Murphy did as he was told. Before long our camp was surrounded by notices telling the Bedouins to bug off. It was too late now, however. We all knew what the incident with the camels meant: Our position had been compromised. At just after 9:00 P.M., this was confirmed by the Humvee’s radio. “You have about a dozen technicals heading your way,” the deadpan voice informed us.
“What’s a technical?” I asked, hoping for the best.
“It’s like what they had in Somalia,” explained Buck. “The insurgents take a civilian vehicle and put a machine gun on the roof. We call ’em technicals.” The name, Buck told me, came from the days when the Red Cross used to buy vehicles for militias in return for not being attacked. The bribes were written off as “technical expenses.” I wondered who’d paid for the Iraqis’ vehicles.
“So we’re… being attacked?”
Buck looked at me for a while.
Then he said, “Don’t you ever look on the bright side?”
I gave a weak, humorless laugh.
“Pass me the night visions,” said Hustler from the backseat. He put them on and heaved himself up into the gun turret.
“They’re still approaching,” announced the radio. “You’ve got three mikes before contact.” This meant three minutes.
Hustler’s boots tap-danced on the flootplate beside me as he swung the .50-cal from side to side, trying to see the technicals.
Buck and Murphy started klacking rounds into their M-16s.
I wished there was something I could do other than just sit and wait. I almost wanted to take Hustler’s place in the machine-gun turret. Instead, I concentrated on trying to silence a hysterical internal monologue. It reminded me of what Wilfred Owen had once written in a letter from the front lines: “There is a point where prayer is indistinguishable from blasphemy. There is also a point where blasphemy is indistinguishable from prayer.” I felt slightly ashamed of my prayers, even in their current blasphemous form. I’d stopped going to church as soon as my parents would let me, and it seemed corny, predictable, and convenient that I would convert while under gunfire. But praying is rational. I’d prayed on September 11, while watching the office workers fall from the floors of the World Trade Center. Unless you knew for a fact that it wouldn’t do any good, why wouldn’t you?
I looked over at Buck, who was now playing with the silver crucifix on the dashboard. I knew that Buck hated having me around (on several occasions he’d tried to get me to ride in the back of one of the ammunition trucks), but I respected him nevertheless. After all, the captain had a war to fight, and I wasn’t just a distraction; I could get him killed. Although there was a permanent knot of worry in his brow, he had remained supernaturally calm since Kuwait.
Before I could finish this thought, Buck exploded.
“Goddammit! Goddammit!” he screamed. “Fuck! Fuck!”
“What the hell’s wrong?” hollered Hustler from the roof.
Murphy launched himself out of the Humvee and crouched down in the firing position. I put my head between my knees.
Perhaps this was the end.
“It’s okay,” said Buck, sounding embarrassed.
“What?” came the hoarse shout from the roof.
“I thought I’d lost my M&Ms,” admitted Buck.
Hustler and Murphy cursed simultaneously.
I wanted to throw up.
“One mike,” said the radio.
Then we heard it: a hateful chorus of gunfire, blasting through the mudflats. It was followed by a clap of man-made thunder and a white flash from our own camp as one of the howitzers spat out more heavy metal.
The noise continued for a while.
When I opened my eyes and took my fingers out of my ears, Buck, Murphy, and Hustler were laughing in disbelief.
“What is it?” I asked, wondering if I was the punch line of the joke.
“The guys up front asked for support,” said Buck. “So they sent up a whole company of tanks. A whole goddamn company.”
Hustler gave a low whistle.
Murphy slapped the dashboard.
I wondered how many tanks were in a company.
The next morning we drove past what was left of the technicals: molten heaps of charred and smoking metal that looked as though they might once have been Toyota pickups. After their late-night rendezvous with fourteen Marine Corps M1 Abrams tanks, however, it was hard to tell. I tried to not look at the human outlines in the crushed, upside-down cabins. “They thought they were being real sneaky,” tutted Buck as he surveyed the wreckage. “They probably didn’t realize we have night-vision goggles and can see them coming. We had all freakin’ day to engage.”
“What I don’t understand,” said Murphy, “is why they wanna fight anyway. Why do they still love that cocksucker Saddam?”
“It’s probably more of a hatred of Americans than a liking for Saddam Hussein,” said Buck. “They think we’re imperialists and that we’re gonna change their way of life and make them all Christians. Hopefully they’ll think otherwise when we take Baghdad and get the hell out of their stinking country.”
Later, after we found a new position—this time raiding the surrounding houses and confiscating AK-47s and Iraqi uniforms—I saw a familiar face approaching across the mud. He was an older Marine, bespectacled, slightly overweight, and with a silver crucifix on his lapel. I noticed a scar on his neck. For a while I couldn’t figure out how I knew him. Then it came to me: He was the chaplain I’d met on my first day at Camp Grizzly. He brought bad news: A nearby Marine unit had opened fire on a civilian truck, killing its driver, after it refused to stop at a roadblock. “I don’t think the Iraqis realize that you’ve gotta stop for the Marine Corps,” he said. The chaplain also told us that a lance corporal from a tank unit had been killed by one of his own company’s .50-cal machine guns. The screws on the gun’s safety catch had worked themselves loose during our twenty-hour convoy. Someone had grabbed the .50-cal while pulling himself out of the tank, and it went off. The round from the gun virtually sliced the lance corporal in half, who was smoking a cigarette nearby. The sheer pointlessness of the Marine’s death depressed me. Another Marine, the chaplain said, had shot himself in the leg with his own 9mm pistol, probably in an attempt to get sent home. The Marine survived and got his wish: He was medevacked to Germany.
The chaplain, I soon realized, got to hear all the hard luck stories.
Then he said: “Have you seen the white buses yet?”
“What white buses?” asked Buck.
“The Iraqis are driving around the towns, picking up all the fighing-age men, and taking them to the front lines,” said the chaplain. “We found a few of the buses and, at first, we couldn’t determine what the heck they were for. We found one guy, no more than nineteen years old, lying outside one of them with a gunshot wound to the back of his head. It didn’t make any sense. Then it dawned on us.” The teenager had been shot by the Republican Guard, explained the chaplain, for refusing to fight. In other words, he’d been killed for refusing to get on the bus, which would have driven him to the front lines, where the Marines would have killed him instead.
Yes, the chaplain heard all the hard luck stories.
“I’ve never seen nothin’ like this before,” said Murphy the next day. “This is just crazy.” It was now Wednesday, March 26—day seven of the war—and we were still stuck in the marshlands. It wasn’t yet noon, but the sky was the color of tangerine and we could see only a few yards ahead. Something very bad was happening. The conditions, the Marine Corps meteorologists told us, were the result of an “anticyclone” sitting over Europe, forcing the jet stream into two paths, one through Scandinavia and the other straight through our camp. The gale was whipping up dried mud from the marshbanks, creating a thick, acrid fog. Even Murphy looked scared.