Middle East Adventure Travel - The Rough Guide to Iraq (Cont.)

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The Rough Guide to Iraq (Cont.)

THE CITY CAME UNGLUED. On the road there was only theft, looters carrying and pushing or pulling whatever they could: air conditioners, water fountains, carpets, lightbulbs. "It's like Wal-Mart out there," a Marine told me. Outside a technical college, a group of Iraqis pleaded with Marine sentries for permission to come inside and take what they could. "I am working on my Ph.D.," one of them said, in excellent English. "I need a computer."

The next day, April 9, the Third Battalion met no further resistance, though others did. Laurent and I crept ahead once we realized that the final miles would be the easy ones. We were standing at a square in the heart of Baghdad, marveling at it all, when Colonel McCoy roared up in his Humvee. "I'm going to the Palestine Hotel!" he shouted, so we jumped into our vehicles and followed him.

Within a few minutes, we pulled up in front of the Palestine, which housed most of the international press corps in Baghdad and which, the day before, had been shelled by U.S. Army soldiers who believed they were being fired upon, killing two cameramen, one Spanish and one Ukrainian. As we watched, McCoy's Marines rolled their largest armored vehicle up to the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, put a metal chain around it, and began pulling it down. The symbolic liberation of Baghdad was being carried out by Colonel McCoy and his men, live on CNN.

"How do you feel?" I asked McCoy.

"Speechless," he replied, though he soon found the politically appropriate words about liberation.

I asked him about the Marines I knew his battalion had lost—Evnin, the two men at the bridge, another killed in a Humvee accident at night. What did McCoy think, now that his mission had been accomplished, about the men who had lost their lives?

This time, McCoy truly was speechless. He looked at the ground, held back tears, and finally said, very quietly, "God bless them."

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