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“Oh, he’s still up there, Bear. Curiosity kills.” I increased the pressure on the trigger, taking up about two of the three pounds needed to fire, and slowed my breathing, confident that another of Saddam’s soldiers was about to make an appearance. I felt, more than saw, the picture in my scope change, as if a cushion of air were being displaced, and a man’s head came slowly around the corner. Ear, cheek, eye, nose. I fired, and his head snapped back sharply as he was blown off the building.

Game over. With those two shots, the ambush of the Main was done.

We had been in Iraq less than a day and it already seemed like a lifetime, for no one had gotten any real rest since leaving Camp Ripper. The night before, a Hellfire missile zoomed in and exploded against an Abrams tank, wounding several crewmen—our first casualties of the war—and no one slept after that. The sleep deprivation combined with the exhaustion of battle was pushing us to a ragged edge, and I was getting surly.

In combat, my sole purpose is to kill the enemy, and I will not tolerate half measures on a battlefield. Violent supremacy works just fine for me. This was the first time that Casey and most of my other Marines had seen me with my real war face on, and they were startled by the sharp change in my attitude, which was totally focused and almost unreasoningly critical.

My mood was not improved when I heard a strange exchange of words on the Tac-1 radio net. The commanding officer of the Bravo Tanks Company that had been attached to our battalion was talking to Colonel McCoy, who had expected those tanks to be at a certain spot on the map. They had not shown up.

“Bravo Six. Darkside Six. What’s taking you so long?” McCoy wanted to know.

“We’ve got some infantry trying to decide if they want to surrender,” responded Captain Bryan Lewis, Bravo Six.

“What do you mean?” McCoy sounded as confused as I was.

“We’re seeing if they want to surrender.”

I was ready to go find Lewis’s tank and kick his ass. We were here to kill the Iraqi soldiers, not let them take their time deciding whether or not to fight! Thousands of leaflets had been dropped onto Iraqi troop positions that had been very specific about exactly how they should capitulate: drop their guns, put their hands up, and walk toward us. In my opinion, if they did not do it exactly that way, then fuck them, and boom, boom, boom, for they remained a threat. This captain of our tankers had some Iraqi soldiers in his sights but was not shooting them. I told Casey that there are no second chances in combat and wondered aloud if Lewis had the right stuff. “The guy’s a fucking coward if he won’t engage,” I growled.

“Jeez, Jack, give him a chance,” Casey told me. “You’re not up there with Tanks, and you don’t know what’s going on.”

Of course he was right, but I was in no mood to cut anybody slack, particularly officers, even if they had been in ferocious combat most of the day. Most of my anger had nothing to do with Lewis or his tanks, and, in fact, I grew to admire Lewis’s skill as a warrior. I was mad because I wasn’t in the fight.

9

Left Out

Few things are more mind-numbing and worrisome than a strike of “friendly fire,” in which your own troops or noncombatants somehow become the targets of fire from your own side. The trigger in such incidents is never pulled to inflict such harm, but war scrambles reality, and at the end of Day 1, March 20, 2003,1 almost killed a whole bunch of people by accident, then almost got killed myself in a separate incident. On either end, friendly fire is never fun.

The invasion of Iraq was roaring ahead with astonishing speed, and our 5th Marines and British Royal Marines captured the Rumaylah oil fields virtually intact. A few rolling columns of red and orange fire rose out of the wrecked metal of the destroyed wells and sent thick black smoke ballooning into the sky, but the defending Iraqis somehow had been caught so off guard that they were able to blow up only nine wells before they were killed or ran away.