We stopped on the roadside to wait for the LAVs to make their lumbering ten-point turns on the narrow road. I took advantage of the stop to talk with the team leaders. They were doing a great job, and I wanted to let them know that. As I stood near Colbert’s window, two Marines raised their rifles, aiming past me and clicking the safeties off. I spun around. Two men walked out from behind a berm less than twenty meters away. A little girl, perhaps five years old, stumbled along between them, holding hands with each. The men forced smiles and waved, but I was focused on the little girl.
Her eyes stared vacantly, looking at nothing even as she picked her way across the uneven ground. She was filthy. Dirt caked her face, and her sweatpants, once pink, were a sickly shade of gray. I knelt down to touch her shoulder, and she shrank back, terrified.
“Food and water — now,” I called over my shoulder to the platoon. “Doc, check her out.” For some reason, I felt a sense of urgency and responsibility for this girl that I hadn’t felt before. Part of it was her small size. Mostly, though, I think I was touched by the contrast between her apparent physical health and her psychological pain. She was far too young to be so afraid. I thought of the Cobras rocketing the palm groves and lighting homes on fire. I remembered the jets dropping bombs and the roar of our own machine guns. Even for armed and trained Marines, there was a lot to be afraid of in Ba‘quba. I tried to imagine what the afternoon must have looked like through the eyes of a child.
“Sir, she seems fine physically, just a little dehydrated,” Doc reported. “It’s like she’s shell-shocked.” He handed her a bottle of water. The two men, overjoyed that we recognized their plight, laughed and hugged us.
Through Mish, the older of the two men began to speak. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, looking dignified and relaxed.
“He says tanks and soldiers are at a dam on the river. He says they are keeping people away from the place because chemical bombs are hidden there, maybe buried in the ground.”
Two independent reports of chemical weapons nearby. In addition to all our daily missions, we had general tasks that were continuous on every mission. One of the most important was safeguarding any evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. I picked up the radio and asked for Godfather, the battalion commander himself. Colonel Ferrando answered with understandable annoyance over a mere platoon commander interrupting him in the middle of a fight. I hurried to exonerate myself by explaining the two reports of chemical weapons at the dam.
“Copy all, Hitman Two. I’ll pass it up to division myself,” he said.
Our report became a national collection priority, but no chemical weapons were found.
I regretted leaving the little girl to her uncertain fate, but the helicopters were gone, the LAVs out of sight, and I had orders to turn back. We passed the last intersection and looped north on the eastern fork of the highway. Our mission was to set up a blocking position while Alpha Company did the same on other highways and Charlie entered Ba‘quba to investigate the Republican Guard headquarters building.
Scanning the mud-brick houses to our right, I saw something that made me stop. Most of the battalion had already traveled past this point, but an Iraqi military truck was parked behind one of the buildings.
“Gunny, stop the Humvee,” I said. Half the platoon advanced slowly on the house. The Marines communicated by hand signals, splitting into teams to come at the building from three directions. Just as that pre-firefight tension swelled to the point of bursting, the front door opened and a swarm of children ran out.
“America! America! Good! Good! Good!”
Rifles dropped.
A middle-aged Iraqi man, dressed in Western clothes and dutifully sporting a Saddam mustache, followed the children into the yard.
“Hi, guys, I’m Hassan.” He spoke with almost no accent. As if to answer our unspoken question, he explained that he had been an English professor at Baghdad University. The twelve girls and boys, running circles around the Marines and trading funny faces with them, were his children.
He said the Republican Guard had visited his house the night before. Eight antiaircraft guns were piled in the back of the Russian-made ZIL cargo truck. Hassan was terrified that the Americans would bomb it and destroy his home in the process. With a mental bow and flourish, I told him we would be happy to remove the cause of his concern.
The prospect of doing something good for regular Iraqi citizens (and the chance to blow up a truck) galvanized the Marines to action. We hitched the truck to a Humvee and dragged it a safe distance from the house. There Colbert and others built a charge from C-4 and detonation cord. They wrapped the guns and the truck’s engine, being sure to include the fuel tanks to help amplify the blast. We gathered the kids and explained what was about to happen. Then we all crouched down together and watched the truck disappear in a fireball. Hassan invited us to stay for dinner and looked a little relieved when I declined, telling him we had unfinished business in Ba‘quba.
I picked an open stretch of highway for our blocking position, with good fields of fire in all directions. Flat, open highway would give Iraqi drivers the best chance to see and avoid us. It gave us the best chance of not having to kill anyone. We placed our looted Iraqi stop sign three hundred meters down the highway, along with a large piece of a cardboard MRE box on which Mish had written “Turn around” in Arabic. We all hoped we were learning fast enough to avoid repeating earlier mistakes.
Pausing for the first time all day, I remembered the prisoner in the back of the Humvee. He sprawled face-down on the truck bed with his hands tightly zip-cuffed behind him. Christeson stood over him with a rifle.
“Cut him free and give him some food and water,” I said. Christeson looked at me as if I’d suggested letting the lions run amok in the San Diego Zoo, but he cut the cuffs off. The man sat up slowly, rubbing his wrists and whimpering. He looked at me mournfully, his long mustache twitching, and I handed him a bottle of water.
“Thank you.”
“You speak English?” I was surprised. Judging from his dumpy appearance, I guessed he was a low-level conscript.
“A little, yes. My heart hurts.” He put his hand to his chest, and the mustache twitched again.
“What’s your name?”
“Ahmed al-Khirzgee. I am good man.”
“What unit are you from?”
“I am not a soldier,” he said with a face like a basset hound’s.
“Then why are you wearing a military uniform, and why were you shooting at us with a military rifle?”
“I am only a very low soldier from Al Quds militia. I do not want to shoot at you.”
“But you did shoot at us. We almost killed you.”
“I have five daughters. Ba’ath Party took them from me and told me to fight the Americans, or my daughters would be killed. What would you do?”
I didn’t know whether to believe him, but he had struck a nerve. Al-Khirzgee was about my father’s age. His clothes were filthy and torn. He looked as exhausted as we were. I remembered my field interrogation at SERE school and thought that, for al-Khirzgee, this was real. He was afraid we would kill him. “Ahmed, I’d probably do exactly what you did,” I said. He stared at his lap before meeting my eyes again. “Drink this water and eat some food. Do what we say, and you won’t be harmed. If you fight or try to get away, this Marine will shoot you.” I turned to wink at Christeson and mouthed “Don’t shoot him.” Christeson nodded and fixed his sternest guard face on our prisoner.
Across the highway, Sergeant Lovell led his team on a foot patrol into a palm grove. It was too close to our position to leave unchecked. When they returned, Lovell made a beeline for me.