was planning to deny access to our troops for use in the invasion and that talks were under way to make sure they wouldn’t. We’d long ago learned to listen to rumors with a grain of salt, but this time the rumors were accurate, and my squad and others were sent to Kuwait to start all over.
We landed in midafternoon under a cloudless sky and found ourselves surrounded by sand on every side. Almost immediately we were loaded on a bus, drove for hours, and ended up in what was essentially the largest tent city I’d ever seen. The army did its best to make it comfortable. The food was good and the PX had everything you might need, but it was boring. Mail delivery was poor—I received no letters at all—and the lines for the phone were always a mile long. In between drills, my men and I either sat around trying to guess when the invasion would start or practiced getting into our chemical suits as quickly as we could. The plan was for my squad to augment other units from different divisions on a hard push to Baghdad. By February, after what already felt like a zillion years in the desert, my squad and I were as ready as we’d ever be.
At that point, a lot of soldiers had been in Kuwait since mid-November, and the rumor mill was in full swing. No one knew what was coming. I heard about biological and chemical weapons; I heard that Saddam had learned his lesson in Desert Storm and was retrenching the Republican Guard around Baghdad, in the hope of making a bloody last stand. On March 17, I knew there would be war. On my last night in Kuwait, I wrote letters to those I loved, in case I didn’t make it: one to my father and one to Savannah. That evening, I found myself part of a convoy that stretched a hundred miles into Iraq.
Fighting was sporadic, at least initially. Because our air force dominated the skies, we had little to fear overhead as we rolled up mainly deserted highways. The Iraqi army, for the most part, was nowhere to be seen, which only increased the tension I felt as I tried to anticipate what my squad would face later in the campaign. Here and there, we’d get word of enemy mortar fire, and we’d scramble into our suits, only to learn it was a false alarm. Soldiers were tense. I didn’t sleep for three days.
Deeper in Iraq, skirmishes began to break out, and it was then I learned the first law associated with Operation Iraqi Freedom: Civilians and enemies often looked exactly alike. Shots would ring out, we’d attack, and there were times we weren’t even sure who we were shooting at. As we reached the Sunni Triangle, the war began to intensify. We heard about battles in Fallujah, Ramadi, and Tikrit, all being fought by other units in other divisions. My squad joined the Eighty-second Airborne in an assault on Samawah, and it was there that my squad and I had our first taste of real combat.
The air force had paved the way. Bombs, missiles, and mortars had been exploding since the day before, and as we crossed the bridge into the city, my first thought was amazement at the stillness. My squad was assigned to an outlying neighborhood, where we were to move from house to house to help clear the area of the enemy. As we moved, images came quickly: the charred remains of a truck, the driver’s lifeless body beside it; a partially demolished building; ruins of cars smoking here and there. Sporadic rifle fire kept us on edge. As we patrolled, civilians occasionally rushed out with their arms up, and we tried our best to save the wounded.
By early afternoon, we were getting ready to head back, but we were assaulted by heavy fire coming from a building up the street. Pinned against a wall, we were in a precarious position. Two men covered while I led the rest of my squad through the shooting gallery to a safer spot on the other side of the street; it struck me as almost miraculous that no one was killed. From there, we sank a thousand rounds into the enemy’s position, laying absolute waste to it. When I thought it was safe, we began our approach to the building, moving cautiously. I used a grenade to blast open the front door. I led