One Bullet Away

“Tell him there’s no honor in getting slaughtered. And ask about weapons and fedayeen in the area.” Mish relayed my request, and the man began speaking intently while pointing at a distant tree line. Behind him, the Marines began to get into the Humvees.

“He says there is a house with many missiles in that village in the trees. Large missiles and small missiles together — about twenty of them. Also, he says there is a place up the road where the fedayeen are living. There’s a tall tower there. Near a lake.”

The village with the missiles was beyond the border of our zone, so we wouldn’t be able to follow up on the lead. But the place with a tower by the lake sounded like the amusement park.

On our way up to the park, we passed through Qalat Abd al Jasadi, the neighborhood of professionals from the previous afternoon. Again the residents welcomed us warmly. Without making promises to remove any ordnance, we asked to see everything that worried them. At the very least, I figured I could collect grid coordinates and send an EOD team as soon as possible. A small group, headed by a man who introduced himself as Ibrahim, led us around the town for nearly two hours, pointing out everything from a hand grenade sitting in a classroom to a T-72 tank abandoned in an orchard. We dutifully marked the locations of unexploded bombs, tank rounds, RPGs, and out-of-place metal objects we couldn’t identify but were reticent to touch. Finally, when the midday sun had us soaked in sweat, the men said that only one object remained.

Ibrahim pushed through a wooden gate in a high wall, leading us into the isolated yard of a house on the neighborhood’s main street. My paranoia kicked in, and I posted Marines outside the wall, at the gate, and inside the courtyard. If anyone hoped to ambush us, they’d better have a good plan and a lot of firepower. But Ibrahim led us through the yard to an innocuous-looking piece of metal buried nose-first in the dirt. A green and silver fin stuck up six inches above the grass.

“That’s an RPG round, sir. It was fired but didn’t detonate,” Colbert said, as he edged back from the projectile.

“Pretty unstable,” I replied. I felt like whispering, as if a loud noise might engulf us all in a ball of fire.

“Correction, sir: very unstable. We can’t just leave it here for EOD to take care of in a week or a month. Kids live in this house. I can blow it up.” Colbert looked at me coolly.

I knew he could blow it up. I also knew that doing so was, for us, expressly against the rules. We could mark ordnance, count it, and photograph it. We could not blow it up. Too many Marines were losing fingers and eyes to volatile piles of explosives. But then, this was a family’s yard. Half the village had gathered outside the gate to watch the Americans work their magic. Our credibility was on the line. Not personal pride — that sort of immaturity got people killed — but the credibility of the U.S. Marines as a force for good in these people’s lives. One concrete act of goodwill outweighed a thousand promises, meetings, and evaluation teams.

“Get the C-4, Colbert, and do your thing. If you blow your hand off, so help me God, I’ll chop the other one off myself,” I said.

“Roger that, sir.”

We herded the growing crowd outside the courtyard as Sergeant Colbert and his team built a charge to detonate the RPG round. He molded a lump of plastic explosive into a disk the size of a silver dollar and inserted a blasting cap. Colbert took the C-4 in one hand and looped thirty yards of time fuse in the other. He and Sergeant Espera entered the yard and walked carefully toward the offending fin. Their helmet chin straps were snugged and their flak jackets tightly closed. When they approached the round, they dropped to their hands and knees, and then to their stomachs, crawling slowly forward and stringing the fuse behind them. No one in the platoon breathed as Colbert tucked the charge into the hole the RPG had dug in the turf. Because it had been fired, the round was armed and could explode at any time. He nestled the charge close to the body of the grenade and then tamped dirt on top to amplify the effect of the blast. Colbert and Espera reversed their approach — first crawling, then kneeling, and finally walking quickly back to the waiting platoon.

“No need to chop my hand off, sir.” Colbert smiled and lit the fuse. Marines waved the Iraqis down to a crouch.

Colbert waited quietly, looking at his watch, before yelling, “Fire in the hole!” A geyser of dirt shot up over the wall, raining pebbles down into the yard and sending a dust cloud out into the street. The villagers cowered for the briefest instant before breaking into cheers. Sergeant Colbert and I walked into the courtyard, looking for the scattered bits of C-4 that would indicate an incomplete detonation. There were none. A crater marked the former resting place of the RPG round, and only tiny scraps of metal remained from the grenade itself.