Four U.S. Humvees crossed the ambushed town, stopping in the Gobi Basin, 1,500 meters away from the town, to build defenses.

These 20 or so US Marines did not know that they were very photogenic, and hundreds of millions of people had seen the pictures of their battles, and even their popularity had surpassed that of the commander of their First Marine Division.

At the same time, their identities have also been announced internationally.

These 20 men belonged to the reconnaissance battalion of the 1st Division of the US Marine Corps, and their combat mission was not to engage the main force.

The 380 marines of the entire 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, divided into large and small teams, were far away from the main force of the Marine Corps to reconnoiter the defense and firepower of the Iraqi troops.

The town is ambushed, and their mission is to leave and report back to the information, while also monitoring the town to see if the Iraqi forces inside will be transferred.

Every Marine Corps soldier is fully armed, with heavy chemical suits, Kevlar helmets, and bulletproof vests with ceramic plates on the front and back that can block AK rifle bullets, as well as tactical vests that can carry rifle bullets, grenades, radios, and various hooks and straps. Together, these things weigh about fifty-five pounds, making the players look bloated, like inflated Michelin tires.

The weather in the desert Gobi is very uncomfortable, the shady place is particularly cold, and it doesn't take a few minutes for the guns to heat up when facing the sun.

After building a defense, the rest of the U.S. Marines were also a little excited about the battle they had just calmed down.

Fix, the top officer of the squad and the head of the operation, saw the different emotions of the crowd, clapped his palms, attracted everyone's eyes to himself, and said:

"You've been brought in as killers, and you're going to be targeted. The Iraqis will do everything possible to put you to death. Don't be an American who believes in everything. Don't take this across borders. Think like a smart bastard. Have more than one mind. Be aggressive. ”

Every Marine underwent a long period of training, and when assembled in Kuwait, he also underwent several weeks of special training to clarify the rules of engagement.

This rule dictates under what circumstances Marines can and cannot shoot at Iraqis. The problem is that some Iraqi soldiers will undoubtedly take off their uniforms and fight in the clothes of ordinary people. Others will not take off their uniforms, but will surrender.

Perhaps some will surrender in military uniforms, while others will fight in military uniforms. In addition, it is possible that a large number of civilians are already armed with AK rifles.

These armed, but not hostile, civilians mingled with the enemy troops dressed in civilian clothing.

Hence the regular rules of the battlefield - shoot at the enemy in military uniform, at the armed one

People shoot - it doesn't apply. At the end of the day, the rules of engagement are: if the Marines encounter a group of armed Iraqis, they can't generally fire first if the Iraqis don't shoot at them first.

Many U.S. Marines are concerned about such rules of engagement, in their words: "If we kill civilians, we will provoke the opposition of the common people and lose the war." But I don't want to lose my comrades in the Marine Corps. The rules of engagement make us less aggressive. ”

Here, Fix repeats a phrase that every Marine Corps commander is familiar with: "You will be responsible for the facts, the facts you saw at the time, not the facts you look back at in hindsight." If at the time you thought you were shooting to protect yourself, you were doing the right thing. As for the fact that we later found out that you killed an unarmed civilian, that's fine. What we care about is the fact that at that time they were in our eyes. ”

After finishing speaking, Fix sat quietly on the side, he didn't know that there was no need to worry about his teammates, but some emotions still needed to be guided.

The war has just begun, and we don't know how many more difficult wars will continue.

Today, every member of the team was a little excited, even excited, but Fix knew that this was because there were no players who had sacrificed, and if there were team members who had sacrificed, the appearance of this team would be completely different.

However, Fix's lieutenant did not think so about the rules of engagement, and after Fix's words, his lieutenant said, "I have been in Somalia for five months, and we have killed quite a few people there. ”

He stared at his soldier without blinking, making everyone understand what he was saying as a sniper. "But our men showed mercy, and let go of more bad guys than we shot. That's right. Don't be him. killing mothers and children. Don't shoot at the crowd. It's as if those in Afghanistan have been oppressed for years. They are just like us. Don't hurt them, even if in the future you can justify doing so according to the rules of engagement. ”

After a few hours of rest, the sound of fierce fighting came from the town behind him, and Fix called everyone to get on board and set off.

The seemingly huge Humvee car, when the team members boarded the car, there was almost no extra space.

Everyone is bloated because they are wearing helmets, tactical vests, chemical suits

and rubber boots. The car was filled with military ration food crates, five-gallon drums of water, diesel fuel, more than 300 grenades, thousands of rifle and machine gun rounds, special smoke and thermite incendiary bombs, several pounds of C-4 plastic explosives, Kramer anti-personnel mines, a large bundle of snake-bellied barbed wire, camouflage nets, a spare tire, car parts, engine oil and oil filter nozzles, a set of tools, a screw cutter, an atlas, bags of rope, a fire extinguisher, five personal gear rucksacks, lighting equipment, Hundreds of spare batteries, shovels, a pickaxe, a sledgehammer for portable radios, and an AT-4 anti-tank rocket hanging from a parachute rope under the carport behind the car, which was pitch black inside and out.

For obvious reasons, no one turned on the front lights during the invasion. All mirrors have been removed. With three radios stacked on the center console, each the size of an old-fashioned VCD, the dashboard is barely visible.

Marines have walkie-talkies in their helmets and can communicate not only with the battalion, but also with other vehicles in the platoon, as well as with the pilots of the aircraft that provide air protection.

The major combat units of the United States Marine Corps were advancing eastward or near the border, and the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion did not have any friendly forces in its area of operations. The battalion marched north in a zigzag pattern on an unpaved path.

The trail passes through an open, almost moon-like desert, flanked by occasional adobe houses, where a handful of sheep and hungry, scrawny cattle forage in the low bushes.

From time to time, the wreckage of some vehicles can be seen: burned-out tanks and empty shells of cars, perhaps relics of the first Gulf War.

On the eastern horizon are columns of smoke from the burning of oil in the Rumaila region.

At the level of a small-unit combat unit, everyone's survival depends on the simplest manual observation.

Each member of these Humvees has a task of observing a specific direction, and when they look through the window, they are often Marines with guns and night vision devices, and their expressions are very focused.

Humvees are vulnerable to small arms – AK rifles, RPG rockets, light machine guns – at a distance of about 600 meters, and are even farther away than heavy weapons. The main armament on each vehicle, the M1-9 grenade launcher or the 12.7 mm machine gun, can accurately hit targets at a distance of about 1,000 meters, with the aim of identifying and destroying the enemy's threat to the Humvee before it has even entered an effective distance.

The team members in the Humvee passed binoculars to each other and exchanged information with other people in the Humvee. They kept in touch with each other about what they saw in the desert around them—a tube 300 meters away could be the barrel of a gun, and a stick in the hand of a shepherd in the distance could be an AK rifle.

For those who had lived peacefully a few days before, the war began......

At dawn, the time quickly came to about ten o'clock in the morning, and the team led by Fix was already very close to the Euphrates River.

Pass through a small town with a lot of Iraqis.

For these American GIs, encountering every Iraqi was enough to make them nervous.

But this close contact could not be avoided, and the small group of shepherds, and the square houses, and the women in black robes, no one knew what was inside the robes.

Nervously watching every Iraqi around them, these American GIs waved in response to the Iraqis waving and greeting them.

The nervousness seemed to prove to be just a distraction, and the road continued on until by the afternoon, Fix's squad was the deepest in the entire U.S. Marine Corps 1st Battalion into northern Iraq.

At the same time, every member of this team has not slept with their eyes closed for more than thirty-six hours.

According to the reconnaissance battalion, a moving Iraqi regular army tank unit may be operating in the vicinity, but at the end of the day, nothing was found.

There is a lot of information like this.

In the words of a staff officer of the U.S. Marine Corps: "We can determine where 70 percent of Saddam's armored forces are, but the remaining 30 percent is enough." ”

Satellites in the sky and unmanned reconnaissance planes hovering at high altitudes can make detailed observations of the ground, but if people are not sent to the scene, they still cannot fully understand all the situations.

The eyes are often deceived, let alone satellites and reconnaissance aircraft.

Ground operations are able to accurately detect enemy forces moving one or two kilometers away, so that they can have sufficient time to react and prepare, and this kind of operation is more efficient and practical than reconnaissance in the sky.

The US military has not yet been able to comprehensively monitor the whole of Iraq, and even if it uses all the reconnaissance equipment and means of the entire US army, it cannot do real-time monitoring of every region of Iraq.

And for the marines of the reconnaissance battalion, this also means that there is no task, moving in a general direction, and then there is no then.

As far as the troops at the grassroots level are concerned, the tasks assigned to them are constantly changing, so they have long learned to do their own things well and do their jobs well.

During the night, Fix's team monitored the railway, and it took them forty minutes to dig a foxhole eight hundred meters from the railroad.

It's a very difficult job, and beneath the surface of the desert in northern and eastern Iraq is very strong. Hard coral reef rocks.

It was once part of the Persian Gulf, but in fact, all of Kuwait and southern Iraq were an ocean.

When the team members were lying in their foxholes, an oil field more than 20 kilometers away was in flames.

The temperature dropped rapidly at night, and in the middle of the night it began to rain lightly, and the inside of the foxhole became muddy, cold and muddy, stained with chemical protective clothing and boots.

The gas mask next to him was also stained with muddy water.

The rain was black, it was the burned oil, and the mud was yellow-black.

The burning oil is like a faulty fluorescent tube, causing the night sky to flicker with fire

Light.

Coalition planes flew overhead, but too high to be seen. They dropped a lot of flares against the missiles, like lightning in the night sky.

War can make the night sky colorful and stunning.

In the cold night, every Marine shivered with cold, the temperature dropped to minus four or five degrees, and everyone could not rest, huddled to keep warm.

One. The night was sleepless, and there were several groups of Iraqi troops passing on the railway, and the number was not large, ranging from a dozen to hundreds.

Walking along the railway, south to north, it was obvious that soldiers from Basra were carrying weapons, but few of them were armed.

It's more like desertion, which is the so-called deserter, which makes the Marines who originally wanted to intercept all of them not move.

Because these Iraqi soldiers did not come here to fight, they have no fighting spirit and have lost their souls, so they can't be called fighters at all.

Near dawn, the command of the reconnaissance battalion also sent an order for the squad to assemble with each other and intercept the communication line to block the Iraqi soldiers who fled the battlefield.

At the same time as the order was issued, the latest news was also sent to every soldier of the Marine Corps that many Iraqi troops in southern Iraq were being defeated, and these defeated soldiers were received and asked to surrender.

That's how wars are often taken by surprise.