“Hitman Two just engaged a car that wouldn’t stop. We’re moving up to investigate. Stand by.” Still afraid of a trunk packed with TNT, we inched toward the car. Just as we got close, an order came over the radio to pass it by. We were told to advance half a kilometer up the road and set up another roadblock while the battalion continued to extricate itself from Muwaffiqiya.
I stared at the driver of the car as we passed. He breathed in rough, wheezy gasps. At least one bullet had punched through his face and exited through the top of his skull. God help us, I thought, and God help him.
A couple of hours before sunset, long shadows fell across fields of crops that stretched for miles in every direction. Up until then, we had seen only the small plots of subsistence farmers. This landscape looked more like the American Midwest. An occasional silo or irrigation pipe completed the effect. I relaxed outside the towns. There we could see, and any threat would have to expose itself to our superior firepower. I fiddled with my shortwave radio and propped it on the dashboard, where the voice of the BBC news anchor could compete with the Humvee’s engine and the wind rushing past. From London, she told Gunny Wynn and me what we were doing. The Army’s Third Infantry Division was closing in on Baghdad, with reports of fighting near Saddam International Airport. Marines were reported to hold a bridge over the Tigris at An Numaniyah, preparing to assault Baghdad from the southeast.
“That must be RCT-5 and RCT-7,” Wynn yelled over the engine. “So how’d we go from being in the lead to being way behind?”
“They swung west through open desert while we shot our way through every shitty little town in central Iraq,” I said. “You complaining that someone else is up there to beat on the Republican Guard for us?”
He smiled. “Nope. Just wondering how we got so lucky. Every time we get lucky, something bad happens to even the score.”
By piecing together news reports, official intelligence, and what we saw with our own eyes, we could usually figure out where we fit in the bigger picture. The Army and Marines would launch a two-pronged attack on Baghdad in the coming days. While the rest of the division crossed the Tigris at An Numaniyah, we would attack into Al Kut to fix in place a Republican Guard armored division garrisoned there, keeping it from hitting the flank or rear of the force near Baghdad. Al Kut was one of the largest cities in Iraq. I found it hard to believe we’d actually attack into a city that big but had learned in the past couple of weeks to reframe how I thought about risk. Yes, it would be completely insane, and yes, we may well do it.
The countryside was so bucolic and the evening so beautiful that the war faded a bit, and I began to fantasize about a warm meal and a clean bed waiting at our destination. I knew, though, that there would be only a muddy field and a cold MRE. Around dusk, the horizon ahead of us flickered with explosions. They only increased my feeling of normalcy, as if they were summer thunderstorms over Kansas, not jets pounding Republican Guard positions around Al Kut. We drove on through the first hour of darkness. As we got closer, we saw the explosions beneath the flashes. Their low rumble rolled across the fields, audible even over the roaring diesels.
We pulled off the road, and the Humvees strained through deep mud, their tires flinging clay over everything. I slipped and slid from vehicle to vehicle, emplacing the heavy machine guns in my little piece of the battalion perimeter. The night was so dark I had to use my night vision goggles just to see the next truck as I walked the lines. The Marines were exhausted, and we planned to leave at first light, so I considered giving the order to skip digging holes. This mud would absorb mortar shrapnel like a huge, leaden sponge. Remembering the terror of our bombardment near Qalat Sukkar, I thought better of it, and we spent the next forty-five minutes carving ranger graves in the wet clay. Colonel Ferrando was right: combat is unforgiving, and hard work trumps hope and luck combined.
My exhaustion had become insomnia, and I volunteered for radio watch while the other guys slept. Snores rose from sleeping bags as I sat in the passenger seat, staring into the darkness, thinking of home. What was my family doing? It was early afternoon on the East Coast, Wednesday, April 2, 2003. My sisters were in class. My parents were at work. Were they worrying about me? I hoped not. At any given time, I knew how much danger I was in. Usually, it didn’t seem like much. They had to assume the worst, and imaginations run wild without hard information. I wished I could tell them I was fine and put them at ease.
Through the Humvee’s dusty windshield, I watched flares popping in the distance, not knowing whether they were ours or the enemy’s. Each one burned brightly for thirty seconds, swinging in its parachute and silhouetting buildings and palm trees. The radio warned of Iraqi tanks in the area, and a machine gun fired somewhere in the dark. Night radio watch always made me philosophical, and I debated whether the war was more dangerous than I thought. Maybe my family’s concerns were justified. Maybe my sense of safety had become skewed. A massive explosion nearby seemed to confirm the thought. I turned away to preserve my night vision from the sudden light and waited for the flames to die down. After a few hours of listening to the radio’s soothing hiss, I woke Gunny Wynn and slept fitfully till dawn.
“Balls out. Damn, they’re really lighting into them,” Sergeant Colbert said. Half the platoon clustered around his Blue Force Tracker, watching a battle unfold a few kilometers to our north. Marine vehicle icons clustered on the bridge into Al Kut, and we could hear them shooting. LAVs, mainly, pumping 25 mm shells and ripping their chain guns. Interspersed with the lighter fire were the occasional explosions of a tank’s main gun. Suddenly, just as we expected the Marines to move into the city, they backed off the bridge and raced south down the highway, passing us without a glance. When the vehicles faded from sight, we continued to watch their icons falling off our map screen to the south at a steady clip.
“Hitman Two, stand by to move in ten mikes.” The captain interrupted our voyeurism, and we began to throw gear into the Humvees, top off oil, wash windshields, and lube machine guns. The CO came over to fill us in.
“That was RCT-1 in Al Kut. They got right up on the bridge and put on a show. RCT-5 and RCT-7 are north of the Tigris and moving on Baghdad. We’re heading south right now, back the way we came, and then eventually we’ll swing around and cross the Tigris in An Numaniyah.”
I couldn’t believe it. “You mean this whole thing was a feint? Everything we’ve done since leaving Qalat Sukkar was to put on a show in Al Kut?”
The captain nodded. “Looks that way.”
It’s not that I felt cheated. I knew that every main effort needs supporting efforts, and we’d been the main effort for long enough. It just seemed funny that in the twenty-first century, a feint still meant getting right up on the bridge and pretending to attack a town. I thought of my buddies with RCT-5 and hoped they appreciated our efforts on their behalf.
We spun through the mud and up onto the highway. Driving south felt like an anticlimax. Each previous mile had been closer to Baghdad, closer to victory, the end of the war, and home. Driving south was depressing. I worked hard to stay vigilant. It takes only minutes to set up an ambush, and the fact that we’d driven past the day before meant nothing outside our own minds.
Refugees filled the road. Thousands of them. Young couples with children, old women in black, men our age watching us self-consciously. They trudged south carrying water bottles, bundles of clothes, bags of bread, and one another. We drove past them for two hours. I was hungry but embarrassed to eat in front of people whose lives had been reduced to what they could carry in plastic shopping bags. We had barely enough food for ourselves. Marines who had eaten only one meal each day for the past week gave their MREs to the fleeing Iraqis. I couldn’t bring myself to stop them. The worst were the children. Babies could be carried, and adults can fend for themselves, but five- and six-year-olds walked next to their parents. Some limped and some cried, but all kept walking south. Away from the bombing. Away from the coming fight.