Colonel Ferrando followed the enemy update with an overview of how the Americans planned to start the campaign. Ideally, there would be three fronts: the Army’s Fifth Corps from the southwest, the First Marine Expeditionary Force from the southeast, and the Army’s Fourth Infantry Division from the north, through Turkey. The Turks were still balking, though, and Ferrando warned that all the forces might have to come through Kuwait. Within the Marines’ zone, Regimental Combat Team 7 (RCT-7), built around the Seventh Marine Regiment, would be farthest east. They would isolate Basra and destroy the Fifty-first Mechanized Infantry Division. Just to their west, RCT-5, composed of the Fifth Marine Regiment with reinforcements, would seize the Rumaila oil fields to prevent their destruction by Iraqi forces. This not only would prevent an environmental catastrophe but also would guarantee the economic vitality of postwar Iraq. The First Marine Regiment, known as RCT-1, and Task Force Tarawa, a force of six thousand men built around the Second Marine Regiment from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, would pass Rumaila to the west and secure bridges across the Euphrates.
Ferrando paused to let the rush of information sink in. A team leader in the back stood up and asked about First Recon’s role in all this. The colonel admitted that our mission was still evolving but suggested that it might include forward reconnaissance for the division, screening missions along the flanks of larger units, controlling air strikes to destroy enemy armored formations, and finding alternative crossing points on the Euphrates in case the Iraqis blew up the major highway bridges.
“You’ll be killing something, gents,” he said. “That’s the only thing I know for sure.”
20
TWO DAYS LATER, we left Commando. Our Humvees had arrived from the airport, so we were spared the caged indignity of the closed-curtain buses. Starting north on Highway 80, we climbed the Mutla Ridge, where, in 1991, the Second Marine Division caught up with the Republican Guard as it fled from Kuwait. This was the infamous “Highway of Death,” where American jets had destroyed hundreds of Iraqi vehicles. Columns of power lines marched to the horizon over a modern highway of new asphalt, but I thought only about black acres of smoldering trucks. The CNN images had been seared into my memory in the eighth grade. I was surprised no trace remained.
We joined a procession of other convoys rumbling north. British “Desert Rats,” their faces wrapped in cloaks, steered tanks under flapping Union Jacks. They looked surprised to be driving toward the Iraqi border. U.S. Army convoys hauled past in the fast lanes, knowing what was over the next rise. After thirteen years here, this land was practically theirs.
We traveled in the slow lane at a sedate fifty miles per hour. Every few minutes, a cruise ship-size Mercedes with shimmering hubcaps flashed past, giving us a fleeting glimpse of the driver — always male, always robed in white, and always disdainful of more than the difference in speed. Twice our progress slowed to allow camel herds to clear the pavement. Boys with sticks walked behind them, slapping their flanks. We passed a fluorescent green sign that read, GOD BLESS U.S. TROOPS — certainly the only one of its kind in the Arab world.
All along the desert that stretches fifty miles from the Mutla Ridge to the Iraqi border, dirt trails led off the highway. Military convoys peeled east and west on these innocuous-looking tracks, passing behind privacy berms and entering whole cities hidden in the sand. Kuwait’s government had declared the northern third of the country a military exclusion zone and relocated the local populace, mainly Bedouin tribes, to grazing land farther south until the end of the hostilities.
We turned left off Highway 80 and passed through a checkpoint rimmed with razor wire. The road snaked two kilometers into the desert before twisting around a rock outcropping and leading straight into the center of a new metropolis: Camp Matilda. The reference was to the Australian song “Waltzing Matilda,” which became associated with the First Marine Division when it moved to Australia following the retaking of Guadalcanal in 1943. Despite its charming name, Matilda was a bleak, unfinished camp. Dozens of white tents stood in rows. No electricity, no hot food, and no showers for at least another week. We stood outside the tents, bemoaning our loss of Commando’s comforts, when an F-16 fighter jet screamed overhead waggling its wings. The jet was returning from a patrol over Iraq’s southern no-fly zone, and the pilot decided to motivate us. It worked. We started carving out a place for ourselves at Matilda and planning our training for the coming weeks.
I woke up early one morning a week later, enjoying the silence in the tent. The platoon lived together in its own tent, while Gunny Wynn lived separately with the other staff NCOs, and I lived with the junior officers. My sleeping bag was in the corner, a coveted spot that gave me a tad more privacy than those in the middle. A slight breeze blew cool air through the tent flap near my feet. I reached over and tuned my shortwave radio to the BBC, hoping to catch the hourly news.
“It’s two o’clock GMT and this is the BBC World Service from London. Holes have been reported in the fence on the Iraqi border with Kuwait, and armed men in the DMZ identified themselves as U.S. Marines. More on this story now from Kuwait City.”
Forty miles from the border in a camp full of Marines, I got my local news from London. The radio had been a gift from my parents, and it was one of my most prized possessions. I listened for another ten minutes before slipping out of my bag and getting dressed. I ducked through the tent flap with my toothbrush and a bottle of water to scrub and spit on the sand beneath the pink sky. Two tents down, another figure was doing the same thing. After brushing his teeth, he poured water onto his hair and began to slap his face and shake his head. I recognized Gunny Wynn’s distinctive morning ritual and called out to him. “Hey, Gunny, want to go to breakfast when you’re done primping?”
“Mornin’. Yeah, give me two more minutes.” The shaking and scrubbing continued.
As we walked across the camp to the chow tent, Wynn and I returned to the topic that occupied most of our idle planning time — tweaking our roster to maximize efficiency and combat power. We were that rare thing, a fully staffed Marine platoon. Twenty-one Marines, from private first class to gunnery sergeant, one Navy medical corpsman, and one officer. Ordinarily, these twenty-three men would be divided into three recon teams of six men apiece, each led by a sergeant, and a headquarters section of five: platoon commander, platoon sergeant, corpsman, communications specialist, and a designated “special equipment NCO” to care for the parachutes and diving rigs we had not brought to Kuwait.
That arrangement worked well for traditional reconnaissance missions, where foot-mobile teams moved independently and the headquarters stayed mainly out of the fight. Tradition had not been consulted in drafting our role in the upcoming war. After a lot of walks across the camp for morning and evening meals, we settled on a modified plan. Sergeant Colbert’s Team One would be divided into Team One Alpha and Team One Bravo, each in its own Humvee. Sergeant Espera would control Team One Bravo, operating effectively as a fourth team within the platoon. Colbert’s armored Humvee would carry four Marines. Espera would have five Marines riding in his open Humvee. Sergeant Patrick’s team, trimmed by one, would consist of five men in a vehicle. Sergeant Lovell’s arrangement was the same. Navy HM2 “Doc” Tim Bryan, our corpsman, was one of Lovell’s five. Wynn and I would ride in the only Humvee without a heavy machine gun. For protection, we relied on Corporal Evan Stafford, nominally the platoon communicator, and Private First Class John Christeson, our nineteen-year-old special equipment NCO, who was not an NCO and had no special equipment. They would stand in the back with rifles while Wynn and I focused on the navigation, coordination, and communication that went into running a platoon.