THEREaS NO TIME to examine the scene of the shooting. The entire battalion pulls back from the bridge, moving a couple of kilometers north to a more defensible position. The triumphant feelings that soared a half hour ago have vanished. Itas suddenly cold, a Humvee becomes stuck in the mud and in Bravoas Second Platoon, Marines are again dealing with weapons that jammed catastrophically in the engagement with the truck. Next to Colbertas vehicle, the .50-cal on Lovellas Humvee had a round explode in the chamber, puffing out the gunas cha.s.sisa"a fifty-pound block of forged steela"like a balloon. In the darkness Lovell marvels, aFellas, we just destroyed a ten-thousand-dollar piece of U.S. government property.a They are lucky the gun didnat blow up.

In Colbertas vehicle, the Mark-19 jammed againa"as it has in two previous engagements. Ha.s.ser, whoas manning the weapon, screams, as.h.i.+t! s.h.i.+t! s.h.i.+t!a and pounds the roof of the Humvee, trying to unjam it. He lets out a half-crazed scream. aRaaah!a Colbert shouts up to him, aWalt! Youare losing control of yourself. Shut the f.u.c.k up and take a deep breath.a aThis G.o.dd.a.m.n gun!a Ha.s.ser shouts. His voice cracks. aItas a piece of s.h.i.+t!a aWalt, you know I like you a lot,a Colbert says, trying to calm him. aBut itas not going to help if you lose control of your emotions. We just donat have enough LSA to keep it lubed properly. Thereas nothing we can do about it.a He adds, aIam sorry I had to yell at you.a Colbertas platoon falls back from the bridge to defend the battalionas eastern flank along the highway. Everyone digs holes in the darkness. The soil here is a waterlogged mixture of clay and rocks. Itas like chopping through partially hardened concrete. After we finish our Ranger graves, the platoon is ordered to move up the road 300 meters, where we dig a new set.

A string of headlights appears a kilometer or so to the west. It is a stream of vehicles escaping the city on a back road. It could be civilians fleeing. But using night-vision equipment, Marines observe what appear to be trucks with weapons on them.

aTheyare f.u.c.king flanking us!a Fick says, worried that the enemy fighters are trying to come up and attack the battalion from the side. Marines then observe one truck with its lights off, stopping directly across from their position and unloading men and equipment, possibly guns. Fick requests an artillery strike to take out the vehicles.

Marines in Bravo who are not on watch gather around to eat their meager food rations before crawling into their wet holes to take quick acombat naps.a aI felt cold-blooded as a motherf.u.c.ker shooting those guys that popped out of the truck,a Espera says, glumly describing the details of each killing he partic.i.p.ated in at the roadblock an hour earlier. Perhaps keeping in mind his priestas admonishments to not enjoy killing, Espera seems to deliberately wallow in a black, self-flagellating mood. aDog, whatever last shred of humanity I had before I came here, itas gone,a he says.

Warning shots erupt at the roadblock manned by Charlie Company a few hundred meters to our north. Tracers light up the sky. We hear a car gunning its engine, apparently still driving toward the blockade. Marines shout. Weapons crackle. We hear the engine still whining, drawing closer, then the screeching of tires. In the silence that immediately follows, someone in our group says, aWell, that stopped him.a For some reason, everyone bursts into laughter.

UP THE ROAD FROM where we are laughing, the men in Charlie Company watch as two men run from a car the Marines have just riddled with dozens of rounds. Itas a four-door sedan. Doors are open, lights are on despite the heavy-weapons fire it took from a platoon of Marines. Itas a miracle that these two men, including the driver, have stepped out alive.

The Marines hold their fire as the men, dressed in robes, throw their hands up. They are unarmed. As Marines shout at them, they drop obediently to the side of the road.

Graves, whose team beautifully destroyed the building that s.h.i.+elded the enemy gunmen during the a.s.sault through Al Hayy, approaches the car with another Marine. Graves sees a little girl curled up in the backseat. She looks to be about three, the same age as his daughter at home in California. Thereas a small amount of blood on the upholstery, but the girlas eyes are open. She seems to be cowering. Graves reaches in to pick her upa"thinking about what medical supplies he might need to treat her, he later saysa"when the top of her head slides off and her brains fall out. When Graves steps back, he nearly falls over when his boot slips in the girlas brains. It takes a full minute before Graves can actually talk. The situation is one he can only describe in elemental terms. aI could see her throat from the top of her skull,a he says.

No weapons are found in the car. Meesh asks the father, sitting by the side of the road, why he didnat heed the warning shots and stop. The father simply repeats, aIam sorry,a then meekly asks permission to pick up his daughteras body. The last the Marines see of him, he is walking down the road, carrying her corpse in his arms.

WHEN THEY TALK about this shooting later, the Marines have mixed reactions. Graves is devastated. aThis is the event that is going to get to me when I go home,a he says. Prior to this shooting, when his team had pa.s.sed by all those shot-up corpses on the roads, Graves says, aI felt good about it, like, aYeah! Marines have been f.u.c.king s.h.i.+t up!a a He adds, aI cruised into this war thinking my buddyas going to take a bullet, and Iam going to be the f.u.c.king hero pulling him out of harmas way. Instead, I end up pulling out this little girl we shot, hiding in the backseat of her dadas car.a Gravesas buddy, twenty-two-year-old Corporal Ryan Jeschke, who was with him at the car, says, aWar is either glamorizeda"like we kick their a.s.sa"or the oppositea"look how horrible, we kill all these civilians. None of these people know what itas like to be there holding that weapon. After Graves and I went up to that dead girl, I was surprised, because honestly, I was indifferent. Itas kind of disturbed me. Now, sometimes, I think, aAm I a bad person for feeling nothing?a a Despite his professed indifference, Jeschke is haunted by the memory of seeing the girlas father walk down the road, cradling his dead daughter. Jeschke says, aI asked Meesh what he thought the father was going through, and Meesh said Arabs donat grieve as hard as we do. I donat really believe him. I canat see how it would be any different for them.a After this shooting and the others like it, Marines deal with the stress through black humor. Even guys privately broken up by the shootings circulate jokes, one of them: aWhatas the first thing you feel when you shoot a civilian? The recoil of your rifle.a THE ARTILLERY STRIKE Bravo Company called previously on vehicles fleeing the city finally starts to arrive. Since First Recon is so far north, the artillery gunners can only reach them by using rocket-a.s.sisted projectile (RAP) rounds, which give their guns a range of thirty kilometers. After RAP rounds are fired, they flash in the sky and then make a sort of fizzing sound, as a rocket motor mounted on each projectile kicks in and drives it to its target. They make for an even more spectacular show than normal artillery. We lie back in our holes and watch 164 RAP rounds shriek across the sky. Seen from a distance, the fiery explosions are beautiful and hypnotizing, just like any decent Fourth of July display. Any carnage visited on the vehicles, hamlets, farms or people is shrouded from us by the darkness. All we see are the pretty lights of the rocketsa red glare.

TWENTY-TWO.

ON MARCH 30, Capt. Pattersonas Alpha Company was ordered to temporarily detach from First Recon and go on a mission to find the body of the Marine who went missing when his supply convoy was ambushed on Route 7 outside Ash Shatrah. No one knows if rumors of his bodyas public mutilation are true, but many Marines inevitably see Alphaas task to re-cover it as a revenge mission. When Alpha Company had pulled out of First Reconas camp for Ash Shatrah, men in Bravo had shouted after them, af.u.c.k the s.h.i.+t out of that town!a Now, on the morning of March 31, with the rest of the battalion making its way north toward Al Hayy, the eighty Marines in Alpha Company are heading south on Route 7 toward Ash Shatrah. To Sergeant Damon Russell Fawcett, a twenty-six-year-old team leader in Alphaas Second Platoon, the mission fills him, he later admits, with conflicting emotions. Fair-haired and blue-eyed, Fawcett grew up in Southern California, a awater baby,a surfing and playing water polo. After several semesters in college, he joined the Marines not just for adventure but because he was so adisenchanted with the human factor in society, the emphasis on technology. I came in to see if the better man will dominate.a For the past eighteen hours since departing on the mission, Fawcett has listened to fellow Marines rage about the motherf.u.c.kers in Ash Shatrah, and their plans to get payback once their commanders clear them hot to a.s.sault the town. A lot of guys are talking not just about the lost Marine but about rumors now circulating of Iraqis abusing American female POWs. (Within the next twenty-four hours, when the tale of Jessica Lynchas captivity and rape reaches the men, she becomes the campaignas unofficial Helen of Troy, a rallying point for generalized anger against Arabs.) Fawcett is particularly disturbed by an acquaintance of his, a sniper, who recently bragged that after being cleared to shoot an armed Iraqi who was taking cover behind a child, the sniper fired at the man through the kid, telling Fawcett, aI just killed a future terrorist.a Fawcett has a desire for revenge like everyone else, but at the same time he keeps thinking, as he later tells me, aWhen I get home people will probably ask me to speak at high schools about this. I donat know how Iam going to explain all the dead women and children Iave seen, the things weave done here.a Now he tells some of the guys heas with, aIf youare mad about them mutilating a Marine, itas not like this is the only country on earth with sociopaths. Weave got people at home in American cities who hurt and degrade people all the time.a Not only are the men in Alpha thirsting for payback, theyare so hungry that when their convoy pauses on its journey to Ash Shatrah, they jump out and ratf.u.c.k trash piles along Route 7. POG supply units pa.s.sing by in recent days have left mountains of MRE litter beside the road. Marines in Alpha, having endured reduced rations for several days, dig through them, hunting for uneaten Tootsie Roll or peanut b.u.t.ter packets.

Alpha Companyas commander is dealing with a whole different set of problems. The mission has gone through so many permutations in the last several hours that itas now clear to Capt. Patterson that finding the body of the lost Marine is a distant secondary objective. In fact, Pattersonas orders now verge on the fantastic. His Marines in Alpha, along with a much larger force from RCT-1, will link up outside the city and join a CIA-controlled operation to liberate Ash Shatrah, a.s.sisted by an indigenous army of afreedom fighters.a According to the portions of the plan Patterson has been let in on, the CIA has spent months training and equipping a small army of Iraqi afreedom fightersa in an unnamed foreign country. Now these freedom-loving patriots have been flown into Iraq, where they will face their first test, liberating Ash Shatrah.

The Marines will not be leading this mission. Their role is simply to be there to help out the Iraqi freedom fighters in case they get into a jam. Once the CIA-controlled exiles have liberated the city in the name of Free Iraq, the Marines will enter, brave the crowds who some are now predicting will be dancing in the streets, and search for the lost Marine.

Patterson has been careful in the past several hours to try to tone down the mood of his men. He later says, aI didnat want some dramatic idea of revenge to be motivating everybody.a Even so, as his company rolls up to Ash Shatrah, Patterson experiences what he later describes as a afeeling that there is a heroic aspect to what weare doing, that we are going to go into this town, getting one of our fallen brothers, and weare going to be the saviors of everyone.a ITaS OVERCAST when Alpha Company arrives on the northern outskirts of Ash Shatrah at about six in the morning on March 31. The ground is wet from recent rains, and the place smells like decay. First Recon had pa.s.sed through Ash Shatrah on March 26 on its thrust up from Nasiriyah, and the town had been exceptionally foul smelling then. This morning, Patterson realizes the odor comes from the corpses of shot-up Iraqi fighters rotting in nearby ditches. Ash Shatrah runs for about two kilometers north down the eastern side of the road. Alpha Company sets up along the north end of the town. Several hundred infantry Marines from RCT-1as Third Battalion are deployed farther down the road, bolstered with tanks and armored vehicles.

Patterson realizes just how big a deal this mission is when he sees General Kelly, Maj. Gen. Mattisas personal emissary, arrive by helicopter to consult with high-level Marine officers and the CIA officials running the show. The CIA guys, three young men who look to be in their late twenties, arrive in an armored vehicle, and emerge wearing jumpsuits, flak vests and black caps. The CIA men ratchet up the antic.i.p.ation level of the mission with exciting new intelligence: One of Saddamas top henchmen, General Ali Ha.s.san al-Majid, known as aChemical Ali,a is believed to be holed up in the town.

AFTER FAWCETTaS TEAM gets into position by the highway at the north end of Ash Shatraha"using the roadas elevation to provide covera"they notice the town is filled with military installations. Just a couple hundred meters away, they spot barracks, artillery pieces, stockpiles of munitions, an obstacle course for training soldiers and, most amazingly, Iraqis in uniform walking around outdoors in broad daylight. Fawcett canat believe that Marine convoys have been driving up and down this road for nearly a week next to a sizable, heavily armed force of Iraqis. Watching this, he later tells me, makes him wonder awhatas going through the minds of the guys we have planning stuff for us.a Itas not like the Iraqis donat have a clue the Americans are coming. The night before, U.S. s.h.i.+ps launched several Tomahawk cruise missiles into the town (at a cost to U.S. taxpayers of approximately 1.5 million dollars per Tomahawk). Patterson, whoas told about the cruise missiles when he arrives, is impressed. Comparable Marine operations against small, run-of-the-mill hostile towns like Ash Shatrah havenat rated the use of such high-tech weaponry. Clearly, this shows the hand of the CIA, sparing no expense in its effort to make the liberation of Ash Shatrah go as smoothly as possible and become a showcase for its handpicked army of Iraqi freedom fighters.

Patterson and his counterpart in the infantry battalion sit down outside the town and coordinate acontrol measures.a They make sure they know each otheras radio frequencies so they can communicate. They study maps of the town so their men donat run into each other later on. They rename all the main routes in the city, replacing confusing Arabic names with ones that are easier to remember, like aSally,a aJanea and aMary.a Marines tend to be methodical about things like this, few more so than Patterson. Within forty minutes of these consultations, Patterson is all set to partic.i.p.ate in this small, history-making event: the first liberation of a town in central Iraq by Iraqi forces.

Thereas just one problem: The freedom fighters have gone missing. Several of them had infiltrated the town the night before, under cover of the Tomahawk strike, in order to find sympathizers among the ranks of the Iraqi soldiers garrisoned there, but they were captured. Apparently, the Baathists who apprehended them had not been impressed by the missile strike, and they were summarily executed. Their comrades waiting outside the town lost heart. Early in the afternoon Pattersonas men are told, aThe freedom fighters have fled.a After all their elaborate preparations, the CIAas army has vanished into the countryside.

BY NOW PATTERSONaS MARINES have started to come under sporadic small-arms fire from the town. They call in a mortar strike on suspected enemy positions. The Marines, whoave driven all night to carry out what they thought would be a sweet, revenge-fueled version of Saving Private Ryan, grow frustrated.

Very quickly their mission outside Ash Shatrah becomes as confusing as all the others they have partic.i.p.ated in. Commanders begin to change the ROE. Initially, Marine snipers are cleared to kill anyone in uniform. They get in a few shots, then word is pa.s.sed down that soldiers are surrendering and they shouldnat automatically be shot.

Following this, Marines see a truck filled with soldiers zoom onto a street directly across from their position. The Marines hold their fire. The Iraqi soldiers drive past, waving white flags, then speed off, throwing the flags from the back of the truck. aWeare letting all these soldiers escape,a one of Fawcettas men complains.

Fawcett requests an artillery strike on a headquarters building 600 meters across from his position. His team has observed Iraqis in green military uniforms coming and going from the front door of this building all morning. Fawcett regrets pa.s.sing his request up almost immediately.

In Fawcettas opinion, his platoon commander doesnat know how to properly call in a strike (a similar complaint men in Bravo Company have about their commander, Encino Man). Fawcett believes the best way to take out the building is to order one or two rounds of artillery, see where they land, and if they donat hit the building, have the artillerymen adjust their fire. Instead, his commanding officer requests a afire for effecta strikea"four to six rounds of artillery shot all at once, then repeated without any adjustment. aItas an officer thing,a Fawcett tells his men. aHe just wants the glory of calling in a big strike. I canat go over his head.a Fawcett and his men watch at least sixteen HE rounds slam into the city and explode pretty much randomly in the streets. When the smoke clears, the only damage to the intended target is that a corner of the building has been clipped off. Fawcett turns to several of his buddies and asks, aDonat you think if some foreign army came into a small American town and did what weare doing here, you wouldnat find some American good old boys eager to string one of them up if they fell into their hands?a A FEW HOURS BEFORE SUNSET, the Marines are ordered to a.s.sault the town. The infantrymen from Third Battalion lead the way in, advancing under heavy machine-gun fire, blowing up buildings in their path with shoulder-fired missiles. They seize several military structures and clear the surrounding houses. Nearly all of the Iraqi soldiers have fled or changed out of their uniforms in order to blend in with the populace. They fire few shots. Thereas no sign of Chemical Ali or the body of the missing Marine.

Fawcettas platoon and another from Alpha drive their Humvees about 500 meters into the town, with Cobras launching h.e.l.lfire missiles ahead of them. They move into a water-purification plant, a complex of industrial structures filled with trucks and machinery. The men are ordered to stay here for the night.

By sundown, any thought that this could be a revenge mission completely disappears. Dozens of Iraqi citizens approach Alphaas hungry Marines on the perimeter, bearing gifts of tea, bowls of rice and flat bread, which Marines refer to as aHajji tortillas.a Some townspeople, speaking broken English, are eager to point out enemy positions. A few invite the Marines to come into their homes for a proper meal. Patterson is now forced to order his Marines, who hours before had been fantasizing about killing everyone in the town, to stop eating food brought to them by the locals.

After dark Patterson gets the clearest confirmation yet that the Baath Party and Iraqi military forces have abandoned the town. Through his NVGs he observes hundreds of people streaming in and out of government buildings alike ants, carting off everything they can carrya"desks, chairs, mattresses.a Iraqis arenat the only ones looting. Inside the water-purification plant Fawcett watches fellow Marines arape the buildingsa"smas.h.i.+ng things up, p.i.s.sing everywhere, hunting for souvenirs.a The water-purification plant must have been some sort of exemplary public-works project. Much of the equipment is new. Many of the trucks parked inside the buildings havenat even been driven; they still have plastic on the seats. Marines use Ka-Bar knives to rip apart their interiors for material to reupholster their Humvees and trucks.

After their exciting night at the water plant, the Marines leave Ash Shatrah early in the morning. Locals cheer. To one of Pattersonas officers, athe change in the town was dramatic, like someone pulled a thumb off their backs. We liberated them.a While the CIA mission failed, the liberation of Ash Shatrah proves to be precedent-setting in another sense. The Marines pull out of the town, leaving behind little or no civil authority, hordes of looters roaming through blown-up, trashed buildings and a scattered army of Baathists, soldiers and other loyalists, many of them still armed and all of them completely unaccounted for. The type of liberation seen at Ash Shatrah will play itself out again and again in other towns across Iraq until the U.S. military reaches Baghdad, where it will do pretty much the same, resulting in a much grander scale of anarchy.

Fawcettas men donat hear any word about the missing Marine until theyave pulled out of the town. They are told that an old man in Ash Shatrah met with officers in the infantry battalion and informed them that the body of the lost Marine had been dragged through the streets and strung up, but was cut down and buried by agood Samaritans.a According to the story pa.s.sed among Marines, the old man claimed that the good Samaritans did their best to give the Marine a Christian burial, then fled the city, fearing reprisals. After hearing this, Fawcett says, aAll weave been looking for is a corpse. The Marine was gone before we got here.a The body of this Marine is discovered a week later by other American forces. They find it buried in Ash Shatrahas trash dump.

TWENTY-THREE.

ON THE MORNING OF APRIL 1, the Marines of First Recona"less Alpha Company, not yet returned from its missiona"greet the new day from their wet, muddy holes dug alongside the highway, north of Al Hayy. Few of the troops slept much the night before. After the fatal shooting of the little girl at Charlie Companyas roadblock, the Marines fired warning shots at several more vehicles, and also killed the occupant of one car, a heavyset man in a twenty-year-old Buick, which had failed to stop. Later the Marines came under attack from a BM-21, which saturated a nearby field with bombs, though no one was. .h.i.t. The destruction continues after sunrise.

Below our position on the highway, slow-moving A-10 jets circle the fringes of Al Hayy, belching out machine-gun fire. The airframe of the A-10 is essentially built around a twenty-one-foot-long, seven-barreled Gattling guna"the largest such weapon in the U.S. a.r.s.enal. When it fires, it makes a ripping sound like someone is tearing the sky in half. The A-10s wrap up their performance by dropping four phosphorous bombs on the city. These are chemical-incendiary bombs that burst in the sky, sending long tendrils of white, sparkling flames onto targets below.

The air attacks are part of RCT-1as advance into Al Hayy from the south. Now, in coordination with that effort, First Recon is ordered to move to a ca.n.a.l on the western side of the town and seal off another escape route.

Civilians line up by the side of the road when First Reconas convoy a.s.sembles for its departure. The morningas show of American airpower has whipped them into a frenzy. They greet the Marines like visiting celebrities. ah.e.l.lo, my friend!a some of them shout. aI love you!a It doesnat seem to matter that these young men have just witnessed portions of their city being destroyed. Or maybe this is the very appeal of the Marines. One of the promises made by the Bush administration before the war started was that the Iraqi populace would be pacified by a ashock and awea air-bombing campaign. The strange thing is, these people appear to be entertained by it. aThey think weare cool,a says Person, abecause weare so good at blowing s.h.i.+t up.a First Reconas convoy pauses on the road by the bridge. Waving and jumping up and down, kids gathered by the tractor-trailer shot up the night before pay no heed to the corpses scattered not far from their feet. Farther on, thereas another shot-up car, with a male corpse next to it in the dirt. More kids dance around the carnage, giving thumbs-up to the Americans, shouting, aBus.h.!.+ Bus.h.!.+ Bus.h.!.+a I walk up to Esperaas vehicle. He gazes out at the grinning, impoverished children with dirty feet and says, aHow these people live makes me want to puke.a Garza, standing at his vehicleas .50-cal, says, aThey live just like Mexicans in Mexico.a He smiles at the children and throws them some candy. His grandmother is from Mexico, and by the way he is grinning, you get the idea that to him living like Mexicans is not all bad.

Espera turns away in disgust. aThatas why I f.u.c.king canat stand Mexico. I hate third-world countries.a Despite Esperaas harsh critique of the white mana"he derides English as the amasteras languageaa"his worldview reflects his self-avowed role as servant in the white manas empire, a job he seems to relish with equal parts pride, cynicism and self-loathing. He says, aThe U.S. should just go into all these countries, here and in Africa, and set up an American government and infrastructurea"with McDonaldas, Starbucks, MTVa"then just hand it over. If we have to kill a hundred thousand to save twenty million, itas worth it.a He lights a cigar. ah.e.l.l, the U.S. did it at home for two hundred yearsa"killed Indians, used slaves, exploited immigrant labor to build a system thatas good for everybody today. What does the white man call it? aManifest Destiny.a a Within a half hour, First Reconas convoy is again creeping north on an agricultural back road. Colbertas Humvee pa.s.ses a tree-shaded hamlet on the left as a series of explosions issues from it. The blasts sounds like mortars being launched, perhaps from inside the village. Ten days ago, being within a couple hundred meters of an enemy position would have sent the entire team into a high state of alert, but this morning n.o.body says a word. Colbert wearily picks up his radio handset and pa.s.ses on the location of the suspected enemy position.

Once the initial excitement wears off, invading a country becomes repet.i.tive and stressful, like working on an old industrial a.s.sembly line: The task seldom varies, but if your attention wanders, you are liable to get injured or killed. Colbertas team stops in a gra.s.sy field a few hundred meters down from the village. Thereas a ca.n.a.l directly across from his Humvee, with a paved road running along it on the other side.

That ca.n.a.l road, another route out of Al Hayy, is the one the battalion is tasked with observing. Marines are to shoot any armed Iraqis fleeing the road.

Despite the lethal mission, the gra.s.sy field we stop in is idyllic. Half of Colbertas teama"those who were up all night on watcha"take advantage of the tall gra.s.s to stretch out and doze. Itas a beautiful day, warm and clear, a bit humid. Thereas a stand of palm trees nearby. Birds fill the air with a loud, musical chattering. Trombley counts off ducks and turtles he observes in the ca.n.a.l with his binoculars. aWeare in safari land,a Colbert says.

The spell is broken when a Recon unit 500 meters down the line opens up on a truck leaving the city, putting an end to the birdsong in the trees. In the distance, a man jumps out holding an AK. He jogs through a field on the other side of the ca.n.a.l. We watch lazily from the gra.s.s as heas gunned down by other Marines.

The birds have resumed their singing when the man shot by the Marines reappears across the ca.n.a.l, limping and weaving like a drunk. n.o.body shoots him. Heas not holding a gun anymore. The ROE are scrupulously observed. Even so, they cannot mask the sheer brutality of the situation.

A few vehicles down from Colbertas, Team Three monitors the hamlet from where mortars seemed to have been launched when we rolled in. Doc Bryan and the others on the team have been watching the village through binoculars and sniper scopes for about an hour now. They have seen no signs of enemy activity, just a group of civiliansa"men, women and childrena"going about their business outside a small cl.u.s.ter of huts. But itas possible that rounds were fired from there. The Fedayeen often drive into a town, launch a few mortars and leave.

In any case, the place is quiet when, at about eleven oaclock in the morning, a lone 1,000-pound bomb dropped from an F-18 blows the hamlet to smithereens. The blast is so powerful that Fick jumps over a berm to avoid flying debris and lands on Encino Man. As the shock wave rolls through Colbertas position, I feel the concussion in my chest as if my internal organs are being picked up and slammed against my rib cage. A perfectly shaped black mushroom cloud rises up where the huts had been.

The only survivor observed by the Marines is a singed dog that runs out of the smoke, making crazy circlesa"indicative of blown eardrums and a subsequent loss of balance. Team Threeas Corporal Michael Stinetorf, twenty-one, who was watching when the bomb hit, is livid: aI just saw seven people vaporized right before my very eyes!a Behind Team Threeas position, the men observe the commanders who called in the strike smoking cigars and laughing. One of them gripes, aThose f.u.c.kheads are celebrating. Theyare laughing like itas a game.a But as in other bombing and shooting incidents, Marines donat all agree on what happened. Maj. Shoup, the air officer who helped coordinate the strike, sees it as a good hit. Prior to the bombing, Shoup was communicating with the F-18as backseater, a friend of his whose call sign is aCurly.a Before releasing the bomb, Shoup says, aCurly reported seeing puffs of smoke coming from the courtyard of the village. These looked like mortars being launched.a Shoup adds, aYou want to improve the morale of Marines? They see that thousand-pound bomb go off, it really improves their morale.a BY NOON RCT-1 has completed its thrust through Al Hayy, and several thousand of its Marines now occupy positions north of the highway bridge seized by First Recon. RCT-1 met with only light resistance through the city, and its signal teams tasked with picking up enemy radio transmissions overhear Iraqi commanders telling their men, aRetreat north.a First Recon is moving north as well. The plan is for the battalion to continue pus.h.i.+ng ahead of RCT-1 and move into Al Muwaffaqiyah, a town of 5,000 people, about five kilometers north of the field where we spent the morning.

The battalion convoy pulls onto a dirt lane and enters a series of shaded agricultural hamlets. We stop, and the residents pour out from their homes, waving and smiling. To the Marines, the villagersa warm welcome is confusing, given the fact that less than two kilometers down the road their neighbors were just wiped out by a 1,000-pound bomb dropped by an American F-18.

aTheyare probably just glad weare not blowing up their houses,a Person observes.

We see the tiny heads of children poking around the corner of a small adobe hut. Several girls, maybe eight or nine, run toward us.

Ever since the shepherd-shooting incident, Colbertas demeanor has changed toward civilians, especially children. When he sees them now, heas p.r.o.ne to uninhibited displays of sentimentality.

aHow adorable,a Colbert gushes as the girls laugh playfully a few meters outside his window. aTheyare so cute.a He orders Trombley to dig out the last remaining humanitarian rations, h.o.a.rded by the Marines to supplement their one-MRE-a-day diet. Colbert steps out of the vehicle, holding the fluorescent-yellow humrat packs. Espera walks up, hunched over his weapon, scowling from his deep-set eyes, perspiring heavily. aDog, I donat like being stopped here.a aPoke,a Colbert says, calling him by his nickname. aGive these to the kids. Iave got your back.a Itas not that Colbert is afraid to walk across the yard. For some reason, he wants Espera to partic.i.p.ate in this act of generosity. aGo on. Youall feel good,a Colbert urges him.

Espera stalks up to the girls and hands them the packs. They run, squealing, back to the hut to show off their prizes to a woman in black standing outside.

aSee, Poke,a Colbert says. aTheyare happy.a In Iraq Espera spends his free moments reminiscing about his wife and eight-year-old daughter back home in Los Angeles. Outside of the Marine Corps, his family is the center of his life. He spent his final night before deploying to the Middle East camping with his daughter in a tree fort head built for her in his backyard. But out here, Espera doesnat seem to want to connect with civilians in any way. Most of all, he doesnat even want to look at the children. While Colbert continues to wave at the kids now opening the humrats by the hut, Espera breaks the Kodak moment. af.u.c.k it, dog. You think handing out some rice and candy bars is gonna change anything? It donat change nothing.a A FEW HUNDRED METERS up from Colbertas team, Meesh meets with villagers, who warn the Marines against trying to enter Al Muwaffaqiyah. They give Meesh detailed information about paramilitary forces that are setting up an ambush on the main bridge leading into the town.

When this report is pa.s.sed over the radio to Colbertas team, Person speculates that the villagers might be helping because they are genuinely on our side.

aTheyare not on anybodyas side,a Colbert says. aThese are simple people. They donat care about war. Theyad probably tell the Iraqis where we were if they rolled through here. They just want to farm and raise sheep.a Because of the villagersa warnings, First Reconas commander orders the battalion to leave the trail and set up in a wadia"a dry riverbeda"four kilometers back from the bridge, where the ambush is supposedly being planned for them.

The Marines dig Ranger graves and set up a defensive perimeter. The battalion orders an artillery strike on the area around the bridge, then a couple of hours before sunset, RCT-1 sends Marines in several light armored vehicles (LAVs) to try to cross the bridge. They are turned back by heavy enemy gunfire. When the LAVs return down the road past the wadi weare in, Gunny Wynn spots one moving slowly with its rear hatch open and a wounded Marine in the back. aGuess the locals were right about that bridge,a he says.

The Marines are told to prepare to stay here for the night. Despite the civilian deaths theyave witnessed or caused in the past twenty-four hours, most Marines are still on a high from seizing the bridge the night before. Being told theyare going to stay in one place for the next twelve hours or so adds to the morale boost.

The men spend the remaining hours of daylight partially stripping out of their MOPPs and was.h.i.+ng up. Reyes breaks out an espresso pot, which he fills with Starbucks coffee, luxury items packed in his gear for special occasions. While brewing it, he accosts Pappy, his team leader, whoas just finished shaving. aPappy, you missed a spot.a Reyes takes his razor and cleans up around the edge of Pappyas sideburns. aSometimes before a big meeting with the boss, I have to clean him up a little,a Reyes explains.

aThe battalion commander thinks Iam a b.u.m,a Pappy says, tilting his head slightly.

aBrother, thatas acause he donat know what a true warrior be,a Reyes says, clowning.

The close relations.h.i.+p shared by Reyes and Pappy is between two men who are complete opposites. While Reyes has so much bubbly effervescence that he manages to be flamboyant even in his MOPP suit, Pappy is a rangy, quintessentially laconic Southern man raised in a churchgoing, Baptist family in Lincolntown, North Carolina, a mountain town of a few thousand souls. Pappy jokingly describes himself as ayour normal North Carolina loser,a and says head barely ever met a Mexican before joining the Corps. Now Reyes is not just one of his best friends but his a.s.sistant team leader, his spotter when sniping, his second in battle. Reyes quips that their relations.h.i.+p is like that of ahusband and wife.a After Reyes finishes shaving him, he nudges Pappyas head to the side for a close inspection and p.r.o.nounces, aLooking like a warrior, Pappy.a Everyone sits around enjoying the waning moments of daylight, as artillery booms into Al Muwaffaqiyah. One of the senior men in the platoon walks up and announces, aLooks like thereas a big meeting going on with the battalion commander. I just hope he isnat coming up with some stupid-a.s.s plan.a

TWENTY-FOUR.

AT ABOUT EIGHT OaCLOCK that night, Fick returns from his meeting with his superiors and gathers his team leaders for a briefing. aThe bad news is, we wonat get much sleep tonight,a he says. aThe good news is, we get to kill people.a Itas rare for Fick to sound so amoto,a regaling his men with enthusiastic talk of killing. He goes on to present Lt. Col. Ferrandoas ambitious last-minute plan to cross the bridge into Al Muwaffaqiyah, push north of the town and set up ambushes on a road believed to be heavily travelled by Fedayeen. aThe goal is to terrorize the Fedayeen,a he says, looking around, smiling expectantly.

His men are skeptical. Theyare all aware that when Marines approached the bridge a few hours ago in LAVs, they were hammered by enemy ambushers. Pappy repeatedly questions Fick about the enemy situation on the bridge. aItas been pounded all day by artillery,a Fick answers, waving off his objections, sounding almost glib, like a salesmana"all of this unusual for him. aI think the chances of a serious threat are low.a Fick walks a delicate line with his men. A good officer should be eager to take calculated risks. Despite the menas complaints against Ferrando for ordering them into an ambush at Al Gharraf, the fact is, only one Marine was injured, and the enemyas plans to halt the Marinesa advance were thwarted. Fick privately admits that there have been times when heas actually resisted sending his troops on missions because, as he says, aI care a lot about these guys, and I donat like the idea of sending them into something where somebody isnat going to come back.a While acting on these sentiments might make him a good person, they perhaps make him a less good officer. Tonight he seems uncharacteristically on edge, as if heas fighting his tendencies to be overly protective. He admonishes his team leaders, saying, aIam not hearing the aggressiveness Iad like to.a His voice sounds hollow, like heas not convinced himself.

The men, who ultimately have no choice in the matter, reluctantly voice their support of Fickas ordersa"ones that he has no choice but to follow, either. After he goes off, Pappy says, aThe people running this can f.u.c.k things up all they want. But as long as we keep getting lucky and making it through alive, theyall just keep repeating the same mistakes.a What galls the men is the fact that they are situated just a few kilometers from the bridge. To them, it seems like a no-brainer to send a foot patrol out and observe the bridge before driving onto it. aReconnaissance,a Doc Bryan points out, ais what Recon Marines do.a Confidence is not bolstered when an Iraqi artillery unita"thought to have been wiped out by this pointa"sends numerous rounds kabooming into the surrounding mudflats. The men break up their discussion. However beautiful artillery might look when itas arcing across the sky onto enemy positions, when itas aimed at you, it sounds like somebodyas hurling freight trains at your head. Everyone runs for the nearest hole and takes cover.

Following the Iraqi strike, we watch Marine batteries pour about 100 DPICM rounds onto the town side of the bridge four kilometers distant. Each DPICM round, loaded with either 66 or 89 submunitions, produces spectacular starbursts as it explodes over the city.

FOR TONIGHTaS MISSION, Colbertas team wins the honor of driving the lead vehicle onto the bridge. The team climbs into the Humvee just before eleven oaclock, some gobbling ephedra for whatas expected to be an all-night mission. Colbert is not especially sanguine about the condition of the teamas equipment. Due to the shortage of LSA lubricant, his vehicleas Mark-19 keeps going down. On top of this, on a night when they are going to be rolling through a hostile town, then setting up ambushes on back roads, thereas almost no moon, which makes the operation of NVGs less than ideal. Ordinarily, the team would turn on its PAS-13 thermal-imaging scope, but tonight they have no batteries for it. (Fick does not hide his anger toward Casey Kasem for failing to keep the teams supplied with these items. aThat guyas either running around with his video camera shooting his war doc.u.mentary or sitting in his hole reading Maxim, while my men donat get what they need,a he complained earlier.) Even though the team will be moving with impaired night-vision and a faulty main gun, Colbert tries to put a good spin on things. aWeall be okay,a he says as they start the engine. aJust make sure you look sharp through those NVGs, Person.a We roll onto the darkened road, heading toward the bridge at about twenty-five miles per hour. Far up ahead, we see headlights from a lone vehicle moving down perpendicular to the road weare on. It reaches the approximate location of the bridge and the lights go off. Colbert is watching this, debating its meaning: Some farmer driving at night toward a bridge thatas been pounded with artillery for several hours? Fedayeen sending up reinforcements or using the headlights to signal someone?

The team ceases its speculation when Cobras thump overhead. They fire multiple volleys of zuni rockets, striping the sky in front of us with white burn trails that culminate in multiple explosions near the bridge. We make out treesa"not palms but spiky eucalyptus treesa"silhouetted in the light of the bursting rockets.

Cobra pilots radio down to Maj. Shoup that their thermal-imagining devices are picking up ablobsaa"possible heat signatures of peoplea"hiding amidst the eucalyptus trees by the foot of the bridge. The pilots tried hitting them with their zunis, but the rockets overshot the trees. Now theyare concerned about firing any more for fear of hitting the Marines approaching on the ground. Due to a comms error in the battalion, none of this information is pa.s.sed to Colbert, Fick or anyone else in the platoon.

Colbert orders Person to continue driving into the direction of the explosions. Everyoneas life depends on Person. Heas the only one inside the Humvee with NVGs on, allowing him to see the road ahead. He hunches forward over the steering wheel, his face obscured by the apparatus. The NVGs give their wearer a bright gray-green view of the night and offer a limited, tunnel-vision perspective but no depth perception. Person is having trouble finding the bridge. Itas not quite where the map indicated it would be. Colbert radios this news to Fick.

He radios back, aNot good. Not good.a Then Person figures out that reaching the bridge requires a sharper right turn than head thought. He makes it. aThereas an obstacle on the bridge,a Person says in a dull monotone that nevertheless manages to sound urgent.

aWhat?a asks Colbert. He has night-vision capabilities on his rifle scope but in the cramped Humvee canat turn it forward to see what Person is looking at.

aItas like a s.h.i.+pping container,a Person says. aIn the middle of the road.a Itas actually a blown-up truck turned sideways on the road several meters before the entrance to the bridge. We stop about twenty meters in front of it. To the left is that stand of tall eucalyptus trees. Theyare about five meters from the edge of the road. Behind us, thereas a large segment of drainpipe thatas been dragged across part of the road.

Person drove around the pipe a moment ago. Through his NVGs it had appeared to be a small trench in the roada"what head thought was the result of natural erosion. Now the team behind us is radioing, aYou guys just drove around a pipe.a Itas becoming clear to the team that this is not random debris. The pipe and the ruined truck in front of us were deliberately placed where they are in order to channel the vehicle into what is known in military terms as a akill zone.a We are sitting in the middle of it.

Everyone in the Humvee (except me) has figured this out. The men remain extremely calm. aTurn the vehicle around,a Colbert says softly. The problem is, the rest of the convoy has continued pus.h.i.+ng into the kill zone behind us. All five Humvees in the platoon are bunched together, with twenty more pressing from behind. Person gets the Humvee partially turned around; the eucalyptus trees are now on our immediate right. But the pipe, which was behind us, now prevents the Humvee from moving forward.

Person guns the engine, starting into a sharp turn, intending to cut around the pipe by going off the road.

aHalt! Stop it,a Colbert says. aDonat go off the road. It could be mined. Weave got to go out the way we came in.a Colbert radios the rest of the platoon, telling them to back the f.u.c.k up, while simultaneously peering out his window through his night-vision rifle scope.

aThere are people in the trees,a he says, no trace of alarm in his voice. He repeats the message over his radio, hunches more tightly over his rifle and begins shooting.

His first shot kicks off an explosion of gunfire. There are between five and ten enemy fighters crouched beneath the treesa"just five meters from the edge of our Humvee. There are several more across the bridge in bunkers, manning a belt-fed machine gun and other weapons, and still more ambushers on the other side of the road with RPGs. They have the Marines surrounded on three sides, raking the kill zone with rifle and machine-gun fire and RPGs.

Why they did not start shooting first is a mystery. Colbert believes, he later tells me, that they simply didnat understand the capabilities of American night-vision optics. The Marine rifles have night-vision scopes wedded to laser target designatorsa"a little infrared beam that goes out and lights up the spot where the bullet will hit. Since itas infrared, the dot can only be seen through a night-vision scope or NVGs. What each Marine sees is not only his own laser dot lighting up a target, but those emitted by his buddiesa weapons as well. The effect is sort of like a one-sided game of laser tag.

Now, in the kill zone, Marines looking through their scopes are seeing the heads and torsos of enemy fighters lit up by two or three laser dots at once, as they pick them off tag-team style, carefully transitioning from target to target. The Marines have to be careful. Their advantage in night optics is precarious. Bunched up as they are together, if they start shooting wildly, they risk killing one another. The other problem is, while the Marines are getting in good shots, their vehicles are so jammed up, no oneas able to move out.

Fick can feel his truck jolting as enemy rounds rip through the sheet-metal sides. Through his window, he sees muzzles spitting flames in the darkness like a bunch of camera flashes going off at once. Then he sees an RPG streak right over the rear hatch of Colbertas Humvee and explode. He decides to jump out of his vehicle and try to direct the Humvees out of the kill zone. Fickas own coping mechanism for combat is what he calls the aDead Man Walking Method.a Instead of rea.s.suring himself, as some do, that heas invincible or that his fate is in G.o.das hands (which wouldnat work for him since he leans toward agnosticism), he operates on the a.s.sumption that heas already a dead man, so getting shot makes no difference. This is the mode heas in when he hops out of his Humvee, armed only with his 9mm pistol, and strides into the melee. Marines on Humvees shoot past his head while low-enfilade rounds from the enemy machine gun across the bridge skip past his feet. To the Marines seeing him approach, their lieutenant almost appears to be dancing. Fick later says he felt like he was in a shoot-out from The Matrix.

In our vehicle, Colbert seems to have entered a private realm. He fires bursts and, for some inexplicable reason, hums aSundown,a the depressing 1970s Gordon Lightfoot anthem. His M-4 jams repeatedly, but each time he calmly clears the chamber and resumes firing, while mumbling the chorus: aSometimes I think itas a sin/When I feel like Iam winnina when Iam losina again.a Meanwhile, Person, frustrated by the traffic jam, opens his door and, with shots crackling all around, shouts, aWould you back the f.u.c.k up!a In the heat of battle, his Missouri accent comes out extra hick. He repeats himself and climbs back in, his movements almost lackadaisical.

Two Marines are hit in the first couple of minutes of shooting. Q-tip Stafford is knocked down in the back of Fickas truck by a piece of shrapnel to his leg. He ties his leg off with a tourniquet, gets back up and continues firing.

Pappy has a bullet rip through his foot and come out the other side, his torn boot gus.h.i.+ng blood from both holes. He tourniquets the wound, resumes firing, gets on the radio and says, aTeam Two has a man hit.a He speaks of himself in the third person, he says, because he doesnat want to panic the rest of the platoon. Beside him in the driveras seat, Reyes, often teased for being the platoonas pretty boy, narrowly escapes a bullet that shatters the winds.h.i.+eld and pa.s.ses within an inch of his beautiful head. But Reyes feels oddly calm. He later says, aWearing NVGs blocks your peripheral vision. You feel coc.o.o.ned in this tunnel. It gives a false feeling of safety.a He concentrates on executing a three-point turn, surrounded by four other Humvees all trying to do the same, each with Marines on top blazing away. But one of Reyesas tires is shot out. Driving on rims makes the Humvee wobble like a circus clown car. Pappy, riding beside him and shooting out his door, with his wounded foot elevated over the dashboard, repeatedly shouts, aYouare going off the d.a.m.n road!a When Team Threeas .50-caliber machine gun opens up over Doc Bryanas head where heas perched on the back of the Humvee, the concussive blasting is so intense that his nose starts bleeding. With his weapon growing sticky with blood and snot, he squeezes off two separate, very effective bursts, getting head shots on a pair of enemy ambushers.

Through it all, Espera fights from his Humvee beside ours while saying Hail Marys. In his NVGs he sees a man cut down in the extremities by a blast from Garzaas .50-cal. When he sees the guy attempt to crawl off, Espera fires a burst, clipping the top of his head, and resumes his Hail Marys.

It takes five to ten minutes for the platoon to extricate itself from the kill zone, leaving most of the would-be ambushers either dead or in flight. Doc Bryan counts nine bodies scattered on both sides of the road. Corporal Teren Holsey, a twenty-year-old on Team Three, gets in the platoonas final kill. He rides hanging off the back of the last Humvee to leave the zone. After his vehicle makes it about fifty meters away from the pipe in the road, he looks back to see if anyone is following. He observes a man limping by the road and cuts him down with a burst from his M-4.

TWENTY-FIVE.

JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT on April 1, the platoon falls back a couple of kilometers from the ambush zone, then turns around on the road, orienting its Humvees toward the bridge. Unlike after the ambush at Al Gharraf, when the team became giddy at the cessation of fire, everyone is now subdued. Colbert is concerned about a loud sc.r.a.ping sound the Humvee had made while pulling back from the bridge. He and Person climb out and find cables tangled around the axlesa"debris from the road. The team spends several minutes cutting them away, then clambers back in. No one says anything in the darkness. They are ordered to prepare for another attempt on the bridge. Trombley falls asleep, snoring loudly in the seat next to me.

Pappy, now in a lot of pain from his wounded foot, is unloaded and sent back to the battalionas rear for medical aid. Reyes is promoted to team leader, and takes Pappyas seat in the Humvee. Q-tip Stafford, wounded in the leg, decides to stick around for the second a.s.sault.