Battling Shadows

Since May 8, when Operation Matador’s scheduled start was accelerated by an unexpected but fierce clash at the riverside town of Ubaydi, the Marines had found no one to fight. But the insurgents left proxies to do the killing for them: meticulously rigged roadside bombs and mines, planted on dirt roads where wheels or tank treads would pass, or along bridges.

Primed for battle, the Marines found only booby traps. Sometimes they found them too late.

On Wednesday, two artillery rounds buried in the road detonated under an Amtrac, blowing a two-foot-wide hole in its armor plating. The explosion set off ammunition inside the vehicle, creating an inferno.

As the Amtrac burned, a 24-year-old Marine in a nearby vehicle grabbed his helmet in both fists and wrenched it. “I hate this country!” he screamed.

Helicopters had just flown out more than a dozen victims from the Amtrac, two of whom would die of their wounds. Four others already lay dead inside the burning hulk. The young Marine slammed his gun mount, sending the machine gun spinning, and knocked over piles of rations and ammunition boxes in the back of his truck, striking out at nothing in frustration.

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After one battle May 8 that killed at least two Marines, a roadside bomb that claimed six more on Wednesday and days of fruitless hunting for the enemy, the Marines were ready for a fight. The remote village of Arabi, just two miles from the Syrian border, looked to be the place. If the Americans found Arabi in the hands of foreign fighters, said Marine Maj. Steve Lawson, commander of Lima Company in the 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment, “we’ll make it rubble.”

The mortar shell hit, and the young mother’s face collapsed in fear. She clutched her child, giving up her efforts to reassure the girl by smiling bravely at the house full of armed foreign intruders.

With no Arabic speakers among the Marines, no English spoken among the villagers of Arabi, and Lima Company’s already sparse crew of Iraqi interpreters reduced when one quit in mid-battle at Ubaydi, there was no way to tell her the mortar round was meant for others, the nuisance gunmen across the Euphrates. Heavy-caliber weapons fire burst out, Marines firing at something else.

A towheaded Marine in his early twenties, glaring, his lower lip thrust out by snuff, questioned the landowner on the doorstep of his stone house as chickens and goats rooted for food outside. The Marine spoke pidgin Arabic, demanding where the foreign fighters were, where the bad guys were: “Mujaheddin wayne? Ali Baba wayne?”

The landowner, in the long white robe of Iraqi village men, spread his empty hands wide. “Mako-shi. Mako-shi,” he said. Nothing, nothing.

Sometimes, the Marines busted up wooden furniture belonging to poor farm families and threw their polyester blankets and clothes in a jumble on the floor. A handful of the hundreds of Marines involved in Operation Matador walked out of homes with a pillow or blanket to cushion the ride in the Amtrac. Sometimes, Marines agreed at one commandeered house as they drank a rousted family’s tea, they beat up suspicious-looking men if that was what it took to get information that could save lives.

At the end of a day of searches, Marines generally commandeer houses for the night, shooing the families out in case the Americans’ presence makes the homes targets for attack.
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The Marines hauled in boxes of plastic-pouched rations and bottled water, and pulled out the family’s blankets, pillows and chairs to place in front of the family’s satellite television. Circled round it, they hung on each word of a BBC report on Malaysia. It was their first word from the outside world in weeks.

Across the street, Marines sprawled in a rare air-conditioned bedroom watching a guest on CBS’s “The Early Show” grate Parmesan onto roasted asparagus.
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The Marines in the bedroom watched the cooking demonstration to the end. One turned to a friend. “Do you like eggplant?” he asked.

So, within sight of Syria, they searched caves in the high, sheer rock escarpment that circles part of Arabi. Seeing a man come out of a cave, look out and go back in, a U.S. helicopter crew shot a Hellfire missile. Commanders came on the radio. Those were ordinary Iraqis hiding inside the caves, the commanders said. Hold off.

“These people here, it’s not their fault,” Kalouf, a young combat engineer with a mission to blow things up, said at the house commandeered by Brown’s platoon. “They’re scared for their lives. I used to get mad at them, but now I understand.”

The insurgents were the only enemies, but they wouldn’t come out to fight. “Frankly, I’m tired of going around not seeing anything, not knowing anything, and then having Marines, guys I know, get blown up by mines,” Kalouf said.

“I’d much rather foreign fighters come out and shoot at us. We can respond to that,” Kalouf said, as the Americans got ready to head back across the Euphrates. “We can’t stand all their IEDs and mines, crap like that. Because we can’t do that.”