Private Jason Keough of the Marines said he was blown up three times while taking Al-Nassiriya. Now in an external fixator, to stabilize and align his shattered leg, he says two men died in the attack. “We lost 11 that day.”

He said he was in a “track” (an amphibious vehicle) when they came under anti-tank fire. Only when he got out of the tank did he realize his leg was blown apart. But because they were under fire, he was pulled into another truck, only to find that they were ambushed and couldn’t get out of town to safer ground.

“I was pulled out of the tank, where I picked up someone’s weapon and started shooting.”

After five or ten minutes, Keough said a rocket-propelled grenade hit their tack, and “hit off all kinds of shit we had on board, including C-4s, AT-4s, Javelins, ammunition, blasting caps, everything we had in the tank went off.”

“I thought I lost my leg, it hurt so much, and there was a lot shrapnel in my leg,” said Keough. “It’s broken down my ankle. Shrapnel went through my leg and almost totally removed my entire foot. It’s amazing how they put it all together,” said Keough.

He said the biggest problem is not knowing what’s going on. “They just take us out there to fight. We don’t know what is going on around us. We don’t even know if we’re losing or winning.”

The young private said the Marine Corps “isn’t what I thought it would be. I won’t say it’s a disappointment, but just not what I thought it would be. What makes it worthwhile is the guys you’re with. You do everything together: live together, eat together, sleep together... you know you always have someone behind you — no matter what.”

Capt. Sam Porter, 32, was charged with setting up a blocking position on a bridge over the main north-south corridor the Marines were using. “I was in a fighting hole; a trench that we dug out, it was about chest deep. I turned around to tell my sergeant that we had friendly fire coming in, and that’s all I remember.

“They ran over me, and killed my sergeant Jim Cawley, a father of two.”

He said when he regained consciousness in the foxhole, his radio operator was holding his head to ensure he did not move it or injure his spine. “He had tears running down his face, and just kept saying: ‘Don’t move, Sir. Don’t move, Sir.’”

“The vehicle didn’t see us. The tank ran over him, and me, but I was in the hole. It shattered my face. I was medivaced to here.”

Porter finds it ironic that as a civilian, he worked as a sales representative for a company that manufactures plates and screws to hold faces together. “I used to go into operating rooms with doctors and nurses, so I know exactly what they did to me.

“The right side of my jaw is broken badly,” he said. “The doctor said my jaw shattered and it looks like egg shells there. They wired my mouth together and we’re hoping for the best. They immobilized my upper and lower jaw.”

Sgt. Jacob Hopkins, 22, is also a victim of “friendly fire.” His group was assigned to set up a defensive blocking position on Highway 7 in Iraq. “We were told to move up to eliminate the Fedayeen there, so the 5th Corps Army could make an initial push into Baghdad.”

They were told to push back south because they were going to receive backup fire. “We heard 81mm mortars were going to start, so went south. I was sitting up in the back of a Humvee, scanning the area in the turret. Around 6:30 p.m. the mortars start popping, I watched them get closer and remember thinking this was not a good sign. Then a round hit ten feet from the Humvee, put a hole in the fuel tank, filled my legs with shrapnel and broke my shin bone.”

His Gunnery Sergeant called up to stop the fire. “I was dying because it hurt so badly. They couldn’t find where the blood was coming from, because I had my MOPP suit on.”

Hopkins said the accident helped him decide to leave the Marine Corps when his time is up. “I’ve been married for eight months and we’re expecting our first child in October, so want to have a job where I can spend as much time with them as I can.”

He said he didn’t sign up “to be taken out by friendly fire, but I knew of the risks involved.”

1st Lt. Andrew Turner, 26, with the Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron, said his helicopter had just finished flying a mission into Jalabah. They flew back to a fuel air base and had just taken on fuel. “We had been flying all day, it was night, and we were wearing night vision goggles.”

Turner, a co-pilot, flies Huey’s. “I guess we crashed, I really don’t know. It happened immediately after takeoff.”

Turner thinks the problem may have been “brownout” where flying sand blinds the pilots. “It’s possible to lose it because you don’t have a visual on the ground and can’t break out of the dust. It happened at night, we couldn’t see.”

Turner was thrown out of the craft, but his crew did not make it. “I’ve been flying with this crew since we got here in February, and they were my combat crew.”

He shattered his ankle, and has some stitches in his face. He’s concerned about scars. “Do girls like men with scars on their face?” he asks.

“My family saw the crash on TV,” he said. “A Marine sergeant and a chaplain showed up at my parents’ home at 9:30 p.m. My dad was yelling when he opened the door, because he didn’t know who it was. The first thing they said at the door was: “He’s alive.” They did it right.

Turner said he had no regrets. “You accept the risks when you join any military service. You do everything properly, but it doesn’t always work out, I accept that.”

Sgt. Sidney Young, 35, went with his unit into Umm Qasr. They encountered stiff resistance during the first couple of days. “It was a lot more than we anticipated, about six times more.”

They took incoming mortar fire there, Young said, for two solid days and had to keep moving because the Iraqis were trying to “key in on us.” He said they took four casualties, and one was killed in action.

His Marine Expeditionary Wing had a difficult job because they could not “soften up the territory” before entering. “We couldn’t do it, because we had to keep the city intact.”

Once in Umm Kasr, his men had to go door-to-door. “It’s a much harder task without having bombing first.”

In addition, vehicles would pass waving white flags and then drive behind a building, pull out their guns, and attack them. “Which made it kind of hard to know who is friend or foe.”

Young encountered soldiers wearing civilian clothes, “but they give themselves away because they don’t change their soldier’s boots. They would run out of buildings and attack us, then run back into the building and put on their ‘thobes’ again.”

There was another disturbing tactic: “When some surrendered and were giving up their weapons, a sniper would pop up and try to kill both of you — the Iraqi soldier and us. But still, hundreds gave up.”

Young said life on the ground was hard, and it was impossible to sleep throughout the night. One morning, he saw five Iraqis giving up some 200 meters from where they had been sleeping the night before. “And they had been launching mortars at us throughout the night.”

“In the first five days of the war, there was a lot of fighting; it was really tough, a lot more than we had anticipated. It’s hard to understand what keeps those guys fighting. My personal opinion is that they were able to keep fighting because they had a lot of stuff pre-staged. Everywhere we’ve gone, we found burned documents. And we found a lot of imported illegal goods.”

Not all the Iraqis soldiers they encountered were poor. “They all had brand new weapons, new gear, and new clothes. For a country that is so poor, there’s a lot of stuff. One warehouse we saw in Umm Qasr was full of DVD players.