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.
Part of it is personal. It’s the same way for athletes: an athlete wants to be in a big game, wants to compete on the field or in the ring. But another part, a bigger part I think, is patriotism.
It’s the sort of thing that if it has to be explained, you’re not going to understand. But maybe this will help:
One night a little later on, we were in an exhausting firefight. Ten of us spent roughly forty-eight hours in the second story of an old, abandoned brick building, fighting in hundred-degree-plus heat wearing full armor. Bullets flew in, demolishing the walls around us practically nonstop. The only break we took was to reload.
Finally, as the sun came up in the morning, the sound of gunfire and bullets hitting brick stopped. The fight was over. It became eerily quiet.
When the Marines came in to relieve us, they found every man in the room either slumped against a wall or collapsed on the floor, dressing wounds or just soaking in the situation.
One of the Marines outside took an American flag and hoisted it over the position. Someone else played the National Anthem—I have no idea where the music came from, but the symbolism and the way it spoke to the soul was overwhelming; it remains one of my most powerful memories.
Every battle-weary man rose, went to the window, and saluted. The words of the music echoed in each of us as we watched the Stars and Stripes wave literally in dawn’s early light. The reminder of what we were fighting for caused tears as well as blood and sweat to run freely from all of us.
I’ve lived the literal meaning of the “land of the free” and “home of the brave.” It’s not corny for me. I feel it in my heart. I feel it in my chest. Even at a ball game, when someone talks during the anthem or doesn’t take off his hat, it pisses me off. I’m not one to be quiet about it, either.
For myself and the SEALs I was with, patriotism and getting into the heat of the battle were deeply connected. But how much a unit like ours can fight depends a lot on leadership. Much of it is up to the head shed, the officers who lead us. SEAL officers are a real mix. Some are good, some are bad. And some are just pussies.
Oh, they may be tough individuals, but it takes more than personal toughness to be good leaders. The methods and goals have to contribute to the toughness.
Our top command wanted us to achieve 100 percent success, and to do it with 0 casualties. That may sound admirable—who doesn’t want to succeed, and who wants anyone to get hurt? But in war those are incompatible and unrealistic. If 100 percent success, 0 casualties are your goal, you’re going to conduct very few operations. You will never take any risks, realistic or otherwise.
Ideally, we could have done sniper overwatches and undertaken scouting missions for the Marines all around Nasiriya. We could have been a much bigger part of the Marines’ drive. We might have saved some of their lives.
We wanted to go out at night and hit the next big city or town the Marine Corps was going to pass through. We’d soften the target for them, killing off as many bad guys as we could. We did do a few missions like that, but it was certainly a lot less than we could have done.
Evil
I had never known that much about Islam. Raised as a Christian, obviously I knew there had been religious conflicts for centuries. I knew about the Crusades, and I knew that there had been fighting and atrocities forever.
But I also knew that Christianity had evolved from the Middle Ages. We don’t kill people because they’re a different religion.
The people we were fighting in Iraq, after Saddam’s army fled or was defeated, were fanatics. They hated us because we weren’t Muslim. They wanted to kill us, even though we’d just booted out their dictator, because we practiced a different religion than they did.
Isn’t religion supposed to teach tolerance?
P eople say you have to distance yourself from your enemy to kill him. If that’s true, in Iraq, the insurgents made it really easy.
The fanatics we fought valued nothing but their twisted interpretation of religion. And half the time they just claimed they valued their religion—most didn’t even pray. Quite a number were drugged up so they could fight us.
Many of the insurgents were cowards. They routinely used drugs to stoke their courage. Without them, alone, they were nothing. I have a tape somewhere showing a father and a girl in a house that was being searched. They were downstairs; for some reason, a flash-bang went off upstairs.
On the video, the father hides behind the girl, afraid that he’s going to be killed and ready to sacrifice his daughter.
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