The platoon hummed. We were on our own, free to make decisions, to run missions the way we saw fit. For the next two days, the buck stopped with me and Gunny Wynn. Everyone was rested after sleeping in the relative comfort of the power plant, and mail had arrived the night before. We’d gorged ourselves on homemade cookies, beef jerky, trail mix, and all the other delicacies we had lived without for a month. Three days without missions had left us all with a sense of withdrawal. I craved action. We believed that we could bring order to our little slice of Iraq, that we could be examples of freedom and tolerance and generosity. And if anyone opposed us, at least a firefight was more exciting than lying around on a warehouse floor. I needed a fix.
Our first stop looked like a nice American subdevelopment. According to the map, its name was Qalat Abd al Jasadi. It was a small neighborhood, only three blocks square. Large, well-kept houses peeked from behind walls of manicured shrubbery. Children played ball in the street while adults did lawn work and tinkered with cars. The orderly homes had caught my attention from the highway. I reasoned that only Ba’ath Party members or supporters would have lived in such comfort under the Hussein regime. If our mission was to stabilize the city and root out unsavory elements, a Ba’ath stronghold seemed as good a place as any to start. And so I made the natural choice for a Marine platoon commander desensitized by three weeks of war and invigorated by three days of rest: I decided to provoke them.
We drove into the quiet neighborhood, snorting diesel fumes and brandishing weapons. Instead of icy stares, we found open arms. Kids ran to us, and adults gathered around to ask questions in halting English.
“Finally, America come! Iraq a nice country, yes?”
An older man elbowed through the crowd. Hard eyes bored from his deeply tanned and lined face. His white robe glared in the midday sun. I sensed that he was the neighborhood elder, the man who would speak with us on behalf of the others. He looked angry. As I climbed from the Humvee, Mish came to my side. I glanced at Wynn to make sure he was picking up the same vibe I was. He cradled a rifle in his lap, face placid, body tense. Then the older Iraqi broke into a smile and grasped my hand.
“Hallo, hallo. Thank you. Welcome.” He explained that most of the neighborhood’s residents were physicians and engineers, respected professionals even under Saddam Hussein. “But we are glad Saddam is gone.” He complained that unexploded bombs and rockets littered the streets and fields, leftovers from the battles of the week before. The community maintained a neighborhood watch to guard against looters and any fedayeen who might bring American reprisals down on them. With ample electricity and fresh water, their only concern was the unexploded ordnance.
In my triage of worries, ordnance ranked a distant third, behind security and basic services such as water and power. I urged him to keep children away from the explosives and promised that we would return the next day, but I was anxious to see as much of our zone as possible before dark. We drove away to the cheers and shouts of the townspeople. “Tomorrow, America, tomorrow!”
I wanted to see the amusement park in daylight so we could better put it under surveillance after sunset. Doing so would be a lot easier and more effective if we knew the ground. We drove west along a raised irrigation dike, hoping to follow it all the way to the Tigris, where we could drive up a paved road to the gates of the park. No plan survives its first brush with reality. The dike dropped precipitously into a ditch, too deep and steep even for Humvees. Corporal Person was willing to buckle his seat belt and give it a try, but I couldn’t afford to roll a vehicle. We backed up and plunged off the side of the berm into a forest of palms.
The grove reminded me of an old-growth pine forest. The trees, spaced widely apart, blotted out the sun. There was no underbrush. We wove between the trunks, sometimes following a dirt track and sometimes allowing the GPS to lead us more directly toward the amusement park. Birds flitted through the fronds high above, and white flowers bloomed in the sunny meadows.
Colbert keyed his handset and whistled. “We just found the Garden of Eden.”
Weaving through the trees cut us to a walking pace, and visibility was frequently under a hundred yards. It should have alarmed me. We couldn’t see, couldn’t maneuver, and couldn’t communicate because the trees distorted our radio reception. But there was no malice in the air. Combat had honed our powers of observation — we knew a threat when we saw it. There was no threat in those palms, and we enjoyed the incongruous beauty of our detour.
It was nearly dark when we emerged from the trees onto a paved road paralleling the Tigris. Three men with rifles stood in the road. A concrete barrier and stacked tires stood next to them, preventing traffic from passing. Instinctively, the platoon swung into tactical formation. Espera drew abreast of Colbert to put more firepower to the front. Reyes and Lovell took up positions to the flanks and rear. I rolled one radio over to the battalion’s frequency, ready to report that we were in contact.
Colbert and Espera stopped less than fifty meters from the men. They still stood in the road, rifles at their sides. Any advantage the men had was gone. The platoon was cocked, ready to fight, and waiting only for a shot or an order to engage. The standoff seemed to last for minutes, but it could only have been a few seconds before one of the men shouted to us in Arabic.
Mish shouted back, and then yelled over his shoulder, “It’s a neighborhood watch. They just want to stop looters.”
The men said looters had been ranging through the countryside each night and stealing anything they could move. Hand-painted banners hung from the windows of homes along the road. Mish translated them as THE TOWN OF SALIH HASAN WILL NOT TOLERATE THIEVES. YOU WILL BE KILLED. The men begged us to stay with them to protect the hamlet.
Seeing their husbands and fathers with the Americans, women and kids poured from the gates of Salih Hasan. The children were jubilant, dancing and skipping along the road in the dusk. The women were more restrained. They drifted to the sides of their men, hiding behind veils.
I wanted to help them. Leaving the neighborhood earlier had smacked of abandonment. It had eaten at me during the drive along the dike and through the palms. We were out there to do more than sight-see and wave the flag. I wanted to make good on my own assertion that Americans had to give concrete gifts to the Iraqi people. An action then, in the first week of the occupation, was worth a thousand speeches about the virtues of democracy or the evil of the fallen regime. The citizens of Salih Hasan believed that their livelihoods, if not their lives, were under attack. For them, our lone Marine platoon was American power personified. We could make everything right. Leaving them would be a symbolic desertion they weren’t likely to forget.
And yet we had a mission. We had been tasked with planting our feet in each of the zone’s four corners and with reporting back on what was happening in all of it. Spending the night in one small village seemed, at the time, like a misallocation of our scarce resources. I reasoned that looters, seeing Salih Hasan protected, would simply move down the road to the next town. We couldn’t ambush them. Since the end of open hostilities, force was permitted only in self-defense or to save a life. Thievery, from the skewed perspective of the occupiers, was regrettable but legal. When I told the men that we couldn’t stay with them, they didn’t protest. Stoicism is a common quality among Iraqis. No wailing, complaining, or arguing. Just a nod of resignation. They are a people accustomed to neglect. I promised we would return the next day and second-guessed myself all the way up the road.