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By Root 1078 0

a Missouri boy who was one of my reclamation projects, rode in the back to handle the radios and provide security. Only twenty years old, Daniel was an old-school Marine with a gift for brawling and getting into trouble. He stacked up an impressive record of being belligerent and hard to control while in 29 Palms, and when he blew off a corrective program, we court-martialed him, busted him in rank, and sent him to the brig to cool off. When he came out, I pulled him into the company office so that I could personally step on him now and then, and I learned that he was a loyal and tough kid who did not suffer fools gladly. My kind of guy. He was also valuable because he honestly thought he was bulletproof anywhere beyond the Baghdad city limits. “I know I’m going to get whacked in Baghdad,” he had complained for weeks. “I’m not going in there. Put me back in the brig, I don’t care. I’ll fight everywhere else, but I won’t go into Baghdad.” I figured he probably would.

Standing on a platform between the front and back seats was our gunner, Mexico-born Sergeant Luis Castillo, whose upper body protruded above the Humvee in a turret that mounted either a Mark-19 automatic grenade launcher or a 240-Golf medium machine gun, weapons we would mix and match to the mission. Castillo was very reserved and had been a sergeant for several months although he was only twenty years old. The tall, slim Marine was content to let other people give the orders and leave him alone to shoot his gun.

Another member of our crew was Corporal Clint Newbern, the communications guy in Casey’s truck. He had a knack for being able to dial in God or anybody else we needed in times of wicked stress, although his southern drawl on the radio never hinted that something of interest might be happening. Lean and wiry and newly married, he was born near Savannah, Georgia, to parents who were martial arts experts and raised their son to earn a couple of black belts of his own. Newbern wasn’t scared of anything and was given to us because his former boss thought the sarcastic young Marine was going to beat him up, which was a distinct possibility. He fit right in.

Handling the gun on Casey’s truck was tall, tough Sergeant Jerry Marsh from Bakersfield, California. He had been a grunt in Kilo Company when Casey was the XO, and he was a machine gunner with exceptional eyesight. He really knew his shit when it came to handling that automatic weapon, and he kept it meticulously clean, even in the worst weather. The soft-spoken Marsh, however, was beset by personal demons, and I handled a lot of calls before we left 29 Palms about how things were not going well around the Marsh household. It was good to get him overseas.

Casey’s driver was another story. A short and pudgy corporal, he excelled during training and was a gear queer who liked to play dress-up and wore every piece of modern fancy combat equipment he could lay his hands on. But once we all started living together, we learned that he frequently lapsed into taking like a small child. We began to wonder how the meticulous youngster, whom we called “Corporal Baby,” would hold up under the stress of combat. We would just have to wait for that verdict.

At 5:34 A.M. on March 20 in Iraq (9:34 P.M. EST on March 19 in the United States), Operation Iraqi Freedom began when a barrage of cruise missiles and smart bombs fell on a Baghdad location where American intelligence teams thought Saddam Hussein was hiding. He wasn’t there, but the dictator had ignored the demand to step down, so the game was on, and “shock and awe” would be the theme for the day.

Out in front of us, Safwan Hill lit up like a birthday cake in hell. Big Tomahawk missiles swooshed into deadly dives and exploded with earthshaking suddenness, artillery rounds roared overhead like freight trains, and planes howled in to drop loads of bombs. The continuous explosions turned the night sky crimson and yellow and orange as a piece of everything in our arsenal slammed into that pile of dirt. The ground shook, and the concussions of exploding bombs thudded