We stopped on the side of the highway to await our orders. At four in the afternoon, they came: leave immediately and drive to the Tigris River bridge at An Numaniyah. Be there by morning. Gunny Wynn and I spread maps on the hood. Sheet after sheet after sheet. I whistled.
“Christ, that’s almost two hundred miles. We have to go south through Al Hayy to Qalat Sukkar, then swing west through Afak and north again all the way to the Tigris. What do you think?”
“I think we’d better stop dicking around and drive.”
Sometimes I felt like a long-distance trucker, living my life in the cab of the Humvee, talking on the radio, and eating meals on the road. At my feet sat a two-liter water bottle to which I’d added six packets of MRE instant coffee, six creamers, a packet of cocoa powder, and two crushed No-Doz tablets. I had to be careful to sip the brew slowly to avoid peaking and crashing before midnight.
By sunset, we’d passed through Al Hayy and by the intersection where Iraqi artillery had nearly hit us three nights and several lifetimes earlier. We turned west on Highway 17 and accelerated into the fading twilight on a narrow macadam road. Our speed stayed high as we crested a series of small hills, passing farmhouses set back from the highway. Lights shone in some of them, and again I was struck by the peaceful countryside. A video filmed from my seat that evening would have looked like any one of a thousand hardscrabble farming towns in the American Southwest.
We raced through Afak without incident and turned north on Highway 1. Its six lanes of pavement had been in our dreams since south of Nasiriyah, when we’d last traveled them before cutting north on Highway 7 with RCT-1. The Army and the other RCTs had remained on Highway 1, swinging west of Iraq’s population centers to speed toward Baghdad. Now we joined the pell-mell rush. Traffic on the highway was thick and eclectic — Humvees, Patriot missile batteries, tanks on trucks, tanks clanking along on their own, hundreds of contracted tankers carrying fuel for the invaders. In the southbound lanes, empty trucks roared toward Kuwait for another load. I watched the massive logistical orchestra and thought of all those nights we’d felt so alone, a few teeth far away from this immense tail. We merged into the flow and relaxed, feeling the false safety of numbers.
Tracking our progress on the maps folded in my lap, I led the platoon off an exit ramp to Highway 27 for the final few miles to An Numaniyah. We arrived in the dead hours between midnight and dawn, joining a queue of Marines assembling to cross the bridge in the morning. I thought a tank might crush me if I slept next to the Humvee, so I crawled beneath it. My eyes closed, but sleep would not come.
At home, I would have gone downstairs and watched TV. Under the Humvee, all I could do was stare at the oil pan a few inches above my nose. I saw my father leaning against the kitchen counter as I told him of my decision to join the Corps. My girlfriend, sobbing beneath a blanket as I said goodbye in a hotel room in Coronado. Shattered windshields. Blood-spattered pavement. And that relentless voice on the scratchy recording: There’s no discharge in the war.
After sunrise, we continued our relentless push and crossed the second of Mesopotamia’s great rivers. Below the bridge, the Tigris sparkled in the morning sun. Fishermen poled skiffs through the shallows, and crowds gathered along the banks to bathe and draw water. A group of children waved from atop a burned-out Soviet tank. Others clambered onto an artillery cannon and sat, cheering, astride the barrel as if it were a hobbyhorse. Military equipment was everywhere. For the next hundred miles, all the way to the gates of Baghdad, every palm grove hid Iraqi armor, every field an artillery battery, and every alley an antiaircraft gun or surface-to-air missile launcher. But we never fired a shot. We saw the full effect of American airpower: every one of these fearsome weapons was a blackened hulk.
The division had fought its way through there the day before, and evidence of the battle was everywhere. We passed a Humvee, its windshield frosted with bullet holes. American sleeping bags and packs lay in the road. I wondered what had happened to their owners. Frequently, the pavement itself bore the starburst crater and radiating shrapnel scars of a mortar strike. All along the highway, buildings and underbrush smoldered. Smoke was thick in the air, burning diesel mixing sometimes with sweeter burning flesh. Wynn and I stared at a blackened and abandoned Abrams tank.
“I thought those things were indestructible,” I said. “How the hell did they manage to bag a fucking Abrams?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know, but let’s hope whoever did it is already dead.”
“Watch out.” I pointed at an object in the road, thinking it was a piece of unexploded ordnance. Then I saw it was a human head, slightly charred and staring placidly at the sky. A short distance away, dogs tore at the body.
Wynn and I were momentarily chastened but then had to laugh. “Can you believe this place?” he said. “Heads in the road. Dogs eating bodies. People at home bitch about cigarette butts on the beach.”
We drove through dusk and into the night before stopping along the edge of the road. The GPS told me where we were, but that was less important than what was out there. Nothing could tell me what was in the fields and palm groves just beyond our little circle. We had moved so quickly that there was no front anymore. Good guys and bad guys were all mixed up. I had slept three hours in three days.
“Gunny, I can’t think straight. I need a couple of hours in the bag,” I said. At that point, sleep wasn’t pleasant, just a mechanical necessity, like putting gas in a car.
To our left, a five-story factory burned in the dark. Flames leaped high into the sky. The fire didn’t crackle; it roared, sucking oxygen from the air around it. I wrapped myself in a poncho and lay on the gravel near the front tire to shield myself from the flickering light.
It was the sleep of the damned. I floated in a netherworld of dreams, memories, and sudden starts. Briefing the platoon. Fireballs. Ragged breathing. Take the shot. Blue cars. Tanks nearby. And the fire, burning, roaring, casting shadows across the palms.
Christeson shook me awake. “It’s been three hours, sir. The patrol’s on its way back in.”
I sat up and rubbed my head, shaking gravel from my hair. “What patrol?”
“Team Three, sir. They went to check out that tank.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Down the road, near the platoon’s last Humvee, Sergeant Lovell and Doc Bryan were swearing softly in the darkness. Around them, the team sat on the pavement, stripping out of soaked, muddy boots and trousers. They looked as if they’d been wading in waist-deep water.
Stinetorf glanced up at me. “That fucking thing has probably been there ten years, sir. Couldn’t drive it out through that swamp if they wanted to.”
Slowly, I understood. Some of my dreams had not been dreams. The company operations chief, a senior enlisted man outside the platoon, had come to me and asked to send Lovell’s team out to investigate an Iraqi tank that had been spotted in a nearby palm grove. I pulled Sergeant Lovell aside and asked him what had happened.
“Ops chief came and told us to go look at some fucking tank out there in the grove. I told him half the fucking division rolled past it already and I only take orders from you and Gunny Wynn.”