To Baghdad and back

I’d like to tell you about Iraq. The vast stretches of desert. The muddy fields and the green grass bending in the hot breeze. The palm trees. The flocks of sheep. The evening wind that picked up as the sun went down. The way the clean light of dawn washed over the clay roofs of Baghdad.

But when I start talking about Iraq and the war I left behind last week, I end up chatting about the young Marines I traveled with. The Marines of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment.

I tell people about Shant Postoyan, the young radioman from Fresno, Calif., who spent his spare minutes hunched over a grimy little notebook, filling its pages with long, passionate letters to his girlfriend back home while artillery shells exploded in the distance.

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I tell them about Rick Parkinson, the captain from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who learned en route to Baghdad that his pregnant wife was carrying a son. That day, he smiled as he sat in the dirt and cleaned his 9 mm pistol, his thoughts thousands of miles away.

I tell them about Jim Scott, the baby-faced and saintly corporal from Las Vegas who wanted to leave the Marine Corps to attend Bible college in Chicago. Jumping out of an amphibious assault vehicle one day with an M-16 rifle in his hands, he remarked, casually and to no one in particular, “I’m ready to shoot an Iraqi in the face if I have to.”

I tell people about Sgt. Drew Andrews, a college student and reservist from Gainesville, Fla., who ran to a burning vehicle with a fire extinguisher in his hand, ignoring the frantic shouts of Marines who told him the ammo in the vehicle was getting ready to explode. The fire finally out, he walked back to the group of Marines and nonchalantly sat down, cool as Steve McQueen. Nobody bothered to tell him he had guts. Nobody needed to.

. . .

Not long before the 200 or so men of Charlie Company left their camp in the Kuwaiti desert for Iraq, their commander, Capt. Brian Collins of Springfield, gathered them together and gave them an eve-of-battle speech. Collins told his men, “You need to take a hard look to your left and to your right, look at the Marines around you. Even if you don’t know their names, I guarantee you their faces will be etched in your memory forever.”

Collins knew what he was talking about.

Who could forget Cpl. Damey McEntire of Texas, a gung-ho student of war who once boasted “I’m not much on reading books” but who nevertheless seemed to know everything about being a Marine?

Who could forget Lt. Jiemar Patacsil, an Oxford, Calif., native who shared his entire secret stash of beef jerky with his hungry buddies, in a somber Last Supper mood, minutes before they risked their lives fording the Diyala River in a beat-up and leaky amphibious vehicle?

And who could forget 1st Sgt. Dave Zhorne of Iowa, a crafty old-timer (age 36) who never ran out of cigarettes and usually managed to find a way to make a cup of hot coffee in the cold morning?

. . .

In three weeks, the Marines of Charlie Company rolled across the Kuwait-Iraq border, over the Euphrates River, across the Diyala and into Baghdad. Between Kuwait and Baghdad, they grew accustomed to the constant sound of artillery booming nearby. To the thwump-thwump of Cobra helicopters overhead and the crash of rockets into Iraqi bunkers and tanks. To the sight of charred pickup trucks and dead Iraqis. To the bite of a hundred sand fleas and the fetid smell of their own unwashed bodies. To the pangs of hunger that made even their few hours of rest a small torment.

They faced the enemy at places like Nasiriyah, Ash Shatrah and Kut. They stood watch at night in the pouring rain and in pitch-black darkness, not knowing whether Saddam Hussein’s fedayeen, or “martyrs’ brigade,” would come leaping at them.

One night, as Charlie Company made camp along the road to Kut after taking prisoners earlier that day, they were told to steel themselves for a brutal firefight.

“I’m not telling you there’s possibly going to be an attack tonight,” Capt. Collins told his platoon leaders. “I’m telling you there’s probably going to be an attack tonight.”

The moment was possibly the first time in the war that the young Marines under Collins’ command realized that, soon, they might be dead. That war is a deadly business.

That moonless night, late in March, was the darkest night of the war. Everyone looked grim. Still the young Marines went to their trenches and waited. Then it happened: a minivan and several cars, their headlights on bright, tried to break through the battalion defenses set up on the road. The Marines rained bullets down upon them, and finally a rocket. The vehicles burst into flames. They never reached the lines where the Marines of Charlie Company waited.

Inside the cars, the Marines found the charred bodies of Iraqi men next to AK-47 rifles. They also found wounded women and children. One of the children, a little girl, had lost a leg. The next morning, a Charlie Company Marine with a lump in his throat put a pack of candy in the girl’s small hands.

I try to tell people about that night and the sight of the red tracers lighting up the darkness and the sound of the rocket and about how scary it all was, but I end up talking about the Marine giving the girl the candy.

The Marines of Charlie Company also took fire at Kut. They pulled into the city in their amphibious assault vehicles, and soon snipers were firing at them from all over. The Iraqis shot rocket-propelled grenades at them. Soon a U.S. tank arrived to help Charlie Company, and a Cobra overhead began blasting away. The Marines of Charlie made it out of the city with no casualties, and soon they were on their way to Baghdad.

. . .

I’d like to tell people about the battles like the one in Kut and Nasiriyah and the little skirmish on the side of the road where bullets whizzed over our heads and a mortar blew a hole in the field in front of us, but I end up talking about the young Marines I rode with.

I start talking about Cpl. Devin Church of Pacific Grove, Calif., who impersonated other Marines and mimicked accents and made us laugh so hard we sometimes forgot that shells were dropping and Iraqis were dying.

I start talking about Navy Corpsman T.J. Heitstuman of Lewiston, Idaho, whose hair was the color of hellfire and who rarely stopped talking about young women he knew and wanted to know.

I start talking about Pfc. Calbert Tso of Winslow, Ariz., who spoke in a whisper and sat as still as a statue of Buddha for hour after hour after hour.

I start talking about Lt. Dave Lewis, of Spring, Texas, who in Baghdad spent more than an hour smiling and waving back at jubilant, celebrating Iraqis, then raised his voice and angrily asked why some Americans didn’t support the war.

I talk about Maj. Jim Swafford of Dallas, a reservist and highly paid software salesman who was losing thousands of dollars in income by fighting in the war as a machine gunner; lanky Lance Cpl. Joe Stilwell of Jacksonville, Fla., who tried harder than anyone to find 15 minutes of sleep but who probably got less than anyone since he had to keep repairing the radios that always needed repairs; Pfc. Daniel English, a Georgian who told wonderful fistfight stories in a thick Southern accent that confounded the other Marines; and Sgt. Joe Gray, the radioman from Maine who had an uncanny way of knowing before anyone else where the company was going and what its next mission was.

I think of Iraq and the war, and I don’t start talking about the little skirmishes or even the sniper bullet that hit the wall 20 feet above my head the last day I was in Baghdad. Instead, I start talking about all those guys I rode to Baghdad with. I’ll probably keep talking about them for a long, long time.