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thedrifter
05-11-03, 02:37 PM
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Members of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit – from left, Lance Cpl. Rhyder Smith, Lance Cpl. Brandon Burge and Cpl. Ryan Meador – play chess in March 7 in Camp Bullrush in the Kuwaiti desert, when action seemed distant.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER


THEN IT WAS ... 'GO'

They surged across the desert in their massive war machines, in a blizzard of smoke and sand, American Marines rolling northward toward war. There were some 200 of them, ordinary American kids from places like San Clemente and Buffalo, N.Y., and Bartlesville, Okla., and every place in between – guys with names like Petrovich and Karpenkopf, Salazar and Mejia, White and Emerson and Smith. They were former high school football stars and former high school drop-outs, those who had run afoul of the law and those who had graduated from some of America's finest universities.

Almost all of them were young, 19 or 20 or 21; only a handful had cleared age 30, and only two, both senior noncommissioned officers, had seen the far side of 40. Most of them were from poor or working-class or middle-class families; they were the sons of carpenters and mechanics and salesmen, not of millionaires and senators.

They were heavily armed as they rode across the desert, laden with M-16s and grenade launchers and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition. They rode in amphibious assault vehicles, known as "tracks," 20-ton monsters armed with .50-caliber machine guns and automatic grenade launchers, and they were backed up by tanks and artillery and helicopters and jet aircraft. Their weaponry appeared to be invincible.

But the weapons were wielded by men, only human, and as hard and fit as they were after months and years of training, their bodies were vulnerable to pain. They could suffer - and in the coming weeks, they would.

They would suffer from stifling desert heat and numbing cold, from sandstorms and rainstorms, from mud and dirt that would burrow deep into their pores, from boredom and homesickness and bone-aching fatigue. They would suffer through all of it with plenty of gripes - griping has been a warrior's art since man first picked up a club - but without real complaint; among these men, whining was considered unmanly.

In this war, they would kill and be killed, would bleed and make others bleed, and they would see things and do things that nobody should have to see or do.

They would come to laugh at things that might shock or appall the gentle folks back home who had sent them to this war: the surprised look on a dead man's face; the way a body came apart by gunfire; the goofy, snaggle-toothed smile of a fellow Marine whose front teeth were accidentally knocked out by grenade shrapnel. And then a minute later they'd get moist-eyed and sentimental over a chatty letter from a grandma or the fate of a miserable mongrel dog slinking along a desolate road.

Individually, they could be sensitive or crude, pious or profane, intelligent or stupid, mature or juvenile, brave or fearful. But collectively, they proved to be magnificent.

They were the men of Alpha Co., 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, based at Camp Pendleton. And when they went to war, Register photographer Mark Avery and I went with them.




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Guns and gas masks are always at hand, even as the Marines of Alpha Co. do their physical training March 13.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER



SO CLOSE, BUT SO FAR

We were what was called "embedded" news media, a new concept for the U.S. military. Instead of covering the war through briefings and quick visits to the front, we, along with hundreds of other journalists, would be permanently assigned to one unit. We would follow them wherever they went, eating what they ate, sleeping where they slept, seeing how they operated, day in, day out.

Although there was no censorship or prior review of the stories or photos we filed, there were some restrictions. For example, we had to agree not to report the names of Marines wounded or killed until their families were officially notified - usually within 48 hours - and there was no reporting of where we were or, obviously, plans for future operations. The restrictions were sensible and worth the opportunity to get close to a Marine combat unit as it faced war.

Our assigned unit was Alpha Company of the 1/5.

Alpha Co. is a "grunt" unit, an infantry company, part of what the Marines sometimes call "The Gun Club." And like every infantry company in the Marine Corps, the men of Alpha (there are no women in Marine infantry units) pride themselves on being tougher than Marines in other job specialties, even combat jobs like artillery or tanks. As for rear- echelon types who provide administrative or logistical support for the front-line fighters, the grunts dismissively call them "pogues" - rhymes with "rogues" - a term derived from the phrase "Persons Other than Grunts."

"You got your grunts and you've got your pogues," Lance Cpl. Eric Young, 20, of Orange, a hard-charging, let-me-at-'em young grunt, told me one day. "Yeah, we're all Marines, but that's really where the pride comes in: being a grunt."

And even by grunts' hard standards, Alpha Co. was renowned as a tough outfit to be in.

"I asked to be in Alpha Company 'cause I wanted to be in a 'boat' company (a unit trained in amphibious landings, which Alpha is)," Cpl. John McFarling, a lean 29-year-old from Charleston, S.C., told me.

"Guys kept saying, 'You want to be in Alpha?' And I'd say yeah, and they'd say, 'You really want to be in Alpha?' and I'm like, what? Now I know what they were talking about. It really is the hardest-trained company in the regiment. And I'm not just saying that 'cause I'm in it. It really is."

Much of that reputation stemmed from Alpha's commanding officer, Capt. Blair Sokol, 30, of San Clemente. A former football player at the U.S. Naval Academy - he stands 6-foot-7 and is movie-star handsome, even with a ready-for-combat shaved head - Sokol was a rigid disciplinarian and a near fanatic on training, pushing his men harder than anyone else.

"Why are we the best company?" Sokol would ask his men, rhetorically, at company formations. "Because of training and discipline," he would answer. Even those Alpha Co. Marines who thought Capt. Sokol was too much of a hard-butt (of course, they used another word for "butt") would admit later when the fighting got fierce that the hard training at Pendleton had prepared them for the job of war.

Mark and I joined Alpha Co. in early March, when they were doing what Marines usually hate doing most: sitting and waiting. They were sitting on a large plot of sand in the Kuwaiti desert, waiting to see if they'd really go to war.

They had arrived by air in early February, and after two weeks of sleeping on the ground and under the stars, their "living support area," as the Marines called it, had some improvements. True, there were no phones, no TVs, no Internet, and mail from the States was taking weeks to arrive. (Marines who complained were told, simply, to "suck it up.") But they did have large tents with wooden floors for sleeping, porta-john toilets, portable shower trailers that each Marine could use about once a week, and a chow hall that served hot but bland food twice a day. Lunch was those soon-to-be famous MREs: Meals, Ready to Eat, 1,200- to 1,300-calorie meals of "pork chow mein" or "turkey breast, chunked and formed" or "grilled beef patty" - a hamburger complete with imitation grill marks - that came in plastic pouches.

Still, it was a galling assignment for the grunts – so close and yet so far. As the politicians dithered, the Marines chafed; the more printable of phrases they used about their Kuwait deployment included "Operation Bush Bluff," and "Operation Just Kidding." They worried they would somehow be cheated of their chance at combat.

That may be a hard thing for folks back home to understand, that these Marines would actually want to go to war. But most of them did.

Pfc. Brian Petrovich, 20, a tall, good-looking former high school football star from Phoenix who'd joined he Marines after tiring of his post-high school job in a local "head shop" - "these crackheads would come in to buy their pipes, and I saw what my future was gonna be if I didn't get straightened out" - talked to me about it before the war began.

"That sounds all strange, you know, that you want to be in a war," Petrovich, aka "Petro," said. "I guess you aren't supposed to really want a war. But all through boot camp it's 'Kill! Kill! Kill!' and stuff. And you get to where, like, you want to do what you're trained to do."

Some of the Marines Mark and I encountered were even less reflective about spilling blood: "I just want to kill those sonsa*****es," they'd say - and you got the feeling that just about any sonsa*****es would do. Even the motto printed on the T-shirts of the 1/5 Marines advertised menace: "Make Peace or Die," it said.

The unabashed bloodthirstiness, the openly expressed eagerness of these fresh-faced Americans to close with and kill the enemy, was a little start ling to an outsider, even one who had served in Vietnam, as I had. At first, Mark and I wondered if it was just big talk and bluster.

But for the most part, it wasn't. And the time would come when that bloodthirstiness - or training, or courage, or whatever you want to call it - would save those Marines' lives. And ours.

continued........

thedrifter
05-11-03, 02:39 PM
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Navy corpsmen tend to a Marine wounded by a land mine March 20 as Alpha Co., 1st Battalion, Regimental Combat Team 5 took control of an oil-pumping station 20 miles across the border in southern Iraq.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER


THE FIRST SIGNS OF WAR


The war came early to Alpha Co.

On Monday, March 17, just as President George W. Bush was giving his speech to the nation, Alpha Co. got the word to "mount up" and move to a staging area farther north, near the Iraq border.

Although it's an infantry company, Alpha doesn't march to war - at least not out on the vast desert wasteland. Instead, Alpha Co. Marines in Kuwait were mechanized infantry - "meched up," in Marine parlance - meaning they rode in amphibious assault vehicles, or "tracks." A dozen tracks were assigned to the company. For an infantryman - and certainly for a 52-year-old journalist - riding in a track was a mechanized form of torture.

The passenger compartment of each track is about the size of an American prison cell, but sometimes 25 or more Marines crammed into the back of one of them, along with their weapons and ammo; they were squeezed in together like Vienna sausages in a can. Fumes from the diesel exhausts tended to collect in the passenger compartment, and the noise from the tank-like treads sounded like a giant spoon caught in a garbage disposal.

As the name implies, the amphibious assault vehicles were designed for waterborne operations, the short-term job of carrying Marines from ships to shore; crossing beaches, not endless miles of desert, was their specialty. Still, Alpha Co. would ride those tracks all the way to Baghdad.

But not yet. Alpha waited a few days in the staging area in the middle of a flat, barren moonscape of a desert plain. Then on Thursday, March 20, came the first real sign of war.

"Lightning! Lightning! Scuds in the air!" Capt. Sokol shouted - "Lightning" was code for a Scud attack - and Alpha Co. prepared for a chemical cloud.

The threat of chemical warfare was the great bogeyman of all the top brass. It was why every Marine in Kuwait carried his gas mask at all times, even during visits to the head, and went through endless "Gas! Gas! Gas!" drills, and walked around in bulky, hot, charcoal-lined anti-chemical-warfare suits. The Marines had trained as if chemical attack wasn't a possibility but a certainty.

So even though there was no indication the missiles were heading for Alpha Co., when the alert came over the company radio net, the Marines had to pull on their gas masks and their protective rubber gloves and boots, and climb into their tracks and seal the hatches tightly behind them. In the heat and the dark, encased in rubber and charcoal, wedged in with a dozen other sweating, stinking human bodies, it felt like being buried alive. Claustrophobic panic felt near at hand.

But it passed, that time and during the further chemical-attack alerts that afternoon. Ironically, those first few alerts on the first day were almost the last; there'd be a few more chemical-warfare scares along the road to Baghdad, but they were taken less and less seriously by the Marines until ultimately the threat of chemical attack was virtually forgotten. If Saddam Hussein had them, he or his lieutenants didn't get around to using them.

(That was good news not only for the Marines, but for their pigeon. To hoots and howls from some Army guys, who joked about alleged trans-species love action in the Corps, the Marines had pigeons as a kind of canary-in-a-coal-mine chemical- warfare detector - if the pigeons died during a chemical alert, it'd be a pretty good sign the attack was real. Alpha Co.'s pigeon, named Jenna after a certain popular adult-film star, rode in a cage in the back of a track all the way to Baghdad, surviving gunfire, explosions, heat, dust, diesel fumes and everything else the war threw at her.)

Those first missiles - all of which flew far over Alpha Co.'s heads - and the threat of sabotage of the Rumaylah oil fields just across the border hastened the war's onset, reportedly moving the start of the Marines' attack ahead a few hours.

Everyone now realized it was starting, that this was really it. But if they were afraid, they wouldn't admit it - not yet.

Capt. Ray Lawler, 29, of San Diego, a popular and funny Marine C-130 pilot - his call sign was "Spanky," and sometimes over the radio net he'd call himself "The Spankmaster Flash" - talked to some of the grunts about it.

"Any of you guys scared?" Lawler, who had volunteered to serve with the infantry as a forward air controller, asked some of the enlisted Marines as they waited, sweltering in the desert heat.

"Not at all, sir!" they shouted back.

"You should be a little scared," the captain shot back, smiling. "It's healthier to be a little scared."

But instead the Marines talked tough and laughed about war and their own potential deaths, like little boys whistling past a graveyard.

Lance Cpl. Jason Mauldin, 23, of San Clemente glanced around at all the firepower, tracks and tanks and artillery off in the distance and the aircraft zooming overhead, and said, "If you want to fight us, you must be some kind of crackhead!"

"Hey Nazario!" a young Marine from 3rd Platoon called out to Jason Nazario, 21, a religious kid from 1st Platoon. "Jesus came to me in a dream last night."

"Really?" Nazario said, falling for it.

"Yeah, He told me 3rd Platoon was gonna be OK."

"Hey, that's good," Nazario said.

"Yeah. But He said 1st Platoon is gonna get slaughtered!"

Everybody laughed - Nazario, too.

But most of them were at least concerned enough to pray, kneeling in the sand with the battalion chaplain, Navy Lt. Carey Cash. The chaplain, who looked like every other Marine except he carried a Bible instead of an M-16, told them that fear was normal, and that their purpose in the war was "noble and good." They recited The Lord's Prayer with him; it was a brief, solemn moment of beauty in a landscape of emptiness and desolation.

Then, just as the sunlight began to soften, the word came down: Go.

"This is surreal," Cpl. James Sterling, 21, of Peoria, Ill., a "tracker" - that is, a crewman - aboard the track Mark and I were riding on, said to me. A Catholic high school kid who had joined the Marines at 17 because "I knew I didn't have the discipline for college," Sterling had suspected, like many others, that the whole thing was a bluff.

"I can hardly believe we're actually doing this."

But we were. The young Marines piled onto their tracks, amid the roar and smoke of diesel engines, and headed northward, toward the border.

To where the war was waiting.


continued........

thedrifter
05-11-03, 02:43 PM
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Marines of Alpha Co. deploy under a pall of smoke near an oil pumping station fire early on the morning of March 20 in southern Iraq.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER



'WE MADE IT' 'FINALLY!'


The official histories haven't been written yet. But Alpha 1/5 is unofficially credited with being the first major U.S. ground unit to cross the Kuwait-Iraq border, a few miles west of the Iraqi town of Safwan, on the night of March 20; the next morning, at the war's first dawn, it was also the first ground unit to spill blood, and to shed it.

The border crossing itself was largely uneventful. The border was basically just two 8-foot-high parallel sand berms, one Kuwaiti, one Iraqi, with some razor wire in between; the Kuwaiti berm had already been breached by bulldozers, and the undefended Iraqi berm was breached by Marine engineers to let tanks and tracks go through. From inside the track, that stretch of sand felt pretty much like any other.

Still, there were whoops and shouts as our track crossed the berm - the seventh vehicle, behind four tanks and two other tracks, to enter Iraq at the onset of the war.

"We made it!"

"Finally!"

"Awesome!"

As darkness had fallen, Alpha Co.'s way to the border had been both lighted and obscured by the oil-well fires that sprang up on the Iraqi side - caused either by Iraqi sabotage or errant U.S. fire, or both. The flames shot hundreds of feet into the sky and were visible for miles, like beacons, but the thick, greasy smoke turned a bright, almost- full moon a dark, hazy gray.

As in any mass movement of men, there were mistakes and screw-ups. A couple of Alpha Co. Marines following the tracks in a Humvee got lost and, thinking they were in Iraq, wound up nervously "capturing" at gunpoint a police post on the Kuwait side of the border. The Kuwaiti police carefully pointed them in the right direction. And other units with Alpha also reportedly got lost on their way to the berm. But we rolled through.

The war planners had assumed Iraqi tanks would be at the border, but the Iraqi soldiers, as they would do throughout the war, had chosen to live and not die; they had fled. The Alpha tracks fired some recon-by-fire rounds at apparently abandoned tanks with .50-caliber machine gun bullets and MK-19 automatic grenade launchers, fearsome weapons that could hurl armor-piercing or anti- personnel grenades up to a mile.

The meteor-like glow of tracers in the dark and the rapid-fire boom of grenades made it look and sound like war, and at least one track took some desultory small-arms fire that ripped through the field packs strapped to the track's sides.

But it was like a BB gun against an elephant; the much-anticipated border battle never materialized.

It wasn't until Alpha Co. reached an oil-pumping station 20 miles from the border that the war began to seem real.

The pumping station, a large complex of sheet-metal buildings and steel pipes, was supposed to be the base for an Iraqi brigade, which ordinarily would have at least a couple thousand troops in it. But low morale had thinned the Iraqi ranks, and a Marine artillery barrage had thinned them even more. The pre-dawn artillery left dozens of the Iraqi soldiers in green uniforms, most of them with bare feet, as if they'd been awakened from sleep, lying mangled and dead on the ground; others who survived the barrage had apparently bolted for home.

However, a few Iraqi troops, either braver or more foolish than the rest, had stayed, hiding in poorly constructed, garbage-strewn underground bunkers, as the Marine behemoth bore down on them. In the dawn light, Marine infantrymen climbed out of the tracks and fanned out, M-16s and shotguns at the ready, to search the holes. Some Marines threw precautionary grenades into bunkers that appeared empty. In others, Iraqi soldiers cried out for mercy and were quickly captured, their hands in the air; some wore civilian clothes or long robes over their uniforms, as if they'd been planning to run away all along.

Suddenly, an Iraqi soldier, desperate to get away, burst out of his bunker on a beat-up old motorcycle - Iraqis in the area put vehicles in underground sand pits to protect them against bombings - and started fleeing at high speed away from the Marines, bouncing and flying over small hills as he tried for a nearby road. All along the skirmish line, Marines opened up on him with M-16s.

Other Marines standing nearby, watching, laughed at the shooting-gallery-style spectacle and joked about how foolish this Iraqi was, trying to outrun bullets on a motorcycle.

"That guy should get a Darwin award," one said, referring to the sardonic award for people who theoretically improve the human gene pool by killing themselves in stupid and ridiculous ways; the consensus was that anyone that dumb deserved what he got.

The Iraqi didn't die, but he was wounded and knocked from his motorcycle. He surrendered, hands in the air, still walking but with his head and chest bloody from a bullet that went in his neck and came out in his jaw.

His wound was treated, gently, by a Navy corpsman; whether he ultimately lived or died none of the Marines of Alpha Co. knew, but in the weeks to come they would often laugh about 'the guy on the motorcycle,' and the credit for bringing him down would be hotly debated.

So far, the fight at the pumping station was seeming almost too easy, too one-sided to be a real war. Three Marines were injured, two of them superficially, by a small "toe popper" grenade one of them stepped on. But the Iraqis were hardly even fighting back.

One group of Iraqis in a white SUV made a run for it, shooting automatic weapons. The Marines blew the vehicle apart with .50-caliber machine guns; three of the Iraqis were severely wounded, four killed. Marines who saw their bodies later marveled at how much the damage the ".50-cals," which spit out half-inch-diameter bullets at the rate of 550 rounds per minute, could do to a human body.

Then a half-dozen other Iraqis, some of whom turned out to be from the Republican Guard, broke for safety in a brown Toyota pickup, wildly shooting an AK-47 out of the truck window - and this time the Marines bled.

One of the rounds hit Lt. Shane Childers, Alpha's popular 2nd Platoon commander, a "mustang" - that is, a former enlisted Marine who had become an officer - who had served in the first Persian Gulf War. The bullet caught him below the protective Kevlar-plate vest that all the Marines wore.

"I got shot in the gut," the lieutenant said, and then, minutes later, as corpsmen labored desperately to save him, he died.

The Iraqis who shot him were immediately "lighted up" by Marine gunfire; some of them were wounded and surrendered, and others died.

The death of Lt. Childers, and the killing in general, finally brought it home to Alpha Co. that this was real. Most of them embraced that warriors' reality, but it troubled some.

"I didn't feel anything after I did it," said Cpl. Mike Cash, 30, of Oceanside, who shot and killed an armed Iraqi in the one of the vehicles that tried to flee. "I know I'm supposed to feel something, but I didn't. That kind of bugs me a little bit, that I didn't feel anything."

"It wasn't like I thought it'd be," said Cpl. Martin Vera, 27, of Long Beach, who had re-enlisted after Sept. 11 because he thought that now, finally, he would get a chance to see some action.

"It wasn't like the movies and stuff. After 9-11 it was like, yeah, I wanted to come back for this. But it bothered me, shooting at those guys,. I had to do it; it's my job. But it bothered me. A lot."

In the end, more than 20 Iraqis were killed at pumping station No. 2, and dozens more surrendered, most of them apparently expecting to be shot out of hand. They trembled and shook.

Cpl. Brandon White, 22, of Thousand Oaks, who later would be wounded in the wrist in a bad firefight in Baghdad, spoke of the fear in their faces.

"One of them kept saying 'Are you kill? Are you kill?'" he said. "They all thought we were going to execute them. We tried to reassure them. We gave them food and water, and when we searched them we found their cigarettes in their pockets and lighted them for them."

"After that they started to relax a little bit. They started calling me 'Nice Mister, Nice Mister,' and saying 'Thank you, thank you.'" When they left for the holding area, they were blowing kisses at me. I guess that's a respectful thing to do in Iraqi or something."

Blown kisses from the enemy. It was starting out to be a strange kind of war.


continued.........

thedrifter
05-11-03, 02:46 PM
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Staff Sgt. Allen Tipps of Sparks, Nev., takes a nap in his skirmish hole in the battalion encampment March 28 in Iraq.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER



IF YOU CAN CALL IT REST


After the firefight, Alpha Co. spent a couple of days guarding the still-burning oil fields, wreathed in black, noxious smoke, the night sky glowing orange from the flames. They captured a few stray Iraqis who crawled out of holes to surrender, but mostly they rested.

As Marines understand the term "rested," it meant they cleaned their weapons, stood guard at least one hour out of every four and slept fully clothed and fully armed under the sun. They wrote letters they couldn't mail - mail pickups were limited, and rare. They also talked about home, wives, girlfriends and about their kids. And many of them gazed helplessly at the officially forbidden skin magazines that somehow had managed to come across the border with them.

Ironically, the Marines fighting the war knew less than the folks back home did; while cable networks were beaming news in the United States 24 hours a day, the Marines might as well have been on the moon for all the access they had to news. At night they'd try to pick up BBC radio news broadcast on the field radios, one Marine listening in on the handset and then relaying tidbits to the others, but the news was vague and general. Plus, maybe worst of all, the BBC didn't even bother to report other critical items of information, like the scores from the NCAA national basketball tournament.

It was just the first of many down times that Alpha Co. would spend during the war, not fighting, just existing, in the heat or the cold or the sand or the mud. That's one of the many things war movies never seem to get right - how much time is spent waiting around for something to happen.

But finally, on the fourth day of the war, March 25, Alpha Co. started rolling north again, part of a vast Marine column that stretched out along a new and little-used highway for miles and miles and miles: Humvees, 7-ton trucks, tanks and artillery pieces with names painted on the gun barrels: "Battle Pig," "Population Control," "Shoot to Thrill" and other, unprintable names.

(Of course, these being Marines and not English professors, spelling wasn't their forte - it accounted for tank names like "Beserk" and "Beligerant.")

It was slow going - stop, start, start, like rush-hour traffic on the San Diego Freeway, the column stretching and contracting like an accordion. Five miles an hour was average; 10 mph felt like flying, but always north.

On and on the column rolled, through barren deserts not much different than what they'd seen in Kuwait - flat, bare, uninteresting: a single bush or tree on the horizon was cause for comment. Except for the occasional Bedouin herder in the distance, it was empty of all humanity but Marines.

On the fifth day of the war, the Marines reached the fabled Euphrates River. The land got greener and suddenly there it was, the first body of water the Marines had seen in months. It wasn't much of a river, just a slow-moving black stream meandering through marsh and mud, but the grunts had all heard of it. They saw it as a milestone of sorts.

"This is called the Fertile Crescent," Lance Cpl. Sean Lamb, 20, earnestly explained to me as he stood on the bank. "I've read about it in books. It's where civilization began. Seeing it is pretty cool, since I've never even been out of America before."

The column moved on, back into desert now, the landscape dotted with the mud and wattle huts of herdsmen. Men in dirty robes stood by the road, patting their stomachs and begging for food. Marines in the passing tracks threw them MREs.

So far, since the first day, there hadn't been much fighting - but there had been killing.

Early on Tuesday morning, March 25 as they camped next to the highway, a civilian truck with three men in it raced toward the Marines, not showing a white flag, not slowing down.

It was the same way Lt. Childers was killed, by men in a civilian vehicle, and the Marines were more than wary; they'd also heard rumors of car-bomb attacks against other U.S. military units. One Marine fired a grenade at the truck, and then dozens of Marines opened up, lighting up the blue dawn sky, riddling the truck with M-16 and .50-caliber fire and mangling the bodies of the men inside. It turned out that they were civilians, with no weapons, no explosives.

"I feel sorry for those guys," Lance Cpl. Jeff Guthrie of San Clemente, at 33 an older, maybe wiser Marine than his buddies, told me. "I don't know why they did that, coming at us like that."

But for many of the other Marines, it was just another thing that happened. After staring at the bodies, which some Marines dragged out and buried by the road, their attention was diverted by a herd of about a hundred camels being driven across the desert by a herdsman. The dead bodies forgotten, Marines grabbed their cameras like so many tourists and ran to take pictures of the camels, the first they'd seen.

That might sound cold, heartless even, when considered from the safety of a living room or a kitchen table, 8,000 miles away in America. But by the side of a road in Iraq, it made a kind of sense. The Marines had seen death, enough for it to lose some of its rubbernecking fascination. Camels were something new.

The column continued on, northward, into an area of powdery sand dunes stretching from horizon to horizon. Suddenly the wind picked up to 40 mph or more, carrying the sand with it, harder and harder, until the afternoon sun turned a ghostly orange and then disappeared altogether, leaving a hazy, dark-tan light. Visibility dropped to about a hundred feet, and some Marines put on their gas masks to protect their faces from the stinging sand but still let them see.

It was the most miserable weather the Marines had seen here - and then it got worse. In the middle of the sandstorm, it started to rain, a few drops at first, making little mud pies on the Marines' uniforms and helmets, and then it rained even harder. Incredibly, it was a rainstorm in the middle of a sandstorm. That night the Marines slept in the mud.

"I hate this country," Pfc. Petrovich said to me.

Everybody did.

continued.............

thedrifter
05-11-03, 02:49 PM
http://www.ocregister.com/features/iraq/dispatches/specialreport/photos/18.jpg

Marines deal with Iraqi prisoners of war lying on the ground as the American troops tried to press on toward Baghdad on April 3.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER




AMAZINGLY, DISAPPOINTMENT


"These guys just don't want to fight," Capt. Sokol said of the Iraqi army, which for the most part had been like a ghost - widely rumored, but unseen and unheard. "I'm starting to lose whatever respect I had for the enemy."

In the American military that sort of statement is almost heresy. Ever since the Vietnam War, when a senior American general famously dismissed the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese as "raggedy-assed little bastards," it has been a military sin to underestimate the enemy.

But this was an enemy that was impossible to underestimate. With their tanks and armored personnel carriers relentlessly bombarded by U.S. air power in advance of the Marines, Iraqi soldiers fled by the thousands, casting off their uniforms and melting into the population, or surrendered to the Americans with their hands in the air.

It seemed as if the Iraqis weren't even trying. At the Saddam Canal southeast of Baghdad, the 1/5 took a key bridge after a small firefight that killed a dozen Iraqis but left no Marines dead. The Iraqis easily could have blown up the bridge to halt, or at least slow, the Marine advance. But they didn't.

Instead, they fired a few rounds - perhaps just enough to satisfy their sense of personal honor - and then climbed out of their bunkers, shouting "No shoot!" No shoot!" and waving streamers of toilet paper from sticks, the only white surrender flags they could muster.

Meanwhile, everywhere the Marines went, Iraqi civilians cheered.

At a small city called Zubhaydiyah, on the south bank of the Tigris River, hundreds of civilians poured out of their dusty, mud-brick homes to wave and smile and cheer as Alpha Co. passed through. It was a shock to the Marines, who had expected house-to-house fighting and who left home amid news media reports of war protests by their fellow Americans.

"This Iraqi guy ran up to my track and yelled, 'Good job! Good job! Thank you!" Lance Cpl. James Miller, soft-spoken and bespectacled from Gillette, Wyo., said later, with a sense of wonder. "It was pretty cool. It was like what you read about in World War II, with Americans liberating towns in France and stuff."

It was the same story as during the next week as Alpha Co. made its way to Baghdad, part of that inexorable Marine column approaching along the Tigris, southeast of the city. Everywhere, people turned out to happily greet the Marines and to happily loot the abandoned Iraqi military bases and government offices.

There was a little fighting as the Marines got closer to the city. But mostly it was with the rag-tag mix of so-called Fedayeen, Islamic fundamentalists and Baath Party officials and fighters from Syria and other countries - "black- dressed bastards," Capt. Sokol called them. But they were quickly dispatched by air and artillery power, and the Marines rolled on.

It was turning out to be a remarkably easy war, by historical standards - and yet, the mood of the Marines, amazingly, was one of disappointment.

"We came here to fight, but everywhere we go, the Iraqis (soldiers) just leave," Lance Cpl. Andrew Morales, 19, from Sylmar, said in a downcast voice. "All we're getting now is EPWs (Enemy Prisoners of War) and deserters. Right now, I feel like I'm not earning my pay."

That's what he said. A Marine lance corporal makes about $400 a week base pay, plus a few bucks a day in combat and overseas pay. Still, after riding almost 300 miles from Kuwait in a lurching, rumbling track, eating meals out of plastic bags, sleeping on the ground and not being able to shower in a month, Lance Cpl. Morales didn't feel like he was really earning his 400 bucks a week.

But if fighting was Morales' measure of earning his pay, he'd earn it soon enough. All of Alpha Co. would.

continued............

thedrifter
05-11-03, 02:50 PM
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Marines of Alpha Co. watch as an Air Force A-10 sprays a building with cannon fire during a firefight in central Baghdad on April 10.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER


MISTAKES AND CONFUSION


Three weeks after the war began, Alpha Co. spent its first night in fabled, exotic Baghdad sleeping in a dump - literally.

On the military maps it looked like simply a large "open area," with no buildings around, and thus a good place to set up defensive positions for the night. But it turned out to be a municipal dump, filled with rotting refuse and twisted heaps of metal and slinking dogs and clouds of flies and mosquitoes - and one truck-mounted Iraqi surface-to-air missile deserted by its crew.

As a result, the Marines were looking forward to their next mission - or any mission.

The plan for Thursday, April 10, was for 1st Battalion, 5th Marines - more than 1,000 men, Alpha Co. included - to drive deep into central Baghdad, on the northeast side of the Tigris River, and capture the vast, heavily bombed Al Azimayah "presidential palace" that Saddam Hussein was rumored to have been hiding in. A detachment of heavily armed CIA operatives and special forces soldiers - long-haired, bushy-mustached guys who answered only to first names like "Woody" and "Jerry" - were supposed to search the palace after the Marines surrounded it.

Given the cheering reception from the locals on the way into Baghdad, some of the Marines assumed it would be a cakewalk.

At first it was, but in the predawn darkness, as Alpha drove south along a major street through a crumbling urban neighborhood, firing from AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, RPGs, broke out from both sides of the road, slamming into tracks and Humvees. The Marines responded with a torrent of fire that lit up the night.

As always in war, there were mistakes and confusion. The column got lost - try finding your way through a slum, in a far-off corner of the world, with no street signs, in the dark, and you'll know what it was like - and the tracks had to circle round and round, trying to find their way.

Somehow in the darkness the column wound up on a bridge across the Tigris - the last place it wanted to be. Voices in the tracks and over the radio screamed with anger and fear as the column had to back up, an agonizingly slow maneuver that made the Marines sitting ducks for the Fedayeen fighters in nearby bunkers and buildings.

It was about that time that Cpl. Brandon White got hit in the wrist by AK-47 fire while driving a Humvee just behind the Alpha Co. tracks. In the seat next to him, Gunnery Sgt. Jeff Bohr, 39, was calling in a med-evac for White over the radio and screaming curses and firing his M-16 out the door, all at the same time, when he caught a bullet in the head and died.

The word spread quickly. "Gunny's dead, Gunny's dead." Bohr was a "tough old dog," the Marines all said, but in his way, he loved his Marines, and in their way, they loved him.

Meanwhile, Bravo and Charlie companies of the 1/5 had taken the palace and a nearby building, so Alpha Co. got a new mission: race north a mile or so and secure the Shari Al Iman Al Azam mosque, another place where Saddam might be hiding.

There was no detailed information about the mosque site, or the neighborhood around it, and no time for elaborate planning; all the Marines had were coordinates on a city map and orders to go.

They didn't know what they were racing into.

The route to the mosque, a large walled compound topped by minarets and domes, snaked through a warren of crumbling brick houses and narrow streets, most just wide enough to allow a track to squeeze through. As the Alpha tracks threaded their way through, AK-47 and RPG fire broke out from Fedayeen fighters leaning out from rooftops and dashing out of alleys and doors. A tank accompanying the Alpha infantrymen took an RPG round in the rear that temporarily disabled it, and other tanks couldn't traverse their gun turrets in the tight streets.

"You're like a caged rat in there," said Sgt. Kevin Hughes, 28, of Nutley, N.J., a Marine reservist with Delta Co., 2nd Tank Battalion, who, when he isn't fighting Fedayeen gunmen in a Third World city in a tank named "Big Sexy," is a derivatives trader for Deutsche Bank. "I kept thinking about 'Black Hawk Down.'"

The reference to the book and movie about U.S. Army Rangers caught in murderous urban warfare in Somalia was one that many Marines would make. They identify with movies, and this was theirs, their "Black Hawk Down."

The AK-47 and RPG fire intensified, turning into a torrent, clipping off radio antennas, ripping through packs tied to the tracks, wounding some Marines. The Marines stood up in the back hatches of their tracks, firing back furiously with their M-16s.

Platoon commander Lt. Nicholas Horton, 24, of LaPine, Ore., threw a grenade at an RPG gunman just as the man fired; the grenade got the gunman, but the RPG penetrated the track, hitting a box of smoke grenades, which set off the track's automatic fire-suppression system; Marines spilled out of the track, vomiting from the effects of the extinguisher gas.

"I got knocked out for a minute," said Pfc. Patrick Liegl from Central City, Iowa. "When I woke up I had some shrapnel in my head, just a little piece, and blood was coming down, and there was smoke, and I thought my hair was on fire. I thought we were in the 13th gate of hell."

Another track was hit by an RPG and enveloped in smoke, and everyone thought the Marines inside were dead. But when the smoke cleared, the Marines were back up again, standing in the open hatches, firing back furiously.

Lance Cpl. Ryan Harnish got hit in the head with an RPG - and survived. The RPG was a dud, but it cracked his helmet and knocked him out. When he woke, he stood up and started firing again - and for hours afterward he shouted everything he said, because he couldn't hear.

It seemed as if Alpha Co. was about to be overwhelmed. The air was filled with the mini sonic booms of passing bullets and the whoosh of RPGs, which hit almost every track.

Everyone was firing, even Capt. Sokol, who pulled out his 9 mm pistol and squeezed off shots at an RPG gunman peeking through an opening in the wall around the mosque.

"You know things are getting bad when the company commander is firing his nine," he said.

And he was right; it was bad, it seemed as if Alpha Co. was in danger of being overwhelmed - so much so that at one point a Marine standing next to me in the track gave me a hand grenade in case any of the enemy got within throwing range. I never had occasion to throw it, which was fortunate; it had been more than 30 years since I had handled a grenade. Still, in that place, it felt reassuring to have it in my hand.

But the Marines' training and courage, their willingness to fight - the warriors' bloodthirstiness that I had earlier suspected was just bluster - won out. The Alpha Co. Marines fought ferociously, firing thousands of rounds of ammunition; the Marines who were hunkered down inside the tracks refilling magazines were begging and pushing their way up through the crowded hatches so they could fire, too.

Tanks accompanying Alpha Co. fired their main guns at enemy positions, the close explosions rocking the tracks. An A-10 Warthog aircraft passed over the fighting zone and riddled an enemy-held building with thousands of uranium- depleted bullets.

Meanwhile, Marines who had dismounted from the track swept through the mosque, blowing doors and driving the Fedayeen fighters before them; eventually they captured 20 suspected Fedayeen and a cache of AK-47s and RPGs.

Slowly, the enemy fire and hail of RPGs began to slack off. Finally, four hours after the fighting began on the way to the palace, the shooting around the mosque died down enough for the Marines to start to withdraw, back through the same narrow streets they had come in on.

They left behind a half-dozen enemy dead lying in the streets, and dozens more presumed dead in the destroyed buildings. They also left behind one of the Marine tracks that had been disabled by an RPG; track platoon commander Lt. John Fennell coolly climbed aboard it and shot the radios with his pistol to destroy the encryption devices, and then it was blown up with a thermite grenade.

Alpha Co. made its way back to the now-secure palace to rest and count the losses. In all, they had one dead - Gunny Bohr - and 25 wounded, half of them superficially. Other companies in the battalion had another two dozen wounded.

Alpha Co. didn't find Saddam in the mosque, but as far as the Marines were concerned, they had won. Because they were alive, and their enemies - a lot of them, at least - were dead.

thedrifter
05-11-03, 02:57 PM
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Lance Cpl. Dominic Chevalier, left, of Pittsburg, and Lance Cpl. Leonardo Morales of Los Angeles grab some sleep in fancy furniture in one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces April 10 as the troops entered central Baghdad.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER



ENOUGH FOR A LIFETIME


Years from now, when they're old and paunchy and their "Semper Fi" and "Devil Dog" tattoos are fading, Marine veterans of this war will still get into fights over which unit saw the most action. But no one will dispute that Alpha Co.'s firefight at the mosque was one of the most intense close-range encounters of the war.

And it touched the Marines who were in it in different ways.

"Everybody was always saying, we want to see action, we want more action," Pfc. Petrovich, the former high school football star from Phoenix, the sweet-faced kid who had earlier talked about wanting to go to war, told me after the mosque firefight. "But then you see it, and suddenly it's like, that's enough for a lifetime."

Some expressed that same theme, almost as if it was expected of them. Then a candid realization came from a hard-core grunt from Orange.

"I guess I was scared," said Lance Cpl. Eric Young.

He paused and seemed to think about what he really felt. And what came out was a truth as old as war, a truth that people who have never fought might not be able to understand: For him, combat had been exhilarating.

"It was a rush," he said, a little tentatively, as if he wasn't sure how the information would register. But then he embraced the truth of it. "I was excited the whole time! Yeah, I'll go back out again. Anytime!"

As it turned out, Young and Alpha Co. didn't get the chance.

After their raging fight, the unit stayed at the palace for several days, picking through the battle-scarred ruins for souvenirs, washing in the large man-made lake, sleeping on the floor under chandeliers and stained-glass domes. The fighting wound down in the city, and it became clear that for all practical purposes the war was over.

That's when Mark and I left them, five weeks after joining them, and after 25 days of war and discomfort and hardship. The young Marines shook my hand and wished me well and thanked me for being there with them, and I had to struggle, not completely successfully, to keep tears from welling up in my eyes.

They would stay in Iraq for a while - nobody knew just where or for how long - but eventually they'll be back home. I promised to be there when they step off the plane.

I caught a ride into the city with some BBC-TV embedded reporters, through seedy high-rise neighborhoods awash in trash, past buildings that still smoldered and smoked from bombs or rockets. But these sights were relatively rare. Baghdad was a damaged city, but not a destroyed one.

On the streets, looters were carting off office chairs and foam rubber mattresses and every other imaginable booty on carts and in cars and balanced on their heads. Gunfire still crackled in the air - some of it perhaps from the Fedayeen or the American military, some of it from armed civilians trying to deter looting. Most of the Iraqis on the street waved cheerfully at me, but a few others stared, eyes hard with anger and resentment.

"Please, are you American?" one relatively well-dressed Iraqi said in broken English when I tried to ask him a question. When I said yes, he turned away.

"Please, I will not talk to you," he said.

I went to the Palestine Hotel, where most of the journalists were hanging out, by the park where the statue of Saddam had been famously pulled down for the TV cameras a few days earlier. But it was overcrowded with reporters, me included, sleeping on floors, with no food and little water.

It wasn't the lack of amenities that got to me. It was just that after so much time with the straight- talking Marines, the journalists seemed like so many chattering crows, pontificating about a war that many of them had seen only, if at all, from a hotel roof.

"Pogues," I thought, in Marine grunt-ese. "Blanking pogues."

I left Iraq a couple of days later, the sole passenger in a C-130 transport plane lumbering back south to Kuwait after making a supply run. As the plane covered in a couple of hours the same territory it had taken Alpha Co. weeks to cross, I thought about where I'd been and what I'd seen.

I knew there would be things I would want to forget, and wouldn't, and things that I would hold close in memory.

I'd remember the wild warrior smile on the grimy, smoke-wreathed face of Alpha Co. executive officer Lt. Nate Shull, a preacher's son from Shreveport, La., when he looked at me during the mosque fight, as the bullets and rockets flew, and shouted, "Awesome!"

I'd remember seeing Alpha's forward artillery observer, Lt. Jason Angell of Brea, who just a few years ago was working at a clothing store in the Brea Mall while attending Cal State Fullerton, light a cigarette during the same fight, and noticing how his hands weren't shaking at all.

I'd remember Capt. Lawler, the forward air controller, calling in 1,000-pound bombs during the fight, close enough to suck the air from your lungs, and saying, totally calm and deadpan, "Gents, this could get a little squirrelly."

I'd remember watching that Iraqi civilian walking along beside the column on the outskirts of Baghdad, happily waving at us until the moment he stepped on a mine and blew part of his foot off in a tangle of blood and bone, and how quickly the Navy corpsmen rushed to help him.

I'd remember Corpsman Noah Glanville, a thoughtful, serious young man from Orange, sitting in a fighting hole after watching Lt. Childers die and telling me how he'd realized, suddenly and too late, how much he hated war, any war.

And I would remember the comforting flash and roar of outgoing artillery in the desert sky, and the reassuring whoppa-whoppa-whoppa of helicopters riding shotgun on the column in bad-guy country; the rumble of the tracks and tanks, and the stillness of the moon and the stars on a cold desert night; the dirt and the stink and the flies, the laughter and the pain, the blood dripping from a wounded Marine's face, and the awful finality of dead men lying on the ground.

But mostly I would remember the Marines themselves, the men of Alpha Co., 1st Battalion, 5th Marines.

I'll leave it to historians and pundits to decide whether the war these Marines fought was a good one or a bad one, an important milestone or a footnote in history.

But whatever their decision is, these Marines were some of the best and bravest guys I've ever known.

And it was an honor to share their war with them.

Sempers,

Roger



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A Navy corpsman tends to an Iraqi prisoner wounded March 20 as Marines took control of an oil pumping station in southern Iraq after crossing the border from Kuwait. This was the first POW photographed in the war.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER

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Artillerymen of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit march in a sandstorm in Camp Bullrush in the Kuwaiti desert March 7.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER

thedrifter
05-11-03, 03:01 PM
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Jeffrey Duarte of Anaheim, a TOW missile gunner in the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, waits for his anti-tank unit to leave camp for a gunnery exercise March 7.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER



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Cpl. Ryan Long of Oceanside does his laundry in a box lined with a trash bag March 14 at Camp Grizzly.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER





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During a chemical/biological weapons alert March 12, Cpl. Mike Cash of Tacoma, Wash., continues reading his book.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER

thedrifter
05-11-03, 03:04 PM
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Marine Lance Cpl. Frank Bailey of Long Island, N.Y., sets up a perimeter March 21 around a pumping station the 1/5 took in southern Iraq. That fight at first seemed too easy, some Marines felt.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER



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Marine Capt. Blair Sokol of San Clemente, commander of Alpha Co., keeps track on the radio during a March 22 attack.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER



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Lt. Matt Fennell of Los Altos mans the turret of a Marine amphibious assault vehicle as Alpha Co. travels north March 31 past an Iraqi traffic sign en route to Baghdad.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER

thedrifter
05-11-03, 03:06 PM
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The U.S. flag flies from a pile of supplies as an amphibious assault vehicle heads for refueling March 28 in southern Iraq.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER




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Cpl. Ryan Hamilton of Dana Point and Lance Cpl. Eric Young of Orange share a mirror as they shave the morning of April 1 with Alpha Co. in Iraq.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER




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Pfc. James Emerson of Billings, Mont., laughs as colleagues kid him April 4 about how dark his face had become as Alpha Co. advanced towards Baghdad.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER

thedrifter
05-11-03, 03:09 PM
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Navy chaplain Lt. Carey Cash leads Marines of Alpha Co. in a religious service the morning of March 29 before their push toward the Fertile Crescent.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER


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Marines of Alpha Co. yell to be heard over the loud engine noise as they travel north in Iraq on April 3.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER


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An Iraqi bandages the foot of a dazed friend who stepped on a land mine April 8 while cheering as the 1st Marine Battalion entered Baghdad.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER

thedrifter
05-11-03, 03:13 PM
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Iraqis cheer as members of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines enter Baghdad on April 8.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER



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Lt. Therrel “Shane” Childers: The dusty pack of Childers, who was killed on the first day of the war, reached Baghdad in an honored place on the outside of the vehicle transporting the platoon he commanded.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER



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Lance Cpl. Philip Cashman of Syracuse, N.Y., is overcome after a firefight April 10 in the streets of Baghdad.
MARK AVERY, THE REGISTER