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.)

I USED TO SMOKE WHEN I WAS in college, then quit, but in the past two weeks I had started again. I was nearing a pack a day.

The battalion's combat troops dug themselves in to the south side of the bridge for the night. I went back to the factory and tried to sleep; the heat was oppressive, the mosquitoes worse.

The Marines planned to take the bridge the next day. Because a pylon was damaged, no vehicles could move over it; the assault would be on foot, World War II style.

At about 10 a.m., word reached the rear that one of the battalion's armored vehicles had been hit by an artillery shell; two Marines were killed, several injured. The first wave of troops crossed the bridge, and soon the air on the far side was thick with ordnance—artillery shells, mortars, bullets. Two more columns of Marines ran forward, toward the bridge and over it.

I fell into one of the lines, telling myself, I am a journalist. This is a war. I must cover it. We passed the armored fighting vehicle that had been shelled; it was a smoking mess of twisted metal.

"Holy shit," one of the Marines said.

"Don't look, don't look," said another.

We ran over the bridge, jumping over a bullet-riddled Iraqi corpse, and as soon as I got over, I noticed Colonel McCoy, standing by a house with his radioman.

"How are you doing, Peter?" he asked, again.

"Just fine, colonel." It was fucking Groundhog Day. I lit a cigarette.

What happened that day was the subject of a story I wrote for The New York Times Magazine. The battle raged around us. Marines were fanning out in all directions, firing their weapons at unseen enemy troops that retreated from building to building as the troops advanced. Fearful of suicide bombers, the Marines fired warning shots at approaching vehicles, and then opened fire. Most of the vehicles, as it turned out, carried confused civilians trying to get out of Baghdad. The day after the battle was over, I counted nearly a dozen bodies; all of them appeared to have been civilians. When I asked one of the Marines what he thought, he said, "That's war."

Just as things that should have disturbed the Marines didn't, things that should have disturbed me didn't. After the fight, I sat in my car, writing, not 20 yards away from a partly crushed corpse sprawled in the road. I'd gotten used to it.

It was April 8. On the BBC, we heard that Baghdad was beginning to fall; the Americans had taken the main presidential palace. With the other journalists, I drove farther into the city. There were Marines everywhere. We parked next to two of their fighting vehicles at an abandoned house, but when a U.S. fighter jet swooped in and dropped an errant bomb 400 yards away, we got out fast.

Not long after, we encountered a group of Marines who had just shot a young boy and girl. They were jittery and didn't know what to do; they asked us to take the injured children to a medic station in the rear. Laurent Van der Stockt bundled them into his car, and Enrico held the girl in his arms as the father held his son, who had been shot in the chest and was losing consciousness. "Why? Why?" the father asked as we raced back toward the bridge.

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