Generation Kill - Evan Wright [43]
Meanwhile, Mattis’s two other Regimental Combat Teams, totaling about 13,000 Marines, will move toward Baghdad on western highways through open desert, much as the Army has been doing since crossing the border. By dividing his forces, Mattis hopes that at least one set of them will be able to seize passable bridges over the Tigris (which the western highways also cross). The problem he’s facing on March 24 is that for more than a day now, RCT-1 has been hesitating on the outskirts of Nasiriyah.
The Marines of Task Force Tarawa, engaged inside the city and south of it in fields by the bridge over the Euphrates, only pushed into Nasiriyah in order to secure the route for RCT-1 and First Recon to use on their advance north. While the Marines in Task Force Tarawa who entered the city suffered heavy losses the day before, the continual American bombardment of Nasiriyah by artillery, attack jets and helicopters has prevented enemy forces from massing on them. They have not retreated and remain in place in Nasiriyah.
Unfortunately, the commander of RCT-1, Colonel Joe Dowdy, whose forces have been stopped on the highway south of the city, along with First Recon’s, for the past twenty-four hours, has been unable to obtain a clear picture of what’s going on in the city with Task Force Tarawa. It’s another one of those combat situations that’s hard for a civilian, who might think of the U.S. military as an all-seeing, all-powerful, high-tech entity, to comprehend. While Dowdy is only a few kilometers south of the bridge and Task Force Tarawa’s positions, his radios can’t communicate with their radios. Task Force Tarawa, based out of Camp Lejeune in South Carolina, uses different encryption codes from those used by Dowdy’s forces, which came from Camp Pendleton. West Coast Marines can’t communicate with East Coast Marines.
For the past twenty-four hours, Dowdy has been wavering, alternately planning to send his 6,000 Marines straight through the city or to bypass it and use a distant crossing point, or even to send some through and hold others back. Unlike First Recon’s commander, whose obsession with mustaches and the Grooming Standard alienates his men, Dowdy is a wildly popular figure in his regiment. With his burly physique and bulldog face, he fits the image of a Marine Corps commander and delivers rousing speeches peppered with verse from Shakespeare and Kipling. But at Nasiriyah he meets his downfall. He simply can’t make up his mind (and within a few days Mattis will take the nearly unprecedented step of removing Dowdy from command, probably as a result of this indecision).
As of noon on March 24, Dowdy’s latest scheme is to push First Recon ahead of RCT-1 and have them join elements of Task Force Tarawa still fighting on the southern side of the bridge. After this, he intends to drive RCT-1 through the city and use First Recon as a quick-reaction force to rush into the city and rescue any of his Marines who are wounded in the initial assault.
NINE
°
AT ONE O’CLOCK on the afternoon of March 24, the Marines in First Recon climb into their vehicles and pull them onto the highway south of Nasiriyah. The winds are picking up. Yesterday’s clear skies have turned gray. The road is clogged with thousands of military vehicles, but they have pulled to the side, forming a one-lane channel through the congestion.
Colbert’s team settles into the Humvee and Person begins punching the dashboard and cursing. Someone higher up in the company changed radio frequencies without telling him, and now he can’t use them. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him lose control in earnest.
Colbert calms him. “It’s okay. We’ll fix it. Everyone’s just nervous because we lost a lot this morning,” he says, referring to the news of Marine casualties.
At one-thirty p.m. First Recon’s convoy of seventy vehicles starts moving on the highway toward the bridge at Nasiriyah.