Generation Kill - Evan Wright [39]
Nasiriyah marks the spot where the terrain in Iraq changes dramatically. At Nasiriyah, the desert land, watered by the Euphrates, turns almost tropical in places. There are dense palm groves, fields of tall grass, even rice paddies. These predominate south of the bridge, where Marines from Task Force Tarawa are dug in taking heavy machine-gun, mortar, artillery, RPG and AK fire.
The fighting in Nasiriyah started at about three in the morning after an Army maintenance convoy that had been rolling on the superhighway far south of the city took a wrong turn onto Route 7 and drove toward the town. The soldiers in this unit, including most famously Private First Class Jessica Lynch, had no navigation equipment and poor maps. They were ambushed a few kilometers outside Nasiriyah, with eleven killed, six captured and five missing.
A few hours later, after dawn, the Marines from Task Force Tarawa, which includes a total of about 5,000 troops, arrived. Their original mission had been to secure the bridge and the route through Nasiriyah for other Marine forces, which would then move through the city and continue north. But having received word of the ambushed soldiers—and seeing with their own eyes the blown-up, burned Army vehicles from the maintenance units smoldering by the side of the road—the Marines from Task Force Tarawa began a search-and-rescue mission. They pushed up to within a kilometer of the bridge aboard lightly armored vehicles and dismounted into the surrounding fields—a patchwork of dried mudflats, berms, grass and palm trees. While the Marines called out, yelling for any American soldiers to show themselves, they started to take rifle and machine-gun fire from surrounding huts and berms. They also heard American voices calling out to them. They found nine soldiers, several of them wounded, from the lost convoy hiding in the foliage, and rescued them.
Still taking sporadic enemy fire, the Marines in Task Force Tarawa regrouped on the highway and prepared to roll onto the bridge into Nasiriyah. They started before noon, about the time First Recon pushed up Route 7 and became mired in the military traffic jam twenty kilometers south of them.
The lead Marines in Task Force Tarawa crossed onto the bridge into Nasiriyah aboard tanks and Amtracs. Amtracs are ungainly, tracked vehicles designed to swim over the ocean as well as drive on land, but are not really designed for heavy combat. Each holds roughly twenty Marines. About a dozen vehicles made it across the bridge, then cut east, hoping to find a route bypassing the center of Nasiriyah.
But the tanks quickly ran into one of the worst features of Iraqi cities: unpaved streets running with open sewer water. They bogged down in the muck, unable to move any farther.
More Amtracs, containing a total of about 150 Marines, raced across the bridge and drove straight into the heart of the city. Central Nasiriyah is a warren of two- to four-story brick and concrete structures, most of them surrounded by walls. As the Marines sped into the center of the town, they began to take hostile fire. Iraqis dressed in civilian clothes, hiding behind walls and windows of the buildings lining both sides of the streets, fired AK rifles, machine guns and RPGs into the Amtracs. The Marines continued on and had made it three kilometers into the heart of Nasiriyah when an Amtrac was hit by an RPG, wounding several. The column pressed ahead to seize a canal bridge on the north side of the city.
Additional Amtracs