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  Fifteen huge M1A1 Abrams battle tanks, the best in the business, stood nearby like brooding steel racehorses, eager to run. Fifty-four armored Amtracs were scattered about, each twenty feet long, eight feet high, and able to carry twenty Marines safely inside while tooling around at forty miles per hour. Sixty-three camouflaged Humvees dotted the sands, several of them specially modified with souped-up engines and armed with a staggering array of missiles, machine guns, and automatic grenade launchers. These vehicles, which traded some armor for speed, were known as CAATs (Combined Anti-Armor Teams) and would race around the desert to protect our flanks and probe enemy weaknesses. This was going to be a war not only of bullets but also of tracks and wheels and gasoline, of rapid movement and space-age mayhem.

  “When other Iraqi units see what happens to the 51st, they might just go ahead and surrender,” McCoy shouted, and the confidence of Darkside Six was infused into his 1,004 Marines. Although most had never seen combat, they whooped as if they were at a Super Bowl instead of in the middle of the Arabian Desert, and the smell of war rose in their nostrils. Few considered that some would not be coming back, for their blood was hot, their knives sharp, and their guns ready, and nobody felt the least bit sorry for Saddam Hussein’s goddamn doomed 51st Mechanized Division.

  The formation ended, and everyone got back to work, tearing down the camp and getting ready to move out. The heavy metal band AC/DC wailed “Hell’s Bells” from a boom box. It was a terrific speech. Too bad Casey and I missed it. We were already gone.

  We had gotten up hours earlier, about four o’clock in the morning the same day that McCoy would give his pep talk, to tune in the radio and hear President Bush give Saddam Hussein and his two weird sons forty-eight hours to leave Iraq. “Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict commenced at a time of our choosing,” the president warned.

  Once those forty-eight hours were up, we had to be at the starting line, because no one really expected the Hussein gang would leave. So beneath the glow of a full moon, Casey and I had our boys load the Humvees with enough ammunition, communications gear, fuel, food, and water to get us through five full days, and we went tearing out with the advance regimental quartering party to find our battalion’s assigned staging point in the Kuwait dirt.

  In any major military movement, somebody has to go in first and stake out an area that is defensible, is accessible by vehicles, and has good lines of communication. With tens of thousands of men and vehicles on the move, the job of the quartering party is not very sexy, but screw it up and confusion reigns.

  Our designated dispersal area was several miles from Safwan Hill, a big pimple in the desert on the Iraqi side of the border with Kuwait. The Iraqis used this dominant geographical feature as their southernmost observation post, and as dawn broke on March 17, they had a superb view of the powerful American force that was growing before their eyes. I knew this place only too well, as did other Marines and Army grunts who had chewed Iraqi sand before. When the fight started, Safwan Hill was to be pulverized.

  We guided in the rest of the battalion that afternoon, and for hours, wave after wave of Marines arrived in convoys that trailed sky-high rooster tails of dust. The Iraqis up on the hill must have been putting down their binoculars and packing their bags to get the hell out of there. It was after dark before our final elements arrived, and before anyone slept, we were lined up with all of our guns facing north.

  “MISSILE LAUNCH… MISSILE LAUNCH… MISSILE LAUNCHT!”

  We thought it was the fucking end of the world. Shit! Where’s my gas mask? We had gotten up after a few hours of brief, exhausted sleep and were still stumbling about in the darkness when the banshee cries from an Army Patriot missile defense battery’s loudspeakers erupted about two hours before dawn on March 18. The missile boys had set up shop a few hundred yards from our position without our hearing a sound and had just scared the hell out of us.

  We jumped over and onto each other in a mad scramble for gas masks and jammed them down tight over faces still lathered with shaving cream, believing that Saddam was about to hit us. Then came a loud “ALL CLEAR… ALL CLEAR!” and we stripped off the masks and happily took deep breaths of clean air. Our new neighbors played that game all day long, until we eventually stopped reacting.

  Even so, we all believed Iraq would probably smack us at some point with chemical and biological weapons. Our leaders had built much of the reason for this preemptive war around those weapons stockpiles, and we had trained hard for surviving them. For us, it was not a question of if… just when. Therefore, while we grew casual about paying attention to the frequent Patriot warnings, I was still glad to be wearing my MOPP (Mission Oriented Protective Posture) suit, which would give us some protection during an assault by unconventional weapons.

  The suit consisted of a jacket and matching overall pants, worn over our T-shirts and shorts. The activated charcoal lining provided an extra layer of insulation that was welcome on chilly nights. We carried masks and heavy rubber gloves that we could put on in less than eight seconds. Bulky booties completed the ensemble but were so clumsy and hot that we seldom wore them for more than a few minutes. Oddly, the MOPPs were of a mottled green pattern, so after wearing desert camouflage for months in Kuwait, we would enter Iraq in jungle colors.

  If Saddam tried to chem us, it would be no more than an inconvenience, because our suits provided good protection for our lungs against any aerosol weapon. Being slimed during a biological/persistent-chemical attack was worse, because those agents might eat right through boots and skin. If a nuke fell, then nothing would help, but we knew our deaths would result in Baghdad becoming a radioactive hole in the ground.

  We weren’t frightened by any of it, but we always wore the suits, because they took too long to put on when a warning came. They also took a long time to take off.

  Answering calls of nature meant you had to take off your flak jacket with its ceramic tile plates, then your bulky MOPP jacket, then the suspenders that held up the pants and the various clips that held everything together.

  As extra protection against WMD attacks, we had our Poultry Chemical Contamination Detectors, five pigeons named Silent Bob, Jay, Crazy Pete, Little Bastard, and Botulism, that lived in cages strapped to the hoods of our Humvees. They were to ride into combat with us under the theory that if they died suddenly, we should probably put on our masks. The same scheme had worked during gas attacks in World War I, and with canaries in potentially poisonous coal mines, so why not now? Chickens had been tested in Kuwait, but they tended to die for too many different reasons, so the great Kuwaiti Fried Chicken experiment was abandoned. Instead, our battalion saw Saddam’s WMD bet and raised him five pigeons.

  The day was spent in final preparations, since the Iraqi dictator had not been seen waving farewell to his loyal subjects. The battalion nudged even closer to the border, our vehicles were refueled, ammo was passed out, breach points were designated in the berms, and we arranged covering fire from other units. Then the intelligence staff dropped the news on us that the 51st Mechanized Division might not be alone in the Basra area. Somehow, the Medina Division, a well-trained armored unit of the elite Republican Guard, had been trucked in with their assload of tanks during the last several nights.

  McCoy took the development in stride. “Well, good on ‘em,” he said. “We’ll slaughter them, too.” His staff scrambled to dramatically change the attack plan only hours before the scheduled departure, because it seemed that a huge armored battle was looming.

  McCoy gathered his officers for a final pep talk and pointed toward the setting sun, which dimmed as it lowered into a mist of dust. “Look at that sunset,” he told them. “Remember it. That might be the last sunset some people see.” He had been a rifle company commander in Desert Storm and knew what was about to happen when the talking stopped and the fighting began. He wanted to be sure his officers understood that they were expected to lead, not follow, and that they must not yield to panic. The motto
was “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” Casey came out of the meeting less nervous over going to war than he had been when he had braces put on his teeth as a kid.

  As the minutes before the invasion ticked away, the desert around me seemed alive with men and machines. My sniper rifle rested in a drag bag in my truck, for giant armored vehicles were about to go to work in this big sandbox, and a sniper has no business in a crossfire of tanks. I would get my shots in later.

  I retreated into myself to be alone with my thoughts. This war was unfinished business, and we considered Saddam Hussein to be our Hitler. We would not be beating up on Mother Teresa tomorrow but taking down a sadistic brute and a whole army of evil people. After Desert Storm, we felt the job was incomplete; we were pulled up short after achieving the rigidly defined objective of kicking the Iraqis out of Kuwait. If we had finished the job then, we wouldn’t be here now. That was Hussein’s tough luck, for this time we were turning the pit bulls loose and the only order was to go get the fucking rabbit.

  There was only one possibility that really brought a lump to my throat: that the attack might be called off and we would be left stuck in the Kuwaiti sand for another six months while diplomats dithered and the press and the liberals tried to turn this whole thing into another Vietnam.

  Surely they wouldn’t call if off now, with thousands of American soldiers and Marines, a British armored division, and other allied troops all poised and ready along a border that was nothing but a couple of sand berms and barbed-wire fences. Aircraft carriers and ships from the U.S. Navy and other nations were on station, and warplanes were rolling out on runways around the globe. From the Pentagon to the campaign theater headquarters at Camp Doha in Kuwait, staff officers of different services and nationalities were working closely together without animosity or rivalry.

  Much had been made about America going into combat virtually alone and without many of its traditional allies. In my opinion, that was for the best. I was glad the Brits were with us and didn’t care that the French and some of the others were not around, because all they would do was take up space, suck fuel, and slow us down. The Russians were disappointing, because I had long felt that we would someday be toe to toe on a battlefield, but as allies, not as enemies-and what a combined force we would be. I wanted them to stand tall with us in Iraq, but they didn’t, and so what? I didn’t want anyone tagging along who did not want to be here.

  The kind I wanted around was exactly like the ragtag collection of six Marines that made up the crews of our two armored Humvees. These boys, professionals all, had become our immediate family, and Casey and I, as the designated parents, personally trained them and shared with them our meals, tents, and trucks. The bonds of brotherhood were strong, because we all understood that someday it might be just the eight of us against a large enemy force. We had not picked these guys by accident; we chose them because we believed they would be reliable in a firefight.

  My driver, and the truck leader, was twenty-two-year-old Corporal Orlando Fuentes, who had gown up in a Puerto Rican barrio until he was thirteen, then moved to Pennsylvania. The first time I saw his big eyes and round face, he reminded me of one my girls’ stuffed animals, and I exclaimed, “Hey, you look just like a panda bear!” The nickname stuck, and the Panda was cool with it. Trained as one of those suicidal idiots who drive the CAATs, he knew only two speeds-fast and faster-and philosophically did not believe in the brake pedal. I sat up front in the passenger seat, usually scared out of my wits that he was going to kill me before Saddam had a chance.

  Private First Class Daniel Tracy, a Missouri boy who was one of my reclamation projects, rode in the back to handle the radios and provide security. Only twenty years old, Daniel was an old-school Marine with a gift for brawling and getting into trouble. He stacked up an impressive record of being belligerent and hard to control while in 29 Palms, and when he blew off a corrective program, we court-martialed him, busted him in rank, and sent him to the brig to cool off. When he came out, I pulled him into the company office so that I could personally step on him now and then, and I learned that he was a loyal and tough kid who did not suffer fools gladly. My kind of guy. He was also valuable because he honestly thought he was bulletproof anywhere beyond the Baghdad city limits. “I know I’m going to get whacked in Baghdad,” he had complained for weeks. “I’m not going in there. Put me back in the brig, I don’t care. I’ll fight everywhere else, but I won’t go into Baghdad.” I figured he probably would.

  Standing on a platform between the front and back seats was our gunner, Mexico-born Sergeant Luis Castillo, whose upper body protruded above the Humvee in a turret that mounted either a Mark-19 automatic grenade launcher or a 240-Golf medium machine gun, weapons we would mix and match to the mission. Castillo was very reserved and had been a sergeant for several months although he was only twenty years old. The tall, slim Marine was content to let other people give the orders and leave him alone to shoot his gun.

  Another member of our crew was Corporal Clint Newbern, the communications guy in Casey’s truck. He had a knack for being able to dial in God or anybody else we needed in times of wicked stress, although his southern drawl on the radio never hinted that something of interest might be happening. Lean and wiry and newly married, he was born near Savannah, Georgia, to parents who were martial arts experts and raised their son to earn a couple of black belts of his own. Newbern wasn’t scared of anything and was given to us because his former boss thought the sarcastic young Marine was going to beat him up, which was a distinct possibility. He fit right in.

  Handling the gun on Casey’s truck was tall, tough Sergeant Jerry Marsh from Bakersfield, California. He had been a grunt in Kilo Company when Casey was the XO, and he was a machine gunner with exceptional eyesight. He really knew his shit when it came to handling that automatic weapon, and he kept it meticulously clean, even in the worst weather. The soft-spoken Marsh, however, was beset by personal demons, and I handled a lot of calls before we left 29 Palms about how things were not going well around the Marsh household. It was good to get him overseas.

  Casey’s driver was another story. A short and pudgy corporal, he excelled during training and was a gear queer who liked to play dress-up and wore every piece of modern fancy combat equipment he could lay his hands on. But once we all started living together, we learned that he frequently lapsed into taking like a small child. We began to wonder how the meticulous youngster, whom we called “Corporal Baby,” would hold up under the stress of combat. We would just have to wait for that verdict.

  At 5:34 A.M. on March 20 in Iraq (9:34 P.M. EST on March 19 in the United States), Operation Iraqi Freedom began when a barrage of cruise missiles and smart bombs fell on a Baghdad location where American intelligence teams thought Saddam Hussein was hiding. He wasn’t there, but the dictator had ignored the demand to step down, so the game was on, and “shock and awe” would be the theme for the day.

  Out in front of us, Safwan Hill lit up like a birthday cake in hell. Big Tomahawk missiles swooshed into deadly dives and exploded with earthshaking suddenness, artillery rounds roared overhead like freight trains, and planes howled in to drop loads of bombs. The continuous explosions turned the night sky crimson and yellow and orange as a piece of everything in our arsenal slammed into that pile of dirt. The ground shook, and the concussions of exploding bombs thudded against our ears. I don’t remember exactly how tall Safwan Hill was before the bombardment, but there wasn’t much left by the time Marines went up to secure it. The Iraqis were long gone, and the observation posts lay in smoking ruin.

  The sights and sounds of impending battle are incredible. Fire flashed from the bombs and rockets, radios buzzed, the sky grew thick with helicopters and planes, and machines clanked around in the darkness. Everything seemed to be happening at once. Engineers operating huge plows tore holes in the sand berms, and thousands of Marines, armed to the teeth, began to move.

  If wars were always this much fun, we could sell tickets, like t
o football games, and I would be the richest man in the world.

  8

  First Kills

  There’s nothing like a good war to get your adrenaline pumping, and giant butterflies were bumping around in my stomach. Like tens of thousands of other men approaching battle that day, I was scared, but having been in combat before, I knew this was only normal. Stepping into the unknown makes everyone nervous. The butterflies were nothing but pregame jitters and could be controlled. I was very aware, however, that just because someone has done this kind of thing a thousand times before does not mean you are going to get it right this time. The past does not matter in this situation, only the present.

  Before dawn on March 20, 2003, American ground forces finally went charging into Iraq. To the west of us, the Army’s massive 3rd Infantry Division swept forward in long snakelike convoys plunging into the desert in what would become a huge left hook toward Baghdad. The Marines would take the eastern route through Basra and fight through the cities located along the two major highways that led north to the capital. The highly mobile 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions and the 173rd Airborne Regiment were pouring forward in their helicopters, and the British armor was on the move. Air power was plastering targets throughout the country, and Special Forces teams were already at work on specific targets. From a standing start, we all gladly joined the attack, although we had hundreds of miles to go, against unknown opposition and the ever-present threat of an attack by chemical or biological weapons. There was no hesitation.

  Our own big Abrams tanks thundered through the breach into Iraq at 5:45 A.M. What had all the makings of a cavalry charge turned quickly into a massive traffic jam.

  The original plan for our entry had been for just the 1st Tank Battalion to go through this particular breach while our unit went through a different one. But the reports of the bulked-up Medina Division being in the area forced the planners to redraw their maps overnight, and they chose to send us both through the same hole in the sand walls. Instead of spreading over a front of three miles, we would hit with a clenched fist of immense firepower that would match any opposing Iraqi armored force.