(4 of 10)
He turned the convoy around. But a company that had had no luck at all so far did not have any now. As the big machines made their slow U-turn, one of the trucks ran out of gas. The convoy stopped, and Jessi, Lori and others piled out of the humvees and trucks and formed a guard around the truck as another soldier poured gas into it.
Jessi and Lori stood back to back, because it just felt safer that way. They joked, or tried to, because they were so scared. As hard as she tries now, Jessi cannot remember what they said. It was something silly, something about not getting shot.
She heard Sergeant Robert Dowdy give the order to lock and load. Jessi grabbed the slide on the side of her M-16, tugged it back and tried to chamber a round. It jammed. She had cleaned it every day, but the grit had swirled in through the truck's windows all day and clogged it again with grime. She snatched at it, trying to eject the jammed cartridge.
She handed the rifle to Dowdy, who tried to fix it, but he failed and just threw it back to her in frustration. She held it like a soldier would, but she might as well have been back in West Virginia, playing war with pop-guns. They had just crawled back to the humvee when Jessi heard a single, sharp gunshot, then silence, then the gunfire began to chatter, coming closer.
"We got to get out of here," Dowdy said.
The bigger trucks, their drivers standing up to grind their boots onto the gas pedals, could not get above 40 miles per hour. One of them bogged down in the roadside sand, another broke down, and running soldiers leapt into the thin cover of other trucks as large-caliber bullets shattered windshields and bored through sheet metal, as dead and dying trucks began to block the road.
One soldier, left behind, was not picked up as the vehicles swerved away.
He was surrounded and shot down.
"They were killing us," Jessi said. "I saw it."
They scuttled everywhere, a hundred, two hundred, more. They flowed from the doors and windows and swarmed along the rooftops and into the street, and the AK-47s bucked in their hands as they fired on full-automatic at the slow-moving trucks. The Iraqis, most of them in loose-fitting, soiled civilian clothes, did not seem to aim at all, but to just shoot and scream and shoot. They sprayed bullets at the convoy and waited for the Americans to drive into their own death.
"Chaos," Jessi said. "It was like being in a bad dream. You just want to wake up and have everything back like it was. But you can't wake up." Jessi remembers dark, bearded faces and words she could not understand, and the clattering sound of the AK-47 and the deafening crack of the American assault rifles in the cab of the humvee as Dowdy, Sergeant George Buggs and Specialist Edward Anguiano returned fire.
Squeezed between them, her own weapon still useless as anything except a club, Jessi could only watch. "They were on both sides of the street, and we were trapped in the middle, and they were hurtin' us bad," said Jessi. The Iraqis used rocket launchers to cripple the trucks. The grenades exploded against sheet metal or blew up geysers of sand. "I didn't kill nobody," Jessi said. She seemed ashamed. "We left a lot of men behind."