Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer

Author:Jon Krakauer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Military
ISBN: 9780385528405
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

In the predawn hours of March 23, 2003, as Jessica Lynch’s convoy rolled across the Euphrates River and entered An Nasiriyah, Pat Tillman was asleep on his cot in Ar’ar, Saudi Arabia, having stayed up late the previous evening reading The Odyssey, Homer’s epic poem about the Greek hero Odysseus and his ten-year effort to make his way home to his wife, Penelope, after the Trojan War. Pat had no knowledge of the tragedy beginning to unfold in Nasiriyah, nor could he have imagined that its aftershocks would one day be a source of unceasing torment to the people he loved.

As the sun crested the horizon that morning in southern Iraq, hundreds of Marines were maneuvering into position to invade Nasiriyah and capture the very bridge that Lynch and the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company had just driven heedlessly across, which was deemed crucial to the rapid push of American troops to Baghdad. When the First Battalion of the Second Marine Regiment drew to within several miles of this bridge, Iraqi forces responded with fire from small arms, machine guns, mortars, and artillery. Around 7:30 a.m., in the midst of this skirmish, a Humvee came racing toward the Marines from the direction of Nasiriyah and screeched to a stop, riddled with bullet holes and with its tires on fire. An extremely agitated American Army captain named Troy King jumped out in a state of near hysteria, yelling that a convoy he had been leading had suffered catastrophic losses after coming under attack back in the city.

This made no sense to Major Bill Peebles, the commander of the tank column leading the Marines’ advance into the city. No Army units, or those of any other military branch, were supposed to have preceded the Marines into Nasiriyah. When King, struggling to speak coherently, informed Peebles that most of his company of soldiers remained behind—some already dead, others pinned down by the enemy in different areas of the city—Peebles led his tanks off to look for survivors. In short order the tanks spotted several U.S. Army trucks that had been shot full of holes and were in flames. Hiding in a ditch behind the ravaged vehicles, still taking heavy fire, were ten soldiers from the 507th Maintenance Company, four of whom were wounded. The Marines gathered up the survivors, spun their tanks around, and hurried away from Nasiriyah to deliver the wounded to a secure location where they could receive medical aid.

After the tanks departed, Bravo Company—comprising approximately two hundred Marines riding in three Humvees and a dozen amphibious assault vehicles known as AAVs, amtracs, or tracs—moved north toward the bridge over the Euphrates River. Crossing it without encountering resistance, they continued toward their next objective: a second bridge, on the northern edge of the city, spanning the Saddam Canal. The most direct route to this bridge was the road on which Lynch’s convoy had been attacked, Ambush Alley. Understandably, they elected to approach the Saddam Canal Bridge by a less hazardous route that swung around to the east.

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