The kill zone
Moving wounded and dodging U.S. bullets in Fallujah.

By David Martinez

ENTERING THE BESIEGED Iraqi city of Fallujah is difficult but not impossible. We come in along the back roads, following the Euphrates River past beautiful date groves, villages of clay houses, and herds of goats. The air is marvelously dry, clean, and bright, the polar opposite of Baghdad's choking, fume-ridden skies. It is a fantastic and timeless landscape.

We are an international group, bringing much-needed medical supplies to the town in a chartered bus. There are journalists and activists from Canada, Pakistan, Wales, Australia, and England, as well as two translators and two Iraqi journalists.

Along the way we pass a stream of vehicles headed in the opposite direction, evacuating women, children, and the elderly. On our path we are joined by minivans and pickups carrying medical and other supplies into the city. Each vehicle bears a banner with the name of the town or neighborhood that is making the donation.

As we get closer, every crossroad is guarded by groups of masked mujahideen wielding rifles. This venture has been arranged by a Palestinian activist and professional bodyguard who has contacted a mosque in Fallujah to ensure our safety and allow us to pass these checkpoints.

In Fallujah we go immediately to a hospital, which is really a converted clinic. We've brought suture kits, blood bags, bandages, and blankets, among other items. We haven't been there 10 minutes when a car screeches around the corner and slams to a stop in front of the hospital.

Volunteers scramble for stretchers while young mujahideen, faces covered by khaffiyas, scan the horizon. A mother and two children are removed from the vehicle. They have all been shot and are screaming in pain. We help bring them inside the already crowded building.

The man in charge of the clinic, an exhausted Iraqi who speaks fluent English, explains that he has very few supplies to work with and that it is almost impossible to cross the town to move people or medicine, because of U.S. troops. He shows us an ambulance with bullet holes in the front window, sides, and top, and the driver has a bandage on his head.

Our Palestinian guide soon wades through the crowd to find us. "I need volunteers!" he shouts, his preferred method of communication. "Now!"

"To do what, exactly?" someone inquires.

"Retrieve wounded persons!" he replies.

My hand goes up, and soon I'm with two women – an Iraqi and a Brit – standing in the back of a flatbed truck, with a grimly smiling Fallujah man next to us who waves a Red Crescent flag and sings, "Allah akbar" (God is great) as we roll toward the kill zone.

• • •

This city of 300,000 is incredibly quiet for the middle of the day. We drop out of the truck and start walking, our passports held high in our otherwise empty hands. We leave our Iraqi driver and enter the crushing stillness of the kill zone, the no-man's-land between resistance fighters and the U.S. forces, somewhere inside the town of Fallujah.

As we walk, I grab the Brit's hand and squeeze it. "For luck," I say, and I think I will remember the wink she gives me for the rest of my life.

The streets are empty. Then a man opens the door of a house, gesturing frantically with wild eyes. We can see what he's pointing at: in the middle of the crossroads lies a young man, covered in blood, a Kalashnikov still slung around his body.

The man from the house then motions around the corner, up the street away from the victim, and says in a thick Arabic accent, "Americans!" Then he makes a hand gesture of a gun firing. So to retrieve the young man will mean walking into U.S. sniper fire.

We creep along the wall until we are almost at the end where the intersection begins. If we carefully look through cracks in the masonry, we can see them: three U.S. marines in shooting positions, about a block away, aiming straight down the street toward the victim.

We decide to attempt communication with them. The Brit tries first. "Hello!" she yells. "Can you hear me?"

No response. I give it a try. "We're a medical emergency team! We want to retrieve this man in the street!"

Maybe it's the American accent. "Go ahead!" a soldier yells.

"OK! We're coming out! Don't shoot!" I reply.

We leave the safety of the wall and enter the street. The three marines simply stare at us. We see the man is clearly dead. Leaving his weapon lying on the ground, we pick him up and start to carry him through the streets back to the waiting truck.

• • •

We successfully return to the hospital with the dead fighter, to find that the Palestinian has driven an ambulance through U.S. sniper positions to move wounded people to the hospital. He returns shortly, his mission accomplished, and the shooting victims are carried into the building.

By now night has fallen. Nevertheless, on the next ambulance run, our same team of three volunteers goes out to help. The Palestinian drives murderously fast, and as we wheel around one corner, he yells, "Snipers!" and we all hit the floor of the van.

But there are no shots fired, and we arrive at another clinic in a different part of town to move wounded patients to the main hospital. We run with rolling gurneys through the dark, there being no electricity in Fallujah at the moment, and load the patients into the ambulance for another harrowing ride back.

As soon as we arrive and begin unloading the patients, the hospital staff tell us there is a pregnant woman in premature labor who needs to be brought from her house. And so we are off again, to another part of town. This time there is no warning from the driver, only a rifle crack as U.S. snipers open fire on our ambulance.

The bullets pierce the walls of the vehicle above our heads. Thank God I'm on the floor. Another shooter blows out our headlights, and I hear the Brit, who is in the front seat, scream as pieces of engine spray into the cabin. Then they take out our front tires.

It is madness. We are in a clearly marked ambulance, with a flashing, noisy siren, and they are shooting at us. We in the back huddle on the floor, clutching each other like lovers as another bullet rips into the engine. The driver throws the vehicle into reverse, hitting a curb at tremendous speed and taking out the rear tires. We screech back to the hospital on rims alone.

• • •

The next morning we begin to load our bus, the same one we came to Fallujah in, with wounded people to take to Baghdad hospitals. While this is transpiring, the Iraqi woman we went out with the day before runs up to me.

"The same mission as yesterday, the same place they want us to go," she says. "Do you want to do it?"

I agree and advise that the same three of us should go.

We jump on board the same flatbed truck, carrying a Red Crescent flag. Our favorite mujahideen, a boy of 11 years who is already a seasoned fighter, shouts to us that nothing will happen to us, that they will protect us and that God is on our side.

We roll back toward the kill zone, on the same route as the day before, and again walk from the truck. Where before there were a few marines, now there are scores. A whole line of houses is occupied, and soldiers are visible on every roof, scanning the horizon with field glasses.

"We are an international emergency medical team!" we say. "Please do not shoot us!"

Three marines run down the front stairs of a house and approach us very cautiously. They take up positions on the street and nervously eye us. Their team leader, sweaty and covered with dust, looks me over incredulously, an American man standing in front of him in an orange baseball cap and jeans.

"What in the fuck are you doing here?" he asks.

"We're here to evacuate wounded people," the Brit replies.

Nearby, we find a middle-aged man lying dead in the street. He is unarmed but was shot in his neck and side. As we begin to remove the body, his family pours out of a nearby house, all of them hysterical with grief and fear.

While our Iraqi partner calms the family, the Brit and I return to the marines to negotiate the evacuation of the family, who are one half-block away from the soldiers. The marines also ask us a favor: they have a family in a house they are occupying, and they cannot give them food or water. Can we evacuate them as well? We agree.

As the family in the occupied house emerges, automatic gunfire starts up very close by, and the marines tell us we are going to have to get this thing done fast. Soon, we're headed back to the hospital with two families and three corpses.

By then it is time to leave Fallujah. The bus we came in on is loaded with injured persons. Word is sent out to the mujahideen guarding the roads to let us through safely, and we begin the journey back to Baghdad.

There is only one hitch on the return trip, when we take a wrong turn on the outskirts of town and run into a bunch of fighters who don't know who we are. It seems the city's defenders are not centrally organized, that they work in small groups, and these folks haven't heard about us.

Are we evacuating wounded Americans? Are we spies? It is very tense for a few moments, but luckily the bus is filled with wounded locals, who explain indignantly to the gunmen what is going on, and we are then free to make the long trip back to Baghdad.

David Martinez is a freelance writer and documentary filmmaker who lives in San Francisco.