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CounterPunch
March 31,
2003
Slaughter at
the Bridge of Death
US Marines Fire on Civilians
By MARK FRANCHETTI
Nasiriya, Iraq.
The light was a strange yellowy grey and the wind
was coming up, the beginnings of a sandstorm. The silence felt
almost eerie after a night of shooting so intense it hurt the
eardrums and shattered the nerves. My footsteps felt heavy on
the hot, dusty asphalt as I walked slowly towards the bridge
at Nasiriya. A horrific scene lay ahead.
Some 15 vehicles, including a minivan
and a couple of trucks, blocked the road. They were riddled with
bullet holes. Some had caught fire and turned into piles of black
twisted metal. Others were still burning.
Amid the wreckage I counted 12 dead civilians,
lying in the road or in nearby ditches. All had been trying to
leave this southern town overnight, probably for fear of being
killed by US helicopter attacks and heavy artillery.
Their mistake had been to flee over a
bridge that is crucial to the coalition's supply lines and to
run into a group of shell-shocked young American marines with
orders to shoot anything that moved.
One man's body was still in flames. It
gave out a hissing sound. Tucked away in his breast pocket, thick
wads of banknotes were turning to ashes. His savings, perhaps.
Down the road, a little girl, no older
than five and dressed in a pretty orange and gold dress, lay
dead in a ditch next to the body of a man who may have been her
father. Half his head was missing.
Nearby, in a battered old Volga, peppered
with ammunition holes, an Iraqi woman _ perhaps the girl's mother
_ was dead, slumped in the back seat. A US Abrams tank nicknamed
Ghetto Fabulous drove past the bodies.
This was not the only family who had
taken what they thought was a last chance for safety. A father,
baby girl and boy lay in a shallow grave. On the bridge itself
a dead Iraqi civilian lay next to the carcass of a donkey.
As I walked away, Lieutenant Matt Martin,
whose third child, Isabella, was born while he was on board ship
en route to the Gulf, appeared beside me.
"Did you see all that?" he
asked, his eyes filled with tears. "Did you see that little
baby girl? I carried her body and buried it as best I could but
I had no time. It really gets to me to see children being killed
like this, but we had no choice."
Martin's distress was in contrast to
the bitter satisfaction of some of his fellow marines as they
surveyed the scene. "The Iraqis are sick people and we are
the chemotherapy," said Corporal Ryan Dupre. "I am
starting to hate this country. Wait till I get hold of a friggin'
Iraqi. No, I won't get hold of one. I'll just kill him."
Only a few days earlier these had still
been the bright-eyed small-town boys with whom I crossed the
border at the start of the operation. They had rolled towards
Nasiriya, a strategic city beside the Euphrates, on a mission
to secure a safe supply route for troops on the way to Baghdad.
They had expected a welcome, or at least
a swift surrender. Instead they had found themselves lured into
a bloody battle, culminating in the worst coalition losses of
the war _ 16 dead, 12 wounded and two missing marines as well
as five dead and 12 missing servicemen from an army convoy _
and the humiliation of having prisoners paraded on Iraqi television.
There are three key bridges at Nasiriya.
The feat of Martin, Dupre and their fellow marines in securing
them under heavy fire was compared by armchair strategists last
week to the seizure of the Remagen bridge over the Rhine, which
significantly advanced victory over Germany in the second world
war.
But it was also the turning point when
the jovial band of brothers from America lost all their assumptions
about the war and became jittery aggressors who talked of wanting
to "nuke" the place.
None of this was foreseen at Camp Shoup,
one of the marines' tent encampments in northern Kuwait, where
officers from the 1st and 2nd battalions of Task Force Tarawa,
the 7,000-strong US Marines brigade, spent long evenings poring
over maps and satellite imagery before the invasion.
The plan seemed straightforward. The
marines would speed unhindered over the 130 miles of desert up
from the Kuwaiti border and approach Nasiriya from the southeast
to secure a bridge over the Euphrates. They would then drive
north through the outskirts of Nasiriya to a second bridge, over
the Inahr al-Furbati canal. Finally, they would turn west and
secure the third bridge, also over the canal. The marines would
not enter the city proper, let alone attempt to take it.
The coalition could then start moving
thousands of troops and logistical support units up highway 7,
leading to Baghdad, 225 miles to the north.
There was only one concern: "ambush
alley", the road connecting the first two bridges. But intelligence
suggested there would be little or no fighting as this eastern
side of the city was mostly "pro-American".
I was with Alpha company. We reached
the outskirts of Nasiriya at about breakfast time last Sunday.
Some marines were disappointed to be carrying out a mission that
seemed a sideshow to the main effort. But in an ominous sign
of things to come, our battalion stopped in its tracks, three
miles outside the city.
Bad news filtered back. Earlier that
morning a US Army convoy had been greeted by a group of Iraqis
dressed in civilian clothes, apparently wanting to surrender.
When the American soldiers stopped, the Iraqis pulled out AK-47s
and sprayed the US trucks with gunfire.
Five wounded soldiers were rescued by
our convoy, including one who had been shot four times. The attackers
were believed to be members of the Fedayeen Saddam, a group of
15,000 fighters under the command of Saddam's psychopathic son
Uday.
Blown-up tyres, a pool of blood, spent
ammunition and shards of glass from the bulletridden windscreen
marked the spot where the ambush had taken place. Swiftly, our
AAVs (23-ton amphibious assault vehicles) took up defensive positions.
About 100 marines jumped out of their vehicles and took cover
in ditches, pointing their sights at a mud-caked house. Was it
harbouring gunmen? Small groups of marines approached, cautiously,
to search for the enemy. A dozen terrified civilians, mainly
women and children, emerged with their hands raised.
"It's just a bunch of Hajis,"
said one gunner from his turret, using their nickname for Arabs.
"Friggin' women and children, that's all."
Cobras and Huey attack helicopters began
firing missiles at targets on the edge of the city. Plumes of
smoke rose as heavy artillery shook the ground under our feet.
Heavy machinegun fire echoed across the
huge rubbish dump that marks the entrance to Nasiriya. Suddenly
there was return fire from three large oil tanks at a refinery.
The Cobras were called back, and within seconds they roared above
our heads, firing off missiles in clouds of purple tracer fire.
There were several loud explosions. Flames
burst high into the sky from one of the oil tanks. The marines
believed that what opposition there was had now been crushed.
"We are going in, we are going in," shouted one of
the officers.
More than 20 AAVs, several tanks and
about 10 Hummers equipped with roof-mounted, anti-tank missile
launchers prepared to move in. Crammed inside them were some
400 marines. Tension rose as they loaded their guns and stuck
their heads over the side of the AAVs through the open roof,
their M-16 pointed in all directions.
As we set off towards the eastern city
gate there was no sense of the mayhem awaiting us down the road.
A few locals dressed in rags watched the awesome spectacle of
America's war machine on the move. Nobody waved.
Slowly we approached the first bridge.
Fires were raging on either side of the road; Cobras had destroyed
an Iraqi military truck and a T55 tank positioned inside a dugout.
Powerful explosions came from inside the bowels of the tank as
its ammunition and heavy shells were set off by the fire. With
each explosion a thick and perfect ring of black smoke ring puffed
out of the turret.
An Iraqi defence post lay abandoned.
Cobras flew over an oasis of palm trees and deserted brick and
mud-caked houses. We charged onto the bridge, and as we crossed
the Euphrates, a large mural of Saddam came into view. Some marines
reached for their disposable cameras.
Suddenly, as we approached ambush alley
on the far side of the bridge, the crackle of AK-47s broke out.
Our AAVs began to zigzag to avoid being hit by a rocket-propelled
grenade (RPG).
The road widened out to a square, with
a mosque and the portrait of Saddam on the left-hand side. The
vehicles wheeled round, took up a defensive position, back to
back, and began taking fire.
Pinned down, the marines fired back with
40mm automatic grenade launchers, a weapon so powerful it can
go through thick brick walls and kill anyone within a 5-yard
range of where the shell lands.
I was in AAV number A304, affectionately
nicknamed the Desert Caddy. It shook as Keith Bernize, the gunner,
fired off round after deafening round at sandbag positions shielding
suspected Fedayeen fighters. His steel ammunition box clanged
with the sound of smoking empty shells and cartridges.
Bernize, who always carries a scan picture
of his unborn baby daughter with him, shot at the targets from
behind a turret, peering through narrow slits of reinforced glass.
He shouted at his men to feed him more ammunition. Four marines,
standing at the AAV's four corners, precariously perched on ammunition
boxes, fired off their M-16s.
Their faces covered in sweat, officers
shouted commands into field radios, giving co-ordinates of enemy
positions. Some 200 marines, fully exposed to enemy fire and
slowed down by their heavy weapons, bulky ammunition packs and
NBC suits, ran across the road, taking shelter behind a long
brick wall and mounds of earth. A team of snipers appeared, yards
from our vehicle.
The exchange of fire was relentless.
We were pinned down for more than three hours as Iraqis hiding
inside houses and a hospital and behind street corners fired
a barrage of ammunition.
Despite the marines' overwhelming firepower,
hitting the Iraqis was not easy. The gunmen were not wearing
uniforms and had planned their ambush well _ stockpiling weapons
in dozens of houses, between which they moved freely pretending
to be civilians.
"It's a bad situation," said
First Sergeant James Thompson, who was running around with a
9mm pistol in his hand. "We don't know who is shooting at
us. They are even using women as scouts. The women come out waving
at us, or with their hands raised. We freeze, but the next minute
we can see how she is looking at our positions and giving them
away to the fighters hiding behind a street corner. It's very
difficult to distinguish between the fighters and civilians."
Across the square, genuine civilians
were running for their lives. Many, including some children,
were gunned down in the crossfire. In a surreal scene, a father
and mother stood out on a balcony with their children in their
arms to give them a better view of the battle raging below. A
few minutes later several US mortar shells landed in front of
their house. In all probability, the family is dead.
The fighting intensified. An Iraqi fighter
emerged from behind a wall of sandbags 500 yards away from our
vehicle. Several times he managed to fire off an RPG at our positions.
Bernize and other gunners fired dozens of rounds at his dugout,
punching large holes into a house and lifting thick clouds of
dust.
Captain Mike Brooks, commander of Alpha
company, pinned down in front of the mosque, called in tank support.
Armed with only a 9mm pistol, he jumped out of the back of his
AAV with a young marine carrying a field radio on his back.
Brooks, 34, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
had been in command of 200 men for just over a year. He joined
the marines when he was 19 because he felt that he was wasting
his life. He needed direction, was a bit of a rebel and was impressed
by the sense of pride in the corps.
He is a soft-spoken man, fair but very
firm. Brave too: I watched him sprint in front of enemy positions
to brief some of his junior officers behind a wall. Behind us,
two 68-ton Abrams tanks rolled up, crushing the barrier separating
the lanes on the highway.
The earth shook violently as one tank,
Desert Knight, stopped in front of our row of AAVS and fired
several 120mm shells into buildings.
A few hundred yards down ambush alley
there was carnage. An AAV from Charlie company was racing back
towards the bridge to evacuate some wounded marines when it was
hit by two RPGs. The heavy vehicle shook but withstood the explosions.
Then the Iraqis fired again. This time
the rocket plunged into the vehicle through the open rooftop.
The explosion was deadly, made 10 times more powerful by the
ammunition stored in the back.
The wreckage smouldered in the middle
of the road. I jumped out from the rear hatch of our vehicle,
briefly taking cover behind a wall. When I reached the stricken
AAV, the scene was mayhem.
The heavy, thick rear ramp had been blown
open. There were pools of blood and bits of flesh everywhere.
A severed leg, still wearing a desert boot, lay on what was left
of the ramp among playing cards, a magazine, cans of Coke and
a small bloodstained teddy bear.
"They are f****** dead, they are
dead. Oh my God. Get in there. Get in there now and pull them
out," shouted a gunner in a state verging on hysterical.
There was panic and confusion as a group
of young marines, shouting and cursing orders at one another,
pulled out a maimed body.
Two men struggled to lift the body on
a stretcher and into the back of a Hummer, but it would not fit
inside, so the stretcher remained almost upright, the dead man's
leg, partly blown away, dangling in the air.
"We shouldn't be here," said
Lieutenant Campbell Kane, 25, who was born in Northern Ireland.
"We can't hold this. They are trying to suck us into the
city and we haven't got enough ass up here to sustain this. We
need more tanks, more helicopters."
Closer to the destroyed AAV, another
young marine was transfixed with fear and kept repeating: "Oh
my God, I can't believe this. Did you see his leg? It was blown
off. It was blown off."
Two CH-46 helicopters, nicknamed Frogs,
landed a few hundred yards away in the middle of a firefight
to take away the dead and wounded.
If at first the marines felt constrained
by orders to protect civilians, by now the battle had become
so intense that there was little time for niceties. Cobra helicopters
were ordered to fire at a row of houses closest to our positions.
There were massive explosions but the return fire barely died
down.
Behind us, as many as four AAVs that
had driven down along the banks of the Euphrates were stuck in
deep mud and coming under fire.
About 1pm, after three hours of intense
fighting, the order was given to regroup and try to head out
of the city in convoy. Several marines who had lost their vehicles
piled into the back of ours.
We raced along ambush alley at full speed,
close to a line of houses. "My driver got hit," said
one of the marines who joined us, his face and uniform caked
in mud. "I went to try to help him when he got hit by another
RPG or a mortar. I don't even know how many friends I have lost.
I don't care if they nuke that bloody city now. From one house
they were waving while shooting at us with AKs from the next.
It was insane."
There was relief when we finally crossed
the second bridge to the northeast of the city in mid-afternoon.
But there was more horror to come. Beside the smouldering wreckage
of another AAV were the bodies of another four marines, laid
out in the mud and covered with camouflage ponchos. There were
body parts everywhere.
One of the dead was Second Lieutenant
Fred Pokorney, 31, a marine artillery officer from Washington
state. He was a big guy, whose ill-fitting uniform was the butt
of many jokes. It was supposed to have been a special day for
Pokorney. After 13 years of service, he was to be promoted to
first lieutenant. The men of Charlie company had agreed they
would all shake hands with him to celebrate as soon as they crossed
the second bridge, their mission accomplished.
It didn't happen. Pokorney made it over
the second bridge and a few hundred yards down a highway through
dusty flatlands before his vehicle was ambushed. Pokorney and
his men had no chance. Fully loaded with ammunition, their truck
exploded in the middle of the road, its remains burning for hours.
Pokorney was hit in the chest by an RPG.
Another man who died was Fitzgerald Jordan,
a staff sergeant from Texas. I felt numb when I heard this. I
had met Jordan 10 days before we moved into Nasiriya. He was
a character, always chewing tobacco and coming up to pat you
on the back. He got me to fetch newspapers for him from Kuwait
City. Later, we shared a bumpy ride across the desert in the
back of a Humvee.
A decorated Gulf war veteran, he used
to complain about having to come back to Iraq. "We should
have gone all the way to Baghdad 12 years ago when we were here
and had a real chance of removing Saddam."
Now Pokorney, Jordan and their comrades
lay among unspeakable carnage. An older marine walked by carrying
a huge chunk of flesh, so maimed it was impossible to tell which
body part it was. With tears in his eyes and blood splattered
over his flak jacket, he held the remains of his friend in his
arms until someone gave him a poncho to wrap them with.
Frantic medics did what they could to
relieve horrific injuries, until four helicopters landed in the
middle of the highway to take the injured to a military hospital.
Each wounded marine had a tag describing his injury. One had
gunshot wounds to the face, another to the chest. Another simply
lay on his side in the sand with a tag reading: "Urgent
_ surgery, buttock."
One young marine was assigned the job
of keeping the flies at bay. Some of his comrades, exhausted,
covered in blood, dirt and sweat walked around dazed. There were
loud cheers as the sound of the heaviest artillery yet to pound
Nasiriya shook the ground.
Before last week the overwhelming majority
of these young men had never been in combat. Few had even seen
a dead body. Now, their faces had changed. Anger and fear were
fuelled by rumours that the bodies of American soldiers had been
dragged through Nasiriya's streets. Some marines cried in the
arms of friends, others sought comfort in the Bible.
Next morning, the men of Alpha company
talked about the fighting over MREs (meals ready to eat). They
were jittery now and reacted nervously to any movement around
their dugouts. They suspected that civilian cars, including taxis,
had helped resupply the enemy inside the city. When cars were
spotted speeding along two roads, frantic calls were made over
the radio to get permission to "kill the vehicles".
Twenty-four hours earlier it would almost certainly have been
denied: now it was granted.
Immediately, the level of force levelled
at civilian vehicles was overwhelming. Tanks were placed on the
road and AAVs lined along one side. Several taxis were destroyed
by helicopter gunships as they drove down the road.
A lorry filled with sacks of wheat made
the fatal mistake of driving through US lines. The order was
given to fire. Several AAVs pounded it with a barrage of machinegun
fire, riddling the windscreen with at least 20 holes. The driver
was killed instantly. The lorry swerved off the road and into
a ditch. Rumour spread that the driver had been armed and had
fired at the marines. I walked up to the lorry, but could find
no trace of a weapon.
This was the start of day that claimed
many civilian casualties. After the lorry a truck came down the
road. Again the marines fired. Inside, four men were killed.
They had been travelling with some 10 other civilians, mainly
women and children who were evacuated, crying, their clothes
splattered in blood. Hours later a dog belonging to the dead
driver was still by his side.
The marines moved west to take a military
barracks and secure their third objective, the third bridge,
which carried a road out of the city.
At the barracks, the marines hung a US
flag from a statue of Saddam, but Lieutenant-Colonel Rick Grabowski,
the battalion commander, ordered it down. He toured barracks.
There were stacks of Russian-made ammunition and hundreds of
Iraqi army uniforms, some new, others left behind by fleeing
Iraqi soldiers.
One room had a map of Nasiriya, showing
its defences and two large cardboard arrows indicating the US
plan of attack to take the two main bridges. Above the map were
several murals praising Saddam. One, which sickened the Americans,
showed two large civilian planes crashing into tall buildings.
As night fell again there was great tension,
the marines fearing an ambush. Two tanks and three AAVs were
placed at the north end of the third bridge, their guns pointing
down towards Nasiriya, and given orders to shoot at any vehicle
that drove towards American positions.
Though civilians on foot passed by safely,
the policy was to shoot anything that moved on wheels. Inevitably,
terrified civilians drove at speed to escape: marines took that
speed to be a threat and hit out. During the night, our teeth
on edge, we listened a dozen times as the AVVs' machineguns opened
fire, cutting through cars and trucks like paper.
Next morning I saw the result of this
order _ the dead civilians, the little girl in the orange and
gold dress.
Suddenly, some of the young men who had
crossed into Iraq with me reminded me now of their fathers' generation,
the trigger-happy grunts of Vietnam. Covered in the mud from
the violent storms, they were drained and dangerously aggressive.
In the days afterwards, the marines consolidated
their position and put a barrier of trucks across the bridge
to stop anyone from driving across, so there were no more civilian
deaths.
They also ruminated on what they had
done. Some rationalised it.
"I was shooting down a street when
suddenly a woman came out and casually began to cross the street
with a child no older than 10," said Gunnery Sergeant John
Merriman, another Gulf war veteran. "At first I froze on
seeing the civilian woman. She then crossed back again with the
child and went behind a wall. Within less than a minute a guy
with an RPG came out and fired at us from behind the same wall.
This happened a second time so I thought, 'Okay, I get it. Let
her come out again'.
She did and this time I took her out
with my M-16." Others were less sanguine.
Mike Brooks was one of the commanders
who had given the order to shoot at civilian vehicles. It weighed
on his mind, even though he felt he had no choice but to do everything
to protect his marines from another ambush.
On Friday, making coffee in the dust,
he told me he had been writing a diary, partly for his wife Kelly,
a nurse at home in Jacksonville, North Carolina, with their sons
Colin, 6, and four-year-old twins Brian and Evan.
When he came to jotting down the incident
about the two babies getting killed by his men he couldn't do
it. But he said he would tell her when he got home. I offered
to let him call his wife on my satellite phone to tell her he
was okay. He turned down the offer and had me write and send
her an e-mail instead.
He was too emotional. If she heard his
voice, he said, she would know that something was wrong.
Mark Franchetti writes
for the London Times, where this dispatch originally appeared.
Yesterday's
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Ben Tripp
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Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
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Them Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic
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Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz-Coup
Pepe Escobar
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Website of the War
Iraq
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