The Killer Elite, Part Three: The Battle For Baghdad

For the next twenty sleepless hours, the Marines in First Recon and War Pig methodically advance up the highway, traveling barely fifteen kilometers, clearing villages on foot, blowing up enemy trucks and weapons caches, and wiping out pockets of Iraqi soldiers as they hide in trenches or take cover in civilian homes.

From a raw-fear standpoint, the worst moments of the fight come early on the afternoon of April 9th. The world's attention is focused on televised pictures of American Marines in the center of Baghdad, pulling down a massive statue of Saddam Hussein. Here, north of the city, enemy mortars start exploding about thirty meters away from Bravo Company's position.

When Lt. Fick reports the bombardment to his commander over the radio, he is told to remain in position. "Stand by to die, gents," says Sgt. Antonio Espera, a former Los Angeles repo man and co-leader of the Humvee team that works in closest proximity to Colbert's. The twenty-two Marines in the platoon sit in their vehicles, engines running, as per their orders, while mortars explode all around. There's almost no conversation. Everyone watches the sky and surrounding fields for mortar blasts. One lands five meters from Sgt. Espera's open-top Humvee, blowing a four-foot-wide hole in the ground.

I look out and see Espera hunched over his weapon, his eyes darting beneath the brim of his helmet, watching for the next hit. Beside him, his twenty-three-year-old driver, Cpl. Jason Lilley, grips the wheel, his face ashen. A few hours before leaving on this mission, Lilley had been sitting around with the platoon talking about the time he ate a clown fish — just for the hell of it — when he worked at a Wal-Mart in high school. Lilley joined the Marines to get out of his hometown in Wichita, Kansas, and stop partying. "My brains were, like, pan-fried," he says.

Nicknamed Space Ghost by his fellow Marines, Lilley is tall, gangly, with pale skin. He usually has a far-off, pensive expression, like someone who is always just one bong hit away from a profound, cosmic realization. He's given some of his deepest thought to a nickname that he helped come up with for nineteen-year-old Cpl. Harold Trombley. Eleven days ago, Trombley accidentally machine-gunned and wounded two young Iraqi shepherds. "I call him Whopper," Lilley explained to me, "because they're sold at Burger King." When I looked up at Lilley, not getting it, he shook his head at my ignorance. "Like, Whoppers, Burger King, BK — Baby Killer. Now do you dig it?"

Before leaving on this mission, many of the men in Colbert's platoon had said goodbye to one another by shaking hands or even by hugging. The formal farewells seemed odd considering that everyone was going to be shoulder-to-shoulder in the cramped Humvees. The goodbyes almost seemed an acknowledgment of the transformations that take place in combat. Friends who lolled around together during free time talking about bands, girlfriends' fine asses and eating clown fish aren't really the same people anymore once they enter the battlefield.

In combat, the change seems physical at first. Adrenaline begins to flood your system the moment the first bullet is fired. But unlike adrenaline rushes in the civilian world — a car accident or bungee jump, where the surge lasts only a few minutes — in combat, the rush can go on for hours. In time, your body seems to burn out from it, or maybe the adrenaline just runs out. Whatever the case, after a while you begin to almost lose the physical capacity for fear. Explosions go off. You cease to jump or flinch. In this moment now, everyone sits still, numbly watching the mortars thump down nearby. The only things moving are the pupils of their eyes.

This is not to say the terror goes away. It simply moves out from the twitching muscles and nerves in your body and takes up residence in your mind. If you feed it with morbid thoughts of all the terrible ways you could be maimed or die, it gets worse. It also gets worse if you think about pleasant things. Good memories or plans for the future just remind you how much you don't want to die or get hurt. It's best to shut down, to block everything out. But to reach that state, you have to almost give up being yourself. This is why, I believe, everyone had said goodbye to each other. They would still be together, but they wouldn't really be seeing one another for a while, since each man would in his own way be sort of gone.

After about twenty minutes, the mortar fire ceases for the rest of the day. Enemy resistance is beginning to wither under the combined effects of the Marine advance on the ground and violent airstrikes from above. Had the Iraqis massed their armor earlier in the day when heavy clouds inhibited airstrikes, they could have wreaked havoc. But for some reason, they missed their chance. Clouds have burned off, and waves of jets and Cobra helicopters simultaneously bomb, rocket and strafe targets in all directions. Trucks, armor, homes and entire hamlets are being bombed and set on fire. With the dramatic increase in firepower from the air, First Recon and War Pig rampage north, covering the final ten kilometers to Ba'qubah in a couple of hours. When the Iraqis finally send down a few armored vehicles, they are blown to smithereens by attack jets and Marines with shoulder-fired missiles.

The Iraqis who had put up fierce resistance earlier have either fled or been slaughtered. Headless corpses — indicating well-aimed shots from high-caliber weapons — are sprawled out in trenches by the road. Others are charred beyond recognition behind the wheels of burnt, skeletonized trucks. The sole injury on the American side occurs when a Marine in Alpha Company is hit by a piece of flying shrapnel from a T-72 tank after it's blown up by one of his buddies with a shoulder-fired missile. His helmet, though partially crushed, stops the shrapnel. All the Marine suffered was a bad headache.