“One owes respect to the living; but to the dead one owes nothing but the truth.” – Voltaire

An eighteen vehicle convoy does not easily make a U-turn. After Captain Troy King had passed the word to all of his soldiers to “lock and load” their weapons, he ordered the string of vehicles to head back through the city they had just left. Iraqi civilians had been tracking the 507^th Maintenance Company’s convoy as it drove north, out of Al Nasiriyah, and King must have begun to worry about attack. His soldiers were properly armed, each with 210 rounds for their M-16s, a thousand rounds had been acquisitioned for the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, and 45 rounds for an M9.

But King had made a mistake.

The 507^th had been equipped with what are known as “crew served” weapons, larger guns for attacking a heavily armored enemy. These included the .50 caliber machine gun and a 40 millimeter MK-19, but also hand grenades, pyrotechnics, and AT-4 anti-tank weapons. Possibly, because they did not expect to be passing through hostile territory, Captain King had not distributed the more lethal weapons and ammunition to the troops of the 507^th. According to the Army’s draft report on the incident, King had ordered pyrotechnics, hand grenades, and the AT-4 anti-tank weapons “consolidated and secured,” which meant they were located in one vehicle. This decision was to contribute to the deadliness of what happened to the convoy.

Darrell Cortez, a Fort Bliss soldier who considered James Kiehl of the 507^th his best friend, was baffled by the fact that those weapons were not in the hands of the troops.

“No soldier was issued grenades or rockets,” Cortez said. “Those, at that point, were still secured. I’ve not seen a report as to why that was the case. I don’t know whose decision it was to keep them locked. I don’t know if it was Captain King or someone higher up who decided, at this time, we will not need these armaments.”

Whoever it was, they turned out to be very wrong.

As the convoy began to make a loop to return in the direction opposite of what it had been traveling, a ten ton wrecker ran out of fuel, and there was no longer any reserve fuel in the tanker truck accompanying the 507^th because the company had been moving for three straight days. King ordered all vehicles to stop; the wrecker was refueled using five gallon cans, emergency fuel carried on each truck and Humvee. Iraqis in personal vehicles, and talking on cell phones, watched the refueling from a relatively close distance for the next forty minutes. A few of them drove past the stopped Americans.

Finally refueled, the 507^th headed back to the south, and turned left at Highway 16. First Sergeant Robert Dowdy, who was in the last vehicle, radioed Captain King to report they were beginning to take small arms fire. King ordered all trucks and Humvees in the line to accelerate, as trained, to get out of the ambush. This was the point where the convoy began to break into smaller groups because of the varying size, and acceleration rates, of the vehicles. In the front of the column, Captain King was racing eastward to lead the 507^th out of the gunfire. Probably because of a high rate of speed, or simple confusion caused by combat, King missed the intersection with Highway 7/8, where he was to take the convoy back to the south.

Sergeant Dowdy radioed his commander to inform him he had passed the critical turn. In the middle of the string of big trucks, Specialist First Class Anthony Pierce, told his driver, Specialist Timothy Johnson to speed up so they could catch Captain King, and give him directions back to the intersection. By the time this had happened, all of the vehicles had passed the turnoff to Highway 7/8, and the fierceness of Iraqi fire on the passing column began to build.

Specialist James Kiehl of Comfort, Texas, sat in the passenger seat of a slow, five ton truck with a trailer, being driven by Specialist Jamaal Addison. Bullets pinging off the side were hardly heard over the noise of the straining engine. Kiehl, like all the others in the 507^th, had not expected this kind of danger. Soldiers in the maintenance company had told their families not to worry about them because they were “in the rear with the gear.” Kiehl and Addison had to be wondering where they were going, and what was happening. The limited supply of walkie-talkie radios and batteries left most of the soldiers without information on convoy movement. But Kiehl knew enough. He was in combat now, a completely unexpected assault, and neither he, nor most of the others in the 507^th were really prepared to fight.

“These people were technicians, mechanics,” Kiehl’s father Randy explained. “Did you ever hear them say the words ‘combat specialists’?”

They were isolated, and alone. No combat infantry had been provided for the maintenance soldiers, who, by design were certain to be left behind as the entire war machine hurried toward Baghdad. Military planners apparently believed that by the time the maintenance crews passed through an area that it would have been secured by the army advancing in front. The decision not to attach a combat unit may have also been a result of cost-saving pressures from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who envisioned Iraqis greeting U.S. troops as their liberators. Instead, James Kiehl and the rest of the 507^th were being met with a wall of gunfire.

Back in Des Moines, Iowa, Kiehl’s wife, Jill, who was seven months pregnant with the couple’s first son, was already beginning to confront the possibility that the president may have misled the nation into an unnecessary war. Her husband, however, had no choice but to serve, even if his unit was exposed by bad planning, nor did it matter that the president may have been less than truthful about the reasons for invading Iraq.

“It’s his commander-in-chief. It’s his head boss,” Jill Kiehl explained. “You don’t question what he said. You just do it, whether you like it or not, for personal reasons. If it is true that a lot of the evidence that they based the war on was made up, it’s gonna upset me a lot. All of this could have been prevented and I could have had a normal life with my husband.”

As the lead vehicles began to pull away, a five ton tractor trailer became disabled, most likely by Iraqi weapons fire. A private, Brandon Sloan, was driving and Sergeant Donald Walters was his passenger. They were being followed by a truck pulling a water tank. While under fire, the two soldiers in the trailing vehicle, Private First Class Patrick Miller and Sergeant James Riley pulled up alongside of Sloan’s truck and executed a “moving combat pickup” of Sloan. Walters, on the far side, did not get into the rescue vehicle, and the U.S. military has no definitive information about his fate.

The Army’s draft report only added mystery to that part of the 507^th’s story.

“It is unclear whether SGT Walters was picked up by others in the convoy or remained in the area of the disabled tractor-trailer. There is some information to suggest that a U.S. soldier, that (sic) could have been Walters, fought his way south of Highway 16 towards a canal and was killed in action. SGT Walters was, in fact, killed at some point during this portion of the attack. The circumstances of his death cannot be conclusively determined by available information.”

Still taking fire as they moved eastward, Captain King appeared to be searching for a flat, open space along the highway, where the big rigs could be turned around. The convoy had to travel three kilometers past the missed intersection before there was enough room to execute a U-turn. A wrecker, which was pulling a five ton supply truck, very quickly got stuck in the sand. George Buggs and Edward Anguiano, the wrecker crew which had helped the 507^th retrieve some of its trapped trucks a day earlier, were left behind as the rest of the convoy made an arcing turn and headed back to the west.

“This is where we start splitting up into different groups,” explained Sergeant James Riley, a 31 year-old machinist. “Because you can’t afford to sit there and wait while somebody else turns around. No, you don’t do that.”

1^st Sgt. Robert Dowdy, at the tail end of the column, had his Humvee pull up next to the stuck wrecker, and Buggs and Anguiano jumped in. Privates Lori Piestewa and Jessica Lynch were also in Dowdy’s vehicle. Piestewa, who was driving for Dowdy and Lynch, had been traveling in the supply truck being towed by Buggs and Aguiano, before it had become disabled. Dowdy keyed his radio and told Captain King he had picked up the two men. Incoming fire was bristling up and down the sides of their vehicles. Dowdy urged King to get the convoy out of the city as fast as possible. Out the back of the Humvee, either Buggs or Anguiano, Dowdy wasn’t sure which one, had picked up the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon and began returning fire at the Iraqis.

King was down to fifteen vehicles, and with bullets and tires kicking up dust, there was increasing confusion. The differing speeds with which the big trucks and smaller Humvees had turned around and their varying acceleration rates had caused large gaps to appear in the convoy. The distance between them and the rest of the convoy was expanding very quickly for Joe Hudson and Johnny Mata, who were driving the 507^th’s remaining wrecker and towing a giant tractor-trailer rig. They had too much weight and not enough horsepower to close ranks with the rest of the column. Forty five miles per hour was about their maximum speed.

Just a few months earlier, Johnny Mata had moved his wife and their two children into their first new home. Built on the morning side of the Franklin Mountains in El Paso, the Matas were still unpacking boxes when Johnny, a chief warrant officer, got his orders to Kuwait, and then onto Iraq. In front of him, Mata saw the convoy was breaking into three groups because of the discrepancies in size and speed of the trucks and Humvees. There was nothing to do but for him and Hudson to go as fast as possible and hope the fifteen tons of steel and rubber they were driving might keep up.

But they did not.

When Nancili Mata, Johnny’s wife, was briefed by the Army about what happened to the 507^th, she was astonished to learn her husband had no way to speak with the soldiers in the other vehicles, who were outrunning his rig.

“Those devices, they didn’t have enough,” she said. “They only had five, the walkie-talkies. The soldiers went out and bought some extras out of their own pockets. They told us that at the briefing.” She turned her palms upward, and lowered her chin, angry at the absurdity of American soldiers using their own modest earnings to equip themselves for war.

“I can’t remember, but they had five in total for the whole 507^th, and the soldiers themselves went and bought some more, and that was one of the mistakes they were going to correct, and they said it themselves, they were going to correct it.”

Out front, Captain King, and his driver, Private Dale Nace, led two of the 507^th’s trucks on a dangerous run back down through the heart of Al Nasiriyah. Behind King’s Humvee was a five ton tractor trailer with Sergeant Joel Petrik and Specialist Nicholas Peterson. Specialist Timothy Johnson and Specialist First Class Anthony Pierce were in the next vehicle back, a five ton truck with an attached trailer. Most of the Iraqi fire they received was coming from the west side of the road, and Petersen, Pierce, and King were returning fire out the passenger side of their vehicles. Cars and debris had been positioned in the middle of the road to slow the Americans, and make them easier targets. Nace, Petrik, and Johnson drove with one hand through the obstacles, while shooting out the window with their M-16s, when they were able to get their guns to function.

Several times, the soldiers found themselves unarmed when their weapons jammed. The Army report blames the malfunction of the M-16s on “inadequate individual maintenance in a desert environment.” This was possible. The 507^th was a maintenance company, and the soldiers very likely did not expect to see combat action. However, there had not been more than a few minutes since they had crossed the Iraqi border during which they might have taken a break to clean a weapon, and their hasty run through the Iraqi deserts had stirred up constant clouds of sand and dust. By the time their weapons failed, the troops in the 507^th had been on the move for three consecutive days. They might have reasonably complained that they had been equipped with weapons by their commanders that were not meant to function in a desert battle.

Captain King and his small group made it back through Al Nasiriyah without injuries. South of the intersections of Highways 8 and 7/8, King came upon tanks from Task Force Tarawa of the U.S. Marines 8^th Tank Battalion. He told them the 507^th had been split up in an ambush, and most of his soldiers were under deadly Iraqi fire. The Marines immediately moved their heavily armored tanks northward on Highway 8 to rescue the 507^th. Unfortunately, those same tanks were originally supposed to provide the armored protection for the Marine’s Alpha and Charlie Companies in their mission to take the two bridges on the north side of Al Nasiriyah, which crossed the Saddam Canal. The two Marine companies, later that morning, faced a brutal assault from the Iraqis, and there were no tanks to assist them in the battle.

Before the tanks had reached them, enemy fire appeared to dramatically increase on the second group of vehicles. The three tractor trailers, one large fuel truck, and a Humvee with a trailer, were twisting and weaving their way through the Iraqi obstacle course on Al Nasiriyah’s main street. Numerous rocket-propelled grenades and unceasing small arms fire was now coming in a consistent volley from both sides of the road. In one of the tractor trailers, Corporal Damien Luten jumped up to man the 507^th’s only .50 caliber machine gun, mounted on top of the truck’s cabin.

The weapon failed.

“I was up there, and I think of it now, kind of thinking of the movie The Matrix,” he said. “And you see the bullets, flying. And it, it seems like it’s slow motion. The bullets were flying. I can actually see them, as they pass me, uh, over my head, back in front of the vehicle. It seemed like they were going that slow.”

Without the protection of the larger gun, Luten reached down for his M-16, and was shot in the knee. Trying to fire the automatic weapon, Luten discovered it jammed. The weapon, he said, had been cleaned every time the convoy had stopped. Luten, though, never fired either his M-16 or the larger machine gun. Both had failed him in combat. Private First Class Marcus Dubois pushed the bob-tailed rig forward, sweeping between old cars and truck tires strewn across the road. At one point, the Iraqis had pushed a bus in front of the Americans.

Ahead of Dubois, a similar truck took numerous hits from the Iraqis, and rumbled to a stop in the oppressive gunfire. Specialist Jun Zhang, who had been driving, jumped out and ran back to climb onboard Luten and Dubois’ rig. Curtis Campbell, the sergeant who had been riding with Zhang, grabbed Zhang’s M-16, and struggled with the weapon, trying to get it to fire. He was shot in the hip, and went down; briefly, before a Humvee crew snatched him from the street. Staff Sergeant Tarik Jackson, inside the Humvee, had already been wounded as he returned fire, and he suffered further injuries while rescuing Campbell. The Humvee, with a man identified by the Army only as “CW3 Nash” at the wheel, was disabled by Iraqi fire, not far from where it had stopped to pluck Campbell from potentially deadly Iraqi attacks.

With Nash, Jackson, and Campbell stranded in the Humvee behind them, Zhang, Dubois, and Luten turned around in the midst of the firefight. They had crossed the Euphrates River Bridge, and a few kilometers away the wavy silhouette of Captain King’s parked Humvee and two trucks was visible. The three men were determined, being that close to safety, they were not going to leave behind the other three soldiers in the disabled Humvee. As they struggled out of their doors, Matthew Rose, the supply officer, and a father of six children, was making a serpentine run, taking his truck through RPGs, debris, and other large obstacles. Corporal Francis Carista, shooting out the passenger window with an M-16, was struck in the heel by a piece of shrapnel. Rose’s rig, battered by the assault, sputtered to a stop near the Humvee, where the other six soldiers had gathered to seek protection.

“My vehicle was being hit. It was blowing smoke everywhere, and at least one of my tires was flat. I didn’t expect to be in that position,” Rose said. “Proper military doctrine says that if you’re in an ambush, drive out of the ambush. I just prayed and drove. I kept saying, ‘Lord, I don’t want to die. I want to see my kids.’”

Miraculously, the gargantuan fuel truck driven by Private First Class Adam Elliot also made it through “ambush alley.” James Grubb, a specialist, had been struggling to return fire out the tanker’s window with his jammed M-16, and was wounded in both arms by the time the fuel truck lumbered up next to the other soldiers of the 507^th, just south of the Euphrates River Bridge. After his truck had crossed the river, Rose, who had once served as an Army medic, began to lead the other medically trained soldiers in treating the seriously wounded. Limping and dragging each other, the soldiers made it into a ditch as Iraqis directed more fire at them from behind sand berms and non-descript buildings.

“When the mortar fire started to get closer,” Rose explained, “We tried to get all the people off the road. Corporal Luten couldn’t walk, so I tried to carry him but couldn’t, so I actually dragged him from the road. I was dragging him when the Marines arrived.”

Down off the road, as they waited, the ten soldiers of the 507^th heard the immediately recognizable clanging sound of approaching tanks. Earlier in the day, they had passed Iraqi T-55 tanks on the side of the road, their turrets facing away, and they suddenly feared those tanks were rolling up to end their lives. Instead, they turned out to be the Marines from Task Force Tarawa, who rotated their turrets in the direction of a few buildings where Iraqi fire had been concentrated. After those structures were blown up by the tanks, the Marines were able to evacuate the 507^th’s wounded, but not without suffering a few KIAs of their own.

At the rear of the 507^th convoy, however, things were much worse.

The soldiers driving the larger trucks had experienced a great deal of difficulty in executing the final U-turn, and had slipped well behind the two groups leading the convoy. As Specialists Edgar Hernandez and Shoshana Johnson approached the intersection to take them back south through Al Nasiriyah, their five ton tractor-trailer came under heavy Iraqi fire. The Iraqis had put a truck in the road to block passage, and Hernandez, who was driving, swerved to go around it and lost control of his rig when he veered to the right and went off the road. Hernandez had been ducking beneath the dashboard to avoid flying bullets, and apparently was unable to prevent jackknifing his truck, leaving the trailer protruding into the road.

“I got stuck in the mud,” he said.

First Sergeant Robert Dowdy, who had remained with the slower trucks to lead them back to safety, ordered his driver to race ahead and catch the vehicle carrying Private First Class Patrick Miller and Sergeant James Riley. Over his radio, Dowdy called out to Miller to “increase speed and keep moving.” Dowdy had his driver, Private First Class Lori Piestewa, pushing their Humvee to near maximum speed as every enemy gun along the road appeared to be tracking their path.

Joseph Hudson, in the wrecker with Johnny Mata, saw the Humvee “fly past.”

“Machine gun fire,” he remembered. “There was people firing at the Humvee. And there was, everywhere you looked, somebody was firing. There was return fire from the Humvee, and they just disappeared into the distance.”

According to Miller, the Iraqis had set up an ambush on the corner of the highway’s intersection, and they were “unloading on anything that turned at their corner.” Somewhere, in one of the trucks, was the weaponry that might have ended the ambush. Dowdy had to be wondering why the pyrotechnics, rocket-propelled grenades, and the anti-tank weapons had been “consolidated and secured.” If he’d had the heavy ordnance, he and the soldiers at the back of the convoy might have been able to take out the guns being leveled at their trucks. But they had no access to those weapons, and their best hope for survival was to run. The Army’s report of the incident did not address this controversial question of weapons consolidation.

Moments later, the Humvee in which Dowdy was riding with four other soldiers, was hit by Iraqi weapons fire, and slammed into the back of Hernandez’ stalled tractor-trailer at a high rate of speed. The impact was loud and forceful, and was another indication to the young soldier that he might not live much longer. Hernandez, who’d only barely worked up the courage, before he left for the war, to ask his eighteen year old high school sweetheart to “be his girlfriend,” was facing death.

“There was one point where I just gave up,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is where I am going to die.’ I remember during the fight, I was holding my arm because I got shot and my weapon got jammed. That’s when I thought I was going to die. I thought, ‘What will my parents say after they find out I’m dead?’ In those last minutes, I just gave up. I was praying.”

The jolt of the Humvee colliding with his truck’s trailer may have interrupted Hernandez’ contemplation of his mortality.

“And all of a sudden,” he said, “Somebody hit us from behind. And the whole truck moved. I turned back, and then I saw the Humvee.”

Dowdy’s Humvee, with Lori Piestewa at the wheel, Jessica Lynch, and George Buggs and Edward Anguiano as passengers, was crushed beneath the trailer. Buggs and Anguiano were, essentially, victims of their own kindness. They had remained behind their own group, the 3^rd Forward Support Battalion, to help pull the 507^th’s stranded trucks out of the sand a few days earlier. The Army was unable to provide details of how they died, but, if they had not assisted the 507^th, they would have never ended up in the deadly ambush and collision, which took their lives.

Edgar Hernandez and Shoshana Johnson saw that there was “no movement whatsoever” by any of the people inside of the Humvee. Johnson, who was later captured by the Iraqis, said she felt “heartbreak ‘cause you just knew that they were all gone.”

Still out on the road, Joe Hudson and Johnny Mata were pushing through the fog of bullets and RPGs, their truck becoming more and more debilitated by Iraqi guns. Mata, trying to make his jammed M-16 work, was attempting to return fire from his position in the passenger seat, while Hudson struggled to stay on the road. He wanted to get the SAW, the Belgian-made M249, to work, hoping he might shoot as he drove. This weapon also failed to operate. Sometime during their scramble, Mata stopped firing, though Hudson was unable to say when the Chief Warrant Officer was killed. He was too busy trying to get them out of the death trap.

“At this point,” he said, “I probably have four of my eight tires shot out by that time. There’s just smoke just flying everywhere, rubber flying everywhere.”

Fairly quickly, Hernandez’ and Mata’s big rig came to a full stop. The Iraqis quit firing, walked up, opened the door of the truck, and pulled out Hernandez, taking him prisoner. Johnny Villareal Mata, whose wife, sixteen year old son and seven year old daughter were in El Paso settling into their new home, had been killed in the combat service he had sought.

His family was uncertain exactly how Mata had died.

“After he got shot in the leg,” Mata’s wife, Nancili said, “They told me he got shot in the back of the head, and like in the back of one of the shoulders, and a lot of the shrapnel. And the autopsy report has a lot more detail that I really don’t understand about the neck and the head.”

Patrick Miller, James Riley, and Brandon Sloan found themselves riding in the last vehicle at the back of convoy, and they were taking the heaviest fire. Using the dashboard to protect himself, Miller popped his head up, from time to time, to make sure he was still on the road. Bullets were bouncing off the hood, the persistent sound of the attack filling the cabin of the truck.

“Just pop, pop, pop, pop,” Miller said. “And I seen one guy jump out in the road, and aim at me. And I ended up hitting him.”

The transmission on his rig, though, was shot out, and the truck ground to a halt. Sloan, killed by Iraqi fire, was left behind in the cab of the truck as Miller and Riley ran through the rain of bullets to get to the wrecked Humvee and tractor trailer, about four hundred yards distant.

When they arrived at the crashed Humvee, Riley reached into the wreckage in an effort to recover Dowdy’s M-16, hoping to get his hands on a functional weapon. Miller, however, was trying to determine if any of the five members of the 507^th inside the Humvee had survived the accident. He leaned into the crumpled vehicle.

“Is anyone alive?” he screamed above the din of the battle. “Is anybody alive?”

There was no answer. Jessica Lynch’s foot was twitching, but Miller assumed it was nothing more than the reaction of nerves after death.

Riley’s M-16, meanwhile, was not working, and his survival, as well as the soldiers still alive, depended on a weapon. Unable to free Dowdy’s gun from the wreckage, Riley got M-16s from Johnson and Hernandez, who were both wounded, and tried to shoot back at the enemy.

“At this point,” Riley said, “The weapons are jamming up. They’re, uh, we’re experiencing some malfunctions. You could hear the bullets winging by your head, and impacting on the concrete around us.”

Without useful weapons, Miller ran off to try and commandeer an Iraqi truck to get them away from the ambush. From beneath the crashed Humvee, Riley, seeking protection with Johnson and Hernandez, tried to provide covering fire for Miller. The Iraqis were becoming braver, moving into the open, and stepped up the level of their assault on the stranded Americans.

“Trying to take cover and taking fire from RPGs, which are rocket-propelled-grenades,” Riley recalled in a nationally televised interview. “Some, I don’t know what they were, an improvised explosive, like a great big pipe bomb. ‘Cause you could hear it hit the asphalt and go, dig, dig, boom, as it blew up.”

Miller was unable to reach the Iraqi truck. According to the Army’s investigation of the incident, Miller found a sand berm above the road, and began to single-handedly take on the Iraqis with his faltering M-16.

“I seen a group of Iraqis setting up a mortar pit,” he said. “And as one of them tried to load the round into the tube, I shot him and he fell over and he dropped the round. They did that like about five or six more times. And never got the round loaded.”

Undoubtedly, Miller’s actions affected whether the other three soldiers remained alive. A well-placed mortar round on the wrecked Humvee and tractor-trailer was certain to kill Riley, Johnson, and Hernandez. After he had taken the mortar out of combat, Miller turned around to shoot at an Iraqi running past carrying an AK-47 automatic weapon. By the time he turned back in the direction of the mortar, he found himself surrounded by Iraqis, who then gang tackled him. (Miller was awarded the Silver Star for his heroic actions during the ambush.)

Riley, in the refuge of the wreckage with Johnson and Hernandez, also knew there was no point in further resistance.

“None of the weapons were functioning,” he explained. “I’ve got two wounded, Miller’s already been surrounded and captured, and they’ve got us totally in….pretty much encircled and pouring fire in. So the choice was taken away….that’s part of the code of conduct. You resist until you no longer have the means to resist, and at that point we didn’t have the means to resist. It was a choice of die now or die later.”

The Iraqis removed the dead and wounded Americans from the crumpled Humvee. Lori Piestewa and Jessica Lynch were still alive. They were later given medical treatment, and Lynch survived. Piestewa, however, became the first Native American woman in history to die in combat under the United States flag. In this new U.S. Army, women had earned the privilege of serving alongside men, and firing their faulty guns out windows at the enemy in combat, even if they had ended up there inadvertently. They had also earned the right to die while fighting.

When Riley, Johnson, Hernandez, Miller, Piestewa, and Lynch were all being taken prisoners of war, another 507^th tractor trailer and a five ton truck had almost reached the edge of Al Nasiriyah. The Army’s report said Howard Johnson and Ruben Estrella-Soto, and Jamaal Addison and James Kiehl had “maneuvered several miles under fire.”

As the guns hammered at the side of his truck, Kiehl probably did not have time to think about a light-hearted request he had made of Captain King’s wife before he left for Iraq. According to Cynthia King, James Kiehl was concentrating on his unborn child before he deployed to the Persian Gulf.

“He came up to me one day,” she said. “And he said, ‘Mrs. King, Mrs. King, would you put in a good word for me and ask your husband to move me to rear detachment until my wife has the baby and I promise to go the next time?’ He was half joking and half serious, but we knew it wasn’t going to happen. But he had to try.”

At the intersection of Highways 8 and 7/8, where Captain Troy King had first lost his way, Addison and Kiehl’s truck had overturned. Evidence indicated it was hit by “either direct or indirect fire.” Just south of where the five ton truck was upturned, Johnson and Estrella-Soto’s rig had come to rest. Structural damage to their tractor-trailer looked like it had come from colliding with the barrel of an Iraqi tank. Kiehl, Addison, Johnson, and Estrella-Soto were all dead. The U.S. military has said it has no real details on their deaths.

As a result, Estrella-Soto’s mother, Amalia, refused to believe her son was dead.

“The Estrella-Soto family is very angry with the military,” said Laura Cruz, a reporter for the El Paso Times. “They despise it, actually, because from their perspective, they still don’t know what happened to their son. The military had told her, ‘We have your son’s body but we can’t return him right away because we are missing a piece of it.’ So, she said they told her to have a closed casket, and she signed paperwork saying, ‘I will not see my son’s body.’ So, she got the casket, and ever since then, she’s been absolutely hysterical. She never got to see him, and because of that, she thinks he’s still alive. She never got to see the body.”

At Fort Bliss in El Paso, the Army’s report of what happened to the 507^th was not given much credibility by soldiers. All of them were afraid to criticize it publicly, but several dismissed its findings.

“Soldiers that are in 552^nd and 507^th know what happened,” one Ft. Bliss junior officer said, “and they look at the report, and go, ‘yeah, whatever.’ I think the ones that are there they see the discrepancy, and they know what happened. They just let it go. Because they have to. They work for the United States government and there are channels to take it all up in.”

“But they don’t,” he was asked. “Even though they don’t buy into the report?”

“No.”

“Is that because if you take it up through official channels, you bring attention to yourself?”

“Absolutely.”

James Kiehl’s wife, Jill, who was pregnant with the couple’s first child when he died, had to deal with her own anger caused by her husband being unable to protect himself because of all the jammed up M-16s identified in the report. She refused to accept the Army’s explanation that the soldiers of the 507^th were at fault because they did not properly clean and maintain their weapons.

“They just said because of the sandstorms and everything, that’s why they were jamming, and I don’t know if they had time to clean them, or if they did clean them, because the location they were at was all sand, and it was impossible to keep them from jamming. They also had to have time to do that, if they are keeping them busy with all of this other stuff, when are they gonna find time to do that, while they are sleeping?”

In his hometown of Comfort, Texas, Kiehl was one of six young people who were serving in the war with Iraq. His high school basketball coach, Colin Toot, said the giant Kiehl was the “kind of kid who was more interested in protecting the girls in his class than he was in dating them.” His protective instinct, Kiehl’s friends said, was also a part of the undercurrent that led him to serve in the military, and guided him during the war. Kiehl, of course, will never know his son’s face, or name, and the boy will grow up staring at pictures and monuments, wondering about his father, knowing him only as an abstraction, rather than a large, comforting, physical presence. Nathaniel Ethan Kiehl was born just weeks after his father had been killed in a war.

James Kiehl had told his own father, Randy, he believed in the fight against Saddam Hussein. James had said he did not want to raise his own child in a world where people have to worry about terrorism. He believed in President George W. Bush’s explanations for the war, and, before he died, he made sure the world knew that he also believed in Christianity, and that Jesus Christ was the son of God, come to save him.

On a country road across the highway from the school where James Kiehl played basketball, his father Randy sat at a table in his home. An all-night production manager of a bakery, Kiehl had raised his son to strive for importance and contribution. Although he knew James believed in the president’s call for the war, Randy Kiehl was beginning to wonder about the countless questions suddenly being raised about the Bush administration’s politics. Raw from the loss of his only child in a war of uncertain purpose, he placed his faith in higher powers than the White House.

“God has a reason,” he said. “We may not like it. We may not agree with it. But in the bigger scheme of God’s plans, there is a reason he took James home. It’s just like his being baptized eleven days before the ambush. ‘Cause God made him ready.”

And softly, Randy Kiehl began to cry.

“To save your world, you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?” – W.H. Auden

In his comfortable home, set on a ridgeline above Tonopah, a surprise awaited Sheriff Wade Lieseke as he returned from his duties in Pahrump, Nevada. Three days of the week, Lieseke lived out of a motel room in Pahrump. Though his home was in Tonopah, on the other side of Nye County, Pahrump was the biggest city in the nation’s second largest county. In order to do his job, the sheriff needed to spend a lot of time away from his family. All 18,400 square miles of Nye County, the endless, hazy distances of the Great Basin Desert, were a part of his law enforcement jurisdiction.

On the right hand wall as he entered the house on this particular evening, a shadow box had been hung. In perfect rows, his medals for military service in Vietnam had been placed behind glass, centered on a folded American flag. Lieseke had lost track of the location of his combat decorations. He wasn’t ashamed of his service, but it wasn’t exactly a time that had given him great happiness, either. The medals had been put away for a reason. Soldiers don’t like to be reminded of war.

“I looked at that thing on the wall,” he said. “And I knew right away it was Fred. You could just tell he had done it by the perfect rows he had hung the medals in. It was all just so precise, so Fred.”

Lieseke’s adopted son, Fred Pokorney, Jr., had come home from the Marines for a few days. When he arrived, he had asked Suzy Lieseke where he might find Wade’s medals from Vietnam.

“Where’d you get those?” Lieseke asked Pokorney.

“Suzy and I dug them out.”

“Why? I had those put away. I never really think about them any more.”

“I know,” Pokorney answered. “But that’s where they need to be. Right there. Where people can see them. You need to be proud.”

Wade Lieseke looked at the commendations he had received as a gunner on an attack helicopter. He had served in four of the war’s major campaigns, and had been decorated with a National Service Medal, Vietnam Service, Vietnam Campaign, the Army Commendation, an Air Medal, the Purple Heart, and the Vietnam Cross of Gallantry with a Palm Leaf bestowed by the government of South Vietnam. Lieseke knew something of war. Hundreds of Viet Cong had died from his accuracy during fourteen months of flying combat missions. War was not something Wade Lieseke celebrated. He hated it as only a soldier can.

But he was moved by his son’s thoughtfulness.

“That’s pretty nice,” he told Pokorney. “I appreciate you thinking of me like that.”

Pokorney smiled. “Yeah, there’s just one thing wrong with it.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“That.”

Pokorney pointed his finger at the U.S. Army Insignia near the top of the shadow box. He had positioned it above a shoulder patch, which he had given to Lieseke, designating the sheriff’s military unit; “282^nd Assault, Alley Cats Helicopter Company.”

“What’s wrong with the Army insignia?” Lieseke asked.

“It oughta be the Marines,” Pokorney explained. “You should have been a Marine because they’re the best.”

Fred Pokorney, Jr., obviously, did not come into the world as Wade Lieseke’s son. Lieseke, whose physical presence in a room demands almost most as much attention as the six foot, seven inch Pokorney’s, first met the future Marine while he was dating Lieseke’s daughter, Angie. During his high school years, Fred Pokorney had come to Tonopah with his father. They were living with Fred’s aunt, while Fred Pokorney, Sr., worked construction in the mining town. When his aunt died, Fred’s father decided to look elsewhere for work. The younger Pokorney, however, did not want to leave Tonopah.

Wade Lieseke invited the young man to come live with his family.

“Sure, you think about what you are doing when the kid is dating your daughter,” Lieseke said. “But with Fred, that just wasn’t an issue. You just met the kid and you knew he was different, very special. You were in the presence of someone outstanding, and you knew it. You just knew it. Him dating Angie was never a worry. We had our discussions. He knew the kind of behavior I expected. And that’s the way he acted. I never had the slightest reason not to trust Fred.”

In Tonopah, Fred Pokorney was noticeable. Tall, with green eyes and dark hair, he was a natural athlete. Classmates say he never struggled to fit in with his peers, and became a leader, even though he was quiet, not what many students considered outgoing. On the football team, Pokorney was a big target as a receiver for the quarterback, and a daunting obstacle for running backs to get around when he played defensive end. A teammate said Fred was “always good for at least one touchdown a game.” Basketball, though, appeared to more closely fit his physical skills. Whenever the Tonopah Muckers competed, Fred Pokorney always seemed to be in the middle, underneath the basket, clearing out rebounds or dropping in two pointers. During the off season, he spent his time in the high school gymnasium, lifting weights, trying to “put on size” to help attract the interest of college recruiters.

Rarely, if ever, Fred Pokorney spoke of his birth parents. He had told Suzy Lieseke that the last time he saw his mother was at age six, after she had left him abandoned in a shopping mall near Lake Tahoe, and police turned him over to the custody of his biological father. Many people in Tonopah assumed Pokorney’s parents were Wade and Suzy Lieseke, even though Fred had lived with them as foster parents. The Lieseke’s never formally applied to adopt Fred because, according to Wade, he never felt he needed “a piece of paper to make him my son.”

“That’s just what he was,” Lieseke said. “He was my son.”

He was born, however, to a construction worker named Fred Pokorney, Sr., who moved around the west, and his first wife. Around the time he was entering kindergarten, Fred Pokorney’s parents divorced. No one in Tonopah ever heard him speak of his mother.

“We always just assumed Fred’s birth mother was dead,” Suzy Lieseke said. “He never once mentioned her to us, and we didn’t pry.”

Whatever his childhood hardships were, Pokorney was reluctant to share the experiences even with his closest of friends, and he did not let the past burden his teenaged years. Fred Pokorney excelled in sports, was a fine student, and worked two jobs, at the Mizpah Hotel and an open pit mine. He went about the business of building his own life.

“He was a pretty independent guy,” said former high school teammate Mike Grigg. “Rather than sitting and pissing and moaning about it, he was working two jobs. He didn’t expect anyone to support him, even in high school. What happened….happened, and he seemed more than confident he could take care of himself.”

Grigg, who is a Nevada State Trooper in Tonopah, came across Pokorney during Marine boot camp. They spoke only briefly, but long enough for Grigg to realize Fred Pokorney was driven into the Marines by the same focus he’d had as a high schooler.

“He was far beyond my maturity level when I was going to school,” he said. “Most kids tend to be carefree and not pay any attention to the kind of things Fred was dealing with, like work and responsibility. He was down to earth and hardworking. His work ethic was outstanding.”

No one admired Fred Pokorney’s determination more than Wade Lieseke. Until he was shot, and critically wounded by a Utah prison escapee, the sheriff had not missed a single game in which Fred played football or basketball. The one contest he was unable to attend was the East-West Sertoma Classic in Reno, an All-Star game for high school seniors put together by the Sertoma Club of Reno. In a Las Vegas hospital, Lieseke lay recovering from the damage done by a bullet; a ripped diaphragm, torn lung, and ruptured spleen. When he got out of his patrol car, the flash of the convict’s gun prompted Wade Lieseke’s adrenalin to stir his combat instincts, and he fired several rounds, killing his attacker. The 1989 incident was later featured on a national, prime time broadcast.

Many weeks later, after he had been released from the hospital, one of the people he depended on the most while his wife Suzy was at work, turned out to be Fred. Pokorney spent his first summer out of high school in Tonopah saving money from his two jobs to help pay for his freshman year in college, and assisting Wade Lieseke in his recovery. Pokorney’s goal of attending college, and playing basketball, had been achieved. After an injury during his freshman year, however, Pokorney did not return to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. He stayed in Tonopah, working construction and the silver mines.

Wade Lieseke noticed Fred had begun talking about joining the military, in particular, the Marines.

“I just kept trying to talk him out of it,” Lieseke said. “I wish to hell I had tried harder. I told him if he wanted to join up he should join the Air Force or the Navy, not the Army, and sure not the Marines. It’s just too damned dangerous.”

As he spoke, Wade Lieseke was having breakfast at a small casino on the north side of Tonopah. The road outside, Veterans’ Memorial Highway, sloped north toward Reno, and down from Tonopah’s altitude of 6100 feet. Behind the casino’s restaurant, on a small plateau, desert wind blew dust across Logan Field; a modest patch of green where Fred Pokorney had run to glory in high school football. Above the conversational clatter of the restaurant, the ping and rattle of slot machines were heard, even during the early morning hours. The air in the lobby was thick with the putrid tang of cigarettes and alcohol, as if small town desperation had become a stench. Lieseke’s big hands curled around his coffee cup, and he looked out the window as he spoke, almost too softly to be understood.

“I said Fred, my problem is that the Marines are always the first ones in there, and he said, ‘That is the tradition and the history.’ And I told him, ‘You also have the first opportunity to get killed.’”

Pokorney’s determination served him well when he joined the Marines. On visits to Tonopah, Wade Lieseke became convinced that the young man, who had brought an additional, unexpected happiness into his home, was certain to become the first four star general in the Marines, who had not graduated from Annapolis. Fred Pokorney loved being a Marine. He was a part of an organization that appreciated and understood his kind of personal strength, the independence and will that men need to do great things. Fred had cultivated these characteristics within himself, and nothing pleased him more than being around people who valued what he had created.

He was home.

After commissioning as an officer, he was stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Neither he nor his wife, Chelle, had ever been back east. And once they had settled into the little beige house near the base, their first excursion to explore the East Coast was a trip for a Memorial Day visit to Arlington National Cemetery. Fred had always had a desire to stand in the sacred spot where American soldiers lay in honor. Chelle’s grandfather, Air Force Colonel William Schulgen, who had served in World War II, was buried in Arlington, and they both wanted to see his grave and offer their respects.

May 28, 2001 was also the first day for new President George W. Bush to offer Memorial Day remarks at the national cemetery. After laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns, the president addressed a crowd spread beyond the seating capacity, standing among the tombstones and markers of the dead, listening, as their president tried to convey a context for the loss and sacrifice marked by rows of dead filling the hills along the Potomac River. Out of uniform that day, Fred Pokorney was erect, his chin up above the crowd, as his commander-in-chief spoke.

“It is not in our nature to seek out wars and conflicts,” President Bush said. “But whenever they have come, when adversaries have left us no alternative, American men and women have stood ready to take the risks and to pay the ultimate price. People of the same caliber and the same character today fill the ranks of the Armed Forces of the United States. Any foe who might ever challenge our national resolve would be repeating the grave errors of defeated enemies.”

Undoubtedly, Fred Pokorney believed his president was talking to him. He was ready. He loved what he was doing. Serving his country in the Marines was the greatest job anyone could ever have. Fred trusted his president. He knew if he ever got orders to go into combat, it was because America was at risk, and he was willing to put his own life up to protect his country. If a Marine cannot trust in his commander-in-chief, he cannot fight in combat. Fred Pokorney believed in America; its principles, its leadership, its unrelenting truths. And he had just heard the president make a solemn vow that America was not going to be seeking out any wars or conflicts. If war came, it was certain to be the result of another nation’s aggression.

After the ceremony, Fred and Chelle lingered among the veterans. Many were wearing their combat decorations; gray and changed by death they had seen, the soldiers were, nonetheless, proud of their service. They had done what their country said needed to be done for freedom. Fred Pokorney spoke with many of the veterans. Hearing their stories made him feel a kinship, a connection to something holy. As he walked among the monuments, stood before the gravestones, and listened to the old soldiers, Fred Pokorney felt as though he were among his own kind.

“I want to be buried here someday,” he told Chelle. “It’s important. And you can be buried on top of me.”

After the holiday, back at the base in North Carolina, life for the Pokorneys settled into the daily rituals of work and household. On September 11^th, 2001, however, Fred and Chelle and Taylor’s days together began to grow tense. America had been attacked, and Fred was a Marine. The consequences of those two facts were obvious, and needed no discussion in the Pokorney house. Months passed, and they heard the talk from Washington about Iraq, and aluminum tubes to build a reactor. Eventually, there was a report in the president’s State of the Union speech that Saddam Hussein had tried to acquire uranium from an African country. Even when they attempted to avoid the newspapers and television newscasts, they still heard about Iraq giving assistance to terrorists, maybe even some of those who had attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The Pokorneys did not dissect the news. They simply knew what it all meant to Fred.

“We aren’t real political people,” Chelle Pokorney said. “Fred was just doing his duty. I do wish the country had agreed more going into it. I heard about most of this from my husband. Those people needed help, I guess. And we were there for that. I just hope they get whatever it was they wanted from us, freedom or whatever it was.”

Back in Tonopah, however, the rhetoric of war was making Wade Lieseke sick with anger. Iraq looked like Vietnam without the trees. Americans would go in, fight and die, and then, ultimately, leave. Iraq was likely, in Lieseke’s estimation, to return to the mess it was before the U.S. invaded. He’d seen it in Vietnam. Lieseke wasn’t political as a young man, either. When the government said it needed soldiers to help stop the spread of Communism, Wade Lieseke believed in the cause.

“What I know now is that it was all a lie,” he said. “I mean, if you’re gonna do that, then do it. We got a lot of guys killed, 60,000, and I’m counting the POWs and MIAs that were never heard from. Whether you wanna believe it or not, they’re gone. That’s over 60,000 killed.”

Lieseke has scars on his body from wounds received in Vietnam, and there are others in his head, which no one can see but him. He admits to being dark, too often depressed, thirty three years after leaving Vietnam. There are memories he’d rather not have, the kind of experiences he hoped Fred would be able to avoid as a Marine. The experts call it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Wade knows what he is dealing with, though, and often, it is just anger over the lies that sent him to war.

“If we are gonna let the place fall to Communists, why in the hell didn’t we do that in the first place?” he asked. “Why did all those U.S. soldiers die? After all these years, what really was the mission? What did you witness all of this death and destruction for? Why did you become a part of this death and destruction? If nothing was gonna change?”

Pretending that attacking Iraq was going to reduce the terrorist threat was just another government deception, as far as Wade Lieseke was concerned. More kids were going to be killed. Nothing was going to be accomplished. The president just needed a war to distract from all of his other problems. Washington leaders always made choices based on factors that had nothing to do with the people who would suffer.

“They’ve got no feeling or compassion or anything like that, when they make these decisions,” Lieseke said, his voice raspy with anger. “They just don’t care. Bush says, ‘We know we’re gonna suffer casualties.’ What a cold statement to make. I know that my decision’s gonna get a bunch of people killed, but, oh well. And people like that, I say screw you. They view our kids as cannon fodder. That’s all. They just don’t give a damn.”

“Now, you’re talking about the president?” he was asked.

“President on down, and all of these elitists he has making these decisions, like Dick Cheney, and the super fucking multi-millionaires sending people into harm’s way. Bush has never had a hard day. His children have never known hardship. But it’s okay. Those aren’t his thoughts when you are getting other peoples’ kids killed. It’s not a thought when they are getting other peoples’ children killed. It’s just not a thought.”

Fred and Chelle Pokorney had different beliefs than Wade Lieseke. They were convinced Fred’s service as a United States Marine was going to make a difference in the lives of oppressed Iraqis, and maybe even stop terrorism. Fred Pokorney’s convictions did not falter.

“Fred did believe in what he was doing,” Chelle said. “And I never doubted my husband. Never doubted him as a Marine or as a man. He was one of the great ones. He so loved what he was doing. That’s all I know how to say. Once you knew Fred, you just knew him, and you trusted him.”

The big Marine, though, was human, and he had his own fears. In a February morning of 2003, Fred and Chelle drove through the Carolina pines to the buses, which were to take him and other Marines to ships bound for Iraq. He tried to be light-hearted, issuing Chelle her own set of orders, “Take care of Taylor and don’t wreck the car.” When they held each other to say good-bye at the base, Fred’s broad frame was quivering. Chelle did not know if it was the chill air, or apprehension at what lay across the ocean. She said she had never seen her husband shake before. As he boarded the bus, she had the recognition of something awful, which she wanted to deny, and push out of her mind.

“I did have this feeling,” she said. “That I was never going to see him again.”

The tanks had been ordered to move off on a rescue mission. Survivors of the 507^th, a maintenance company, were under heavy Iraqi fire and armor was needed for their protection and evacuation. The tanks, however, were expected to be part of the plan to protect the amphibious assault vehicles of Charlie Company as they ran through An Nasiriyah’s “ambush alley.” Originally, all of the Marine companies were supposed to circumvent the city proper. But Bravo Company had bogged down in the mud to the east, and Alpha and Charlie had suddenly got orders to take two bridges over the Saddam Canal on the north side of the city.

Sergeant William Schaefer of Charlie Company thought he had heard wrong.

“Say again,” he said into his radio.

The orders were repeated. Schaefer had not been mistaken. He, like all of the other Marines in Charlie Company, was worried. They felt very vulnerable without the tanks. Their amphibious assault vehicles, known as “traks,” were made of heavy aluminum, and were susceptible to rocket propelled grenades and artillery attacks. The design of traks, which was thirty years old, allowed for protective armor plating to be attached. But there was none available when the Marines arrived for preparations in Kuwait. The Pentagon, and the White House’s plans for a light, cheap, fast-moving assault, was about to leave the men of Charlie Company unnecessarily exposed to their enemy. Circumstance was also conspiring against the Marines when the tanks were dispatched to rescue the 507^th. The tank company had already performed its rescue operations and had returned to the rear for refueling. As it moved up “ambush alley,” Charlie Company passed burning U.S. and Iraqi vehicles left over from the fight to save 507^th’s soldiers.

In one of the vehicles behind Schaefer, 1^st Lieutenant Ben Reid, and Second Lieutenant Fred Pokorney, was dodging fire from the warren of buildings in Al Nasiriyah. Body parts of Iraqis were strewn across the road in front of the traks. They saw no one in uniform. Women and teenagers were pointing weapons at the Americans. RPG rounds and machine gun fire poured in from the small structures lining the narrow streets. Pokorney had taken a flesh wound in the arm. The overwhelming diesel smell made the anxious breathing of the men inside their tracked vehicles even more labored and difficult.

After they crossed the bridges over the Saddam Canal, three miles through the city, the battle intensified when they dismounted from their traks. Close air support appeared, and American A-10 Thunderbolts, the Warthog jets were dropping bombs on enemy locations while strafing other positions. An Iraqi RPG, however, hit close enough to Ben Reid and three of his men that two of them were instantly killed, and the third, Fred Pokorney, was laying immobile. Reid, who had been knocked into near unconsciousness, got up and discovered the two had fatal injuries. He did not turn over Pokorney, assuming he had suffered the same fate. But there were no external signs of massive, fatal, trauma.

Before Reid went for help, he told one of his injured men, Jose Garibay, to keep everyone located in one spot. Reid began to run and an explosion, ten to fifteen feet in front of him, threw the young lieutenant into the air. When he landed, Ben Reid was staring at the dirt, and saw a lot of blood dripping from his face onto the ground.

“I was scared,” he said. “I thought that was it for me. I almost stayed where I was. I thought about it, anyway. But I got up and continued to run toward the trak.”

In the back of the trak, Reid found two of his men, Elliot and Trevino, breaking out packs of ammo. He issued them orders to move to where Garibay and the rest of the wounded were waiting for assistance. They were to get the wounded to the battalion aid station south of the Euphrates River, back through “ambush alley.” Reid jumped out of the trak, and looked to the north, trying to see the two mortar crews he had placed in that spot. They were gone. He had no idea where.

“I felt really alone,” Reid said. “Then I looked south and saw some guys down by the canal in the prone.”

Small arms fire and RPG rounds were filling the air around Reid. He decided to return to Jose Garibay, and the wounded troops, and give them orders to retreat. Reid crouched as he ran down to the canal to tell Garibay a trak was coming over to pick them up, and get everyone to the battalion aid station. His orders to Garibay were to load all of the wounded; no matter how much it hurt. Reid intended to find some help for Garibay, and the injured men.

He moved in the direction of the Marines he had seen lying along the canal. An explosive thud of some kind knocked him backwards, slightly. Reid said he didn’t think anything of it. His gunnery sergeant and several other Marines were staying low, off of the elevated road, to avoid being hit by intensifying Iraqi fire. Reid, who must have seemed disoriented, and in shock, was pulled to the ground by Gunnery Sergeant Blackwell.

“See if my eye is still in my head,” he asked Blackwell.

“Yeah, I think so. Looks like it,” he was told. Initially, none of the troops recognized Reid. The Marines broke out their first aid kits and began to treat the lieutenant.

“I guess I started doing a sanity check on myself,” Reid said. “I realized I had no Kevlar or gas mask, guess they had been blown off. I also had lost my maps and binos. Don’t know what happened to those. I noticed right then they [Blackwell and other Marines] were worried about something.”

The gunnery sergeant saw the A-10 first, according to Reid. The jet, designed for close combat support, made a strafing gun run along the canal and the elevated road, and opened up with its 30 millimeter cannon, which are capable of firing 3900 rounds per minute.

An American aircraft was firing on American Marines.

“It’s the first time any of us have been in combat, sir,” Ben Reid explained. “And remember, we don’t train together, [with Air Force.] They probably thought we were an enemy mechanized force. They probably saw our injured going south through the city, and assumed we were Iraqis. I’m not sure.”

The A-10 had made other passes through the area, and Gunnery Sergeant Blackwell and the men gathered with him along the canal were very nervous. Even in his own battered state of consciousness, Reid was aware of that much. He saw the men had “kept their attention focused up in the air.”

“I remember gunny [Gunnery Sergeant] being very worried about the Air Force support in the area,” Reid recalled.

As the plane made its run, Reid looked in the direction of where he had left his injured troops. They did not get hit by the A-10’s hail of cannon fire because they were gone, evacuated, he hoped, to an aid station. But Fred Pokorney, who might have still been alive, and the two others who had been killed in action, were lying out in the open.

“Fred was not put on a trak,” Reid explained. “He was still on the ground, and I assume still up in that area. I’m not saying he got hit by the A-10. I don’t know, and I don’t know if he was still alive or not.”

One thing Reid did know, however, when he had looked at Pokorney before running for assistance, was that he did not see any massive trauma to the Marine’s body. At least two published reports suggested Pokorney had been hit in the chest by a rocket propelled grenade. If so, Reid was certain to have seen extensive physical damage to Pokorney. But he did not. Ultimately, Pokorney’s wounds were determined to be so traumatic that his family did not view his body. Much of his torso was reportedly gone, as was an arm, and part of his face and head. These are the types of massive wounds Reid was certain to have noticed, if they had happened when the RPG round landed, apparently injuring Pokorney, and killing two others. Since Pokorney showed no visible external wounds when Reid saw him after the RPG explosion, he might have still been alive. He was almost certainly riddled with 30 millimeter bullets from the A-10 as he lay on the ground. Either way, Fred Pokorney, who had put himself at risk to call in artillery rounds on a radio with poor reception, in a defective military communications network, was now killed in action.

“I saw the A-10 come in from the north to the south,” Reid explained. “And I saw it fire up the east side of the road, about 85 meters from where I was with the gunny. I remember seeing the big, green tracers skipping off some of the parked tracks. The A-10 also dropped a bomb on a building several hundred meters to the east of us.”

Reid stumbled to the other side of the road, and was placed inside of a trak for treatment of his injuries. A bullet entrance wound, but no exit, was visible in his shoulder. Reid had no memory of being shot. Captain Dan Wittnam stuck his head in the track where Reid was being bandaged, and ordered the Marines to get back on the east side of the road. Wittnam, along with another Marine, set up with the M249 Squad Automatic Weapons, and the wounded stumbled between their suppressing fire to reach safety. Reid, who said he had “a rough time seeing and was pretty tired,” was helped across the road by Corporal Pedersen. Another amphibious trak arrived and Reid was placed in the back with a number of other injured Marines.

All of the Marines were in shock from being shot at by their own Air Force.

Wittnam, a 33-year-old who was a Charlie Company commander, said, “The earth went black from dirt being kicked up. And a feeling of absolute, utter horror and disbelief.”

The A-10, though, had not completed its mission. Corporal Jared Martin heard the jet, and watched it approach.

“He was low. He was coming right toward us. The next thing I know, I’m feeling a lot of heat in my back.”

Martin’s right hand and left knee began bleeding. He had a piece of shrapnel stuck below an eye, and his fingers didn’t feel right, as if they were “just dangling.”

Martin, and Lance Corporal Edward Castleberry, was not far from Lance Corporal David Fribley, who was next to his trak.

“I’m turning around screaming at him, telling him to get in,” said Castleberry, who was the driver of the trak. “He was trying to climb in, he’s got one arm trying to get in, and he just takes a huge round directly through his chest, and it blew out his whole back.”

26-six-year old Lance Corporal David Fribley was killed instantly. Flesh and viscera from the fallen Marine flew onto Jared Martin’s clothing.

“I wore what was inside of his body on my gear for a couple of days,” Martin said.

Finally, the tanks that had been dispatched to rescue soldiers of the 507^th Maintenance Company returned to the north bridge over the Saddam Canal and began firing their 120 millimeter cannons at the Iraqis. Malfunctioning pumps had delayed their refueling, which was cut short when word came that Charlie Company was pinned down in a firefight. The armored tanks with their big guns, the weapons that were originally supposed to protect Alpha and Charlie Companies as they took the bridges over the Saddam Canal, had, at least, showed up to help some of them escape with their lives.

The Iraqi attack was suppressed, and helicopters were allowed into the area to medevac the wounded. Lt. Ben Reid, who had been lying in the back of a track for thirty minutes and talking to other injured soldiers, vaguely remembered being loaded onto a CH-46, the giant twin rotor helicopter that took him back to a shock trauma hospital in Jalibah. The bodies of the dead, including Lt. Fred Pokorney’s, were removed after the wounded.

Pokorney’s father, Wade Lieseke, will tremble with anger all of his life.

“I’m not an emotional person on a lot of things,” he said. “But this is just such total bullshit. This is just such a horrible waste, and it didn’t need to happen, and that’s the frustration of this. He’s a young man who didn’t need to die. We didn’t need to waste all of his talents on fuckin’ Iraq, and he’s blown to bits.

“But that’s the worst memory, knowing how he died. This beautiful person that we knew, was blown apart, literally blown apart, and for what? He died that horrible death and left all these things behind; his beautiful daughter, his beautiful wife, a life that would have been nothing but success. They’d had a good life, and now there’s nothing.”

Lieseke snapped his fingers.

“And now it’s over.”

Everything had ended for Fred Pokorney, and brutally. But for his family, the horror of George W. Bush’s war was just beginning.

“Fred died a hero,” Wade Lieseke said. “But he’s still dead.”

And as he had wished, 1^st Lt. Fred Pokorney is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

“The greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, ‘That is all there was!’ But twist them all together and you have something tremendous.”

Victor Hugo

Maybe it was something his father had said. Or, perhaps his stepmother. Either way, James Kiehl had been thinking about getting baptized. Besides, he was about to be part of an invasion force entering a country with a well-bred hatred of Americans. And James Kiehl stood out as a target. He was a giant, Redwood of a man at 6 feet, 8 inches in height, and bullets flying over the heads of everyone else were likely to hit him.

James’ father, Randy Kiehl, was relieved when he got word that his son had decided to be baptized in the northern Kuwaiti desert.

“Janie [James' stepmother] and I approached James in discussions of Christianity. We talked about it. It wasn’t one of those passing subjects. And I didn’t hammer it into him. Because that’s a decision each person has to make on their own. We tried a couple of times to cajole him a little bit but something always seemed to come up that it didn’t work.”

A computer and systems technician, James Kiehl was part of the 507^th Mechanized Company from Fort Bliss, Texas. According to his friends, Kiehl was “scary smart,” and was able to take apart computers, figure out problems, and then reassemble them to full functionality. In the air defense artillery operations, which were supported by the 507^th, Kiehl did everything from keeping vehicle systems operational to maintenance and deployment of computerized launch systems for the Patriot Missile Company.

Kiehl was only a few days away from crossing over the Iraqi frontier as part of the U.S. military’s invasion force, and his mind was on unsettling possibilities. The persistent words of his father and stepmother, urging him to consider his spiritual life, were gnawing at James Kiehl’s consciousness as he faced war.

Baptism presents, of course, a special problem in the desert. The shortage of water creates certain restrictions. Military chaplains required a minimal number of soldiers interested in an immersion baptism before precious water resources were used to create a pool. Unfortunately, only two soldiers, Kiehl, and Sergeant Lewis Baldrich, had expressed an interest in the religious rite. The chaplain, Captain Scott Koeman, did not know if he’d get permission to conduct the ceremony because of water shortages.

James Kiehl, however, was determined. He told a television reporter traveling with his unit that he realized his “hour of need” had arrived.

“My hour of need was having my own stepmother to ask me to think about the path that I was on,” he said during an interview. “It was something I was thinking about, and I kept putting it off. Is that something I wanna do right now? But I kept thinking about it and just putting it off. And I put it off for so long it was time for a reality check.”

Kiehl, like thousands of young Americans camped in the northern deserts of Kuwait, was confronting his own mortality. Married for only about eighteen months, James Kiehl had left under orders for the Persian Gulf with his wife seven months pregnant. At 5 feet, 2 inches, Jill Kiehl is a foot and a half shorter than her husband, a man she described as a “big, goofy, lovable kid.” Initially, the couple worried a child was likely to affect their plans for James to use his military benefits to attend college and get a degree in computer programming. Barely out of their teens, James and Jill were slightly intimidated by the responsibilities of parenthood.

“At first, of course, he was nervous and scared,” Jill said. “But after a while he was just as excited as I was, and especially after he found out he was having a boy. He was, he said he didn’t care either way, but I know he wanted to have a son to be able to do all the guy stuff; cars and the hunting and fishing and wrestling around and sports and everything.”

During his time at Camp Virginia in northern Kuwait, before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, James Kiehl did, however, reveal other anxieties about his future. He convinced the chaplain, Captain Scott Koeman, to baptize him and Sergeant Baldrich, even though no other soldiers were ready for the commitment. Baptized just over a week before he crossed into Iraq with the 507^th Mechanized, Kiehl’s imagination was already working through a fateful reckoning, which he seemed to sense.

A television crew from KTVT-TV, Dallas, which was among journalists embedded with the unit, came across the baptismal rites by accident. During an interview they taped with Kiehl, he sounded as if he knew what lay ahead for him on the road to Baghdad.

“You always have the threat of something new here every day,” he said. “And every morning, you wake up, and then you think the next morning you may not wake up. I look at it that if it’s my time to go, it’s my time to go. But if I can leave here, leaving something behind, saying, you know, I was here……….”

The water for the baptism did not come from the Army’s tanker trucks. Soldiers donated their own rationed bottles of water to fill the plastic lined pit where Kiehl and Baldrich were to cleanse their souls. In the desert sand, in the midst of the Muslim world, American soldiers dug a hole to accommodate the broad frames of Kiehl and Baldrich. Unconcerned about the great spiritual conflict or the perceived cultural insult to Arabs, the pit was lined with plastic, and the bottles of drinking water were poured into the hole. Accompanied by a guitar, the troops stood and sang hymns of praise to their God, asking his protection from harm. On the other side of the border, Iraqis were petitioning Allah with the same request.

As the soldiers gathered around the small pool of water, Chaplain Koeman turned their private thoughts into his public hopes.

“Our danger lies to the northwest,” he said. “We do not know what we are going to face when we cross the border. And it is possible that when we get across into Iraq, not a shot will be fired and not one single Patriot will have to be launched. We’ll turn in all of our ammo, and that will be great. Amen?”

The last word had the inflection of a question, as if the chaplain was trying to convince them of his optimistic vision. But he acknowledged, just as the troops did, there was an alternate possibility.

“However, on the opposite end of the scale of things that could happen, we know that it is possible we could get hit,” he told the soldiers listening to his brief sermon.

The men were silent as Koeman called forward Kiehl and Baldrich, asking them a question Christians have answered with nothing more than their faith for two thousand years.

“Do you believe that Jesus Christ is your only Lord and saviour?”

Both men answered, “I do.”

“Therefore,” Koeman continued, “Go and make disciples of all nations and baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

Kiehl and Baldrich took off their desert camouflage field jackets, and wore olive drab tee shirts, combat boots, and pants into the baptismal pool. Individually, they sat in the foot deep water, and lowered themselves backwards as the chaplain cradled their heads to dip them beneath the surface. Kiehl, whose outsized facial features presented a boyishness, smiled as his face was covered with water.

“I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” Koeman said, loud enough for the other soldiers to hear.

The two Americans stepped up from the water, their clothing drenched, as the other troops applauded.

“Praise God,” Chaplain Koeman intoned.

Dripping, James Kiehl and Lewis Baldrich moved among their friends, accepting congratulations. Baldrich proudly shook hands while the massive Kiehl leaned over and hugged everyone whom he greeted.

“James never wanted to have things done in a good-mannered way,” his father Randy Kiehl explained. “He always left things until the last minute. Homework, learning a solo piece on his sax, learning basketball, always the last minute. But we always knew when the time was right he would make the right decision.”

A few days after James Kiehl’s baptism, Muslim clerics, during Friday night prayers at mosques throughout Iraq, asked Allah’s assistance in turning back “the American crusaders.” Exactly one week later, as Iraqis knelt before their God, U.S. bombs were already falling on Baghdad. The 507^th Mechanized Company was also part of an almost unimaginably huge convoy that had begun to race across ancient deserts, and into the heart of the land where civilization began.

And whatever came of the attack on Iraq, James Kiehl, the towering basketball star of Comfort, Texas High School, was as prepared as he knew how to be.

_________________________________________________

Too many questions went unasked by journalists.

Allegations, suspicions, accusations, diplomatic impatience, imperialism, and even poor journalism were all contributing factors to the launch of a massive American military convoy across the Iraqi border with Kuwait. On the morning of March 20, 2003, five lanes of vehicles, their headlights pointing northward, wended for miles across the sands of Persian Gulf deserts. Thirty three vehicles of the thousands in the procession belonged to the 507^th Maintenance Company of Fort Bliss, Texas. The sixty four soldiers in the 507^th portion of the convoy were deployed to support the vehicles and launch systems of the Patriot Missile battalion, considered a vital element of U.S. armaments to be used against Iraq.

Though they had no way of knowing, the soldiers of the 507^th were in danger even before they moved out. Their commander, Captain Troy King, had been given an orders brief that included both a CD-ROM, and a 1:100,000 scale map showing the various routes troops were to follow. King was also provided a handheld Global Positioning System that gave him a readout of directional signals and distance. If he got lost, the GPS displayed an arrow pointing the convoy to its proscribed route, and the distance it needed to cover to get back on course. Additionally, as a backup, he had the map with the route of travel. Unfortunately, King had highlighted it incorrectly. King was also quoted as telling a few of his troops that his GPS had jammed, affecting directional readings.

According to the Army’s preliminary report of what happened to the 507^th, King was to take his company up a course designated as Route Blue (Highway 8,) turn onto Route Jackson, (Highway 1,) and then return to Route Blue, thus avoiding the city of Al Nasiriyah. On his map, however, only Route Blue had been highlighted. An error of this magnitude is easily corrected during what military planners call “briefback,” a session where the officer explains to his commanders his own understanding of the orders he has been issued. King, though, was not asked to participate in a briefback session. The army has not explained why there were no briefbacks on orders, though perhaps, under pressure to deploy quickly, Lt. Col. Joseph Fischetti, commander of the 5^th Battalion, 52^nd Air Defense Artillery, had not ordered briefbacks for officers.

The young wife of one of the 507^th’s soldiers was astonished by the lack of logic among officers readying for the attack. After meeting with army investigators, Jill Kiehl was dumbfounded by their findings, and their shortage of detailed information or answers.

“I don’t even know who did the original briefing,” Jill Kiehl said. “They should have given him [King] a map that was highlighted and said, ‘This is your route,’ not just said, ‘You know where you’re supposed to go, right? Right.’ Okay, that’s stupid. Right there, that was the first thing to go wrong. They tried to find a scapegoat, which was Captain King, and blame it all on him. I was saying, ‘Yes, but what about everyone else who took part in it? What about them?’ There were errors from a lotta peoples’ parts.”

Jill Kiehl’s husband, Specialist James Kiehl, and Specialist Jamaal Addison were riding in a five ton truck, pulling a small supply trailer as the 507^th moved through the darkness of an early desert morning. Kiehl was an unlikely warrior, almost too encumbered by his great size to be in the military; a friend described him as both “the class clown and the silver voice of reason, at the same time.” Back in El Paso, at Fort Bliss, Kiehl was known as a tech-head and prankster, who once taped a video camera to a radio controlled toy car and raced it around the base motor pool, laughing at the reactions soldiers had as they realized they were being spied on by a remote camera. Raised in the rocky Texas Hill Country, Kiehl, like thousands of other soldiers, had enlisted in the military to earn money for a college education.

Kiehl might have been remembering the last conversation he’d had with his father over the telephone the day he deployed. Only halfway intended as a light-hearted recommendation, Randy Kiehl told his only child how to avoid harm.

“I said, ‘son, you get over there, and dig yourself a foxhole about seven feet deep.’ He said, ‘why seven feet deep, dad?’ You’re six foot, eight. I said, ‘put four inches of sand above you.’ He said, ‘you’re right, dad.’ You can reach up above that and fire an M-16, or whatever you’re carrying. Start shooting. You’ll probably get somebody. But you dig that foxhole to seven feet. Never had that opportunity.”

The 507^th Maintenance Company never stopped long enough to dig any foxholes.

Because some of the heavy trucks and armor needed in battle were expected to get stuck in the Iraqi sands, the 507^th had large tow trucks needed to recover stranded vehicles. In one of them, Chief Warrant Officer Johnny Mata stared at the string of lights leading toward Baghdad. This was the kind of service to his country Mata had long dreamed about. The Pecos, Texas native had told his wife that, if he did not ever get to go into combat, he would “feel like I cheated my country during my years of service.” In his little town on the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, Johnny Mata was famous for his athletic skills, and his ability to fix cars. While his wife, Nancili, and their two children, waited in their new house near the Franklin Mountains in El Paso, Johnny was finally realizing his ambition to serve America in a war.

Nancili Mata had no ability to envision what was about to happen to her husband.

“Too many mistakes,” she said. “Too many. Too many. Way too many. I started researching on my own and looking at letters and reports, and archive material in that report when they did everything. I came to the conclusion that there were four or five mistakes. Usually, a person gets killed for just one mistake.”

At the tail end of the great chain of military vehicles, the 507^th also included Jessica Lynch, who was to become a national figure because of her controversial rescue, and an eighteen year old private, Ruben Estrella Soto, Jr., whose mother had to be convinced to sign the papers for him to enlist in the army. His father, who distrusted the military, tried until the end to convince his son not to join. Engaged to Sonia Romero before he left for the Persian Gulf, Ruben Estrella Soto, Jr. had told friends he wanted to be famous, and to bring together his family, which was spread out across Texas and Mexico.

Moving to the northwest, military planners had picked map positions, referred to as objectives Dawson, Bull, Lizard, and Rams, where the convoy was to stop, rest, and prepare for the coming battles. The trip was largely without incident as the 507^th moved to Attack Positions Dawson, Bull, and Lizard. At Bull, the unit was linked up with the 3^rd Forward Support Battalion. Leaving their last stop in the early evening, the heavy trucks and vehicles spent much of their time off-road, navigating soft sand. What the army described as “poor trafficability” and mechanical problems caused the 507^th to break into two smaller groups. Darkness and blowing sand led to a number of drivers being confused. Eventually, several trucks broke down, while others simply settled into the soft, grainy earth.

The 3^rd Forward Support Battalion’s vehicles continued moving northward, and Captain Troy King made the decision to split the 507^th. Vehicles still functioning, which were able to keep pace with the larger convoy, kept going under King’s command. Tow trucks, vehicles bogged down, and those with mechanical problems became the responsibility of First Sergeant Robert Dowdy. While King’s smaller group traveled through the night to arrive at Attack Position Lizard just before sunrise, Dowdy’s team worked to free the second group of trucks, which had become stuck and to repair those that weren’t mechanically functional. Eventually, Dowdy’s convoy caught up with Captain King’s. Arriving more than twelve hours after King’s, however, mechanical failures and trapped vehicles caused Dowdy’s team to spend twenty two hours covering only eight kilometers of desert. They were tired, sleepless.

While waiting for First Sergeant Dowdy to arrive with the trailing vehicles, Captain King contacted his battalion commander to let him know of the 507^th’s circumstances. King was informed by 3^rd FSB’s staff that the overall plan of movement, including route, was unchanged, and King indicated he understood his instructions. He was also told that the larger battalion was planning to move out, on schedule, and was not able to wait for the trailing convoy. When he learned of his commander’s intentions, Captain King ordered his executive officer, First Lieutenant Jeff Shearin to gather the thirty two soldiers and seventeen vehicles already at Attack Position Lizard, and depart with the larger 3^rd FSB convoy.

As the main group was leaving Lizard, Robert Dowdy radioed Captain King, who was waiting for him, to tell him he was only ten to twelve kilometers away. Dowdy reported that he had all of the 507^th’s remaining trucks either running, or in tow. He was also being accompanied by two more soldiers, tow truck operators from the 3^rd FSB, who had been left behind to pull fuel tankers out of the sand. Sergeant George Buggs and Private First Class Edward Anguiano were using their wrecker to pull a disabled five ton truck belonging to the 507^th.

Only three and a half hours after Dowdy’s group reached Attack Position Lizard, Captain King had re-organized them into an eighteen vehicle, thirty three soldier convoy, and ordered them to pull out. King seemed determined to catch up with the larger convoy of the 3^rd Forward Support Battalion. Because he was unable to reach commanders in the 3^rd FSB via radio, Captain King decided the only way to rejoin the main group was to take a direct line across the open desert to intersect Highway 8, the assigned route of all the vehicles driving north toward Baghdad. Although there were only fifteen kilometers of distance between his location and the paved road, the rough terrain caused many vehicles in his convoy to become stuck. Five more hard hours elapsed before the soldiers were able to cover the short distance, and most of King’s troops had now gone almost two days with no more than a few hours of sleep.

Back on his assigned route, Troy King moved his parade of vehicles westerly along the hardtop road designated Highway 8, which was also known to military planners as Route Blue. After a short distance, King’s convoy came to an intersection with Highway 1, referred to on his map as Route Jackson. Mistakenly, King had assumed he was to proceed all the way to the next attack position by traveling along Route Blue, when all tactical planning had called for convoys to move onto Highway 1, Route Jackson, to avoid Al Nasiriyah by skirting the city to its southwest. The intersection where King had just arrived was expected to be confusing for drivers, and the army had stationed soldiers there to provide directions for traffic. Unfortunately, King’s convoy was hours behind the battalion leaders, and the troops, who had been directing traffic at the intersection, were long since gone. A small contingent of Marines was present at the spot where the two roads came together, and Captain King asked them if he was on Route Blue, which was confirmed for him by the Marines. Wrongly assuming he was to continue on Route Blue, up Highway 8, King failed to direct his soldiers to make a left hand turn onto Route Jackson, Highway 1. The arrow on his GPS, pointing generally northward, affirmed his decision, and the 507^th Mechanized Company began driving up the wrong road, toward the city of Al Nasiriyah.

Nancili Mata, the wife of the 507^th’s Chief Warrant Officer Johnny Mata, has been unable to accept the idea that the Marines did not steer Captain King onto the correct road, a mistake she first discovered when she was briefed about the incident by the U.S. Army.

“The Marines are at a checkpoint, and they see so many Americans going through that checkpoint in one way, and then all of a sudden one comes the other way? They just let them pass,” she said. “When Captain King got there, he asked, ‘Is this Route Blue?’ The Marines said, ‘Yes, it is.’ So they kept going, even though they should have said, ‘Okay, Captain King, why are you going this way? It’s not secure over there.’ So that was another mistake.”

The misstep by King, however, was not unexpected by many of the people who served in the 507^th. Troy King worried the soldiers who were under his command. A dental assistant, King had been in Army for about a decade, and had only recently received his captain’s bars. He had never before been in combat.

Laura Cruz, a reporter for the El Paso Times, who has written extensively on Fort Bliss and the soldiers of the 507^th, had heard numerous criticisms of King’s abilities.

“The soldiers of the 507^th have mentioned that they didn’t trust him,” she said. “I don’t know if they’ll tell you on the record that they didn’t trust him, but it is one of the things they told me, and I’ve heard it from other people, as well. I’ve also heard a lot of the P.O.W.s say they didn’t have any respect for him, and they weren’t convinced Captain King would make a good commander.”

Months after the incident, Troy King had still not spoken to reporters about his role in the tragedy that befell the 507^th. He was under strict orders at Fort Bliss to remain silent, and was not allowed the public opportunity to defend his command decisions.

As King pushed his convoy up Route 8, lights began to shimmer in the distance. Talking to his first sergeant, Robert Dowdy, on the radio, the two concluded they were looking at an industrial complex or an oil refinery, and King chose to continue. Another intersection lay ahead, however, and if King had understood the road markings, he might have yet avoided the disaster awaiting the 507^th. Just south of Al Nasiryah, Highway 8 turned west, while Highway 7/8 followed a northerly course across the Euphrates River and into the city. If King had made a left turn, the 507^th would have missed ambush alley, and might have safely passed Al Nasiryah to the west.

But the lights kept coming closer. And King’s troops were optimistic that what they were seeing up ahead was the main convoy of the 3^rd Forward Support Battalion. A mechanic in the 507^th, Joe Hudson, was beginning to feel relieved.

“I thought it was the convoy in front of us,” he said. “That we were catching up to them. Then all of a sudden, a town appeared out of nowhere, buildings just started popping up everywhere. Wow, we’re in a town, and what was running through my mind: hope this is a friendly town.”

Communications for vehicles in the 507^th’s convoy were inadequate. Only five drivers had SINCGARS (Single-channel Ground and Airborne Radio System,) and some soldiers had been equipped with walkie talkie radios. Batteries in most of the handheld radios, however, had been depleted because of the amount of time they had been used during the previous two days. Several sources have also said soldiers in the 507^th used their own money to buy additional radios for their unit because they did not feel their communications capabilities were sufficient. Why no additional batteries, battery chargers, or handheld radios were supplied to the 507^th, is an issue not addressed in the army’s report on the 507^th’s combat engagement at Al Nasiriyah.

Al Nasiriyah is built up to the banks of the Euphrates River, and the 507^th was immediately into the urban center the moment it crossed the bridge. Ahead, Iraqi soldiers had established a checkpoint, but they made no attempt to stop the convoy nor did they show any hostile intent toward the Americans passing through their city. Many of the Iraqi soldiers were in uniform, while others were armed civilians. The 507^th reported seeing a few pickup trucks with Iraqi civilians manning machine guns, which had been mounted in the back. Regardless, none of them fired on the U.S. vehicles or troops. They simply waved, and the trucks rolled past a crude sign saying, “Welcome.”

But Specialist Joe Hudson was growing worried.

“We passed them,” he said. “They’re waving at us. I’m like, you know, something doesn’t feel right. I mean, these are uniformed Iraqi soldiers.”

An anonymous letter from one of the 507^th’s soldiers, quoted by ABC News, described what it felt like to enter the foreign, hostile city.

“At about 5:30 or six, we started driving through the city of Nasiriyah. It seemed like a peaceful town. Most of the town was still asleep. We crossed over the Euphrates River and drove all the way through town. We then pulled over to the side of the road and turned around. We later figured out the group we were looking for wasn’t where they said they were. At about this time, we started seeing more traffic. The information we had been given was that the Iraqi soldiers would be giving up. We were also told that the Iraqi soldiers would be keeping their weapons. So we were nervous.”

If the failures of Captain Troy King were partially responsible for placing the soldiers under his command inside of a hostile enemy city, so was the flawed planning of the U.S. military, which was instrumental in leading the 507^th to this dangerous spot. Determined to reach Baghdad quickly, under political pressure from the Bush Administration for a speedy, low casualty, low cost victory, the Department of Defense laid out a plan of attack that used a light and fast movement into Iraq. The plan, however, was certain to leave behind any maintenance company as vehicles broke down or got stuck in desert terrain. The main convoy would be moving off while the impaired vehicles were being recovered. Catching up had to be considered impossible for the heaving tow trucks of the maintenance company.

“The 507th Maintenance Company was placed in a terrible predicament by the wanton desire of its command structure to race to Baghdad.” wrote the Rev. Tandy Sloan, in a letter to CNN. Sloan, the father of Private Brandon Sloan, believed that what happened to the 507^th was, “a tragedy, which is preposterous in nature, and unheard of in proportion.”

“It seems to us that these events were brought about by unpreparedness (sic) of our military in this conflict,” he added. “In their view, [they] could not afford time to cover their ranks as they went, or even to slow down for unforeseen complication, such as heavy trucks stalling or becoming bogged down in the sands of the desert they knew they had to cross.”

The army did not make accommodations for this inevitability. With hundreds of trucks and Humvees, there were certain to be breakdowns in the desert. But, in many ways, the maintenance company troops were left to fend for themselves. They were not provided any kind of combat infantry support, even though the 507^th’s soldiers had received only standard training in combat.

“They left us there,” one unidentified soldier told ABC News. “They were supposed to protect us, and they didn’t. We were all alone with no protection. That is not supposed to happen. We are always supposed to be protected.”

One of the U.S. commanders in Iraq, who has fifteen years of experience in foreign operations, including the first Gulf War, described what happened to the 507^th as “doubly frustrating.”

“Because,” he said, “we train against precisely that scenario. It’s called a contemporary operational environment. As the enemy realizes they are defeated, those kinds of assets, like logistical support provided by the 507^th become soft targets. They’re easier to hit. That’s the only means they [the enemy] have to strike back. It makes no sense to send those guys out without support. We train against that. We know better than that. Sending those guys out without proper combat support was a calculated risk and a decision that was made, but I don’t think it was a good one. Like I said, we sure don’t train like that to send out our logistical support unsecured.”

In fact, many of the soldiers did not even expect to encounter hostile Iraqis. The political spin from Washington, which was being fed to troops and reporters, was that Iraqi soldiers were likely to greet them with “happy fire.” Washington was so confident of friendly treatment for American troops that soldiers were informed that surrendering Iraqis were to be allowed to keep their weapons. The 507^th was not ready, mentally or professionally, for what it was about to confront.

The troops in the 507^th were certainly not considered marksmen or experts in small arms warfare, though they were capable of defending themselves. While the soldiers of the 507^th were issued a basic combat load of ammunition prior to their departure from Camp Virginia, having infantry or armored support attached to their company was likely to have improved their odds of survival. But they were abandoned as the main convoy raced to Baghdad.

Darrell Cortez, a Fort Bliss soldier who lost his best friend in the ambush of the 507^th, thinks someone needed to find a better plan.

“I personally disagree with the leave them behind, they can catch up later mentality,” he said. “I don’t know how we could do it better, though. Stop a three hundred vehicle convoy for one vehicle that is broken? Could delay the entire mission.

Stopping? You put four or five six people in eminent danger versus the complete mission. In the military sense, crass to say, they don’t mean as much as completing the mission.”

After passing through a second Iraqi checkpoint without incident, and crossing a canal bridge just north of Al Nasiriyah, the 507^th came to the end of Highway 7/8. The road made a “T” intersection with Highway 16, and Captain King took his convoy west, to the left. A short time later, King was faced with a similar decision when Highway 16 reached a “T” intersection with Highway 7. Choosing to go northward, in the general direction of Baghdad, King had the convoy follow him through a right turn. A few kilometers down Highway 7, King began to believe he was off course, and brought all trucks and Humvees to a stop.

While King checked his Global Positioning System handheld to find where the correct route was located, a number of Iraqi cars passed the stopped Americans. Soldiers of the 507^th had noticed the same vehicles as they traveled through the city. A few members of the company began to worry they were being scouted by the enemy. King’s GPS showed that the main route of the convoy was due west, across more open desert. After all of the difficulties his unit had experienced in going off road, he decided to turn around his convoy and retrace its route through Al Nasiriyah. As King issued an order for the U-turn, more Iraqi vehicles came into view. Everyone in the 507^th, including Captain Troy King, knew their moves were now being scrutinized by the enemy. Troops were nervous, worried about driving back through the Iraqi checkpoints and becoming targets. Matthew Rose, a 37 year old supply sergeant for the unit, was among a few soldiers in the 507^th who grabbed their M-16s, and established a defensive perimeter. A pickup truck carrying a machine gun sped past.

Combat seemed even more unavoidable when King issued an order to get prepared. They were simple, frightening words, which signaled to the soldiers they were in danger, in a foreign country, and some of them might soon die.

“Lock and load.”

The war in Iraq began six years ago today (Mar. 20) as American forces began the invasion. In a few days, we began counting our first casualties. Within a few more weeks, I was on the road traveling the country to talk to families of people serving in the conflict. Some of these were families of the fallen. Eventually, I was also able to interview survivors and commanding officers who had been involved in the initial tragedies of friendly fire deaths and a battalion that lost its way. Over the next several days, I will post here the stories of these individuals, what they experienced in battle, and what war is like from a soldier’s or a Marine’s point of view. What they know about war is all that any of us needs to know.

“Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.” – Otto von Bismarck

When the orders came over the radio, both of the young Marines were worried. 1^st Lt. Ben Reid, and the platoon’s other officer, 2^nd Lt. Fred Pokorney, talked quietly about the sudden change of strategy from battalion headquarters. A month had been spent working out a detailed plan to bypass the Iraqi city of Al Nasiriyah, after Charlie Company had crossed the Euphrates River. Three companies of Marines, Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie of the 1^st Marine Expeditionary Force, were to secure three separate bridges on the north and south sides of Al Nasiriyah.

Already, though, something had gone wrong.

“If we don’t take those bridges now, regiment will give away our missions.” The battalion commander’s voice over the combat network was clear, and distinct. “So, we are going to run the gauntlet. Alpha, you take the southern bridge. Charlie, you take the northern bridge.”

Reid and Pokorney spoke privately, acknowledging their fears to each other, but not their troops. Pokorney, though, had no doubt about what the orders meant

“We’re dead,” he told Ben Reid.

Tanks, which were supposed to provide them armored support, had just been called away on a rescue mission, and still Charlie Company was being ordered to go straight up “ambush alley,” a main thoroughfare in the center of Al Nasiriyah. Commanders had decided there was no time to wait for the return of the tanks. Al Nasiriyah needed to be controlled by the Americans, and neither Pentagon planners nor the White House was exhibiting much patience for a more calculated approach to battle. There was tremendous political pressure to prove that a small invasion force had the strength to move quickly and decisively onto Baghdad.

The stretch of road in front of Charlie Company was known to be occupied by Iraqi irregulars, and Saddam Hussein’s Fedayeen fighters, who had set up firing positions, and were hiding in buildings, waiting to attack. This information was the reason leadership had chosen a strategy of skirting the city, after taking the southern bridge over the Euphrates. Alpha and Charlie companies were then expected to close on the two northern bridges across the Saddam Canal.

A few hours earlier, Ben Reid and Fred Pokorney had gotten their first look at combat. Charlie Company, positioned at the rear of a column advancing up the main supply route, had moved northward as part of the 2^nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade at 3:00 a.m. Around first light, the two young men saw Iraqis firing at the approaching Marines.

“From what I remember,” Reid said. “First contact with the enemy was a few mortar rounds the Iraqis were shooting at us from the rooftop of a building. The front of the column also came into contact with machine guns, and I remember the anxiousness of the Marines in contact to employ their weapons systems.”

As he listened on the radio, Reid gathered information on enemy positions, unfolded his map, and marked Iraqi and friendly positions with blue and red dots. Information off the combat network radio led him to believe the Marines out front were doing a good job of hitting their targets. Reid was encouraged. In the middle of the night on the Iraqi desert, while his platoon was preparing to move out, Ben Reid had spoken with several soldiers in a huge convoy moving through his own company’s lines. He was surprised to learn that none of the personnel, junior officers, or senior staff non-commissioned officers had any maps of the area in which they were being deployed. Reid was pleased that he and Pokorney seemed to be more prepared for the coming challenges.

The morning of March 23^rd was already expected to be significant in the military career of Fred Pokorney. Not only was he getting his first combat experience, the 6’7” Marine was scheduled for promotion to 1^st Lieutenant. Ben Reid had told his friend to plan on a brief ceremony acknowledging Pokorney’s rise in rank, after they had accomplished their mission of taking the northernmost bridge over the canal.

Pokorney and Reid had become friends on the long ocean voyage from the U.S. to Kuwait. The two had shared a state room on the ship with several other junior officers. Pokorney was with Bravo Company, and had been attached to Charlie Company to serve as an artillery forward observer in an infantry rifle company. Standard Marine procedures, these types of rotations are designed to give officers experience in a number of different military disciplines. Pokorney, however, might have remained with his artillery unit, and been relatively safe in the rear.

But he asked for a change of orders.

His wife, Chelle Pokorney, did not learn of her husband’s plans until he was preparing to leave for the Persian Gulf.

“After September 11^th, Fred was very eager, and willing to do something about what had happened to our country,” she said. “But he didn’t tell me he was going over with the infantry until the last minute. He was in the infantry before he became an officer, and joined the artillery.”

If the Marine Corps’ advertising agency had ever stumbled across Fred Pokorney, Jr., they might have used him as the new, national poster board Marine. Pokorney’s dark eyes conveyed the kind of determination Marines have used to accomplish history’s most difficult military goals. A photo during his days as an enlisted Marine showed him kneeling in the front of three officers, and holding the company banner on a guidon.

Discipline was not what Fred Pokorney was looking for in the Marines. He already had that characteristic. Born with a hardened will, no one had ever heard him indulge in remorse or self-pity. Things were just what they were, he believed; you learned how to deal with circumstance, not make excuses, and if you were man enough, you excelled. Nonetheless, Pokorney was probably hoping the Marines might become his family. As a child, his existence was disrupted by the divorce of his parents, and the nomadic nature of his father’s work. Fred Pokorney wanted a permanent home.

After a promising basketball career was ended by an injury during his freshman year in college, Pokorney went to work in the silver mines of Tonopah, Nevada, where he had attended high school. In a few years, he enlisted in the Marines; his focused self-discipline, and rigorous attention to detail brought him a quick promotion to sergeant. In Pokorney, Marine commanders knew they had a natural, and they offered to pay for his college education, which, ultimately, qualified him to become a commissioned officer after attending Officer Candidate School (OCS.)

Wade Lieseke, a decorated Vietnam veteran who became Pokorney’s adopted father, was worried about his son joining the Marines.

“I remember when Fred said he was gonna be an artillery officer, I was thinking, ‘Oh God, at least he’ll be safe.’ The artillery is in the rear. It never occurred to me they’d have an artillery forward observer. In my day, airplanes did that.

“But he wanted to be a Marine,” Lieseke said. “He said they were the best and he wanted to be part of the best.”

Before the Marines sent him off for an education at Oregon State University, Fred Pokorney was stationed at the Bangor Marine Barracks in Washington State, a submarine base. He met Carolyn Rochelle Schulgen, a nursing student, and they married. Around the time he earned his degree in history and political science, the Pokorneys learned they were going to be parents. After Chelle pinned his officer’s bars onto his shoulder at a commissioning ceremony, the young family, Fred, Chelle, and Taylor, went east to the Fleet Marine Force at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. He spent more than a year in OCS and artillery training. Upon completion of those courses, Fred Pokorney became a “Mustang,” an enlisted Marine who had earned the rank of officer. He had finally achieved the stability that had been missing from his childhood; the honor and pride of the Marines fortified his already strong personal character. The Marines were his family, and his devotion to the corps took him away from Chelle and Taylor.

During the two hundred kilometer roll from northern Kuwait to the Jalibah Airfield south of Al Nasiriyah, where the Marines were to encamp, Pokorney frequently brought up the subject of his wife and daughter to Lt. Ben Reid. Inside the amphibious assault vehicle, as the tracks ground against the desert sand and the rank smell of diesel filled their lungs, Fred Pokorney was sharing pictures of his girls playing in the snow back in the Carolinas.

“Here we are, advancing on the enemy, and he’s showing us all pictures of Chelle and Taylor,” Reid said. “He was so proud of them and loved them so much. Fred was, I mean, Fred was a great husband, and the most honorable guy you could ever meet. He had good, strong values. This was the kind of guy you would want your own daughter to meet and marry.”

He was also the kind of Marine that Reid wanted in his unit as they approached enemy fire. Up ahead, the tanks from Marine Task Force Tarawa had been sent forward to rescue soldiers from the 507^th Mechanized Company, a maintenance and technical support group from Fort Bliss, Texas, which had lost direction, and had fallen victim to an Iraqi ambush. Lacking adequate communications, and their automatic weapons jammed by desert sand, the mechanics were pinned down by withering Iraqi fire until the Marines pulled them out for evacuation to the rear. A series of wrong turns had led the 507^th to disaster.

On the combat radio network, Reid heard a voice claiming that the 507^th was attacked by Iraqi soldiers faking surrender. The description of events indicated the Iraqis had been waving white flags to lure the Americans into a position where they were easy targets for machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Although there is no evidence, or narrative testimony to prove the deception actually occurred, the information was repeated by battalion communications headquarters, picked up by embedded journalists, and dispatched to the United States as fact. Before the day of March 23^rd had concluded, the story was also used to explain what had happened to the fifty four man platoon commanded by Lt. Ben Reid. But nothing of the sort ever happened to either the 507^th or the Marine companies. Neither the Army nor the Marines offered any understanding of where the story originated, or why it was never clarified.

“I still don’t know where that came from,” Reid said. “It was just on the comms net, and the reporters started broadcasting it. A lot of stuff that’s been in the media, about what happened to us and the 507^th, is wrong. It needs to be cleared up.”

As Reid and Pokorney’s unit edged up the road with their company just south of Al Nasiryah and the Euphrates River Bridge, they saw Cobra helicopters, and F-18 Hornets making passes near the city. The helicopters fired at a tree line, and red smoke from the trail of their Zuni rockets floated across the sky. Reid, the fire support team leader, wanted to know who or what was being engaged by the aircraft, and radioed battalion for information. The positions of the targets might be valuable when he began to coordinate his own combat fire. Although he reached commanders on the combat network, Reid got no answers. Just short of the bridge over the Euphrates River, Charlie Company came upon burning T-55 Russian tanks. A few, unmanned, also appeared untouched. Several vehicles belonging to the Army’s 507^th Mechanized were in flames. A ball of fire consumed a large, armored truck used for logistical support.

Alpha Company, which had taken the Euphrates Bridge, had set up in a herringbone position to protect their location, and as Reid and Pokorney’s Marines moved through their ranks to cross the river, sporadic small arms fire was audible on the edge of the Iraqi city. Original orders for Charlie Company were to follow Bravo Company to the east, and avoid “ambush alley.” Unfortunately, visual contact with Bravo had been lost, and simple radio communications failed.

“I hate to say this, sir,” Ben Reid explained. “But you gotta remember, our radios were built by the lowest bidder. We had all kinds of problems with our combat comms network. And once all these different companies started taking fire, there was an unbelievable number of people trying to talk on that one combat net. Anything you wanted to say kept getting stepped on by other people jumping on the air.”

As a result, Reid’s company commander had no idea what had happened to Bravo after it had crossed the Euphrates. If Bravo was stuck in the mud off to the east, Charlie was certain to jeopardize the mission of securing the northern bridges by taking the same route. Everyone might end up bogged down, immobilized, and exposed to Iraqi attack. Reid was told by his commander that it was likely Bravo had made a run up “ambush alley” to get to their objective of the first canal bridge. But he didn’t really know what maneuver had been executed by Bravo. Immediately, Reid knew what that meant, and when new orders from battalion command passed over the net confirming his fears, Charlie Company began moving into the city of Al Nasiriyah, making a direct course up “ambush alley.”

Very quickly, Reid and Pokorney’s men encountered small arms fire. Their ten amphibious assault vehicles, (referred to by Marines as amtracks, or tracks,) and two Humvees, were armed with .50 caliber machine guns and nineteen 40 millimeter grenade launchers. Returning fire, the convoy hurried through the crude urban reaches of Al Nasiriyah. Bullets pinged off the side of the Americans’ tracked vehicles, and enemy fire dramatically intensified the further north they traveled into the city. While the Marines configured their armor in a combat-oriented position, on their right, to the east, they saw modest, low structures, mud huts uncommon in more developed cities. The other side of the road was lined with office buildings, and architecture slightly more peculiar to the commerce of a mid-sized city, though few structures rose to more than four or five stories in height. Iraqi gunners had set up fields of fire from hidden posts inside of mud huts, and the more modern, small office structures.

Ramp doors at the rear of some of the tracks were partially open. Lt. Fred Pokorney, and the mortar men, who would not be active until the convoy stopped, were using their M-16s to return Iraqi fire. Pokorney called out that a track, just to the rear of the one in which he and Reid were traveling, was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, and caught fire. Four Marines were wounded. But the platoon kept pushing up through Al Nasiriyah. Exposed through the open door, Pokorney was suddenly hit in the right arm by a bullet, and fell to the floor.

“Hey, I’m hit,” he yelled to Reid over the intercom. “Hurts like hell. I’m fine. I’m fine. I was just nicked. I’ll be all right. Don’t worry about it.”

Still under attack from RPGs and small arms weaponry, Reid’s platoon crossed the two northern bridges over the canal. In the center of the road, 200 meters north, a track was burning. Reid’s own track #C-208 stopped between the bridge and the burning vehicle. The remaining vehicles in his platoon quickly configured into a combat position on either of the road. As Reid hastily jumped down, he saw dusty agricultural fields and drained swampland spread beyond the canal and the raised roadbed. Iraqis were directing machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades at his platoon from a few nearby buildings.

Reid and Pokorney, like the men serving at their side, had little intelligence about the military strength of their enemy. Political pressure from the White House had led commanders of the U.S. invasion of Iraq to portray an excessively optimistic and expeditious campaign. Briefings in advance of the attack on Al Nasiriyah indicated the operation to secure the bridges, and control the city, was expected to take about six hours. Instead, fighting went on for eight days before the Marines were able to take complete control. Intelligence was supposedly unclear on Iraqi troop numbers in the region, and whether the soldiers were Saddam Hussein’s Fedayeen fighters, Republican Guard, or Iraqi irregulars and citizens, who often acted as observers or carried bombs.

Foreign intelligence sources later reported the Americans were battling an estimated 40,000 troops of the Iraqi 3rd Army Corps. Armaments deployed against U.S. soldiers, most of them oblivious to what they were confronting, included 250 tanks, approximately 100 mortars and 100 artillery, as well as 1000 rocket propelled grenade launchers and anti-tank guided missiles. In terms of sheer troop strength, the Iraqis doubled the number of American soldiers approaching from the south in the U.S. 3^rd Motorized Infantry Division, though the U.S. offensive was supported by considerably more armor; 200 tanks, 150 artillery pieces, and 600 armored vehicles. By doctrine, U.S. military planners always try to have a three to one force ratio against an enemy. In this case, the Americans were simply outnumbered.

Grabbing the maps he had marked, and his flak jacket and helmet, Reid threw them to the ground as he jumped. The ramp at the back of the track was still up and he banged loudly to order his men out of the vehicle to take cover below the roadbed, along the canal. Reid began linking up his mortars to return fire on enemy locations. Using the guns on the tracks first, he got one of them to focus on a huge building near the T-intersection on the east side of the road. The two other weapons mounted on the track were pointed back to the southwest in the direction of Al Nasiriyah, where Reid assumed most of the heaviest fire was originating. Over the noise of explosions, he shouted at his Marines to pick up the pace of their fire. The mortars began to hit the targets Reid had selected. But there was trouble with the fire support team on the track.

Radio communications were not working.

“We’ve got no comm. on arty conduct of fire or our 81s,” Pokorney told Reid.

“Okay,” Reid answered. “Let’s forget those nets. Take a look at this map.” Lt. Reid pointed at spots he had marked. “We need suppression or duration suppression on these positions. See if you can pass them over the battalion net.”

“Got it,” Pokorney answered.

“I’m going to fight our 60s,” Reid said, as he left the safety of the track. “They’re all we’ve got right now.”

Outside, Reid moved along the road, trying to find targets. One of the Marines in his platoon pointed out a group of vehicles, and Reid ordered all the guns on the tracks to try to take them out of the fight. Directed fire from the Americans did not appear to reduce the intensity of the Iraqi attack.

Staff Sergeant Phil Jordan ran up the road to talk to Reid.

“Sir, Torres has been hit,” Jordan said.

There was no way Reid might have prepared himself for such news. His first time in combat, the young lieutenant was stunned by word that one of his men was down. Briefly, Reid admitted, he lost his focus. Jordan, who must have seen the shock on his commander’s face, offered reassurance as RPG explosions, and rounds from small arms filled the air.

“Don’t worry, sir,” Jordan said. “I’ve already killed two or three Iraqis, so we’re even.”

“Okay, Staff Sergeant,” Reid answered, regaining his composure. “I need you to run and get the fifty cals focusing their rounds back into the city. Have them fight the close fight. I’ll get the mortars to take on targets 2000 meters and beyond.”

As Jordan ran off to find machine gunners, one of Reid’s forward observers was coming down the road with the radio. Another platoon had called asking for fire support because they were taking incoming from Iraqi mortars. On the radio, Reid said he had all of his weapons in the fight, and he was doing everything possible. Seconds after the Marine had left with the radio, Reid found himself on his back, looking up at small arms rounds cutting through the air.

“Get the fuck down,” Fred Pokorney screamed. “You’re getting us all shot at.”

Reid had been tackled by Pokorney, the Tonopah, Nevada All Star football player. Before leaving to call in the artillery missions, Pokorney had noticed that Reid was standing up, and seemed almost oblivious to the danger he was attracting to himself and the rest of the Marines.

“I was glad Fred told me I was being an idiot,” Reid said. “He probably saved my head from getting blown off. “

Only seconds after Pokorney had rolled off of Reid, Phil Jordan returned to ask his commander how they might be able to improve their combat posture. The two Marines agreed their mortars needed to be more widely dispersed.

“Espinoza, come up here and take my place spotting,” Reid yelled. “I’m going to take Garibay’s gun south.”

Reid ordered Corporal Jose A. Garibay’s mortar crew to follow him down toward the canal, a spot about sixty meters south of their present location, but still north of the bridge. Staff Sergeant Phil Jordan followed with two cans of ammo. As they ran, Reid failed to notice their positions were being bracketed by Iraqi RPG gunners. One round landed long. The next fell short. The subsequent explosion was long, but closer to the Americans. The Iraqis were walking their shots onto target by adjusting off of each previous explosion.

As Reid and his men set up the mortar, they realized they did not bring a wiz wheel, which was needed for calibrating the range of their targets. A Marine ran back to grab the device while Reid put in the aiming stake. His men, however, were unsure of shooting without precise calculations from the wiz wheel. Reid told the mortar crew to estimate an elevation based upon previous missions fired. The lieutenant grabbed a round, and dropped it in to sink the base plate. Down range, they spotted the location of the explosion, and Reid dropped two more rounds into the tube to make corrections on the targets based on where the previous rounds had landed.

“I guess that was kind of stupid,” Reid said later. “I had no idea really where those rounds were going to land. But I wanted to get a round out there quickly, and adjust off of it. Besides, I didn’t want to just sit there, and do nothing, while we were under fire, other than wait for a wiz wheel.”

When the Marine returned with the wiz wheel for the mortar, he was trailed by Fred Pokorney. Most of the gun crew was provided protection in a partial defilade around the mortar. Reid was up near the aiming stake, spotting the mortar rounds. Iraqi RPG explosions were coming closer, each concussion registering more powerfully on the Marines’ eardrums.

“I got those nine arty missions passed over the battalion net,” Pokorney yelled to Reid.

“Are they the positions I gave you?”

“Yeah.”

A few seconds after Pokorney had spoken, an explosion knocked Ben Reid back onto the road. The force of the blast was felt in his arm, which Reid thought had been blown off. When he saw the arm still hanging at his side, Reid assumed it had been broken by the explosion. The lieutenant lay in the road waiting for the ringing in his ears to cease.

The first words he heard were devastating.

“Sir, Buessing is dead.”

Ben Reid, the young Annapolis graduate, in his first combat command, had suffered an initial death among his men. Turning, Lt. Reid saw Lance Corporal Brian R. Buessing, and recognized from the wounds that his Marine had been killed instantly. Buessing died serving in the same Charlie Company mortar squad in which his grandfather had won a Silver Star during the Korean War.

Reid was uncertain of what to do next, both fear and responsibility for the rest of his men racing through his head. Two other bodies lay not far from where Buessing had fallen. Reid ran to the nearest and rolled the Marine over to see who it was. Staff Sergeant Phil Jordan was also dead. The other man down was 2^nd Lt. Fred Pokorney, his hulking frame lay twisted near where the round had exploded. Reid assumed Pokorney had also been killed.

“I didn’t go check on Fred,” Reid said. “I just assumed from the way he was laying, he was dead. I know he wasn’t moving. But I couldn’t see any physical injuries. I know he was at least injured by that round. I just made an assumption about Fred. Maybe it was a bad assumption.”

In a moment of doubt, Reid worried that his men had been hit by his own improperly calibrated mortar rounds. On the road, the men were slightly down range from the mortar positions, though they were considerably offline from the guns’ directions. Reid also feared that he had given Pokorney the wrong coordinates of Iraqi targets to radio into artillery operations.

“I don’t think that was it, though,” Reid explained. “If an artillery round had landed there, it would have killed all of us. And I know I wasn’t off by five kilometers on the coordinates. There’s no way I could have missed by that far.”

What Reid described as a “magic round” had also wounded three of this other men, including Coporal Garibay, Corporal Jorge A. Gonzalez, and Private First Class Tamario D. Burkett. Uncertain of the extent of injuries to his troops, Reid ordered Garibay to keep everyone in place until he returned with medical assistance. RPG rounds were consistently exploding closer and closer to Reid’s platoon. Crouching down, he turned and ran in the direction of his track.

In the low sky to the north, an American A-10 Thunderbolt jet, known as the “Warthog,” and the “tank killer,” made a turn and lined up for a gun run down the raised canal road where Reid’s men had fallen.