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

You Are Here:

Home >> The Rough Guide to Iraq (Cont.)

Today's Question
What is the best way to get water if I'm lost in the desert? answer

What's the most reliable tool for starting fires? answer

Today's Question
What one equipment change can I make in my home to reduce my water usage most? answer

Why do you drive a grease-powered car, and should I do it too? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine July 2003

Page:

The Rough Guide to Iraq (Cont.)

THE CLICHÉ ABOUT A BATTLE PLAN not surviving its first contact with the enemy happens to be true. Improvisation is required in warfare, though improvising is a way of acknowledging that the chaos is stronger than your ability to master it. The battles that the battalion would fight on its way to Baghdad, the resistance they would meet, how they would defeat that resistance—these things were, for the most part, figured out on the fly. I got a taste of this one night after I rode with the battalion's intelligence officer, Captain Bryan Mangan, to a briefing at regimental headquarters, five miles south of the battalion's camp. Mangan was supposed to lead a psychological operations team from HQ back to camp, but as we got ready to drive back, he saw that the psy-ops Humvees were already leaving.

"Where are those idiots going?" he asked his driver.

"They're following you."

"But I'm here," Mangan said.

"They think they're following you."

"Why?"

"Because you're driving in a Humvee, and that's a Humvee they're following."

"There are 4,000 motherfucking Humvees in this fucking country."

Pause.

"Do they have a radio?" Mangan asked.

"Yes," the driver replied.

"Can we call them on it and tell them to get their asses back here?"

"Let me check."

The driver ran to the com tent. He returned in a minute.

"No, sir," he said.

The unlikeliness of all this was heightened by the fact that Mangan was a yuppie. About 30 years old, he'd grown up in New York City's wealthy Westchester County suburbs and graduated from Fordham Prep, the kind of private school that sends its graduates to Harvard and Yale and on to banking and politics. He enlisted in the Marine Corps instead. He'd considered leaving the military shortly before the war began but decided to stay with it. Iraq would be his way of doing something about 9/11.

This was Mangan's first war. Like many Marines, he had mixed feelings about the sort of killing that occurs in the sort of war he was fighting, where enemy soldiers were dressing as civilians, and where many Iraqi combatants were being forced to fight. "We're going to have to do things that are potentially ugly," he told me. "We are killing. There's no other way around it. In order for us to do what we have to do, we kill people."

I was surprised at how much the Marines would reveal to us. Since the Vietnam War, there has been a chilliness between the military and the press, but there was none with the Third Battalion. By embedding hundreds of journalists, the brass had sent the unstated message that it was OK to be honest.

"Why do you think you're here?" I asked Mangan's driver.

"We're here to liberate these fucking Eye-rackis," he replied.

The psychology of killing is driven not just by a sense of mission or hatred, but by fear. Despite their bravado, these guys were scared—scared of being killed, scared of being captured. This is one of the reasons why traveling with them was almost as dangerous as not traveling with them. Anytime you weren't right next to a Marine, you became a potential target. Marines were even scared of other Marines. "There are a lot of trigger-happy guys out here," one told me.

One morning I walked 25 yards from the spot where we had stationed our cars and found a discreet place to serve as a desert latrine. Gary happened to be 200 yards away, standing next to a command vehicle and listening to its military radio. Suddenly the routine chatter turned urgent: "Potential unfriendly in the perimeter. We've got him sighted. He's got a black shirt on; he's crouching down. Looks like a fedayeen."

Because lots of Iraqi soldiers and fedayeen irregulars wore dark civilian clothes—the better to fade into the shadows—a black T-shirt was potential enemy garb. At least one Marine, perhaps more, had lined me up in his crosshairs. Colonel McCoy happened to be listening and gave an order that the guy in the black shirt might be one of the media guys, so nobody should fire.

I wore light-colored shirts until the war was over.

Page:

TODAY'S NEWS UPDATE!
Just wait 'til the food rankings
You may have seen the recent findings of the American Public Health Association and the Partnership ...