Throughout the afternoon, helicopters ferried overhead. Marine CH-46s and Army Black Hawks flew north and then disappeared back to the south before flying north again. Back and forth. Back and forth. Through the afternoon, dusk, and darkness, the helicopters never stopped. We knew what they were doing. The Marine helicopters were painted an anonymous slate gray, but each Black Hawk bore large red crosses on its nose and sides. Casevac. They were casualty evacuation aircraft, flying dead and wounded Marines from the battlefield back to aid stations in the rear. Marines just like me were on those helicopters, and I was moving inexorably toward the place that put them there, just another cog in the machine. It was a helpless feeling, a powerless feeling, but not a self-pitying feeling. Just the opposite. I began to see a quiet resolve in the Marines around me, and I felt it myself. The platoon recleaned weapons and rechecked maps. Each passing helicopter bled energy into the Marines beneath it. We prided ourselves on being professionals, on thinking clearly with the world evaporating before our eyes. We could turn the violence on and off. But emotion began to creep in. I was angry. I wanted revenge. For the first time, my blood was up.
We spent the night there on the roadside, under the stars and the crisscrossing helicopters. The intel officer passed out aerial photographs of Nasiriyah for each platoon, paper blankets four feet wide that showed each alley and house in clear detail. The town sprawled about five kilometers square, bounded on the south by the Euphrates River and on the north by a canal. Highway 7 stretched northward on the western side of town, and Highway 8 paralleled it to the east. South of the Euphrates, Nasiriyah’s outskirts gave way gradually to palm groves and farmland — our current location. The Marines had decided to use Highway 8, calling it Route Moe, but already it was known simply as “Ambush Alley.”
I gathered the team leaders under my Humvee’s tarp, and together we studied the picture. The battalion’s mission on Monday would be to drive into Nasiriyah and join Second Battalion, Eighth Marines on the south side of the eastern bridge over the Euphrates, the southern end of Ambush Alley. We knew little about what had already happened in Nasiriyah. The BBC reported dozens of American casualties but offered few details. We heard vague reports that an Army maintenance unit had mistakenly entered the town on Sunday and been ambushed by fedayeen. Task Force Tarawa entered the town to rescue survivors and open the bridges for RCT-1 to pass over on its blitz to Baghdad. Now it looked as though the Marines were stopped and engaged in heavy fighting. We were about to join them.
We started north slowly on Monday, March 24, driving through fields next to the road in order to bypass all the supply trucks waiting for Nasiriyah to be secured. The casevac helicopters continued their morbid rounds. We passed the head of the traffic jam and continued alone. I jumped in my seat as a well-camouflaged Marine artillery battery fired a salvo from its howitzers just as we drew abreast of them. Fields gave way to concrete block buildings and metal warehouses. Men stood along the sides of the road, some jeering, some watching impassively, all menacing. To our right, an oil storage tank burned, throwing flames and a black plume high into the sky. We crossed a bridge over railroad tracks and looked down on the burned hulks of Iraqi tanks still sitting in their revetments.
Over the past four days, we had seen dozens of wrecked Iraqi vehicles. Tanks hit by American jets, trucks and antiaircraft guns blown up on the roadsides. Now we saw more wreckage in the southbound lanes. But something was different. I stared.
“Holy shit, Gunny. Those are Humvees.”
Bloody hands had pawed at the doors, leaving plaintive prints. Bullet holes frosted the windshields. Congealed blood, more blood than I thought a human body could hold, pooled around the flattened front tires. These were the sad remnants of the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company, which had blundered into Nasiriyah after making a wrong turn and was all but wiped out by fedayeen militiamen. At least nine soldiers had been killed and six captured, including Private First Class Jessica Lynch. All we knew that afternoon, though, was that Americans had been in those Humvees, and it looked like those Americans had died.
We were only three kilometers south of the bridge. Every tree, every wall, and every building looked hostile. I was afraid for the first time in Iraq. Against the white noise of the blood rushing through my head, I heard my feet tapping involuntarily on the Humvee floor. My knees stitched up and down like a sewing machine. My mouth felt dry and gummy. Everything seemed to pass in a blur. I thought of war stories that talked about hyperclarity in combat, seeing every blade of grass and feeling colors more intensely than ever before. But for me, whole city blocks faded into a gray fuzz. I feared I was processing information too slowly, seeing only one of every ten things I should. I felt short-changed. I wanted hyperclarity, too.
24
MACHINE GUNS RATTLED somewhere to our front. Mortar rounds thumped into fields off the sides of the road, leaving brown columns of dust hanging in the air. Wreckage blocked half the highway. We sped up, careening over the curbed median to drive north in the southbound lanes.
“How’d we go from quiet fields to this in half an hour?” Wynn asked, steering with his left hand while aiming a rifle out the open door with his right.
I’d been asking myself the same question. “Southernmost city on the way to Baghdad. We’re right where they want us.”
Radio reports of gunshots and suspicious activity stopped as we entered a maelstrom of shooting and moving. There was too much to call in. Forward of the artillery batteries and support troops, but still behind the infantry units up at the bridges, we took small-arms fire from palm groves along the road, which meant the grunts ahead were surrounded. Finally, we passed Marine vehicles herringboned on the highway and saw infantrymen strung out in the fields in shallow holes. At the southern end of the bridge leading to Ambush Alley, we swung to the left and pulled into the defilade of a small dirt lot surrounded by palm trees.
My first reaction was to laugh. We had stumbled onto the set of a Vietnam War movie. Dense green palms encircled us, and a fence of dried fronds lined the side of the clearing. Gunfire echoed everywhere, and Marines darted back and forth, hunched low. Cobras thumped overhead, launching rockets into buildings along the far side of the river. I half-expected the notes of “Fortunate Son” to come drifting through the trees.
An artillery round crashed into the field across the road. It sliced through power lines, which sprung back and whipped through the air like angry snakes, spitting sparks. Wounded Marines fell, and calls of “Corpsman!” rose above the fire.
Alpha and Charlie companies moved forward to the riverbank, and we listened to a deafening roar of outgoing fire as they lit into enemy positions on the far banks. Bravo Company remained in the lot, waiting for instructions. I jogged over to the palm frond fence and slipped through it to talk with Marines dug in on the far side. They were facing south and west, guarding our flanks. A water buffalo rotted on its side in front of them, a victim of the crossfire. I found their platoon commander hunkered down in a hole with a rifle and a radio. He said the platoon was from Fox Company 2/8. They had been under fire all day, and he warned me about walking around like I was.
“They’re in the trees, man. They’re fucking everywhere, and the fuckers can shoot, too.”
Vietnam.
I went back to the lot and got orders to strip all nonessential equipment from my Humvees. When Task Force Tarawa attacked across the bridge into Nasiriyah, my platoon would race in after them to evacuate casualties. There were too many RPGs in the air for helicopters to fly over the city, so all casevac would be on the ground. It was morbid, planning to evacuate Marines who were now walking around, talking with their buddies, and preparing for the attack. While we worked to dump excess fuel and add extra stretchers and medical supplies to the Humvees, mortars exploded into the dirt across the road, showering the pavement with clods of clay and clattering pebbles. I stood talking with Sergeant Patrick when a metal object sailed over the guardrail and clanged into the back of his Humvee, bouncing through the bed.