One Bullet Away

“Sir, I’m gonna pull your punk card,” Espera interrupted. “With all due respect, I think you’re wrong.” He leaned close and pointed his thin cigar. “Guerrilla wars aren’t fought from sanctuaries with support from sugar mama countries. That’s political scientist bullshit. They’re fought from the mind.” He tapped his temple with the cigar. “If these people don’t want for themselves what we want for them, then this will be Vietnam. We’ll get our pride and our credibility involved, and then we’ll keep throwing money and men down the pit long after everybody else knows we’re fucked. We’ll leave, and Iraq will be even worse than the shit hole it was a month ago when we kicked down the door.”

“Who’ll give us the most trouble?” I asked.

“Guys our age,” Espera said. “They hate us. They want to kill us. I can see it in their eyes.”

I agreed with him. During the first week of the war, there were definite trends in the welcome we received. Everyone under eighteen was happy to see us. The women all cheered for us. The older men, over fifty-five or so, flashed the thumbs-up. But the young men, the guys in their twenties and thirties, stared silently.

“Why is that, Espera?” I asked. For evaluating motivations on the street, my sixteen years of school weren’t worth two weeks as a repo man in L.A., and I knew it.

“Shit, sir, we emasculated them. Cut off their balls and held ’em up for their wives and kids to see. We did for them what they know they should have done for themselves.”

“But they had twelve years to do it.”

“Don’t go getting all academic on me, sir. I’m explaining why they feel that way. I’m not saying they’re right.”

Colbert cut in. He lay on his back on the concrete floor, scrubbing M203 grenades with a toothbrush. “What about the fact that the young guys have the most to lose with the old regime coming down? They had the power, and now they’re going to lose it.”

“That’s what the eggheads on TV will say, sure. But they’re wrong,” Espera said, jabbing his cigar with each word. “You think all the mass graves are full of little kids and old men? These young guys got hosed by the regime just as much as everyone else. Saddam was an equal opportunity murderer. Kids, old guys, women. He killed his own daughters’ husbands.”

The Marines fell silent. The only sound was Colbert’s toothbrush swishing back and forth across a grenade.

The next morning, we made our third move in four days, traveling north and west to the Menin al Quds power plant near the Tigris. Its transformers and warehouses sat in cultivated fields a couple of miles off a main highway north of Baghdad. Just past the entrance gate stood a bronze statue of Saddam Hussein, dressed in a tie and fedora and holding a rifle above him. Some previous visitor had left a pile of feces on his head. Our mission there was twofold: we would provide security for the power plant while workers labored to undo years of neglect, and we would use it as a staging base to patrol the northeastern quadrant of Baghdad. Having heard similar plans twice in as many days, I kept my doubts to myself.

Bravo Company moved into a warehouse at the compound’s edge. Gunfire had ruptured an oil tank, and a film of sticky petroleum covered the ground outside. It stuck to our tires and the soles of our boots. The smell made me lightheaded. Inside the warehouse was a cargo bay, and upstairs a hall of offices we turned into sleeping spaces. The bleak building’s best feature was a gravity-fed pump of frigid water that allowed us to shower for the first time in more than a month. We wore flip-flops because broken glass covered the ground, and the water pressure almost tore the horseshoe from my neck. But the shower was worth it. As darkness fell and tracers again rose from the city, the Marines of Bravo Company shrieked and shouted beneath the welcome deluge of cold, fresh water.

After showering, I put my filthy cammies back on and walked over to the recon operations center for another of the seemingly infinite briefs and planning cells for upcoming missions, both real and imagined. The Marine Corps has an institutional culture of doing more with less, and that includes not only less money and less equipment but also less time, less certainty, less guidance, and less supervision. What makes it all possible is more planning and more preparation. While the Marines took advantage of a much-deserved rest, the battalion’s officers and staff NCOs debriefed past missions, tracked current missions, and planned future missions. Those who needed rest the most, the decision makers, frequently got the least. I was nearly stumbling with fatigue as I passed a roaring generator and entered the ROC.