Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Meanwhile, Mattis’s 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 passable bridges over the Tigris (which the western highways also cross). The problem he’s 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 massing 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 Recon’s, for the past twenty-four hours, has been unable to obtain a clear picture of what’s going on in the city with Task Force Tarawa. It’s another one of those combat situations that’s hard for a civilian, who might think of the U.S. military as an all-seeing, all-powerful, high-tech entity, to comprehend. While Dowdy is only a few kilometers south of the bridge and Task Force Tarawa’s positions, his radios can’t communicate with their radios. Task Force Tarawa, based out of Camp Lejeune in South Carolina, uses different encryption codes from those used by Dowdy’s forces, which came from Camp Pendleton. West Coast Marines can’t 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 bypass it and use a distant crossing point, or even to send some through and hold others back. Unlike First Recon’s 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 can’t 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, Dowdy’s 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 assault.

AT ONE O’CLOCK 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. Yesterday’s 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.

Colbert’s 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 can’t use them. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him lose control in earnest.

Colbert calms him. “It’s okay. We’ll fix it. Everyone’s just nervous because we lost a lot this morning,” he says, referring to the news of Marine casualties.

At one-thirty p.m. First Recon’s 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, it’s a reasonable assessment that everyone in the vehicle has a better-than-average chance of getting killed or injured this afternoon.

It’s 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 dust—familiar from Camp Mathilda but which we hadn’t seen a lot of until today. Cobras clatter directly overhead. They circle First Recon’s 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-1’s convoy. A Marine standing by the road pumps his fist as Colbert’s vehicle drives past and shouts, “Get some!”

No one says anything in the vehicle.

We drive into a no-man’s-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 we’re 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.

“Now, this looks like Tijuana,” says Person.

“And this time I get to do what I’ve always wanted to do in T.J.,” Colbert adds. “Burn it to the ground.”

There is a series of thunderous, tooth-rattling explosions directly to the vehicle’s 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. It’s a strange sensation feeling those massive guns firing behind you. Marines who so scrupulously picked up all their litter this morning are now bombing the shit out of the city.

Up ahead are wrecked U.S. military vehicles, a burned-up Dragon Wagon military transport truck, a mangled Humvee. The windshield is riddled with bullet holes. We pass a few meters from the Humvee, close enough to see pools of brown fluid—probably blood—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.

“Small-arms fire to the rear,” Colbert says, passing word from the battalion radio. No one reacts. It’s like a weather bulletin.

“Car coming at twelve o’clock!” someone shouts. Weapons clatter as everyone readies to shoot it.

A white Toyota passenger car with orange fenders—the markings of an Iraqi taxicab—zooms out of the black cloud ahead, toward First Recon’s convoy, where, no doubt, up and down the line hundreds of Marines take aim to shoot it.

“No weapons! No weapons!” gunners shout in Colbert’s Humvee, meaning they don’t see any weapons in the cab.

The cab squeezes past Colbert’s 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. They’re also used by car bombers. And they’re used by civilians to evacuate the wounded.

Ever more powerful blasts boom outside the Humvee. We pass a succession of desiccated farmsteads—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.