CHAPTER 1
Departure and Forty-Seven Dead
The hardest part of any deployment, peacetime or otherwise, is, of course, the leaving. Wartime deployments are harder still because, in addition to dealing with the knowledge that you will not see home, friends, or family for six months or longer, there is the specter of pending combat hovering about. Of the numerous and varied emotions one experiences when preparing for such a deployment, fi rst and foremost for a Marine Corps infantryman of twenty years is excitement. Saying so in this politically correct age is, of course, verboten. The professional soldier is supposed to view combat with a cool, detached, and grim outlook. Excitement is for boyish amateurs who just dont know any better and who make cracks about how Saving Private Ryan is their favorite comedy. But if youve volunteered for twenty years to be an infantryman, and if youve endured the rigorous, punishing training and the misery and hardships that go along with it, well then, when the roll is called and your name is heard, youre excited. That rush is only slightly tempered by the dark side, by the threat of death or mutilation that combat represents. After all, the threat is at first a distant one and the adrenaline coursing through you easily overpowers any thoughts of your fragile body being ripped apart by steel, copper, or brass traveling at three thousand feet per second. Besides, my orders had me assigned to the safe and simple job of
training soldiers of the New Iraqi Army in Kirkush, far from the dangers of places like Baghdad.
Still, safe orders or hazardous duty, combat or boredom, it is always hard to leave, and this deployment was no different. If anything, it was worse, for not only would I be leaving my three children, ages ten, fourteen, and eighteen, I would be leaving them without their mother, for in January 2002, my wife of nineteen years, Denise, had died of a blood clot. She had been in treatment for the blood clot since December 31, 2001, and according to medical records, her doctors had spent most of January 29, 2002 debating whether they should place a filter in her chest. In the end, they decided that her condition was not life threatening and they opted not to install the filter. By six the next morning, they had been proved wrong. My wife had passed.
Further complicating the situation, Id remarried two years later and now I would be leaving my new bride after less than two months of marriage.
Those were the things going through my mind in early February 2004 as I spent my second day in Camp Wolverine, Kuwait. Wolverine was the layover before the final leg of my journey to Iraq. Family concerns aside, I could not help but notice that, as wartime deployments went, this one had pretty nice perks. Wolverine had an all-night Burger King, a Pizza Inn, and a coffeehouse. There were phones, Internet access, and a chow hall darn near as good as the one at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. During my earlier trip to the region, in 1990, for the Gulf War, we lived in the holes we dug, there were no BK Broilers to be had, and my unit went eighty-eight days with neither a shower nor even a change of clothes. The second go-round started off much better. I slept in a tent and generally felt as if I were at Club Med.
Beyond the Wolverine, Kuwait City appeared immaculate and boomed with prosperity. When I had last seen Kuwait, the place resembled a large, stinking dump, the natural result of six months of Iraqi occupation and the war that had ousted them. Trash and the detritus of the Iraqi defeat were everywhere. Destroyed armored vehicles, spent artillery shells, and shattered cars and trucks of every type, military and civilian, covered the land as far as the eye could see.
Thirteen years ago, I had led a rifle squad in India Company, 1st Battalion, 6th Marines. Our mission had been to charge through the Iraqi defenses along the Kuwait- Saudi Arabia border and destroy the Iraqi army dug in between us and Kuwait City. The nature of the terrain, utterly flat in all directions, provided absolutely zero cover for attacking infantry. That landscape, combined with the large, densely seeded mine fields, which were covered by excellent Russian, French, and South African– built artillery, as well as the sheer numbers of Iraqi troops we would be facing (thirteen divisions of dug-in soldiers who had had six months to prepare their defenses), made our survival seem somewhat improbable.
“You know how we mark enemy units on maps with red symbols?” my platoon sergeant had asked, holding up a well-used map of the future battlefield. “Well, you might as well just paint this whole motherfucker red,” hed concluded with a short, bitter laugh. General Walter Boomer, the senior Marine Corps officer in the Gulf, had said the same thing, albeit with less colorful language, describing our “force ratios” as “horrible.” No matter how you phrased it, though, it had all meant the same thing more defenders than attackers. That is never supposed to happen, of course. Armies that choose the terrain and dig in, in advance of attack, have all the advantages. Theoretically, then, the attackers should at least be numerically superior. General Norman Schwarzkopf assessed that our losses could be as high as 50 percent just getting through the breech lanes. And that came before the expected fi ghting in Kuwait City. These things all made us just a little pessimistic about the immediate future. I remember looking around me as we got ready to cross the line of departure in our drive against the Iraqi army. I studied the faces of my friends, Crowley, Douglas, McDonald, Gaudet, Davis, Doc Wright, and so many more. How many of them would be dead by this time tomorrow? I also wondered how many of them were looking around and asking themselves the same thing about me.
As our vehicles lurched forward into the attack that day thirteen years ago, one of the new marines in our platoon played a cassette of the Kansas song “Carry On, Wayward Son.” What is it about music I had asked myself that can so lift the spirit when combat is near?
Now many things were different. Chief of which concerned the fact that I did not deploy as part of a unit as I had back in 1990. In the war that would finish Saddam forever, destiny gave me no part; headquarters battalion and the rear lines called. Saddam was captured and his sons were dead. Except for the downing of U.S. Army troop helicopters, American losses in late 2003 and early 2004 had been very light, and it looked, for all intents and purposes, as if the war were over. At least that was what most people thought.
The tent in which I sat waiting for my flight into Iraq overfl owed with about eighty people, all of whom were facing three large televisions. A different movie played on each set, and added to that was the background noise of forty conversations that made it pointless to try and watch a movie, so I simply waited to hear my flight, designated CHROME 33, called up. In the timeless way of the military, wed all been awake since 0530 for a fl ight that might not leave until the next day. “Hurry up and wait” is a phrase that certainly has been known in the Greek phalanx, the Roman cohort, and in every army since.
Our flight received the go signal at 2300. About forty of us stood and shuffled outside to form a single file. An air force tech sergeant called off forty names from a roster and scratched out the names of those who did not answer up. He then counted the names remaining, counted the bodies standing in front of him, and had us follow him to a bus. In less than ten minutes we were on the flight line and being issued earplugs. We wo