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getting into the middle of the fight. The crews were under strict orders to identify targets as military before firing. They were supposed to fire warning shots, then shoot into engine blocks if a vehicle continued to approach. Some cars screeched to a halt. Others kept coming, and the gunners and tank commanders ripped into them. Some vehicles exploded. Others smashed into guardrails, their windshields streaked with blood. The crews could see soldiers or armed men in civilian clothes in some of the smoking hulks. In others, they weren’t sure. Deep down, they knew they were inadvertently killing civilians who had been caught up in the fight. They just didn’t know how many. They knew only that any vehicle that kept coming at the column was violently eliminated.
    At one point, a white minivan sped alongside Donovan’s tank. The driver, a middle-aged man in civilian clothes, made eye contact and gave Donovan a manic “don’t shoot” gesture. Donovan motioned for him to get out of the way. As the van pulled away, Donovan saw that three uniformed soldiers with guns were lying in the rear bed. He radioed ahead to the front of the column. Minutes later, he watched one of the gunners with the fire support team pulverize the minivan as it tried to escape down an exit ramp.
    At the next interchange, Donovan spotted a technical—a red Nissan pickup with a Soviet-made heavy machine gun mounted in the truck bed. A young man was firing the gun at the column, his black hair blowing wildly, as the Nissan sped across an overpass. Donovan screamed, “Oh, shit!” and yelled for the loader to open up with his M-240 medium machine gun. Donovan fired his M-4. They missed, and the technical got away.
    The technical vehicles worried Lieutenant Colonel Schwartz because the drivers seemed so fearless and reckless. A few seemed determined to ram the column, driving straight toward the massive tanks and Bradleys before the coax rounds shattered their windshields and sent the vehicles careening into the guardrails. Schwartz was worried, too, about antitank weapons. He thought he had spotted a couple of American-made TOW missiles—tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided missiles—lethal weapons designed to destroy armored vehicles including American tanks and Bradleys.
    Still, he felt confident. The lead tracks were radioing back to other tracks, giving them “triggers” to prepare to fire on technicals speeding up from the rear flanks. Schwartz’s air liaison officer was in his ear all morning, radioing with updates from the air force pilots circling overhead, tracking technicals and trucks pouring in from the crowded neighborhoods on either side of the highway.
    The column was moving steadily. Nobody was stopping or even slowing. The tracks were passing on targets, handing off, just as Schwartz had ordered. Every single vehicle in the column had been blistered by RPGs or recoilless rifle rounds and thousands of rounds of small arms, but everybody was still intact and moving. Some of the RPGs had detonated on the gear and rucksacks stored on the tracks’ external bustle racks, and now the stuff was on fire. Most of the crews just let it burn.
    Schwartz was laying down suppressive fire with his .50-caliber, shouting into his radio microphone. He was repeating himself now, but he wanted his message drummed into his soldiers’ brains: “Pass ’em off . . . pass ’em back . . . keep moving . . . keep the momentum.” The column, still intact, still paced and measured, rumbled up Highway 8. The staff officers back at the brigade operations tent could mark its progress on their computer screens, the column represented by tiny blue icons that inched, slowly, inexorably, north toward Baghdad.

TWO
    THE RIGHT THING
    A s their tank approached the final checkpoint on Highway 8, Lieutenant Gruneisen’s crew was blasting the heavy metal song “Creeping