My Men are My Heroes (13 page)

3/1 moved out in a convoy that included the entire 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF), a huge assemblage of approximately 68,000 Marines and British soldiers that included Task Force Tarawa (TF Tarawa) from the 2d Marine Division, the 1 st Marine Division, the British 1 st U.K. Division, the 3d Marine Air Wing, and the First Service Force Support Group and attendant Reserve units.

The Thundering Third was part of Regimental Combat Team 1 (RCT1), a 5,000-man combined arms force built around the 1st Marine Regiment.

According to the original plan, the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division and the Brits would move south into Iraq through Turkey while the 3d Infantry Division took An Nasiriyah.

That changed when the Turkish government said no to the Coalition's using Turkey as a jump-off point a few weeks before the invasion began.

The new plan called for the Marines to move north into Iraq and destroy Saddam Hussein's army. Their first waypoint was a pair of important bridges in the city of An Nasiriyah that spanned the Euphrates River and the Saddam Canal. The bridges were divided by a 3-mile stretch of road. The Marines were to hold the bridges and the road while the entire Marine contingent moved north toward Baghdad. Before the Marines reached the bridges, the Army's 3d Infantry Division, part of the so-called “left fist” of the U.S. Army's attacking force, was supposed to check the bridges to make sure the route was passable.

Meanwhile V Corps—essentially the entire U.S. Army invasion force with the exception of an airborne brigade that would strike northern Iraq—would move into the country from the west to threaten Baghdad using traditional invasion routes along the Tigris River. It was a sophisticated plan that very few Marines in 3/1 except senior officers knew anything about.

Before March 20, Kilo, 3/1 was laying up along with the rest of the 1st Marine Division behind the last berm-and-barbed-wire fence that marked the border between Kuwait and Iraq. The company had been mated with a platoon of reservists operating the thin-skinned amphibious assault vehicles (AAVs) that would drive them to the war. The reservists' job was to take Kilo's Marines into combat much as their fathers and grandfathers had in previous wars. Only this time they would be driving across sand instead of swimming across the sea in front of them.

There wasn't much new for 3/1's Marines to look at while they waited for the war to start. For as far as the eye could see was tan sand rolling along in gentle, undulating ridges. Somewhere ahead of them was the entire Iraqi army. Behind them and on both flanks was the multinational Coalition force.

The air hummed with anticipation. Every Marine was doing something. Some halfheartedly practiced donning their hated gas masks; others cleaned their weapons. Still others packed and repacked their 80-pound rucksacks full of ammo, food, water, candy, cameras, underwear, socks, and other personal gear. Some roughhoused their way into a state of hypertensive relaxation. All were tired of training and eager to go to war.

Their eagerness to get moving was heightened by the constant threat of missile attack. Saddam's army was equipped with Russian-designed intermediate-range ballistic missiles code-named “SCUD” by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. SCUDs were relatively primitive but quite versatile: They could carry high-explosive gas, biological, and chemical warheads.

Four times that morning the Marines dove into their gas masks when “Lightning! Lightning! Lightning!” crackled over the battalion radio nets warning of incoming SCUDs. Despite the potential danger, the Marines hated the gas masks and hated the mission oriented protective posture (MOPP) suits designed to protect them against gas, biological, and chemical agents.

By evening everyone knew the war was on, Kasal says. Each Marine looked inside himself and decided he had a war to fight. All the loud, angry bullshit, the snapping orders that stung like hard rain, all the endless, repetitious training was behind them. It was time to man up. Before Kilo's men mounted their AAVs, they were told to make a formation between their respective paths so Kasal and Captain Michael Martin, their company commander,
could make a final inspection before they departed.

Kasal was just as ramped and ready to go as his young Marines, but he couldn't show it. They looked to him and the other NCOs and officers in the company for guidance. If the leaders seemed rattled in any way, the men would be upset, and now was not the time for histrionics. Kasal stayed calm and exuded a self-confidence and pride in his men that eased their minds and left them determined not to fail the company.

Kasal had been in their boots before. He knew they were jittery, uptight, and eager to show their stuff. He was also well aware that nervous energy was not the best driving force to motivate young warriors. It leads to mistakes, and mistakes lead to tragedy. Kasal intended to share his lessons learned with the young men now looking to him for guidance. He had learned that being an infantryman is a unique craft, a skill that combines cunning and combat coolness with white-hot, carefully controlled aggression. Every gesture he made, every word he said was designed to teach that craft, to impart that knowledge, to model that unique mental state.

The command group shook each man's hand. It was never said but always understood that Martin and Kasal were saying their last goodbyes. Every Marine in the company knew what they were doing and appreciated the gesture, Kasal's men recalled later.

Kasal knew something else for certain: The time for training was over. Kilo was as good as it was going to be when it crossed the line of departure to begin the fight to liberate Iraq from Saddam. The moment of truth was at hand.

The first day of war in Iraq was relatively uneventful. Kilo Co. headed north in their uncomfortable, overstuffed AAVs along with a rolling city of 68,000 other Marines that flowed across
the desert at the excruciatingly slow pace of about 15 miles per hour. They were stuffed in the trucks like sardines, and unless the men had security watch and stood up to look outside, they remained packed inside trying to sleep or scratch their asses without smacking someone. They still wore their MOPP suits, body armor, and helmets. Weapons were clutched in every pair of hands. Several more false gas-attack alarms had reminded them that they were in a combat zone, so their despised gas masks were always near.

All day and night the endless convoy started and stopped, started and stopped, occasionally deploying in various defensive formations only to start and stop again. Occasionally Kilo Marines would see a distant smoke plume or pass a smoldering car or truck. They even rolled over a few squashed bodies and passed beside dead Iraqis baked into the road from conflicts with the infantry battalions ahead, but the heavy combat the young Marines anticipated had not yet developed.

Kasal sensed the war was getting closer because increasing numbers of Iraqi soldiers in dirty civilian clothes and cheap civilian shoes were surrendering to the units leading RCT1 up Route 8. Reports coming back to 3/1 identified the Iraqis as the first deserters from the 8,000-man Iraqi division in An Nasiriyah—a division that, it was rumored, would surrender rather than fight when the overwhelmingly disproportionate Coalition force got closer to the bridges at An Nasiriyah.

Even without combat, Kilo's men were already tired, dirty, hungry, and stressed. Kasal and Martin were not much better off. They had already run for more than 24 hours on caffeine and catnaps. Kasal knew that the infinite boredom of the road march could be as deadly a foe as combat itself if it made the men complacent and dull. He was determined not to let that happen.

“Marines in combat need to be constantly reminded of what they are doing,” he says. “They get tired and bored and sleepy
and don't pay attention. The section leaders and squad leaders have to make sure they don't get that way. The platoon sergeants make sure the squad leaders are doing their job, and my role was to make sure they were all doing their jobs.”

Any Marine will tell you that riding in an AAV rolling across the desert is not pleasant when shared with 19 or 20 other guys, their equipment, extra food and water, ammo, and a three-man crew. Lance Corporal Alex Nicoll, a rifleman in 3d Squad, 3d Platoon, Kilo, remembers some of the tracks were stuffed with as many as 28 or 29 men.

“Hey, when your track breaks down, you have to ride somewhere,” Nicoll explains. “So we would just get in another track. It's better to be in a firefight than crammed into a track all day. You breathe exhaust fumes and get a terrible headache, and the noise and movement gets terrible.”

The only good thing about riding instead of walking was not humping their 80-pound rucks in the withering heat, Nicoll says. The AAV's roof opens up, so several Marines at a time could get some fresh air while serving as lookouts—except when the wind blew exhaust fumes in their faces.

“After a day everyone had black faces,” Nicoll remembers. “The exhausts were perfectly aimed to hit us in the face. After the deployment they sent around a questionnaire asking about what could be improved. I hope the exhausts got fixed.”

The view outside was just about as bad as what they couldn't see inside. The Marines who rode across Iraq compare the scenery to a giant, stinking landfill occupied by dirty, scared people and unfamiliar animals. They frequently use the words “garbage,” “filth,” “poverty,” “devastation,” and “emptiness” to describe the view. Incongruously, running through this emptiness was a four-lane superhighway that would have been perfectly normal in Arizona or Utah.

Taking a turn as a lookout was marginally better than being
cramped down below with only what passed for fresh air moving across their tension-tightened faces. The sun was hot, the MOPP suits were hot, their helmets cooked their brains, and sand fought to penetrate every uncovered orifice. Already men were dealing with pus-filled eyes contaminated with grit and lungs irritated by inhaled sand that caused hacking thick green phlegm. Even with their heads outside the track, the fetid air was filled with dust, bad breath, and the stench of rotting flesh, burning oil, and indefinable smells as rank as the garbage that filled the countryside around them.

On March 25, 3/1 got the word that 1st Battalion, 2d Marines had gone into An Nasiriyah and taken heavy casualties. It had been hit on Route Moe, the city street in An Nasiriyah that RCT1 had to traverse before it could cross the Saddam Canal to the north. 2/1 was not going to be able to complete its mission to secure the southern bridge for the 1 MEFs passage because of heavy contact they were already facing.

3/1's convoy slowed to a stop. The desert horizon to the north rocked with explosions marked by black and brown plumes of greasy smoke—proof that the war had begun in earnest and that a battle lay ahead.

In fact the bridge battles actually began when the 507th Maintenance Company, a rear echelon Army unit formerly based at Fort Bliss, Texas, was ambushed south of the first bridge across the Euphrates. The 507th was on a road march with the 3d Infantry Division when somebody driving the big trucks made a navigational error and took a wrong turn into An Nasiriyah, where an Iraqi trap was waiting for them. The shock of the ambush sent its soldiers scurrying for cover.

When Alpha Co. 1/2 arrived on the scene, they discovered the Army troops burrowed in the ditches on the side of the road
near their burning vehicles. The Euphrates River was still ahead. The Iraqis had set up a defensive position on the approaches to the bridge to deny a crossing. It was a risky tactic because it is easier to defend the approaches from across the river, but it worked well enough to decimate the soldiers who had no idea they were lumbering into an ambush instead of traveling a safe route. The Americans engaged in a fierce firefight with the Iraqis for more than an hour and suffered many wounded and dead. Other soldiers were missing and presumed captured.

The 1/2 Marines were just as mystified as the soldiers of the 507th by the ambush because they thought the Army had secured An Nasiriyah. Intel reports circulating among the 2d Marine Regiment had suggested that approximately 8,000 soldiers from the Iraqi 11th Division intended to surrender there.

But as Task Force Tarawa closed in on the city, they didn't find any surrendering Iraqi soldiers. Instead they found burning American Army trucks, dead and wounded American soldiers, and mayhem.

The Marines from Alpha 1/2 did their best to help the injured, two of whom were critically wounded. The Iraqis only increased their rate of fire as the Marines moved about on their mission of mercy. During the rescue an Army officer reported that half the soldiers in the ill-fated convoy were missing. (The situation became a world-shaking event when Army brass revealed later that several women were among the dead and captured soldiers in the unfortunate 507th. Most famous was Private First Class Jessica Lynch, who was awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart after her daring rescue from an Iraqi hospital.)

Marines from Alpha Co. brought forward their corpsmen to treat the critically wounded soldiers and called for helicopters to get them out. Other Marines fanned out in search of the missing soldiers. Five were found hiding in a nearby swamp; several of their dead were also discovered. Later, America would learn from
an Iraqi newsreel that a number of captured soldiers had been executed. The Marines kept fighting, taking the Iraqi ambushers' fire and starting a struggle that went on for days.

As soon as the soldiers were under the Marines' protective wing, Alpha was told to move on to An Nasiriyah and take the southern bridge.