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By Root 1001 0

Baghdad, and while the troops moved in, I set up in a position of cover. A bunch of Iraqis came running from a building with their hands filled with Iraqi currency, and we stopped four of them, one of whom was a middle-aged man who stubbornly refused to take his hands from his pockets. He was only five feet from me, and I was well within my rights to shoot him dead, for he might have a weapon or grenade in the deep pockets of his baggy robe. I handed off my rifle and took out my pistol, and he pulled back, plunging his hands even deeper into his pockets, so I whipped the side of his head, forced him to the pavement, twisted his arms, and then yanked his hands out, arrest style. All the fool had in his pockets were some ten-thousand-dinar bills. He had risked his life rather than show other Iraqis that he was carrying a large wad of money that was becoming more worthless by the day.

On April 15, at four o’clock in the afternoon, Baghdad SWAT was sent to the Central Bank of Baghdad, which was being robbed once again and was ablaze when we arrived. A platoon from India Company cordoned off the area; then our assault force plunged through the smoke to clear the huge building. I climbed atop my Humvee, which had become my standard support position, and was searching window by window and door by door when I picked up some movement on the second story of a neighboring building, near a ladder. A guy with an AK-47 was creeping up on our guys in the swirling smoke that had made him almost invisible. “Almost” isn’t good enough. I set up on him at only 168 yards through the rolling cloud and dropped him cold with two quick shots.

We recovered over ten million dinars and around a million U.S. dollars from the bank’s vault that day, filling up Amtrac after Amtrac with money, which we hauled back to the Main headquarters compound. A million bucks, there for the taking. It had been a bank robbery, the bank was a catastrophe, and young Marines were actually sitting on piles of enough cash to make them rich, but we were all so focused on fighting and staying alive that I still believe not a one of us scoffed up so much as a dollar bill. The money ended up back at the American Embassy in Kuwait. We think.

Epilogue

Welcome Home

The nuttiness finally ended on April 19, when we handed off central Baghdad to the Army’s 1st Armored Division and began our long trip south. Destination: Kuwait, then home. I had mixed feelings about leaving the combat zone, because the silence and lack of communication from my wife had become deafening, and the day that I would have to deal with the situation was drawing close. It had been hard enough to hold my focus when a mission was going on, but now that we were in a safe, isolated rear area, I had plenty of time for unwanted and unwelcome reflection about what was happening at home.

The battalion rolled back through towns where we had once spilled blood and lost friends killed and wounded. Our first stop was the awful Iraqi town of Ad Diwaniyah, the same shithole that we had so thoroughly messed up only a few short weeks before. The place was just as disgusting as we remembered, and we sat there for weeks, from April 24 until the end of May, waiting and rotting.

Our momentum was spent, and boredom, not the fedayeen, became the enemy. The jolt of coming to such a screeching, complete halt after combat left us with mental whiplash and morale contusions. At least in Baghdad we had sodas and decent food, and we could look at the cool women and check out an empty palace now and again, but now even those minor pleasures were gone. In retrospect, cop duty with Baghdad SWAT was better than anything Ad Diwaniyah had to offer.

The Main headquarters was set up in what once had been some sort of Iraqi military boot camp, a spread of dusty one-story buildings that had motivational sayings painted on the walls in Arabic. Dirt covered everything, and our boots kicked through piles of spent cartridge shells as we cleared workspaces and dove into the usual blizzard of postcombat paperwork to account for all of