert says, cutting off what will likely be a
bitter tirade about Captain America. In recent days, Person
has pretty much forgotten his old hatreds for pop stars
such as Justin Timberlake -- a former favorite subject of
long, tedious rants about what's wrong with the U.S. -- and
now he complains almost exclusively about Captain
America. Lack of respect for this officer is so acute among
enlisted ranks that some of his own men openly refer to
him as "dumbass" -- sometimes directly to his face."He's
just nervous," Colbert says, not quite defending the officer.
"Everyone's nervous. Everyone's just trying to do their job."

For the next twenty sleepless hours, the Marines in First

Recon and War Pig methodically advance up the highway,
traveling barely fifteen kilometers, clearing villages on foot,
blowing up enemy trucks and weapons caches, and wiping
out pockets of Iraqi soldiers as they hide in trenches or
take cover in civilian homes.

From a raw-fear standpoint, the worst moments of the fight

come early on the afternoon of April 9th. The world's
attention is focused on televised pictures of American
Marines in the center of Baghdad, pulling down a massive
statue of Saddam Hussein. Here, north of the city, enemy
mortars start exploding about thirty meters away from
Bravo Company's position.

When Lt. Fick reports the bombardment to his commander

over the radio, he is told to remain in position. "Stand by to
die, gents," says Sgt. Antonio Espera, a former Los Angeles
repo man and co-leader of the Humvee team that works in
closest proximity to Colbert's. The twenty-two Marines in
the platoon sit in their vehicles, engines running, as per
their orders, while mortars explode all around. There's
almost no conversation. Everyone watches the sky and
surrounding fields for mortar blasts. One lands five meters
from Sgt. Espera's open-top Humvee, blowing a four-foot-
wide hole in the ground.

I look out and see Espera hunched over his weapon, his
eyes darting beneath the brim of his helmet, watching for
the next hit. Beside him, his twenty-three-year-old driver,
Cpl. Jason Lilley, grips the wheel, his face ashen. A few
hours before leaving on this mission, Lilley had been sitting
around with the platoon talking about the time he ate a
clown fish -- just for the hell of it -- when he worked at a
Wal-Mart in high school. Lilley joined the Marines to get out
of his hometown in Wichita, Kansas, and stop partying. "My
brains were, like, pan-fried," he says.

Nicknamed Space Ghost by his fellow Marines, Lilley is tall,

gangly, with pale skin. He usually has a far-off, pensive
expression, like someone who is always just one bong hit
away from a profound, cosmic realization. He's given some
of his deepest thought to a nickname that he helped come
up with for nineteen-year-old Cpl. Harold Trombley. Eleven
days ago, Trombley accidentally machine-gunned and
wounded two young Iraqi shepherds. "I call him Whopper,"
Lilley explained to me, "because they're sold at Burger
King." When I looked up at Lilley, not getting it, he shook
his head at my ignorance. "Like, Whoppers, Burger King,
BK -- Baby Killer. Now do you dig it?"

Before leaving on this mission, many of the men in

Colbert's platoon had said goodbye to one another by
shaking hands or even by hugging. The formal farewells
seemed odd considering that everyone was going to be
shoulder-to-shoulder in the cramped Humvees. The
goodbyes almost seemed an acknowledgment of the
transformations that take place in combat. Friends who
lolled around together during free time talking about bands,
girlfriends' fine asses and eating clown fish aren't really the
same people anymore once they enter the battlefield.

In combat, the change seems physical at first. Adrenaline

begins to flood your system the moment the first bullet is
fired. But unlike adrenaline rushes in the civilian world -- a
car accident or bungee jump, where the surge lasts only a
few minutes -- in combat, the rush can go on for hours. In
time, your body seems to burn out from it, or maybe the
adrenaline just runs out. Whatever the case, after a while
you begin to almost lose the physical capacity for fear.
Explosions go off. You cease to jump or flinch. In this
moment now, everyone sits still, numbly watching the
mortars thump down nearby. The only things moving are
the pupils of their eyes.

This is not to say the terror goes away. It simply moves out
from the twitching muscles and nerves in your body and
takes up residence in your mind. If you feed it with morbid
thoughts of all the terrible ways you could be maimed or
die, it gets worse. It also gets worse if you think about
pleasant things. Good memories or plans for the future just
remind you how much you don't want to die or get hurt.
It's best to shut down, to block everything out. But to reach
that state, you have to almost give up being yourself. This
is why, I believe, everyone had said goodbye to each other.
They would still be together, but they wouldn't really be
seeing one another for a while, since each man would in his
own way be sort of gone.

After about twenty minutes, the mortar fire ceases for the
rest of the day. Enemy resistance is beginning to wither
under the combined effects of the Marine advance on the
ground and violent airstrikes from above. Had the Iraqis
massed their armor earlier in the day when heavy clouds
inhibited airstrikes, they could have wreaked havoc. But for
some reason, they missed their chance. Clouds have
burned off, and waves of jets and Cobra helicopters
simultaneously bomb, rocket and strafe targets in all
directions. Trucks, armor, homes and entire hamlets are
being bombed and set on fire. With the dramatic increase in
firepower from the air, First Recon and War Pig rampage
north, covering the final ten kilometers to Ba'qubah in a
couple of hours. When the Iraqis finally send down a few
armored vehicles, they are blown to smithereens by attack
jets and Marines with shoulder-fired missiles.
The Iraqis who had put up fierce resistance earlier have
either fled or been slaughtered. Headless corpses --
indicating well-aimed shots from high-caliber weapons --
are sprawled out in trenches by the road. Others are
charred beyond recognition behind the wheels of burnt,
skeletonized trucks. The sole injury on the American side
occurs when a Marine in Alpha Company is hit by a piece of
flying shrapnel from a T-72 tank after it's blown up by one
of his buddies with a shoulder-fired missile. His helmet,
though partially crushed, stops the shrapnel. All the Marine
suffered was a bad headache.

With each air assault, Recon teams advance into the flames
and smoke, hunting for fleeing enemy fighters. The only
people Colbert's team encounters are terrified villagers -- a
half-dozen men and one small, extremely frightened girl
hiding in a ditch while their homes, fields and grape arbors
burn in the wake of a Cobra attack. The men, fearing for
their lives, scream, "No Saddam! No Saddam!" when
Colbert's team approaches, weapons drawn. After Colbert
and Fick pat the men on their shoulders to reassure them
that they are not going to be executed, the village elder
bursts into tears, grabs Fick's face and smothers him in
kisses.

While this is going on, Sgt. Eric Kocher, leading a team in

Bravo's Third Platoon on a sweep of a nearby field, bumps
up against another group of Marines from the reserve
Recon unit. About six of the reservists surround a dead
enemy fighter, a young man in a ditch, lying in a pool of his
own gore, still clutching his AK. While they ponder the
corpse, Kocher apparently is the only one alert enough to
notice a live Iraqi -- this one armed -- hiding in a trench
nearby.

When Kocher alerts the reservist Marines to the presence of

a live Iraqi in their midst, everyone turns his weapon on the
man and shouts at him to stand up and drop his weapon.
Ever since the weeklong battle in An Nasiriyah, where
Iraqis attacked and killed Marines by luring them into
ambushes with false surrenders, enemy takedowns have
become highly charged affairs. One of the reservist Marines
at the scene, First Sgt. Robert Cottle, a thirty-seven-year-
old SWAT team instructor with the Los Angeles Police
Department, takes out a pair of zip cuffs -- sort of like
heavy-duty versions of the plastic bands used to tie trash
bags -- and binds the Iraqi's hands behind his back.

Cottle cuffs the enemy prisoner's wrists so tightly that his

arms later develop dark-purple blood streaks all the way to
his shoulders. The prisoner, a low-level Republican Guard
volunteer in his late forties, is overweight, dressed in
civilian clothes -- a sleeveless undershirt and filthy trousers
-- and has a droopy Saddam mustache. He looks like a guy
so out of shape, he'd get winded driving a taxicab in rush
hour. Surrounded by Marines, the man begins to blubber
and cry. Kocher takes over handling him. A twenty-three-
year-old who served with Colbert in Afghanistan, Kocher is
an amateur bodybuilder with a quietly aggressive, take-
charge personality. He hands his rifle to another Marine,
puts on latex gloves and produces a 9-mm sidearm. He
slams the Iraqi to the ground, puts the pistol to his head
and shouts, "If you move, I'll blow your fucking head off!" A
few minutes later, according to Kocher, Cottle, the
reservist, shook his hand, thanked him for spotting the
Iraqi and said, "You might have just saved our lives."

Kocher marches the Iraqi about thirty meters up to the

highway and knocks him to the ground again. But no red
flags are raised until Captain America arrives on the scene.
By most accounts, Captain America approached the
prisoner -- now lying facedown -- shouting and brandishing
his bayonet. The Iraqi began to cry and plead for his life.
According to several of the Marines who were there,
Captain America began to jab the prisoner with his bayonet
and taunt him, threatening to cut his throat.
Captain America, thirty-one years old and married, denies
making those threats. "I just told the guy to shut the fuck
up," he says later. He also denies ever jabbing the Iraqi. He
had his bayonet out, he says, because "up close it's the
best way to handle someone without shooting him."
Kocher says he was worried that the situation was spiraling
out of control. He ordered one of the Marines on his team,
twenty-two-year-old Cpl. Dan Redman, to guard the
prisoner. Redman put his boot on the Iraqi's neck and stood
over him with his M-4 rifle. "We were trying to calm the
situation down," says Redman. "I didn't stomp or kick the
guy. Dude, we just wanted Captain America to go away."

The next day, Sgt. Cottle, the reservist who initially shook
Kocher's hand and thanked him, filed a report charging
Kocher, Redman and Captain America with assaulting the
prisoner. Cottle later tells me, "I feel bad for the enlisted
guys. They weren't really the problem. It was the officer."
One of Cottle's fellow reservists, a senior enlisted man who
also witnessed the events, says, "From what I saw, that
officer is sick. There's something wrong with him." Captain
America denies any misdeed. He simply thought his
accusers were insufficiently acquainted with the realities of
the battlefield. "They saw the beast that day, and they
didn't know how to handle it," Captain America says later.
"The prisoner was handled properly, even though they
didn't like the way it looked."

My first encounter with the enemy prisoner takes place in

the back of Lt. Fick's Humvee, about an hour after the
incident. It's late in the afternoon, and Bravo's Second
Platoon is manning a roadblock just south of Ba'qubah. The
prisoner is squirming on the truck bed, only now there's a
burlap sack tied over his head. 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?" says one
nineteen-year-old Marine, scowling.

Fick walks over. "Hey, I don't want any war crimes in the
back of my truck." He says this lightly. He has no idea yet
of the brewing controversy over 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 military-
ration poundcake. 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. "I hate you. Do you hear
me?"

By the time I speak to the prisoner, I've already heard the

rumors of his mistreatment during his capture. He has no
bayonet marks. The worst sign of mistreatment on his body
are gruesome bruises on his arms from the zip cuffs. He
speaks English reasonably well and tells me his name is
Ahmed Al-Khizjrgee. He periodically grabs his shoulders
and winces in pain. Despite his suffering, there's something
buffoonish yet crafty about him, like Sgt. 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.
One of the Marines points out that a lot of other Iraqis have
thrown their weapons down 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. Their superiors told
them Iraq was winning the war. "Everybody under Saddam
is silent," he says. "If Saddam s

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." The Marines now smile at him and feed him more
poundcake.

Al-Khizjrgee fails to catch on to the newly festive

atmosphere. He leans toward me and whispers, "How can I
go home now? What if my sergeant finds me?"

About half an hour earlier, the BBC reported that Baghdad

has fallen. I pass this information on to him.

He begins to cry. "I am so happy!"

The news is only getting better. Fick walks up and tells Al-
Khizjrgee he will be driving him to Baghdad tonight.

"For free?" he asks, as if unable to believe his good fortune.

Back in Colbert's Humvee, we drive back to Baghdad in the

darkness. Person begins to sing, "Mamas, don't let your
babies grow up to be cowboys."

"Hold on, buddy!" Colbert shouts.

After forty hours without sleep, more than half of this spent
in combat, nerves are on edge, and Person has just
violated Colbert's cardinal rule as team leader: No country
music is allowed in this war.

"It's a cowboy song," Person says.

"I hate to break it to you, but there are no cowboys."

"Yeah, there are," Person says, his face simultaneously

blank and defiant. "There's tons of cowboys."

"A cowboy isn't some dipshit with a ten-gallon hat and a

dinner plate on his belt. 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 and First Recon, driving south on the same
highway they fought their way up during the previous thirty
hours, are again taking fire. I spot an enemy muzzle flash
no more than five meters from the right side of the vehicle
-- directly outside my window. Colbert opens up, his rifle
clattering. If his past performance in this type of situation is
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.

They drive the next ten kilometers in near silence,

searching for more targets, until they 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."

Early the next day, first recon crosses a pontoon bridge

over the Diala River and enters Baghdad proper. The
greeting in Saddam City, First Recon's destination on the
north side of Baghdad, is a familiar blend of enthusiasm
tinged with violence. Three million Iraqis live in Saddam
City, a sprawl of low-slung, vaguely Soviet-looking
apartment complexes and homes spread out over several
kilometers. Thousands line the streets as First Recon's
convoy winds along the edge. When Colbert's Humvee
stops, it's swamped by young men in threadbare clothes
who zombie-shuffle up to the windows. Many smile, but
their faces have a hungry, vacant look. A few try to reach
out and grab things such as canteens and packs hanging on
the side on the Humvee.

The convoy snakes through the streets again. Iraqis line

the way, shouting "Bush! Bush! Bush!" The Marines turn
into the gates of an industrial complex, sections of which
are still burning from American bombings. Tonight's camp
is a gigantic cigarette factory that sits on the edge of
Saddam City. 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. After setting up
positions by a loading dock, Marines stock up on Sumer-
brand cigarettes and lie back to enjoy the spoils of
conquest. "I think it's pretty safe here," Fick tells his men in
the remaining moments of daylight. "We should all get a
good rest tonight."

Within minutes of sundown, the Marines are rocked by a

powerful explosion - a car bomb, about a hundred meters
distant. Tracers shoot up from rooftops across the city. Fick
walks up to me and smiles. "I was wrong," he says. A few
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."

It's factional fighting between Iraqis, and it goes on all

night. During the lulls, ambulance sirens wail across the
city. Most of the Marines sleep pretty soundly through it
anyway. Sgt. Espera uses the free time to work on a letter
he's been writing to his wife back home in Los Angeles. She
works at an engineering firm and raises their eight-year-old
daughter. "I've learned there are two types of people in
Iraq," begins the letter, which he reads to me, "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?"

By daylight, most of the gunfire stops in Baghdad. Colbert's

team is sent out with the rest of his company to patrol a
neighborhood north of Saddam City.

The residents here seem pleased to see the Marines. It

turns out that this is a middle-class area. Unpaved roads
lead to large stucco homes that would not be entirely out of
place in San Diego. Men on the streets greet the Marines
almost as soon as they turn in and address them in halting
yet formal English. "Good morning, sir," they say. The
Marines stop. Iraqis gather around the Humvees smoking
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. "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 by black robes, they squat 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 says.

"If we'd have fought these women instead of men," another

Marine observes, "we might have got our asses kicked."

Within the first few days of their patrols, the Marines are
quickly overwhelmed by the magnitude of Baghdad's social
breakdown. There's no electricity or clean water. The
streets are filled with raw sewage. Children are dying of
disease. Bandits roam freely at night. Hospitals have been
looted. The only items in plentiful supply are AK rifles.
Locals claim that since armories and police stations were
overrun at the end of the war, an AK now costs about the
same as a couple of packs of cigarettes. Gun battles
continue to rage every night among Shias, Sunnis, bandits,
die-hard fedayeen and even Kurdish "freedom fighters" who
have been flooding into the city to hunt down Saddam
loyalists. The fighting is so bad that Marines aren't even
allowed out after dark.

Sadi Ali Hossein -- a courtly man in his fifties who helped

run one of the city's main electric plants but now offers his
services to the Marines as a translator -- has a grim view of
Iraq's future. "This is a bomb," he says of the rift between
Sunni and Shia religious factions. "If it explodes, it will be
bigger than the war." Sgt. Espera has his own take on the
situation. "Let a motherfucker use an American toilet for a
week and they'll forget all about this Sunni-Shia bullshit."

Despite the general Iraqi enthusiasm for the American

invaders, many of them also spout bizarre conspiracy
theories.They believe Bush and Saddam are secretly in
league with each other. Iraqis approach Marines and ask
them if it's true that Saddam is now living in Washington,
D.C. Hossein claims that ninety percent of Iraqis believe
this story. Those I ask about this legend, a few of them
educated professionals, are positive that this is true. "My
good friend saw Saddam fly away with the Americans in a
helicopter," one man tells me, voicing a widespread urban
legend.

During the next few days, First Recon moves from the
cigarette factory to a wrecked hospital to a looted power
plant, all the while dogged by an increasingly bitter rift over
the prisoner-handling incident that occurred outside
Ba'qubah. The first Marine to come under investigation is
Sgt. Eric Kocher, who is kicked off his team. Cpl. Dan
Redman, who placed his boot on the prisoner's neck, is also
put under investigation. Captain America is temporarily
relieved of his command.

After days of fact-finding and acrimonious meetings among

the men, First Recon commander Lt. Col. Steve Ferrando
clears the three men charged in the prisoner incident and
reinstates Kocher and Captain America. Later, I meet with
Ferrando in his temporary, partially destroyed office. He is
a lean forty-two-year-old who speaks in a grating whisper,
following a bout with throat cancer. Because of that voice,
everyone calls him Godfather, which he also uses as his call
sign. Ferrando tells me he thinks his men walked a fine line
but were still "within the box" of acceptable behavior. But
he adds, "In my mind, when you allow that behavior to
progress, you end up with a My Lai massacre." Then he
leans across his desk and asks me if I think he should have
taken harsher action toward Captain America.
I honestly can't answer him. In the past four weeks, I have
been on hand while this comparatively small unit of Marines
has killed quite a few people. I personally saw three
civilians shot, one of them fatally with a bullet in the eye.
These were just the tip of the iceberg. The Marines killed
dozens, if not hundreds, in combat through direct fire. And
no one will probably ever know how many died from the
approximately 30,000 pounds of bombs First Recon ordered
dropped during airstrikes, or from the several hundred
rounds of artillery the battalion called in on towns and
highways, often at night. And of these perhaps hundreds of
fatalities, how many others are without legs or eyes or
other pieces of their bodies? I can't imagine how the man
ultimately responsible for all of these deaths -- at least on
the battalion level -- sorts it all out and draws the line
between what is wanton killing and what is civilized military
conduct. I suppose if it were up to me, I might let Captain
America keep his job, but I would take away his rifle and
bayonet and give him a cap gun.

First recon's final night in Baghdad, April 18th, is spent

camped in the playing field of the soccer stadium that once
belonged to Saddam's son Uday. Tonight, the usual gun
battles fought by locals start before sunset. Recon Marines
keeping watch high up on the bleachers suddenly come
under fire. As rounds zing past, one of the men, caught by
surprise, stumbles as he tries to pull his machine gun off
the fence and take cover. His arms flail while he tries to
regain his balance. More gunshots ring out. Marines
watching on the grass below burst into laughter. It's almost
as if the war has turned into a comedy.

Later on, several Marines in another unit gather in a dark

corner of the stadium to drink toasts to a one-armed Iraqi
man who's been selling locally distilled gin for five American
dollars per fifth. Generally, it doesn't require any alcohol to
lower the young Marines' inhibitions. When they bring up
the topic of "combat jacks" -- who has masturbated the
most since entering the combat zone -- no one ever
hesitates to mention the times he's jacked off on watch to
stay awake and pass the hours. After surviving their first
ambush at Al Gharraf, a couple of Marines even admitted to
an almost frenzied need to get off combat jacks. But now,
with the one-armed man's gin flowing, a Marine brings up a
subject so taboo and almost pornographic in its own way, I
doubt he'd ever broach it sober among his buddies. "You
know," he says, "I've fired 203-grenade rounds into
windows, through a door once. But the thing I wish I'd seen
-- I wish I could have seen a grenade go into someone's
body and blow it up. You know what I'm saying?" The other
Marines just listen silently in the darkness.

At first light, the battalion leaves Baghdad on a deserted

superhighway and sets up camp sixty kilometers south. On
Easter Sunday, the chaplain holds a special service in a
barren field. "I have good news," he begins, announcing to
the crowd of about fifty that a Marine from Recon's support
unit has chosen this day to be baptized. When Colbert
hears the good news, he cannot conceal his outrage. To
him, religion is right up there with country music as an
expression of collective idiocy. "Give me a break," he says.
"Marines getting baptized? This used to be a place of men
with pure warrior spirit. Chaplains are a goddamn waste."

The next day, First Recon suffers its fourth and fifth
casualties when Gunnery Sgt. David J. Dill, a combat
engineer attached to the battalion, steps on a mine and
blows his foot off. Flying shrapnel takes out the eye of
another Marine nearby. There's a bitter irony to the
confusion that follows. The three Marines cleared in the
prisoner incident work together on the rescue. Kocher runs
into the minefield to assist Dill. After loading him into a
Humvee, Captain America orders the Marines to take a
shortcut, over their strenuous objections, and the vehicle
becomes mired in a swamp. "Dude, it was awful," says
Redman, "trying to rock that Humvee out, with Dill in the
back seat, his foot blown off." They finally carried Dill to
another Humvee and got him to medical treatment. His leg
was amputated below the knee several hours later --
though through no fault of the delay caused by Captain
America's shortcut.
First recon moves to its final camp in Iraq, at a former Iraqi
military base outside the city of Ad Diwaniyah, 180
kilometers south of Baghdad. Bravo Company winds up in
one of the shittiest spots in the camp. They set up on an
exposed concrete pad next to the latrine trenches and burn
pits. Dust storms blow continually. Most Marines have only
had one shower in the past forty days. The men are beset
by flies and dysentery. Surveying this last infernal camp
with an almost satisfied smile, Cpl. Michael Stinetorf, a
Second Platoon machine-gunner, says, "One universal fact
of being in the Marine Corps is that no matter where we go
in the world, we always end up in some random shitty
place."

The senior officers, set up in nicer quarters across the

camp, are basking in the glow of victory. First Recon, one
of the smallest, most lightly armed battalions in the Corps,
led the way for much of the Marines' blitzkrieg to Baghdad.
"No other military in the world can do what we do,"
Ferrando tells me. "We are America's shock troops." Maj.
Gen. James Mattis, whom I also interview at Ad Diwaniyah,
heaps praise on the courage and initiative displayed by the
men in First Recon, whom he credits with a large measure
of success in winning the war. "They should be very proud,"
he says.

When I return to Second Platoon's encampment and pass

on the general's praise, the men stand around in the dust
considering his glowing remarks. Finally, Cpl. Gabriel Garza
says, "Yeah? Well, we still did a lot of stupid shit."

Despite their success in blasting their way through more

than a dozen ambushes and firefights, the Recon Marines
did not do the job they had been trained for: stealthy,
undetected reconnaissance. "Normally, in our jobs," says
Colbert, "if we get shot at, it means we failed. The enemy is
never supposed to see us. We're the most highly trained
Marines in the Corps. The way they used us in this war, it's
like they took a Ferrari and put it in a demolition derby. We
did OK, but we didn't sign up for this."
Even so, most Marines unabashedly love the action. "You
really can't top it," Cpl. Redman says. "Combat is the
supreme adrenaline rush. You take rounds. Shoot back, shit
starts blowing up. It's sensory overload. It's the one thing
that's not overrated in the military."

Despite their misgivings and their discomfort, the mood is

buoyant in this hellish camp. The Marines sleep through
each night for the first time in weeks, boil coffee every
morning on fires started with C-4 explosive, run for miles
each afternoon in the 110-degree heat, play cards, dip tin
after tin of Copenhagen and bench-press for hours on a
free-weight set they assemble from gears and flywheels
from wrecked Iraqi tanks. "Man, this is fucking awesome,"
Cpl. James Chaffin, a twenty-two-year-old Recon Marine,
declares one morning while blazing up his coffee with a ball
of C-4 explosive. "I can't believe I'm getting paid to work
out, dip and hang out with the best guys in the world."

Sgt. Espera composes more long letters to his wife and

occasionally shares with younger Marines bits of wisdom he
learned on the streets of L.A. He says one afternoon that if
he were writing a memoir of the days when he worked as a
car-repo man before joining the Marines, he would title it
Nobody Gives a Fuck. According to Espera, the ideal place
and time to repossess or even steal an automobile is in a
crowded parking lot in the middle of the afternoon. "Jump
in, drive that bitch off with the car alarm going -- nobody's
going to stop you, nobody's going to even look at you," he
says. "You know why? Nobody gives a fuck. In my line of
work, that was the key to everything. The only people that
will fuck you up are do-gooders. I can't stand do-gooders.
Luckily, there's not too many of those."

Many Marines I talk to are skeptical of the aims used to

justify the war -- fighting terrorism, getting weapons of
mass destruction (which they never see). Quite a few
accept that this war was probably fought for oil. Standing
around the camp, surveying the blown-up buildings in the
horizon, Bravo Company medic Robert "Doc" Bryan says,
"War doesn't change anything. This place was fucked up
before we came, and it's fucked up now. I personally don't
believe we 'liberated' the Iraqis. Time will tell."

Colbert is one of the few Marines who continue to follow the

war's progress on the BBC each day. When the BBC runs a
report of a U.S. Army unit that accidentally fired on
civilians, he stands up, outraged, and walks past his fellow
Marines dozing on the concrete. "They are screwing this
up," he says. "Those idiots. Don't they realize the world
already hates us?"

"Relax, Devil Dog," Espera says, calling him by the

universal Marine nickname. "The only thing we have to
worry about are the fucking do-gooders."

(RS 927, July 24, 2003)