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T
HE
R
ACE TO
B
AGHDAD
B
y now, the so-called Race to Baghdad had begun. American and
allied units were streaming across the border, making large
advances every day.
We spent a few days hanging around our camp back in Kuwait,
waiting for an assignment. As frustrating as our stay at the border
station was, this was worse. We wanted to be in action. There were
any number of missions we could have accomplished—eliminating
some of those “nonexistent” air defenses farther into Iraq, for
example—but the command didn’t seem to want to use us.
Our deployment had been extended so that we could take part
in the beginning of the war. But now the rumor was that we would
be rotated back to the States and replaced by Team 5. No one
wanted to leave Iraq now that the action was getting hot. Morale hit
rock bottom. We were all pissed off.
T
o top things off, the Iraqis had sent some Scuds over just before
the war started. Most had been taken care of by Patriot missiles,
but one got through. Wouldn’t you know it took out the Starbucks
where we’d hung out during our prewar training?
That’s low, hitting a coffee place. It could have been worse, I
guess. It could have been a Dunkin’ Donuts.
The joke was that President Bush only declared war when the
Starbucks was hit. You can mess with the U.N. all you want, but
when you start interfering with the right to get caffeinated, someone
has to pay.
W
e stayed for three or four days, grousing and depressed the
whole time. Then, finally, we joined the Marine push in the area of
Nasiriya. We were back in the war.
N
EAR
N
ASIRIYA
N
asiriya is a city on the Euphrates River in southern Iraq, about
125 miles northwest of Kuwait. The city itself was taken by the
Marines on March 31, but action in the area continued for quite
some time, as small groups of Iraqi soldiers and Fedayeen
continued to resist and attack Americans. It was near Nasiriya that
Jessica Lynch was captured and held during the first few days of the
war.
Some historians believe that the fighting in the area was the
fiercest the Marines encountered during the war, comparing it with
the most ferocious firefights in Vietnam and later in Fallujah. Besides
the city itself, the Marines took Jalibah Airfield, several bridges over
the Euphrates, and highways and towns that secured the passage to
Baghdad during the early stages of the war. Along the way, they
began encountering the sort of fanatical insurgency that would
characterize the war after Baghdad fell.
We had an extremely small part in the conflict there. We got into
some very intense battles, but the bulk of the action was by
Marines. Obviously, I can’t write about most of that; what I saw of
the overall battle was like looking at an enormous landscape
painting through a tiny straw.
W
hen you’re working with Army and Marine Corps units, you
immediately notice a difference. The Army is pretty tough, but their
performance can depend on the individual unit. Some are excellent,
filled with hoorah and first-class warriors. A few are absolutely
horrible; most are somewhere in between.
In my experience, Marines are gung ho no matter what. They
will all fight to the death. Every one of them just wants to get out
there and kill. They are bad-ass, hard-charging mothers.
W
e inserted into the desert in the middle of the night, with two
three-seat DPVs, driving off the back of a 53. The ground was firm
enough that no one got stuck.
We were behind the tip of the U.S. advance, and there were no
enemy units in the area. We drove up through the desert until we
came to an Army base camp. We rested a few hours with them,
then took off to scout for the Marines ahead of their advance.
The desert wasn’t entirely empty. While there were long
stretches of wilderness, there were also towns and very small
settlements strung out in the distance. We mostly skirted the towns,
observing them from the distance. Our job was to get an idea of
where the enemy strongpoints were, radioing them back so the
Marines could decide whether to attack or bypass them. Every so
often we’d reach high ground, stop for a while, and take a scan.
We had only one significant contact that day. We were skirting
by a city. We obviously got too close, because they started
engaging us. I fired the .50-cal, then swung around to the 60 as we
hauled ass out of there.
We must have traveled hundreds of miles that day. We lay up
for a while in late afternoon, got some rest, then took off again after
nightfall. When we started attracting fire that night, our orders were
changed. The head shed called us back and arranged for the
helicopters to come back and pick us up.
You might think that our job was to attract fire, since that
revealed where the enemy was. You might think that the fact that
we were close enough to get the enemy to fire meant we had
discovered a significant force that was previously unknown. You
might think that meant we were doing well.
You might be right. But to our CO, it was all wrong. He wanted
us
not
to get contacted. He didn’t want to risk any casualties, even
if that meant we couldn’t do our mission properly. (And I should
add that, despite the gunfire and the earlier contact, we had not
taken any casualties.)
We were pissed. We went out expecting to be scouting for a
week. We had plenty of fuel, water, and food, and had already
figured out how to get resupplied if we needed to. Hell, we could
have gone all the way to Baghdad, which at the moment was still in
Iraqi hands.
We reported back to base, dejected.
T
hat wasn’t the end of the war for us, but it was a bad sign of what
lay ahead.
You have to understand: no SEAL
wants
to die. The purpose of
war, as Patton put it, is to make the other dumb bastard die. But we
also want to fight.
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