Imperial Grunts

^{CHAPTER EIGHT} CENTCOM ^{IRAQ, SPRING 2004 WITH NOTES ON NICARAGUA AND VIETNAM}

The road to Iraq began less in Washington than at Camp Pendleton, California, which along with Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, represented the main nodes of Marine strength in the United States. A naval force relatively small in size, the Marines were not spread out over a constellation of bases in the interior continent like the Army. They clustered in only a few places, on the West and East Coasts.

Except for the swaying palm trees and clean Pacific breezes, parts of Oceanside, California, next door to Camp Pendleton, seemed a replay of Jacksonville, North Carolina: pawnshops, tattoo parlors, military surplus stores, late-night convenience hangouts, and greasy spoon joints. I had been home from the Horn of Africa two days before I flew out here from New England.

As in Jacksonville and Fayetteville, I got up at the Comfort Suites, the best hotel in town, and went into the lobby for a breakfast of bad coffee and pre-packaged muffins. The other guests were men in BDUs or off-the-rack suits, the latter government workers or private contractors, usually ex-military. In its own small and sterile way, the morning ritual underscored how far removed the policy nomenklatura in Washington and New York—in its cocoon of fine restaurants and theoretical discussions—was from the frugal necessities of those who actually manned and maintained the Empire.

Washington and New York heralded the world of ideas; places like Oceanside the application of them. Because ideas can be tested only through application, Oceanside was sometimes the more intellectually stimulating.

To deploy from Camp Pendleton or Camp Lejeune in significant numbers overseas, which was the case with Iraq, the Marines assembled a MAGTF (pronounced “magtaf”): a Marine Air-Ground Task Force. MAGTFs came in different sizes, depending upon the need. But the key feature of all MAGTFs was their self-sufficiency, with ground combat, aviation, support service, and command components. The largest MAGTFs were the three Marine Expeditionary Forces, or MEFs as they were called, consisting of forty thousand to forty-five thousand marines each.

The First Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF), based out of Camp Pendleton, covered the Pacific. The Second Marine Expeditionary Force (II MEF), based out of Camp Lejeune, covered the Atlantic. The Third Marine Expeditionary Force (III MEF) was forward deployed in Okinawa, Japan. Smaller than the other MEFs, III MEF had only seventeen thousand marines and was focused on the Korean Peninsula. But all these areas of responsibility were fluid and overlapped. For example, both I and II MEF had seen action in Operation Iraqi Freedom the year before.

Below the MEFs were the MEBs, Marine Expeditionary Brigades of 8,000 to 10,000 marines each. Below them were the MEUs, Marine Expeditionary Units. The MEUs, with about 2,200 marines each, were the real workhorses of Marine deployments in the unconventional post–Cold War world, able to react fast to overseas emergencies with their six-hour Rapid Response Planning Process. The Marines’ smallest element was their special purpose MAGTFs, custom fit for just about every situation.

Iraq obviously rated a MEF, the largest kind of MAGTF.

A year earlier, I MEF had been tasked to capture Baghdad. Its ground combat element, the 1st Marine Division, “marched up” from Kuwait to the Iraqi capital, a feat that recalled the ten thousand Greek hoplites under Xenophon who had marched north from Mesopotamia and across Asia Minor in 400 B.C., and “hacked their way through every army that challenged them.”¹ The marines advanced on Baghdad under the symbol of the Blue Diamond—the five stars of the Southern Cross against the blue of the evening sky—which commemorated the 1st Division’s landing in 1942 at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. The 1st Division also retook Seoul in 1950 during the Korean War, Hue City in 1968 during the Vietnam War, and Kuwait City in 1991 during Desert Storm.

In 2003 during Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF, in U.S. military parlance), the 1st Marine Division, along with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, did most of the fighting. Following the ouster of Saddam Hussein, the 1st Division assumed responsibility for stabilizing heavily Shiite south-central Iraq. During that deployment, unlike the experience of the Army in the Sunni Triangle, not one marine was killed. The Marines ascribed their success partly to lessons learned from their Small Wars Manual.²

The Small Wars Manual, it was at least hoped, would guide the division’s latest assignment. In the early weeks of 2004, I MEF, with the 1st Division as its ground combat element, was preparing to deploy to western Iraq, an area the size of North Carolina stretching from the Euphrates River to the Syrian border, including part of the Sunni Triangle. This area of responsibility contained 2.8 million people, 80 percent of whom were Sunni and 20 percent Shiite.

While I was at Camp Pendleton, Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis, the 1st Division’s commander, delivered his pre-deployment brief to thousands of marines.[72] He made it clear that not only were the Marines returning to Iraq, they were also returning to their roots as unconventional warriors: a tradition forged long ago in the Philippines and in the Central American “Banana Wars” of the early twentieth century, when the Marines were referred to as the “State Department’s troops.”

Old black-and-white photos of U.S. Marines in Nicaragua accompanied the brief. Noting Iraq’s “confusing, challenging” environment, Maj. Gen. Mattis told his marines that “Chesty Puller faced a similar situation in Nicaragua in 1929 and learned how to be a warrior. He learned on hundreds of patrols over years of fighting where he and his men destroyed the enemy and won the trust of the people.”

That history might have been obscure to people in Washington, but it was fresh and relevant to those at Camp Pendleton—perhaps more relevant than the two world wars. Lewis Burwell “Chesty” Puller, born in rural Virginia, grew up worshipping Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.³ He developed a chest “like a pouter pigeon” (hence the nickname). In Haiti, beginning in 1919, Marine Pvt. Chesty Puller led bush patrols composed of native Creole-speaking troops in the struggle against the cacos—outlaw gangs opposed to the U.S. occupation. In 1924 he became a second lieutenant, and between 1929 and 1933 he served two tours in Nicaragua, fighting against Augusto César Sandino, the leftist guerrilla leader after whom the Sandinistas were named.

A bandit to the Marines and a hero to radicals throughout Latin America, Sandino threatened Nicaragua’s stability, which was crucial to the protection of the Panama Canal. Puller and his gunnery sergeant, William A. Lee, commanded a company of three dozen locally recruited Indians in the fight against Sandino. They marched thirty miles a day, living off the land. “Whenever a chow line formed, Puller and Lee made sure they were at the back; their men got fed first,” writes Max Boot in The Savage Wars of Peace.

Men wounded or killed were evacuated from the battlefield. Applying the Marine ethos to his native troops, Puller never left an indig behind. In 1931, after an earthquake and fire had devastated the capital of Managua, Puller and other marines took the lead in salvage, rescue, and recovery operations. It was just one aspect of the humanitarian side of Marine operations in Nicaragua.

While the political outcome to that early U.S. intervention in Nicaragua was messy, the Marines took pride in it, just as they and the Green Berets took pride in their performance in Vietnam. Though many Americans categorized such interventions as failures and moral disgraces, the Marines knew that the history of those interventions was complex: there were tactics that worked, as well as those that didn’t; actions of positive moral consequence, and of negative consequence.

Invoking Nicaragua, Gen. Mattis said he needed “self-disciplined young sailors and marines who can smile to children,[73] wave to Iraqis who flip you the bird… who are tough enough to be kind to the innocent, no matter what the enemy does to us or our buddies…. We must win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people,” he went on, repeating a Vietnam War phrase. “Satellites don’t give us intel in a counterinsurgency—as you win their trust, the people will give you intel.”

Nevertheless, aware of the gritty realities bedeviling the Army in western Iraq at that moment—realities with which the Marines would soon have to deal—Mattis said that in the eyes of Iraqis, Marines had to be seen as No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy. He added, “Wave at them, but have a plan to kill them.”

Gen. Mattis ended on a religious note. Marines should use the solitude and hardships of the Iraqi desert to strengthen their faith in God: “We, like the people who’ve gone to the desert before, will know ourselves better and come to have a greater appreciation for each other.”

Mattis had the reputation of a “warrior-monk,” a spartan fighter with deep moral convictions who was prodigiously well read in history and philosophy, even as he could communicate succinctly with lance corporals. He was a confirmed bachelor; his living quarters at Camp Pendleton were filled with maps and books. On his official résumé he chose to list only his commands, not other career paraphernalia. There was something minimalistic and vaguely Eastern about him—a gene almost, something which I had first detected in lesser degrees in Brig. Gen. Robeson and Capt. Cassidy in Djibouti. With Maj. Gen. Mattis it became sufficiently noticeable for me to identify.

The Prussian-style high-and-tight crew cuts and the cult of German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel that existed within the corps fooled a lot of people. In fact, the U.S. Marines came from the East, from the Orient. That was their spiritual tradition. It was the legacy of their naval landings throughout the Pacific, of the Marine legation guards during the Boxer Rebellion in China, of the “China Marines” in the 1920s, and, most of all, of the very didacticism of the Navy itself, the Marines’ sister service, which fit well with Eastern philosophy.

The Army had Clausewitz; the Marines Sun-Tzu. It was a Marine brigadier general, Samuel Blair Griffith II—who had served in China before and after World War II—who translated Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War in 1963 and Mao Zedong’s On Guerrilla War in 1978.[74] Marines picked up on the local philosophy the same as they did the local food—not all marines obviously, not even most or many, but enough influential officers here and there so it filtered into the Marine character.

Embracing the local culture seemed to be particularly necessary in western Iraq, “where American military units,” as one journalist had written, “had come and gone so often that they had little time to understand their surroundings,” or to form meaningful relationships.[75] The Marines even had an acronym for the dual tasks that lay ahead—“winning hearts and minds” and “nation-building.” It was SASO (stability and security operations). SASO was the buzzword at Camp Pendleton in late January 2004. It represented a hope that the conventional application of military force in “OIF-I”—what the Marines called their deployment in Iraq the year before—would be followed up in “OIF-II” by a more subtle, unconventional use of military force, resulting in the stabilization of Iraq as a democratic society.

As I would see, these hopes died hard.

Kuwait was the jumping-off point for my journey into Iraq. An oil-rich Persian Gulf city-state like Dubai, from where I had flown to and from Afghanistan a few months back, Kuwait was different. Dubai had been a veritable luxury shopping mall, punctuated by designer restaurants, nightclubs offering Russian prostitutes, and service up to the highest Asian standards, with international staffs. At times in Dubai, I didn’t quite know where I was. Kuwait, however, was more traditional, with no alcohol and little flagrant prostitution, though Filipino cathouses were said to exist on Kuwait City’s outskirts. Many of Kuwait’s malls catered to a new Arab middle class rather than to a wealthy global elite. Unlike Dubai, whose Arabs and subcontinental Asians seemed like the smiling employees of one vast airport duty-free shop, Kuwait seemed an authentic mixture of Arabia and the Indian subcontinent. In the crumbly, crowded streets near my modest-priced hotel, Kuwait City brought back memories of my first visit to Baghdad twenty years earlier, during the Iran-Iraq War, prior to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait that had set in motion the destruction of Iraq’s nascent prosperity.

My choice of a relatively cheap hotel was deliberate. The hardest, loneliest times on such trips were the days and hours before embedding, when you were particularly sensitive to the creature comforts you were about to give up. Nothing is worse for morale in these moments than lux-urious surroundings.

One morning, following a typical Middle Eastern breakfast of ful beans, green olives, goat cheese, fresh pita bread, and tea in the dowdy dining room of my hotel, where I seemed to be the only westerner, a Marine lieutenant colonel in civilian clothes drove up to the entrance, threw my backpack and duffel bag into the rear of a sport utility vehicle, and transported me northwest into the desert, the site of Camp Udari, the staging point for the Marine deployment to Iraq. An hour later I was back in the Kellogg, Brown & Root world of tents, palettes, shipping containers, chow halls, and acronyms. Vast lines of seven-ton trucks and Humvees stretched across the horizon, all headed north. The epic scale of America’s involvement in Iraq, so much larger than the other deployments I had been covering around the world, became quickly apparent.

The lieutenant colonel quickly passed me and my bags on to another officer, who drove me farther into the desert, to link up with the 1st Battalion of the 5th Marine Regiment, now part of Maj. Gen. Mattis’s First Marine Division. The 1st of the 5th as it was called, or simply “1/5,” had begun its field isolation the day before. In two days it would be crossing the border into Iraq.

Soon I was amidst two quarter-mile-long lines of Humvees and seven-ton trucks. A sandstorm had started. There was an icy wind. Rain threatened. Several officers and noncoms came up to me, introducing themselves. I was bewildered. It wasn’t just their desert cammies, ballistic sunglasses, and high-and-tights that made them look the same; that I was used to. It was also that they all had mustaches. The decision to grow mustaches had been made by 1/5’s commander, Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, who believed that if his men looked a bit like Iraqis, winning hearts and minds might be easier. It would be days before I could distinguish many of his marines individually.

The two lines of humvees and seven-tons constituted Charlie Company, a subdivision of the 1st of the 5th. When I arrived, 1st Lt. David Denial of South Gate, California, was in the middle of a brief. He had an easel against the side of a Humvee, jerry-rigged with armored plates, making the Humvee into what the Marines called a hardback.

First Lt. Denial screamed above the wind and the Humvee’s idling engine: “If you’re forward of an explosion, haul ass a hundred meters in urban terrain, two hundred in rural; if you’re behind an explosion, un-ass a hundred meters in urban, two hundred in rural. If you make contact with the enemy, let me know. I’ll do the translation. I speak Army; not much, but I speak it. And explain the ROEs to your subordinate NCOs. This battalion killed civilians last year in OIF-I because in some cases it didn’t know the ROEs.”

The 1st of the 5th, which comprised just under a thousand marines, was a small part of the 1st Marine Division that would be replacing the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in western Iraq. This formed a major piece of one of the largest troop movements in half a century, with roughly 250,000 soldiers and marines leaving and entering Iraq through the narrow umbilical cord of several bases in Kuwait, over a six-week period. Here was where the mass organizational know-how, borne of several major wars in the twentieth century, paid off for the U.S. military.

About 60 percent of the battalion were veterans of OIF-I. They had fought pitched battles in the oil fields of southern Iraq, slogged through muddy, dusty hellholes like Ad-Diwaniyah, and in a nine-hour battle on April 10, 2003, secured Saddam’s palace at the bend of the Tigris in central Baghdad, in the course of which 1/5 sustained dozens of casualties and collected several Bronze Stars for valor. Yet the most significant thing about OIF-I, according to 1st Lt. Richard Wilkerson of Knoxville, Tennessee, was that except for fourteen total hours of hard fighting over a twenty-day period, it was also a small war. “Most of the time we were doing SASO: convoy ops, presence patrols, community policing, that is,” Lt. Wilkerson said.

The sun sunk so fast over the desert that it was like a searchlight being switched off. Because of the northeast wind I immediately began to freeze. I have never been so cold as in semi-tropical deserts at night. Lt. Col. Byrne held his command brief in the “lee” of a Humvee in the pitch blackness. (A naval force, marines used any opportunity they could find to employ seafaring terminology.) The one-hour meeting dealt with the logistics of a forty-mile-long convoy split into four serials, leaving at thirty-minute intervals, with 250 vehicles spaced a hundred meters apart. Everything from guard duty to battery charging to radio frequency hopping to ammunition draws was gone over. “If the comms shit in bed as comms have a tendency to do, it means we’ll have a break in radio contact, so use your fucking hand signals,” advised one officer. Thus the meeting went.

The meeting broke up with everyone going off to sleep under their respective cammie nets. Field isolation meant no running water, no coffee or tea, and no chow except for MREs. “Come on,” Lt. Col. Byrne told me, “I’ll show you your hootch.” He pointed out a cammie net and then disappeared. I couldn’t see a thing. A voice asked, “What’s your name?”

“Bob,” I answered. “I’m a writer.”

“Me too. I write haikus and science fiction. But my real passion is harvesting venom from pygmy rattlesnakes and reading about feudal Japan. I started my own computer company in high school but didn’t have enough money to go to college. I love guns, so I joined the Marines. Do you need anything?”

“I didn’t expect it to be this cold in Kuwait. My gear is insufficient.”

There was a rustling sound and then I felt a thick sleeping bag in my hand, and a liner given to me by someone else moving around in the dark. A minute later I was handed a balaclava.

The haiku writer was Lance Cpl. Mike Neal of the South Side of Chicago. He handled the M240G medium machine gun mounted atop the Humvee in which I would travel all the way to Al-Fallujah. The driver of the Humvee was Cpl. Daniel Pena of Waukegan, Illinois. The commander of the Humvee and five others, comprising Lt. Col. Byrne’s headquarters and personal security element, was Chief Warrant Officer II David Bednarcik of Allentown, Pennsylvania. All were veterans of OIF-I. They had fought their way from southern Iraq into Saddam’s palace. They called themselves the “Renegades.”

Lance Cpl. Neal and Cpl. Pena were twenty and twenty-one, respectively. Chief Warrant Officer Bednarcik was in his mid-thirties. Because he was an infantry weapons specialist, he was more properly addressed as Gunner Bednarcik rather than Chief Bednarcik, the way chief warrant officers are addressed in the Army. All three introduced themselves to me in the dark; only in the morning would I see their faces.

Stars winked through the cammie net. I got a few hours of sleep. Reveille was at 5:30 a.m. Immediately thereafter, rifle and other drills commenced. Then ammunition was handed out for the long journey, and radio call signs were issued: “Red Cloud,” “Apache,” “Crazy Horse,” “Geronimo,” and other Indian names. Because of the feverish activity and excitement of departure, the distinctions between the various categories of Marine sergeants and corporals that I had noticed in Djibouti seemed less sharp here.

Before we rolled out, Protestant and Catholic prayer services were held. At the Protestant ceremony, about several hundred marines huddled together on the dun flatness of the Kuwaiti desert, as bagpipes sounded “Amazing Grace.” Chaplain Steve Pike of Whittier, California, read from Deuteronomy (26:4–10), about the Hebrews’ “affliction” in Egypt, and how the Lord had brought them out of bondage. Then he thanked God “for such a dry, hard place” where the Marines could do the “difficult spiritual work necessary to experience the glory of Easter,” a few weeks away. He prayed for “the marines, their families, and the Iraqi people.” At the end of the service, rumbling lightly over the desert, was the sound of hundreds of voices:

The congregation dispersed quietly. Lance Cpl. Mike Neal gave me a refresher course on feeding ammunition to a machine gunner in the event we made contact with the enemy. At 1300 hours, a “police call” was announced, when the entire battalion formed a quarter-mile-long line that moved in unison over the camp area, in order to pick up our trash off the desert. The cammie nets were taken down. Marines put on their “flaks” (what Army Special Forces had called “individual body armor”). “Hard cover” (Kevlar helmets) replaced “soft cover” (bush hats; what Special Forces called “boonies”).

Ours would be the last of 1/5’s four “serials” to break camp. The complex preparations, including the counting of vehicles and “packages” (personnel), reminded me of the organizational procedures that had accompanied one of the last of the great camel caravans to cross Inner Mongolia in the late 1920s, as experienced by Owen Lattimore in The Desert Road to Turkestan. If one considered that the age of mass infantry warfare might be drawing to a close, this journey of more than 350 miles through open desert into central Iraq could constitute one of history’s last great military convoys.

Finally we were on the road. “Why did you join the Marines?” I asked the driver of our Humvee, Cpl. Pena, a short, soft-spoken, fair-complexioned Mexican-American with a bulky physique and sweet disposition. He provided a typical story.

“To get away from lots of shit at home. I had bad habits. I would have been in jail by now had I not joined the corps. Just graduating from Waukegan, Illinois, High School was a real struggle for me. I won’t reenlist, though. I’m going to college to study business management. I want to go into real estate and be a good citizen. The state of Illinois will pay for my education through the GI Bill.”

We traveled north only two hours on Main Supply Route Tampa, or Highway 80—the famed “Highway of Death” for Iraqi soldiers fleeing Kuwait during Desert Storm. Then we stopped for the night at NAVISTAR: navigation starting point, the term that the U.S. military used for the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border. NAVISTAR was a massive fuel and maintenance facility—the mother of all truck stops. A sign at the entrance warned: “Kevlars and flak jackets are mandatory gear for all travel beyond this point.”

Lance Cpl. Neal came down from his machine gun position on the Humvee’s roof and immediately began talking to me, as he had the night before when we met. He was a big kid with stores of energy, dark hair, and a warm, friendly face that was constantly on the verge of a broad smile. On his shoulder was a big tattoo of a ghoulish monster. “That’s Parintachin,” he explained, “the crazy little clown that lives inside my head.”

Neal’s subject now was the nine-hour fight to secure Saddam’s palace at the bend of the Tigris in central Baghdad. “It was like the movie Black Hawk Down without the rioters. I was RPGed so often I gradually stopped ducking. During one of the lulls I was relaxed enough to eat an MRE and fall asleep for a few minutes. I was so tired and hungry. You get used to anything if it goes on long enough.”

NAVISTAR was a vast gravel maze of Jersey barriers that smelled of oil and gasoline. We did a fast-paced quarter-mile march in formation to the chow hall. There was no time to piss even—or you would lose your platoon and never find them again in the dark, as masses of marines and soldiers were being processed through in different directions. The chow hall was airless and overcrowded, with low ceilings and putrefying smells. “This ain’t no fuckin’ Denny’s,” a sergeant major screamed over the confusion. “Eat fast, don’t talk, and get the fuck out. There are more people waiting to chow down.”

The immensity of the redeployment was visually staggering. Outside, engines and generators whined in the dark, as long lines of trucks partially blocked out the stars.

In the order of the convoy, the Renegades led by Gunner Bednarcik were part of the Charlie “stick” of Alpha Company. We were provided a narrow patch of sand between two lines of vehicles to lay our sleeping bags. Reveille would be at 2:30 a.m. There was no place to wash; no heads or Porta-Johns either. By 2:45 a.m. we had packed our gear and marines were fiddling with straps and lubricants, loudly cursing at broken doors and transmission problems.

Iraq was heralded by the lights of burning petrol fires. We rode for hours on the hardball road in the dark. My teeth chattered and my thighs shook from the freezing cold air pouring through the roof hatch where Lance Cpl. Neal sat behind his machine gun. “I’m so cold that my face has frozen into a permanent grin,” he shouted down through the hatch.

Dawn brought a landscape of cindery desert and short grass the greenish gray color of mold. As we continued north the desert became increasingly alkaline, with knife-sharp depressions of salt mixed with dried mud. A five-minute piss break was announced through the handheld ICOMs, or intra-squad radios. Hundreds of marines lined up along the road to water the desert. Marines looked at each other and laughed. I ate a cold MRE of Thai chicken for breakfast.

We passed long armored convoys of Turkish trucks bearing fuel and consumer items out of and into Iraq. The construction of the hardball road was the quality of an American interstate, a legacy of Iraq’s oil wealth from the 1970s and 1980s before Saddam invaded Kuwait and sanctions were imposed. As the morning wore on, Iraqi civilians appeared along the sides of the highway and in battered minivans, and waved at us. We crossed the Euphrates River between An-Nasiriyah and An-Najaf, entering the heart of southern Shiite Mesopotamia. Here and there were small green areas bordered by irrigation ditches. Iraqis in soiled yet dignified robes and keffiyahs stood beside sheep and cattle, and waved. But for the most part, the dreary moonscape did not cease.

Of all the landscapes and geographical situations across the earth, according to the French orientalist Georges Roux, Iraq’s is among the least changed throughout history. Roux’s book Ancient Iraq neatly bridges the gap between the romantic vision of Mesopotamia, based on the first chapters of Genesis, and the rather grim landscape I found there on this and previous visits.⁵

Adam and Eve, it turned out, did not live in a garden paradise but in a turgid mud swamp. The Tigris and Euphrates “flow with such a low gradient that they meander considerably and throw numerous side branches,” creating many “lakes and swamps,” interspersed with “dreary wastes strewn with dry wadis and salt lakes.”⁶ The ancient Mesopotamian towns, Roux continues, “were built of nothing but mud.”

There is also the early-twentieth-century English traveler Robert Byron’s description of Iraq: “It is a mud plain…. From this plain rise villages of mud and cities of mud. The rivers flow with liquid mud.”⁷

Keep in mind that Iraq has the bone-dry climate of a desert, which is constantly cracking the mud and blowing it into fine dust. Roux notes that temperatures in Mesopotamia, from prehistory onward, reach 120 degrees in summer, and the average annual rainfall is under ten inches, most of which comes in the early spring, causing floods. But since all the land to the west until the Mediterranean and to the east until the Indian subcontinent is riverless and rainless desert, this dreary artery of mud was where ancient civilization developed.

But it did not exactly prosper. Contrary to popular belief, fed by biblical clichés, the valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates did not make Iraq an old and unified land in the way that the Nile Valley made Egypt. Both river valleys may have been the mothers of history and of civilization, narrow lines of life amid desert nothingness, but that is where the similarities ended.

Roux explains that since antiquity the Nile had an annual flood of almost constant volume, with the great lakes of East Africa acting as regulators. Because the Nile “freely inundates the valley for a time and then withdraws,” it required only the “cheap and easy ‘basin type’ of irrigation,” in which canal slits were dug and men waited for them to fill up. But the Tigris and the Euphrates had no great lakes at their source to regulate floods. They were two rivers instead of one, with the Tigris born of the snows of Kurdistan and the Euphrates flowing down from the mountains of Armenia. Moreover, their annual flooding occurred too late for the winter crops and too soon for the summer ones. Thus, irrigation in Mesopotamia was a never-ending drudgery involving reservoirs, dikes, and regulator sluices. Even then, unlike Egypt, little was guaranteed. Low waters over a few years meant drought and consequently famine, whereas high waters swept away mud houses as if they had never existed. Roux states that “this double threat and uncertainty” bred a “fundamental pessimism” among Mesopotamia’s inhabitants.⁸

That pessimism grew not only out of the perennial struggle against nature, but also out of the struggle of man against man—another thing that did not exist in Egypt. Freya Stark explains: “While Egypt lies parallel and peaceful to the routes of human traffic, Iraq is from earliest times a frontier province, right-angled and obnoxious to the predestined paths of man.”⁹

In other words, the Nile has always been a natural migration route. People didn’t need to cross it, but to go up or down it. The Nile brought ivory and spices from Africa. The Tigris and the Euphrates brought nothing except their waters. The times that foreign invaders violated Egypt by sea, or by land across the Sinai Peninsula, were few enough to be well remembered—the aggressions of Alexander the Great and Napoleon, for example, which brought learning and economic progress.

But Iraq was never left alone. The valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, as Freya Stark indicates, ran at a right angle to one of history’s bloodiest routes of migration. From the Syrian desert in the west came the Amorites, the Hittites, and the medieval Arab armies of the Umayyad caliphs in Damascus: a threat that in modern times has been represented by the rival Baathist regime in Syria. To the east loomed the high plateau of Elam, “the great mountain that strikes terror,” from where invaders, including Aryan Kassites, Persians under Darius and Xerxes, Mongol hordes, and Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranians, all marched down into Mesopotamia.¹⁰

Yet the most important difference between the Nile Valley and Mesopotamia was that while the former was always a demographically cohesive unit, the latter was a nebulous border region where various groups clashed and overlapped. Outsiders have occasionally been inclined to interpret Iraq as a modern outgrowth of an age-old polity, known variously by such names as Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, Babylonia, and the Baghdad caliphate. In truth, as Roux painstakingly documents, each of these civilizations encompassed only a part of present-day Iraq, a part that was often at war with the other parts. The Sumerians, who lived in southern Mesopotamia, fought the Akkadians of central Mesopotamia, and both of them fought the Assyrians, who inhabited northern Mesopotamia. The Assyrians, in turn, fought the Babylonians, who occupied the border region between what had been, in a previous millennium, Sumer and Akkad. This is to say nothing of the many islands of Persians who lived amidst the native Mesopotamians, forming another source of strife.

Though the ancient Greek historians called the region Mesopotamia, meaning “the land between the [two] rivers,” Roux notes that the inhabitants of Mesopotamia themselves “had no name covering the totality of the country in which they lived.” The terms they used were either too vague (“the Land”) or too precise (“Sumer,” “Akkad,” and so on).¹¹ Thus, the current division of Iraq between Indo-European Kurds in the northern mountains, Sunni Arabs in central Mesopotamia, and Shiite Arabs in southern Mesopotamia was—like the divisions that I had seen in Yemen, Colombia, the Philippines, and Afghanistan—a formidable legacy of both history and geography.

I reached into an MRE bag and grabbed a fudge brownie for lunch. It had the consistency of drying cement. During another piss break a growly senior noncom took a back seat in our Humvee after the alternator had gone bust on his command car. “Fuck this… un-fuck that… un-ass that… Corporal, you’re as fucked up as a football bat,” he went on. After gouging on MREs he fell into a deep sleep, for which I was grateful.

I kept up a running conversation with Gunner David Bednarcik. The gunner was a stocky, matter-of-fact regular Joe with a shrewd and likable temperament, the kind of guy I’d trust on anything from setting up presence patrols in an unpacified area to presidential politics. There were rare moments when he reminded me of the late comic John Candy, of course without the obesity (in fact, Bednarcik was a long-distance runner). He was a lifer in the corps, set on doing thirty years, though he would only half admit it. More than a decade older than Cpl. Pena and Lance Cpl. Neal, he had a mild, avuncular disposition toward them and the other “knuckleheads” in the platoon, as he called them.

“I’m from Allentown, Pennsylvania, a place where people are real patriotic,” he told me with distinct pride. His family boasted World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam War veterans. Grenada and Beirut had affected him deeply, so he joined the Marines. A former drill instructor at Parris Island, South Carolina, and later a gunnery sergeant, he was the ultimate iron grunt. Yet he also harbored a mellowness that made him a delight to be around.[76]

“Parris Island is a machine,” Gunner Bednarcik explained, in a reference to Marine Corps basic training. “Drill instructors there are rough because of all the pressure on them to produce competent recruits in a finite period of time. Every minute of the day is micro-managed for the recruits. You can’t talk nice to grunts,” he intoned in a knowing, authoritative manner, as though confiding a secret to me. “Make no mistake, these are tough kids around you, really tough kids. Unless you’re tough with them, they don’t respond. The Army wants to train you in order to teach you skills. Fuck that. Marine Corps training seeks to break you down in order to remake you as a better person.”

I asked him about one officer in particular, who had seemed a bit distant. “Yeah, I know,” Gunner Bednarcik said. “He’s a real East Coast marine. You see, Camp Lejeune is close to the flagpole at Quantico [Virginia] and II MEF now has less to do in terms of deployments. The combination makes East Coast marines sticklers for details and regulations”—exactly what I had noticed in Djibouti.

“Camp Lejeune. Jacksonville, N.C.,” the Gunner went on, shaking his head with disapproval, “jack shacks, strip joints, the Business of Immorality in other words. Wherever you see the Business of Immorality you know there is a low ratio of available women to young men. Truth be told, Pendleton marines have more fun. The young marines there are right by the interstate, close to Hollywood and San Diego. The best deal for a lance corporal is to do basic at Parris Island and then be posted to Camp Pendleton.”

It was after midday. Dried mud oases with whited-out date palm jungles and mud-walled villages appeared under a broad and pasty sky. Women in billowing black robes were walking on berms beside irrigation ditches, with water jugs on their heads. There were donkeys and cattle but no camels. Then came more alkaline desert.

In the late afternoon, exactly thirteen hours after leaving NAVISTAR, we pulled into “Scania,” another U.S. military fuel and resupply depot, located two hours south of Baghdad near Al-Hillah. The Jersey barriers, HESCO baskets, and Porta-Johns created the instant sensation of having left Iraq. After refueling, the convoy lined up in eight yawning columns, divided by narrow gravel lanes, where we were told to lay out sleeping bags.

Darkness fell as we stumbled back from chow. Lance Cpl. Neal showed me how to arrange the rifle plates in my flak jacket as a more comfortable surface for sleeping atop the gravel. Using a flashlight in the dark, he showed me a World War I compass that his Marine grandfather had given him, inscribed “Semper Fi, Love Grandpa.”

One marine, cursing the sharp gravel, simply laid his sleeping bag on the hood of a truck and fell asleep. Under the stars, we all fell silent as the bagpiper played the “Marine Hymn.” Then the loud noises and other chaos of this latter-day caravanserai resumed.

While I was lying in my sleeping bag, one of the Renegades, Cpl. Michael Pinckney of South Kingstown, Rhode Island, came up to me and began to talk: “I’m twenty-three. My generation sucks. They’re all soft. They don’t care about their identity as Americans. We live in some bad-ass country, and they’re not even proud of it. My family flies the flag, but other families don’t. Nobody knows what it means to be American anymore, to be tough. I like being home and yet I don’t. People at home are not proud of us being in Iraq, because they’ve lost the meaning of sacrifice. They expect things to be perfect and easy. They don’t know that when things go wrong you persevere; you don’t second-guess. During OIF-I, we all slept in the rain and got dysentery in Ad-Diwaniyah. But back home, everyone is going to shrinks and suing each other. That’s why I like the Marine Corps. If you fuck up, your sergeant makes you suck it up. I don’t want to be anywhere else but Iraq. OIF-I and OIF-II, this is what manhood is all about. And I don’t mean macho shit either. I mean moral character.”

Despite news reports of low morale in the armed services because of overdeployment, with Army Special Forces and the Marines I had met only two kinds of troops: those who were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those who were jealous of those who were.

Reveille was at 5 a.m. After packing our sleeping bags and chowing down, the Gunner gave the platoon a brief on IEDs (improvised explosive devices, including car bombs), which the insurgents often placed on the highway to Baghdad. “All right you knuckleheads, the latest intel mentions Volkswagens, sedans, BMWs, Opels, and red Toyotas as particularly suspicious. I know, I know, that’s half the cars on the road. All’s I mean is, as Bugs Bunny would say, be wery, wery aware.”

The next brief came from Sgt. Christian Driotez of Los Angeles. Sgt. D, as he was called, was from a Salvadoran immigrant family. Powerfully built with a hands-on, Charles Bronson–type expression, he was, nevertheless, the mildest, most considerate sergeant I would meet in the Marine Corps, as well as a true leader of men. He had joined the corps, he claimed, because he wanted to make “a fucking difference”—after having seen kids dragged off to fight against their will by left-wing rebels in his family’s native country.

“Remember the battalion motto for OIF-II,” Sgt. D told the platoon: “Make Peace or Die. And make sure you got your fucking ACOG [advanced combat optical gunsight] on your rifles. This is where Iraq really starts. There will be no head calls. So bring empty water and Gatorade bottles to piss in. We’re tight, but we’re gonna get a lot tighter as the weeks go on. I’m already proud of you guys.”

Before we pushed off, the chaplain asked the holy angels to protect us.

We would drive north until the outskirts of Baghdad, then veer west into the heart of the Sunni Triangle near Al-Fallujah. There, at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Mercury, 1/5 would replace the 1st Battalion of the 504th Regiment of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.

As soon as our serial pulled out onto the main highway, the convoy halted because of a suspected improvised explosive device. Two Army helicopters flew overhead to survey the area and to escort the serial onward. It was a false alarm, though. “Fucking paranoia,” Gunner Bednarcik complained. I saw immediately how one person, planting a primitive explosive device, might tie an entire infantry company in knots, even if it had air support. Asymmetry was a basic fact of life in Iraq. And it usually favored the insurgents.

“I want action,” Cpl. Pena blurted out.

“No thanks. I’ve had my fill of shooting civilians,” answered Lance Cpl. Neal. “During OIF-I,” he explained, “we had strong indications that a vehicle was hostile and I was ordered to fire. It turned out to be an old man who died in seconds. I felt miserable, but under the same circumstances I would have no choice but to do it again.”

We were on the outskirts of Baghdad. Pena, Neal, and the Gunner were amazed at the new cars and satellite dishes that clogged the road and rooftops, which they told me had not been here the year before, on the eve of the invasion. The only ugly thing we noticed was the graffiti on the highway overpasses scrawled by the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division. The mosques, both Sunni and Shiite, with their glittering faience domes bore the mark of Persian architectural influence: the product of history and geography, as Iran was next door. The golden age of Baghdad at the turn of the ninth century, under the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, had been, to a significant degree, the upshot of Persian ideas and artisanship.

In early afternoon the low dun walls of Al-Fallujah came into view over the desert. The convoy turned away from the city, though, and headed eastward a few miles: until the apricot-colored desert, partially lost in a haze of choking dust squalls, gave way to a maze of Jersey, Texas, and Alaska barriers, followed by concertina wire, HESCO baskets, and tank treads functioning as speed bumps.[77] Here and there I saw light scrub and lines of eucalyptus trees. For the marines, this would be their home for months to come.

It was a complex of two bases, really: FOB (forward operating base) St. Mere, and the smaller FOB Mercury. Both had been named by the 82nd Airborne. St. Mere commemorated the village in Normandy, Sainte-Mère-Eglise, that the 82nd had fought for on D-Day. The entire area had been a training facility for the Iranian Mujahidin Khalq (Holy Warriors of the Masses), a guerrilla group supported by Saddam Hussein that sought to overthrow the regime in Teheran. Because Saddam’s Iraq was such a highly militarized state, Iraq was cluttered with palaces and military encampments in which American troops ensconced themselves.

The 1st Marine Division was divided into three regimental combat teams, or RCTs. FOB St. Mere was the headquarters of RCT-1, of which 1/5 formed a part. St. Mere was also the headquarters of I MEF. High-ranking officers were everywhere, therefore. Pena and Neal took one look at the place and muttered disdainfully, “POGs” (pronounced “poges”—persons other than grunts, that is, office types at the regimental, division, and MEF level). “They live high on the hog,” Pena said, “not like us grunts who do the real fighting. But we like it that way.” The chow hall at St. Mere was the fanciest I had seen thus far in my travels, with separate salad and dessert bars and a big-screen television set permanently to the ESPN sports channel. St. Mere also had a nice PX, laundry facilities, and Kellogg, Brown & Root shower units.

We left FOB St. Mere after a brief stop and journeyed two miles farther into the desert: to FOB Mercury, 1/5’s new home.

Forward Operating Base Mercury was a bleak gravel and dirt expanse with low reinforced-concrete buildings and rows of tents. It was noisy with the groan of generators. There were no amenities. Instead of nice shower and toilet units there were plastic Porta-Johns. The chow hall made you think of a penitentiary. I shared a barracks room with five captains and two warrant officers, along a hallway with busted doors, smashed fluorescent lights, and choking dust. Kit bags were splattered everywhere. “This room looks like a yard sale,” one of my rack mates complained in jest after we had moved in. After days of traveling, our “feet funk” was overpowering. Of course, all the deprivations up to this point counted for little compared to those suffered by both the troops and the journalists who had experienced OIF-I.

It didn’t help matters that there was often no water in the showers. Living conditions at FOB Mercury would never really improve much over the weeks I was there. Something was always running out—the water, the electricity, the chow even. But FOB Mercury would turn out to be the ultimate stripped-down forward base. It was a place where everyone contributed directly to the fighting effort. It harbored a monastic purity that I had found almost nowhere else in the world among the American military.

The first night there we were attacked by mortars and rockets. It would be a regular occurrence. Problems tumbled down upon the marines before they had even washed and unpacked. The Iraqi barber who serviced the base had just been murdered; the local water contractor had been threatened. The day we arrived there was a shoot-out at a meeting of the provincial council in Al-Fallujah, which couldn’t even decide on getting a road built. A number of American soldiers and marines in the city, who had arrived in-country some days before us, were wounded in the process.

One of the captains in my hootch, Jaime McCall of Wilmington, Delaware, had just learned that come the end of June, following the transfer of political power back to the Iraqis, U.S. troops might require search warrants whenever they entered Iraqi houses in pursuit of terrorists. As the battalion judge advocate general, he was sure a compromise could be worked out. Nevertheless, the early consensus in the hootch was that the Bush administration was thrusting too much responsibility upon the Iraqis too soon.

Within hours the details and rigors of the convoy had been forgotten and everyone immersed himself in his new tasks. Because 1/5 would be replacing the 1st of the 504th of the 82nd Airborne in the region between Al-Fallujah and Baghdad, the commander of 1/504, Army Lt. Col. Marshall Hagen of Fosston, Minnesota, spent the next few days showing Lt. Col. Byrne around the AOR (area of responsibility), introducing him to members of the various Iraqi town councils.

It was a unique AOR. Partly because of its proximity to Baghdad, it had more Shiites than perhaps any other place in the Sunni Triangle. The Shiites were generally easier for the U.S. military to deal with. Not only had they been on board for regime change, but their more formalized clerical bureaucracy facilitated the identification of local leaders, and thereby the establishment of communal relationships with the Army and Marines. (It had also facilitated the Iranian revolution in 1978–79, allowing the ayatollahs to form a state within a state even before the Shah fell.)

Army Lt. Col. Hagen’s knowledge of the local tribes, clans, and subclans, and the power struggles therein, plus his ability to separate good guys from bad guys on each local council, was considerable—testimony to the fact that even such a conventional force as the 82nd Airborne was capable of adaptation to the most unconventional of circumstances. “I’m no expert,” he told me; “there are at least seven different Iraqs, and many layers to each of them. Anyone who calls himself an expert on Iraq is full of shit. The more I learn, the more unfathomable it all becomes.”

For the next few days, Lt. Cols. Hagen and Byrne and their staffs were to become inseparable, as the Army unloaded a virtual data dump about the area on the Marines. Intel briefings about such items as the trajectories of incoming mortars and attempts to identify their points of origin would last up to three hours at a time. Hostility between the services, while it still existed, was less noxious now than at any point in American military history—a legacy of the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 that created unified area commands and enlarged the joint staff at the Pentagon in order to force the services to work together.[78]

The first stop on Lt. Col. Hagen’s tour for Lt. Col. Byrne was the West Baghdad City Council meeting, which took place every Saturday in the Mansour district of Baghdad. The council included sheikhs and other leaders of the towns immediately to the west of the Iraqi capital. The route from FOB Mercury to Baghdad took us onto a six-lane highway, past one of the palaces of Saddam’s younger son, Qusai, now occupied by several Army Special Forces A-teams. After the palace came the former Saddam International Airport, now a sprawling conglomeration of separate coalition military bases—“Camp Victory” for the Combined Joint Task Force, “Camp Blackjack” for the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division, and so on. The whole area was referred to as BIAP (Baghdad International Airport). Just as the convoy from Kuwait had represented perhaps the last industrial age caravan, BIAP represented the epicenter of perhaps the last great mass infantry invasion.

A few minutes away lay the western edge of downtown Baghdad: decrepit-looking compared to the late 1980s when I had last seen it, the result of more than a decade of economic sanctions. Inside the art gallery where the council meeting was about to begin, I was stunned by the sight of Iraqis chatting loudly in little groups, with cell phones going off all the time. There were men and women in traditional keffiyahs and abayas (headscarves), and also in well-tailored suits; unlike the frumpy Eastern European attire of the 1980s when Iraq had been under the security tutelage of the East Germans. The creepy-looking Hollywood uglies—morose-looking security types I remembered from two decades before—were gone. The air of freedom was everywhere in the room, or so it seemed.

Two decades before, council members would have stood apart from each other in nervous silence, waiting to salute the senior official as soon as he entered the room. Now, the moment the council chairman sat down he was peppered with accusations. “We have seen nothing from you…. When are we going to see results?” The meeting quickly descended into backbiting.

During a short break, my initial romance with the new Iraq was shattered when a member of the council in a well-tailored suit, Sheikh Dhari al-Dhari, told me:

“People live in fear. There are robberies all the time, carjackings, kidnappings of the members of well-to-do families. The rich families are beginning to move to Amman [Jordan], to escape from the chaos. People don’t go out after dark.”

Sheikh al-Dhari described a situation reminiscent of Russia and South Africa following the collapse of their authoritarian regimes. As bad as those regimes were, because of their longevity they had made life predictable and people had found ingenious ways to adapt. Because the rules, albeit oppressive, were known, people sometimes found ways around them. But then came liberation and an interregnum of no rules, when nothing was predictable, fostering a new kind of oppression, tied to soaring crime rates.

Actually, Russia and the rest of the communist bloc—much more than South Africa—was the appropriate comparison for Iraq. The ruling Baath (Renewal) party here had been like the Soviet Communist party, its avowed utopian ideology receding deeper into the past as it evolved into a criminal organization. And when that crumbled, smaller mafias and protection rackets came into being that attached themselves to other criminal and terrorist enterprises. The much-trumpeted prisoner release announced by Saddam just prior to the American-led invasion in March 2003 had had a specific purpose: to let common criminals loose all over the country, to prepare the ground for post-invasion ungovernability.

Whereas the Americans were most concerned with terrorism, average Iraqis were just as concerned with common crime. One of the worst areas in the country was the town of Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad, where an infamous prison and torture facility was located. Responsibility for the town of Abu Ghraib was split between the 1st Cavalry Division and the 82nd Airborne, the latter of which was handing over its section of Abu Ghraib to the Marines.

Lt. Col. John Ryan of the 1st Cavalry Division got up to address the Iraqis on the council.

“You people can’t have security if you can’t police your own,” Lt. Col. Ryan barked. “You know who the criminals and terrorists are. They’re mainly not foreign terrorists. They’re your own sons and cousins. You want jobs. Well, there will be no jobs without security. You have to take responsibility for your own neighborhoods. The coalition will be left with no choice but to spend more money in the countryside, where people are more law-abiding and friendly to us, than in Abu Ghraib. We will not feed the mouth that bites us,” he went on. “I don’t want to search your homes at three in the morning, but you people leave me no choice. Either help us find the criminals or stop complaining about it.”

Lt. Col. Byrne hid his head in his hands out of embarrassment. He did not like the insulting tone of the Army lieutenant colonel, who hadn’t even removed his flak jacket as the marines and Lt. Col. Hagen had done, and had spoken to the council like a drill instructor to recruits.

“You overthrew the system,” one council member shot back, “so it is your job to provide security.”

“If you want jobs,” Lt. Col. Ryan replied evenly, “help us more with security.”

Lt. Col. Byrne addressed the group. His tone was subdued: “I am an American marine. We have a different tradition than the Army. I am honored to be here to serve you. Like you, I am a believer. Before coming here, I met with my chaplain and prayed with him to bless our mission.”

But the Army lieutenant colonel turned out to be no less culturally aware than his Marine counterpart. As I found out, Lt. Col. Ryan had tried the soft approach for weeks and had gotten nowhere, even as intelligence mounted about active links between several council members and violent criminals. Lt. Col. Ryan’s tough manner was an experiment, he told me later. It was targeted at certain members of the council. Meanwhile, he was meeting privately with other council members.

After the meeting ended, Sheikh al-Dhari told Lt. Col. Byrne that “we need visual examples of progress. The more time that you Americans spend on your own security, the less effort you put into rebuilding, and the less respect the average Iraqi has for you.” The sheikh had gotten to the root of the American military dilemma in Iraq, as I’ll explain.

In fact, repression had not been the only tool used by Saddam Hussein. He had also bribed the paramount sheikhs of the Sunni Triangle with cash, fancy cars, tracts of land, and other tangible gifts. But the American-led invasion dismantled that entire system. And what had the Americans brought in return to assuage such notables, who for millennia had affected the thinking of their extended clans? The promise of elections? What was that? An abstraction that meant little to many here. In a part of the world where blood was thicker than ideas, it was a difficult step for one Muslim to dime out another Muslim, especially for something as intangible as elections.

Thus, the sheikhs and others, driven by narrow self-interest—as if that should have surprised anyone—made it known that they were open to deals with Syrians and assorted other jihadists, who knew the ingress routes and safe houses along the Euphrates River ratline into Iraq. It didn’t help matters that the very militarization of the state facilitated by Saddam had turned Iraq into one huge ammunition storehouse for the supply of rockets and mortars to the jihadists, and the making of IEDs (improvised explosive devices). And with the Iraqi army disbanded, there was now a pool of people with knowledge of ordnance and explosives, and the incentive to use it against the Americans.

I noted the derision with which the council members and other Iraqis present at the meeting looked at us, with our Kevlar helmets and flak jackets further fortified by rifle plates. Simply by being seen with us, they were taking greater risks than we were, and yet they had no such protection, and rarely demanded any. The fact that, a year after the invasion, American marines and soldiers still had to travel around Iraq wearing such protective gear was itself an indication of how little had been achieved.

Because the Bush administration, trapped in an election cycle, could not tolerate more American casualties, unusual security precautions had to be taken which only increased the distance between the American military and the average Iraqi. The willingness to accept a greater number of casualties might have meant faster progress, but the home front in America probably lacked the appetite for that.

Lt. Col. Byrne, a marine brat who had grown up near Quantico, told me: “OIF-I may have been our greatest military victory since World War II. The Iraqi regime was a bunch of animals. How can any civilized person be against what we did? Our defense budget relative to our GDP is now lower than it’s been for decades. Objectively, we can stay here at little cost for years helping the new Iraqi government, in order to get the job done. And with sufficient time, we simply can’t lose. But will the home front, and the media that influences it so much, allow that? That’s the issue.”

Keep in mind that this was the early spring of 2004. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal and many other bad things were still in the future, and the marines with whom I was embedded were still more hopeful than hard-bitten. It was a time when Iraqis were still waving at them. Also remember that as a lead fighting unit in the successful 2003 conquest of Baghdad, they had returned here with an idealistic sense of mission. Byrne’s comment, and those of other marines with whom I was traveling, reflected how the war was being viewed at a certain moment in time. After I left Iraq, and as the summer arrived, and then the autumn, the military situation would worsen, and embedded correspondents would accurately report a corresponding change in attitudes among marines, registered in growing doubts about the efficacy of the war.

Leaving the council meeting, I noticed the towering, half-completed mosque which dominated the entire Mansour district of Baghdad. Saddam had ordered it built as a monument to himself. On the eve of OIF-I, the mosque was on its way to being one of the largest buildings in the world, hideous beyond all imagining, like the Houston Astrodome surrounded by rocket launchers. I was reminded of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceau¸sescu’s half-completed House of the Republic in Bucharest at the time that he was toppled.

The architecture of parts of Baghdad told you everything you needed to know about the deposed regime. The presidential palace and the remnants of the nearby Defense and Interior ministries that had withstood American bombing made Baghdad’s so-called Green Zone appear like a Babylonian temple precinct built to monstrous Stalinist proportions. Here in wafer-thin yellow brick and blue faience, all forms of megalomania from antiquity to the late twentieth century were united. The eight-pointed star, symbol of the Baath party, was, like the Nazi swastika, everywhere: on bridges, highway girders, overpasses, windows, gates, and other grillwork, evidence of the regime’s egotistical desire for dominance over every facet of life. Even in the countryside I would find a world of opulent little palaces surrounded by primitive mudhut settlements: a veritable landscape of antiquity.

The palaces of Saddam and his sons Uday and Qusai, some adorned by immense man-made lakes, had two motifs: Las Vegas hotel-casinos or love shacks for their menagerie of mistresses and rape victims. Indeed, Saddam’s son Uday bore a marked resemblance to Ceau¸sescu’s spoilt and depraved son, Nicu, who also violently abused women.

The social and cultural refuse created by the regime was everywhere, overwhelming the American authorities. While clichés abounded about the talent of the Iraqi people and their ability to quickly build a vibrant capitalist society, officers of the 82nd Airborne who had been here for months told another, more familiar story: of how Iraqis, like their Syrian neighbors, had in recent decades not experienced Western capitalism so much as a diseased variant of it, in which you couldn’t even open a restaurant or a shop without having connections to the regime. Above the level of the street vendor, in other words, capitalism here would have to be learned from scratch.

After we returned to FOB Mercury from the council meeting, the 82nd Airborne intel shop delivered another three-hour brief and data dump to the marines, this one dealing, in part, with tribal and clan politics. A bewildered Gunner Bednarcik came out of the meeting muttering, “There seems to be no end to this thing. But now I suppose we’ll have to see it through, for the sake of our honor.” He stayed up half the night, downloading photos of every intersection we had crossed, in order to learn the route better and prepare for ambushes. It would be a ritual of his for several weeks, as we visited all the towns in the area of responsibility for the first time.

Truly, Iraq’s tribal reality hit you square in the face the moment you peered into local politics. Because Iraq was among the most backward parts of the Ottoman Empire, with little tradition of central government, tribalism had always been strong here. The Iraqi nationalism that followed World War I was in reality a vague ideological construction, dependent on an intertribal consensus. Tribalism was particularly prevalent near the Bedouin-influenced western desert, part of 1/5’s area. The strength of the tribes intensified during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, when the state lost much of its potency amid economic pressures. Because the tribes in the western desert near Al-Fallujah were too strong to destroy, Saddam had no choice but to co-opt them and make them part of his power structure.[79] It was such traditional loyalties existing below the level of the state that both Marxist and liberal intellectuals, in their pursuit of remaking societies along Soviet and Western democratic models, tragically underestimated.¹² Indeed, a year after the invasion of Iraq, with the country teetering on chaos, among the few groups in Washington without egg on their faces was a subculture of Middle Eastern area experts known as “tribalists.”

Unable to sleep the first few nights at FOB Mercury, I walked around the camp under the stars, watching marines wash their BDUs in plastic buckets with their rifles beside them, often the only chance they had to do such chores. Every few hours the ground would shake from a rocket or mortar attack on the base, which everyone quickly got used to, even as there were periodic casualties.

Lt. Col. Byrne’s next excursion was to Al-Karmah, nicknamed “Bad Karma” by the 82nd. Located between FOB Mercury and western Baghdad, it was a mini-Fallujah, a town where the soldiers of the 82nd were always getting shot at. Like Al-Fallujah, Karmah was a lawless town on the smuggling ratline to Jordan and Syria, where tribal rule was supreme and no one went to the police for anything. As with Al-Fallujah, Saddam had kept control by turning it into a Baath party stronghold. Both of these towns had a strong sense of local identity. The state of Iraq had usually counted for little in such places, except when it employed high levels of oppression.

Before departing for Al-Karmah, Chief Warrant Officer Todd Mathisen of Reno, Nevada, a surrogate chaplain, read us Psalm 91, the so-called warrior psalm: because “He is my refuge and my fortress…. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.” Mathisen told us that in Hebrew the words “trust” and “refuge” can mean the same thing. “So if you trust in the Lord of the Israelites, gents, you will be protected. Remember, you’re on the enemy’s

playground, the terrain of evil. To trust in the Lord is the best way to hunt down the devil.”

After more than a year of travel with the U.S. military, I had become accustomed to such sermons. They revealed a similar emphasis on a Christian God evinced by American troops in their letters home during the Revolutionary War, in the songs the soldiers sang during the Civil War that, as Edmund Wilson noted, “were like psalms,” and in the stirring photos of Marines bowing down in prayer prior to the Pacific landings of World War II.¹³ Though today’s society may be more multicultural than those of the past, that is much less the case regarding the religious makeup of our all-volunteer military. Moreover, for young men living in austere conditions who were not rear-echelon types counting the days to go home but combat troops going out daily to risk their lives, morale could not be based on polite subtleties or secular philosophical constructions, but only on the stark belief in your own righteousness, and in the iniquity of your enemy.

Al-Karmah was heralded by a lovely mosque with a dazzling blue faience dome. Otherwise, it was a shithole. As soon as we pulled into the police station, Gunner Bednarcik had his marines mount the rooftop and fan out in a 360-degree protective fire formation. Lt. Col. Hagen then took Lt. Col. Byrne into the station to introduce the incoming Marine commander to the police chief, Ahmed Abdul Kareen. Kareen was the third police chief in Al-Karmah since the American conquest. The first had proved incompetent. The second had been assassinated. Kareen immediately began asking for more pistols and flak jackets, and complained about car thefts and other crimes that he was unable to stop. The police here had no power to bring in criminals; only the sheikhs could do that.

We moved to another room in the police station where the new town council had been assembled. The talk was about providing seed to the farmers, repairing a cement factory to create several hundred more jobs, landscaping a soccer field for local youth, and ripping out the guardrails on the highway which terrorists were using to plant IEDs. The civil affairs officers whom Lt. Col. Byrne had brought along took notes and asked follow-up questions. The area was too dangerous to interest civilian relief charities.

Outside the police station, I saw that the Gunner was not altogether happy with how the Renegades had manned and maintained their fire positions. “We’re new,” he told me. “That’s what makes us vulnerable. The 82nd knows this place like their front yard. It’s only a matter of time before we’re tested.”

That happened on the next visit to Al-Karmah. Toward the end of the next council meeting, the police fled and the kids on the streets beside the station scattered. Shops shut, bad signs all. A few minutes later, rocket-propelled grenades hit the compound, followed by mortar rounds from the east, and small arms fire from a girls’ school to the west. The small arms fire then came at the Renegades from the north, as the beginning of an encircling movement: a classic ambush. The firefight lasted more than an hour. A QRF (quick reaction force) was called in over the radio, including helicopters. Sgt. D was all over the place, zigzagging, carefully firing off rounds, encouraging his men. Cpl. Pena and the others were on the rooftops, shooting. When he returned to FOB Mercury and finally cleared his rifle in the clearing barrel, Sgt. D’s smile was so wide it seemed that his whole face would split apart. It was the platoon’s first firefight since OIF-I. For the two platoon members who had not fought in Iraq the previous year, Al-Karmah was the place where they had their “cherries popped.”

That night Gunner Bednarcik’s and Sgt. D’s marines were in high spirits, sitting around in camp chairs under the stars, reliving every moment of the firefight. Lance Cpl. Neal told me, “It never fails. You never feel so alive as after you’ve just been in a close firefight, then had a hot shower, and had your laundry done.” He himself had not gotten off a shot that day. “I stayed dry,” he explained matter-of-factly. “I had no viable target to shoot at. I’m the machine gunner. I have to be extra careful.” In fact, a few days later, one of the town council members would compliment Lt. Col. Byrne on the disciplined shooting of his men. Not one civilian had been hit. It made it easier for the council members to justify to their constituents the American counterattack. Marines were tough young kids from troubled backgrounds, but when the shooting started, I was impressed at how they instantly became mature and calculating thirty-year-olds.

My next visit to Al-Karmah was two days later with Bravo Company, commanded by Capt. Jason Eugene Smith of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a graduate of Louisiana State University. Capt. Smith, with his determined, rawboned visage, was one of the battalion linchpins.

Organizationally, the Marine Corps was shaped like a triangle; it kept subdividing into threes. Thus, the 1st of the 5th had three infantry companies, or “line” companies: Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie. That wasn’t the whole story, though. There was also a weapons company, and a “command element” for Lt. Col. Byrne, managed by Gunner Bednarcik. But the company captains—of Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Weapons—were the universal joints for the battalion. Because the Marine Corps had a more powered-down hierarchy than the Army, the company captains were the equivalent of the Army’s iron majors.

The infantry captains for 1/5 were variations of the same mold: intense, terse, driven, and generally humorless, like Capt. Cassidy in Djibouti, only more so because of the combat-active environment in Iraq. Because majors and up in the Marine Corps are prisoners of staff work, for the captains this would be their last chance to be in the field with the grunts. Thus, they were all out to prove themselves. Capt. Jason Smith was no exception.

He told his marines, “We’re going into Al-Karmah as the first group after the gun battle. We’re going to get off the trucks, walk the streets, look people in the eye—to let ’em see the good things about the United States. The kids here refer to the terrorists as ‘Ali Babas.’[80] So be aware when you hear those words. Look for the presence of the abnormal: horns honking, kids fleeing, stores closing. The police chief and many of the townspeople are on the fence. We’ve got to show ’em the way to go.”

As soon as we arrived at the police station, the police fled, running past us in the opposite direction. Stores closed, kids ran, and traffic disappeared off the streets. As I entered the station with Capt. Smith, I braced for a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades. Meanwhile, other elements of Bravo Company were flooding adjacent areas of the town with foot patrols.

Capt. Smith, his translator, and I entered the police chief’s office. Another Marine officer followed us inside, but Capt. Smith told him to leave, saying, “I want to talk frankly to the police chief.” Tension seemed to suffocate the room.

“I’m here to make sure you fulfill your obligations,” Capt. Smith told Chief Kareen. “Why did your men just desert the station?”

“Only civilians fled,” the chief replied nervously.

“I didn’t see civilians. I saw men in uniform run away,” Capt. Smith replied icily in a mild southern drawl. “If I were concerned with my own safety, I’d have stayed home in the United States. I expect a similar attitude from you and your men. You’re going to see a lot of the Marines from now on. We know 95 percent of the town are good people, intimidated by the other 5 percent. I am aware of the risk you take by working with us. We are prepared to take the same risk.”[81]

Whereas Capt. Smith’s bearing was erect, immobile, and unblinking as he stared laser-like at the police chief, the police chief was bobbing and weaving all over the room, lighting a cigarette, moving from chair to chair, his back curled like a wet noodle, delivering evasive answers. The police chief made demands for more flak jackets and other equipment, which Capt. Smith promised to facilitate. Upon leaving the room, Capt. Smith told me that the police chief was a bellwether challenge: if the Marines were serious about proving that they were the superior tribe in town, the police chief might show more courage. On the other hand, it might just be a matter of getting a new chief. “This guy was appointed,” Smith observed. “We might have to find somebody crazy enough to volunteer.”

Outside we noticed new Arabic graffiti: “Death to Traitors.” “Long live Saddam Hussein.” “Kill the Members of the City Council.” The information officer with us made a note to return and paint over the graffiti, and replace it with new slogans. The Marines were about to initiate a graffiti war.

No one attacked us, though. Some local kids told us that they saw more than thirty Ali Babas with RPGs and AK-47s run away as soon as the Marines dismounted from their vehicles to commence foot patrols. One officer remarked that a simple change in the TTPs (tactics, techniques, and procedures), such as sending in foot patrols at the same time we entered the police station, is “more effective than all the high-tech shit.”

Later at FOB Mercury, 1/5’s civil affairs officers were briefed by their outgoing 82nd counterparts about two road-widening projects for Al-Karmah, originally slated to cost $32,000 and $75,000, respectively, for which the local contractor was now demanding more money.

“What about bringing in another contractor from Baghdad?” someone asked.

“If you bring in an outside contractor, he’ll end up dead,” the officer from the 82nd said. It was assumed that the cost overruns were because the contractor and some city council members wanted a slice of the American largesse. “It’s like Kosovo,” remarked Gunnery Sgt. Mark Kline, an

African-American from Kansas City, Missouri, with experience in the Balkans. “The whole system here has been built on graft. All we can do is get these folks out of the ditch they’re in, to a slightly higher level of development. What we call corruption is their way of doing things.”

I went on a number of Humvee patrols deep into the countryside of central Iraq. It was an extraordinary landscape. My first impression was of a flat, ashen monotony pulverized by the sun. Within that monotony, though, was a pageant of micro-terrains created by ruler-straight, fungal-green irrigation ditches cut into the earth like cuneiform marks; and sluggish rivers, including the Euphrates, whose slate-blue surfaces would harden into a chain of goose bumps in the breeze. Masses of reeds, fatalistic and yielding, twice the height of a man, whispered like time itself in the wind.

“You know what it all reminds me of?” remarked Gunner Bednarcik. “South Carolina. Yeah, real tranquil. Nothing like shrimping in South Carolina. The tide comes in and the shrimp feed in the marshes.” A look of ecstasy crossed his face.

The ditches and dams, as well as the wide and navigable cement-lined canals—like the one that stretched from Baghdad all the way to the Syrian border—were impressive feats of engineering, as were the highways, cloverleaf overpasses, and architectural immensities of the Green Zone. Saddam, like the tyrants of Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China, was a classic “hydraulic” dictator. According to the early-twentieth-century German political scientist Karl Wittfogel, who borrowed from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s theory of “oriental despotism,” civilizations of the Near and Far East have manifested an absolutism “more comprehensive and more oppressive than its Western counterpart.”¹⁴ This was due to the disciplined social organization required to maintain extensive water and irrigation systems and other public works projects in age-old river valleys. That, in turn, led to the raising of large armies and the building of massive defense works.

Sitting in the back of a seven-ton truck during presence patrols in the Iraqi countryside meant bumps and bruises and dust so fine it billowed up from the tires like smoke. Relief came from the smiling farmers and their families who would gather on the berms under the date palms to wave; as a whole, the rural areas were the most friendly to the Americans, since deep in the Mesopotamian outback the Baath party had been weakest. A year after OIF-I, the fact that hordes of Iraqis in most of the country were still smiling at American troops did not qualify as news. Yet simply because it was a mundane reality did not render it insignificant.

The pro-American sentiment continued despite the lack of demonstrable improvements in people’s lives. Farmers complained to the marines about the lack of clean water and functioning schools. For all intents and purposes, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the civilian arm of the American occupation, had no presence in much of Iraq. To the degree that anything got done in these regions, it was done by the American military.

One day on patrol an Iraqi man waved us down to warn of a suspicious object he had noticed on a bridge we were about to cross. The convoy halted, and several marines went on foot to inspect. They saw an IED. An explosives team was called in, and the object was detonated. It turned out to be a daisy chain of six bombs composed of 120mm and 155mm rounds, primed by a cell phone signal. When the explosives team detonated the 155mm rounds—the same used for booby traps in Vietnam—you could feel the air pressure almost a mile away.

It was the very lifesaving helpfulness of people in the rural areas that sometimes, albeit indirectly, depressed the marines, for despite OIF-II’s emphasis on winning hearts and minds, they still wanted to fight. Another day while we were on patrol, word came of 1/5’s first casualty of the current deployment. Pfc. Gerardo Perez of Houston had been wounded by a bullet in the shoulder while his platoon was helping another battalion during a firefight in nearby Al-Fallujah. “Fuck, why didn’t that happen to us,” blurted the marine next to me in the back of the seven-ton. “Fuck him, so he’s wounded, he’ll live, at least he was in a fight,” said another marine. “I’m going to crack your asses for saying those things,” their sergeant said. “Don’t get us wrong,” the first marine told me. “We care about the guy who was wounded. But shit happens. We just want the chance to do what we’ve been trained for.”

I understood the feeling. If you were going to be a journalist, you should want to be where there was real reporting to do, not back in Washington covering press conferences or going on talk shows. And if you were going to join the military, I assumed you would want to fight.

The first WIA (wounded in action) had whetted 1/5’s appetite. It was an indicator that, as one marine put it, “the pace would pick up.” One senior noncom told me: “Mark my words, this SASO [stability and security operations—nation building] shit is going out the window. OIF-II will turn to be as violent as OIF-I.”

The 82nd Airborne finally departed the area. A ceremony was held in the chow hall handing over FOB Mercury to the Marines. Again, the chaplain delivered a benediction. Bagpipes sounded a Christian hymn and the “Marine Hymn,” and everybody shouted, “Ooh-rah.” The base was promptly renamed FOB Abu Ghraib (not to be confused with the prison), just as St. Mere was renamed FOB Al-Fallujah. The Marines, in keeping with their small wars tradition, consciously wanted to fit in with the local environment wherever possible.

Conditions at the renamed FOB Abu Ghraib got worse before they got better. Water for the showers ran out in the evening and on a few occasions ceased for up to thirty-six hours at a time, even as marines came back from patrols lathered in grime and sweat; nor was the electricity dependable. People had to scavenge for toilet paper and for plastic drinking water bottles even. The Kellogg, Brown & Root–staffed Army bases that I knew from Afghanistan and elsewhere appeared luxurious in retrospect. When the weather turned hot, the water problem became more acute. The Gunner joked that marines turn every place they go into a slum.

Soon living conditions began to improve—somewhat. Meanwhile, more and more HESCO baskets and Texas barriers were brought in to contain mortar and rocket blasts, which were unceasing. The mortar and rocket attacks from the direction of Al-Fallujah and Al-Karmah necessitated night-long patrols that were the essence of drudgery: hanging around in a suspect spot in the darkness, shivering, getting a headache from the night vision goggles, seeing and hearing nothing, then returning bleary-eyed at dawn, only to learn that soon after you left the place, a mortar was launched at the FOB from a nearby spot.[82]

Ten days after we had settled in, with nighttime attacks continuing, Lt. Col. Byrne established platoon-sized satellite bases beyond the FOB, which, in turn, dispatched fire teams that camped out at night and went on foot marches through the countryside. In short, the Marines were doing many of the things that Army Special Forces in Afghanistan had wanted to do, but which the regular Army in Bagram wouldn’t let them.

“It isn’t enough, though,” Gunner Bednarcik warned, shaking his head. “We need to put FOBs right in the middle of some of these towns, like Al-Fallujah and Al-Karmah.”

Events would prove him right.

On one patrol we found suspicious burn marks by a road near the Euphrates. The marks were in haystacks and berms, both of which could absorb the back blast of a mortar. Being near a road, the attackers could escape before the radar-driven “counter-battery” of the Americans destroyed the site. The perseverance paid off. One morning before dawn, I got up and walked across the FOB’s gravel expanse to the Porta-John to take a leak. On the way back, shuffling toward me, guarded by two marines, was a veritable Ghost of Christmas-Yet-to-Come. The hooded PUC (person under control), along with two others, had been caught with IED-making equipment, mortar materials, and a truck filled with sandbags on which a tire rested: the perfect makeshift mobile rocket-launching platform. Because their legs were caked with mud, it was assumed that the mortar caches were located alongside riverbanks and irrigation ditches.

Lt. Col. Byrne was under considerable pressure from his superiors on this issue. Truly, the law of military bureaucracy is that shit rolls downhill. “Your orders are to hunt and kill these fuckers,” one general commanded Byrne. “Bring me back dead folk.” The higher-ups knew that it was only a matter of time before one of the insurgents got lucky and hit a chow hall with a mortar or rocket during mealtime, or a crowded MWR (moral, welfare, and recreation) facility, killing dozens or more marines in one blow.

One blazing hot afternoon in the camp after a mortar attack, Pfc. Jason Igo, one of the Renegades, called out to me, “Hey, Bob, where ya from?” After I told him, I asked where he was from. “All over,” he said. “A military brat, uh?” I responded. “No, I was homeless. I lived in abandoned apartments, backyards, trailers, in Washington, Oregon, Minnesota…. I was abandoned at twelve, didn’t know my father till I was fifteen. His girlfriend didn’t like me, though.” Pfc. Igo had fought in OIF-I. He had no plans to reenlist. He wanted to attend a technical college in Arizona. The Marine Corps, he told me, had given him a stability that he had never had before.

FOB Abu Ghraib was a fighting camp, the one that I had been looking for throughout my travels. Once, coming back in the middle of the day from a patrol that had started before dawn, I found the base nearly empty; most of the marines were where they needed to be, outside the perimeter, in the midst of Iraqi towns and villages. If only more American bases in Iraq and elsewhere were like this, I thought—with few creature comforts and consequently a short support tail.

There was a particular sanctity about the chow hall: grim, badly lit, with depressing food, marines jammed together beside long tables, wearing flak jackets, gummed with dust, their rifles and helmets at their feet, every sixth marine or so quietly praying and crossing himself before starting to eat. Second Lt. David Russell of San Antonio, Texas, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis—a marine with an unfailingly delightful disposition—told me one evening, eyeing the mess hall: “Isn’t this place great! I love being here. It’s the new version of the Wild West, minus the booze, the whores, and the fun, of course. But we do have Indians in Iraq—good Indians and”—his voice lowering in mock seriousness—“very, very bad Indians.”

One day I went out with 2nd Lt. Russell and the rest of Alpha Company on a foot patrol through Nassir wa Salaam, a predominantly Shiite town in the midst of the Sunni Triangle. Nassir wa Salaam meant “Victory and Peace,” a bombastic artificial name that Saddam had given it. Its real name was Haswa, the place of gravel. Haswa was decked with flags and other Shiite regalia. In Iraq even the Sunni mosques, because of the Persian architectural influence, looked Shiite. Thus, it was only through the flags that you could tell from the outside whether a mosque was really Shiite or not: red and black flags for the Imam Hussein, the Shiite martyr massacred at Karbala in A.D. 680; green flags for Abbas, the Prophet Mohammed’s uncle and founder of the Abbasid caliphate based in medieval Baghdad; and yellow for the twelfth imam, whom Shiites believe is in occultation and will return to earth at some point.

Our first stop in Haswa was the police station, where the chief told us that as everywhere else in central Iraq since the toppling of Saddam, his town was besieged by a crime wave, carjacking in particular. As marines began to walk the streets they attracted hordes of kids and rough teenagers who had no jobs or schools to go to. They were friendly, but only because the Iraqi Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, had told them to be.

The ICOMs suddenly stopped working. Lt. Russell looked up at the town’s sagging electric wires. “Yeah, the power lines here bleed electricity and knock out our intra-squad radios. If we get into trouble now, I can’t communicate with the rest of the company. It’s an example of how third world infrastructure defeats Western technology and power.” As often, the best communication turned out to be shouting.

The intelligence provided to the marines about IEDs was useless. It told them to beware of garbage, junkyards, old white cars, and so forth. But there was garbage and old white cars everywhere, and the whole town was a junkyard. The “latest and greatest” advice was to beware of kids on old bicycles. There were kids on old bicycles everywhere we looked. Here and there throughout the day we saw expensive late-model sedans—the kind used for car bombs. In Haswa every situation the entire day just smelled bad; thus all you could do was relax, give yourself up to fate, and enjoy the scenery.

Lt. Russell remarked wryly, as though seeing all this from a safe distance: “I remember reading about foot patrols in Vietnam. Over six months the casualty rate from booby traps would be 30 percent, and yet no one ever saw the enemy. That’s the kind of stuff that drives you insane. An enemy you can see focuses your organizational skills and actually reduces stress.”

Alpha Company’s commander was Capt. Philip Treglia of Elida, Ohio. “We will divide responsibility three ways on this patrol,” he told his men. “One marine smiles, talks with the kids and the hajis, and does the public relations. The marine behind him has the responsibility for intel, like registering the GPS position for any guy with a beard who won’t shake hands or gives you a stink stare. The third marine never takes off his sunglasses. His hand is on the trigger all the time. His only job is security.”

Angry complaints from passersby assaulted our ears. “We have no water or electricity”… “The city council that you Americans established was supposed to provide us with services, but it stole the money. They are a bunch of thieves”… “The city council was supposed to build us a soccer field, they’re all bastards. Do something!”… “My house was broken into, can you find and arrest the culprit?”… “My daughter has an irregular heartbeat, can I take her to your military doctor?” In one section of town, anger over water cutoffs was so passionate that Lt. Russell ordered his platoon to distribute a mineral water bottle to one person in every household. As he later admitted, it was a well-intentioned but ineffectual action. But he felt that he just had to do something.

The theme throughout the day was the same: the citizens of this ratty, crumbling, fly-and-garbage-strewn, overcrowded Shiite hellhole of seventy-five thousand were dumbfounded and disappointed that the Americans, who had done what none of them thought possible—swiftly dismantle Saddam’s totalitarian regime—now couldn’t even get the tap water running or the garbage collected.

I saw mounds of chopped-up automobile parts and trash everywhere. Yet here and there were new rooftop satellite dishes. Women stood silently in the alleys, hidden under abayas, just staring at us. People seemed increasingly aware of the outside world, and therefore increasingly dissatisfied at their predicament, even as their town teetered on the brink of chaos and lawlessness, and the city council had lost all legitimacy. Haswa—Nassir wa Salaam—was Liberia or Sierra Leone without the violence. Only tribe and religion held society together here.

“To rule this place,” Lt. Russell observed, “requires an infinite capacity to give, and an infinite capacity to hurt.”

Two days later came the Haswa City Council meeting. In a grim room with busted windows, Marine officers and council members—men in keffiyahs and Western suits, and women with kerchiefs—filled boxy brown sofas. Syrupy tea was offered in small glasses. I expected Lt. Col. Byrne and Maj. Larry Kaifesh of Chicago, the battalion civil affairs officer, to read the riot act to the council for its delinquency in providing constituents with basic services. But it didn’t happen, for the problems turned out to be frustratingly complicated.

The water pumping station was short of electricity. The pumps were out of order. Pipes were broken. Under the new democratic regime, proper tenders for all this work had to be submitted; that would take time. Some of the tenders already submitted turned out to be fake. One of the contractors had absconded with money. Meanwhile, nearby towns were pleading for water hookups, further straining the system. The council was like the one in western Baghdad. Its members were either well-meaning, albeit ineffectual, or not well-meaning at all. A mixture of passivity and intrigue undermined the discussions. The council members became passionate only when asking the marines for personal favors: obtaining weapons licenses and satellite phones.

Listening to all the steps required to get the tap water running, I reflected that Saddam was able to break through bureaucratic logjams by employing fear and coercion. In fact, Iraqis cared more about the tangible necessities of daily life, like water and electricity, than about less tangible things like democracy. Democracy here would be a much slower process than in the Balkans, which represented a far more advanced region of the old Ottoman Empire.

Some of the departed Army officers had confided to me that they got results only by dealing directly with the tribal leaders, even as they paid lip service to the new democratic councils. Marines were coming to a similar conclusion. “This SASO shit just isn’t working,” one noncom told me yet again. “I hope we go back to fighting, like in OIF-I.”

He soon got his wish.

On March 31, 2004, a few weeks after 1/5 had arrived from Kuwait, a van with four American contractors was ambushed in Al-Fallujah. The vehicle was blasted with small arms fire and set alight. Frenzied crowds dragged the burned bodies through the streets. Two of the four were hung from a nearby bridge. Some of the body parts were cut off with shovels. Headlines in the United States compared the incident to the killings of Americans eleven years before in Mogadishu, Somalia.

There was relatively little talk about the incident at FOB Abu Ghraib. Marines digested the news silently; discerning what the consequences would be for 1/5 wasn’t that difficult. The next day, April 1, Lt. Col. Byrne disappeared for many hours behind closed doors at the headquarters of the Regimental Combat Team at FOB Al-Fallujah. It was Capt. Jason Smith who quietly pulled me aside in the barracks and told me that 1/5 would be going into Al-Fallujah.

The briefing on April 2 at Camp Abu Ghraib’s Combat Operations Center was low key and terrifically business-like. The taking of a middle-sized city of 285,000 is an amazingly complex affair. Was there enough barbed wire on hand to create makeshift detention facilities? “We need wire, wire, and more wire,” Byrne said, “and that means we need a lot of stakes and pile drivers.” Were there enough translators, MREs, mineral water bottles, ammo, power amps, blue force trackers, and so on? An “ass-load” of refugees was assumed, which would require a whole logistics operation of its own. And how many marines should be left behind to secure the FOB in case of an attack? The attack on Al-Fallujah itself was just one of many details to be worked out.

A pattern set in that should not have been surprising, but which was extraordinary to actually observe: The more it became apparent that the battalion was really going to war, the quieter and more deliberate the discussions became. Marines kept more to themselves, busy packing; deciding what gear to take and what to leave behind could determine life or death days from now. People washed and groomed themselves, assuming it would be the last time for quite a while. In the shower I ran into the Navy doc, Lt. Cormac O’Connor of Indianapolis, Indiana. He prayed that he wouldn’t be busy in the coming weeks. It was a vain hope, he realized.

Power devolved to the head of the “Three Shop,” the Operations section of the battalion: Maj. Pete Farnum of Tipton, Iowa, whose tall, rather hulking, and quietly capable demeanor gave him a particular air of authority.[83] Maj. Farnum drove the briefings over coming days, variations of which would be part of those given the President of the United States, for the assault on Al-Fallujah, which was a political decision taken at the highest levels, would be worked out in detail here at FOB Abu Ghraib, at the nearby headquarters of the Regimental Combat Team, and at the FOB of another battalion (the 2nd Battalion of the 1st Marines) that would be included in the operation. The RCT building at FOB Al-Fallujah was suddenly besieged by men in civilian hiking clothes and bearing either M-4 assault rifles or Glock pistols: Army Special Forces, Delta, CIA, FBI, and other elements that would have pieces of the Marine-led attack on Al-Fallujah.

The process was like writing and performing a symphony whose complexity demanded that the main briefs be “fragged out” into smaller ones, dealing with different aspects of the task. For example, I attended a meeting dedicated to one matter only: arranging for Navy construction battalions to transport portable bunkers and other equipment to be used at the checkpoints set up around the city prior to the assault.

All the elements came together fast because of a factor largely missing from civilian life, the incontestability of command; meetings quickly resulted in priorities, which in turn led to decisions. As soon as the ranking officer decided on something, the debate moved on to the next point.

“Armies have always been viewed with suspicion in democratic societies because they are the least democratic of all social institutions,” writes the military historian Byron Farwell. “They are, in fact, not democratic at all. Governments which have tried to… blur the distinction between officer and man have not been successful. Armies,” Farwell goes on, “stand as disturbing reminders that democratic processes are not always the best, living and perpetual proof that, in at least this one area, the caste system works.”¹⁵ That was certainly true in the planning of the attack on Al-Fallujah.

At the Combat Operations Center, the room was packed as Maj. Farnum delivered his penultimate brief before 1/5 departed for Al-Fallujah. Among those in attendance were the four battle captains who would bear the heaviest load of risk and personal responsibility for the assault: Alpha Company commander, Capt. Philip Treglia; Bravo Company commander, Capt. Jason Smith; Charlie Company commander, Capt. Wilbert Dickens of Rich Square, North Carolina; and Capt. Blair Sokol of Newark, Delaware, the commander of Weapons Company.[84] Capt. Sokol, awarded the Bronze Star for valor in OIF-I, was a towering, taciturn man who had been a football lineman at the Naval Academy. He was also a tactical genius-in-the-making. This time he would remain slightly in the rear, in order to run the other three captains, and principally to deal with “deconfliction” issues:

When three companies assault a city in order to box in the enemy, the biggest danger is often not the enemy itself but friendly fire. And with 5.56mm rounds able to travel several miles before losing velocity, avoiding friendly fire in city streets—and at the same time orchestrating an attack from different directions—requires an uncommon instinct for spatial geometry.

Once more, Maj. Farnum went over the basics of the plan. The 1st of the 5th would bear responsibility for capturing the southern half of Al-Fallujah, the part below a main thoroughfare that the U.S. military had dubbed “Michigan.” The northern half of the city would be taken by the 2nd Battalion of the 1st Marines, or 2/1. But because the southern half of Al-Fallujah contained a sparsely populated industrial zone and an adjacent commercial area, both of which could be captured relatively easily, 1/5 would be the first battalion to establish a substantial foothold in the city.

Prior to the assault, nine traffic control points would be set up around Al-Fallujah to create a “blocking cordon,” isolating it and preventing insurgents, for the most part, from leaving or entering. Following that, the two battalions would occupy the city’s outskirts, using the new forward operating bases to prosecute raids for HVTs (high-value targets). Concomitantly, there would be IO (information operations), whose underlying message would be to convince the city’s inhabitants that the Marines represented the “superior tribe” there. Selling democracy not just in Al-Fallujah but elsewhere in the Sunni Triangle was an idea that had been losing traction for some time now.

One officer told me: “This is a flash-bang strategy. Stun the bad guys with aggressive fire, then psy-ops the shit out of them, always coming back to the theme of the inevitability of the superior tribe.”

The final stage would be the handover of the city to the new Iraqi Police, the new Iraqi Army, and the American-created Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC). Marines listened politely to this, but I don’t think they believed it. The ICDC and the Iraqi Police in the Al-Fallujah area were said to be deserting in droves, at the company level no less. I had found that the ICDC and the police were loyal where the Americans were strong and disloyal where there was a perception of American weakness. People in all cultures gravitate toward power and are susceptible to intimidation by thugs and chieftains. But the chieftain mentality was particularly prevalent in Iraq.[85]

As Maj. Farnum went through his brief, it dawned on everyone inside the room that Operation Valiant Resolve, as it was code-named, represented the opposite of what the Marines had come to Iraq to do. Instead of nation-building—what the Marines called SASO—they were about to lead a theater-level attack on a large urban area, with assistance from the CIA and the Army’s Delta force, 5th Special Forces group, and the psy-ops branch of Special Operations Command. Air assets would include AC-130 spectral gunships, Marine Cobra and UH-1D Huey helicopters, unmanned Pioneer surveillance planes, and Air Force F-15s.

The truth was, that what the Marines called OIF-II had quite literally become OIF-II. Like Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom of 2003 had been a relatively painless and dazzling success only because it was incomplete. In both cases, victory was declared before the hard part of the operation had been attempted. In 1991 in Desert Storm, key Republican Guard units had been left intact, allowing the regime to survive; in OIF-I, cities and towns like Al-Fallujah and Al-Karmah had largely been bypassed, without eradicating pro-regime elements in those places.

It was a classic American syndrome: an aversion to sustained engagement overseas that leads to more carnage, rather than less. The Americans wanted clean end-states and victory parades. Imperialism, though, is about never-ending involvement. And deny it all they wanted, American officials were in an imperial situation, even if the Bush administration and the troops themselves, to say nothing of the public, were uncomfortable with the word.

Maj. Farnum reiterated that Operation Valiant Resolve was not retribution for the butchery of March 31. “It’s just that the problem of Fallujah has festered to the point where dealing with it represents a pivot opportunity to improve the atmosphere in the entire AOR.”

He then deferred to Lt. Col. Byrne, who, because of his higher rank and the fact of his command over the battalion, needed to succinctly inspire the grunts for close-quarters combat against jihadists and the most hardened elements of the old regime. “Gents, let me tell you what this is really about. It’s about killing shitheads. The CG [commanding general of the 1st Division, Jim Mattis] has changed the op order from ‘capture or kill’ the enemy to ‘kill or capture.’ He wants the emphasis on ‘kill.’

“You’ll be facing interesting folk,” Byrne continued. “Guys who fought in Grozny [Chechnya], in Afghanistan, guys who aren’t all that interested in giving up. I made everyone grow mustaches for the sake of cultural sensitivity. Now I want you all to shave them off. We’re going on the offensive.”[86]

He then stood up, signaling the end of the brief. Everyone else stood up and shouted, “Ooh-rah.”

Outside, Lt. Russell, in his ever-chipper manner, noted a difficult truth: “This is one where we have no idea whether there will be lots of casualties within days, or no one will even shoot at us.” The biggest worry was that just one well-placed IED would cause a “cluster fuck,” or traffic foul-up, which, in turn, would facilitate a major ambush. Al-Fallujah was the ultimate challenge that the U.S. military had been studying and prepping for since the end of the Cold War, when MOUT (military operations in urban terrain) first came into vogue.

But some high-ranking marines were uncomfortable with that realization. After all, most of the precedents were bad: Mogadishu, Grozny, Jenin… You were ambushed as in Mogadishu in 1993, barely won through indiscriminate slaughter like the Russians in Grozny in the mid-1990s, or won relatively cleanly, in view of the circumstances, like the Israelis in Jenin in 2002, but nowhere near clean enough to satisfy world public opinion.

Actually, there was a model to be followed, at least partially, one that Lt. Col. Byrne occasionally alluded to, and which harked back to one of the most glorious chapters in Marine history. It was the twenty-six-day battle for Hue in Vietnam, that began January 31, 1968, during the Tet offensive. According to the Marine Corps Gazette, Hue bears no less a positive connotation than the battles of Belleau Wood, in France in 1918, and Tarawa, in the central Pacific in 1943.[87]

A former imperial city of the once-unified Vietnam with 140,000 inhabitants, located near the Demilitarized Zone, Hue had been stormed by 12,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars. They rounded up South Vietnamese soldiers, government officials, and other American sympathizers, clubbing or shooting up to 6,000 of them to death. American soldiers and marines, including the 1st of the 5th, counterattacked, leading to a month of brutal, theater-level urban combat that featured three undermanned Marine infantry battalions fighting house-to-house. The Marines, in helping to take back the heavily fortified urban center, helped to kill 5,113 of the enemy and expel almost another 5,000, while suffering only 147 killed and 857 wounded: results that they would have qualified as an historic victory in either of the two world wars.[88] Of the 6,000 prisoners and civilians slaughtered by the Hanoi government, 3,000 mass graves were discovered. The indiscriminate North Vietnamese massacre of thousands, as well as the Marine and Army heroism inside the city, went relatively unnoticed in the America media, though, compared to coverage of the massacre at My Lai, which happened a month later, in which a U.S. Army platoon killed 347 innocent civilians.¹⁶[89]

Al-Fallujah might be like Hue, I thought. As at Hue (and Stalingrad, too) snipers on both sides would provide a force-multiplier effect. Like Hue, it would be a messy squad leader’s war, a struggle of privates first class and corporals rushing from street to street, where the enemy would hide within crowds, firing mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, and mosques would be used as enemy fortresses in a similar way that Buddhist temples had been at Hue. It would be a battle where a certain percentage of the local inhabitants would sympathize with the insurgents, but where the majority would flee or lie low, just trying to survive.¹⁷

More briefings followed at lower levels of command. Each company captain briefed his staff noncoms on their specific routes and objectives in the city, and the radio frequencies and call signs to be used. Briefs were also held on the placement of heavy guns and snipers. The engineers had to decide where to drop dirt and spike strips for the roadblocks. The order of the convoy to the battle zone had to be established, divided by “sticks” and “serials,” just as before the departure from Kuwait. By the evening of April 4, the officers had already gone several days with little sleep. This was before the operation had begun.

“Stepping time” was scheduled for 1 a.m. on April 5. At 7:30 p.m. April 4, Capt. Jason Smith assembled Bravo Company in a V formation in front of the red company flag. He told his 150 marines that they should be grateful for the opportunity now given them. Then a chaplain, Navy Lt. Wayne Hall of Oklahoma City, blessed Bravo: “Today is Palm Sunday,” he began, “the day of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, where he broke the bounds of Hell. Tonight commences your triumphal entry into Fallujah, a place in the bounds of Hell. This is a spiritual battle, and you marines are the tools of mercy.” As he invoked the holy spirit, the 150 marines dropped to one knee and bowed their heads, removing their bush or field caps as they did so.

I told Capt. Smith that I would link up with Bravo the next day, after accompanying Lt. Col. Byrne to Al-Fallujah’s outskirts. Capt. Smith’s face was glowing in rapture. This was the moment he had lived for. Bravo had been selected to be the tip of the spear for the assault inside the city, just as Bravo Company of the 1st of the 5th Marines had been the first inside the citadel of Hue thirty-six years earlier.¹⁸

By 9 p.m. the camp was silent, as many marines slid away to take power naps. In the shadows cast by the full moon I noticed scout-snipers painting their faces in green cammie stick.¹⁹

A few hours later, we “stepped” outside the gate.

The weather had turned cold and windy. The dust of the desert looked like snow in the moonlight. In under an hour, the Renegades arrived at a point in the desert half a mile outside Al-Fallujah, where a communications team set up a temporary command post for Lt. Col. Byrne. Al-Fallujah was a line of twinkling yellow and bluish lights, where the sound of small arms fire and RPGs could be heard intermittently: Charlie Company, commanded by Capt. Wilbert Dickens, had already made “contact” with the enemy at the “cloverleaf,” a highway intersection outside the city to the northeast.

It was too cold and cramped in the Humvee for me to sleep. Along with Gunner Bednarcik, Cpl. Pena, and Lance Cpl. Neal, I listened to the news of the cloverleaf engagement on the battalion “tac” (tactical radio network) throughout the night. Catnapping in daylight and staying up all night would become a pattern over the coming week. Night fighting favored the Americans, armed with night vision goggles. As Lt. Col. Byrne had told me, “The bad guys only have what God gave them. We have what Raytheon gave us.”

At dawn, coughing and freezing, I walked over to Byrne’s Humvee. He was sitting in the back seat, his head half hidden inside a balaclava, shivering and coated with dust like the rest of us. He was listening and talking to three different radio nets at once. Military command is about making split-second executive decisions, the consequences of which might psychologically immobilize your average CEO, and making those decisions during periods of extreme physical discomfort.

I asked Byrne why the Marines had not shut down Al-Fallujah immediately after the murder of the contractors, to prevent the perpetrators from escaping the city: what the Israelis would likely have done. Instead, they had waited five days.

He explained: “In the West Bank, the Israelis have ‘flooded the zone,’ dividing it into sectors and checkpoints. Because the Israelis are already there in such numbers, it’s less trouble for them to cordon off a city. But we are spread thin throughout Iraq. For us to cordon off a city takes a special effort. If we do that every time there is an outrage, soon the enemy will be dictating our every movement.”

Indeed, the Marines were doing this operation on a shoestring, initially with two battalions, when they really required three: Hue, a city with half the population of Al-Fallujah, had been invested with nearly three Marine battalions. As I had observed in Afghanistan, there were just too many support troops concentrated near the capital, and too few fighting elements dispersed throughout the countryside. Nothing angered me more than to enter a vast chow hall at Camp Victory, the headquarters of the military coalition at Baghdad airport, and see it teeming with troops choosing different kinds of fine cakes for dessert, and then to travel in the countryside and see barely a U.S. presence at all. The U.S. military was everywhere burdened by a top-heavy bureaucracy, with too many layers of staff that needed pampering. Thus, it was organizationally miscast for dealing with twenty-first-century insurgencies. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, as I had seen, the U.S. military had set up structures it was historically comfortable with, not those particularly suited for the challenge at hand.

I spent the first half of April 5 touring various traffic checkpoints with Byrne, and listening to casualty reports (eight wounded so far). In mid-afternoon, regimental and division-level commanders powwowed with Byrne and his company captains by the side of his Humvee in the desert, a mile outside Al-Fallujah. A snatch of the conversation:

It was decided that when Bravo Company penetrated the city along with Alpha and Charlie, all fanning out in different directions in the industrial zone of southeastern Al-Fallujah, marines would affix bayonets to their M-16 assault rifles. The point was mainly psychological: to show the people of Al-Fallujah that the marines truly meant business. As one high-ranking officer told me, “Folks here have been conditioned to seeing the U.S. Army patrol the main roads in large vehicles. We aim to dismount and enter on foot with bayonets.”

After the division and regimental commanders left, Byrne and his captains went over the radio call signs: “Geronimo” for the lieutenant colonel and the Renegades, “Apache” for Alpha Company, “Blackhawk” for Bravo, “Red Cloud” for a platoon from Weapons Company that would assist Alpha and Bravo, “Little Wolf” and “Crazy Horse” for two counter-mechanized units, and so on.

As the sun was setting and word came of three KIAs from Charlie Company by the cloverleaf, I said goodbye to Lt. Col. Byrne and walked with Capt. Smith a few hundred yards through the desert to where Bravo Company was assembling for the night attack.

Capt. Smith briefed his lieutenants and staff noncoms, then conducted comms rehearsals. They lit cigars and had a smoke together before dispersing to their various Humvees and seven-tons. Smith handed me over to 2nd Lt. Joshua Palmer of Banning, California, who escorted me to the seven-ton in which I would be riding.

Second Lt. Joshua Palmer, like 2nd Lt. David Russell, was a polished, well-spoken, and well-read college graduate in his early twenties, who had joined the corps out of a true sense of idealism. I remember the serene glow in his eyes. He talked easily with his men, who had not the education that he had. Like Capt. Smith, 2nd Lt. Palmer was the picture of contentment that evening. The two of us sat together in the front of the seven-ton, talking about books and listening to the sounds of rockets and mortars above the drone of the truck engine, trying to forget how cold we were. Al-Fallujah lay a quarter of a mile away.

Al-Fallujah was known as the “city of mosques,” with more than two hundred in the city and surrounding villages, making it a regional center of Sunni Islam. Its name, though, might have had a pagan derivation: Pallugtha, an Assyrian word for “division,” a reference to a side branch of the Euphrates that no longer existed. Al-Fallujah marked a northern border of the kingdom of Hammurabi (1792–1750 B.C.). From antiquity, one of the two major land-based trade routes that connected Mesopotamia to Syria and the Mediterranean began near here. Because of the city’s reputation for tribal independence and smuggling, Saddam had to work to keep the city under control. Thus, it was made into a Baath party stronghold.

At midnight the trucks began to move, zigzagging without lights to avoid mortar hits as we crossed the short patch of desert to where the city streets began. In a moment we were outside the walls of the soft drink factory which satellite photos and other intel had indicated would make a suitable forward operating base for Lt. Col. Byrne and 1/5. Immediately Bravo began rounding up PUCs, including some Sudanese nationals. But the factory was taken without a fight.

Byrne soon arrived to take command of his new post, a sprawling cluster of one-story buildings protected by an outer wall. With him was Col. John Toolan of Brooklyn, the RCT-1 commander. Col. Toolan tried to inspect the area to the east of the compound, but his up-armored Humvee immediately came under intense bombardment, silenced by the guns of a hovering AC-130 Spectre gunship called in by a forward air controller on the ground.[90] All of this happened within the space of a few minutes.

I found Capt. Smith just as he had begun to lead Bravo’s advance deeper into the city on foot. Streets and buildings were blacked out. Marines fanned out into alleys under the moonlight, as mortars and rockets sounded in the northern half of the city, a half mile away, where we could see tracers.

It was organized confusion, as Smith kept trying to ascertain the boundary seams between Bravo and Alpha directly to the south and behind us. Against a surrealistic urban landscape of howling stray dogs and the sand-encrusted remains of rusted automobiles and cement mixers, marines in their desert cammies crouched motionlessly at every intersection, like so many gray boulders, peering through their night vision goggles, their rifles covering designated fields of fire.

Smith’s forward contingent of Bravo moved out of the industrial zone and into an area of low-end stores. Yet the whole of Al-Fallujah still looked like one big automobile chop shop. Just before dawn, when the prayer call sounded from nearby mosques, we reached “Michigan,” the broad thoroughfare that marked the northern edge of 1/5’s responsibility. It would be days before the other battalion—2/1—might be able to reach it from the other side.

Smith immediately began ordering marines onto rooftops; he wanted “guardian angels” everywhere when daylight arrived. Because there was a shortage of lightweight portable ladders, marines had to scramble onto each other’s shoulders.

Smith; his 1st sergeant, Scott Van De Ven of Grayling, Michigan; a radio operator whose name I neglected to write down; and I scrambled onto a roof, only to find that rather than the flat empty space we had anticipated, this roof and every other one nearby was cluttered with rusted and discarded mufflers and tailpipes, to such an extent that we all had to pitch in and make space just to lie down and rest, in shifts. I managed an hour’s sleep. I used one of the rusted mufflers as a pillow and awoke covered in filth. I looked around in broad daylight to see the roofscape of Al-Fallujah covered with thousands upon thousands of old mufflers and tailpipes, guarded by U.S. Marines, standing atop this part of the city with fixed bayonets.

Mosques and factories loomed in the distance. It was truly ugly: the classic terrain of radicalism, occupied by the lumpen faithful.²⁰ Islamic radicalism should be distinguished from Islamic conservatism. Conservatism is about tradition, often featuring a high degree of aesthetics, and is notably represented by the royal courts of Morocco, Jordan, and the Gulf states. But radicalism germinates from a break in tradition, when Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam) finds itself amid the alienating anonymity of early-industrial-age slums and shantytowns, where traditions can be maintained only by reinventing religion in a more abstract and ideological form. Indeed, Al-Fallujah’s ancient-looking factories had a Cold War, Eastern Bloc quality to them that reminded me of 1980s Romania.

First Sgt. Scott Van De Ven immediately began calling over the intra-squad radios for water, chow, and radio batteries. Capt. Smith had other concerns: the marines were spread out too sparsely at intersections and on the rooftops, even as suspicious late-model cars began prowling the area. The bad guys were casing our locations. Smith immediately demanded the establishment of roadblocks over the ICOM and battalion “tac.” The empty streets and closed shops were signs that we would soon be attacked.

It was impressive the way the insurgents, as well as the local population at large, could gather information about the marines so quickly. British Col. Callwell wrote at the end of the nineteenth century that indigenous forces are helped by a system of intelligence that seems to issue from the soil itself:

Smith ordered marines off the rooftops and to new locations. He and his men broke into an automobile repair shop, where Bravo established a POS, or forward headquarters “position.” Stripped-down MREs and water soon arrived by truck. I had just poured water into the heating filter for a Country Captain Chicken MRE, and was preparing to remove some clothing layers beneath my flak vest, as the weather had turned hot after a freezing night, when RPG and small arms fire rattled the scrap iron that formed the roof of the filthy garage headquarters.

The fire directed at us did not let up. Over the ICOM, Smith learned that it was coming from a mosque on Michigan about three hundred meters away. The mosque was gridded for a possible air strike, and everyone began a fast march toward it.

Smith did not really have to order the marines straight into the direction of the fire. It was a collective impulse, a phenomenon I would see again and again over coming days. The idea that marines are trained to break down doors, to seize territory and beachheads, was an abstraction until I was there to experience it. Running into the fire rather than seeking cover from it goes counter to every human survival instinct—trust me. I was sweating as much from fear as from the layers of clothing I still had on from the night before, to the degree that it felt like pure salt was running into my eyes from my forehead. As the weeks had rolled on, and I got to know the 1/5 marines more as the individuals they were, I had started deluding myself that they weren’t much different from me. They had soft spots, they got sick, they complained. But in one flash, as we charged across Michigan amid whistling incoming shots, I realized that they were not like me; they were marines. It is no exaggeration to say that Capt. Smith and Bravo literally rode to the sound of the guns.

We ran through several residential lots until we were just outside the gates of the mosque. It had a Persian-style blue dome though it was Sunni. Then the firing stopped. One of Smith’s corporals, Robert Dawson of Staten Island, New York, led a squad of nine marines inside the mosque. His men detained two people and found some arms, but most of the gunmen had fled just as Smith’s men and other marines were closing in on it.

“I want to IO the shit out of this place tomorrow,” Smith said, referring to information operations—dropping leaflets, painting graffiti. The point was “to let them know that if they flagrantly use mosques for offensive operations, their mosques lose their protected status,” he told me.

We crossed back to the southern side of Michigan amid sporadic fire. I had stopped ducking—you do get used to anything. A car approached. It was the mayor, Mohammed Ibrahim al-Juraissey, and his bodyguard. The mayor asked if it was safe for him to continue down the street. Out of the blue he started complaining about the reporting of the local al-Jazeera correspondent. There was something bizarre and dreamlike about this. Smith, ignoring the bit about al-Jazeera, told the mayor: “We tried our very best, sir, to shoot them [the gunmen in the mosque]. But we are new to the city. Next time we will be more efficient.”

Directly across the street from the mosque, on the southern side of Michigan, was an apartment building which the marines had suspected was being used to fire on them. They had searched it and ordered a large family with children and babies into the courtyard. Smith approached the male head of the family to apologize. Smith stood erect now, except for a slight hunch in his shoulders, his hands deep in his pockets, a position I would see him take often when he was deciding, thinking, or about to say something important. He stared unblinking at the man, the same way he had at the police chief in Al-Karmah.

It was sometimes hard to imagine someone as serious and intense as Capt. Jason Smith. And yet there was a courtly quality about him, too. I thought of a Confederate officer.

Through his Iraqi translator, Smith told the man: “Sir, we are truly sorry that we had to ask your family to leave the building. You can all go back in now. We will compensate you for the inconvenience. We are United States Marines, a different breed than you are used to. We do not take kindly to people shooting at us. If you have any information about the Ali Babas, please share it with us. If you know any of the Ali Babas personally, please tell them to attack us as quickly as possible, so that we may kill them and start repairing sewers, electricity, and other services in your city.”

After the translation was completed, the man, looking dumbfounded, gripped Capt. Smith’s hand and wouldn’t let go. Smith wasn’t kidding about the compensation. Lt. Col. Byrne had been given a hoard of ready cash to use as he saw fit in order to win allies in the city. Byrne already had plans to pay the owner of the soda factory. “I’m going to give him rent, make repairs, buy a lot of his soda, and pay his employees for all the days they missed work because of us.”

Walking back to the garage across an open space, we were set upon by an RPG and an intense barrage of small arms fire. We ran for cover and crouched against a building. Then we saw a body in the street. Amid the chaos, a marine had accidentally killed an Iraqi civilian who was suspiciously running away. Smith got angry at the marine. “Did he have a weapon? No! So where in the ROEs does it say you can shoot at him?” Everyone became somber. I felt bad for the marine who had fired the shot—any civilian would have felt bad for him, if he or she had experienced the complexity and confusion of this urban battle space, and the split-second life-or-death decisions required. Another luxury car passed, tracking our movement. “It’s like trying to grab a fistful of water,” Smith remarked, looking at the car.

Back at the garage, I finally got to strip off my excess layers of clothing. I had sweated so much that the glue holding together the laminated press credentials around my neck had melted and destroyed them. I ate my Country Captain Chicken, now cold. I didn’t care. The moment that the danger had passed, I realized I was starving.

Smith took out a packet of instant coffee powder and poured it dry on his tongue, chasing it down with mineral water. Then he conducted a debrief.

Again, slightly hunched, with hands in pockets, he spoke in his slight southern drawl: “I find it encouraging that while our units were separated, we quickly got organized and moved on the objective. But the moment the objective was cleared, we let our guard down. We took too long crossing the open space, got fired upon, and shot a civilian. I know we have been running on empty without sleep and little food or water. But I expect more of marines. We are going to spend the night doing foot patrols. We are going to stop suspicious vehicles. The Ali Babas don’t take chances. They left the mosque as soon as we closed in on it. They look for targets of opportunity. We won’t give them any.”

I noticed 2nd Lt. Palmer, the young marine with the serene look in his eyes who had been with me the night before in the truck, talking about books. He had slipped into the garage with a few of his men. Despite the turmoil and absence of sleep, he was upbeat while talking to me. I heard another marine say, “We’re in shape to handle this without much sleep. Thank God Capt. Smith PT-ed the shit out of us at Camp Pendleton,” referring to physical training.

Indeed, Cpl. Nicholas Magdalin of Chicago, who had been attached to Bravo and was now with the Renegades, told me that back at Camp Pendleton, when the company “wasn’t working well together, Capt. Smith took us on a field op. He fucking broke us. I mean broke us. We were so desperate,” Cpl. Magdalin went on, “that in order to survive the hike we started helping each other as never before, the stronger guys carrying the packs of the weaker guys. It made us really come together as a team. Seeing that, Capt. Smith finally allowed us to rest, telling us that ‘there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do, no matter the odds, if we had unity.’”

After I had finished my MRE we were attacked again by RPGs, mortar, and small arms. Again, everyone moved in the direction of the fire. This time it was two blocks away to the north, on Michigan. The crack of bullets can be a good sound. It often means outgoing, and in any case usually means it is a safe distance away. The whistle and swish of bullets is bad; it usually means incoming and close by. Running down a back street with one of Capt. Smith’s lieutenants, we heard the latter sound. Both of us jumped into a sewer ditch.

This firefight, like the previous one, lasted more than an hour, though they both seemed much longer. On a few occasions, I caught glimpses of the insurgents—in black pajamas and fedayeen-style keffiyahs—who were shooting at us. The combat was that close.

There was no sweeter sound than the drone of the AC-130 overhead. It meant help was on the way. Then came the thudding, drilling noise of its guns—help itself. I thought of the two forward air controllers, Capts. Chris Graham of Miami and Don Mareska of Moscow, Idaho, two backslapping friendly pilots who, only a few weeks before, had been downcast with me in the chow hall over the fact that in this SASO environment, they wouldn’t have the opportunity to use their skills. Now they were the stars of the show. Mareska would be slightly wounded in the leg the next day.

The AC-130 was one of the few advantages the marines had. Almost all of the fire and explosions I heard were incoming. The insurgents could fire indiscriminately and blame collateral damage on the Americans, whereas the Americans I saw picked and chose their shots carefully. There was zero toleration for civilian casualties, though it was an impossible standard to always meet.

I wasn’t back at the garage for more than half an hour before the third sustained, intense firefight of the day commenced. Two marines were wounded. I rode in a Humvee truck with them back to the soda factory. The truck got stuck for a moment crossing Michigan, which had become a free-fire zone. A hail of bullets descended on us. Luckily the side panels were up-armored. I lay flat against my stomach.

Through all the attacks that day, April 6, 2004, Bravo Company had gradually advanced its lines deeper into the city. There was nothing fancy about this: the marines slugged it out three steps forward, two steps backward. This was the classic, immemorial labor of infantry, little different from the way it had been practiced in Vietnam, World War II, and earlier back to the Greeks and Romans. Commanders inserted grunts and waited for them to be attacked, using the opportunity to break the enemy over the contact line. Whereas elite assets like Delta were high maintenance and required specific high-value targets, there was still a place in this world for old-fashioned infantrymen.

Back at the soda factory, the new FOB headquarters, I learned that there were still no units available to relieve Bravo. Capt. Smith’s marines would have to fight on, with little sleep. I again thought of the throngs of troops at Camp Victory.

The Renegades had their Humvees outside the walls of the forward operating base, guarding it against attack. As there was no running water for a shower, soon after I returned I went back outside the perimeter to visit with Bednarcik, Pena, and Neal. “Sit with us for a while and relax. You need it,” one of them said. That’s when the 122mm rocket landed fifty feet away.

As with gunfire, the thud of an explosion can be a good sound; it means that you missed it. But the swoosh and airflow of an incoming rocket means oh shit, it’s over, as you cower in the longest split second you’ll ever know. That’s the sound we heard. The Humvee rocked; fortunately it was up-armored. Lance Cpl. Neal, a bundle of delightful energy who had not stopped talking for weeks, went silent for a while, whereas Lance Cpl. Nathan Favorit of Watertown, Minnesota, the machine gunner in the next Humvee, who was usually so quiet that not even Lt. Col. Byrne could draw him into a conversation, suddenly exploded in chatter. “I tried to get Neal on the ICOM. ‘Talking Guns [Neal’s call sign], this is Bastard Guns, please, please come in.’ For a moment there was no response. My God, I thought you guys…”

For weeks I had lived with constant rocket and mortar fire. It was maddening because you had absolutely no control over your destiny, unlike in firefights where you could run, duck, dive into a ditch, or hug a wall. Rocket and mortar attacks represented the utter randomness of life compressed beyond all imagining, with devastating, unalterable consequences. At St. Mere, a Navy doc had been talking outside with his father on a cell phone when he was killed by a mortar blast. At the cloverleaf, a rocket that had traveled almost ten miles killed a man who would have gotten away unscathed had it landed even a few feet away, on the other side of a blast barrier. Should I walk to the chow hall or Porta-John in this direction or that? It might be a decision that determined whether you lived or died.

I walked from the Humvee back inside the base, found a small storeroom that smelled like cat shit—the only room unoccupied by marines—and opened my sleeping bag. Still in my flak jacket, I went to sleep for a few hours on the cement floor using my helmet as a pillow.

The next day, as rocket and mortar fire continued intermittently on the base, which still had no Porta-Johns and only a sporadic trickle of cold running water, we got a visit from twelve stars’ worth of Marine generals: Maj. Gen. Jim Mattis (two stars) and Lt. Gen. Jan Huly (three stars), Lt. Gen. James Conway (three stars), and Gen. Michael Hagee (four stars). Hagee was the Marine Corps commandant, one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had traveled to the base from Washington with Huly, the Marines’ deputy commandant for plans, policies, and operations. Conway was the I MEF commander, and Mattis the division commander. It said something for the Marine Corps that the commandant would come all the way from Washington to what one officer termed “this shithole.” (Conditions at the soda factory later improved to the point where one journalist would describe it as “relatively luxurious.”) Cpl. Magdalin, who happened to be nearby when their armored vehicles rolled in, had his picture taken with them. “Even if I am killed tomorrow, my life is now complete,” he told me in disbelief.

The four generals, along with Col. Toolan, the RCT-1 commander, and Lt. Col. Byrne, pored over a satellite map of Al-Fallujah which they spread out on the hood of a Humvee. The plan was for 2/1 to come down from the northern part of the city and 1/5 to move in from the south and east, in order to box the insurgents against the Euphrates River, which flows north to south along the city’s western edge. The bad news was the following:

• There was no such thing as a friendly mosque in the city. Mosques were storage depots for explosives, and their ramparts and minarets were used by snipers and other gunmen.

• The American-trained Iraqi Civil Defense Corps in the area were not only deserting, but cooperating with those inside the mosques.

• It was not the high-tech stuff, but the basics that the U.S. military had neglected. The Marines were short of Arabic translators, bolt cutters for breaking into shops in their rear, and 5.56mm ammo even. (The bolt cutters would arrive the next day, and ammo soon after.)

• The plan for taking the city down was realistic militarily, but high politics in the form of cease-fires threatened to intrude.

What the Marines did have going for them was a particular warrior spirit that was less the product of American patriotism than of Marine Corps tradition joined with the traditional camaraderie of the grunts—what I had experienced with the Renegades the night after their firefight in Al-Karmah.

Democracy may have been an additional factor. Citizens of democracies eschew wars but, once they embark on a war through democratic consultation, show a propensity to fight to the bitter end. This has been true since the days of ancient Athens, and it has made democratic troops the fiercest in combat.²¹ Vietnam was not really an exception. By wide majorities, as attested by Harris polls, Americans supported continued heavy bombing of North Vietnam until late in the war, and President Nixon’s victory over George McGovern’s surrender strategy in 1972 was a blowout. The soldiers and marines I encountered during months of travels with the military—whose parents and grandparents had fought in Vietnam—thought of that war as every bit as sanctified as the nation’s others. As for those who saw Vietnam differently, they were generally from the more prosperous classes of American society, classes which even back then were in the process of forging a global, cosmopolitan elite.[92] By the time of Iraq this new global citizenry was more deeply established, calling into question the age-old ability of individual democracies to persevere in a sustained and difficult war.

The grunts’ unpretentious willingness to die was also the product of their working-class origins. The working classes had always been accustomed to rough, unfair lives and turns. They had less of an articulated and narcissistic sense of self than the elites, and could subsume their egos more easily inside a prideful unit identity, of the kind that uplifted an entire platoon—the organizational layer at which the Marine Corps functioned best.

These marines, in fact, were as old as antiquity, as old as their fellow marines who had stormed Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima and Hue City; as old as their Army brethren who had stormed Omaha Beach. They were the same people. Their intent, unquestioning visages were dead ringers for those in black-and-white World War II movies. Working-class existence had functioned as the Great Preserver of the oldest, simplest virtues: unblinking courage and straightforwardness, which was both revealed and obscured by the profane language they used.

Finally, there was the unapologetic, literal belief in God absent for the most part among the elites, a faith both tempered and uplifted by the democratic experience, which endowed the grunts with stores of compassion.

To wit, a mood of depression set in at the soda factory when it was learned that a six-year-old Iraqi girl, whose family lived nearby, had been killed by a mortar intended for the American base. It was the same depression that I had observed within Bravo after the Iraqi civilian had been mistakenly shot by a marine. The number of KIAs in the battalion from the Al-Fallujah fighting had by then reached a half dozen, and the wounded had crept up into the dozens.

One of the dead was 2nd Lt. Joshua Palmer, who was shot in the neck and abdomen while leading his platoon into a house from which marines were taking fire. He had been slated for promotion to 1st lieutenant in two days, but in his typical understated manner kept the news to himself. He was recommended for the Navy Cross. To think that any humane and peaceful global order is possible without such men would be self-delusory.

I went out more times into the city to see Capt. Smith. As Bravo advanced westward, deeper into downtown Al-Fallujah, the POS (forward “position”) moved from the garage to a small warehouse with hardened cement walls. Because it had a high ceiling, Smith had to get near the roof in order to facilitate radio transmissions. Thus, on one occasion, Lt. Col. Byrne, I, and some other reporters who had recently arrived found Smith squatting atop a metal bookcase, speaking on the battalion tac as RPGs and gunfire registered outside on the street. He looked well rested after four hours of sleep, the most he had had in a week. “Blackhawk Two, this is Blackhawk Six, I need Red Cloud backed up. For the moment, it’s a Red Cloud and Little Wolf show.”

Smith then spoke over the ICOM, directing a Bravo platoon to the 905-degree grid, a few blocks farther to the west. Having returned to Iraq intending to bond with the local culture in the classic tradition of unconventional war—partly by growing mustaches and giving their forward operating bases Arabic names—circumstances had forced the marines to revert to direct action, and thus Al-Fallujah had become a familiar American urban space. Points on the map were identified not by any local landmark, but by their GPS grids. Streets had been given American names, like Michigan. Contact points with the enemy were color coded. And so I followed Smith and Byrne to “Violet,” an intersection where Alpha Company would link up with Bravo, where the commercial part of southern Al-Fallujah edged into the residential part. Here Bravo intended to go “firm” for a while: dig in and establish yet another POS.

We were now a hundred meters away from the point of contact with the enemy. Two Marine M1A1 Abrams tanks stood fifty meters away. We all crouched against a wall as bullets whizzed by. But as the marines consolidated the position, the whistles turned to cracks and we stood up and relaxed a bit. Someone took a leak. Through binoculars, men armed with RPG launchers, wearing checkered keffiyahs around their faces, could be seen surrounded by women and children, taunting us. Only the snipers tried to get shots off.

The third world urban environment was like the Old West, I thought, when the cavalry invested Indian encampments only to find the braves periodically surrounded by women and children. However much the cavalry tried to spare the lives of noncombatants, the inevitable collateral damage among civilians raised profound moral questions, especially among humanitarians back east, who, because of the dissolution of the mass citizen army at the end of the Civil War, no longer felt close to this smaller, horse-borne volunteer force beyond the Mississippi.²²

Byrne’s Humvee pulled up, with Cpl. Magdalin at the wheel. Byrne and Smith began conferencing with the base over the battalion tac. Smith wanted to move the two tanks southward to draw enemy fire away from Bravo, allowing his men to farther advance. But he did not have direct command over the tank unit, so the request had “to go up through staff” before the tanks right next to him could move. Eventually they did. Even here in the midst of the battlefield there was an issue with cumbersome management.

Moreover, Bravo and the other infantry companies were dangerously scattered throughout the southern half of the city, so much so that the enemy could easily infiltrate the large warren of streets to the rear between Bravo’s newly advanced position and the base about a mile away to the southeast. The company commanders would deal with this problem by standing up nonstop nighttime satellite patrols, despite the sleep deprivation afflicting many marines.

Another Marine battalion, the 3rd Battalion of the 4th Marine Regiment, would arrive in a few days from western Iraq to assist 1/5 and 2/1. But that redeployment, in turn, would make marines vulnerable in another part of their AOR. One hundred thirty thousand American troops in Iraq were simply not enough to deal with a fraction of that number of insurgents. It wasn’t only because insurgencies, pace nineteenth-century British Col. Callwell, arise from the soil itself, and thus have whole categories of advantages that a military force from the outside, alien to the culture, lacks. It was also because, as the large number of American troops near Baghdad International Airport attested, the U.S. defense establishment, despite all the talk of reform and transformation, was still organized for World War II and the Korean War, with too many chiefs at massive rear bases and too few Indians at the edges. It was the same problem that I had observed in the Philippines and in Afghanistan. It just existed on a bigger scale in Iraq.

I thought again of the Indian wars, and of military historian Robert M. Utley’s criticism of how the Army had responded to the massacre of Custer’s 7th Cavalry—the 9/11 of its day:

The Army of that era never truly learned the lesson that small units of foot soldiers were more effective against Indian braves than large mounted regiments, burdened by the need to carry forage for the horses. The Sioux and their allies were ultimately vanquished not because the U.S. Army fully adapted to the challenge of an unconventional enemy—it didn’t—but because of the flooding of the Old West with settlers, who were, in turn, aided by the railroad.²⁴ This time, however, the U.S. military would have to do better.

I last saw Capt. Jason Smith of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in the middle of a street in Al-Fallujah that was popping with small arms fire, his hands deep in his pockets, his expression hardy and purposeful. T. E. Lawrence called doubt “our modern crown of thorns”; Smith betrayed none.²⁵ He was enunciating orders through the ICOM and conferring through the battalion tac: Blackhawk, Apache, Red Cloud, Crazy Horse… He might have been the subject of an oil portrait executed by Frederic Remington, or an officer of the old Confederacy that still inhabited the soul of the American military, invigorating its fighting spirit. His expression, his whole demeanor, was that of an earlier, less complicated age.

And yet, as necessary as Capt. Smith and others like him were for the United States and for the world, he was not ultimately the answer to the challenge raised by that vast crowd of the proletarian faithful I had seen strolling by the sea in the Yemeni port city of Mukalla at the very beginning of my travels. How to deal with that crowd? The answer existed in parts only, of which I had caught glimpses in Mongolia, on Basilan Island in the southern Philippines, on Lamu Island in Kenya, and elsewhere, for when imperialism is most obvious, as it was in Iraq, it was also most vulnerable and under siege.

In truth, Iraq in 2003 and 2004 was less a replay of Vietnam than of the Indian Mutiny against the British in 1857 and 1858, when the orientalists and other pragmatists in the British power structure, who wanted to leave traditional India as it was, lost sway to Evangelical and Utilitarian reformers who wanted to modernize and Christianize India—to make it more like England. But such attempts to bring the fruits of Western civilization to the Asian subcontinent were met with a violent revolt against imperial authority. Delhi, Lucknow, and other Indian cities were besieged and captured before being retaken by colonial forces.²⁶ Yet the debacle did not signal the end of the British Empire, which continued on and expanded even for another hundred years. Instead, it signaled the transition from an ad hoc imperium fired by an intemperate, evangelical lust to impose its values to a calmer, more pragmatic and soldiering empire built on international trade and technology.

The lesson was clear: The more subtle and cautious its application of power, the greater would be America’s sustaining impact. The United States could hold sway over the world only quietly, off camera, so to speak. The focus of the media klieg light on Al-Fallujah, following my departure there, was central to the decision—made at the highest levels of the U.S. government—to call a cease-fire that would end the Marine assault. This happened just as the Marines, strengthened by the arrival of a whole new battalion, may have been about to overrun the insurgents.

To be sure, the decision to invest Al-Fallujah and then pull out just as victory was within reach demonstrated both the fecklessness and incoherence of the Bush administration. While a case can be made for either launching a full-scale marine assault or continuing the previous policy of individual surgical strikes, a case cannot be made for launching a full-scale assault only to reverse it because of political pressures that were easily foreseeable in the first place.²⁷ But in larger historical terms the Al-Fallujah drama also demonstrated the weakness of nation-states against the thundering new forces of a global media. Take Al-Jazeera, the independent, Qatar-based network whose characterizations of the fighting added to the political pressure on the White House to halt the offensive. Al-Jazeera was itself an example of the very political freedom that the U.S. sought to encourage in the Arab world. The more we succeeded in our quest for open societies, the more those open societies would seek to restrain us—and consequently the more quiet and devious our military behavior would have to be.

The American Empire of the early twenty-first century depended upon a tissue of intangibles that was threatened, rather than invigorated, by the naked exercise of power.²⁸ Or as Army Col. Tom Wilhelm had told me in Mongolia, an empire of behind-the-scenes relationships was all that was possible anymore.

I left the soda factory in Al-Fallujah just as the cease-fire was announced and more journalists began to arrive. From St. Mere I hitched a ride at midnight on a C-46 Sea Knight helicopter to an air base farther west, only to learn that military flights from there to Kuwait had stopped weeks before. There was little food and only a soiled cot on a concrete floor to sleep on. Twenty-four hours later, I caught another helicopter ride to another base deeper into Iraq’s western desert, where an Air Force C-130 bound for Kuwait was due to stop over the next day. I spent the night in an open tent. It was freezing and there was a dust storm. The Air Force plane was a no-show. But a civilian cargo plane arrived, en route to Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. It was an Antonov with a Russian crew and they agreed to take me. They smoked even more than the marines did, but the strong tea, black bread, and sausages that they offered tasted good after weeks of MREs and Gatorade. One of the hatch doors didn’t seal properly upon closing, and they stuffed it with oily rags. “No problem,” one of the Russians said dismissively as the plane took off.

The plane landed at the far end of Sharjah airport, reserved for cargo planes. I said goodbye to the crew and made my way in the dark to the civilian arrivals terminal. I hadn’t bathed properly for a long time, and my clothes and backpack were layered in dust. Suddenly, I was under bright lights amid noisy crowds of prosperous Europeans on holiday, clad in fine clothes and jewelry and smelling of expensive perfumes and colognes. It was a half-hour taxi ride to a luxury hotel in Dubai. In the lobby, on the way to my room, I noticed a newsstand. The front pages were all about Al-Fallujah. I felt like a person at the center of a scandal that everyone was reading about, in which even the most accurate, balanced accounts were unconnected to what I had actually experienced and the marines I had experienced it all with. I felt deeply alienated. After I ate and showered and scrubbed my backpack, I didn’t want to talk to anyone. All I wanted to do was write.

There was still so much I had to see. Places such as Indonesia, Korea, and even an area command or two still beckoned, not to mention other armed services. I had only begun my journey. I remember what one of the Marine generals visiting from Washington had told me before I left Al-Fallujah:

“Go home and rest a few weeks in the world of porcelain shitters. Then come back for more.”