Nasiriya, Iraq

Harris, get your ass in the truck!” barked the nervous Marine sergeant. “MOVE OUT!” There was no moon to light up the night as we raced to get out of a town that had seen a lot of fighting and a lot of dying. Military intelligence warned that enemy troops were heading our way—1,000 vehicles attached to the Republican Guard, including lots of heavy Soviet-made armor—considered overwhelming odds against the small Marine unit that had adopted me as an embedded war correspondent for CNN.

I was riding “shotgun” in the passenger seat of a seven-ton ammo truck, part of a light-armored 2nd Marine reconnaissance unit, Charlie Company, out of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. “You gotta duck down if I gotta shoot out your window,” said Corporal Boile Sanchez-Frias, age twenty, who grew up washing his clothes in a river in Santa Domingo before moving to Queens, New York, and easily adapted to washing fatigues in a bucket in the desert. Sanchez parked the headphones to his CD player and gripped the wheel with one hand, his M-16 with the other.

Squinting through night-vision goggles, he was pushing fifty miles per hour when the night exploded around us.

“ I can’t see a f---ing thing!” shouted the machine gunner on top of the truck, Lance Corporal William Caldwell, who raised pit bulls in Chester, South Carolina, with his wife when he wasn’t manning the “50 cal.”

“ Anything moves, just shoot it,” Sanchez yelled back. Caldwell opened up at the tree line; his gun shook the truck, white-hot shells tumbling through the hole in the roof, bouncing off my helmet and onto the floor. All around us, 25-mm cannon boomed from more than thirty light armored vehicles (LAVs) in the convoy, 81-mm mortars pounding what appeared to be the enemy positions, lobbing high incendiary “heat rounds” called “shake and bake” more than a mile, 7.62-mm machine guns hammering the night with a rat-tat-tat staccato of destruction.

Suddenly, the truck ahead of us swerved, flipping the water tank it was pulling. Sanchez weaved around it, kept going. “They told me, don’t stop for nobody,” he said.

Duty calls: Marine on guard, above; Harris on TV, below.

Orange tracer rounds crept lower and lower, directly at the ammo truck I was riding in. I winced, my stomach suddenly churning, wondering whether it was The End. I kept the camera rolling, recording the madness as Caldwell briefly got cold feet and took refuge in the cab. “GET BACK UP THERE AND KEEP SHOOTING,” screamed Sanchez, “OR I’LL F---NG SHOOT YOU MYSELF!”

Replaying the videotape now, it is chilling, and if I ever wondered what the hell I was doing there, I know now that I had to be there, just to see for myself. If they could do it, if I could do it, chasing Hemingway.

Nasiriya sits on the banks of the Euphrates River, just a few kilometers from the purported birthplace of Abraham 6,000 years ago, steeped in biblical history, remembered more recently for the hospital where Jessica Lynch was rescued and as the graveyard of seventeen Marines—some ambushed on their way into town by Iraqis; others, possible victims of a U.S. fighter jet that missed its Iraqi target. All that happened early on March 23, hours before Charlie Company’s light-armored recon unit arrived. The Marines’ mission: hunt and destroy what appeared to be a far nastier resistance than anticipated, reinforce fellow grunts with firepower, and keep the supply lines open to Baghdad by securing key highway bridges along a six-mile stretch of road since dubbed “Ambush Alley”—and, unbeknown to us at that moment, a road that was about to become a bloody, terrifying stage for so-called friendly fire.

I’d been up and down Ambush Alley five times, taking Iraqi fire with each run, and this moment was no different, or so we thought. The shooting appeared to be coming from Iraqis under a bridge ahead of us. But the pounding became so relentless from farther away, on the other side of the bridge, that some feared Iraq’s Republican Guard had arrived faster than expected and were more determined than ever to defend Saddam and their homeland.

“GET OUT OF THE TRUCK!” yelled Sanchez as bullets kicked up dirt around the tires. “We’re about to get f---ing hit!” I grabbed my camera and jumped from the cab, my gas mask catching on the door, ripping loose as I half fell, then scrambled down a small embankment in the dark. The only solace of riding in an ammo truck, I was thinking, is that if the end comes, it will come quickly, and that, having loaded up on life insurance, I was worth more dead than alive. War can make your thinking very twisted.

That night’s firefight lasted an interminable two hours, and when the smoke cleared and the last flares floated down, their red glare indicated friendly Marines on the other side of the bridge—not Iraqis, as intelligence had mistakenly advised. We rolled by in silence, just staring at the horror. Charlie Company, my unit, had wounded more than twenty fellow Marines in the unit on the other side of the bridge who thought they were shooting at the enemy, too.

As I later learned, both units had called in artillery strikes on the other, but, thank God, the cool “arty boys” knew better—calculating that friendlies were in both coordinates—and declined to unleash any more unmitigated hellfire. Now, as daylight came, Charlie Company edged past the Semper Fi’s on the receiving end; they appeared dazed, staring vacantly as they stood beside smoldering trucks and Humvees that had been set ablaze with amazingly accurate fire. Charlie Company, my unit, suffered only one minor injury—Corporal Rey Narvais’ eyes were cut by flying glass after a round crashed through his window, broke the steering wheel, and landed in his lap. The incident was still officially under investigation when I recently checked. So was what Marine sources told me was a trigger-happy young officer, who was relieved on the spot and dispatched to a new job, guarding Iraqi POWs in a makeshift brig. “Hey,” quipped a sergeant, trying to spin the war story. “Just shows you how tough Marines are. No one blinked.”

I was able to break that story because, as an embedded journalist with the military, I was given perhaps the closest ringside seat to fighting since Vietnam. We “embeds” were promised we could get as close to the battle as we dared—as long as we didn’t jeopardize an operation—and report what we saw or learned. In other words, the Pentagon promised us war with all its ugly trimmings and, at least in my case, for the most part delivered: The unit I was with got shot at by Iraqis and shot back; they got shot at by other Marines and shot back. I talked to stunned young men elated over their first Iraqi tank kills, then moments later ashen-faced to learn that close friends had just died.

I watched as a backhoe dug two graves for Iraqi soldiers shot by Sergeant Herb Phinney, age twenty-four, of Great Falls, Montana, who made the unit’s first kills. Marines tossed in two bodies, one with a pack of unfiltered cigarettes in his green uniform pocket, then covered the graves with dirt and tagged them for later reburial by their families. Phinney was a sort of Renaissance Marine. He loved opera, read voraciously, and told me he was determined to go home a better man for his wife and two small children, one born after he deployed in January.

Like a handful of other Marines, he kept a journal. That’s where he went to be alone. “The only time I feel like I’m by myself is when I’m writing in it,” he said. Driving, sleeping, shooting, eating, he was never more than a few feet from his men. He put his sleeping bag on top of his LAV; his men slept on the ground around it. He read me the entry about drawing first blood. “As we approached two Iraqi soldiers, my gunner yelled out they had two AK-47s and he could see the banana clips. They started to run and turned around. I gunned both of them down. I know I am going to pull the trigger when the time comes again. I feel numb to the whole ordeal. I wish they would have just dropped their weapons.”

I always wondered what it would be like being there, after watching war movies growing up, arranging and rearranging guns (with no clips or firing pins) given to me by a relative who’d taken them off dead German soldiers in World War II, when he’d served under George Patton. I’d heard the heroic tales about my stepfather, a Marine dive-bomber pilot in the Pacific, and studied war at Phillips Academy under a brilliant history teacher who loved Teddy Roosevelt—and had also taught a preppy Texan named George W. Bush.

At Duke, during ROTC drills, a few anti-Vietnam war classmates hurled tomatoes at me, and a stunning ADPi—my girlfriend!—later spurned me over our different paths, hers briefly to a commune, mine to a job as a public-affairs officer afloat with the 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean. There, as a young ensign, I gave Dan Rather his first tour of the flagship, got “early out” orders as the Vietnam War was winding down, and flew home on a KC-135 full of body bags of kids my age.

Then it was on to a brief tour at Harvard business school, a cub-reporting job at The Atlanta Constitution, freelancing for Rolling Stone, staff jobs at The San Francisco Examiner, then The Washington Post, where I worked for Bob Woodward and later became Atlanta bureau chief, before moving on to a correspondent’s job and lots of makeup at CNN. It’s been my home ever since, covering some of the big crime stories of our time—O.J. Simpson, the Olympic Park bombing, the death of Princess Diana, Oklahoma City, the Clara Harris “Murder by Mercedes” trial. Then, in January, my boss, Keith McAllister, asked if I might like a two-month camping trip in the Iraqi desert. How could I refuse? It was an honor to be asked, a dream and a nightmare of a proposition. My wife, Carol, was furious. “You volunteered, didn’t you?” she asked. “How could you?”

“ I didn’t have a choice.”

“ But you did.”

“ If I don’t do it, I’ll go through life wondering if I could have done it, why I didn’t do it, and resent it like hell.”

She made peace with it, but didn’t like it one bit. But that’s what I do, and I felt I’d trained for it all my life.