Colleagues at home, brothers in a Humvee

Humvee 604618 was my home day and night for the final two weeks of the determined drive by combat Marines from the 1st Marine Division to push their way into Baghdad and dethrone a despotic regime.

In the crowded vehicle were five Marines from Camp Pendleton -- two in the cab, three in the open-sided back -- all with M-16s at the ready as our convoy rolled through sniper-infested villages and towns where the smoke from artillery and airstrikes was still coiling into the air. I sat in the back, armed with pen and notebook.

This unit could have been straight from Central Casting: There was the all-knowing veteran, Staff Sgt. Adrian Garza, a Latino from Saginaw, Mich.; Cpl. Edwin Guzman, the jokester from Puerto Rico; Gunnery Sgt. Allen Whiteside, an African American from Houston, who kept his men at an emotional distance; and two whites, Lt. Sam Meites of Chicago, who left behind a comfortable upper-middle-class life to test his strength and endurance; and Lance Cpl. Brian Bernius of San Bernardino, whose sad, thoughtful eyes and concern for the downtrodden made him the moral center of the group.

And while Hollywood may have much to atone for in its depictions of war, it has gotten this much right: Something about men with disparate backgrounds and temperaments being thrown together in war makes the personalities more vivid, more memorable. And their differences insignificant.

“Ground troops” is a pallid phrase to describe the laughing, bickering, caring Marines of Humvee 604618. They had worked together in the same office at Camp Pendleton, but living together, depending on one another 24 hours a day was different. There was no reality beyond the Humvee, the mission and the shared experience of war.

“In circumstances like this, you get to where you can almost hear the other man thinking,” said Garza, 32. “You have to.”

It was my reality too. On facing benches along the sides of the truck bed, Guzman and Meites took positions nearest the tailgate. I sat next to Guzman and across from Garza. Garza found foam padding to keep my hindquarters from being warped by the bench; Bernius gave me clean socks when I had none; Guzman hopped into the truck to retrieve my computer when my knees ached; Whiteside and Meites shared their insights into military life.

In return, I shared my satellite phone, passed along small bits of information I’d gleaned from interviews with top brass and used my company cash to buy Pepsis and other nonregulation treats for the group.

Guzman, 21, proved to be an irrepressible life force even amid grim circumstances. Bright, verbal and given to sustained put-ons, he continually insisted he wanted more “trigger time.” He carried his M-16 with the butt-stock pointing skyward in the “cool” manner of Third World rebels he had seen on television. He loved to infuriate his superiors by insisting he saw no need to wear his flak jacket -- that nothing could hurt him.

In Baghdad he got his chance for “trigger time” and decided against it. Ordered to return fire at a sniper, Guzman held up. The sniper was beyond a group of women and children and, he said later, he didn’t want to risk shooting a child. “I still hope for trigger time before this is over,” he said with his usual laugh.

If Guzman was eager for action, Garza was restrained. A veteran of Somalia and the Persian Gulf War, he had seen violent death and dying. To ride with Garza and Guzman was to be privy to an ongoing tutorial on how to be a Marine.

“There’s a difference between taking charge and taking advantage,” Garza barked one day when Guzman tried to get another Marine to perform a task he’d been ordered to do. When Guzman showed more interest in eating than cleaning his M-16, Garza asked him about his priorities. “This will keep me from feeling hungry,” Guzman said. “Yeah, and your rifle will keep you alive,” Garza replied.

Garza is knowledgeable and resourceful -- he seemed to have everything needed for the mission, including hot sauce to enliven the Meals-Ready-to-Eat (MRE) and an endless supply of toilet paper. He seemed never to sleep.

When Marines realized that civilians were being used as shields, many were confused by the moral dilemma of combat among innocents. Garza was not. I’ll do what I can to miss civilians, he said quietly but firmly. “But in that situation, it’s him or me. And I’m determined to go home to my kids.”

And in his downtime, he wrote poetry, about life as a Marine, the uncertainty of moving through a shifting battlefield, of not knowing what the next twist in the road, the next small town, might bring. Unlike his public tutelage of Guzman, his poetry was private, but with coaxing he was willing to share:

Dig in they say, it might be awhile,

As we see the fighting far off

It’s really just a few miles

We lost a few bros, is all

The news they pass.

The price of leadership

Whiteside, 29, of Houston, carried himself with a presence that said don’t trifle with me. He rode in the Humvee’s passenger seat and remained aloof from the enlisted Marines he supervised. Even in a group he was alone. The price of leadership, he said.

“Someday you may have to order them to do something they don’t want to do, maybe something that could get them killed,” he explained. “You can’t have them say: ‘Hey, I thought we were buddies.’ ”

Like Garza, he watched for signs of younger Marines dropping their vigilance, of not digging “fighting holes” deep enough, not wearing their helmets, of letting the desert dirt clog their M-16s. Handsome and thoughtful, his love for the Corps and his fellow Marines is deep and unfeigned, but he worries about the impact of long deployments on his 2-year-old son. “I don’t want him to grow up not knowing me,” he said.

In his playful way, Guzman challenged Whiteside’s authority one day. Once judged the strongest recruit in his class, Guzman told the gunny, “When we get back to Camp Pendleton, we’re going to have to put on the gloves.” Whiteside didn’t hesitate. “No need to wait for Pendleton or gloves, let’s go right now,” he shot back, without rancor.

After the fall of Baghdad, Whiteside grew introspective. The movies, he said, have it all wrong. “There’s nothing glamorous about dead bodies.”

Meites, 23, the son of prosperous Chicago lawyers, was the only officer on the Humvee. He had enlisted in the Marine Corps after graduating with a degree in economics from Pomona College in Claremont. But rather than go on to graduate school or the corporate world, he wanted to test himself physically and mentally. This war did both.

The gap between his life in the U.S. and his life in Iraq was underlined one day at mail call when he got an invitation from a family friend. It was for a three-day pre-wedding bash complete with sumptuous buffets, an outing at Disneyland, a private golf tournament.

At the time, the Marines were camping in dirt and dust -- for two nights running the convoy organizers chose Iraqi garbage pits as camping spots. Because of supply problems, the Marines were reduced to one MRE per day. “A buffet would be nice right about now,” Meites said sarcastically.

He took a turn, though he wasn’t required to, with pick and shovel in the daily digging of “fighting holes” to be used if the unit came under attack while stationary, no easy task in the concrete-like Iraqi soil.

The Iraq experience, he said toward the end, was an ambivalent one. He learned he could rise to the challenge of war but was left with horrid memories. “I’ll never forget the smell of burning bodies along the road,” he said.

And life on the Humvee? “There are days when it really is a band of brothers,” Meites said, “but there are other days when it’s: ‘Who are these people? I want out.’ ” When his tour is up, he plans to go to business school.

Bernius, 22, was the butt of much criticism over his driving, but he never snapped back or rose to anger. More than any of the others, he worried about Iraqi civilians caught in the cross-fire and about their fates once the U.S. leaves.

He was forever breaking into song, usually by rapper Tupac Shakur or R&B; crooner R. Kelly. Lyrics often concerned busted love, broken dreams and the problems of the underclass. When he gets home he plans to marry his fiancee and start a family.

Bernius had been profoundly affected by what he saw in An Nasiriyah, the town in Central Iraq that turned into a “sniper’s alley” when the Marine convoy tried to pass through. Fighting raged for hours, with Marines using groundfire, artillery and airstrikes, and the Iraqi paramilitary fighters hiding behind civilians and crouching on rooftops.

“When first we came there it was kind of cool, seeing all the blown-up artillery,” Bernius said. “I thought: ‘Wow, look at what power we have.’ ”

Then Bernius crested a hill and saw the carnage. “There were bodies in the street and beside the road, everywhere, bodies, and more bodies,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t cool anymore. Nobody should have to see that.”

Even amid the quick and decisive U.S. victory over Hussein, Bernius, in his own fashion, worried about the limits of U.S. military power.

After coming across two rival groups of villagers, Bernius tried to mediate using his Arabic phrase book. One side was asking the Marines to kill the others for reasons that were unclear. But the Marines were ordered back into the convoy before Bernius could help. “I’m worried about what will happen to those people when we leave,” he said. “I really am. I wish we could help them but I guess we can’t.”

For some, separate ways

After my two weeks with Humvee 604618, I raced north with other Marines to Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s ancestral home, which the Marines captured easily. I returned to Baghdad only long enough to collect my gear and begin my journey home. My war was over.

Back at the Humvee, I asked each of the five what he had learned. Meites and Whiteside talked of leadership. Bernius said he learned he wants to leave the Corps and become a firefighter. “This isn’t me,” he said.

Guzman surprised me. “When I came here I thought of the Iraqis as just ragheads or terrorists,” he said. “But you see them up close, they’re people just like us, especially the kids.”

Garza said it was too early to draw lessons from the war. The work, he said, is not over, as the Marines prepare for the long trip back to Kuwait, through territory that could yet hold pockets of resistance.

“I won’t consider this mission a success until I’ve got everybody back -- alive,” he said and returned to the task of staying vigilant.