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As much as I was trying to banish emotion from my thoughts, I couldn’t, and a lot of guilt was added to the load. I had selected Mark for the platoon and spent hours and hours with him over the past two years, coaching him on how to realize his dream of being a sniper. War requires compromises, and when the fool who had been the sergeant major’s original driver chickened out before the war, I had thought nothing of letting Evnin take over that driving job in addition to being Dino Moreno’s spotter. So Mark was killed taking the place of a coward.

His death had a sharp impact on our tight little sniper community. We are used to dealing death, not absorbing it. A couple of my snipers who had been working with the tank battalion at Al Kut had come clanking back down the road after the fight, and Corporal Sean Dunn jumped down from a tank and asked me, “Who got hit?”

When I told him, Dunn, who had been Mark’s best friend and had gone through school with him, almost collapsed. Standing beside that scarred road, I held the big Marine in my arms while his tears painted muddy paths down his dirty cheeks.

All the while, I wondered what would have happened if I had been able to get into the fight earlier. Could I have saved the boy? I believed the death was my fault, for I had ordered Mark into that assignment, and now I would just have to live with the terrible result. War really, really sucks. Mark was part of my family, and I will miss him.

17

Ghostbusters

We were finished with Al Kut by 2:54 in the afternoon and began to withdraw, completely changing direction in order to rejoin the push toward Baghdad, only a hundred miles to the northwest. Explosions boomed in the distance as captured caches of enemy ammunition and weapons were blown up. Our part of the fight was done, and the Marines of Task Force Tarawa could clean up the rest. We had helped kick the butts of the Baghdad Division of the Republican Guard, and now it was time to leave.

The road out, which had been empty on our way into Al Kut, was now lined with Iraqi civilians, some waving and giving thumbs-ups while others just stared with baleful eyes. They had known a battle was coming, so they had closed their shops and left their homes until the fighting was done, and now they were reappearing to see what was left. Looters were already stripping destroyed vehicles. Kids obviously untroubled by the bloody and torn corpses strewn about their scarred city kicked a soccer ball around a desolate field. To these people, we were only the latest conquering army, and they were already getting on with their lives.

Fire from our 155 mm howitzers rumbled overhead in kettledrum staccato to light up any area that the enemy might use to counterattack as we regrouped at the edge of the city, with the armored vehicles lining up at a newly liberated gasoline station to fill their big fuel tanks. Let Saddam pay the bill. About thirty kilometers farther up Route 7, we went into a defensive position beside the road. A lone, abandoned Iraqi 20 mm antiaircraft gun pointed its useless barrel at a sky filled with potential targets as Coalition planes roamed freely, heading north on bomb runs. The ground was covered with the gun’s unfired ammunition.

April 3 had been a very long and dangerous day, and Al Kut had been a dangerous place. Mark Evnin was the only Marine who was killed, but several others were wounded, including a corporal who caught a burst from an enemy machine gun—seven bullets on a diagonal line across his torso from his right hip to his left shoulder. He lived because the ballistic plates in his flak jacked stopped three potentially fatal rounds.

Another casualty was Captain Bryan Lewis, the commander of our Bravo Company tanks. During the opening moments of the battle for the palm grove, an Iraqi soldier managed to put a bullet through Lewis’s left hand before being killed. Lewis never paused in his relentless attack, waited until after the fight to even tell anyone that he was