I watched as the residents shook their fists and spat in Arabic at Mish. He shrugged and listened with heavy-lidded eyes. Three men from Ar Rifa pointed at us, their voices raised and their feet stamping angrily. I told Lovell’s Marines to keep an eye on me and walked out to join Mish.
“What are they saying?”
Mish paused, savoring his importance. “They say they are happy the Marines are here, and they’re grateful to be liberated.”
“Goddammit, Mish, cut the bullshit.”
“They wonder why you are sitting here and are afraid you will attack the town and kill them. They say the fedayeen are at the other end of town, in the old headquarters of the Ba’ath Party. They want to help us kill the bad guys.”
Now we were making progress. “OK, ask them if they can do something for us.” I handed Mish a fistful of infrared chem lights. “Tell them to wait until after dark, then crack these chem lights and put them on the roofs of the buildings where the fedayeen are holed up. American helicopters will be able to see the lights and may destroy the buildings.”
This was a plan we’d been briefed on earlier. I had my doubts about it, given what I’d already seen of Iraqi tribalism. Most of these lights, I expected, would end up on the roofs of people to whom these men owed money. Still, it might work if we could corroborate the identity of the buildings with another source. The men thanked me profusely for the lights as Mish extorted cigarettes from them. Dusk had deepened over Ar Rifa, and we jogged back across no man’s land to the relative safety of the Humvees.
The battalion repeated instructions to stand by and wait for RCT-1, so we settled in for an uneasy night. The Marines attached batteries to our fireflies, and soon the little infrared lights winked comfortingly from each Humvee when viewed through night vision goggles. A few Marines dozed on the ground while their teammates scanned the fields and town for movement. I checked our perimeter security again and stopped at Colbert’s Humvee to use the AN/PAS-13. This black plastic sight was about the size of a tissue box and enabled us to see heat. Traditional night optics amplify ambient light, hence the nickname “star-light scopes.” Thermal optics like the AN/PAS-13 see heat differentials and paint any heat source, such as a human being, as a bright white blob moving against a dark background. Satisfied that we were alone, I walked back to my Humvee to monitor the radio and choke down a cold MRE. A call from headquarters interrupted me.
“Be advised we have a friendly logistics convoy approaching from the south.”
I raised the handset to reply as machine gun fire shattered the night. Red tracers streamed east and west from the highway as trucks rumbled closer. I looked in vain for incoming fire.
“Get down! Everybody down!”
The platoon was already diving from turrets and hoods onto the dirt. I dropped behind the engine block with the side of my head pressed into the mud. Yelling “Cease fire” into the handset, I watched the convoy of trucks racing toward us, still pumping rounds into the trees and buildings along the highway. Not a single tracer round traveled toward them from the darkness. For a moment, I fixed on the irony of waiting to be shot by fellow Marines. Rage followed cynicism as I thought indignantly of how we had spent the entire day sitting in this dangerous spot, making it safe for their passage, and now these pogues were blasting through at fifty miles per hour, shooting everything in sight. My neural tangent circled back to how good it would feel to return fire, knowing we could waste the careless bastards. By then, though, the trucks were nearly abreast of us, and I pushed deeper into the dirt, watching beneath the Humvee as seven-ton trucks and tractor-trailers roared past, spewing tracers in wild streams far above our heads. Thank God they couldn’t aim. I called a warning north to the other platoons before sitting up and leaning back against the tire. Mud caked the side of my face.
Colbert shouted from the darkness, “Fuckers thought our fireflies were muzzle flashes.” Another voice volunteered that support troops should carry clubs instead of guns.
Near midnight, the battalion called to tell us we’d be linking up as a battalion on the north side of Ar Rifa before beginning a long drive north to an airfield near Qalat Sukkar. Gunny Wynn and I huddled beneath a poncho, shining a red-lens flashlight on our maps and trying to figure out how to get there. Qalat Sukkar was the next town north on Highway 7, about twenty miles away. The airfield, though, was east of the town on a road labeled Highway 17. It looked like forty or fifty miles of nighttime driving, without headlights, through enemy territory far forward of any American positions.
Wynn turned to me with a resigned look and said, “Being in this battalion is like winning the lottery every fucking day.”
27
NORTH OF AR RIFA, we spotted the battalion’s fireflies flashing in a field east of the highway and silently rolled into the perimeter. While the platoon prepared for the long drive to Qalat Sukkar, Gunny Wynn and I sat in on a brief of the night’s mission. I was reaching a numbed equilibrium where nothing fazed me. In the past twelve hours, I had been shot at by other Marines, overseen the killing of a group of men intent on killing us, watched artillery pour into a crowded town, nearly been killed by my own CO, and now was about to be launched on a long-range mission into enemy territory.
The colonel pulled his officers and staff NCOs into a tight circle and rasped through the plan. The British Parachute Regiment would assault the Iraqi military airfield at Qalat Sukkar the next morning in order to use it as a staging base for the push to Baghdad. We would do reconnaissance on the field before the attack. There were reports of tanks and antiaircraft guns there that posed a significant threat to the British force. No more details were given. We’d be racing sunrise and had to leave immediately to be of any use to the assault force. A platoon commander in the back asked the colonel if he had ever seen a movie called They Were Expendable.
I drove the first leg of the trip, allowing Wynn to catch a bit of much-needed rest. Night vision goggles restricted my sight to two narrow fields of grainy green. Ahead of me, Espera’s Humvee wove up the highway, its driver clearly struggling as I was. Colbert and Lovell carried the thermal sights at the front and rear of the platoon. Routine banter crackled back and forth on the radio as possible targets were identified and then dismissed as sheep, goats, or early-rising farmers. We were exhausted. I remembered Shaka’s scolding in Afghanistan about officers transferring their own fatigue onto troops who were capable of more than they knew. He was right. But you could only push so hard before something broke.
We left Highway 7 south of Qalat Sukkar to circumvent the town on empty country roads. For two hours, we crept through the darkness. I was taking limited cues — a glimpse of a house or the condition of the road — and building a story around them: population density, terrain, the likelihood of the Iraqi army being nearby. It occurred to me that my impressions could be completely wrong, that I could drive that route in daylight and make entirely different assumptions. Our assumptions governed our responses — whether to attack or withdraw if we got hit, whether to respond with massive force or precision fire, whether to call for reinforcements. I figured I was getting half my assumptions right. The thought was chilling. Fatigue, darkness, stress, and a vague mission conspired to envelop us in a fog. Emotionally, I felt as if we were driving a hundred miles an hour down a highway in a blinding snowstorm.