Middle East Adventure Travel - The Rough Guide to Iraq (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine July 2003

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The Rough Guide to Iraq (Cont.)

THE FACTORY WAS A MILE and a half down the road from the Diyala Bridge, which crosses a tributary that flows into the Tigris. It was the Third Battalion's mission to seize the bridge and march into the Iraqi capital. The battalion was on edge; the previous day, a tank from a sister battalion had been destroyed by a suicide bomber. Everyone was exhausted.

On the first morning of the two-day battle, April 6, I stayed back at the factory, sitting in the passenger seat of my car, writing. After a few hours I heard the sounds of battle and saw huge plumes of smoke ahead. I put on my flak jacket and helmet and walked up the road, which was jammed with tanks and armored fighting vehicles waiting to cross the bridge. A Marine commanding a six-man mortar crew in an open-backed Humvee stopped and asked me if I wanted a lift.

"You're not going all the way, are you?" I asked.

"No, we'll be a few hundred meters back."

I hopped into the back and the driver continued on. Less than a minute later the Humvee came under fire. I dived to the floor, attempting to become one with it as the Marines around me opened up with their M-16s.

"I shot him!" one of them shouted. "I shot him!"

The driver went nuts. He veered over the center median, knocking everyone from whatever position they happened to be firing from. Then he veered back, jolting us again.

"Who the fuck is driving?" someone yelled.

I knew who was driving: a Marine trying to dodge bullets.

"You're never going to drive this fucking Humvee again," a Marine next to me shouted, between shots.

The Humvee made a hard right and jerked to a halt. The Marines jumped out, and so did I.

"How'd you like the ride?" one of them asked me.

"Where are we?" I replied.

"The bridge," he said.

The colonel's Humvee was a few yards away.

"How are you doing, Peter?" McCoy asked as I scrambled over.

"Fine, colonel."

His Marines were firing every kind of ordnance they had across the river, and shots were coming back, and there we were, in it.

A few yards away, a terrified Iraqi woman came running out of a building in a black cloak with a white scarf across her forehead. "Is that a frigging nun?" McCoy said.

The assault was on foot, World War II style. We passed an armored fighting vehicle that had been shelled, a smoking mess of twisted metal. "Holy shit," one of the Marines said. "Don't look, don't look," said another.

I listened as he talked on the radio with his commanders and his other officers. In between radio squawks, McCoy chatted as though we were hanging out in a park, watching the neighborhood kids play in a sandbox.

"They're doing a poor job of Chechen tactics," he explained, referring to the hit-and-run guerrilla tactics the Iraqis were using. "We trained on that. We're getting them with snipers. Coughlin's already got six to eight kills today."

His attention returned to the radio phone. He listened, then he gave an order.

"We just got a SIGINT hit that the enemy has requested arty," he said. In other words, the signals intelligence unit had intercepted a radio conversation in which the Republican Guard unit on the other side of the bridge was calling in artillery fire on our positions.

"We've got to get our guys down," McCoy continued. "We've got guys in the open here."

I was one of those guys.

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