My Men are My Heroes by Nathaniel R. Helms Page A

constantly reminded of what they are doing,” he says. “They get tired and bored and sleepyand don’t pay attention. The section leaders and squad leaders have to make sure they don’t get that way. The platoon sergeants make sure the squad leaders are doing their job, and my role was to make sure they were all doing their jobs.”
    Any Marine will tell you that riding in an AAV rolling across the desert is not pleasant when shared with 19 or 20 other guys, their equipment, extra food and water, ammo, and a three-man crew. Lance Corporal Alex Nicoll, a rifleman in 3d Squad, 3d Platoon, Kilo, remembers some of the tracks were stuffed with as many as 28 or 29 men.
    â€œHey, when your track breaks down, you have to ride somewhere,” Nicoll explains. “So we would just get in another track. It’s better to be in a firefight than crammed into a track all day. You breathe exhaust fumes and get a terrible headache, and the noise and movement gets terrible.”
    The only good thing about riding instead of walking was not humping their 80-pound rucks in the withering heat, Nicoll says. The AAV’s roof opens up, so several Marines at a time could get some fresh air while serving as lookouts—except when the wind blew exhaust fumes in their faces.
    â€œAfter a day everyone had black faces,” Nicoll remembers. “The exhausts were perfectly aimed to hit us in the face. After the deployment they sent around a questionnaire asking about what could be improved. I hope the exhausts got fixed.”
    The view outside was just about as bad as what they couldn’t see inside. The Marines who rode across Iraq compare the scenery to a giant, stinking landfill occupied by dirty, scared people and unfamiliar animals. They frequently use the words “garbage,” “filth,” “poverty,” “devastation,” and “emptiness” to describe the view. Incongruously, running through this emptiness was a four-lane superhighway that would have been perfectly normal in Arizona or Utah.
    Taking a turn as a lookout was marginally better than beingcramped down below with only what passed for fresh air moving across their tension-tightened faces. The sun was hot, the MOPP suits were hot, their helmets cooked their brains, and sand fought to penetrate every uncovered orifice. Already men were dealing with pus-filled eyes contaminated with grit and lungs irritated by inhaled sand that caused hacking thick green phlegm. Even with their heads outside the track, the fetid air was filled with dust, bad breath, and the stench of rotting flesh, burning oil, and indefinable smells as rank as the garbage that filled the countryside around them.
AMBUSH!
    On March 25, 3/1 got the word that 1st Battalion, 2d Marines had gone into An Nasiriyah and taken heavy casualties. It had been hit on Route Moe, the city street in An Nasiriyah that RCT1 had to traverse before it could cross the Saddam Canal to the north. 2/1 was not going to be able to complete its mission to secure the southern bridge for the 1 MEFs passage because of heavy contact they were already facing.
    3/1’s convoy slowed to a stop. The desert horizon to the north rocked with explosions marked by black and brown plumes of greasy smoke—proof that the war had begun in earnest and that a battle lay ahead.
    In fact the bridge battles actually began when the 507th Maintenance Company, a rear echelon Army unit formerly based at Fort Bliss, Texas, was ambushed south of the first bridge across the Euphrates. The 507th was on a road march with the 3d Infantry Division when somebody driving the big trucks made a navigational error and took a wrong turn into An Nasiriyah, where an Iraqi trap was waiting for them. The shock of the ambush sent its soldiers scurrying for cover.
    When Alpha Co. 1/2 arrived on the scene, they discovered the Army troops burrowed in the ditches on the side of the roadnear their burning vehicles. The