One Bullet Away

War Pig was already doing an Australian peel, where the lead vehicle turns around as the second in line continues firing straight ahead to protect the turning vehicle. The drill is repeated down the line until the last vehicle turns. I moved the platoon forward, and we fired off into the darkness, hopefully keeping a few Iraqi heads down as the last LAV turned and roared back down the highway. Far to the north, headlights flashed and spun in the dark fields. Mortars continued to fall, including one that hit the pavement nearby, throwing sparks into the sky. When our turn came, each Humvee swung around to the south, and we accelerated behind War Pig, passing the rest of the battalion as it sat facing north.

The night was moonless, with a low overcast threatening rain. Helicopters could not fly under the weather, and jets above it couldn’t provide accurate close air support. Facing a coordinated defense-in-depth, with little idea of what lay to the north, the colonel decided to pull back two kilometers and set up a hasty defense on the roadside. With a little distance between us and the enemy positions, we could call in jets and wait for daylight.

I lined the platoon up along a berm a few hundred meters off the road. War Pig had done most of the shooting, so the Marines weren’t too amped-up. We started watch rotations, and I crawled under the Humvee to enjoy an hour’s insomnia. When the rain started, trickles of water crept across the baked earth and pooled under my back.

Before dawn on April 9, I squirted grape jelly from its plastic pouch onto an MRE cracker. Wynn and I had been sitting together by the radio for an hour, waiting for the sky to lighten. Throughout the night, jets had screamed overhead, above the clouds, and we had felt the whump of bombs being dropped near the highway. They could have been JDAMs hitting GPS coordinates provided by the battalion, or other bombs targeted by the pilots using Litening pods, special sensors that could see through darkness and clouds. I was too tired to go and find out, and it didn’t matter anyway. Bombs were bombs. They all killed the same way.

I finished my breakfast and walked over to the company headquarters Humvee, parked a short distance away in the center of our perimeter. The Marines would soon be clamoring for news, and I wanted to have something for them.

“Good morning, sir. What’s the plan for the day?”

“Shit on Ba‘quba,” the captain replied, scouring his pistol with a toothbrush.

“We’re not just gonna drive up the highway, are we?”

“No,” he replied. “LAR and the Humvees will stay on the highway. Each platoon will punch a foot-mobile patrol out to the east or west, and we’ll sweep north in a long line.”

“Christ, sir, it’s damn near fifteen miles to Ba‘quba.”

He looked at me blankly and said, “Yeah, well, hydrate. It’ll be a long day. That’s the plan.”

I briefed the platoon over the map board on the hood, and shortly after sunrise we retraced our steps toward the ambush of the night before. Gunny Wynn and I decided that he would control the machine guns, while I went with the other half of the platoon on foot. The clouds had cleared, and the sun was already hot. I gulped a canteen of water and slipped a PowerBar into my cargo pocket. This promised to be a slog.

At the 14 northing, I and eleven other Marines from the platoon moved off the western side of the road. We formed a wedge three hundred meters across and started walking north. Sergeant Espera walked point. I walked in the center of the wedge so I could control the formation most easily. Doc Bryan walked next to me so he could move quickly to any wounded man. Gunny Wynn kept the lead Humvee just in front of Sergeant Espera. All the guns were trained our way, ready to support us if we made contact.

Each furrow in the field was a potential ambush site. We found blankets and tin trays, evidence of positions quickly abandoned. I was happy to see that Iraqis had recently been here; it meant there probably wouldn’t be land mines. We moved that way for more than an hour, covering a kilometer of ground.

We crossed a dirt path running perpendicular to the highway and saw a truck hidden in a thicket. The squad approached it with weapons ready, but it was abandoned. Its doors bore the distinctive red triangle of the Republican Guard. I could think of no excuse to bring it with us and no way to ensure it would go to good use carrying a farmer’s crops to market, so we blew it up with a charge of plastic explosive on the engine block. North of the dirt road, there were a few mud-brick buildings farther west of the highway. Calling back to the battalion, I asked for Mish and for permission to go speak with the people there.