We wait in the desert for the war to start. A sandstorm kicks up. Visibility is 20 feet. Sand and dust and dirt get into every crevice, every weapon, food and water.

I'm still thinking of riding with Kilo, but I see that Simon and Bob are stuck in the back of an Amtrac, where it's hot, loud and cramped. And 'Tracs are big targets for an Iraqi with a rocket or mortar.

Then it occurs to me: ride with McCoy. Darkside has his own humvee. He rides close to the action. But he's smart enough to stay safe.

I approach him with my suggestion and he says yes. I'm thinking I'm pretty smart until I overhear him say, "I'll never get shot. People get killed all around me, but I never get hit."

This does not fill me with confidence.

But I take my gear to his vehicle. McCoy is in the front passenger seat next to a couple of vehicle-mounted radios. Cpl. Omar Monge is the driver, Lance Cpl. Garfield Shealy is McCoy's radio operator and Lance Cpl. Samuel Baynes rides in the turret hatch, manning an M-60 machine gun. I ride in the back.

We wait in the blowing sand.

Every couple of hours, we hear the alarm: "Gas, gas, gas." We scramble for the gas masks strapped to our hips and drag them over our heads. You can't breathe well in a gas mask. Air comes in through a filter on the side. Sweat drips down your cheeks and under your neck.

Everyone in the military trains for chemical, biological and nuclear attack. This has been going on for decades, since I was a young Marine. But it's taken on new urgency with this war.

People talk about how and when Saddam will use chemical or biological weapons. Most figure he'll wait until the noose is tight on Baghdad and he's about to go down in flames. Because it's a given that his army won't beat the U.S. military.

Even so, every time someone thinks he hears an artillery shell going off in Iraq, the gas alert sounds. If an Iraqi coughs on the other side of the border, a gas alert goes up. We stay masked for 10 minutes, 15, sometimes as much as an hour, before the all-clear sounds. Some guys fall asleep wearing their masks.

"I'd like to beat the hell out of whoever came up with the idea of chemical weapons to begin with," says Sgt. Kevin Smith, of Natchez, Miss.

Smith is a long-faced Southern boy who likes chewing tobacco and dirty jokes. He's one of my best friends in the battalion.

Late in the afternoon, I find Smith sitting on a dirt mound, opening an MRE.

"Please, join me, Mr. Koopman," he says. "I'm Kevin and I'll be your waiter this evening."

I sit down, and Smith opens one of the tan plastic bags. "Our special this evening is beefsteak with savory gravy," he says. "For dessert, we have some nice, um, Skittles."

"Where's my napkin?" I ask.

Smith hands me a rolled-up MRE toilet-paper ration and asks if I'd like to see the wine list.

We share the tepid water from his canteen.

Later, word comes down for everyone to put on MOPP suits. MOPP stands for Mission Oriented Protective Posture. Basically, it's a jacket and pants designed to protect the wearer from chemical and biological agents. It has an activated charcoal lining and can breathe, but not well.

We're told we'll stay in the suits until after we've crossed the border, maybe through the end of the war. We wear the suits over T-shirts and shorts; it's too hot for regular clothes.

We hear the sound of American artillery fire pounding Iraq. Helicopters buzz back and forth across the border. Inside the battalion tactical center, radios buzz. Engineers on the border are coming under Iraqi mortar attacks. A Marine tank has been hit by a Hellfire missile, fired from a Cobra gunship, in the first friendly-fire incident of the war.

No one knows what's going on to the north. No one knows whether the Iraqi army will hit hard or fade away.

An intelligence report says the Medina Division of Iraq's Republican Guard has secretly moved from Baghdad to the border.

The Medina Division is about the only Iraqi unit that the Marines respect. And now, allegedly, here it are, ready to get down to business.

The news scares the hell out of me. Have the Iraqis developed a plan to ambush the Marines? It doesn't seem possible that the Iraqi military would win this, or any fight. Still, they could inflict damage and kill people. I have thoughts of a bloodbath. I picture hundreds of Iraq tanks dug into ambush positions. I picture the battalion caught in the middle, explosions all around, people dying and me trying to crawl into a hole.

The battalion staff stays up all night rewriting the battle plan. They have one night to redo what the division has worked on for months. No one gets much sleep.

If anyone is worried, they don't show it.

"Looks like the Republican Guard is going to come out and play," McCoy says in the morning. "Well, good on 'em. We'll slaughter them, too."

The war starts in the morning.

The order to move comes from Ripper 6, the regimental commander, Col. Steve Hummer. McCoy's boss.

Pretty much the entire 1st Marine Division starts forward toward Iraq. The land is flat and sandy. You can see thick smoke on the horizon to the west and north.

The military movement is slow. The border between Iraq and Kuwait is strung with long lines of concertina wire and a deep trench. Engineers were there the night before to blow holes in the wire and make sure roads crossed the trenches. The result, however, is that Marine tanks and trucks bottleneck trying to get over the border quickly.

McCoy taps his radio handset impatiently against his helmet. "Go! Go! We've got to get past this!" he says to no one in particular.

Finally, the battalion moves through the gap. Into Iraq.

Now it's for real.

But there are no Iraqis. The battalion's tanks and AAVs pick up speed, cruising over bumps and berms north toward Basra, Iraq's second-largest city.

About a half hour after crossing the border, I see Iraqis. They live in low mud huts encircled by low mud walls. The terrain is greener here than in Kuwait. There are plowed fields and scrub brush.

People have hung white flags on their rooftops. They gather in courtyards to watch the tanks and trucks rumble past. Some wave. Most do not.

The Marines are on constant alert. At every stop, they dismount and set up defensive positions in the dirt. No one knows when or from where an attack might come.

There is none. The reports that the Iraqi Medina Division was readying for a border fight were false.

And then, we're at Basra.

Three-Four is ordered to attack and secure bridges on the outskirts of town, to attack and defeat the 51st Mechanized Infantry Division, which has its garrison on the southeast side of the city, and to secure Basra International Airport.

There is almost no fighting. Only scattered skirmishes, when some unlucky, or hardheaded, Iraqi soldier decides to dig in and make a fight of it. "We had guys out there killing the enemy," McCoy says. "A lot of Iraqis simply surrendered, but there were a few out there who decided to make a stand. You've got to respect them for that."

McCoy drives around the battlefield, looking for any place Iraqis might put up a fight. He goes to the garrison where the Iraqi division had been. Marine tanks prowl the roadway. They fire at Iraqi armored vehicles in the distance. You can see the rounds hit. Sparks shower the horizon to the sound of a distant "boom."

Most Iraqi armor appears to be abandoned and, in many cases, nonfunctional. But the tankers blow holes through them, just in case.

Adjacent to the Iraqi garrison barracks is a road that becomes known among the Marines as "Hogan's Alley." It's a reference to a training area at Quantico, Va., run by the FBI, where cops and Marines and soldiers practice "fire/don't-fire" exercises.

In this case, the Marines have Iraqi civilians in the distance and surrendering Iraqi soldiers alongside the various tanks and armored vehicles, as well as the occasional soldier who wants to fight.

The tanks move on the left side of the road. Their cannon blasts raise huge dust clouds. The concussion is tremendous. If you're within two city blocks of tank cannon, the blast hits you in the chest like a 2-by-4.

Across the ditch to the left is a family of sheepherders. Two young men, a boy, three women and a donkey. They're terrified.

The tank guns fire over them, slightly to the left and right.

Marine tank commanders get out of their top hatches and motion for the family to stay put and stay down.

"I was real worried for that family," Capt. Bryan Lewis, commander of the tank company, says later. "I was really quite proud that we got through there and did our job and they didn't have a scratch on them when we left."

It's at Hogan's Alley that the legend of Darkside grows.

As the tanks fire to the left, McCoy's humvee crawls along behind them to the right. McCoy gets out his binoculars and tries to make out hits in the distance. The humvee stops and McCoy looks to his right.

There, about 50 yards away, is an Iraqi T-55 tank. It's been dug into the dirt. Its turret is aboveground and its machine gun visible. If someone is inside that tank, he has only to traverse the turret and shoot us at point-blank range.

McCoy jumps out of the humvee with his M-16, followed by Shealy, the radio operator. The two men run over to the tank, pointing their rifles into the ditches and trenches dug next to it.

McCoy jumps onto the tank and tries the hatch. It's "battle-hatched," or locked from the inside. Which means there's probably a crew inside.

The two Marines run back to the humvee. McCoy yells, "Light it up." The colonel and Shealy fire their M-16s at the tank. The turret gunner, Baynes, opens up with his M-60. The bullets bounce harmlessly off the armor, knocking around the machine gun. Darkside is trying to rattle whoever's inside. Considering how close we are to the tank, this does not seem to be the best idea.

McCoy grabs a fragmentation grenade -- known as a "frag" -- from his vest and runs toward the tank. He throws the grenade into the trench next to the turret and hits the deck. The frag goes off; dust and dirt bounce 3 feet into the air.

Still nothing. We drive off. McCoy calls the Marine tank commander and tells him to hit the Iraqi tank. And I'm thinking, there's someone in there. Maybe a couple of guys. They're dead moments later when a high-explosive round blasts the turret.

Word gets around. Not only among the men of Three-Four but the regiment: Darkside is a hard charger. He gets up to where the fighting is. And he frags tanks.

"I can't let the lance corporals have all the fun," McCoy says.

He wasn't being entirely impetuous. Darkside also wanted to motivate his men. And he did.

As the Marines mop up around the garrison, it becomes clear that the Iraqis have no fight in them. The barracks are empty because the Iraqis have run. And now Iraqi soldiers start surrendering in groups. As the Marines drive down dirt roads, they find uniforms scattered everywhere. Helmets and AK-47s are in the ditches. There are so many guns lying around, the Marines don't bother to take them all. Sometimes they just run over them, trying to break them into pieces.

The battalion now turns its attention to the airport.

McCoy gets on the radio to put his infantry and tanks together for a fast strike. Night has fallen, but that means nothing. Everyone has night-vision goggles. They wear them on their helmets and look like alien creatures.

But swampy land and the fog of war slow things down. In the middle of the night, the Marines swing around to the edge of the airport, but not everyone is in place, so the attack waits until dawn.

We sit in total darkness all night. I sleep about two hours, total. There's no room in the backseat of a humvee. Only about 3 inches of leg room. I sleep sitting upright, my body armor pushed up around my neck to keep my head from lolling to the side.

As the sun comes up, the Marines move in from the south. McCoy lets everyone know they are to leave the civilian portion of the airport alone. The U.S. military doesn't want to have to rebuild the area after the war. They focus on a military complex to the east.

A couple of low buildings and an earthen berm encircle an empty stretch of ground the size of a football field. Tanks and AAVs set up about 300 yards from the complex and pour machine-gun fire into it. Sparks fly from the buildings as the big .50 cals walk up and down the compound. From the distance, you see figures of men running. And falling under the hail of half-inch-thick bullets.

Then it's quiet. No targets present themselves. The buildings are shot to hell. The Marine turrets move left and right, looking for something, anything, to shoot.

This is the first combat I witness. It is anti-climactic. But the war has just begun.

A man appears in the distance. He's alone. Holding a white flag. He's wearing the green shirt and trousers of a regular army soldier, but no hat, and carrying no weapon.

"Keep the 60 on him," McCoy tells Baynes, in the turret. The man walks slowly toward the colonel's humvee. The driver, Cpl. Monge, gets out and motions for the man to lie face down in the dirt.

Monge kneels on the man's back and frisks him, twisting his torso to one side and then the other to search his pockets. He finds nothing but cash. A big wad of bills, all Iraqi dinars. Which means the whole stack might buy one good lunch in Baghdad.

"He said everyone is deserting," Monge reports. "He said he went to sleep last night dug in with his unit over by the bridge, and when he woke up everyone had gone but three of them. His buddy was too afraid to come out. He told this guy to go over and surrender, and if he lived through it, the other guy would come, too."

The radio crackles. Tan-colored vehicles are crossing a bridge to the north, heading toward the airport. Iraqi reinforcements. Inside his AAV, the Kilo Company commander, Capt. Kevin Norton, sees the Iraqis. He calls in artillery. The bridge and adjacent woods are engulfed in smoke as big shells scream in and lay waste to everything.

An old Sheraton Hotel separates the military compound from the civilian side of the airport. Marines move into the lobby. Gunshots ring out and explosions spark through the windows as grenades go off inside.

It's here that the only Marine injuries occur. A couple of guys throw grenades into rooms, to clear them, and they bounce back, fragging the throwers. But no one is hurt badly.

And so the Basra airport falls. At the terminal building, a dozen Iraqi civilians come out to greet the Marines. They're fearful, first of the Marines, and then, when it becomes obvious they won't be shot, for their families. They've seen Marine artillery shells landing in the city, in the direction of their homes. Artillery makes a godawful blast. It scares everyone.

The battalion moves down the road. People are exhausted. Norton, the Kilo Company commander, has a glazed look in his eyes. He can't focus. He has been without sleep for three days. He has killed Iraqis, coordinated his troops. Finally, incoherent, he puts his executive officer in charge and takes a nap.

"Norton's in the zone," McCoy says after a briefing. "It's the feeling you get when you run a marathon. Late in the game, you're past exhausted. Your brain stops functioning and you run on pure adrenaline. It's a scary place."

McCoy turns control of the airport over to British troops. The British will stay in Basra and fight a guerrilla war. Probably with the same troops who dropped their uniforms and guns along the side of the road.

People will look at Basra as a place where the Iraqis fought hard, harder than many imagined.

But not against the Marines.

On the way out, McCoy stops to cut down an Iraqi flag. It's on a flagpole at the entrance to the airport. The flagpole is adjacent to a huge poster of Saddam's face. McCoy uses his bayonet to cut off Saddam's mustache. Two guard shacks flank the entrance. Parked next to one shack are two vehicles, riddled with holes. One is a pickup and it's black from fire. It has an anti-aircraft gun attached to a trailer hitch.

As we drive past the pickup, I see the body of a man, maybe the driver. He's lying on his side in the charred vehicle. He's burned beyond recognition. The skin on his face is burned off to expose teeth locked in an eternal grimace.

"Man, that dude's f-- up," Shealy says.

I see a Marine approach the pickup, holding a camera. I'm thinking, 'Don't take that picture.' He puts the camera to his face and snaps a photograph. McCoy is on the radio, talking to Ripper 6. The Marines are on their way to Baghdad. Orders have them driving to the east side of the city. There they are to engage another mechanized division.

The plan has the 3rd Battalion taking a bridge, crossing it and fighting and harassing the Iraqi tanks until Marine tanks can get across and blast the hell out of them. In McCoy's words, Three-Four will "grab the tiger by the tail" until the tanks get across.

"Gents, you're about to make history," McCoy tells the Marines in his humvee.

This plan sounds suspiciously dangerous. But the Marines, once again, are nothing but optimistic. They're still looking for a good fight.

But first, there's about 300 miles of desert.

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