One Bullet Away

Alpha and Charlie companies took the right fork in the road, while Bravo and LAR went left. The two roads diverged and then ran roughly parallel about a kilometer apart. By attacking on two axes, we could throw Ba‘quba’s defenders off balance but still support each other. We spent the next four hours in constant contact with the enemy.

The running firefight started badly. A large concrete building stood in a field between the two roads on which the battalion was moving. LAR halted three hundred meters south of the building to observe it before moving forward. Sporadic rifle shots cracked toward us. As we sat there, engines idling, the captain called me over. “Nate, I want your platoon to dismount and move through this field to clear that building,” he said.

I looked at him for a long moment, trying to gauge his reasoning. “Sir, are you nuts? You want me to leave my firepower behind and move across three football fields of open ground toward a fortified position, when we can just drive right up to it with all this armor? I’ll be halfway there, and the rest of the battalion will be five miles farther north.”

“This isn’t the time for debate,” he said. I could see his resolve wavering. His orders were experiments to see which ones would stick.

“Sir, is this your idea or a battalion order?” I had so completely lost faith in my commander that I couldn’t follow his orders. If the plan had come from Major Whitmer or Colonel Ferrando, however, I would execute it without hesitation.

“I see what needs to be done here. Don’t worry — I’ll have the LAVs line up behind you to provide overhead machine gun fire.” My anger was starting to boil over. Typically, when an infantry attack is supported by machine guns, the guns are displaced ninety degrees from the objective so they can shoot in front of the advancing attackers. He planned to put the machine guns directly behind us to shoot over our heads at the buildings as we moved toward them. We would block the LAVs from firing. These basic tactics are taught during the first few weeks of an infantry officer’s training. The captain commanding the LAVs looked at me sympathetically and rolled his eyes.

Command relationships are built on trust. My CO was right about one thing: this wasn’t the time for debate. It was the time for my trust in him to override my questions and concerns. It was the time for that trust to translate into instant obedience to orders. But I had no trust, not in him. His poor decision making since before the start of the war had sapped every bit of the natural trust Marines are taught to have in their chain of command. He was a nice, hard-working guy but tactically incompetent, and that’s all that mattered.

“Sir, that’s a fucked plan, and I can’t do it. I’m not worried about getting hosed. If the fedayeen were in that building, they would have opened up on us by now. I’m worried that we’ll get way out there in the field for no reason, and then the whole battalion’s attack will lose momentum and bog down. Look over there.” I pointed through a far-off tree line where Alpha’s and Charlie’s Humvees continued the attack to the north. “They’re moving. We have to be moving.”

He shot me a glance without saying anything, and I walked back to my Humvee. I was upset that some of my Marines had been within earshot of the argument. It was unprofessional to discredit the captain in front of them, but circumstance hadn’t allowed me many options. Besides, feelings and regulations came in a distant second to winning battles and keeping Marines alive. We started moving forward, passing the concrete building without seeing anything amiss.

On the radio, Alpha Company directed jets in on an Iraqi infantry fighting vehicle, called a BMP, that was shooting at them. The jets’ engines screamed as they dove at the target, but I couldn’t see anything through the smoke and haze. Cobras hammered targets to our front, and the LAVs poured fire into buildings and palm groves along the road. The platoon had found its rhythm now — talking, moving, and shooting as one organism.

We did our best to hit discrete targets, but the battlefield is an empty place. With smoke, explosions, and rifle shots all around, it feels as if the whole world is a target. But that feeling evaporates when you look through the gun sight. Threats are everywhere, but targets are nowhere. You cannot just shoot at a tree, or a parked car, or a propane tank, or the air. You need a target. Like it or not, targets are usually human beings. But targets are hard to find, because they hide. Many times, the result was that we drove through an inferno but fired very few rounds. That wasn’t the case in Ba‘quba.