aExcellent,a Colbert answers. as.h.i.+t my brains out. Not too hard, not too runny.a aThat sucks when itas runny and you have to wipe fifty times,a Trombley says conversationally.

aIam not talking about that.a Colbert a.s.sumes his stern teacheras voice. aIf itas too hard or too soft, somethingas not right. You might have a problem.a aIt should be a little acid,a Person says, offering his own medical opinion. aAnd burn a little when it comes out.a aMaybe on your little b.i.t.c.h a.s.shole from all the c.o.c.k thatas been stuffed up it,a Colbert snaps.

Hearing this exchange, another Marine in the platoon says, aMan, the Marines are so h.o.m.oerotic. Thatas all we talk about. Have you guys ever realized how h.o.m.oerotic this whole thing is?a Just before sundown, Marine artillery batteries, dug in a few kilometers ahead, begin to pound the city. As darkness falls, Colbertas team excavates Ranger graves by the Humvee. The ground trembles as a column of ma.s.sive M1A1 tanks rolls past, a few feet from where the Marines are resting. Out of the darkness, someone shouts, aHey, if you lay down with your c.o.c.k on the ground, it feels good.a I WAKE UP AT DAWN on March 24 to the sound of a pickax thudding into the ground near my sleeping hole. Near me, a sergeant in Second Platoon named Antonio Espera excavates a pit, sweat rolling off his face even though itas a chilly morning. aIam f.u.c.king ashamed, dog,a he says, huffing as he swings the pickax. aWhen we left Afghanistan we didnat leave a speck of Americana behind.a Espera gestures to the trash-strewn road. aI was trained Marines donat litter.a His rage at the garbagea"thousands of brown plastic wrappers and green foil pouches from MREs lying along the highwaya"has made him irrational. Heas digging a trash pit, when there are half a dozen sleeping holes, soon to be vacated, which could serve the same purpose. But he continues digging at a furious pace.

With his shaved head and deep-set eyes, Espera is one of the scariest-looking Marines in the platoon. Technically, he serves as Colbertas a.s.sistant team leader, though in actuality he commands a separate Humvee. Esperaas crew of four Marines always rolls directly behind or beside Colbertas, and he is one of Colbertas closest friends in the platoon. The two men could hardly be more opposite. Espera, thirty, grew up in Riverside, California, and was, by his own account, truly a abad motherf.u.c.keraa"partic.i.p.ating in all the violent pastimes available to a young Latino from a broken home and raised partially in state facilities. He was serving in an infantry platoon when he and Colbert met a few years earlier. Somehow they struck up a friends.h.i.+p, which on the face of it is odd. Colbert, with his Nordic features and upper-middle-cla.s.s background, is also among those who frequently engage in routine racial humor, referring to the Spanish language as adirty spic talk.a Espera, whoas part Native American, part Mexican and a quarter German, frequently rails about the dominance of Americaas awhite mastersa and the genocide of his Indian ancestors. But describing his friends.h.i.+p with Colbert, Espera says, aInside weare both the same: violent warriors. Only he fights with his mind, and I fight with my strength.a For his part, Colbert says that when he met Espera he was impressed by his amaturity, dedication and toughness.a Even though Espera is not yet a Recon Marine, Colbert pulled strings to bring him into the elite battalion to serve as his a.s.sistant team leader.

This morning, despite the ongoing boom of artillery and rumors now spreading among the ranks of a b.l.o.o.d.y fight taking place up the road, Espera and several other Marines in the platoon seem to be suffering from a low-grade case of invadersa guilt. aImagine how we must look to these people,a he says, disgustedly kicking a pile of trash into his freshly dug pit.

There is a cl.u.s.ter of mud-hut homes about thirty meters across from the platoonas position by the road. Old ladies in black robes and scarves stand in front of the homes, staring at the pale, white a.s.s of a Marine. Heas naked from the waist down, taking a dump in their front yard.

A Marine on Esperaas team whoas helping him pick up the trash gestures toward this odd scene and says, aCan you imagine if this was reversed, and some army came into suburbia and was c.r.a.pping in everyoneas front lawns? Itas f.u.c.king wild.a Colbert tunes in the BBC. The men receive the first hard reports of the heavy fighting in Nasiriyah, of Americans being captured, of ma.s.s casualties among the Marines.

None of the younger Marines listening to the reports shows much reaction. But the news. .h.i.ts Gunny Wynn, the platoon sergeant, hard.

aI canat f.u.c.king believe it,a he says. aHow did so many Marines get hit?a Doc Bryan rants, aMarines are dying up the road, and weare sitting back here with our thumbs up our a.s.ses.a A while later, Doc Bryanas prayers are answered. At twelve-thirty on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, a somber Fick gathers his team leaders for a briefing. aIn approximately one hour, we are going to bust north to the bridge at the Euphrates,a he says. aChange in the ROE: Anyone with a weapon is declared hostile. If itas a woman walking away from you with a weapon on her back, shoot her. If there is an armed Iraqi out there, shoot him. I donat care if you hit him with a forty-millimeter grenade in the chest.a When he finishes, Espera says, aSir, weare going to go home to a mess after we start wasting these villages. People arenat going to like that.a aI know,a Fick says. aWe now risk losing the PR war. Fighting in urban terrain is exactly what Saddam wanted us to do.a Fick has no clear idea what First Recon will be doing at the bridge. The word heas been given from his commander is that his platoon is going to serve as a quick reaction force to rush into the city and evacuate Marines that are wounded there. But the details he has on this mission are sketchy. Heas not even certain of what route theyare going to be taking through the city, or even what their destination will be once they get there.

After his briefing, Fick does what he often does in a difficult situation: He turns to Colbert for advice. When I first met Fick and heard him extol the intelligence and character of his men, I had wondered if this was just lip service. But Iave found in the past few days of the invasion that whenever thereas a problema"a life-and-death one, such as this missiona"Fick always turns to his men for guidance. Now he and Colbert and other team leaders spread out maps of Nasiriyah on the hood of his Humvee and try to figure out where in the h.e.l.l they might be going. There are several routes through the city (which is spread across approximately sixteen square kilometers), and they have no idea which their mission into the city will take.

Meanwhile, Espera gathers men from his team and Colbertas and pa.s.ses on the briefing Fick just delivered on the change in the ROE. He summarizes Fickas briefing like this: aYou see a motherf.u.c.ker through a window with an AK, cap his a.s.s.a But then he warns the men, aDonat get buck fever like Casey Kasem did the other night at the ca.n.a.l. You cap an old lady sweeping her porch, acause you think her broom is a weapon, itas on all of us.a THE REASON FIRST RECON and all the rest of the Marines have been waiting on the highway south of Nasiriyah for twenty-four hours and now are venturing out with orders that are unclear is that their leaders arenat quite sure what to do. Ever since lead elements of Task Force Tarawa were unexpectedly chewed apart and stopped in their advance through the city yesterday, Marine commanders have been waffling.

The point of taking Nasiriyah and its bridge is clear enough. The city is a gateway into central Iraq. From the start, Maj. Gen. Mattisas invasion plan has hinged on sending a substantial Marine force through central Iraq on a route that stretches for 185 kilometers from Nasiriyah in the south to Al Kut in the north. Al Kut sits on the Tigris and commands key bridges that the invading force will need to cross in order to reach Baghdad.

The land between Nasiriyah and Al Kut is historically known as the Fertile Crescent or Mesopotamia, which is Greek for aland between two riversaa"the Euphrates and the Tigris. Mesopotamia has been inhabited for more than 5,000 years. Its terrain is a starkly contrasting patchwork of barren desert and lush, tropical growth, all interlaced with ca.n.a.ls. It was here that humankind first invented the wheel, the written word and algebra. Some biblical scholars believe that Mesopotamia was the site of the Garden of Eden.

Mattisas plan is to invade it with a Regimental Combat Teama"designated as RCT-1a"a force of about 6,000 Marines. First Recon will serve as RCT-1as advance element. His objectives are twofold: to pin down large numbers of Republican Guard forces in and around Al Kut (thereby preventing them from defending Baghdad to the west), and to secure Al Kutas main bridge over the Tigris.

Meanwhile, Mattisas two other Regimental Combat Teams, totaling about 13,000 Marines, will move toward Baghdad on western highways through open desert, much as the Army has been doing since crossing the border. By dividing his forces, Mattis hopes that at least one set of them will be able to seize pa.s.sable bridges over the Tigris (which the western highways also cross). The problem heas facing on March 24 is that for more than a day now, RCT-1 has been hesitating on the outskirts of Nasiriyah.

The Marines of Task Force Tarawa, engaged inside the city and south of it in fields by the bridge over the Euphrates, only pushed into Nasiriyah in order to secure the route for RCT-1 and First Recon to use on their advance north. While the Marines in Task Force Tarawa who entered the city suffered heavy losses the day before, the continual American bombardment of Nasiriyah by artillery, attack jets and helicopters has prevented enemy forces from ma.s.sing on them. They have not retreated and remain in place in Nasiriyah.

Unfortunately, the commander of RCT-1, Colonel Joe Dowdy, whose forces have been stopped on the highway south of the city, along with First Reconas, for the past twenty-four hours, has been unable to obtain a clear picture of whatas going on in the city with Task Force Tarawa. Itas another one of those combat situations thatas hard for a civilian, who might think of the U.S. military as an all-seeing, all-powerful, high-tech ent.i.ty, to comprehend. While Dowdy is only a few kilometers south of the bridge and Task Force Tarawaas positions, his radios canat communicate with their radios. Task Force Tarawa, based out of Camp Lejeune in South Carolina, uses different encryption codes from those used by Dowdyas forces, which came from Camp Pendleton. West Coast Marines canat communicate with East Coast Marines.

For the past twenty-four hours, Dowdy has been wavering, alternately planning to send his 6,000 Marines straight through the city or to bypa.s.s it and use a distant crossing point, or even to send some through and hold others back. Unlike First Reconas commander, whose obsession with mustaches and the Grooming Standard alienates his men, Dowdy is a wildly popular figure in his regiment. With his burly physique and bulldog face, he fits the image of a Marine Corps commander and delivers rousing speeches peppered with verse from Shakespeare and Kipling. But at Nasiriyah he meets his downfall. He simply canat make up his mind (and within a few days Mattis will take the nearly unprecedented step of removing Dowdy from command, probably as a result of this indecision).

As of noon on March 24, Dowdyas latest scheme is to push First Recon ahead of RCT-1 and have them join elements of Task Force Tarawa still fighting on the southern side of the bridge. After this, he intends to drive RCT-1 through the city and use First Recon as a quick-reaction force to rush into the city and rescue any of his Marines who are wounded in the initial a.s.sault.

NINE.

AT ONE OaCLOCK on the afternoon of March 24, the Marines in First Recon climb into their vehicles and pull them onto the highway south of Nasiriyah. The winds are picking up. Yesterdayas clear skies have turned gray. The road is clogged with thousands of military vehicles, but they have pulled to the side, forming a one-lane channel through the congestion.

Colbertas team settles into the Humvee and Person begins punching the dashboard and cursing. Someone higher up in the company changed radio frequencies without telling him, and now he canat use them. Itas the first time Iave ever seen him lose control in earnest.

Colbert calms him. aItas okay. Weall fix it. Everyoneas just nervous because we lost a lot this morning,a he says, referring to the news of Marine casualties.

At one-thirty p.m. First Reconas convoy of seventy vehicles starts moving on the highway toward the bridge at Nasiriyah. Given the heavy casualties sustained by Marines at the bridge during the past twenty-four hours, itas a reasonable a.s.sessment that everyone in the vehicle has a better-than-average chance of getting killed or injured this afternoon.

Itas about twenty kilometers to the bridge. The funny thing I notice between all the vehicles lined up on the road is that all the trash dropped by the Marines in the preceding twenty-four hours, which Espera had been railing about earlier in the morning, has been picked up.

The air is heavy with that fog of fine, powdery dusta"familiar from Camp Mathilda but which we hadnat seen a lot of until today. Cobras clatter directly overhead. They circle First Reconas convoy, nosing down through the barren scrubland on either side of the road, hunting for enemy shooters. Before long, we are on our own. The helicopters are called off because fuel is short.

Then we clear the last of the vehicles in RCT-1as convoy. A Marine standing by the road pumps his fist as Colbertas vehicle drives past and shouts, aGet some!a No one says anything in the vehicle.

We drive into a no-manas-land. A burning fuel depot to our right spews fire and smoke. Garbage is strewn on either side of the road as far as the eye can see. It appears that weare driving straight through the town trash dump, with shredded plastic bags littering the area like confetti after a parade. The convoy slows to a crawl, and the Humvee fills with a black cloud of flies.

aNow, this looks like Tijuana,a says Person.

aAnd this time I get to do what Iave always wanted to do in T.J.,a Colbert adds. aBurn it to the ground.a There is a series of thunderous, tooth-rattling explosions directly to the vehicleas right. A Marine artillery battery is set up in a field next to the road, firing into Nasiriyah. The 155mm guns in the row have six-meter-long barrels spouting flames and black smoke with each shot. We draw even with them, then move ahead. Itas a strange sensation feeling those ma.s.sive guns firing behind you. Marines who so scrupulously picked up all their litter this morning are now bombing the s.h.i.+t out of the city.

Up ahead are wrecked U. S. military vehicles, a burned-up Dragon Wagon military transport truck, a mangled Humvee. The winds.h.i.+eld is riddled with bullet holes. We pa.s.s a few meters from the Humvee, close enough to see pools of brown fluida"probably blooda"spilled on the ground by the doors.

We drive into an increasing gloom. The hundreds if not thousands of artillery rounds and bombs poured onto the city in the past twenty-four hours have kicked up a localized dust storm over the road. Visibility drops to a few kilometers.

aSmall-arms fire to the rear,a Colbert says, pa.s.sing word from the battalion radio. No one reacts. Itas like a weather bulletin.

aCar coming at twelve oaclock!a someone shouts. Weapons clatter as everyone readies to shoot it.

A white Toyota pa.s.senger car with orange fendersa"the markings of an Iraqi taxicaba"zooms out of the black cloud ahead, toward First Reconas convoy, where, no doubt, up and down the line hundreds of Marines take aim to shoot it.

aNo weapons! No weapons!a gunners shout in Colbertas Humvee, meaning they donat see any weapons in the cab.

The cab squeezes past Colbertas Humvee and continues down the line. A taxi driving into a convoy of heavily armed Marines during a firefight and artillery bombardment seems insane. The stereotype of the reckless Arab cabdriver in New York City pops into my mind. Later, Marines figure out that cabs are used by Fedayeen to move through their lines and observe or to ferry troops. Theyare also used by car bombers. And theyare used by civilians to evacuate the wounded.

Ever more powerful blasts boom outside the Humvee. We pa.s.s a succession of desiccated farmsteadsa"crude, square huts made of mud, with starved-looking livestock in front. Locals sit outside like spectators lining a parade route. A woman walks by the road with a basket on her head, oblivious to the explosions.

We reach the bridge over the Euphrates. Marines from Task Force Tarawa are spread out on both sides of the road in fields and dense palm groves. Rifles crack intermittently, with occasional bursts from machine guns. Theyave been dug in here for twenty-four hours now and are still taking fire from Iraqi gunmen farther out in the fields.

The bridge is a long, broad concrete structure. It spans nearly a kilometer and arches up gracefully toward the middle. The guardrails on both sides are twisted and riddled with bullet holes. The dust and smoke is so dense itas like being in a snowstorm. We canat even make out the city on the other side of the bridge. The span simply disappears into a gray cloud bank.

After fifteen minutes of solid tension inside the Humvee, Person cannot repress the urge to make a goofy remark. He turns to Colbert, smiling. aHey, you think I have enough driving hours now to get my Humvee license?a First Reconas column cuts off the road at the causeway where the bridge starts. We take a left down a dirt trail and drive below the bridge to the banks of the Euphrates. There we finally glimpse Nasiriyah on the other side. The front of the city is a jumble of irregularly shaped two- and three-story structures. Iraqi towns are characterized by uniform dullness of color, buildings constructed somewhat haphazardly out of mud bricks or from cinder blocks covered in stucco. Everything is the shade of earth, of the dust that hangs in the air. Through the haze, the buildings appear as a series of dim, slanted outlines, like a row of crooked teeth.

To our immediate right, a dozen or so Marines from Task Force Tarawa sit between the bridge pilings beneath the elevated roadway. Some are stretched out, sleeping, despite the steady blasts of Marine artillery landing in the city on the opposite riverbank. One of the Marines sits upright, puffing on a fat cigar. His face is black with grime. He stares expressionlessly at Colbertas Humvee. No moto greeting of Get some! from him.

First Reconas Alpha and Charlie companies set up along the bank of the river, facing the city. Bravo pulls back about seventy-five meters from the riveras edge.

The whole maneuvera"driving seventy-five meters from the riverbanka"takes about fifteen minutes. The ten Humvees in Bravo Companyas two platoons run into about twenty trucks from the battalionas Support and Headquarters Company, which are trying to drive into a field farther back from the bridge. The Humvees drive around like clown cars as everyone shouts over the radios or out their windows to direct traffic. Finally, Colbertas Humvee stops next to the road leading onto the bridge. Thereas no clear order of what Bravo is doing here yet.

Colbert canat get over the lush greenery of the palm groves and fields around us. After two months in the desert, itas jarring to suddenly have arrived in Mesopotamiaas fertile surroundings on the outskirts of the Garden of Eden. Even as Marine artillery rounds blow it to smithereens, Colbert keeps repeating, aLook at these f.u.c.king trees.a An enemy mortar explodes nearby. A mortar blast is different from artillery. You hear the blast as an artillery sh.e.l.l is fired, then the sound of it whizzing through the sky, followed by the boom as it hits. Mortars come out of nowhere. Thereas no warning, just a blast, and a column of black smoke where it hits. If theyare close you feel a sharp increase in the air pressure. The sonic vibrations make the hairs on your body tingle, and your teeth feel numb for an instant.

Another mortar bangs outside. Person smiles. aYou know that feeling before a debate when you gotta p.i.s.s and youave got that weird feeling in your stomach, then you go in and kick a.s.s?a he says. aI donat have that feeling now.a A machine gun rattles up on the riverbank.

aStand by for s.h.i.+t to get stupid,a Person says, sounding merely annoyed.

SEVENTY-FIVE METERS in front of us are the men in First Reconas Alpha and Charlie companies, spread across the southern banks of the Euphrates. They form a line stretching for nearly a kilometer from the bridge on their eastern side to gra.s.sy fields on the west. The men begin taking sporadic sniper fire from Nasiriyah. As enemy shots crackle in the air, the Marines take cover behind low, dried mud berms, then scan the city, which rises one hundred meters distant on the opposite riverbank, through rifle scopes and binoculars. They search the thousands of windows and crevices and alleys for signs of enemy shooters.

The procedure when youare getting shot at by rifles or machine guns is pretty straightforward. The Marines all hunt for muzzle flashes. If a gun is pointed toward you, even if the shooter is concealed behind a wall or berm, its flash will generally be visible. Every time an enemy gunman takes a shot, he momentarily reveals his position.

The men in Alpha and Charlie companies spot muzzle flashes coming from windows of apartments 250 meters or so across the river. But in their first twenty minutes at the riverfront, the Marines fire very few shots. There are civilians moving about in the streets of the city. Even during this low-intensity gun battle, some even stand still, trying to observe the Marines aiming at them.

The strangest, most unsettling spectacle Marines see, however, is that of armed men who dart across alleys, moving from building to building, clutching women in front of them for cover. The first time it happens, Marines shout, aMan with a weapon!a Despite the newly aggressive ROEs, Marines down the line shout, aIam not shooting! Thereas women.a One of the Marines witnessing this is the commander of Alpha Company, Captain Bryan Patterson, whose Humvee command post is set fifty meters back from the riverfront. Patterson, thirty-two, is from Indianapolis, Indiana, and is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. With his medium build and dark hair he tends to keep a tad longer than regulation, he looks not a day over twenty-four.

Until this afternoon Patterson has always wondered how he would react under fire. Though heas been in the Marines his entire adult life and before joining First Recon he commanded an infantry platoon, heas never been in combat.

Now several mortars impact within 150 meters of his position. Patterson gets on his radio and calls the battalion. His fear is that these might actually be afriendlya mortars dropped by Marines, not aware that First Recon has moved up to the western side of the bridge. Several minutes later, the battalion radios back that these are definitely not Marine mortars.

While Patterson stands there out in the open by his Humvee, talking on the radio, the area around him is raked with enemy gunfire. Marines taking cover behind surrounding berms look up to see if their commander is. .h.i.t and burst into laughter. Patterson seems oblivious to the shooting and keeps talking on the radio, periodically tilting his head back, gulping down Skittles from an MRE.

Whatever indefinable qualities make a good commanding officer, Patterson has them. Unlike Encino Man and Captain America in Bravo Company, Pattersonas men speak of him in the highest terms. Patterson hardly fits the image of the swaggering, barrel-chested Marine Corps officer. He is one of the most una.s.suming characters you could ever meet, almost shy. He admits, aI canat give gladiatorial speeches to my men.a His reasons for going to the Naval Academy and becoming a Marine couldnat be more prosaic. aI didnat know what I wanted to do with my life,a he says. His view of being an officer is devoid of romance. aAs company commander, Iam like a midlevel manager at any corporation.a His views on the war are equally temperate. aThere is not a good thing that comes out of war,a he tells me later on. aIam not going to pretend Iam this great American savior in Iraq. We didnat come here to liberate. We came to look out for our interests. That we are here is good. But if to liberate them means putting a Starbucks and a McDonaldas on every street corner, is that liberation? But I have to justify this to myself. Itas Saddamas fault.a Still, he says, athe protestors have a lot of valid points. War sucks.a The reason his men look up to him is probably very simple. Aside from the fact that heas calm and articulate, Patterson respects them. His Marines came to the Middle East on a s.h.i.+p, and behind the backs of his men, Patterson often says, aI could have fallen overboard and they would do fine without me.a Now, he and his men come under increasing fire at the riverbank. His Marines spot an anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) battery shooting at them from across the river. AAA guns fire large-caliber rounds from multiple barrels, like extremely high-powered machine guns. They are designed to shred aircraft flying thousands of meters overhead, but in Iraq, gunmen point the barrels down and aim them at ground targets, such as Marines. Their fire is devastating, and this one, about a kilometer and a half down the riverbank, is beyond the effective range of the heaviest weapons possessed by the Marines in First Recon.

Patterson and his men notice some Marines from Task Force Tarawa a couple hundred meters away. Among them is a Javelin team.

The Javelin is basically a big, honking, shoulder-fired missile for blowing up tanks. Patterson brings the Javelin crew forward. Within minutes they fire a missile into the AAA battery across the river. Patterson watches through his binoculars as a direct hit from the Javelin blows up the AAA battery, setting off numerous secondary explosions as nearby stocks of munitions cook off. He estimates the one strike takes out three to five Iraqis whoad been manning the AAA guns. aIt felt good to get revenge for the Marines from Task Force Tarawa killed in Nasiriyah,a Patterson later admits.

Now, directly across the river, every Iraqi with an AK or machine gun seems to open up on First Reconas position. Apparently, the Javelin strike alerted everyone in the city with a gun to the Marinesa presence here. Taking concentrated enemy fire, the men in Alpha and Charlie lose their inhibitions about possibly shooting women in the city. Up and down the line, just about every rifle, machine gun and grenade launcher roars to life. For about sixty seconds they savage the city, pouring thousands of rounds into it. Patterson later says of this first burst of wild, fairly indiscriminate fire, aThey all had to pop their cherries.a IN THE STORM OF SHOOTING set off by Alphaas attack on the AAA gun, enemy fire rakes the area around Colbertas Humvee, seventy-five meters back from the riverfront. Bravo Second Platoon occupies slightly elevated ground behind Alphaas position, but luckily most of the Iraqi fire seems to be wildly high. A row of palm trees between us and the riverbank s.h.i.+vers as rounds rip through fronds and send puffs of smoke off the trunks. Incoming rounds, I notice as I crouch down to the ground beside Colbertas vehicle, make a zinging sound, just as they do in Bugs Bunny cartoons.

Initially, Marines in Bravo stand outside their vehicles, milling around with stupid smiles on their faces. Several are giggling. Itas like everyone just stepped onto the set of a war movie. One of First Reconas seniormost enlisted men struts past, shouting, aGotta love this s.h.i.+t! Weare in the middle of it now, boys!a He sounds like the emcee at a pro-wrestling smackdown. aIt is on!a This senior enlisted man, in his mid-forties, is one of those thickly built, slightly overweight guys whose fat just makes him look like an even bigger bully than he is. His job is to be the grand enforcer of discipline within the enlisted ranks, to be sort of a professional d.i.c.khead. Fairly or unfairly, the Marinesa nickname for him is the aCoward of Khafji.a Khafji, a small Saudi Arabian town south of the Kuwait border, was the setting of one of the earliest battles of the first Gulf War. In the official version, Iraqi mechanized units, probing for American weaknesses, dropped into Khafji, surprising advance Marine units occupying the town, kicking off a forty-eight-hour battle to extricate the Americans.

According to several enlisted men and officers in First Recon, the battle of Khafji was actually triggered by several Marines who veered into the town to make phone calls to their families and girlfriends at home. As incredible as this sounds, itas true that in the current war, Marines, such as Colbert, carry international calling codes, which can be used on Iraqi land-lines to dial out to Marine satellite phones. Recon units are trained, if theyare cut off behind enemy lines and their radios are down, to break into Iraqi homes or offices and dial their unitsa satellite phones.

In the legend circulating through First Recon, the senior enlisted man theyave nicknamed the aCoward of Khafji,a then a sergeant in another unit, was among those who led the charge on Khafjias available phones. Marines were frantically dialing home when several noticed a sizable force of Iraqi soldiers occupying a nearby building. As the story goes, the aCoward of Khafjia jumped into a Humvee and fled the town, leaving behind his buddies. He later told his fellow troops he had fled in the interest of saving a awater bulla (storage tank) attached to the rear of his Humvee and preventing it from falling into Iraqi hands. (When I ask him about the veracity of this story, he denies it happened that way but refuses to provide any details.) Whatever the truth, the Coward of Khafji name has stuck.

Now, as the Coward of Khafji walks past Colbertas vehicle amid the rising gunfire, Person leans out the window and shouts, aHey, whereas your Humvee? Isnat it time for you to get out of here?a Luckily for Person, the gunfire is increasing. The Coward of Khafji, who possesses a mighty authority to punish men within the battalion, doesnat hear him.

A volley of enemy mortars explodes in the surrounding fields. Machine-gun fire, which previously seemed to be only coming in from the northa"the direction of the citya"now erupts on all sides. Currently, Second Platoon faces the river to the north. The Humvees in the platoon are pushed up beside the elevated causeway leading onto the bridge. Around us are open, dried mudflats. These extend fifty to seventy meters north toward the river, and to the west and south of us. Beyond the mudflats are fields of dry, bent gra.s.s. Several dozen Marines from Task Force Tarawa are spread out in these fields, lying p.r.o.ne on the ground, firing at Iraqis and outlying buildings.

Several hundred additional Marines from Task Force Tarawa are also directly across the roadway from us in a sunken field to the east. This field, perhaps a kilometer square, has high-tension power lines running through it and is bounded by a thick forest of palms and a scattering of buildings. One of these buildings, a small two-story hospital, contains Fedayeen, who have been targeting Marines in the field all afternoon. More Fedayeen have been shooting from the palm grove.

In the past few moments, heavy fire from First Reconas Marines in Alpha and Charlie has been joined by shooting from the thousand or so Marines in Task Force Tarawa to our east, west and south. It sounds as if dozens of weapons are now firing on all sides. Itas as loud, and nearly as steady, as the sound of a river rus.h.i.+ng over a dam. One thing you can say about intense weapons fire, it sounds like it ought to. Itas an extremely angry noise.

When I jump down, face-first into the dirt, I twist my head to the side and see the palm trees overhead s.h.i.+ver from multiple rounds. .h.i.tting them. I also see that the gra.s.s in the field to my left is waving from the effects of low, grazing machine-gun fire. The fire is outbound, and though I canat see the weapon, I can see a ghost of black smoke rising above what is probably the barrel. Itas my hope that most of the fire Iam hearing is outbound, from Marines. I would hate to think itas from Iraqis ma.s.sing to overrun our position.

But in my first experience at being in the midst of heavy gunfirea"from machine guns to mortars to Marine artillery still slamming into the city over our headsa"I feel surprisingly calm. While the Marines might possess that aadolescent sense of invulnerability,a I have the more adult handicap of having always lived in denial. Itas a problem for which Iave attended therapy sessions and self-help groups in an effort to overcome, originally at the urging of a now ex-wife. But I find that in a pitched firefight, denial serves one very well. I simply refuse to believe anyoneas going to shoot me.

This is not to say Iam not scared. In fact, Iam so scared I feel not completely in my body. Itas become a thinga"heavy and c.u.mbersomea"Iam keeping as close to the ground as possible, trying to take care of it as best I can, even though I donat feel all the way in it. As I squeeze flat against the earth, so do the Marines around me in Second Platoon. Guys whoad been laughing and joking a few moments earlier drop down and embrace the earth. I look up and see Espera five meters in front of me, cursing and wiggling, trying to pull down his MOPP suit. Espera makes no show of trying to laugh off his fear. Heas wrestling his p.e.n.i.s out of his pants so he can take a leak while lying on his side. aI donat want to f.u.c.king p.i.s.s on myself,a he grunts.

The Marines took a combat-stress cla.s.s before the war. An instructor told them that 25 percent of them can expect to lose control of their bladders or bowels when they take fire. Fearing one of these embarra.s.sing accidents, when the bullets start flying they p.i.s.s and s.h.i.+t frantically whenever they can.

The guy on my other side is Pappy, the team leader they all look up to as athe coldest killer in the battalion.a Since my arrival with the platoon, heas been one of the most hesitant to talk to me. Early on at Camp Mathilda, he had said in his polite, North Carolina accent, aItas nothing personal, but I just donat have good feelings about reporters.a Now he catches my eye and flashes a smile. He seems neither giddy, as are some of the others, nor terrified. But he looks a lot older, suddenly, as if the lines around his eyes have deepened in the hour since we drove up here.

aHow are you doing?a I ask.

aIam not like some of these younger Marines, eager to get some,a Pappy says. aIad be just as happy if they ordered us to turn around right now and we drove back to Mathilda. Just the same, I want to be with these guys so I can do what I can to help them live.a I ask him what the h.e.l.l weare doing here waiting around by the entrance to the bridge while the bombs fall. I canat figure out why Bravo company is up high by the road, where the men are exposed, yet canat fire their weapons for fear of hitting Marines in surrounding fields.

Pappyas response is sobering. aOur job is to kamikaze into the city and collect casualties,a he says. aWeare just waiting for the order to go.a aHow many casualties are there?a I ask.

aCasualties?a he says. aTheyare not there yet. Weare the reaction force for an attack thatas coming across the bridge. RCT-1 is going to be moving up here any minute and crossing the bridge. Weare going in during the fight to pick up the wounded.a Itas the first time anyone has told me anything about this mission that Iam accompanying them on. I donat know why, but the idea of waiting around for casualties that donat exist yet strikes me as more macabre than the idea of actual casualties.

Yet despite how much it sucks here, itas kind of exciting, too. I had almost looked down on the Marinesa shows of moto, the way they shouted Get some! and acted so excited about being in a fight. But the fact is, thereas a definite sense of exhilaration every time thereas an explosion and youare still there afterward. Thereas another kind of exhilaration, too. Everyone is side by side, facing the same big fear: death. Usually, death is pushed to the fringes in the civilian world. Most people face their end pretty much alone, with a few family members if they are lucky. Here, the Marines face death together, in their youth. If anyone dies, he will do so surrounded by the very best friends he believes he will ever have.

As mortars continue to explode around us, I watch Garza pick through an MRE. He takes out a packet of Charms candies and hurls it into the gunfire. Marines view Charms as almost infernal talismans. A few days earlier, in the Humvee, Garza saw me pull Charms out of my MRE pack. His eyes lighted up and he offered me a highly prized bag of Combos cheese pretzels for my candies. He didnat explain why. I thought he just really liked Charms until he threw the pack head just traded me out the window. aWe donat allow Charms anywhere in our Humvee,a Person said in a rare show of absolute seriousness. aThatas right,a Colbert said, cinching it. aTheyare f.u.c.king bad luck.a The heavy gunfire tapers off. Mortars still explode every couple of minutes, but everyone rises from the ground. Lying in the dirt becomes tedious. In a way it also becomes more terrifying because you canat see whatas going on around you.

Now when thereas a boom, most people just drop to one knee. One Marine in another platoon has developed a fierce stutter. aP-p-p-pa.s.s m-my b-b-binoculars,a he spits out. His buddies exchange looks but say nothing to him. Not far away, an officer who took cover beneath a Humvee wonat come out. Marines donat laugh at this, either. (Some are disturbed by this act of perceived cowardice in one of their leaders and later seek counselling.) Colbert seems to blossom under extreme duress. He goes into full Iceman mode, becoming extra calm, alert and focused even when everyoneas just standing around waiting for another blast.

Marines tear into their MREs. They eat a lot during lulls in firefights. Most just squeeze main mealsa"like the pressed, crumbly steaks and chicken pattiesa"directly from the foil pouches into their mouths.

Then a new sound erupts nearbya"a rapid-fire thunking. Everyone drops to the ground except Colbert. He remains upright, eating. aThose are ours, gents,a he says between bites. Colbert informs the Marines flattened in the dirt that the athunkinga was unmistakably the sound of Marine Bushmaster weapons. No need to worry.

F-18 fighter-attack jets rip through the sky and drop low just 200 meters or so over our heads. Marines call these amoto pa.s.ses.a The jets fly too high and too fast to be much help hunting down small human targets on the ground, but their dramatic appearances are intended to boost morale.

While we sit around eating, thereas a ma.s.sive explosion overhead just on the other side of the causeway. Cables from high-tension electric towers snap and bounce above us, struck by a friendly artillery round, intended for Nasiriyah. It happens too quickly for anyone to duck. Shrapnel bangs into Pappyas Humvee, but no one is. .h.i.t.

Marines thirty meters across the road from us are not so lucky. We hear screams of aCorpsman!a I stand up and see one injured Marine staggering in circles. The errant round sprayed six Marines from another unit with shrapnel. Two are later reported to have been killed from wounds sustained in this incident.

CLOSER TO THE RIVER, Pattersonas men are also experiencing the chaos of fire from all directions. Patterson pushes some of his men farther west and south into surrounding fields. Heas concerned that outlying farm structures might conceal enemy gunmen.

Corporal Cody Scott, a twenty-year-old from Midland, Texas, leads a team out from Alphaas Second Platoon to clear a building. Scott joined the Marines over his motheras objections on his eighteenth birthday, and is a big guy with the slow-moving gravity of someone much older. The night before, while paused on the highway south of Nasiriyah, Scott took the time to record his thoughts in his diary: aI feel that the militarya"leading men into battlea"is my calling. Some people are artists, some musicians; I was born a warrior. Since I was young Iave felt drawn to the warrior society. This war, as of yet, is not a b.l.o.o.d.y one. The opposition is slim. Our minions are rolling in with such force that the enemy is laying down without a fight. The people of this country live like rats. Hopefully, these people will lead a better life because of what weare doing.a Now leading his teama"aa ragtag mishmash of men,a as he calls them in his diarya"on their first combat mission is a chance to fulfill all his dreams. They follow the berm of a small ca.n.a.l, running north-south. Their objective is a hut about 150 meters away. As they bound toward it, an Iraqi man pops out of the field in front of them. Scott and his men raise their weapons to shoot him, but the Iraqi is unarmed. He gestures to them, speaking in Arabic. Scott fears itas a trap. Maybe heas there to lead them into an ambush.

But before he can take any action, three mortars explode nearby on the western side of the structure. The Iraqi disappears as Scott and his men take cover. Then rounds slam into the ground all around them. Scottas men try shooting. His M-4 jams on a double feeda"two rounds stuck in the chambera"and a SAW gunneras weapon also malfunctions, popping off just one round at a time. Another gunner on his team succeeds in laying down a steady bead of fire.

About this time they notice that all the red tracers streaming in at them are coming from the west, where Marines from Task Force Tarawa are hunkered down. The mini-firefight is Marines shooting at Marines.

Scottas men stop shooting, as do the Marines firing at them in the distance. In his diary that night, Scott writes a considerably more concise and less florid entry than his previous ones: aCombat was not what I expected. How we all made it out without a scratch is beyond me.a IN ADDITION TO THE PROBLEM of friendly fire, Pattersonas Alpha Company snipers on the riverfront are dealing with the ambiguities of guerrilla war, not covered in the Marine Rules of Engagement. The ROE under which the Marines operate are quite naturally based on the a.s.sumption that legitimate targets are people armed with weapons. The problem is Iraqis dressed in civilian clothes who are armed not with guns but with cell phones, walkie-talkies and binoculars. These men, it is believed by the Marines, are serving as forward observers for the mortars being dropped into their positions.

Mortars are a weapon of choice for the Iraqis. A mortar is a rocket-propelled bomb that is launched from a tube thatas about a meter long. The mortar rocket itself is about the size and shape of a bowling pin. It fires out of the tube almost straight up, then arcs down and explodesa"anywhere from one to six kilometers away. Even the smaller mortars used by the Iraqis will, when they hit, scoop out about a meter-wide hole in the ground and spray shrapnel for twenty-five meters in all directions. A direct hit from a mortar can disable the biggest American tank, or blow the f.u.c.k out of a Humvee.

Since mortars are small and light, they can be moved around easily and fired from rooftops, trenches, alleys, even from the backs of pickup trucks. Even better from the enemyas standpoint, you canat tell which direction theyare being fired from. They might be five kilometers away in a trench behind a house or an apartment block.

But since mortar crews are so far away and usually out of sight, they rely on forward observers. These characters tend to hang out near Marine positions with binoculars, cell phones or radios. They watch where the mortars are landing and call back to the guys shooting them to tell them how to adjust their fire. Those who appear to be observers in Nasiriyah are unarmed, dressed in civilian clothes and blend in with the population.

During the first hour by the river, Marine snipers had to request permission up the chain of command to get acleared hota to shoot suspected forward observers. Killing unarmed civilians is a dicey issue, but eventually the Marine snipers are given permission to take out Iraqis with binoculars or cell phones on the other side of the river.

Marine snipers work in two-man teams, a shooter and a spotter. One of the best teams in Alpha Company is led by thirty-nine-year-old Sergeant Ken Sutherby, originally from Michigan. Sutherby looks and talks exactly the way youad expect a Marine sniper to. He is tall and gaunt, with unblinking, pale-blue eyes, and speaks in a dry, almost airless voice. His laconic mannerisms are no doubt reinforced by the fact that Sutherby is slightly hearing impaired. He carefully scrutinizes anyone speaking to him in case he misses a word. When you get to know him, he emerges as something of a character, like a vaguely improbable figure in an Elmore Leonard crime novel.

Sutherby has been in and out of the Marine Corps since the age of nineteen. Between his years as a rifleman and sniper, heas worked as a car repo man in his hometown of Detroit, as a bodyguard for members of the Saudi royal family in Beverly Hills, and most recently, again as a bodyguard, this time for Suge Knight, the hip-hop mogul and convicted felon behind Death Row Records. Sutherby rejoined the Marines this last time because aitas more stable than working in the civilian world.a Beneath it all, Sutherby is basically a family man. He and his wife have four kids of their own and provide foster care to as many abused and neglected children. aI enjoy my family,a he says. In fact, he calls his M-40 sniper rifle aLila,a which stands for aLittle Angel,a his nickname for his youngest daughter.

Sutherby and Lila get their first kill at about three oaclock in the afternoon. While nearby Marines in Alpha pour fire into buildings and windows across the river, where they think there are enemy gunmen, Sutherby and his spotter observe an Iraqi man in what they describe as ablack pajamas,a behaving suspiciously in an alley. Heas about 400 yards distant (for some reason, while the rest of the Corps is metric, snipers still do everything in yards), and he seems to be watching the Marines through a pair of binoculars.

Sutherby and his spotter crouch behind a low brick wall. He props Lila on a sandbag for stabilization and watches the Iraqi in black pajamas for a good ten minutes. Every time mortars boom on the Marinesa side of the river, the Iraqi steps out in the alley. On his last trip out, Sutherby takes a chest shot.

Sutherby seldom gets to see the results of his work. As soon as he takes the shot, the recoil jiggles his scope, blurring his vision. But his spotter, a twenty-two-year-old, Corporal David Raby from Nashville, Tennessee, sees the man go down. A minute later another Iraqi steps into the same alley with a pair of binoculars, perhaps even those from the man Sutherby just shot. He takes out the second guy with another chest shot.

After another hour, Sutherby and Raby see a man in an alley who has binoculars and a cell phone or radio. He is 500 yards away, and more careful than the first two. He appears every fifteen minutes or so, popping his head out from around a corner. Sutherby and Raby are forced to wait half an hour until the guy lingers long enough to get a clean shot. By this time, Sutherbyas eyes are fatigued. He rests on Lilaas stock, with his eyelids closed, until Raby says, aSutherby! You see him?a Sutherby opens his eyes and kills the man. Itas a perfect head shot. In fact, Sutherby has the rare satisfaction of seeing the kill. The manas hands jerk up to his face while he tumbles forward.