Marines manned three of the four machine guns in the late afternoon. They searched the horizon with binoculars, calling out points of interest to one another. The fourth gun lay in pieces across a Humvee hood. Over it, Corporal Jacks labored intently. I watched his big dirty hands cleaning each small part with tenderness, even love. He reassembled the gun and then began to wipe down each individual grenade in the linked belts of Mark-19 ammunition. Watching Jacks clean his gun before eating, sleeping, or cleaning himself, I saw a bit of the essence of the Marine Corps, the spirit that has sustained young Marines in bad places for more than two hundred years. This was no idle patriotic reverie on my part, though. It was the kernel of a growing unwillingness to watch these Marines mistreated or wrongly employed by those with more power than experience. I cautioned myself not to pass judgment too quickly. As a platoon commander, I saw only a tiny piece of the puzzle. But every tactical fiber in my body said driving through Al Gharraf had been a mistake. We had gotten lucky, and it would be dangerous if someone mistook that luck for skill.
The sandstorm shrouded what was left of the daylight, and I hurried to finish preparing for a night on the line. I squinted through my compass to give left and right lateral limits to each machine gunner. The gunners marked these limits on their guns’ traversing bars so that in case we were attacked in the dark, the guns’ sectors would all overlap but wouldn’t include any other friendly positions. This was routine procedure, essentially unchanged since World War I. Battlefield success came from timely creativity atop a firm foundation of grunt work. Recon’s reputation was built on creativity and individual improvisation, but woe to the young lieutenant who failed to heed the unglamorous basics. Upon them, all else rested.
And so I went down the line, sighting, calculating, and drawing lines on my map. As I worked, Gunny Wynn also visited each team, looking for injuries and equipment damage and checking our ammunition. Through the whole engagement, the platoon had fired only about a thousand rounds, and we carried enough extra ammo in the back of my Humvee to top everyone off. At the end of the line, members of Lovell’s team were counting bullet holes in their Humvee and marveling at holes in the rest of their gear. Stinetorf showed me a long gash through the canvas of his North Face backpack where an AK-47 round had carved its path only inches from where he’d been standing.
“I’m guessing their warranty won’t cover this,” he said, fingering the rip.
Colbert’s Humvee had also been shot up. There were twenty-two bullet holes in it, including six in the door next to Evan Wright’s seat. When I walked up, he was studying them with a kind of awe.
“How you feeling, Evan?” I half-expected him to say he had enough information for his story and wanted to leave on the next resupply helicopter.
“Embedded,” he replied. “More embedded than I ever thought I’d be.”
Espera put an arm around his shoulders. “But he’s staying with us. Dude’s got balls.”
Gusts of wind swept across the field, blowing dust through little knots of Marines still reliving the day’s drive. I dropped my pack on the downwind side of the Humvee and stripped out of my flak jacket and helmet, feeling light and free under the breezy overcast. I swung a pickax into the earth, carving out my bed. Far from a chore, I found digging therapeutic as the day’s tension flowed from my arms through the handle to dissipate in the ground. While I dug, I thought about the relativity of safety. My friends and family at home were surely worried about me at that very moment. For them, Iraq was a dangerous place. For me, some towns were dangerous, and some were safe. Within the dangerous towns, some blocks were dangerous and some safe. On a dangerous block, one side of the street could be dangerous and the other safe. I finished digging the hole before I could work out whether that meant I was always safe or always in danger.
Darkness fell, and the wind picked up. Thunder mixed with the rumbling of distant explosions, and lightning blended with the flash of artillery rounds shooting overhead. Gunny Wynn and I sought refuge in the cab, where we monitored the radio and tore into our first MRE of the day. I realized that I was ravenous. Wynn gnawed on a Tootsie Roll as I watched his face reflected in the windshield by the dim green radio lights.
“What’s on your mind?” I asked.
“After Nasiriyah and this last place, it’s pretty clear to me what the Iraqi strategy is. They won’t touch us out here in open country because we’ll blast the shit out of them. They’ll wait till we’re in the towns, and then they’ll attrit us. When we fight back and wound civilians, they’ll get paraded all over TV and make us look like thugs.”
