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  We were only a few miles away from An Nasiriyah during the big fight but were not involved in it and didn’t even know about it until later. When our quartering party reached the dispersal area in advance of the battalion, we took a break to air out the vehicles, clean weapons, grab some chow, and wash our hands, feet, and faces. But only fifteen minutes after coming to a halt, Casey got the unexpected call to move out immediately, forcing us to throw our gear back together, gas up, reload the two trucks, and take off for the regimental headquarters. We were about to roll out on a daring and dangerous mission into bad-guy territory and would not see our battalion again for four days.

  Gunner Chris Eby, a weathered veteran of twenty-two years in the Corps, was the gruff leader of the regimental quartering party, and he assembled the advance teams of all the battalions to move forward as a single unit and find a place large enough to accommodate all of Regimental Combat Team 7-three combat battalions and the attached engineer, reconnaissance, tank, and artillery units-so we would all be together for the next push. The Secret Squirrels of the intelligence teams once again thought that they had pinpointed the location of Saddam Hussein’s powerful and elusive Medina Division, and we were going after them. The powerful division, which was said to have perhaps two hundred tanks, hundreds of heavy artillery pieces, and maybe up to ten thousand men, officially was named the “Medina the Luminous Division,” and we intended to illuminate it even more.

  Casey and I returned to our trucks after the briefing and told the guys we were about to hit the road again.

  “Speed is the thing here,” Casey emphasized.

  “Where are we going?” someone asked.

  Casey unfolded a map on the hood of his Humvee and explained that we would be going 175 miles farther up the road, to the railroad city of An Numaniyah, where we were to cross the Tigris River. He pointed to a spot and said, “That will put us seventy-five miles from Baghdad.”

  He did not have to explain that making a leap of 175 miles through enemy-held territory would be a dangerous undertaking, but looking around at our traveling buddies made the task at least seem possible. This was no lightly armed Jessica Lynch convoy, for we had about thirty hardback Humvees, manned by combat Marines carrying everything from machine guns to antitank missiles and radios that could put us in instant touch with aircraft. Gunner Eby, who drank more coffee than the tasters at Maxwell House, would lead the parade, and he intended to roll right through any enemy ambush with guns blazing and not stop until we were at our destination.

  This was no meandering, touristy jaunt through the interesting countryside of the Euphrates Valley, but deadly serious business. We were trying to lead the regiment into position for a huge fight with one of the major divisions guarding Baghdad.

  The weather was perfect for a long Sunday drive, and during the first part of the trip, we barreled along the six-lane highway at about fifty miles per hour, and cool wind blew through the windows. As haggard and sleepless as we were, we had to stay awake and alert, and it was on this stretch of deserted highway that I noticed for the first time that Jerry Marsh, Casey’s gunner, was no ordinary mortal. In my truck, the boys took turns standing in the machine gun turret as we jounced over the long miles. But in Casey’s Humvee, Marsh just stood there, locked in position behind his gun. He would keep that position hour after hour, day after day, with bugs hitting his face and sand grinding his eyes, knowing that if anyone was going to die, it was most likely going to be him. He reminded me of Granny tied into her rocking chair atop the Beverly Hillbillies’ truck. With his exceptional eyesight, it was good to have him up there.

  We had made about seventy-five miles when the speed factor vanished at a narrow bridge across the Euphrates River, where we hit a traffic jam of colossal proportions and came to a grinding halt. The sun was setting by the time our turn came to cross, and it took another forty minutes to get over and regroup. The blue canopy of sky changed into soot darkness, so we went to night vision goggles and rolled on into uncharted territory.

  The good road gave way to construction as we struck out almost due north, and our speed dropped off dramatically to a maximum of fifteen miles per hour. We were passing fewer and fewer other vehicles, and the fields around us were deserted, eerily dark and quiet. This wasn’t good. Where the hell was everybody? Trigger fingers rested on guns.

  Midnight came and went and still we drove, and sleep pulled at our eyelids. About two o’clock on Monday morning, March 24, one of our tracked vehicles bogged down in a marshy area beside the road. When we stopped to pull out, a heavily camouflaged Marine from a Force Recon platoon materialized out of the surrounding darkness and wanted to know what the hell we were doing up here.

  “Moving north,” Gunner Eby told him.

  “You guys know there’s nobody in front of you?” asked the Marine with the blackened face. His team was scattered about at the northernmost edge of the advance, and he said they did not know what was going on farther up the road.

  Somehow we had jumped to the lead position of the entire Marine advance and were basically out on our own. That was only a minor concern to Gunner Eby, so he thanked the Recon dude for the information and cranked us up again.

  Sleep was quickly forgotten as we moved deeper into the unknown. There were no stars, and we heard helicopters buzzing overhead, heading for targets up ahead. We waited expectantly for a sharp crack of gunfire or the sudden blast of an ambush, but none came.

  Eby kept us rolling for two more hours before pulling us to a stop. We were so far out on a limb that we could no longer even see the tree, but both Casey and I argued that we should keep on pushing. We dont know where everybody else is, but we know where we are, so let’s keep moving! Gunner Eby rightly ignored us. It was senseless to step much farther into the great void without supporting forces; the last person we had seen was that lone Marine advance scout, and he was now far behind us.

  Except for our radios, we were out of contact with any friendly units, isolated and exposed. All of a sudden, those thirty Humvees bristling with weaponry didn’t seem quite as powerful as before. If we were jumped by a bunch of enemy tanks and troops tonight, we would put up a hell of a fight but stood a good chance of being annihilated.

  Nevertheless, I had reached the end of my rope. Our convoy coiled into a defensive position beside the road, and guards were posted, but I passed out in my seat even before my Humvee coasted to a stop. For the first time since Kuwait, I got more than forty-five minutes of shutdown time, and the boys had mercy on an old man and let me sleep.

  Fortunately, our luck held and nothing happened while we were parked out there on our own beside the road in the middle of the Iraqi night. I awoke two hours later, at daybreak, to see the Abrams tanks and the Amtracs of the 5th Marines grinding past, which meant the big boys had caught up and we were no longer alone. I got out and stretched, feeling as if I had been asleep in a cushy hotel bed for a week.

  Thousands of Marines and hundreds of vehicles were pounding through the red grit in the brilliant light of a clear morning. Gunner Eby received orders from our own regimental headquarters, still far back down the road, to tuck into the 5th Marines column for a while. We got back on the road.

  Desert sandstorms are not weather phenomena but evil things that rise up from hell. One of the extra-large variety brewed up and dropped on us on Monday, March 24, and the war came to a halt. The sheer power of the hurricane of dirt made all of our weapons look puny by comparison. When those breezes start to whisper against your ear, you had better take shelter and button up, for you won’t be going anywhere for a while, and you are going to come out of the experience feeling like sand has been ground into your very soul.

  We had begun to feel cocky because of the speed of our midnight ride and believed that the Iraqis could not stop us. We thought that nothing could. We were wrong.

  Our convoy was taking a maintenance break when the first gentle breezes began to hum around the vehicles, raising the talcumlike loose sand and
swirling it about in small funnels of dirt. The velocity increased, more sand jumped into the air, and visibility fell as dirt colored the sky. Within a few hours the wind was howling, and the giant sandstorm covered everything in the Euphrates River Valley. There was nothing to do but button up and stay put until the storm passed, because telling directions had become impossible.

  Our heavy Humvee was being rocked on its springs by the wind, and from my seat in front I couldn’t see a damned thing. I lowered goggles over my eyes and wrapped a thick bandana around my mouth, but it made no difference. Sand seeped into every crevice, including those in my body, and choked me with tiny dunes that piled up at the back of my throat. We shut the trucks tight and stuffed rags into every crack, but the harsh wind, keening at a banshee pitch straight out of a Halloween movie, seemed to push sand right through metal.

  Outside it was worse, but a few Marines had to be out there on security patrols, and their exposed flesh was lashed with whips of grainy sand. Risks increased with the bad weather, and all along the line, dreadful accidents happened. A guy fell from an Amtrac and had to lie injured in the swirling storm because medical evacuation was impossible. A tank drove off a bridge and plunged into the Euphrates, drowning its crew, and no one knew about it until the next day. A bulldozer ran over two sleeping men, killing one and severely injuring the other.

  It was like being trapped inside a deadly sunset, and the rushing clouds that surrounded us changed from orange to red to purple as the wind changed speed and direction, then stacked high into the dark scarlet sky until we could not tell when day turned to night. There was nothing to do but sit there and endure the pounding as the windblown grit chipped paint from our big metal machines. Sleep was impossible. The millions of dollars that we had floating around the battlefield in advanced optics and sighting systems couldn’t help us, so we sat there blind.

  “The storm was worse than anyone imagined,” the battalion historians would write later. Mother Nature did what the Iraqi army could not do-stop the 1st Marine Division. The fucking dirt was everywhere, the wind would not let up, and for ten hours, we sat there and suffered.

  The sandstorm finally eased about three o’clock in the morning of Tuesday, March 25. Then it began to rain, the water pouring down in cataracts that slammed us for the rest of the night, churned the dust into pasty mud, and further ruined the already sloppy road. Despite the weather, we started moving again even before the sun came up over a yellow horizon. None of our boys had been hurt, but days would pass before our conversations could start with something other than a cough that visibly expelled dust from our bodies.

  A herd of camels, saddled but riderless and separated by the storm from their owners, serenely strolled past at daybreak, their heads held high, haughty princes of this terrible environment.

  I had hoped that by being out front, we might bump into some action, because I was feeling hamstrung. Once the battalion caught up with us, we rejoined the Main and continued to roll. Iraq seemed endless, and the odometer on my Humvee was ticking away the miles to Baghdad.

  Were we ever going to find some fighting? “Is this what we’re going to be doing for the entire war?” Casey asked me one afternoon, and although I wanted to give him my usual optimistic song and dance, I was having some doubts myself. The days of the war were falling from the calendar at an alarming rate. It wouldn’t last much longer, and I had not been involved in any real fighting, including the dustup back at Basra. In moments of doubt, I wondered if McCoy had forgotten our deal, or had lost confidence in me.

  11

  Send In the Bull

  There had been a major shake-up in the Pentagon over the past months, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, wanting a thorough overhaul of the Army and new strategic thinking, won a decisive victory over the generals. Rumsfeld argued that a relatively small, fast-moving attack force could slice right through the Iraqi defenses and reach Baghdad quickly, making the war short. The generals argued for the more traditional doctrine laid down by Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Desert Storm and the current U.S. secretary of state: the combination of overwhelming force, a specific objective, and a clear exit strategy. Rumsfeld and his civilian deputies outmaneuvered and overruled them, and as a result, this offensive was being carried out with about half the manpower used in Desert Storm. Early in the planning, they had considered using only fifty thousand troops, but since Iraq had a population of twenty-four million people, including more than six million in Baghdad, that one was discarded.

  Shortly before the invasion began, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki told Congress that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in Iraq. He was upbraided by the Pentagon’s civilian leadership and retired. Army Secretary Thomas White supported Shinseki and would be fired. Rumsfeld and his acolytes were clearly in control.

  But now, their novel war plans were in jeopardy. Moving fast and keeping unrelenting pressure on the enemy meant that the advance could not slow down and that support troops had to keep pace, just the opposite of what was happening. Maps and reports showed the Army was struggling out in the desert, and the big Marine drive along the two big highways was sputtering. The unexpectedly tough enemy opposition, ambushes on convoys, bad weather, the sandstorm, and an increasingly dire fuel and supply situation had the top commanders second-guessing themselves. On television, former generals said the war wasn’t going well because we didn’t have enough troops involved. The whole enterprise had reached a critical point, and the leaders were about to order a three-week halt in place to refit, reorganize, and rethink.

  Out in the sand, we were totally unaware of all of the bureaucratic fighting in Washington. I was just hanging around in the desert with Casey and my boys, and all we wanted to do was to get into the fight. Our trucks were packed with everything we needed, and there were Marines as far as we could see, lines of tracked vehicles and trucks and thousands of men, all moving in the same direction.

  We were so firmly on the sidelines that except for some local patrols for security, we were snoozing, getting haircuts, doing laundry, cleaning weapons, and servicing the trucks. In fact, from where we stood, we thought the war was going quite well.

  More than a week had elapsed since we had invaded Iraq, and my butt was sore from spending so much time bumping along in the passenger seat of my Humvee. I stomped around the sand and bitched out of frustration with being useless in the middle of a war. I was a sniper, and I needed to get into the fight.

  About four kilometers directly ahead, the 5th Marine Regiment was bogged down on Route 1 outside of Ad Diwaniyah, a town of about a quarter million people on the central Iraqi plain. Every time the 5th Marines battled through one patch of ambushers, another bunch was waiting for them, and they had been taking casualties for almost two days. We were some four kilometers back and could hear a bit of battle going on, bang-bang, thump-thump, but it didn’t involve us.

  And about fifty miles to the east, over on Route 7, another regimental-sized Marine unit called Task Force Tarawa had ground to a stop. They were blocked outside of Al Kut, a town where, back in the distant era of World War I, Turkish defenders held up the British drive on Baghdad for 143 days. We couldn’t wait that long, but TF Tarawa, which had been bloodied in An Nasiriyah, was fighting on fumes. They were just about out of everything, and the supply convoys trying to bring up water, ammunition, and fuel were being shot up in the south.

  Finally, on Saturday, March 29, my luck changed and we got back into the game. Sergeant Major Dave Howell drove up, unfolded his stocky frame from the Humvee, and took me aside. “John, get your ass over to the command tent,” he said. “We’re getting out of this cluster fuck. They’ve decided to send in the Bull, and the Boss wants you.”

  Dave had come out of Force Recon, and although he was the senior enlisted man in the battalion and a trusted tactical adviser to Colonel McCoy, he would always be just a fuckin’ grunt at heart. He loved to go tearing across the battlefield so he
could guide a fight, and I had assigned two good snipers, Staff Sergeant Dino Moreno, a dark-haired Italian who had been placed in my slot as the sniper platoon sergeant when I moved over to be the H &S gunny, and Corporal Mark Evnin, a New Englander, to ride shotgun with him. When Howell’s regular Humvee driver decided to become a pacifist just before we went to war, Dave kicked his ass out of the truck and Evnin became the driver. The fourth seat was given to one of our more popular embedded reporters, John Koopman of the San Francisco Chronicle. We called him “Paperboy.”

  Dave Howell was the only person in the Corps who called me John, instead of Jack, but usually only did so when he was angry, just as my father had done. Now I felt like my surrogate dad had given me a Christmas present. I grabbed Casey and headed for McCoy’s command post.

  The new mission would have a totally unexpected result for me. Not only was I finally going to get into the shooting war, but since necessity breeds invention, a flat tire on a Humvee was about to become a stepping-stone to an important new variable in my craft, something that had never been taught in sniper school. My concept of a Mobile Sniper Strike Team, shelved long ago, was about to be reborn. The answer had been right under my nose the whole time.

  Radios provided a low grumble of background noise in the large tent as McCoy sketched out his plan with a black grease pen on a whiteboard. Marines were tied down in independent struggles on Route 1 and on Route 7, but a thin east-west road called Highway 17 linked those two main highways. We were to go and capture that road to open a new supply route over to the beleaguered Task Force Tarawa, but the road was dotted with towns and villages, any one of which could be an enemy strongpoint, and we would have to tackle them, one after another. Since it was not in our nature to be passive, McCoy ordered, “Go in like you own the place. We’re going to kick over the beehive and see what comes out.”