Thousands of nineteen and twenty-year-old Marines cut loose in a desert. How often did this camel get chased?

When America goes to war it brings its own bridges.

This picture could be a postcard for the invasion year. Sand, smoke, palm trees, and a broken-down Iraqi fighting vehicle.

When the 50 starts bucking, it rocks the whole truck.

Dealing with women was a little different. Many older women and little girls interacted with us on the streets. Most women of the ages in between kept their distance.

Manmade sandstorm

When you’re close, you understand the context. The farther away you get, the harder it is to see what’s really going on.

On the second day of the invasion, the entire sky is blanketed with thick black smoke from burning oil fields. Midday looks like late evening, like the sun has already set and the darkness is coming. The smoke cloud is oppressive. I feel like I’m in a cavern underground instead of open desert. My unit stops next to a burning pipeline. The fire burns hot and high, thirty-foot flames belching greasy fumes into the sky. When the wind shifts, I feel the warmth of fire on my skin.
A couple hours into the day, an Iraqi man with a thick moustache approaches our position and begs us to put a sandbag over his head while he talks to us. Our CO doesn’t want to do this. For weeks, US forces have been dropping leaflets in Southern Iraq telling the people we’re here to help. A sandbagged Iraqi man on the side of the road sends the wrong message. But the man insists.
“Please, sir. Please cover my head,” he says to our translator. “If anyone sees me here, my whole family will be murdered.”
The man is the commander of the local army, and he has come to surrender. Some of his men surrendered to us the day before, and he told the rest to stack their weapons and uniforms and go home. But Saddam’s spies are still everywhere, and if they see him talking to US forces, those still loyal to the regime will make an example of him.
“Jesus Christ,” Romero says, coming back to the Humvee. “You believe that shit? Murder a dude’s whole family just for talking to us?”

I have no idea what this is, but I think it’s British.

Some friends from across the pond.

I was amazed to learn that British soldiers get rations of beer.

Fun with optics??

A few nasty little buggers they didn’t get a chance to deploy.

Almost every Humvee had a “shitter box” around the exhaust pipe. This was an empty ammo crate you placed over the hole you dug so you had something to sit on while you shit.

Even in a war it’s cool seeing new things

These towers always made me real uneasy. They were probably just water towers, but in Iraq, who the hell knows.

Peters finds a puppy abandoned by one of the roving packs of dogs. He takes it in, cares for it, feeds it, and tries to teach it tricks. For a few days, this puppy becomes a mascot for our unit, guys stopping by to pet it and watch it play. The puppy responds to the love and attention the way that puppies do, with happy yelps and a lot of tail wagging.
I don’t know why Peters bothers. In a few days we’ll have to move again, and he’ll have to leave the puppy behind. Peters will feel terrible about it because he’s a warm-hearted guy. And now the puppy will be under the misapprehension that humans are friends. When we leave the puppy, he’ll likely be shot or run over by a convoy, or he’ll be hunted down and eaten by other dogs. If he somehow manages to fight his way to adulthood, he’ll become just like the other dogs in Iraq, a scabby mutt with nothing on his mind but hunger, roaming the countryside subsisting on garbage and corpse flesh.

Family home in southern Iraq.

Not what I want to see over my mud hut.

Kids were always a sign. If the kids were waving it meant something about the neighborhood. If the kids were yelling and kicking the bottoms of their feet at you, you knew exactly the neighborhood you were in.

Iraqis could jerry-rig anything. Years of sanctions taught them how to keep their trucks running without access to parts. This is maybe why some of them were so good at making IEDs later on.

Iraqi Pastoral

Looks like the end of the world, like some corpse should stand up and come staggering across the bridge.

I’m sure there’s an arsenal and many bodies at the bottom of the Euphrates.

Humvee Life (3)

Luxury accommodations (1)

When the looting started, huge crowds swarmed the cities. They were often in families and often carrying burlap sacks. At the time, I thought they were carrying potatoes or other food in those sacks, but this makes me wonder.

Unfortunately for Private Schmuckatelli, his plane ticket was non-refundable.

This guy put his face on everything.

Sometimes, in the middle of nowhere, a scene hits just right.

I can still feel the ground shake as these rumble down the highway.

Two-day-old, powdered corpse, an Iraq War specialty.

Iraqi forces destroyed many bridges trying to slow the progress of American forces. It didn’t work.

Welcome to Baghdad

“Taxi!”

People forget, a lot of Iraqis were happy to see us arrive. Things started to turn because of decisions made later.

There were huge migrations of people like this everywhere. Some were avoiding danger. Most were going into cities and taking out anything they could carry.

Iraq was in chaos shortly after we took down the regime. Roving gangs, foreign insurgents, militias, and looters made parts of Iraq unlivable. A lot of this was caused by decisions made by politicians. American soldiers and Iraqi civilians alike had to endure it.

Armored gypsy wagon.

Marine “Glamour Shots”

Big weapons cache.

One way to solve a problem.

Four walls and an iso mat. Life is good.

Anything and everything can be a gym.

In the 80s and early 90s, Iraq’s army fought two devastating wars and lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers. The regime was able to smuggle in mountains of weapons in the late 90s, but the military was still a shell of its former self. It had become little more than a force for slaughtering Kurds and Shiites and keeping the regime in power.

There’s nothing like a pack of Cobras hunting nearby to ease your nerves.

Death in a war zone is unceremonious, face-down in the dirt, bodies left to rot in the sun.

A little time in Kuwait.

But it’s a dry heat.