One Bullet Away

It was late afternoon by the time we crept slowly across the bridge into the amusement park. Tending Suhar had cost us two hours. On the hundred-meter span across the lake, the platoon made the mental shift back to combat mode. Tenderness gave way to aggression. We turned right at the end of the bridge and made a slow counterclockwise sweep through the abandoned walkways and parking lots. As in the rest of Baghdad, looters had been a step ahead of us. Broken glass lay everywhere, along with random pieces of furniture discarded by thieves in midflight. The incongruity was surreal: Humvees passing a carousel, and Marines poking rifles into the Tilt-A-Whirl’s teacups to make sure they were empty. Everything was empty. The park was not only deserted but assertively so. Doors swung on their hinges, and paper trash tumbled by in the wind. It was Hollywood movie set empty. The part of me still untouched by the war wanted to sit down at one of the picnic tables and read in the sunlight.

The platoon leapfrogged through the park, with teams alternating security and kicking down doors to search buildings. We found a movie theater, a snack bar, and administrative offices, but no signs of fedayeen. With the sun quickly sinking, I urged the Marines forward. I wanted to reach the northern tip of the park, where my map showed the large building identified to us as a “suspected regime palace.” We approached it more warily than we had the other buildings but repeated the same drill of posting two teams on the perimeter and sending two teams inside. The building was a single story, sprawling along the lakefront.

I followed Sergeant Espera through the door and into a large room. The Marines moved in stacks, rushing along the walls with rifles at eye level. My weapon was a digital camera. A piano stood in the corner next to a long wooden bar. The glass cabinets had been emptied of alcohol, and broken glassware crunched under our feet. We moved through a ballroom with an inlaid floor and shattered chandeliers. Decorative ceiling panels hid recessed lighting, and unbroken windows opened onto a pool in the courtyard outside. Flashlights mounted on rifles cut beams of light through the shadows. Following a hallway, we opened a door. A king-size bed and a large bathtub filled the room. The next door revealed the same layout.

The “palace” was a hotel. It was opulent, more opulent than anything we had seen in Iraq, but certainly not one of Saddam’s residences. The amusement park had been a weekend getaway spot for midlevel Ba’ath Party officials. That conclusion made a fedayeen presence seem even more likely. I snapped a dozen photographs to pass on to the battalion’s intelligence officer before continuing our sweep through the park.

We moved south along the Tigris. There were fewer buildings there, only a shady field filled with picnic tables and a scenic walkway overlooking the river. We rumbled down the sidewalk, scraping past benches and an ornate railing. I looked to the right and felt a cold shot of adrenaline in my chest. Bunkers and trenches honeycombed the mud flats at the river’s edge. Armored personnel carriers, large generators, and antiaircraft guns sat along the banks. Four machine guns simultaneously swiveled and depressed to aim down at the fortifications below us. Through my binoculars, nothing moved.

Since the positions all looked deserted, I split the platoon in half to save time. Wynn took two teams down the slope to investigate the bunkers along the river, while Sergeant Lovell’s team and I remained behind to check inside another building. It was a trailer, like a mobile home, and it sat separate from the rest of the park. It looked out of place. Lovell shouldered the door open, and we entered the single room. Papers cluttered the floor, but I hardly noticed at first. I stared at the maps hanging on every wall. They were Iraqi street maps of Baghdad, with the eagle crest of the regime on each sheet, and I recognized them immediately. They looked like the maps I’d been studying in the ROC. Most of the American positions in Baghdad were drawn on the sheets in red pencil. They were out of date, but only by a few days.

“Holy shit, Lovell, check this out. They know all our positions.”

“Yeah, and these filing cabinets are filled with more.” He kicked open a drawer, and reams of maps and papers spilled out. “Looks like we found the fedayeen headquarters.”

We gathered up large armfuls of papers to take back to the intelligence shop, giving priority to the annotated maps and anything personal — identification cards, operations orders, and whatever else we could guess at without reading Arabic. Lovell’s team piled the rest of the papers on the pavement outside the trailer and doused the stack in gasoline from a spare fuel can. It burned quickly, sending ashy flakes floating across the picnic grounds. I radioed down to Gunny Wynn to let him know we had a fire going.