One Bullet Away

Fourteen hundred Zulu translated to five o’clock local time, a few hours before sunset. I lined the platoon up an hour early on the dirt road that led out of the division’s headquarters compound. Our ritualistic “combat prep” time was important to any successful mission, and I didn’t want to rush it. Besides, I had come to enjoy the anticipatory tingle I got whenever we prepared to step outside the wire. Gunny Wynn and I walked up and down the line of vehicles. Doc Bryan was mixing a strong coffee to sustain him through the evening, while Stinetorf racked his .50-caliber’s charging handles to clean the moving parts for later. Many of the Marines wore calf-length digital-pattern desert cloaks, leftovers from the first Gulf War which provided great protection from the dust, with an added benefit of being almost impossible to see through night vision goggles. I walked up to Colbert’s Humvee and leaned down to talk through his open window.

“OK, point man, back-brief our route to me.”

“Sir, we’ll leave the compound here and drive north on the paved road that parallels Route 5. We’re not the lead element for that portion, so I just follow in trace. At the zero-zero northing, we link up with LAR, and they’ll take the lead. I’ll be recon’s first vehicle behind them. We’ll continue north and see what happens.”

“Good. It’ll be nice having some real firepower with us for a change.” I turned and walked back to my Humvee without saying what I knew we were both thinking: Why did we have this firepower with us for a change?

Across the road, the Marines in division headquarters sat in little clumps, eating their MREs. They watched as we prepared to leave, envy and relief mixing on their faces. I was sure my platoon pitied them, knowing that they would be safe and warm here in their sleeping bags.

I folded the night’s maps and tucked them in my Plexiglas map case. It measured about two feet square and allowed me to see thirty or forty kilometers of road at a time without having maps flapping all over the place in the wind. A bandolier of grenades hung from the visor above my head, ready for quick loading in the M203. On the center console sat two GPS receivers, carefully checked to make sure they read the same, and a pile of rifle magazines loaded with all tracers. Stuck to the inside of the windshield in front of my seat were two laminated cards outlining the request procedures for artillery and air support. Stress has a way of banishing even the simplest things from one’s mind, so I was reassured to have the cheat sheets in my hour of need. A red-lens flashlight, hand grenades, night vision goggles, smoke grenades, colored flares, IV bags, humrats, a sniper rifle, and four radios completed the ensemble. For all its size, that Humvee would be a tight fit for us this evening.

Exactly on time, we started the engines and crept slowly from the camp. Out on the road, we entered a different world. Crowds of Iraqis thronged the streets. Most of them paid us little attention; they were preoccupied stealing every movable object in sight. Children drove donkeys towing pieces of scrap metal. A man on a bicycle staggered past with a wooden table balanced precariously on his fender. Behind him, an old woman dragged a plastic jug with one hand and a huge spool of copper wire with the other. We threaded through the crowd, guns elevated in deference to the people but eyes scanning for the signs of trouble we’d learned to look for over the past few weeks: anyone coolly appraising us, cars reappearing, people on radios or cell phones. Soon we escaped into the farmland beyond Baghdad’s suburbs, increasing our speed as the shadows lengthened and the sky turned gray.

We passed dozens of blown-up Iraqi tanks and armored personnel carriers. Some of them sat in revetments off the road; others were parked on the shoulder. Fire had blackened their desert tan paint jobs, and overpressure had blown their hatches open. I hoped the record of destruction would continue as we got farther north.

Approaching the 00 northing, we contacted War Pig on the radio. Their hulking LAVs sat in a defensive coil on the west side of the road. A coil is the twenty-first-century version of a wagon train circling up for the night. The LAVs were parked back to back, with their guns pointed outward in a full circle. We pulled to the side of the road and waited as they unlooped themselves and whined slowly up onto the pavement, taking their place at the head of the formation. The dozen LAVs traveled in a staggered column, their guns alternating left and right. Colbert followed behind the last LAV, with the rest of the platoon close at his heels. Behind us, First Recon stretched to the south in a long line. With the confidence of firepower, we accelerated into the darkness, the first Americans to enter that part of Iraq.