The war started with an odd bit of air turbulence just before dawn. A waffling and whining noise, ironically enough. Hardly remarkable. Anyone who wasn't listening for it might have missed it.
I had just woken up on the Kuwait-Iraq border in a sleeping bag laid out on an armored vehicle's lowered ramp. I looked at my watch. It was 0429 hours on March 20, 2003. George W. Bush's deadline for Saddam Hussein to quit Iraq had passed half an hour earlier.
On the desert floor, our miles-long armored column was parked directly under the air corridor the Tomahawk cruise missiles would travel to Baghdad. Colonel David Perkins, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, had informed us they'd fly 350 feet over our heads. A few minutes later, I heard them.
They were otherworldly, like ghosts in flight. They'd be arriving in Baghdad shortly, lighting up the palace district with dramatic effect for the world to see on CNN. It sounded like 20 of them. When the last one had past, I burrowed back into my sleeping bag to doze a little more before stand-to was called.
We would arrive where those missiles were going in 19 days, after an epic movement through Iraq's western desert and combat along the Euphrates and Tigris, filthy and transformed by our experiences. I was a reporter embedded with A Company of the 4/64 Armor Regiment, 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division. Designated to lead the assault on Saddam's seat of power on April 7,
2003, our armored column attacked Baghdad at dawn. No one expected to see dusk. What we expected was Mogadishu writ large. The Americans would win, that was indisputable. But we, the first in, embarked on it without expectation of survival. We prepared to make a good run of it, stripping soft gear off the outside of the Bradley that might burn if we got hit, loading up on water and ammo. Smitty, the Bradley's 20-year-old radio operator, was bounced to make room for a psyops soldier and the amplifiers that would blast the "surrender" messages. Smitty was angry.
"I don't wanna stay back!" he said.
"Smitty," I said. "We're gonna get f--ing killed. You get to live. Be happy."
"If y'all gonna get killed, I wanna get killed with you," Smitty said.
Captain Wolford, the company commander, told me later that he was praying when he fell asleep and praying when he woke up that morning. "I had never done that before," he said.
I was the only one in the company who had a choice in the matter. But the question of whether to ride with one's friends, when one has a job to do, when one has made a commitment, is not much of a question at all. There was heavy fire that day and for two days after. A lot of people died. But not us. We lived, and learned some of the many lessons that war has to offer.
Things rarely happen as expected. Once you start, you have to finish. You don't get to be the same again. There is nothing much good about any of it, but winning is better than losing. And there is no such thing as a safe place to which you can withdraw. The fate of two reporters demonstrated that last point when they chose not to accompany the assault into Baghdad, considering it too dangerous. They were killed along with three American soldiers when an Iraqi missile struck the brigade's field headquarters south of Baghdad. Two cameramen, believing themselves safe in Baghdad's Hotel Palestine, were killed the next day when American tankers, my friends, mistook them for Iraqi forward artillery observers and fired.
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