A few vehicles down from Colbert's, another team in the platoon monitors the area where mortars had seemed to be fired from about an hour earlier. This team, led by Sgt. Steven Lovell, a sniper, has been watching the village through binoculars and sniper scopes. They have seen no signs of enemy activity, just a group of civilians -- men, women and children -- going about their business outside a cluster of three huts. But it's possible that rounds were fired from there -- the fedayeen often drive into a town, launch a few mortars and leave.
In any case, the place is quiet when, at about eleven o'clock, a lone 1,000-pound bomb dropped from an F-18 blows it to smithereens. The blast is so powerful that Fick jumps over a berm to avoid flying debris and lands on his superior officer. A perfectly shaped black mushroom cloud rises up where the huts had been, and a singed dog runs out of the smoke, making crazy circles. Lovell, who was watching when the bomb hit, is livid: "I just saw seven people vaporized right before my very eyes!" Down the line of Humvees, the commanders who called in the strike smoke cigars and laugh. Later, they tell me that mortar fire was definitely coming from the hamlet.    By noon, First Recon is back on the move, heading toward Muwaffaqiyah, a town of about 5,000. Several kilometers south of the town, the convoy stops in an agricultural village, where locals warn that an ambush is being set up by the bridge into Muwaffaqiyah. It's another confusing scene. Villagers greet the Marines enthusiastically -- fathers hoist babies on their shoulders, teenage girls flout religious code by running out with their heads uncovered, giggling and waving. But only a short way up the road, their neighbors have just been wiped out by a 1,000-pound bomb.

     First Recon sets up a camp four kilometers east of the bridge. Before sundown, a light-armored reconnaissance company from RCT 1 attempts to cross the bridge and meets stiff resistance. It takes at least one casualty and rolls back. Artillery strikes are called in on suspected enemy positions.

     At about eight o'clock that night, Fick holds a briefing for his platoon's team leaders. "The bad news is, we won't get much sleep tonight," he says. "The good news is, we get to kill people." It's rare for Fick to sound so "moto" -- regaling his men with enthusiastic talk of killing. He goes on to present the battalion commander's ambitious last-minute plan to go north of Muwaffaqiyah and set up ambushes on a road believed to be heavily traveled by fedayeen. "The goal is to terrorize the fedayeen," he says, looking around, smiling expectantly.

     His men are skeptical. Sgt. Patrick repeatedly questions Fick about the enemy situation on the bridge. "It's been pounded all day by artillery," Fick answers, waving off his objections, sounding almost glib, like a salesman. "I think the chances of a serious threat are low."

     Fick walks a delicate line with his men. A good officer should be eager to take calculated risks. Despite the men's complaints against Col. Ferrando for ordering them into an ambush at Al Gharraf, the fact is, only one Marine was injured, and the enemy's plans to halt the Marines' advance were thwarted. Fick privately admits that there have been times when he's actually resisted sending his troops on missions, because, as he says, "I care a lot about these guys, and I don't like the idea of sending them into something where somebody isn't going to come back." While acting on these sentiments might make him a good person, they perhaps make him a less-good officer. Tonight he seems uncharacteristically on edge, as if he's fighting against his tendencies to be overly protective. He admonishes his team leaders, saying, "I'm not hearing the aggressiveness I'd like to." His voice sounds hollow, like he's not convinced himself.

     The men, who ultimately have no choice in the matter, reluctantly voice their support of Fick's orders. After he goes off, Patrick says, "The people running this can fuck things up all they want. But as long as we keep getting lucky and making it through alive, they'll just keep repeating the same mistakes."

     Confidence is not bolstered when an Iraqi artillery unit -- thought to have been wiped out by this point -- sends several rounds slamming into a nearby field. However beautiful artillery might look when it's arcing across the sky onto enemy positions, when it's aimed at you, it sounds like somebody hurling freight trains at your head. The Marines run for the nearest holes and take cover.

    For tonight's mission, Colbert's team wins the honor of driving the lead vehicle onto the bridge. We roll out at about eleven, in total darkness. There's almost no moon, which makes the operation of night-vision goggles less than ideal, and the battalion has run out of the specialized batteries that power the thermal-imaging devices, a key tool for spotting enemy positions in the dark. Cobra pilots flying overhead spot armed men hiding beneath trees to the left of the foot of the bridge. But communication breaks down, and this word is never passed to Colbert's team.

    We see the Cobras fire rockets across the bridge a few hundred meters in front of Colbert's vehicle. The explosions light up the sky. But no one in the vehicle even knows what the Cobras are shooting at. Colbert orders Person to keep driving toward the bridge and the explosions.

     Everyone's life depends on Person. He hunches forward over the steering wheel, his face obscured by the night-vision apparatus hanging over his helmet. The NVGs resemble an optometrist's scope. Two lenses over each eye attach to a single barrel that sticks out about five inches. The goggles give their wearer a bright-gray-green view of the night but offer a limited, tunnel-vision perspective and no depth perception. It requires a great deal of concentration to drive with them. "There's an obstacle on the bridge," Person says in a dull monotone that nevertheless manages to sound urgent.

    There's a blown-up truck turned sideways at the entrance to the bridge. We stop about twenty meters in front it. To the left is a stand of tall eucalyptus trees about five meters from the edge of the road. Behind us, there's a large segment of drain pipe. Person drove around the pipe a moment ago, believing it to be a piece of random debris, but now it's becoming clear that the pipe and the ruined truck in front were deliberately placed to channel the vehicle into what is known in military terms as a "kill zone." We are sitting in the middle of an ambush box.

     Everyone in the Humvee -- except me -- has figured this out. They remain extremely calm. "Turn the vehicle around," Colbert says softly. The problem is the rest of the convoy has continued pushing into the kill zone. All five Humvees in the platoon are bunched together, with twenty more pressing from behind. Person gets the Humvee partially turned around; the eucalyptus trees are now on our immediate right. But the pipe prevents the Humvee from moving forward. We stop as Colbert radios to the rest of the platoon, telling them to back the fuck up.

     He simultaneously peers out his window through his night-vision gun scope. "There are people in the trees," he says and repeats the message to alert the rest of the platoon. Then he leans into his rifle scope and opens fire.

     There are between five and ten enemy fighters crouched beneath the trees. There are several more across the bridge, manning a machine gun, and still more on the other side of the road. They have the Marines surrounded on three sides. Why they did not start shooting first is a mystery. Colbert believes they simply didn't understand the capabilities of American night-vision optics.

     But the Marines' advantage is precarious. As soon as Colbert opens up, the enemy sprays the kill zone with rifle and machine-gun fire. They also launch at least one RPG that flies across the hood of our Humvee. Two Marines in the platoon -- Patrick and Cpl. Evan Stafford -- are shot almost immediately. Stafford is knocked down, hit in the leg, and Patrick is shot in the foot. Both tie tourniquets (which Recon Marines carry on their vests) onto their wounds and resume shooting.

     They cannot fire indiscriminately with their Humvees so close together. Each carefully picks his targets. Robert Bryan, team medic, in a Humvee behind Colbert's, takes out two men with head shots. When the .50-caliber machine gun opens up overhead, the concussive blasting is so intense that Bryan's nose starts gushing blood. Espera sees an enemy combatant, already shot in the chest and trying to crawl away, and drops him with an M-4 burst into his head. Sgt. Rudy Reyes, often teased for being the platoon's pretty boy, narrowly escapes a bullet that shatters his windshield and passes within an inch of his beautiful head. Fick jumps out of his vehicle and runs into the center of the melee in order to direct the Humvees, still jammed up in the kill zone, to safety. With his 9 mm pistol raised in one hand, Fick almost appears to be dancing on the pavement as streams of enemy machine-gun fire skip past his feet. He later says he felt like he was in a shootout from The Matrix.

    In our vehicle, Colbert seems to have entered a realm of his own. He stares intently out the window, firing bursts from his weapon and, for some inexplicable reason, humming "Sundown," the depressing 1970s Gordon Lightfoot anthem. Meanwhile, Person, frustrated by the traffic jam, opens his door and, with shots crackling all around, shouts, "Would you back the fuck up!" In the heat of battle, his Missouri accent comes out extra hick. He repeats himself and climbs back in, his movements seeming almost lackadaisical.

     It takes five to ten minutes for the platoon to extricate itself from the kill zone, leaving most of the would-be ambushers either dead or in flight. The next five hours are spent pushing back to the bridge and assaulting it again with tanks and more helicopters. On the other side, about three square blocks of Muwaffaqiyah are completely leveled before the bridge is declared secure, though in the process of taking the bridge, the Marines blow a massive hole in it, rendering the span nearly impassable.

    At sunrise, the marines seem to be in a near hypnotic state. After six hours of combat -- their second straight night without sleep -- they are given a couple of hours' rest before moving out. They park their Humvees in a dried mud field a few kilometers back from the bridge. Several gather around Colbert's vehicle, drinking water, tearing into their food rations and cleaning and reloading the weapons they will likely be using again later in the day.

     Everyone has radically different ways of dealing with the stress of combat. During lulls in the action, Colbert becomes excessively cheerful. This morning he's pointing at birds flying overhead, exclaiming, "Look! How pretty!" It's not like he's maniacally energized from having escaped death. His satisfaction seems deeper and quieter, as if he's elated to have been involved in something highly rewarding. It's as though he's just finished a difficult crossword puzzle or won at chess.

     When Espera comes by to share one of his stinky cigars, he gestures to Colbert and says, "Look at that skinny-ass dude. You'd never guess what a bad motherfucker he is." When they met a few years ago, Espera says he felt sorry for Colbert. "I thought he had no friends - he's such a loner," he says. "But he just can't stand people, even me. I'm only his friend to piss him off. But the dude is a straight-up warrior."

     Trombley seems interested in combat only during its intense moments -- when the bullets are coming directly at us. After that, he often snaps into deep sleeps. During the team's second assault on the bridge, while rolling toward the firefight, flanked by tanks and armored vehicles with weapons thundering, Trombley was slumped over his machine gun, snoring, and had to be jiggled awake.

     I react to fear in a more traditional manner. After the most recent ambush, my entire body was trembling so badly when we rolled back from the bridge that my feet were bouncing off the floor of the Humvee, and my teeth were chattering. Bryan later tells me this was likely a physical reaction to excessive adrenalin, which cuts the flow of blood to the extremities, resulting in severe cold. Person affects no discernible change. "When I am in these ambushes," he asserts confidently, "I don't feel like I'm going to die."

    Espera, who, after combat, always looks as though his eyes have sunk deeper into their sockets and the skin on his shaved skull has just tightened an extra notch, says, "We've been brainwashed and trained for combat. We must say 'Kill!' 3,000 times a day in boot camp. That's why it's easy." Then he adds, "That dude I saw crawling last night, I shot him in the grape. Saw the top of his head bust off. That didn't feel good. It makes me sick." Bryan, with his two confirmed kills in the ambush, says he feels nothing about having taken human lives. "It's a funny paradox," he says, bringing up his frantic effort a few days earlier to save the life of a civilian wounded by a Marine. "I would have done anything to save that kid. But I couldn't give a fuck about those guys I just killed. It's like, you're supposed to feel fucked after killing people. I don't."

    Fick, who saw Patrick med-evacked off with his shot foot, appears to be in a morbid state of self-reflection. He walks among his Marines saying almost nothing. They've set up again a few kilometers back from the bridge and gather in small groups around their Humvees going over every detail of the previous night's actions. Several of them slap Fick on the back, laughing about the courage he displayed by walking through the kill zone to direct the Humvees out at the height of the ambush. Fick sloughs off their praise, saying, "I merely had a lack of situational awareness." He tells me, "We should never be in a position like this again. That was bad tactics."

     Captain America, the platoon commander who is almost universally disrespected by the enlisted men, seems to deal with the stress by rising to a state of jabbering incoherence. Up by the bridge there are four enemy dead scattered under the eucalyptus trees, along with piles of munitions -- RPGs, AKs and hand grenades. Captain America runs back and forth, picking up their weapons, hurling them into the nearby canal and screaming at the top of his lungs. No one knows what he's screaming about or why, but as another officer who came upon this scene later concluded, "Whatever he was doing, he was not being in command."

    The four killed are the first combatants the Marines in First Recon have ever seen up close. The dead wear pleated slacks, loafers and leather jackets. An officer leans down and picks up the hand of one. Between his thumb and index finger, there are words tattooed on his skin in English: i love you. The officer reads it aloud for the benefit of the other Marines nearby and says, "These guys look like foreign university students in New York."

     The biggest revelation is the discovery of Syrian passports on the dead fighters. Not one of them is an Iraqi. Sgt. Eric Kocher, 23, a team leader in Captain America's platoon, is one of the first Marines to notice a fifth enemy fighter, wounded but still alive, lifting his head up and watching the Americans.

     Kocher kneels over him and pats him down for weapons. The man howls in pain. He's shot in the right arm and has a two-inch chunk of his right leg missing. He carries a Syrian passport that bears the name Ahmed Shahada. He's twenty-six years old, and his place of address in Iraq is listed as the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, by local standards one of the better hotels, catering to foreign journalists and European aid workers. He's carrying 500 Syrian pounds, a packet of prescription painkillers in his shirt pocket and an entry visa to Iraq dated March 23rd. He arrived barely more than a week ago. Handwritten in the section of his visa that asks the purpose of his visit to Iraq is one word: "Jihad."

     When news spreads of the foreign identities of the enemy combatants, the Marines are excited. "We just fought actual terrorists," Bryan says. After nearly two weeks of never knowing who was shooting at them, the Marines can finally put a face to the enemy. Intelligence officers in the Marine First Division later estimate that between fifty and seventy-five percent of all enemy combatants in central Iraq were foreigners -- primarily young Palestinian men bearing Syrian or Egyptian passports. "Saddam offered these men land, money and wives to come and fight for him," says an intelligence officer.

     As it turns out, the war for the future of this country is largely being fought between two armies of interlopers.

     Just before midnight on april 2nd, the battalion reaches the outskirts of Al Kut. Located 110 miles north of Nasiriyah, Al Kut is the largest city in north-central Iraq. More important, it is headquarters of a Republican Guard division. But the anticipated showdown in Al Kut never happens. Soon after reaching the edge of the city, the battalion is ordered to head to Baghdad. Seizing Al Kut itself was never an actual goal.

     This entire campaign has been a feint -- a false movement designed to convince the Iraqi leadership that the main U.S. invasion was coming through central Iraq. The strategy has been a success. The Iraqis left a key division and other forces in and around Al Kut in order to fight off a Marine advance that never actually came. With so many Iraqi forces tied down near there, Baghdad was left relatively undefended for the combined Army and Marine assault to come. Gen. James Mattis, commander of the First Marine Division, a key architect of this diversion, later boasts to me, "The Iraqis expected us to go all the way through Al Kut -- that the 'dumb Marines' would fight their way through the worst terrain to Baghdad." While the plan worked brilliantly, Mattis adds, with characteristic modesty, "I'm not a great general. I was just up against other generals who don't know shit."

    It takes two days to reach the outskirts of Baghdad. Hastily erected oil pipelines zigzag along the highway to the city, built by Saddam to flood adjacent trenches with oil that was then set on fire. As a result, smoke hangs everywhere. Saddam intended these flaming oil trenches to be some sort of half-assed defense, but their only effect is to add to the general state of pollution and despair. Dead cows bloated to twice their normal size lie near some ditches. Smoke curls up from bombed buildings. Artillery rumbles in the distance. Human corpses are scattered in small clusters every few kilometers. It's the usual horrorscape of a country at war. Just before reaching the final Marine camp outside Baghdad, Espera's vehicle swerves to avoid running over a human head lying in the road. When the vehicle turns, he looks up to see a dog eating a human corpse. "Can it get any sicker than this?" he asks.

     Person, however, has an entirely different reaction. Set back from the highway, gleaming like some sort of religious shrine, there is a modern-looking glass structure with bright plastic signs in front. It's an Iraqi version of a 7-Eleven. Though looted and smashed, it gives Person hope. "Damn!" he says. "It looks almost half-civilized here."

     First Recon sets up in a field of tall grass next to some blown-up industrial buildings. Baghdad is too far away to see but close enough to hear as U.S. bombs and artillery pound it steadily around the clock. The bombardment sounds like the steady rhythm of a car with a bass-booster stereo parked outside your window.

     On my first afternoon here, I sit down with Captain America. Back in Kuwait, when Captain America still had a mustache, he bore an uncanny resemblance to Matt Dillon's goofy con-artist charmer in There's Something About Mary. He comes off as one of the more thoughtful and articulate men in the battalion, and I begin to wonder if the enlisted men have read him all wrong. He's very likable, but with an unfocused intensity that's both charismatic and draining. When he stares at you, he doesn't blink; his pupils almost seem to vibrate. He mixes acute and surprising political observation -- "This part of the world would be better off without us" -- with Nietzschean speculation on the deadly nature of battle. "Right now, at any time, we could die," he says, leaning forward. "It almost makes you lose your sanity. The fear of dying will make you lose your sanity." He adds, "But to remain calm and stay in a place where you think you will die, that is the definition of insane, too. You must become insane to survive in combat."

     When I bring up one of the complaints his men make against him -- his proclivity for leading them on childish but also dangerous treasure hunts for Iraqi military souvenirs -- he launches into a detailed description of the relative merits of Iraqi and U.S. arms, freely admitting to taking Iraqi AKs. He even boasts of killing an enemy fighter with one. "These are good, up-close weapons for firing from a vehicle," he says, sounding perfectly reasonable.

     Sgt. Kocher, one of Captain America's men, spots me talking to him and later approaches to tell me something that's troubling him. Kocher is a veteran of Afghanistan, where he served on the same team with Colbert. Like Colbert, Kocher prides himself on his extreme professionalism. He grew up "running around in the backwoods of Pennsylvania" and is powerfully built. When he gets out of the Marine Corps, he plans to become a professional bodybuilder. Where Captain America has a scattered presence, Kocher's is one of pure focus. He now leads his own Recon team, and three nights ago while patrolling outside Al Kut, he claims Captain America attempted to stab an enemy prisoner of war with a bayonet. According to Kocher, his team was operating in total darkness with NVGs when it encountered an enemy fighter kneeling in a ditch, trying to hide from them. He and two Marines approached the Iraqi, weapons drawn. "The truth is," says Kocher, "We were all pissed because Sergeant Patrick had just been shot, and I wanted to shoot that guy. But that would have given away our position." Kocher and his two men disarmed the Iraqi, with Kocher grabbing him and putting him in a crushing armlock. Then, according to Kocher, Captain America came charging through the darkness with his bayonet drawn. (Long before this incident, I had heard enlisted men belittle Captain America for strutting around with a bayonet, something no other Marine in the battalion did regularly. "He just wants to overdramatize everything, so he feels like more of a hero," says one Marine.) Kocher says, "He jumps over me and jams him in chest with his bayonet. He turned the situation into chaos."

     According to Kocher, the prisoner had rifle magazines clipped to his chest that deflected Captain America's bayonet. Kocher, Captain America and the man tumbled over. It took several moments of struggling to regain control of the prisoner. Kocher says that as soon as he restrained him, with his arms pinned behind his back, Captain America rushed forward again, this time to kick the enemy in the stomach. "He hits me in the stomach instead," Kocher says.

     The sergeant keeps a written log. "I call it my 'bitter journal,' " he says. "If something happens to me, I want my wife to know the truth. Because of guys like Captain America, we've fought retarded."

     Captain America disputes Kocher's version of events. He says the prisoner was not under control when he arrived. In his version, he brandished his bayonet when the man resisted being captured. "I jabbed him with my bayonet," Captain America says. "If I'd wanted to kill him, I would have shot him. By stabbing him, I saved his life."

    In this case, the details seem too murky to draw any firm conclusions. What will soon become clear, though, is that this incident ominously foreshadows one of the more controversial episodes of the campaign, when, a few days later, outside Baghdad, Captain America and his bayonet make another dramatic appearance during a prisoner capture. And this time, ironically, Kocher and another enlisted man critical of Captain America will be involved.

     On this night, all is looking good. Ferrando visits Colbert's team and offers rare praise. "I've heard they're speaking pretty highly of First Recon at division headquarters," Ferrando says. "The general thinks we're slaying dragons."

     After he leaves, Espera offers his own assessment. "Do you realize the shit we've done here, the people we've killed? Back home in the civilian world, if we did this, we would go to prison."

    (RS 926, July 10, 2003)        

Continue to Part 3