Looking for Battle, Marines Find That Foes Have Fled

"Shoot it!" another Marine joked.

Down in the hold, Kalouf yawned.

'I Hate This Country!'

The Marines' slow drive west had been punctuated by the booms of controlled blasts destroying roadside bombs, known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. The booms mixed with the sharper bursts of mortar rounds exploding and the crackle of automatic weapons -- what the Marines called nuisance fire from the south bank of the Euphrates.

Since May 8, when Operation Matador's scheduled start was accelerated by an unexpected but fierce clash at the riverside town of Ubaydi, the Marines had found no one to fight. But the insurgents left proxies to do the killing for them: meticulously rigged roadside bombs and mines, planted on dirt roads where wheels or tank treads would pass, or along bridges.

Primed for battle, the Marines found only booby traps. Sometimes they found them too late.

On Wednesday, two artillery rounds buried in the road detonated under an Amtrac, blowing a two-foot-wide hole in its armor plating. The explosion set off ammunition inside the vehicle, creating an inferno.

As the Amtrac burned, a 24-year-old Marine in a nearby vehicle grabbed his helmet in both fists and wrenched it. "I hate this country!" he screamed.

Helicopters had just flown out more than a dozen victims from the Amtrac, two of whom would die of their wounds. Four others already lay dead inside the burning hulk. The young Marine slammed his gun mount, sending the machine gun spinning, and knocked over piles of rations and ammunition boxes in the back of his truck, striking out at nothing in frustration.

Hours later, a Marine sniper picked a volunteer for company and headed out on a freelance night mission, hoping to find by stealth the bombers that 1,000 Marines had failed to roust out.

One House at a Time

The mortar shell hit, and the young mother's face collapsed in fear. She clutched her child, giving up her efforts to reassure the girl by smiling bravely at the house full of armed foreign intruders.

With no Arabic speakers among the Marines, no English spoken among the villagers of Arabi, and Lima Company's already sparse crew of Iraqi interpreters reduced when one quit in mid-battle at Ubaydi, there was no way to tell her the mortar round was meant for others, the nuisance gunmen across the Euphrates. Heavy-caliber weapons fire burst out, Marines firing at something else.

A towheaded Marine in his early twenties, glaring, his lower lip thrust out by snuff, questioned the landowner on the doorstep of his stone house as chickens and goats rooted for food outside. The Marine spoke pidgin Arabic, demanding where the foreign fighters were, where the bad guys were: "Mujaheddin wayne? Ali Baba wayne?"