I almost felt sorry for them.
When the destruction was finally over, everyone in the Humvee was shouting. This, I thought, is what the will to live sounds like. “YEAH! YEAH! OH, YEAH!” we all howled in union, like the animals we were.
“Targets destroyed,” said the monotone on the radio.
By dawn the mudstorm had cleared. I’d never felt better in my life. We were lucky, of course: We hadn’t lost anyone. But the nightly purging of terror followed by the relief of the sunrise was making me feel superhuman. When you’re not scared, it’s impossible to remember what fear is like. Ironically, the war had probably improved my health: My bowel movements had slowed to one every other day, and the face mask of mud I’d worn since crossing the Iraq border had cleared up my stress acne. Hustler’s morning coffee, meanwhile, was more refreshing than any Starbucks cappuccino. My happiness was pure; childlike almost. It was the joy of being able to wiggle my toes or jump up and down. It was the elation of simply being alive.
As we prepared to move north and reunite with the rest of our convoy, I heard one of the lance corporals from the FDC singing the “Oompa Loompa” song from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. “Ooompa loompa, doompadee doo,” he chanted. “I’ve got a perfect puzzle for you…” The movies, I thought, have got the soundtrack to war all wrong. War isn’t rock ’n’ roll. It’s got nothing to do with Jimi Hendrix or Richard Wagner. War is nursery rhymes and early Madonna tracks. War is the music from your childhood. Because war, when it’s not making you kill or be killed, turns you into an infant. For the past eight days I’d been living like a five-year-old—a nonexistence of daytime naps, mushy food, and lavatory breaks. My adult life was back in Los Angeles with my dirty dishes and credit card bills.
By 8:00 A.M. we were on the move. As we roared back onto Highway 8, we realized that the previous night’s attack had been more ambitious than imagined. Bloodied Iraqi bodies were strewn over the road, some of them heaped on top of each other next to more obliterated white pickup trucks. Iraqi mortars, never to be fired, were lined up in the ditches. The dead wore olive drab jackets, head scarfs, and civilian shoes. I found it sad, in a way, that they couldn’t even afford proper uniforms. Ahead of us, meanwhile, were the flattened remains of the Republican Guard tanks. I wondered if the tank crews had been as reluctant to fight as the nineteen-year-old that the chaplain had found next to the white bus. “We took quite a number of prisoners last night,” said the voice over the Humvee’s radio, “including a brigadier general.” In fact, Coalition forces had so far taken nearly nine thousand Iraqi prisoners of war. General Mattis, it seemed, had been right all along: The Marines were an all-weather fighting force.
By noon we were rumbling up Highway 8 at 50 miles an hour. The postnuclear-attack landscape of the marshlands had finally ended, replaced by green farmland and adobe-style homesteads in palm-tree-lined tracts. I assumed that these properties belonged to the local Shiite landowners. At about 11:00 A.M. we passed the first blue overhead freeway sign since Nasiriyah. On it were three white arrows pointing north toward Baghdad and al-Hilla, with the place-names written in English and Arabic. This meant that we were now only about ninety miles south of the Iraqi capital—barely a two-hour drive. I remembered reading about Hilla after the first Persian Gulf war. It was one of the towns where Saddam had quashed the Shiite uprising by murdering 170 men and boys at the al-Mahawil garrison. Other Shiite insurgents were allegedly thrown from the top floor of the city’s hospital or pushed into the Euphrates with weights tied to their feet. Some victims were hung from power lines. Members of the Republican Guard from Hilla who refused to fight their own people were also executed. I wondered how much these people could hate the Americans, given what Saddam had already done to them.
At 11:30 A.M., Barrow called my satellite phone. I felt as if we hadn’t spoken in years, even though it had been only twenty-four hours.
“Just so you know,” said Barrow, “the editor’s very keen for you to file anything you can. You’re the only one at the front.”
“Okay,” I said, my muscles tightening. “I’ve been a bit, er, busy. But I’ll try and get something over to you by the end of today.”
“That would be great,” said Barrow. “As much as you can.”
The familiar pressure of newspaper deadlines almost made my life in Iraq feel more normal. But fear returned, like an unmissed companion, the further north we went. On the Humvee’s radio we were hearing reports of sniper fire from the roadside ranches. “Two Marines down,” said the calm bass voice.
Buck, as usual, was giving away nothing about our mission. Eventually, after driving perhaps thirty miles, we skidded left off the express-way and started looking for a new position. My knowledge of the routine made it no less terrifying, especially when we resumed our job as the forward reconnaissance unit. Predictably, the faces of two Iraqi shepherds bobbed out of the long grass as soon as a suitable location had been found. “These guys are sheep herders by day and warriors by night,” announced Buck. “I’ve had enough of this shit. Let’s go search their house.”
Murphy swung the Humvee into a U-turn and headed in the direction of a small mud-and-brick dwelling in the adjacent field. I wondered how the Iraqis would react to the Marines storming into their home. Hustler was in the gun turret, chewing loudly. I could tell he was itching to let loose with the .50-cal. I didn’t blame him. I felt as though a gunfight might break the tension. Another Humvee from Kilo Battery followed us. The vehicles stopped about fifteen feet from the house and four Marines, including Buck, jumped out. They crept up on either side of the doorway, rifles locked and loaded, then burst in, shouting. They emerged a few minutes later carrying two AK-47s and four rounds of ammunition, plus a couple of Republican Guard uniforms. The property had been empty, even though the Iraqi shepherds had sworn that their wives and children were at home there. “This is getting like Vietnam,” said the sergeant who led the raid. “We can’t fight ’em during the day because we don’t know who the fuck they are.” It was the first time I’d heard the V-word since leaving Camp Grizzly.
We drove back to our position and I started digging another coffinsized foxhole, probably my tenth since the war began. I’d just finished when we got the order to move again. “We’re gonna CSMO in about ten mikes,” declared the radio. “We’re drawing some sniper fire so keep your grapes down.”
I was sweating and filthy with a ring of sunburn around my neck. I had changed my underwear only once since leaving Kuwait.
Soon enough we were on the move again. It took me a while, however, to work out what was happening: We were going backward, toward the marshes. Was this a retreat? By the time we joined Highway 8, every other vehicle in the 1st Marine Division seemed to be going in the same direction. The rest of the afternoon was spent in a DMZ-style traffic jam, going nowhere. Tanks, burning up gallons of diesel, wheezed and choked around us. I caught sight of Speckled Ali, the NBC pigeon, swinging in his cage from one of the seven-ton trucks. He looked well. At one point we heard the pfut-pfut of sniper fire from a building a thousand yards from the roadside. Minutes later a navy F-14 Tomcat howled overhead, making a steel trapdoor sound with its payload of five-hundred-pound bombs. The Marines cheered. The scale of the destruction, however, seemed disproportionate to the threat of the riflemen.
By dusk we were back where we’d started, in the ocean of mud. There were rumors that we’d tried and failed to take an airport, or that the advance was a feint—a giant bluff—to divert the insurgents’ attention from al-Najaf, where they were fighting the 3rd Infantry Division, in which Oliver Poole was embedded. Whatever the reason, it was a right hook to morale: especially mine. I began to seriously question what I was doing in Iraq. How much more fighting could I take? And what was the point of being an embedded journalist anyway? Proper war correspondents write about both sides of a conflict. I might as well have been paid by the Marines. Also, I had no idea what was going on. Buck made sure that the only information I got was what I heard on the Humvee’s radio or saw with my own eyes. Perhaps he was worried that I would be captured and interrogated by the Iraqis—Saddam had already imprisoned four journalists, including a Newsday reporter and photographer, calling them “spies.” My battlefield perspective, therefore, was about as useful as Baghdad Bob’s. My mum knew more about the war than I did. Sometimes I felt as though all I could do was stand next to the guns and describe how loud they were. Was that worth dying for? The alternative, of course, was to go unilateral. But that seemed like suicide.