Evan Wright

"Late in the afternoon of March 24, 2003, I was digging a hole by a bridge over the Euphrates River in Iraq. I was a reporter embedded with a platoon of Marines in the elite 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. We had been under rocket and machine-gun fire for several hours. The bridge was a key crossing point for the American invasion and was hotly contested by several thousand Iraqi paramilitaries firing on our position from three sides. More than a dozen Americans had already paid for this bridge crossing with their lives. The Recon Marines I accompanied- the Special Forces of the Corps- had been ordered to hold a position beside the bridge and wait. An armored assault across the Euphrates was due any time now, and the Recon Marines were standing by to rescue the crews of any armored vehicles disabled by enemy fire. In classic military tradition, the assault had been repeatedly delayed. Now, as night approached, the Recon Marines were ordered to dig in. Machine-gun fire raked the palm trees overhead. To avoid the bullets I excavated my hole from a kneeling position. Weighted down with forty pounds of body armor and gear, I felt myself wheeze each time I pitched by shovel into the earth and scratched out more clay. I was midway through this exhausting task when I felt a steely hand grip my arm, then heard a voice: "That's it, brother. Work those biceps." Sergeant Rudy Reyes stood over me, offering an encouraging smile. It seemed Rudy had chosen this moment to continue the fitness instruction program he had begun- without my ever asking- when we had met a couple of weeks earlier, prior to the invasion. Eyeing the progress of my excavation on this combat-filled afternoon, Rudy pounded my back and added, "You see, brother. Just a little bit of fitness every day is all you need." Pausing to allow an enemy mortar to explode in the field to our rear, Rudy concluded, "Keep this up, you'll be in shape in no time.""

"The General is a small man in his mid-fifties who moves and speaks quickly, with a vowel-mashing speech impediment that gives him a sort of folksy charm. A bold thinker, Mattis' favorite battlefield expression is "Doctrine is the last refuge of the unimaginative." On the battlefield, his call sign is "Chaos." His plan for the Marines in Iraq would hinge on disregarding sacred tenets of American military doctrine. His goal was not to shield his Marines from Chaos, but to embrace it. No unit would embody this daring philosophy than First Recon."

"In the months leading up to the war on Iraq, battles over doctrine and tactics were still raging within the military. The struggle was primarily between the more cautious "Clinton generals" in the Army, who advocated a methodical invasion with a robust force of several hundred thousand, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his acolytes, who argued for a much smaller invasion force- one that would rely on speed and mobility more than on firepower. Rumsfeld's interest in "maneuver warfare," as the doctrine that emphasizes mobility over firepower is called, predated invasion planning for Iraq. Ever since becoming Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld had been pushing for his vision of a stripped-down, more mobile military force on the Pentagon as part of a sweeping transformation plan. Mattis and the Marine Corps had been moving in that direction for nearly a decade. The Iraq campaign would showcase the Marines' role in Iraq as a rush. While the U.S. Army- all-powerful, slow-moving and cautious- planned its methodical, logistically robust movement up a broad, desert highway, Mattis prepared the Marines for an entirely different campaign. After seizing southern oil facilities within the first forty-eight hours of the war, Mattis planned to immediately send First Recon and a force of some 6,000 Marines into a violent assault through Iraq's Fertile Crescent. Their mission would be to seize the most treacherous route to Baghdad- the roughly 185-kilometer-long, canal-laced urban and agricultural corridor from Nasiriyah to Al Kut."

"Saddam had viewed this route, with its almost impenetrable terrain of canals, villages, rickety bridges, hidden tar swamps and dense groves of palm trees, as his not-so-secret weapon in bogging down the Americans. Thousands of Saddam loyalists, both Iraqi regulars and foreign jihadi warriors from Syria, Egypt and Palestinian refugee camps, would hunker down in towns and ambush points along the route. They had excavated thousands of bunkers along the main roads, sown mines and pre-positioned tens of thousands of weapons. When Saddam famously promised to sink the American invaders into a "quagmire," he was probably thinking of the road from Nasiriyah to Al Kut. It was the worst place in Iraq to send an invading army. Mattis planned to subvert the quagmire strategy Saddam had planned there by throwing out a basic element of military doctrine: His Marines would assault through the planned route and continue moving without pausing to establish rear security. According to conventional wisdom, invading armies take great pains to secure supply lines to their rear, or they perish. In Mattis' plan, the Marines would never stop charging."