CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

Airborne school and the Ranger Indoctrination Program turned out to be both instructive and demanding, and Pat's outlook brightened considerably during the six weeks it took for him and Kevin to complete the two courses. Learning to jump out of airplanes was thrilling, and RIP involved enough suffering to hold Pat's attention. The latter has a notoriously challenging curriculum designed to impart tactical skills Rangers need for Special Operations warfare, while simultaneously pushing recruits past their physical and mental limits in order to cull the weak and insufficiently motivated. Upon graduating from RIP shortly before Christmas, Pat and Kevin received the tan berets the Army awards to the elite forces of the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment, after which they were a.s.signed to a unit called the "Black Sheep": Second Platoon, Alpha Company, Second Ranger Battalion, based at Fort Lewis, Washington.

Russell Baer was a twenty-two-year-old private when the Tillmans arrived at Fort Lewis. "There had been a lot of buzz about them coming," Baer says.

All the tabs-the veteran Rangers-were talking smack about how they were gonna smoke the NFL dude. The first time I laid eyes on Pat and Kevin they were standing with their duffels next to the other new guys, who were nervous and sweating. Pat and Kevin didn't look scared at all. They acted confident, like they had done this every day of their lives.... I imagined they would be egotistical jocks. But during those first days, as I watched them interacting with the other noogs,* I knew I would get along with them. Pat didn't go around beating his chest. He would talk to these goofy, scrawny-looking privates and treat them as equals. I knew I would get along with them. Pat didn't go around beating his chest. He would talk to these goofy, scrawny-looking privates and treat them as equals.

The Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment is the Army's premier infantry unit. As with the Army's Green Berets and Delta Forces, Navy SEAL teams, Air Force Special Operations Wings, and Marine Special Operations Battalions, the Ranger Regiment functions under the auspices of the U.S. Special Operations Command. Rangers consider themselves to be superior warriors, members of a lofty tribe that has little in common with the "regular Army"; derogatorily, they refer to soldiers from the regular Army as "Legs." To set itself apart from other Army units, the Ranger Regiment maintains unique customs and merciless rituals. When newly minted Rangers arrive at Second Battalion fresh out of RIP, it is de rigueur for the old hands to put the noogs through the grinder, lest they fail to appreciate their place in the pecking order. The Ranger who a.s.sumed primary responsibility for edifying Pat in this regard was a corporal from Mountain Home, Arkansas, name of Jason Parsons.

"We heard that this Tillman guy was coming in," Parsons recalls.

I was like, "Oh boy, that's just what we need, a prima-donna football star...." I was a little pessimistic about it.... I figured he was gonna be a huge problem. So when he gets there, I go up to where he was standing at parade rest with his brother. First thing I noticed was "That dude has a thick neck." I was expecting a little bit bigger guy. But he still had a pretty thick neck. Looking at him I thought, "Yeah, he's strong." And then I did what any good NCO would do: I messed with him a little bit.* Not full-on smoking him, just messing with him a little bit. I took the opportunity to give him some s.h.i.t, just to kind of see how he would react. You get a lot of feedback in the first thirty minutes of someone being there: what their character is, how they relate to people, how they think about themselves. I thought he came across as arrogant. A little bit of c.o.c.kiness is a good thing in a Ranger, definitely, if you can back it up. And football players are used to working their a.s.ses off, so I figured he had a work ethic. Not full-on smoking him, just messing with him a little bit. I took the opportunity to give him some s.h.i.t, just to kind of see how he would react. You get a lot of feedback in the first thirty minutes of someone being there: what their character is, how they relate to people, how they think about themselves. I thought he came across as arrogant. A little bit of c.o.c.kiness is a good thing in a Ranger, definitely, if you can back it up. And football players are used to working their a.s.ses off, so I figured he had a work ethic.At first Pat conducted himself very well. He had been disciplined. I was happy about that. But then I noticed he was being treated differently from the rest of the recruits by one of the other NCOs.

The sergeant in question, according to Parsons, "was doing the whole 'You want to be my buddy?' thing. In Ranger Regiment, NCOs aren't supposed to be buddy-buddy with the new guys. That's not the way it works. You don't treat them as equals. You need to let the noogs know that they are in a subordinate position, to get things rolling in the right direction.

"So starting off, me and Tillman had a lot of friction. I was probably the first guy who let him know he wasn't special.... Throughout his life he was used to being the guy in charge, but in my life I was also used to being in charge, and I had the rank, so that's the way it went. He had a few issues with that, but we straightened them out pretty early on."

According to Marie, it was a struggle for Pat when NCOs like Parsons went out of their way to "stuff him up," just to show him who was boss. "Pat was used to a certain level of control in his life," she explains, which completely disappeared as soon as he joined the Army. I think he knew in theory how hard it would be, but until you actually experience it, you can't appreciate what it's really like. In his sports career he was always rewarded for how well he performed. In the military it doesn't work that way. It's all based on how long you've been in, and what your rank is. It doesn't matter how capable you are. I think that was a little shocking for both Pat and Kevin. Dealing with that was really difficult, but Pat had such a strong sense of who he was that it didn't change him. He learned how to function within the system, how to deal with it, but he never let them break his spirit. The Army never changed him at all.

Pat's ability to weather his initiation into the Ranger fraternity was enhanced considerably by the fact that Marie was back in his life again, and they were living away from the base. Two months before Pat and Kevin reported to Fort Lewis, while they were still at boot camp in Georgia, Marie had flown to Seattle and spent several days looking for a house for them to rent. "When they first joined the Army," she says, "I was like, 'Maybe we should just live on base. It might be easier.' But Pat said, 'Absolutely not! We're not living on base!' So I went out there to see what kind of place I could find, because the Army didn't really give you much money for housing if you wanted to live off base."

In his journal, Pat had expressed the hope that she would find "a quaint little cottage somewhere with personality and charm," along the lines of his childhood home in New Almaden. As it turned out, the first house she looked at, ten miles from Fort Lewis, fit this description almost precisely: a cute two-bedroom brick bungalow with wood floors and a fireplace, perched on a gentle slope above Puget Sound, surrounded by azaleas and rhododendrons and wintercreeper, with a big madrone tree in the side yard, a weeping cherry by the front steps, and a porch looking out across the water toward Fox Island and-when the clouds parted-the immense, mysterious peaks of the Olympic Mountains. The air was saturated with the scent of salt.w.a.ter and cedar forests. Seabirds wheeled overhead. There was even a view of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which arched through the mist over the eponymous strait like an image from a dimly remembered dream.

Marie signed a lease for the cottage and then returned in November to clean, paint, and move all their belongings up from Arizona while Pat and Kevin went through jump school and RIP. By the time they'd graduated, their new home was all ready for the brothers' arrival. "Pat and I loved that house," Marie says wistfully. "And Kevin did, too. Even today, Kevin and I still have this special feeling about living there, like it was some sort of utopia. Which is so funny, considering what they were going through in the Army.

"They would go to work and do this G.o.d-awful stuff, but we lived in this little fantasy bubble away from all that. They would come home, and it was like a separate world. Pat wanted that and needed that. He didn't want our life to be a military life. And it wasn't, in a lot of ways. Pat never came home in uniform. They would come and go in regular clothes. When they were home, they would get up in the morning and leave for work, almost like they had normal jobs." Eventually Marie landed a good job of her own in downtown Seattle, forty miles to the north on Interstate 5, and when she returned in the evening after work, she says, "They would be home waiting for me. There were chunks of time when they were gone to Ranger School or overseas or whatever, but then they would come home, and it was like they had never left. The three of us were away from everything and everybody, and for Kevin and me both, we had all that we needed, which was for Pat to be there."

The already strong bond among the three of them grew even stronger. When Pat and Kevin weren't on the base, they were usually with Marie; they didn't socialize much with others, and Pat drank very little alcohol. He regarded being a Ranger as one of the most serious challenges he'd ever undertaken, and he didn't want to do anything that might dull his focus on the task at hand.

When they enlisted, the Tillman brothers a.s.sumed they would be deployed to Afghanistan to fight Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban-a war that seemed vital to protecting national security. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush had repeatedly promised that if he was elected, his administration would promote a "humble" foreign policy. "I'm going to be judicious as to how to use the military," he pledged during his second debate with Al Gore. "It needs to be in our vital interest, the mission needs to be clear, and the exit strategy obvious.... I think the United States must be...humble in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course." The Tillmans, like most Americans, therefore had no reason to suspect that in November 2001, President Bush and Vice President Cheney had instructed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to secretly create a detailed plan for the invasion of Iraq.

Scarcely two months after the 9/11 attacks, even though bin Laden was still at large in Afghanistan, the president and his most influential advisers regarded the Afghan campaign as a mere sideshow, almost a diversion. Truth be told, the primary focus of the Bush administration had always been taking down Saddam Hussein. On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the United Nations to make the president's argument for invading Iraq, presenting satellite photos and other evidence in a PowerPoint presentation that persuasively-but erroneously-indicated Saddam possessed weapons of ma.s.s destruction and had conspired with al-Qaeda to carry out terrorist attacks against Americans. When Powell finished his spiel, it was plain to the world that the United States would be invading Iraq in the immediate future.

Pat was very disturbed. By the time it became clear that war with Iraq was imminent, Pat and Kevin had been training at Fort Lewis for just over a month. Seventeen days after Powell addressed the United Nations, Pat wrote in his journal, It may be very soon that Nub & I will be called upon to take part in something I see no clear purpose for.... Were our case for war even somewhat justifiable, no doubt many of our traditional allies...would be praising our initiative.... However, every leader in the world, with a few exceptions, is crying foul, as is the voice of much of the people. This...leads me to believe that we have little or no justification other than our imperial whim. Of course Nub & I have...willingly allowed ourselves to be p.a.w.ns in this game and will do our job whether we agree with it or not. All we ask is that it is duly noted that we harbor no illusions of virtue.

At the beginning of March, Pat, Kevin, and the other Rangers of Alpha Company were flown to a small airfield in the desert outside of Ar'ar, Saudi Arabia. "Curious how quickly this whole endeavor has come along," Pat wrote. "Two months out of RIP and Kevin and I are 50 miles off the Iraqi border.... The last couple of days have been spent putting up a tent city, stringing concertina wire, and staying up all night with guard duties. We are one of the first to arrive so the task of setting up the place falls on our shoulders."

Contemplating the uncertainty of what lay ahead, he beseeched, "Let Kevin & I come out of this well." Were either of them to be seriously hurt or killed, he acknowledged, "I cannot begin to imagine what it would do to our family." He was particularly concerned about Marie: "Needless to say I miss her incredibly and cannot get the picture of her face, before we left, out of my mind. She was so genuinely upset/worried/disappointed that it etched a hole in my mind.... I can't wait to start a family with Marie, absolutely can't wait."

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IRAQ.

"Having kids was definitely something we both wanted," Marie confirms. "It was part of why we decided to get married, to start a family. We were pretty young, but with Pat playing football, we felt settled and could afford to do it. But then when he decided to join the Army, it didn't seem like the right time. Pat was more inclined to still have a baby, but I wanted to hold off until he would be around more. So we decided to wait until after he got out. It didn't seem like that big a deal to wait. We were still really young."

On March 14, the Tillmans' platoon was a.s.signed to act as a QRF-a quick reaction force. They would remain on perpetual standby, prepared to board helicopters and be in the air within ninety minutes to come to the aid of other units that might require rescue or additional firepower. With combat perhaps imminent, the Rangers practiced donning gas masks and heavy charcoal-lined suits called MOPPs (for Mission Oriented Protective Postures) that were intended to safeguard them in the event of an attack with chemical or biological weapons. After trying on his hot, clammy, indescribably uncomfortable MOPP gear, Pat reflected: It sounds like we will wear this garb wherever we go. The idea of being shot at is not a warm one, although it's infinitely less frightening than chemical or biological threats....If Kevin and I are part of a situation where we must fight, every bit of my soul knows we will fight as hard as anyone ever has. We will not question the reasons for our being here or allow any personal beliefs to interfere with our job. My hope is that decisions are being made with the same good faith that Kevin and I aim to display.... I hope [this war is about] more than oil, money, & power.... I doubt that it is.... If anything were to happen to Kevin I would never forgive myself. If anything happens to Kevin, and my fears of our intent in this country prove true, I will never forgive this world.

Sitting in his tent, Pat pulled out an anthology of essays that included Ralph Waldo Emerson's intricately wrought, twenty-page tour de force, "Self-Reliance"-a disquisition on the importance of following one's conscience rather than conforming to the dictates of society: G.o.d will not have his work made manifest by cowards....Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness.... Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind....What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude....I suppose no man can violate his nature.... A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza;-read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.... We pa.s.s for what we are.... Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment....Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.

Pat absorbed the essay over several days. By the time he reached its final lines, he was exhilarated: So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls.... A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

"Let me applaud the hero who is Ralph W. E.," Pat exclaimed in his journal. "'Self-Reliance' touched my soul.... Brilliant, truly brilliant."

On March 19, the night before the invasion of Iraq, Emerson's ideas were still reverberating inside Pat's head, unleashing a torrent of thoughts and feelings. "I want to set the world on fire and make it right," he wrote, but he worried about the pain he brought to those he loved by adhering to his principles: My honor will not allow me to create a life of beauty and peace but sends me off to order and conformity. My life becomes everything I'm not. I love my wife more than myself yet drag her through the same puddle. Who do I love? Where is my pa.s.sion directed? Best I can tell, it's to those who could care less: the general ma.s.ses. I follow some philosophy I barely understand.... My direction is selfish, my telos telos destructive.... Sometimes my need to love hurts-myself, my family, my cause. Is there a cure? Of course. But I refuse. Refuse to stop loving, to stop caring. To avoid those tears, that pain...To err on the side of pa.s.sion is human and right and the only way I'll live. destructive.... Sometimes my need to love hurts-myself, my family, my cause. Is there a cure? Of course. But I refuse. Refuse to stop loving, to stop caring. To avoid those tears, that pain...To err on the side of pa.s.sion is human and right and the only way I'll live.

At 5:30 a.m. local time on March 20, some three dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles thundered from their launching bays on warships in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, and steered toward Iraq to deliver a surfeit of shock, awe, and death to targets throughout Baghdad. "Well the war has certainly begun," Pat wrote from his tent in the desert, thirty-five miles outside of Iraq. "My heart goes out to those who will suffer. Whatever your politics, whatever you believe is right or wrong, the fact is most of those who will feel the wrath of this ordeal want nothing more than to live peacefully."

Pat's platoon was informed they would be parachuting down to a site within Iraq to join the fight. "Our first jump since Airborne school may be combat, how about them apples?" he mused. A day later, however, the mission was delayed indefinitely. And on the night of March 27, when the platoon finally climbed into helicopters and flew off with the Navy's SEAL Team Six to engage the enemy at a place called Qadisiyah Airbase, Pat and Kevin weren't among them.

"Pat was left in the tent," Jason Parsons explains. "That's pretty much all there was to it. He was a new guy without much training under his belt. They wanted to send out the more seasoned soldiers. The noogs tend to be more of a liability than an a.s.set."

Pat was furious. "I knew it was coming," he wrote, "but still I can't help my anger.... I'm not out for blood or in any hurry to kill people, however I did not throw my life to s.h.i.t in order to fill sandbags and guard Hummers. This is a f.u.c.king insult that boils my blood. All I want to do is rip out the throat of one of these loudmouth f.u.c.ks who's going as opposed to me." The fact that Pat believed the Iraq War to be illegal and unjust did not prevent him from wanting desperately to get into the fight, to face enemy fire alongside his comrades, to prove himself in combat. Being left in the tent was also a rude slap to his ego. "I feel like the last kid picked," he complained to his journal, "losing my job my rookie year, not making varsity as a freshman. I want to f.u.c.king hurt something. I threw away or postponed a great deal to come here, broke the rules in a way. Here, nothing is based on merit. Everything has to do with time in battalion, time of rank-no comment on ability, apt.i.tude, or skill.... I bring up 'rule break' only because I want someone to do this for us. Realize we are not normal privates, break the f.u.c.king rules, and put us in a position to add value. f.u.c.k this place."

At the last minute, Private Jade Lane had been chosen for the Qadisiyah mission instead of Pat, Lane says, because he had an M203 grenade launcher attached to his M4 carbine, Pat didn't, "and they wanted more firepower." Lane, for his part, would have been happy to let Pat go in his place. "The first thing I saw when they kicked the helicopter doors open," Lane remembers, "was two huge murals of Saddam on the airfield. You could see all these muzzle flashes lighting up the night, and helicopters with mini-guns were just opening up on enemy targets on the ground-to look out and see that, it was like, 'Holy s.h.i.t. This is real. This is actually happening.'" As the chopper came in under heavy enemy fire, a twenty-one-year-old Ranger named Manuel Avila was shot twice in the chest, and a crewman on another helicopter was shot in the head.

Avila's injuries appeared to be life threatening. Pat, monitoring the mission over the radio back at the base in Ar'ar, was chastened. Avila was part of his four-man fire team, and he was fond of him. "Very quiet, hard working, good man," Pat wrote of his wounded teammate when news of the casualties arrived. "He was actually born in Mexico and came north with his family as a boy. Not exactly the story some folks think of when they b.i.t.c.h about all those 'foreigners' coming over. Bravo, Manuel, you not only do your family, friends, & fellow soldiers proud, you symbolize the men this country was built by.... I wait to see how they will all return. What exactly is the look of a man after an encounter with fire, an encounter with a comrade shot, an encounter with death?"

Avila had been the SAW gunner on Tillman's team. When Avila was shot, Pat became the new SAW gunner. Weighing twenty-two pounds (including a two-hundred-round drum of .223-caliber ammunition, the same bullets fired by the M4 and M16), the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon is a belt-fed machine gun designed to lay down high volumes of suppressive fire. Not only did the gun itself weigh a lot, but a SAW gunner was required to carry at least six hundred to eight hundred rounds of ammunition, because the weapon could fire a thousand rounds per minute and tended to use up a lot of bullets in a hurry once the shooting started. "Truth be told," Pat confessed to his journal, "I'd rather stick with the lighter M4, but being that I have no choice, I will learn this new weapon and get proficient at it. This is a heavy casualty-producing weapon, which will change my role a bit. Oh well-improvise, adapt, and overcome."

* Army slang for "new guys." Army slang for "new guys."* NCO is the acronym for noncommissioned officer, that is, a corporal or sergeant of any grade. NCO is the acronym for noncommissioned officer, that is, a corporal or sergeant of any grade.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

Pat and Kevin were finally sent out on their first mission on March 31, as part of an immense contingent of Marines, Rangers, Green Berets, Delta Force operators, SEALs, and Air Force Pararescue Jumpers dispatched to rescue a nineteen-year-old soldier reportedly being held prisoner by Iraqi fighters at a hospital in a city called An Nasiriyah. The prisoner's name was Jessica Dawn Lynch.

Her capture eight days earlier, and the rescue that eventually followed, were about to become the most publicized episodes of the entire Iraq War. The saga of Jessica Lynch would also turn out to have a momentous impact on Pat Tillman-although the wallop wouldn't be delivered until more than a year after she became a household name, and the connection between Lynch and Tillman has not previously been disclosed. On March 23, 2003, Private Lynch had been traveling north on Highway 8, a major freeway leading to Baghdad, as one of thirty-three soldiers in an eighteen-vehicle convoy of the Army's 507th Maintenance Company, which was heading up-country to support a Patriot antimissile battery. The soldiers were for the most part mechanics, supply clerks, and cooks, poorly trained for combat, who did not expect to find themselves anywhere near the front lines. At 1:00 in the morning, the sleep-deprived officer leading the convoy, Captain Troy King, missed a crucial turn onto his a.s.signed route, a six-lane expressway that would have kept him ten miles outside of An Nasiriyah, a congested city. Approximately five hours later, at a major intersection adorned with a statue memorializing the Iran-Iraq War, King missed another critical turn.

The convoy-a few Humvees escorting an a.s.sortment of heavy trucks towing trailers-had unwittingly exited Highway 8, which also would have diverted it around Nasiriyah, and was now headed directly into the city on a four-lane boulevard. The board-flat, barren desert they'd been driving through since leaving Kuwait abruptly gave way to palm groves and lush green shrubbery. About a mile after leaving Highway 8, the convoy motored past several Iraqi T-55 tanks positioned beside the road, but failed to notice them in the dark, and thus continued driving blithely on.

Half a mile farther, the convoy crossed a low, gently arching bridge, longer than two football fields, spanning the greasy, ash-colored flow of the Euphrates River. When they reached the far sh.o.r.e, they were in the heart of Nasiriyah. A military town, it was roughly the Iraqi equivalent of Colorado Springs or Tacoma or El Paso. Its 500,000 residents included three regiments of the Iraqi Army (about 5,000 soldiers) as well as an estimated 800 Fedayeen militia fighters. Lynch's convoy of cafeteria workers and desk jockeys were the first Americans to enter this exceedingly hostile environment since the start of the war three days earlier.

The heavily armed citizens of Nasiriyah had been nervously expecting the Americans to invade their city. Tanks, artillery, and squads of fighters were positioned in strategic locations around the metropolitan area to repel the coming attack. But none of the anxious locals antic.i.p.ated that the invading force would be a lightly armed convoy of transport trucks, driven by men and women who appeared to be utterly unaware of the Iraqi forces ama.s.sed around them. The Iraqis were so astonished by the Americans' cluelessness that they held their fire and merely stared in disbelief.

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A few blocks after crossing the Euphrates River, as the convoy entered the urban core of Nasiriyah, it pa.s.sed an Iraqi military checkpoint manned by armed soldiers who smiled and waved at the Americans as they drove by, and Lynch's convoy continued to roll north through the middle of the city, unmolested, for another three miles.

After crossing a bridge over a waterway called the Saddam Ca.n.a.l and then driving a mile past Nasiriyah's northern edge, Captain King, the convoy commander, stopped to consult his GPS, whereupon he belatedly realized they'd made a seriously wrong turn an hour earlier. Determining that the convoy would need to retrace its route in order to return to the intersection where he'd led them astray, King ordered his troops to lock and load their weapons, turn around, and begin driving back the way they'd just come.

Soon after the Americans reversed course, the Iraqis overcame the paralysis of their initial shock and began shooting at the convoy. Some of the American soldiers panicked, and most of their dust-clogged, improperly maintained weapons jammed. In short order, Captain King lost his bearings in the maze of unfamiliar streets, one truck was disabled by enemy fire, and two other rigs got stuck in soft sand. Sergeant Donald R. Walters, who had been riding in the disabled truck, was inadvertently left behind, taken prisoner by the Fedayeen, and subsequently killed.

As word traveled rapidly through the city that a befuddled, lightly armed American convoy had blundered into their midst, Fedayeen fighters were drawn to the scene like hyenas to a flock of defenseless sheep, and the attack intensified. The convoy splintered, and its vehicles soon became widely separated in the confusion and billowing dust. An American soldier was shot, and then another.

Jessica Lynch and four other soldiers were in a Humvee towing a trailer near the rear of what remained of the convoy. Directly in front of Lynch's Humvee was a five-ton truck driven by Specialist Edgar Hernandez, towing a flatbed trailer. The two vehicles accelerated south through Nasiriyah down a street that the Marines would christen "Ambush Alley," desperately trying to flee the city as Fedayeen on rooftops shot at them with AK-47s, heavy machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenades. Around 7:20, they sped back across the long bridge over the Euphrates River and were nearly out of the kill zone when Hernandez's tractor trailer came upon an Iraqi dump truck that had been positioned across the road to block the Americans' pa.s.sage. Hernandez swerved onto the right shoulder to avoid hitting the truck, his trailer jackknifed, and a moment later Lynch's Humvee smashed into the back of the flatbed at fifty miles per hour.

Lynch, who was in one of the rear seats, and her best friend, Private Lori Piestewa, who was driving, survived the crash but were gravely injured and taken prisoner by the Fedayeen. The other three occupants of the Humvee perished on impact or shortly thereafter. All told, eleven soldiers from the Maintenance Company lost their lives in the attack on the convoy, and seven were captured.

Lynch and Piestewa, both unconscious, were brought to nearby Tykar Military Hospital, where Piestewa soon succ.u.mbed to her injuries. A few hours later, an Iraqi military ambulance transported Lynch to Saddam Hussein General Hospital, a civilian facility two miles across town. Within a few days American forces learned from multiple Iraqi sources, including the husband of an Iraqi nurse who was caring for Lynch, that she was being held at Saddam Hospital. The nurse's husband, a lawyer named Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, told some Marines manning a checkpoint outside of the city that he had spoken with Lynch at her bedside. When the Marines asked al-Rehaief to return to the hospital to gather more information, he went back twice and provided the Americans with detailed maps indicating the layout of the six-story building and Lynch's precise location. He also told the Marines that the American girl had been shot in both legs, her head was bandaged, and one arm was in a sling.

Relying on the intelligence provided by al-Rehaief, the operation to rescue her was set into motion on March 31. At dawn, Pat, Kevin, and their fellow Rangers were flown to Tallil, a sprawling, bombed-out Iraqi airfield twelve miles southwest of Nasiriyah that the Americans had captured ten days earlier. After sitting in the sun all day waiting for something to happen, they were informed the mission had been postponed for twenty-four hours. The next morning they again prepared for battle and waited throughout the day. That evening when darkness fell, explosions flashed in the nearby city as a Marine artillery battery began sh.e.l.ling an enemy command post to divert enemy forces away from Saddam Hospital. At midnight, a Special Ops team stormed the hospital, s.n.a.t.c.hed Lynch from her bed, hustled her out on a stretcher to a waiting Black Hawk helicopter, and flew her to safety.

During the rescue operation, the Tillmans remained just outside the city as part of a quick reaction force ready to storm the hospital in the event of trouble. Their role in the rescue "was marginal," Pat admitted in his journal. Throughout the night of April 1-2, "We sat on the airfield freezing our b.a.l.l.s off waiting to be called in." But, he reported happily, "the girl, Jessica, was saved, no one was hurt, overall the mission was a total success."

The definitive account of Lynch's ordeal was published on the front page of the Washington Post Washington Post on April 3. "She Was Fighting to the Death," the headline announced above the story's breathless opening sentence: on April 3. "She Was Fighting to the Death," the headline announced above the story's breathless opening sentence: Pfc. Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi hospital, fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed the Army's 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, U.S. officials said yesterday.Lynch...continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting March 23, one official said.... "She was fighting to the death," the official said. "She did not want to be taken alive."Lynch was also stabbed when Iraqi forces closed in on her position, the official said, noting that initial intelligence reports said she had been stabbed to death....Lynch's rescue at midnight local time Tuesday was a cla.s.sic Special Operations raid, with U.S. commandos in Black Hawk helicopters engaging Iraqi forces on their way in and out of the medical compound, defense officials said.Acting on information from CIA operatives, they said, a Special Operations force of Navy SEALs, Army Rangers and Air Force combat controllers touched down in blacked-out conditions...."There was shooting going in, there was some shooting going out," said one military officer briefed on the operation. "It was not intensive. There was no shooting in the building, but it was hairy, because no one knew what to expect...."The officer said that Special Operations forces found what looked like a "prototype" Iraqi torture chamber in the hospital's bas.e.m.e.nt, with batteries and metal prods....

Thanks largely to details first revealed in this article, as well as dramatic video of the rescue distributed to the media by the Army, Jessica Lynch dominated the news for weeks. The details of the incident provided by military public affairs officers made for an absolutely riveting story that television, radio, and print journalists found irresistible: a pet.i.te blond supply clerk from a flea-speck burg in West Virginia is ambushed in Iraq and fearlessly mows down masked Fedayeen terrorists with her M16 until she runs out of ammo, whereupon she is shot, stabbed, captured, tortured, and raped before finally being s.n.a.t.c.hed from her barbaric Iraqi captors during a daring raid by American commandos.

The story was so gripping that little heed was paid to a paragraph near the beginning of the aforementioned Washington Post Washington Post article, which stated, article, which stated, Several officials cautioned that the precise sequence of events is still being determined, and that further information will emerge as Lynch is debriefed. Reports thus far are based on battlefield intelligence, they said, which comes from monitored communications and from Iraqi sources in Nasiriyah whose reliability has yet to be a.s.sessed. Pentagon officials said they had heard "rumors" of Lynch's heroics but had no confirmation.

Over the following weeks, months, and years, subsequent reporting by investigative journalists revealed that most of the details of Lynch's ordeal were extravagantly embellished, and much of the rest was invented from whole cloth. Because her rifle had jammed, she hadn't fired a single round. Although her injuries had indeed been life threatening, they were exclusively the result of her Humvee smashing into Hernandez's tractor trailer; she was never shot, stabbed, tortured, or raped. After she had been transferred to Saddam Hussein General Hospital, her captors treated her with kindness and special care. And when the American commandos arrived at the hospital to rescue Lynch, they met no significant resistance.

The spurious particulars did not come from Private Lynch. The bogus story was based on information fed to gullible reporters by anonymous military sources. The government official who arranged for reporters to interview these sources- the guy who deserves top billing for creating the myth of Jessica Lynch, in other words-was a White House apparatchik named Jim Wilkinson. Although his official job description was director of strategic communications for General Tommy Franks (the commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan), actually Wilkinson served as the Bush administration's top "perception manager" for the Iraq War. As Ben Smith noted in an article published in the New York Observer New York Observer in October 2003, in October 2003, Wilkinson has gone from politics to war and back since he worked for George W. Bush in Florida during the 2000 election, and his journey is a mark of the administration's utilitarian approach to marketing war, politics and the presidency.... He's also got as pure a Republican pedigree as you can wish, and an edge honed in the bitter partisan wars between Bill Clinton and the Republican House leadership.Mr. Wilkinson grew up in East Texas and attended high school in Tenaha, population 1,046, then gave up plans to become an undertaker to go to work for Republican Congressman d.i.c.k Armey in 1992. Mr. Armey soon became House majority leader; his communications director, Mr. Wilkinson's mentor, was Ed Gillespie, now chairman of the Republican National Committee.Mr. Wilkinson first left his mark on the 2000 presidential race in March 1999, when he helped package and promote the notion that Al Gore claimed to have "invented the Internet." Then the Texan popped up in Miami to defend Republican protesters shutting down a recount....For his troubles, Mr. Wilkinson was made deputy director of communications for planning in the Bush White House, and was among the aides who set up the Sept. 14, 2001, visit to Ground Zero that redefined George W. Bush's presidency.

When the invasion of Iraq commenced on March 20, Wilkinson was the president's man on the ground at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar, controlling and carefully shaping information about the war disseminated to the international press. In this capacity, he adroitly stage-managed both the rescue of Jessica Lynch and the subsequent media coverage of her ordeal. It was Wilkinson who arranged to give the Washington Post Washington Post exclusive access to cla.s.sified intelligence that was the basis for the now-discredited "She Was Fighting to the Death" story that ran on the front page of that newspaper. exclusive access to cla.s.sified intelligence that was the basis for the now-discredited "She Was Fighting to the Death" story that ran on the front page of that newspaper.

In much the same way that sources at the highest levels of the Bush-Cheney administration manipulated the New York Times New York Times reporter Judith Miller into writing articles seeming to confirm that Saddam possessed weapons of ma.s.s destruction, Wilkinson duped reporters and editors at the reporter Judith Miller into writing articles seeming to confirm that Saddam possessed weapons of ma.s.s destruction, Wilkinson duped reporters and editors at the Washington Post, USA Today Washington Post, USA Today, and other media outlets into running wildly hyperbolic stories about Lynch. Wilkinson simply sowed a little misinformation where it would have the most impact, sat back, and watched his fabulation go viral, propagated by the media frenzy that he knew would ensue.

The true saga of Jessica Lynch and the subsequent battle of Nasiriyah were actually much more compelling than the tall tale so dexterously engineered by Wilkinson, but they painted a rather more disturbing picture of how the war was unfolding. On March 16, just a week before Lynch was captured, Vice President Cheney had declared on national television, "My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators," and then predicted, "I think it will go relatively quickly,...[in] weeks rather than months." As Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor reported in their book Cobra II Cobra II, "The CIA was so sure that American soldiers would be greeted warmly when they pushed into Southern Iraq that a CIA operative suggested sneaking hundreds of small American flags into the country for grateful Iraqis to wave at their liberators." But a cascade of disastrous events that began with the attack on Lynch's convoy threatened to contradict the a.s.surances made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others that Americans would be "greeted with sweets and flowers" and victory would be achieved quickly.

This tragic cascade started with an innocent error, when Lynch's convoy took a wrong fork in the road. By the end of that day, thanks in no small part to this mistake, twenty-nine American servicemen and servicewomen were dead. It was Wilkinson's job to divert attention from this alarming setback lest it undermine the homeland's overwhelming support for Operation Iraqi Freedom. Several days later, after even more bad news further threatened to erode public support for the war, Wilkinson learned that Jessica Lynch was lying in a hospital bed, guarded haphazardly if at all, just a few miles from an American military outpost. Right away, he knew exactly how to make the most of the opportunity.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.

In the predawn hours of March 23, 2003, as Jessica Lynch's convoy rolled across the Euphrates River and entered An Nasiriyah, Pat Tillman was asleep on his cot in Ar'ar, Saudi Arabia, having stayed up late the previous evening reading The Odyssey The Odyssey, Homer's epic poem about the Greek hero Odysseus and his ten-year effort to make his way home to his wife, Penelope, after the Trojan War. Pat had no knowledge of the tragedy beginning to unfold in Nasiriyah, nor could he have imagined that its aftershocks would one day be a source of unceasing torment to the people he loved.

As the sun crested the horizon that morning in southern Iraq, hundreds of Marines were maneuvering into position to invade Nasiriyah and capture the very bridge that Lynch and the Army's 507th Maintenance Company had just driven heedlessly across, which was deemed crucial to the rapid push of American troops to Baghdad. When the First Battalion of the Second Marine Regiment drew to within several miles of this bridge, Iraqi forces responded with fire from small arms, machine guns, mortars, and artillery. Around 7:30 a.m., in the midst of this skirmish, a Humvee came racing toward the Marines from the direction of Nasiriyah and screeched to a stop, riddled with bullet holes and with its tires on fire. An extremely agitated American Army captain named Troy King jumped out in a state of near hysteria, yelling that a convoy he had been leading had suffered catastrophic losses after coming under attack back in the city.

This made no sense to Major Bill Peebles, the commander of the tank column leading the Marines' advance into the city. No Army units, or those of any other military branch, were supposed to have preceded the Marines into Nasiriyah. When King, struggling to speak coherently, informed Peebles that most of his company of soldiers remained behind-some already dead, others pinned down by the enemy in different areas of the city-Peebles led his tanks off to look for survivors. In short order the tanks spotted several U.S. Army trucks that had been shot full of holes and were in flames. Hiding in a ditch behind the ravaged vehicles, still taking heavy fire, were ten soldiers from the 507th Maintenance Company, four of whom were wounded. The Marines gathered up the survivors, spun their tanks around, and hurried away from Nasiriyah to deliver the wounded to a secure location where they could receive medical aid.

After the tanks departed, Bravo Company-comprising approximately two hundred Marines riding in three Humvees and a dozen amphibious a.s.sault vehicles known as AAVs, amtracs, or tracs-moved north toward the bridge over the Euphrates River. Crossing it without encountering resistance, they continued toward their next objective: a second bridge, on the northern edge of the city, spanning the Saddam Ca.n.a.l. The most direct route to this bridge was the road on which Lynch's convoy had been attacked, Ambush Alley. Understandably, they elected to approach the Saddam Ca.n.a.l Bridge by a less hazardous route that swung around to the east. Shortly after crossing the Euphrates, therefore, they turned right, abandoned the pavement, and started rolling across a salt flat that would take them to their objective via this roundabout path.

Unbeknownst to Bravo Company, however, the salt flat was actually a swamp where the city's sewage acc.u.mulated beneath a carapace of sunbaked mud. Two tanks attached to the company suddenly broke through the crust and plunged four feet into smelly quicksand. The more they spun their treads trying to crawl free, the deeper the immense vehicles wallowed. A moment later one of the amphibious a.s.sault vehicles broke through the crust and became stuck as well, and then another. Within minutes, three tanks, three Humvees, and three tracs were sucked down into the bog.

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One of the hopelessly mired tracs served as the mobile command post for Lieutenant Colonel Rick Grabowski, the First Battalion commander, who was directing the mission. Containing all of Grabowski's communications equipment, the trac had become trapped near the edge of the salt flat beneath an overhead power line, which seemed to interfere with radio transmissions, making it nearly impossible for the commander to communicate with either headquarters or his other units, Alpha and Charlie companies.

Upon seeing that the American vehicles were immobilized, swarms of Iraqi fighters materialized and began shooting at them from nearby rooftops as scores of local residents simultaneously emerged from their homes and hurried out of the city, fleeing the battle that they knew would soon commence in earnest. Grabowski ordered his men to dismount from their tracs and form a defensive perimeter. Most of them were young recruits who had never seen combat. As they exited the vehicles, many of the Marines appeared scared and confused. Barely under way, the mission was already "Charlie Fox-trot"-a total cl.u.s.terf.u.c.k.

Even before Bravo Company had blundered into the sewage, Grabowski had been feeling a lot of heat from his boss, the Marine brigadier general Rich Natonski. Three hours earlier, shortly after the rescue of the survivors from Jessica Lynch's convoy, Grabowski's men were moving north through the outskirts of Nasiriyah, clearing buildings and skirmishing with the enemy, when the general had helicoptered in from his command post specifically to admonish Grabowski for the sluggish pace of his advance. Donald Rumsfeld's strategy for the entire invasion-for the entire war-was predicated on speed, and officers on the ground were under unrelenting pressure to keep pushing rapidly toward Baghdad, no matter what. Natonski took Grabowski aside, got in his face, and told him, "I need you to f.u.c.king get up there and seize the bridges." Adding to the sense of urgency, Natonski explained, twelve Army soldiers from Lynch's convoy were still missing somewhere in the city, and Grabowski's Marines should "be looking for those individuals" as they moved toward the bridges.

Not long past noon, while Grabowski and Bravo Company were struggling to extricate themselves from the reeking bog on the eastern edge of Nasiriyah, Charlie Company moved north across the Euphrates River Bridge, expecting to rendezvous with Bravo Company and then follow them to the Saddam Ca.n.a.l Bridge. Seeing no sign of Bravo Company, and unable to raise them on the radio, Captain Dan Wittnam, the commander of Charlie Company, a.s.sumed that Bravo Company must have already gone on ahead. So Wittnam, on his own initiative, ordered his men to proceed directly up Ambush Alley to the Saddam Ca.n.a.l Bridge.

Sergeant William Schaefer, commanding Charlie Company's lead trac, was incredulous. "Say again," he radioed back, requesting confirmation of the orders. Schaefer was concerned because a platoon of tanks was supposed to precede Charlie Company wherever they went, but the tanks a.s.signed to be their escorts were diverted to rescue the survivors of the Jessica Lynch convoy, and hadn't yet reappeared. Emphatic orders had been sent down the chain of command, however, that taking the bridge was to take priority over all else, so Schaefer swallowed his reservations, ordered his driver to put trac C201 in gear, and led the convoy into Ambush Alley. Like all Marines, he had been indoctrinated: "First, accomplish the mission." Compared with the other branches of the Armed Forces, the Marine Corps was relatively frank about where troop safety ranked in the big picture-and more than a few grunts actually took perverse pride in the Marines' reputation for getting the job done at any cost.

With trac C201 out in front, Charlie Company's eleven tracs and three Humvees headed for the Saddam Ca.n.a.l Bridge. Watertight, tublike contraptions that can deploy propellers in order to cross open water, tracs were designed to ferry troops from ships to beachheads. Twenty-six feet long with a gun turret on the roof, a trac is intended to carry twenty men and is impelled by belted treads, like tanks, rather than wheels. Because a trac's light aluminum "armor" is easily penetrated by rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and heavy weapons, Major Peebles's platoon of M1A1 Abrams tanks was supposed to lead Charlie Company into the fray. After being diverted to rescue the Maintenance Company soldiers, however, the tanks had burned up so much gas that they'd had to run far to the rear to refuel. When Peebles arrived at the so-called rapid-refueling point, he discovered that its pumps had broken down and it would take forty minutes to refill each of his enormous machines using a siphon. With the tanks thus temporarily hors de combat, Charlie Company's vulnerable tracs clattered toward the northern bridge on their own, without an escort.

As the tracs rolled up Ambush Alley, enemy fighters began to shoot at them from adjacent rooftops, and within minutes the sporadic fire became a furious attack coming from all points of the compa.s.s. Somehow none of the Americans running the show-not Natonski nor Grabowski nor the CIA nor any of the generals at Central Command-had any idea that Nasiriyah was a major military hub overflowing with enemy forces. The Marines on the ground had been a.s.sured that taking the bridges would be "a cakewalk"-that the residents of the city were Shiite Muslims who despised Saddam and his Sunni minions, and would welcome the Americans as liberators. As Grabowski later explained to a colonel investigating the incident, "Our indications were...that the bridges were not going to be defended, that we're going to go in there and just seize them.... No one expected that level of a fight in An Nasiriyah. No one." As it turned out, the sectarian dynamics in Nasiriyah, as in the rest of Iraq, were much more convoluted than the neoconservative brain trust at the White House and the Pentagon a.s.sumed.

On February 15, 1991, during the first Gulf War, the Voice of America had broadcast a rousing speech by President George H. W. Bush imploring Shia throughout the country to rise up against Saddam. Nine days later, the CIA broadcast a similar message over a radio station called the Voice of Free Iraq, suggesting that the United States would support such an uprising. During the first week of March the Shiite residents of Nasiriyah responded by overthrowing the city's ruling Baathist regime, only to discover that the Americans had no intention of getting involved. Even worse, after routing the Iraqi Army, the U.S.-led coalition signed a peace agreement that explicitly allowed Saddam's government to retain its fleet of helicopter gunships. Having defeated Saddam, the first president Bush and his secretary of defense, d.i.c.k Cheney, no longer had any use for the Shia. The Americans feared the uprising they'd fomented would give control of Iraq to the Shia, whose close religious ties with Iran discomfited them even more than Saddam did.

As the Shiite rebellion gained momentum, Saddam's Republican Guard swooped in and savagely crushed the insurgents throughout southern Iraq, including Nasiriyah, summarily executing tens of thousands of Shia while U.S. forces stood by and did nothing to intervene. Bodies of the dead were dumped in ma.s.s graves around the city. The embittered survivors understandably felt betrayed by the Americans, and a dozen years later when the second president Bush invaded Iraq, the Shia were not about to be played for fools again.

Instead of being welcomed as saviors by the citizens of Nasiriyah, the Marines who entered the city in 2003 were attacked. While gusts of Iraqi bullets ripped into the American vehicles, local women and children deliberately ran out onto the streets to deter the Marines from shooting back. According to Grabowski, they were "smiling and waving and they knew what they were doing."

Initially the Marines held their fire. As the Iraqi attack intensified, however, self-preservation superseded concerns about civilian casualties. Accelerating to thirty miles per hour, the grunts began shooting frantically with every weapon available as they careened down Ambush Alley trying to escape the kill zone. The twenty-one-year-old lance corporal Edward Castleberry, the driver of trac C201-the column's lead vehicle-used one hand to squeeze off bursts with his M16 as he steered with the other, while the trac's commander, Sergeant Schaefer, eviscerated Fedayeen fighters with a .50-caliber machine gun mounted in the vehicle's turret. "Pieces of people were all over the street," Castleberry later told the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times. When an Iraqi ran into the middle of the road and began spraying AK-47 rounds directly into the front of his trac, Castleberry drove over the man in self-defense, crushing him beneath the machine's treads.

Shortly before Charlie Company arrived at Saddam Ca.n.a.l Bridge, trac C211, positioned near the rear of the column and driven by the thirty-one-year-old sergeant Michael Bitz, was. .h.i.t with two RPGs, critically injuring five Marines and setting the vehicle on fire. Aware that if the trac came to a stop, the two dozen men inside the burning machine would probably be overrun and ma.s.sacred, the vehicle's commander, Second Lieutenant Michael Seely, pounded on Bitz's helmet and screamed at him, "Go! Go! Go!" They managed to keep the machine rolling north with the rest of the column, spewing oily black smoke, until it had crossed the bridge and traveled approximately a hundred yards beyond, when the engine quit turning and it shuddered to a stop.

Very soon it became apparent that the Marines had driven into a deadly cul-de-sac. Several hundred Fedayeen guerrillas and Iraqi Army regulars were dug into well-defended positions all around the Americans, energetically targeting them with an a.s.sortment of light and heavy weapons. The fourteen tracs came to a halt, and the men of Charlie Company scurried from their flimsy vehicles into the surrounding terrain, which offered scant cover. Bitz, Schaefer, and other Marines rushed to pull the moaning, blood-drenched men from Bitz's flaming trac, C211, before the stores of ammunition inside exploded, and loaded them into the designated "medevac" trac, C212. At the same time, mortar squads hurriedly set up three 60-millimeter mortars and began lobbing rounds toward the enemy at such a rapid rate that the tubes began to glow from the heat.

First Sergeant Jose Henao was in charge of gathering and evacuating the wounded Marines. Although few of Charlie Company's radios were functioning, Henao managed to get a call out to the battalion command post with an urgent request for a medevac helicopter, but the landing zone was receiving way too much fire for any aircraft to come in. Immediately after finishing the call, trac C212 was. .h.i.t with an RPG, so Henao and another noncommissioned officer unloaded the wounded men inside and laid them down on the east side of the road. The volley of RPGs continued for several minutes, but luckily, Henao testified, "a lot of the RPGs, they weren't detonating. They were just landing, and going by us. I saw one coming straight to our trac. It hit the back, bounced off, and landed about forty yards away and never exploded."

For the first three days of the war, U.S. forces had raced north from Kuwait without encountering any noteworthy enemy resistance. The greatest impediment to their advance was having to deal with hundreds of Iraqis who rushed forward to surrender as the Americans drew near. The ferocity of the Iraqi countera.s.sault in Nasiriyah thus caught the Marines completely off guard.

Before the invasion, most of the residents of Nasiriyah were in fact terrified of the American military's overwhelming superiority, and a.s.sumed they would be obliterated. But when the invaders were led into Nasiriyah by the timid, poorly armed 507th Maintenance Company, the Iraqis adjusted their opinion of their adversary's purported invincibility. According to the executive officer of the Iraqi Twenty-third Brigade, who was later captured and interrogated by the Marines, the Iraqi forces adopted an entirely different frame of mind when the Americans in Jessica Lynch's convoy "didn't fight when they got engaged," and instead fled the city. All the Iraqi soldiers were "emboldened," the executive officer explained: "It emboldened even the tribal leaders to fight the Americans, because if this is the best you've got, then why not be on the winning side." When the Marines showed up on the same streets where the 507th Maintenance Company had just been routed, the Iraqis a.s.sumed that the Marines would also turn tail and run if confronted with a show of force, so they fought with great determination.

Thus did Charlie Company wind up in a desperate fight for their lives. Although they battled the Iraqis courageously, the Marines were surrounded, outnumbered, and outgunned and had no place to hide. The Abrams tanks that had been sent to rescue the Lynch convoy would have shifted the odds decisively in the Americans' favor, but they had still not appeared. Nor was Charlie Company receiving any help from the air. Sending in a couple of Cobra attack helicopters to take out enemy positions from above would also have made a crucial difference for the Marines north of the Saddam Ca.n.a.l Bridge, but the Marine Corps had given Charlie Company neither a forward air controller to call in such air support nor a UHF radio-both of which were required to contact aircraft and tell them where to shoot. So the grunts were left to their own devices. Their only option was to try to keep the enemy at bay until reinforcements arrived.

Jose Henao went over to one of the mortar crews to see how they were holding up, and kneeled down next to Staff Sergeant Phillip Jordan. Pumping out sh.e.l.ls as fast as they could be dropped into his red-hot mortar tube, Jordan calmly remarked to Henao, "We're in a s.h.i.t sandwich."

"Yes we are," Henao replied, and then hurried off to tend to the wounded men from trac C211, who were calling out for him about seventy yards away.

When Henao had covered about half that distance, there was an enormous explosion back where he had just been talking to Jordan. RPGs and enemy mortar rounds had been detonating around the Marines for fifteen or twenty minutes, but this explosion was notably larger. It killed Jordan instantly. Slumped near Jordan with the front portion of his head blown off, gurgling and twitching in the throes of death, was Lance Corporal Brian Buesing. Second Lieutenant Fred Pokorney lay dead in the middle of the road several feet away. Three other Marines were gravely injured by the blast.

A moment later, a second tremendous explosion occurred, killing Corporal Kemaphoom Chanawongse, a Thai immigrant, as he was bringing ammunition to resupply Jordan's mortar squad, and wounding another Marine. Hundreds of bullets then began to impact the earth at a fantastic rate, followed many seconds later by a weird screeching noise like a "bada.s.s blender," as one grunt described it; another Marine said the sound reminded him of a "buzz saw." Blindingly bright pyrophoric decoy flares drifted down from the sky in the wake of the bullets, fizzing and sputtering like Fourth of July fireworks. "It looked like little sparklers going off about twenty feet in the air," recalled a witness who survived the attack. The Marines' sense of alarm was heightened by their complete bafflement. Only one of the men on the ground seemed to have any idea what was a.s.saulting them.

"I knew exactly what it was," said that man, Second Lieutenant Michael Seely, who had been awarded the Bronze Star and a Purple Heart in 1991 during the first war with Iraq, and was the company's most seasoned officer. "I'd been strafed eight times during Operation Desert Storm by an A-10. I know exactly what they sound like." The A-10 "Warthog" is an American jet aircraft designed to destroy tanks. The Marines of Charlie Company, Seely immediately understood, had been mistaken for the enemy and were being attacked by the U.S. Air Force.