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Good
Kills
By
Peter Maass
New
York Times Magazine, April 20, 2003
To get to
Baghdad
, the
marines of the Third Battalion fought the old-fashioned way - by
shooting as many of the enemy as they could. Their victims weren't all
soldiers.
As the war in
Iraq
is debated
and turned into history, the emphasis will be on the role of technology --
precision bombing, cruise missiles, decapitation strikes. That was what
was new. But there was another side to the war, and it was the one that
most of the fighting men and women in
Iraq
experienced, even if it wasn't what Americans watching at home saw: raw
military might, humans killing humans. The Third Battalion, Fourth Marines
was one of the rawest expressions of that might. Based in Twentynine
Palms, Calif., it specializes in desert warfare, and its forces number
about 1,500 troops, equipped during the war in Iraq with about 30 Abrams
tanks and 60 armored assault vehicles, backed up with whatever artillery
and aircraft were required for its missions, like 155-millimeter howitzers
and Cobra gunships and fighter jets. The battalion made the ground shake,
quite literally, as it rumbled north from Kuwait through Iraq, beginning
its march by seizing the Basra airport, continuing on past Nasiriya, into
the desert and through a sandstorm that turned the sky red and became, at
its worst moments, a hurricane of sand that rocked armored vehicles like
plastic toys nudged by a child's finger. On the way to Baghdad, the
battalion also fought fierce but limited battles in Afaq and Diwaniya,
about 120 miles south of Baghdad, and in Al Kut, about 100 miles from the
Iraqi capital.
On April 6, three days before the fall of
Baghdad
, the
battalion arrived at the Diyala bridge, a major gateway into the
southeastern sector of the city. The bridge crosses the
Diyala
River
, which
flows into the
Tigris
. Once
across its 150-yard span, the Third Battalion would be only nine miles
from the center of
Baghdad
. The bridge
was heavily defended on the north side by both Republican Guard and
irregular forces, and the battle to seize and cross it took two days. It
was, in retrospect, a signal event in the war, a vivid example of the kind
of brutal, up-close fighting that didn't get shown on cable TV.
The Third Battalion had a consistent strategy as it moved toward
Baghdad
: kill every
fighter who refused to surrender. It was extremely effective. It allowed
the battalion to move quickly. It minimized American casualties. But it
was a strategy that came with a price, and that price was paid in blood on
the far side of the Diyala bridge.
--
The unit's commander, Lt. Col. Bryan McCoy, had a calm bearing that never
seemed to waver as he and his troops made their way through
Iraq
. His mood
stayed the same, whether he was in battle or drinking his morning coffee
or smoking a cigar; neither the tone nor the pace of his voice strayed
from its steady-as-she-goes manner. Perhaps his calm came from experience.
His father was an Army officer in
Vietnam
, serving
two combat tours there. McCoy was born into the military and has lived in
it for his entire life. This wasn't the first time he fought against Iraqi
soldiers; he was a company commander during the Persian Gulf war in 1991.
When I spoke to him on the southern side of the Diyala bridge soon after
the battalion arrived there on the morning of April 6, he was in a serene
mood. ''Things are going well,'' he said. ''Really well.''
When Colonel McCoy told you that things were going well, it meant his
marines were killing Iraqi fighters. That's what was happening as we
exchanged pleasantries at the bridge. His armored Humvee was parked 30
yards from the bridge. If one of the Republican Guard soldiers on the
other side of the bridge had wanted to shout an insult across the river,
he would have been heard -- were it not for the fact that Colonel McCoy's
battalion was at that moment lobbing so many bullets and mortars and
artillery shells across the waterway that a shout could never have been
heard, and in any event the Iraqis had no time for insults before dying.
The only sound was the roar of death.
''Lordy,'' McCoy said. ''Heck of a day. Good kills.''
McCoy's immediate objective was to kill or drive away enough of the forces
on the north side of the river to let him move his men and equipment
across. He had no doubt that he would succeed. He was sitting in the front
seat of his Humvee, with an encrypted radio phone to his left ear. He had
the sort of done-it-again pride in his voice that you hear from a business
executive who is kicking back at the clubhouse as he tells you he beat par
again. Two Abrams tanks lumbered past us -- vehicles that weigh 67 tons
apiece do not move softly -- and the earth shook, though not as much as it
was shaking on the other side of the river, where American mortars were
exploding, 150 yards away. The dark plumes of smoke that created a
twilight effect at
noon
, the broken
glass and crumpled metal on the road, the flak-jacketed marines crouching
and firing their weapons -- it was a day for connoisseurs of close combat,
like the colonel.
''We're moving those tanks back a bit to take care of them over there,''
he explained, nodding to his right, where hit-and-run Iraqi fighters were
shooting rocket-propelled grenades at his men, without success. Colonel
McCoy's assessment was Marine blunt: ''We're killing 'em.''
He turned his attention to the radio phone, updating his regiment
commander. His voice remained calm.
''Dark Side Six, Ripper Six,'' he said, using his call sign and his
commander's. ''We're killing them like it's going out of style. They keep
reinforcing, these Republican Guards, and we're killing them as they show
up. We're running out of ammo.''
McCoy, whose marines refer to him as, simply, ''the colonel,'' was not
succumbing, in his plain talk of slaughter, to the military equivalent of
exuberance, irrational or otherwise. For him, as for other officers who
won the prize of front-line commands, this war was not about hearts and
minds or even liberation. Those are amorphous concepts, not rock-hard
missions. For Colonel McCoy and the other officers who inflicted heavy
casualties on Iraqis and suffered few of their own, this war was about one
thing: killing anyone who wished to take up a weapon in defense of Saddam
Hussein's regime, even if they were running away. Colonel McCoy refers to
it as establishing ''violent supremacy.''
''We're here until Saddam and his henchmen are dead,'' he told me at one
point during his march on
Baghdad
. ''It's
over for us when the last guy who wants to fight for Saddam has flies
crawling across his eyeballs. Then we go home. It's smashmouth tactics.
Sherman
said that
war is cruelty. There's no sense in trying to refine it. The crueler it
is, the sooner it's over.''
When I suggested to Colonel McCoy one morning that Iraqi civilians might
not appreciate the manner in which his marines tended to say hello to the
locals with the barrels of their guns raised, he did not make any excuses.
''They don't have to like us,'' he said. ''Liking has nothing to do with
it. You'll never make them like you. I can't make them like me. All we can
do is make them respect us and then make sure that they know we're here on
their behalf. Making them like us -- Yanks always want to be liked, but it
doesn't always work out that way.''
--
Though the fighting was lopsided, the marines did not get to the Diyala
bridge unscathed. On April 3, three days before the battle for the bridge,
the Third Battalion entered the town of
Al Kut
. It was an
incursion intended to convey the point that, as Colonel McCoy described
it, there were new ''alpha males'' in the country.
The attack began at dawn with an artillery barrage that had excited
marines next to my vehicle. They yelled ''Bam! Bam!'' as each shell was
fired into the air. Tanks led the way into town, and as I stayed a
kilometer behind at a medic station, the sounds of battle commenced,
mortars and machine-gun fire that were accompanied, as ever, by the
visuals of war -- smoke plumes that were an arsonist's dream.
A half-hour into the battle, a Humvee raced out of the city and stopped at
the medic station. A marine, whose body was rag-doll floppy, was pulled
out and put on a stretcher. A marine doctor and medics surrounded him. His
clothes were stripped off and needles and monitors placed on and into his
body, and the dialogue of battlefield medicine began among the team, all
of whom had slung their M-16's over their backs as they tried to save
their comrade's life.
''Left lower abdomen.''
''He's in urgent surgical.''
''Wriggle your toes for me.''
''Ow, ow.''
''He needs medevac, now.''
''Iodine.''
''My arms are numb.''
''Keep talking, Evnin.''
His name was Mark Evnin. He was a corporal, a sniper who was in one of the
lead vehicles going into Al Kut. Iraqi fighters were waiting in ambush and
had fired the first shots; one of them got him.
''Keep talking to us. Where are you from?''
''Remon,'' he mumbled.
''Where? Where are you from?''
''Verrrmon.''
Evnin was not doing well. The battalion chaplain, Bob Grove, leaned over
him, and because the chaplain knew Evnin was Jewish, he pulled out of his
pocket a sheet with instructions for ''emergency Jewish ministration.''
Grove read the Sh'ma, which begins, ''Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God.''
Then he began reading the 23rd Psalm, at which point Evnin said,
''Chaplain, I'm not going to die.''
A Chinook landed 50 yards away. Evnin's stretcher was lifted from the
asphalt and rushed to the chopper. Shortly after he was airborne, he went
into shock and died.
Colonel McCoy was just a few feet from where Corporal Evnin was mortally
wounded. ''I saw him go down,'' he said afterward. ''That fight lasted
about nine seconds. We had about 15 human-wave guys attack the tanks. They
were mowed down. They drew first blood. They got one of us, but we got all
of them.''
Corporal Evnin was the battalion's first K.I.A., but he was certainly not
the only marine to die in
Iraq
. The men of
the Third Battalion paid close attention to news of marine battle deaths.
The day before they arrived at the Diyala bridge, a Marine tank was blown
up by an explosives-laden truck that drove alongside it and was detonated
by its driver. It was the realization of one of the marines' worst fears:
suicide bombers.
McCoy remained focused; he told me that his mission, to kill Iraqi
fighters, had not changed. ''I'm not allowed to have the luxury of
emotions to guide my decisions,'' he said. ''It'll cloud my decisions, and
I'll make a bad one if I submit to that. I have to look at everything very
clinically.'' He reacted to the suicide bombing tactically: a new danger
had emerged, and his troops would have to be on increased alert to the
threat posed by civilian vehicles.
But the deaths of their comrades deeply affected the grunts, and when the
battalion got to Diyala bridge, every man was primed to kill.
''There's an unspoken change in attitude,'' McCoy told me a few days
before we reached the bridge. ''Their blood is up.''
--
The battle for the Diyala bridge lasted for two days. One of the bridge's
main pylons had been badly damaged, and armored vehicles could not move
over it. So after the first day of fighting on April 6, the battalion dug
itself into the southern side for the night, giving itself time to plan an
infantry assault over the span the next morning.
In the morning, the battalion released another round of heavy artillery
barrages to soften up the opposition on the northern side of the river. In
the fighting, two more marines were killed when an artillery shell hit
their armored vehicle on the southern side of the bridge. Eventually, the
battalion killed most of the Republican Guard fighters, or at least pushed
them back from their dug-in positions on the northern side, and McCoy
decided that it was time to try a crossing.
The men of the Third Battalion moved across the Diyala bridge
''dismounted,'' that is, on foot. It was a tableau from
Vietnam
, or even
World War II; grunts running and firing their weapons in front of them.
This was, as McCoy described it, ''blue-collar warfare.''
When the marines crossed to the northern side, they found themselves in a
semi-urban neighborhood of one-story shops and two-story houses, a few
dozen palm trees and lots of dust. A narrow highway led away from the
bridge, toward
Baghdad
.
Immediately, they were met with incoming fire -- occasional bullets and
the odd rocket-propelled grenade, fired mostly from a palm grove on the
eastern side of the road to
Baghdad
. Colonel
McCoy set up his command position -- basically, himself and his radioman
-- adjacent to a house by the bridge. Marines fanned out into the palm
grove, while others moved north up the road, going house to house. Advance
units set up sniper positions and machine-gun positions a few hundred
yards farther up the road; beyond them, American mortars and bombs, fired
by units near and behind Colonel McCoy's position, were loudly raining
down.
One of Colonel McCoy's sergeants ran up to him and told him that Iraqi
reinforcements had just arrived.
''A technical vehicle dropped off some [expletives] over there,'' he said,
pointing up the road.
''Did you get it?'' Colonel McCoy asked.
''Yeah.''
''The [expletives]?''
''Some of them. Some ran away.''
''Boys are doing good,'' the colonel said moments later. ''Brute force is
going to prevail today.''
He listened to his radio.
''Suicide bombers headed for the bridge?'' he said. ''We'll drill them.''
Then, one by one, about a half-dozen vehicles came up the road,
separately, and the marines got ready to drill them.
--
Battle
is confusion. If a military unit is well
trained and well led, the confusion can be minimized, but it can never be
eliminated. Split-second decisions -- whether to fire or not fire, whether
to go left or right, whether to seek cover behind a house or in a ditch,
whether the enemy is 200 yards ahead or 400 yards ahead -- these kinds of
decisions are often made on the basis of fragmentary and contradictory
information by men who are sleep-deprived or operating on adrenaline; by
men who fear for their lives or for the lives of civilians around them or
both; by men who rely on instincts they hope will keep them alive and not
lead them into actions they will regret to their graves. When soldiers
make their split-second decisions, they do not know the outcome.
The situation was further complicated on the north side of the Diyala
bridge, because what was left of the Iraqi resistance had resorted to
guerrilla tactics. The Iraqis still firing on the marines were not wearing
uniforms. They would fire a few shots from a window, drop their weapons,
run away as though they were civilians, then go to another location where
they had hidden other weapons and fire those.
Amid the chaos of battle McCoy was, as usual, placid yet focused. Black
smoke blew overhead and through the streets; hundreds of marines crept
forward on their bellies or in low runs, darting, as fast as they could
with their combat gear, from palm tree to palm tree or from house to
house. On all sides, there was the sound of gunfire, an orchestra of
sounds -- the pop-pop of assault weapons, the boom-boom of heavy machine
guns, the thump of mortars. Harmony was taking a day off. There would be a
sudden burst of a few shots, then a crescendo in which, it seemed, every
marine in the vicinity was firing his weapon at an enemy who was, for the
most part, unseen; and then it would stop, briefly.
The bulk of the fire emanated from McCoy's forces, not the Iraqis. Some
marines branched farther out to the east, beyond the palm grove. Others
moved forward, straight down the road, trying to ''go firm'' on a front
line there, to establish a defensive perimeter into which Iraqi fighters
could not penetrate.
The plan was for marine snipers along the road to fire warning shots
several hundred yards up the road at any approaching vehicles. As the
half-dozen vehicles approached, some shots were fired at the ground in
front of the cars; others were fired, with great precision, at their tires
or their engine blocks. Marine snipers can snipe. The warning shots were
intended either to simply disable a vehicle -- wrecking the engine or the
tires -- or to send the message that the cars should stop or turn around,
or that passengers should get out and head away from the marines.
But some of the vehicles weren't fully disabled by the snipers, and they
continued to move forward. When that happened, the marines riddled the
vehicles with bullets until they ground to a halt. There would be no car
bombs taking out members of the Third Battalion.
The vehicles, it only later became clear, were full of Iraqi civilians.
These Iraqis were apparently trying to escape the American bombs that were
landing behind them, farther down the road, and to escape
Baghdad
itself; the
road they were on is a key route out of the city. The civilians probably
couldn't see the marines, who were wearing camouflage fatigues and had
taken up ground and rooftop positions that were intended to be difficult
for approaching fighters to spot. What the civilians probably saw in front
of them was an open road; no American military vehicles had yet been able
to cross the disabled bridge. In the chaos, the civilians were driving
toward a battalion of marines who had just lost two of their own in battle
that morning and had been told that suicide bombers were heading their
way.
One by one, civilians were killed. Several hundred yards from the forward
marine positions, a blue minivan was fired on; three people were killed.
An old man, walking with a cane on the side of the road, was shot and
killed. It is unclear what he was doing there; perhaps he was confused and
scared and just trying to get away from the city. Several other vehicles
were fired on; over a stretch of about 600 yards nearly a half dozen
vehicles were stopped by gunfire. When the firing stopped, there were
nearly a dozen corpses, all but two of which had no apparent military
clothing or weapons.
Two journalists who were ahead of me, farther up the road, said that a
company commander told his men to hold their fire until the snipers had
taken a few shots, to try to disable the vehicles without killing the
passengers. ''Let the snipers deal with civilian vehicles,'' the commander
had said. But as soon as the nearest sniper fired his first warning shots,
other marines apparently opened fire with M-16's or machine guns.
Two more journalists were with another group of marines along the road
that was also involved in the shooting. Both journalists said that a squad
leader, after the shooting stopped, shouted: ''My men showed no mercy.
Outstanding.''
--
The battle lasted until the afternoon, and the battalion camped for the
night on the north side of the bridge. The next morning, April 8, I walked
down the road. I counted at least six vehicles that had been shot at. Most
of them contained corpses or had corpses near them. The blue van, a Kia,
had more than 20 bullet holes in its windshield. Two bodies were slumped
over in the front seats; they were men in street clothes and had no
weapons that I could see. In the back seat, a woman in a black chador had
fallen to the floor; she was dead, too. There was no visible cargo in the
van -- no suitcases, no bombs.
Two of the van's passengers had survived the shooting; one of them, Eman
Alshamnery, had been shot in the toe. She had passed out and spent the
night in the vehicle. When she woke in the morning she was taken by
marines for treatment by their medical team.
Alshamnery told me that her home in
Baghdad
had been
bombed and that she was trying to flee the city with her sister, who was
the dead woman I had seen in the back seat of the van. Alshamnery said she
had not heard a warning shot -- which doesn't mean that one wasn't fired.
In fact, it would have been difficult, particularly for civilians
unaccustomed to the sounds of war, to know a warning shot when they heard
it, or to know where it came from, or how to react appropriately.
Alshamnery, who spoke to me through a Marine interpreter, was sitting next
to another woman, who gave her name as Bakis Obeid and said she had been
in one of the other passenger vehicles that was hit. She said her son and
husband had been killed.
There were other survivors. A few yards down the road from the Kia van,
three men were digging a grave. One gravedigger gave his name as Sabah
Hassan and said he was a chef at the Al Rashid hotel, which is in the
center of
Baghdad
and, in
more peaceful times, was where foreign journalists stayed. Hassan said he
was fleeing the city and was in a sedan with three other men on the road
when they came under fire, apparently from the marines. A passenger in his
car was killed. I asked him what he felt.
''What can I say?'' he replied. ''I am afraid to say anything. I don't
know what comes in the future. Please.'' He plunged his shovel back into
the earth and continued his funereal chores.
Not far from the gravediggers, I came across the body of the old man with
the cane. He had a massive wound in the back of his head. He died on his
back, looking at the sky, and his body was covered with flies. His cane,
made of aluminum, lay by his right hand.
Just a few yards away, a
Toyota
pickup
truck was by the side of the road, with more than 30 bullet holes in its
windshield. The driver, who was wearing a green military tunic, was dead,
his head thrown back, slightly to the left. Nearby, the body of another
man lay on the ground, on his stomach; attached to the back of his belt
was a holster for a pistol. An AK-47 assault rifle was in the sand nearby.
These were the only fighters, or apparent fighters, that I saw on the road
or in adjacent buildings.
As I took notes, several marines came by and peeked inside the blue van.
''I wish I had been here,'' one of them said. In other words, he wished he
had participated in the combat.
''The marines just opened up,'' another said. ''Better safe than sorry.''
A journalist came up and said the civilians should not have been shot.
There was a silence, and after the journalist walked away, a third marine,
Lance Cpl. Santiago Ventura, began talking, angrily.
''How can you tell who's who?'' said Corporal Ventura. He spoke sharply,
as though trying to contain his fury. ''You get a soldier in a car with an
AK-47 and civilians in the next car. How can you tell? You can't tell.''
He paused. Then he continued, still upset at the suggestion that the
killings were not correct.
''One of these vans took out our tank. Car bomb. When we tell them they
have to stop, they have to stop,'' he said, referring to civilians.
''We've got to be concerned about our safety. We dropped pamphlets over
these people weeks and weeks ago and told them to leave the city. You
can't blame marines for what happened. It's bull. What are you doing
getting in a taxi in the middle of a war zone?
''Half of them look like civilians,'' he continued. He was referring to
irregular forces. ''I mean, I have sympathy, and this breaks my heart, but
you can't tell who's who. We've done more than enough to help these
people. I don't think I have ever read about a war in which innocent
people didn't die. Innocent people die. There's nothing we can do.''
--
Two days later, the Third Battalion arrived at the Palestine Hotel in the
center of
Baghdad
, the first
marines to reach the heart of the city. They had made it from the Kuwaiti
border in 22 days. As the marines were taking up defensive positions
around the hotel, I noticed a sniper I had become acquainted with during
the past weeks. (Because he has children who do not know precisely what he
does in the Marines, he had asked me not to name him.) He was squatting on
the ground in Firdos
Square
, in front
of the hotel, scanning nearby buildings through the scope on his rifle,
looking for enemy snipers. About 150 yards away, at the other end of the
square, one of the battalion's armored vehicles was in the process of
wrapping a metal chain around the statue of Saddam Hussein, preparing to
pull it down.
Although this was a moment of triumph, I was still thinking about the
civilians killed at Diyala bridge, and I said to the sniper that I had
heard that he was one of the men who had fired shots there. He nodded his
head, and I didn't need to ask anything more, because he began to talk
about it. It was clear the bridge was weighing on his mind, too. He said
that during the battle, he fired a shot at the engine block of a vehicle
and that it kept moving forward. For him, this had been evidence that the
person behind the wheel was determined to push ahead, and to do harm.
I said that a civilian driver might not know what to do when a bullet hits
his vehicle, and might press ahead out of fear or confusion.
''It's easy to be a Monday-morning quarterback on Monday morning,'' he
replied. ''But we did everything we could to avoid civilian casualties.''
When I visited the kill box down the road from Diyala bridge the morning
after the battle, I noticed that the destroyed cars were several hundred
yards from the marine positions that fired on them. The marines could have
waited a bit longer before firing, and if they had, perhaps the cars would
have stopped, or perhaps the marines would have figured out that the cars
contained confused civilians. The sniper knew this. He knew that something
tragic had happened at the bridge. And so, as we spoke in Baghdad
, he stopped
defending the marines' actions and started talking about their intent. He
and his fellow marines, he said, had not come to
Iraq
to drill
bullets into women and old men who were just trying to find a safe place.
Collateral damage is far easier to bear for those who are responsible for
it from afar -- from the cockpit of a B-1 bomber, from the command center
of a Navy destroyer, from the rear positions of artillery crews. These
warriors do not see the faces of the mothers and fathers they have killed.
They do not see the blood and hear the screams and live with those
memories for the rest of their lives. The grunts suffer this. The Third
Battalion accomplished its mission of bringing military calamity upon the
regime of Saddam Hussein; the statue of Saddam fell just a few minutes
after the sniper and I spoke. But the sniper, and many other marines of
the Third Battalion, could not feel as joyous as the officers in the rear,
the generals in
Qatar
and the
politicians in
Washington
.
The civilians who were killed -- a precise number is not and probably
never will be available for the toll at Diyala bridge, or in the rest of
Iraq
-- paid the
ultimate price. But a price was paid, too, by the men who were responsible
for killing them. For these men, this was not a clean war of smart bombs
and surgical strikes. It was war as it has always been, war at close
range, war as
Sherman
described
it, bloody and cruel.
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