Sensory overload paralyzed me. I saw mud buildings set many meters back from the road. Beyond the turn, the buildings were concrete and seemed to tower above the road on both sides, trapping us in an urban canyon. Flashes of incoming fire surrounded us, but I didn’t hear it, and I couldn’t tell whether my platoon was shooting back. There was no fear, but no bravado either. I felt nothing. I was a passive observer watching this ambush unfold on a movie screen.
When Gunny Wynn yanked the wheel straight, I snapped back to the present. My hearing returned all at once: roaring machine guns, Humvee engine shrieking. I saw the street, the fedayeen positions, and my platoon in a fight. Fire poured from the buildings on both sides. Wisps of smoke swirled in the wake of each bullet. We drag-raced down the street, but it felt like a crawl. I lifted off my seat as we crashed through potholes and over missing slabs of pavement. Colbert darted left around a wrecked car smoking in the middle of the road. Wynn followed, and we jumped the median, swerved past a light pole, and picked up speed. Muddy water and sewage sprayed in rooster tails from the Humvees’ tires.
“This is Hitman Two, in contact. Taking small arms, left and right. We’re engaging.” I couldn’t even see the rest of the battalion ahead of us.
“Roger, Two,” headquarters replied. “We took some on our way through, too. Just keep pushing.”
Survival and command tugged me in different directions. A normal human survival reaction would be to curl up on the Humvee floorboards and close my eyes. This is precisely the reaction Marine Corps training is designed to overcome. And it worked. After the initial shock of the ambush, I felt calm and completely self-possessed. The Marines looked the same. They were aiming their shots, calling out targets, and moving as one.
For a platoon commander, the job was simple. Haul balls through town, shoot enough to keep the bad guys from aiming, and hope to get everybody out the other side. My biggest fear was that a driver would be shot or a Humvee blown up and we’d have to stop to pick up survivors. Stopping meant dying, and I stayed on the radio with Team Three at the back of our column, just to make sure they were still there.
“Two-Three, how you doin’ back there?”
“Two-Three’s up. Runnin’ and gunnin’.”
My best concession to the survival instinct, at this point, was to shoot. The first lesson every young infantry officer learns at Quantico is that your job when being shot at is to shoot back. “Gain and maintain fire superiority” is how the Marine Corps describes it. There were only twenty-three of us, so every gun counted. There was no artillery to call, no updates to give my commander. I was just another shooter. I leaned into my M-16 and began firing into windows and doors. The rifle’s sharp reports were deafening inside the Humvee. With the radio handset pressed to my left ear, my right ear rang from the gunshots. I realized my earplug had fallen out, and I irrationally reached down to find it. I needed both hands on the rifle, though, in the bouncing Humvee.
My magazine held all tracer rounds to mark targets for the platoon, and I could see that I wasn’t hitting anything. All the jarring made it hard to aim. My rifle had an M203 grenade launcher slung beneath the barrel. Close is good enough with grenades, so I reached into a bag of 203 rounds hanging from the roof of the cab. Pumping the breach of the grenade launcher, I fired as fast as I could reload.
Aside from insects and plants, I’d killed one living thing in my life. While mowing my parents’ lawn as a teenager, I’d accidentally wounded a chipmunk with the mower blade. Gritting my teeth, I’d cut off its head with a shovel. Even this mercy killing had bothered me. I’d never been hunting and had no desire to go. Now, shooting grenades at strangers in an unnamed town, I was kind of enjoying myself.
The long-sought hyperclarity had kicked in. I saw a young man crouching in an alley. He wore dark trousers and a blue shirt. His silver belt buckle gleamed. He bent forward on one knee, bracing his upper body against the wall of a building. He held an AK-47 and sighted down its barrel as he fired at us. The rifle jumped in his hands, and little spurts of flame flashed from the muzzle. He seemed very small to me, although he could not have been more than thirty meters away. I lobbed a grenade at him and the round exploded against the wall just above his head. I watched him fall over the rifle. We flashed past the alley, and I reloaded, firing more grenades into windows and open doors.
