US Marines turn fire on civilians at the bridge of death

national | miscellaneous | news report Monday March 31, 2003 17:23 by Joe

From the Sunday Times which requires registration which is why I'm posting it in full here.

March 30 2003

US Marines turn fire on civilians at the bridge of death

Mark Franchetti, Nasiriya

THE light was a strange yellowy grey and the wind was coming up, the
beginnings of a sandstorm. The silence felt almost eerie after a night of
shooting so intense it hurt the eardrums and shattered the nerves. My
footsteps felt heavy on the hot, dusty asphalt as I walked slowly towards
the bridge at Nasiriya. A horrific scene lay ahead.

Some 15 vehicles, including a minivan and a couple of trucks, blocked the
road. They were riddled with bullet holes. Some had caught fire and turned
into piles of black twisted metal. Others were still burning.

Amid the wreckage I counted 12 dead civilians, lying in the road or in
nearby ditches. All had been trying to leave this southern town overnight,
probably for fear of being killed by US helicopter attacks and heavy
artillery. Their mistake had been to flee over a bridge that is crucial to
the coalition's supply lines and to run into a group of shell-shocked young
American marines with orders to shoot anything that moved. One man's body
was still in flames. It gave out a hissing sound. Tucked away in his breast
pocket, thick wads of banknotes were turning to ashes. His savings, perhaps.

Down the road, a little girl, no older than five and dressed in a pretty
orange and gold dress, lay dead in a ditch next to the body of a man who
may have been her father. Half his head was missing. Nearby, in a battered
old Volga, peppered with ammunition holes, an Iraqi woman - perhaps the
girl's mother - was dead, slumped in the back seat. A US Abrams tank
nicknamed Ghetto Fabulous drove past the bodies.

This was not the only family who had taken what they thought was a last
chance for safety. A father, baby girl and boy lay in a shallow grave. On
the bridge itself a dead Iraqi civilian lay next to the carcass of a
donkey. As I walked away, Lieutenant Matt Martin, whose third child,
Isabella, was born while he was on board ship en route to the Gulf,
appeared beside me. "Did you see all that?" he asked, his eyes filled with
tears. "Did you see that little baby girl? I carried her body and buried it
as best I could but I had no time. It really gets to me to see children
being killed like this, but we had no choice." Martin's distress was in
contrast to the bitter satisfaction of some of his fellow marines as they
surveyed the scene. "The Iraqis are sick people and we are the
chemotherapy," said Corporal Ryan Dupre. "I am starting to hate this
country. Wait till I get hold of a friggin' Iraqi. No, I won't get hold of
one. I'll just kill him."

Only a few days earlier these had still been the bright-eyed small-town
boys with whom I crossed the border at the start of the operation. They had
rolled towards Nasiriya, a strategic city beside the Euphrates, on a
mission to secure a safe supply route for troops on the way to Baghdad.
They had expected a welcome, or at least a swift surrender. Instead they
had found themselves lured into a bloody battle, culminating in the worst
coalition losses of the war - 16 dead, 12 wounded and two missing marines
as well as five dead and 12 missing servicemen from an army convoy - and
the humiliation of having prisoners paraded on Iraqi television.

There are three key bridges at Nasiriya. The feat of Martin, Dupre and
their fellow marines in securing them under heavy fire was compared by
armchair strategists last week to the seizure of the Remagen bridge over
the Rhine, which significantly advanced victory over Germany in the second
world war.

But it was also the turning point when the jovial band of brothers from
America lost all their assumptions about the war and became jittery
aggressors who talked of wanting to "nuke" the place. None of this was
foreseen at Camp Shoup, one of the marines' tent encampments in northern
Kuwait, where officers from the 1st and 2nd battalions of Task Force
Tarawa, the 7,000-strong US Marines brigade, spent long evenings poring
over maps and satellite imagery before the invasion. The plan seemed
straightforward. The marines would speed unhindered over the 130 miles of
desert up from the Kuwaiti border and approach Nasiriya from the southeast
to secure a bridge over the Euphrates. They would then drive north through
the outskirts of Nasiriya to a second bridge, over the Inahr al-Furbati
canal. Finally, they would turn west and secure the third bridge, also over
the canal. The marines would not enter the city proper, let alone attempt
to take it.

The coalition could then start moving thousands of troops and logistical
support units up highway 7, leading to Baghdad, 225 miles to the north.
There was only one concern: "ambush alley", the road connecting the first
two bridges. But intelligence suggested there would be little or no
fighting as this eastern side of the city was mostly "pro-American".

I was with Alpha company. We reached the outskirts of Nasiriya at about
breakfast time last Sunday. Some marines were disappointed to be carrying
out a mission that seemed a sideshow to the main effort. But in an ominous
sign of things to come, our battalion stopped in its tracks, three miles
outside the city. Bad news filtered back. Earlier that morning a US Army
convoy had been greeted by a group of Iraqis dressed in civilian clothes,
apparently wanting to surrender. When the American soldiers stopped, the
Iraqis pulled out AK-47s and sprayed the US trucks with gunfire.

Five wounded soldiers were rescued by our convoy, including one who had
been shot four times. The attackers were believed to be members of the
Fedayeen Saddam, a group of 15,000 fighters under the command of Saddam's
psychopathic son Uday. Blown-up tyres, a pool of blood, spent ammunition
and shards of glass from the bulletridden windscreen marked the spot where
the ambush had taken place. Swiftly, our AAVs (23-ton amphibious assault
vehicles) took up defensive positions. About 100 marines jumped out of
their vehicles and took cover in ditches, pointing their sights at a
mud-caked house. Was it harbouring gunmen? Small groups of marines
approached, cautiously, to search for the enemy. A dozen terrified
civilians, mainly women and children, emerged with their hands raised.
"It's just a bunch of Hajis," said one gunner from his turret, using their
nickname for Arabs. "Friggin' women and children, that's all."

Cobras and Huey attack helicopters began firing missiles at targets on the
edge of the city. Plumes of smoke rose as heavy artillery shook the ground
under our feet. Heavy machinegun fire echoed across the huge rubbish dump
that marks the entrance to Nasiriya. Suddenly there was return fire from
three large oil tanks at a refinery. The Cobras were called back, and
within seconds they roared above our heads, firing off missiles in clouds
of purple tracer fire. There were several loud explosions. Flames burst
high into the sky from one of the oil tanks. The marines believed that what
opposition there was had now been crushed. "We are going in, we are going
in," shouted one of the officers.

More than 20 AAVs, several tanks and about 10 Hummers equipped with
roof-mounted, anti-tank missile launchers prepared to move in. Crammed
inside them were some 400 marines. Tension rose as they loaded their guns
and stuck their heads over the side of the AAVs through the open roof,
their M-16 pointed in all directions. As we set off towards the eastern
city gate there was no sense of the mayhem awaiting us down the road. A few
locals dressed in rags watched the awesome spectacle of America's war
machine on the move. Nobody waved.

Slowly we approached the first bridge. Fires were raging on either side of
the road; Cobras had destroyed an Iraqi military truck and a T55 tank
positioned inside a dugout. Powerful explosions came from inside the bowels
of the tank as its ammunition and heavy shells were set off by the fire.
With each explosion a thick and perfect ring of black smoke ring puffed out
of the turret. An Iraqi defence post lay abandoned. Cobras flew over an
oasis of palm trees and deserted brick and mud-caked houses. We charged
onto the bridge, and as we crossed the Euphrates, a large mural of Saddam
came into view. Some marines reached for their disposable cameras.

Suddenly, as we approached ambush alley on the far side of the bridge, the
crackle of AK-47s broke out. Our AAVs began to zigzag to avoid being hit by
a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). The road widened out to a square, with a
mosque and the portrait of Saddam on the left-hand side. The vehicles
wheeled round, took up a defensive position, back to back, and began taking
fire. Pinned down, the marines fired back with 40mm automatic grenade
launchers, a weapon so powerful it can go through thick brick walls and
kill anyone within a 5-yard range of where the shell lands.

I was in AAV number A304, affectionately nicknamed the Desert Caddy. It
shook as Keith Bernize, the gunner, fired off round after deafening round
at sandbag positions shielding suspected Fedayeen fighters. His steel
ammunition box clanged with the sound of smoking empty shells and
cartridges. Bernize, who always carries a scan picture of his unborn baby
daughter with him, shot at the targets from behind a turret, peering
through narrow slits of reinforced glass. He shouted at his men to feed him
more ammunition. Four marines, standing at the AAV's four corners,
precariously perched on ammunition boxes, fired off their M-16s. Their
faces covered in sweat, officers shouted commands into field radios, giving
co-ordinates of enemy positions. Some 200 marines, fully exposed to enemy
fire and slowed down by their heavy weapons, bulky ammunition packs and NBC
suits, ran across the road, taking shelter behind a long brick wall and
mounds of earth. A team of snipers appeared, yards from our vehicle.

The exchange of fire was relentless. We were pinned down for more than
three hours as Iraqis hiding inside houses and a hospital and behind street
corners fired a barrage of ammunition. Despite the marines' overwhelming
firepower, hitting the Iraqis was not easy. The gunmen were not wearing
uniforms and had planned their ambush well - stockpiling weapons in dozens
of houses, between which they moved freely pretending to be civilians.
"It's a bad situation," said First Sergeant James Thompson, who was running
around with a 9mm pistol in his hand. "We don't know who is shooting at us.
They are even using women as scouts. The women come out waving at us, or
with their hands raised. We freeze, but the next minute we can see how she
is looking at our positions and giving them away to the fighters hiding
behind a street corner. It's very difficult to distinguish between the
fighters and civilians."

Across the square, genuine civilians were running for their lives. Many,
including some children, were gunned down in the crossfire. In a surreal
scene, a father and mother stood out on a balcony with their children in
their arms to give them a better view of the battle raging below. A few
minutes later several US mortar shells landed in front of their house. In
all probability, the family is dead.

The fighting intensified. An Iraqi fighter emerged from behind a wall of
sandbags 500 yards away from our vehicle. Several times he managed to fire
off an RPG at our positions. Bernize and other gunners fired dozens of
rounds at his dugout, punching large holes into a house and lifting thick
clouds of dust. Captain Mike Brooks, commander of Alpha company, pinned
down in front of the mosque, called in tank support. Armed with only a 9mm
pistol, he jumped out of the back of his AAV with a young marine carrying a
field radio on his back.

Brooks, 34, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, had been in command of 200 men
for just over a year. He joined the marines when he was 19 because he felt
that he was wasting his life. He needed direction, was a bit of a rebel and
was impressed by the sense of pride in the corps. He is a soft-spoken man,
fair but very firm. Brave too: I watched him sprint in front of enemy
positions to brief some of his junior officers behind a wall. Behind us,
two 68-ton Abrams tanks rolled up, crushing the barrier separating the
lanes on the highway. The earth shook violently as one tank, Desert Knight,
stopped in front of our row of AAVS and fired several 120mm shells into
buildings. A few hundred yards down ambush alley there was carnage. An AAV
from Charlie company was racing back towards the bridge to evacuate some
wounded marines when it was hit by two RPGs. The heavy vehicle shook but
withstood the explosions.

Then the Iraqis fired again. This time the rocket plunged into the vehicle
through the open rooftop. The explosion was deadly, made 10 times more
powerful by the ammunition stored in the back. The wreckage smouldered in
the middle of the road. I jumped out from the rear hatch of our vehicle,
briefly taking cover behind a wall. When I reached the stricken AAV, the
scene was mayhem. The heavy, thick rear ramp had been blown open. There
were pools of blood and bits of flesh everywhere. A severed leg, still
wearing a desert boot, lay on what was left of the ramp among playing
cards, a magazine, cans of Coke and a small bloodstained teddy bear.

"They are f****** dead, they are dead. Oh my God. Get in there. Get in
there now and pull them out," shouted a gunner in a state verging on
hysterical. There was panic and confusion as a group of young marines,
shouting and cursing orders at one another, pulled out a maimed body. Two
men struggled to lift the body on a stretcher and into the back of a
Hummer, but it would not fit inside, so the stretcher remained almost
upright, the dead man's leg, partly blown away, dangling in the air.

"We shouldn't be here," said Lieutenant Campbell Kane, 25, who was born in
Northern Ireland. "We can't hold this. They are trying to suck us into the
city and we haven't got enough ass up here to sustain this. We need more
tanks, more helicopters." Closer to the destroyed AAV, another young marine
was transfixed with fear and kept repeating: "Oh my God, I can't believe
this. Did you see his leg? It was blown off. It was blown off."

Two CH-46 helicopters, nicknamed Frogs, landed a few hundred yards away in
the middle of a firefight to take away the dead and wounded. If at first
the marines felt constrained by orders to protect civilians, by now the
battle had become so intense that there was little time for niceties. Cobra
helicopters were ordered to fire at a row of houses closest to our
positions. There were massive explosions but the return fire barely died
down. Behind us, as many as four AAVs that had driven down along the banks
of the Euphrates were stuck in deep mud and coming under fire.

About 1pm, after three hours of intense fighting, the order was given to
regroup and try to head out of the city in convoy. Several marines who had
lost their vehicles piled into the back of ours. We raced along ambush
alley at full speed, close to a line of houses. "My driver got hit," said
one of the marines who joined us, his face and uniform caked in mud. "I
went to try to help him when he got hit by another RPG or a mortar. I don't
even know how many friends I have lost. I don't care if they nuke that
bloody city now. From one house they were waving while shooting at us with
AKs from the next. It was insane."

There was relief when we finally crossed the second bridge to the northeast
of the city in mid-afternoon. But there was more horror to come. Beside the
smouldering wreckage of another AAV were the bodies of another four
marines, laid out in the mud and covered with camouflage ponchos. There
were body parts everywhere. One of the dead was Second Lieutenant Fred
Pokorney, 31, a marine artillery officer from Washington state. He was a
big guy, whose ill-fitting uniform was the butt of many jokes. It was
supposed to have been a special day for Pokorney. After 13 years of
service, he was to be promoted to first lieutenant. The men of Charlie
company had agreed they would all shake hands with him to celebrate as soon
as they crossed the second bridge, their mission accomplished. It didn't
happen. Pokorney made it over the second bridge and a few hundred yards
down a highway through dusty flatlands before his vehicle was ambushed.
Pokorney and his men had no chance. Fully loaded with ammunition, their
truck exploded in the middle of the road, its remains burning for hours.
Pokorney was hit in the chest by an RPG. Another man who died was
Fitzgerald Jordan, a staff sergeant from Texas. I felt numb when I heard
this. I had met Jordan 10 days before we moved into Nasiriya. He was a
character, always chewing tobacco and coming up to pat you on the back. He
got me to fetch newspapers for him from Kuwait City. Later, we shared a
bumpy ride across the desert in the back of a Humvee.

A decorated Gulf war veteran, he used to complain about having to come back
to Iraq. "We should have gone all the way to Baghdad 12 years ago when we
were here and had a real chance of removing Saddam." Now Pokorney, Jordan
and their comrades lay among unspeakable carnage. An older marine walked by
carrying a huge chunk of flesh, so maimed it was impossible to tell which
body part it was. With tears in his eyes and blood splattered over his flak
jacket, he held the remains of his friend in his arms until someone gave
him a poncho to wrap them with.

Frantic medics did what they could to relieve horrific injuries, until four
helicopters landed in the middle of the highway to take the injured to a
military hospital. Each wounded marine had a tag describing his injury. One
had gunshot wounds to the face, another to the chest. Another simply lay on
his side in the sand with a tag reading: "Urgent - surgery, buttock."

One young marine was assigned the job of keeping the flies at bay. Some of
his comrades, exhausted, covered in blood, dirt and sweat walked around
dazed. There were loud cheers as the sound of the heaviest artillery yet to
pound Nasiriya shook the ground. Before last week the overwhelming majority
of these young men had never been in combat. Few had even seen a dead body.
Now, their faces had changed.

Anger and fear were fuelled by rumours that the bodies of American soldiers
had been dragged through Nasiriya's streets. Some marines cried in the arms
of friends, others sought comfort in the Bible. Next morning, the men of
Alpha company talked about the fighting over MREs (meals ready to eat).
They were jittery now and reacted nervously to any movement around their
dugouts. They suspected that civilian cars, including taxis, had helped
resupply the enemy inside the city. When cars were spotted speeding along
two roads, frantic calls were made over the radio to get permission to
"kill the vehicles". Twenty-four hours earlier it would almost certainly
have been denied: now it was granted. Immediately, the level of force
levelled at civilian vehicles was overwhelming. Tanks were placed on the
road and AAVs lined along one side. Several taxis were destroyed by
helicopter gunships as they drove down the road.

A lorry filled with sacks of wheat made the fatal mistake of driving
through US lines. The order was given to fire. Several AAVs pounded it with
a barrage of machinegun fire, riddling the windscreen with at least 20
holes. The driver was killed instantly. The lorry swerved off the road and
into a ditch. Rumour spread that the driver had been armed and had fired at
the marines. I walked up to the lorry, but could find no trace of a weapon.
This was the start of day that claimed many civilian casualties. After the
lorry a truck came down the road. Again the marines fired. Inside, four men
were killed. They had been travelling with some 10 other civilians, mainly
women and children who were evacuated, crying, their clothes splattered in
blood. Hours later a dog belonging to the dead driver was still by his
side. The marines moved west to take a military barracks and secure their
third objective, the third bridge, which carried a road out of the city. At
the barracks, the marines hung a US flag from a statue of Saddam, but
Lieutenant-Colonel Rick Grabowski, the battalion commander, ordered it
down. He toured barracks. There were stacks of Russian-made ammunition and
hundreds of Iraqi army uniforms, some new, others left behind by fleeing
Iraqi soldiers.

One room had a map of Nasiriya, showing its defences and two large
cardboard arrows indicating the US plan of attack to take the two main
bridges. Above the map were several murals praising Saddam. One, which
sickened the Americans, showed two large civilian planes crashing into tall
buildings. As night fell again there was great tension, the marines fearing
an ambush. Two tanks and three AAVs were placed at the north end of the
third bridge, their guns pointing down towards Nasiriya, and given orders
to shoot at any vehicle that drove towards American positions. Though
civilians on foot passed by safely, the policy was to shoot anything that
moved on wheels. Inevitably, terrified civilians drove at speed to escape:
marines took that speed to be a threat and hit out. During the night, our
teeth on edge, we listened a dozen times as the AVVs' machineguns opened
fire, cutting through cars and trucks like paper.

Next morning I saw the result of this order - the dead civilians, the
little girl in the orange and gold dress. Suddenly, some of the young men
who had crossed into Iraq with me reminded me now of their fathers'
generation, the trigger-happy grunts of Vietnam. Covered in the mud from
the violent storms, they were drained and dangerously aggressive. In the
days afterwards, the marines consolidated their position and put a barrier
of trucks across the bridge to stop anyone from driving across, so there
were no more civilian deaths. They also ruminated on what they had done.
Some rationalised it. "I was shooting down a street when suddenly a woman
came out and casually began to cross the street with a child no older than
10," said Gunnery

Sergeant John Merriman, another Gulf war veteran. "At first I froze on
seeing the civilian woman. She then crossed back again with the child and
went behind a wall. Within less than a minute a guy with an RPG came out
and fired at us from behind the same wall. This happened a second time so I
thought, "Okay, I get it. Let her come out again". She did and this time I
took her out with my M-16." Others were less sanguine.

Mike Brooks was one of the commanders who had given the order to shoot at
civilian vehicles. It weighed on his mind, even though he felt he had no
choice but to do everything to protect his marines from another ambush. On
Friday, making coffee in the dust, he told me he had been writing a diary,
partly for his wife Kelly, a nurse at home in Jacksonville, North Carolina,
with their sons Colin, 6, and four-year-old twins Brian and Evan. When he
came to jotting down the incident about the two babies getting killed by
his men he couldn't do it. But he said he would tell her when he got home.
I offered to let him call his wife on my satellite phone to tell her he was
okay. He turned down the offer and had me write and send her an e-mail
instead. He was too emotional. If she heard his voice, he said, she would
know that something was wrong.