A few days after I arrived I went out to battle position Vera Cruz with Lieutenant Colonel Marano and other members of 1-7’s headquarters company.  [REMOVED AS PER GUIDANCE FROM PUBLIC AFFAIRS OFFICER], and one Marine likened it to putting a lone outpost in the middle of “Indian country” in the old west.

Marano said putting the BP out there was a deliberately provocative act, designed to put Marines in an area that hasn’t seen any American presence since the invasion. Since Marine engineers began building Vera Cruz insurgents have fired mortars and rockets at it several times. A suicide car bomber drove into the front gate a few weeks ago, killing only himself. On my first visit to Vera Cruz, Marano and I stood on a sand berm while he pointed out where pieces of the car and pieces of the bomber had landed. After indicating where Marines found the man’s liver, Marano wondered, “How’s paradise looking now, asshole?”

Insurgents have also planted several IEDs on the road that snakes west from Ubaydi to Vera Cruz.  It’s a distance of over 20 kilometers, and there is only so much the Marines can do to patrol the road.  An IED on that stretch of road killed Lance Corporal Ford.  In the middle of last week another IED blew up between two Humvees, injuring no one.  On my first trip I met Capt. Greg Jones, who commands the company responsible for Vera Cruz and several other battle positions.  He went out to the site of the tank IED and watched the doc confirm that Ford was dead.

Friday evening I met up with Jones and other guys from his company at al Qaim and drove out with them to a battle position in New Ubaydi.  Saturday morning, after going out on a foot patrol with Marines and Iraqi Army soldiers, I got on another convoy going from Ubaydi to Vera Cruz.

It’s a long-ish drive, and I spent most of it watching the desert go by my window.  Humvee windows are more than an inch thick and about the size of a small television screen, so you feel a little sealed off from what’s outside.

After a while we stopped, which didn’t give me pause.  When you’re in the military or spend much time with the military you get used to stopping and waiting for all kinds of reasons and for no apparent reason at all.

Word came back on the radio that one of the vehicles in the convoy had spotted two men running away from a dirt road running south into the desert.  They’d disappeared after apparently scurrying up and over a low ridge running parallel to the side road.

[REMOVED AS PER GUIDANCE FROM PUBLIC AFFAIRS OFFICER].  Apparently the two guys who ran away had been in the process of laying the IED, and had been scared off by the convoy before they could wire the explosives to the pressure plate.

Along with two other vehicles my Humvee drove around to the other side of the ridge and then south into the desert.  We kicked up huge clouds of dust, bumped up and down the uneven terrain, and didn’t see a single living thing.  After a few minutes we stopped, turned around and headed back up to the road.  By this time a tank was squatting in the middle of the highway and civilian traffic from both directions had pulled over onto the shoulders.  My vehicle ended up heading back west to help cordon off that end of the road.

After sitting around for a while I got a reprieve—Capt. Jones called up and asked the corporal in command of my vehicle to walk me down to the site of the IED.  We walked over and saw a couple young Arab men lying on their stomachs.  They were blindfolded and had their hands secured their back with standard-issue plastic handcuffs that cinch tight around the wrists.  They were barefoot, and the Marines said their sandals were lying next to the IED.

Capt. Jones said they’d managed to find a piece of low ground to hide in, and then tried to get back onto the highway once the Humvees had passed.  That’s where they’d run into the tank and tried to double back into the desert.  The Humvees had run them down and they’d apparently given up without a fight.

Their story was that they’d walked up to the IED because they were curious, and then gotten scared of the explosives and run away.  They ran away so quickly that their sandals came off right next to the bomb.  One guy said they were in the area to buy sheep; the other said they were in the area to find their lost sheep.  The Marines’ translator, an American citizen born in the Middle East, said the men had fake Iraqi IDs and sounded like Saudis or Yemenis.

I wasn’t all that close to these guys; I was probably 50 meters away chatting with Capt. Jones and a few of the other Marines. About another 50 meters away a blue flatbed pick-up truck was parked with its blinkers on. The smart thing to do when an American convoy rolls through is to stop your vehicle and sit tight until the Americans are gone; this guy had apparently been stuck in place since the Americans pulled off the main road to chase the IED-planters. The driver was sitting calmly behind the wheel, and the Marines weren’t sure if the vehicle had been searched or not. They decided to check it out.

The translator and a Marine interrogator had been standing with me and Capt. Jones, and as they walked over to the vehicle I heard them telling the guy to turn off his engine.  They held up their hands and turned their wrists to the side, mimicking turning the key in the ignition.  I turned back and Capt. Jones began answering one of my questions, explaining that even with all the specific anti-IED operations they conduct they often just find guys while they’re driving down the road.

He was interrupted mid-sentence by the loud POP POP POP POP POP of gunfire.  In an instant we were both on the ground, and another short burst of gunfire was followed by the even-louder sound of Marines returning fire.  I heard Capt. Jones firing just to my left, and stuck my fingers in my ears.  I couldn’t see anything because I’d had my back to the truck and was now lying on my stomach facing the wrong direction.  Staying as low as possible I rotated myself around and raised my head a few inches, but by the time I did it was over.  Afterwards the Marines figured the whole thing had lasted between seven and ten seconds.

The translator and the interrogator had asked the man to turn off the truck, open the glove box and the doors, and step out of the vehicle.  The two said the guy was very calm, but was acting as if he couldn’t hear or couldn’t understand what they were saying.  He’d stepped out of the vehicle on the driver’s side, putting the truck between him and the Marines.  The interrogator, through the translator, asked him again to open all the doors.  The guy said, “Yallah,” which I’m sure I’m misspelling, but which means “Let’s go.”  In this context, the translator told me, it means, “Okay.”  The interpreter said he didn’t sound like an Iraqi.

Then the Arab said, almost conversationally, “Allahu Akbar” and started shooting from the hip with his Kalashnikov.

The interrogator said he didn’t hear the loud crack of gunfire until an instant later; he knew he was being shot at because he felt a bullet pass over his shoulder and heard its super-sonic snap. 

“He almost killed me,” he said later, with a hint of astonishment.

He simultaneously ducked for cover and grabbed for his pistol.  Meanwhile Capt. Jones, the corporal I’d walked up with and another Marine had opened fire with their M-16s.

I pieced all of this together after the fact; I didn’t see any of it.  After the guy was down Marines started yelling around to make sure no one was hit.  They called out to me, and I gave a thumbs-up.  They went around again.  My heart was racing and I was breathing hard; as heartily as I could I called back, “I’m fine!”

I got up and walked with some Marines to the other side of the truck.

Someone let out a loud “WHOOO!” which sounded like both a celebration and a sigh of relief.  The Arab was lying on his back next to the truck, and I couldn’t see where he was hit.

Then someone noticed that the back of the flatbed was filled with bomb-making materials, and everyone trotted away for fear that the whole truck was wired to blow.  After they’d gotten a safe distance away Capt. Jones decided to go back.

“We need to get a Medevac on this dumb son of a bitch,” said Capt. Jones.  “I’m going to pull this motherfucker away from the truck.”

Jones dragged the man away by his shoulders, leaving a trail of blood in the dirt.  Marines gathered around; the doc was working on his wounds while other men cut up his clothing looking for wires.  I noticed that this guy, like his friends up on the road, was barefoot.  Soon his clothes were in tatters, his penis exposed, and a bloody wound visible in his thigh.  He was slick with sweat and his lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear any words.  I think his eyes were open.

“Keep this motherfucker alive,” Jones said.  “I want to know what he knows, doc.”

“We got him in the leg,” another Marine said.

“That’s one brazen motherfucker right there,” said another.

It wasn’t clear, at first, how serious his injuries were.  It looked like he’d been shot once in the hand and once in the leg.  The Marines, understandably, weren’t sympathetic.  But they worked to patch him up.

The call had been put in to the Medavac choppers, and very shortly I saw a Blackhawk approaching and an escort helicopter circling the area.  The Marines tossed a smoke grenade to mark the spot where the chopper should land, but for whatever reason the pilot touched down a few hundred meters away.

The Marines decided to use the Humvee as a stretcher, and hoisted the Arab onto the hood.  A couple men held him steady as the vehicle drove down to the chopper.  One of the Marines traveled back to al Qaim on the chopper, acting as an escort for the wounded insurgent.

When the vehicle returned, its hood smeared with blood, we stood around smoking cigarettes, drinking water and Gatorade, and going over what had happened.  Jones said that, in nine total months in Iraq, he’d never been shot at before.  I wouldn’t say I was “shot at,” since the guy was obviously aiming for Marines, but I’ve never been that close to someone shooting in my direction.

They figured that, when the convoy came around the bend, the guy in the truck “took off, fucked his buddies.”  They’d tried to run away on foot, and the driver had realized his best bet was stopping the vehicle and playing it cool.

“The only time he pulled out his weapon is because he didn’t want to be detained.”

Capt. Jones said that the Marines’ response to the gunfire had been a textbook example of what to do.  Then he paused and said, “I’m kidding.  That was disgustingly ugly.  That was some heinous confusion.”

His standards are higher than mine—the guy was shot twice and on the ground within seconds, and no Marines were wounded.  As one said, “He’s down.  We’re not.  We win.  Again.”

Everyone seemed to think the guy would pull through except the doc, who was sure he was going to die.  The doc said the bullet that entered the man’s leg had been deflected up through his colon, punched through a kidney and exited through his lower back.  We found out later that night that the man had died; when I got back to al Qaim on Monday I found out that doctors there had worked to save him for an hour before he finally passed away.

After a while we had to clear the area so EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) could blow up the IED.  On the way back to the Humvee the corporal who’d escorted me said, “Hopefully those are the fuckers that almost blew us up.”  He was on the convoy that narrowly missed an IED blast three days earlier.

Back in the vehicle the driver was annoyed he’d been sitting around and missed the action. He’d had the air conditioning on and hadn’t even heard the shots fired.

“I’m having the boringest time of my life and something interesting actually happens.  That sucks.”

We watched from a distance as EOD sent a robot out to drop explosives near the IED.  After a few minutes of waiting for something to happen we lost interest and started chatting about other things.  Then a muted thump drew my attention back over to the dirt road, where a pillar of smoke and dust was now rising.  Shortly afterwards the Humvee pulled around and the convoy continued east to Vera Cruz.

I kept an eye out on my way back to al Qaim yesterday.  After taking care of the roadside bomb EOD had detonated the dead man’s pick-up truck.  The only evidence I could see that anything had happened there were a few pieces of shredded blue metal strewn beneath the power lines.