Generation Kill

by Evan Wright

  Twenty-one-year-old Lance Corporal Jeffrey Carazales from Cuero, Texas, has a profound realization as he cruises through the destruction at the wheel of a Humvee in Bravo’s Third Platoon. “Everything in life is overrated except death. All that shit goes out the window—college, nice cars, pussy. I just don’t want to end up looking like that dude who looks like a box of smashed tomatoes.”

  COLBERT HAS his own problems. His radio is on the same network with Bravo’s Third Platoon under the command of Captain America. All morning Captain America has been tying up the network shouting that his vehicle is coming under fire. “I am so sick of him spazzing out,” Colbert yells, throwing down his headset. “He’s running over rocks and reporting it’s enemy fire.”

  The enlisted Marines riding with Captain America are becoming alarmed. Several days ago, back at the railroad tracks, he picked up weapons discarded by the surrendering Iraqis, among them a small East German machine gun. Now, rolling north of Nasiriyah, he’s begun firing out the window of his Humvee, even when nobody else in his platoon sees any enemy threats.

  While driving past an Iraqi home with an unoccupied Chevy Suburban parked in front, he sprays it with machine-gun fire.

  One of the enlisted men in his vehicle challenges him. “What are you shooting at?” he asks him.

  “The enemy uses SUVs all the time,” he answers. “Any chance to take one out, I will.”

  The Marines don’t necessarily disagree with his logic. It’s the random unexpectedness of his firing. They are trained to call in targets over the radio, not just to verify them but to alert everyone else. Marines aren’t just supposed to run around the countryside shooting guns out the window. One of the Marines who ride in the Humvee with him concludes, “The guy is not right in the head.”

  BUT WHATEVER FAULTS emerge among some commanders and enlisted Marines, everything about racing up a highway in a country you’re invading is baffling. You pass three dead men by the road, surrounded by weapons, then shepherds in the field behind them waving and smiling. There’s a car with a dead woman shot in the backseat—no hint why Marines or helicopters shot her—followed by a burned-up SUV packed with AAA guns in the rear. Many houses we pass have white flags hanging over their front doors, which Marines take to be surrender flags. Then we pass homes with black flags on them. The radios up and down the battalion come to life. Everyone wants to know, are these special flags used to signal enemy fighters? Marines train their weapons on homes flying black flags until word is passed down the net that these are flown by Shia households.

  Marines in Alpha Company spot a BM-21, an Iraqi mobile rocket launcher, moving toward First Recon’s convoy. The battalion halts and calls in an air strike on it.

  While they’re waiting, two men pop up from a berm in the field beside Colbert’s vehicle and take off running. Marines train their guns in on them to shoot, but neither of them have weapons, so they let them go.

  Gunny Wynn spots two men lying down in another berm about 300 meters distant. One seems to be holding something in his hands that glints—binoculars or a gun sight. Pappy and Reyes, who serve as one of the platoon’s sniper teams, set up by the road, with Reyes spotting.

  They observe the two men for about ten minutes. An object continues to glint in one of the men’s hands. Pappy is cleared hot to take him out and fires a single shot. Pappy doesn’t dwell much on the details of his kill. When I ask him about it a short while later, he says, “The man dropped down and did not come up.”

  For his part in the killing, Reyes says, “I pray I’m making the right decisions. My fate is all in the Tao I’ve tried to live by.”

  WHILE WE REMAIN HALTED, waiting for the air strike on the Iraqi rocket launcher, Corporal Michael Saucier from First Recon’s Charlie Company is helping pull road security on the convoy. Saucier, a twenty-year-old from Savage, Minnesota, operates a .50-caliber heavy machine gun and is one of several young Christians in the battalion. In bull sessions with other Recon Marines, he freely talks about his belief in “God, Jesus, the whole nine yards.” At the same time, he’s not really a big Bible-thumper. He counts among his closest friends one of the most profane nonbelievers in the battalion, and plans, when he gets out of the Corps, to go with him on a “Fear and Loathing” tour of Europe. Despite his relaxed attitudes about doctrine—Saucier believes “Christianity should be about sincerity, not a bunch of rules and denominations”—he’s come to war covered in kick-ass Christian tattoos. There’s a cross on his back, a dove on one leg, and the face of Jesus adorns his chest.

  When the convoy stops for a “short halt”—typically one expected to last less than twenty minutes—the vehicles split into two columns. They park on both sides of the road, with the rear wheels of the Humvees in the dirt, the front wheels on the pavement, all of them facing the road at a forty-five-degree angle. The parking maneuver is called a “herringbone.” At both ends of the herringboned convoy, two Humvees pull ahead of the others, park side by side in each lane of the road and face out, orienting their main guns forward to stop traffic from approaching. The procedure for stopping vehicles is for the .50-cal gunners on the Humvees to cart their weapons up and fire warning shots high over approaching cars.

  Saucier is on his team’s .50-cal, mounted in the center of their open-top Humvee, when he and other Marines see a passenger car about 350 meters down the road “acting funny.” The car stops, and four clean-cut young men step out of a nearby field and approach it.

  Of all the little clues Marines are hunting for to determine whether the people and objects in this alien environment are hostile or benign, some facts begin to emerge: Fighters tend to be clean-cut or have mustaches, and farmers usually have beards. The four young men Saucier observes walking up to the car are all clean-cut. They get into the car, and it begins to drive toward Saucier’s Humvee.

  Rules have changed since last night when Marines allowed three civilian vans to roll through their lines unchallenged. Now Marines are under orders to keep all civilian traffic at least 200 meters from their convoy.

  Saucier aims his .50-cal high over the passenger car now approaching and thunks off several warning shots, sending bright tracers coursing over it. The car keeps coming.

  “Light it up!” Marines shout nearby.

  Saucier rips a ten-second burst, riddling the car with 100 armor-piercing incendiary rounds. The vehicle bursts into flames about 150 meters away, then rocks up and down as secondary explosions erupt inside. Nobody gets out.

  Saucier and the other team members who also fired have just killed five men. The day before, by the Euphrates, Saucier fired into buildings in the city where he saw muzzle flashes, but he never saw any people. This is the first time he has seen a bunch of guys, then helped kill them.

  Saucier stares at the burning car as explosions continue to burst inside, and he is relieved. “It means they must have been carrying weapons in there,” he concludes. “Those must have been bad guys.”

  AFTER CHARLIE COMPANY destroys the white car, the battalion resumes its advance.

  Bravo’s Third Platoon pushes in front of us and immediately comes under fire from a sniper hidden somewhere in a gas station. Marines saturate the suspected sniper position with fire and continue north. While they roll, Captain America spots an Iraqi man running through the field outside his window and cuts him down with his East German machine gun.

  After being up all night, then experiencing the adrenaline-fueled ride through Nasiriyah, the morning has a dreamy quality. Charred or colorfully mashed-up people along the road just add to the surreal impression. The mood in Colbert’s Humvee is eerily relaxed.

  Next to me, Trombley opens up an MRE and furtively pulls out a pack of Charms. “Keep it a secret,” he says. In full violation of Colbert’s ironclad no-Charms-because-Charms-are-bad-luck policy, he unwraps the candies and stuffs them into his mouth.

  TWELVE

  °

  BY TEN IN THE MORNING on March 25, First Recon has covered about twenty kilometer
s since passing through Nasiriyah. Neither Lt. Fick nor the Marines in Second Platoon knows what they are doing here on Route 7. Maj. Gen. Mattis’s grand scheme of sending the 6,000-strong RCT-1 from Nasiriyah to Al Kut—now about 165 kilometers north of here—is completely unknown to the men in the platoon.

  Right now the only order the men are operating under is to turn off Route 7 onto a dirt trail winding through an area of dry canals. The trail loosely parallels Route 7, runs for about ten kilometers through a series of small villages and ends outside a town called Al Gharraf (named for the canal). At this point most Marines don’t even know the name of the town, or if it indeed is their final destination for the day. While the 6,000 troops in RCT-1 will continue on Route 7, the 374 Marines in lightly armed First Recon will be invading this little chunk of Mesopotamia all by themselves.

  Another essential piece of information the Marines in the battalion haven’t been given is that the purpose of driving onto this trail is to draw enemy fire. Today marks their first day of serving as ambush bait in central Iraq. They will spend most of the next ten days moving north, either on Route 7 or on parallel dirt trails, frequently ten to twenty-five kilometers ahead of RCT-1, trying to scare enemy forces into attacking. The rationale makes sense when it’s explained to me by Mattis after the invasion: The small force races up back roads ahead of the big force rolling behind on the main road. The enemy orients their troops and weapons on the small force (not realizing it’s the small one), and the big force hits them where they’re not looking for it. It’s a trick that works best when you’re going up against an army like Iraq’s, which has no air assets and bad communications and will have a tough time figuring out that the small force is just a decoy. I admire the plan when Mattis and others explain it to me. And in a way, I’m glad I didn’t know about it in advance, because it would have been scarier to remain with Second Platoon. Perhaps this is why they didn’t tell the Marines in the platoon about this plan either.

  Colbert’s Humvee is in on point for the company when we make the turn off Route 7. There’s a dead man lying in a ditch at the junction. Two hundred meters past the corpse, there’s a farmhouse with a family out front, waving as we drive by. At the next house, two old ladies in black whoop and clap. A bunch of bearded men shout, “Good! Good! Good!” The Marines wave back. In the span of a few minutes, they have gone from kill-anyone-that-looks-dangerous mode to smiling and waving as if they’re on a float in the Rose Bowl parade.

  A kilometer or so onto the trail, we are surrounded by lush fields of grain, then small hamlets nestled beneath palm groves. Rays of sunlight poke through the clouds, turning the dust in the air silver. Fick’s impression is that the “whole place tingles.” And not in a bad way. More villagers run out from their homes, cheering. Grinning fathers hoist up their babies By one house, teenage girls in maroon dresses sneak out from behind a wall. Defying tradition, their heads are uncovered, displaying pretty faces and long black hair. They jump up and down, laughing and waving at the Marines.

  “Damn! Those girls are hot,” Person says.

  “Look alert,” Colbert warns.

  The road dwindles to a single, rutted lane. We crawl along at a couple of miles per hour, then stop. Several boys, about nine or ten, scramble up from a dry creek bed on our right. They come within about five meters of the Humvee and start yelling, “Hello, America!” Some of them put their hands to their mouths, begging for food.

  Colbert tries to ignore them. One of the kids, however, stares him down. He makes clownish faces at Colbert, trying to make him laugh.

  “Fuck it,” Colbert says. “Break out the humrats,” he says, referring to humanitarian rations. “Let’s feed the ankle-biters.”

  We throw several bright yellow humrat packs out the window. As kids run up to grab them, Colbert says, “You’re welcome. Vote Republican.” He gazes at them, now yelling and fighting each other for the humrat packs, and adds, “I really thank God I was born American. I mean, seriously, it’s something I lose sleep over.”

  By now, a shamal dust storm has begun to brew. Obliteration of sunlight in a true shamal, as this one is, is nearly complete. A typical Iraqi shamal produces a dust cloud that extends three to six kilometers from the Earth’s surface into the upper atmosphere. The sky turns brown or red or yellow, depending on the complexion of the dust. Our sky is the color of bile—brown tinged with yellow. Winds now gust up to fifty miles an hour. We hear thunder.

  First Recon’s convoy becomes twisted up on the back trails winding through the hamlets and palm groves. One set of vehicles takes a wrong turn. A bridge indicated on the map turns out not to exist. A couple of the battalion’s seven-ton trucks nearly tumble into a dry canal when the roadway gives out. It takes about an hour for the convoy to “unfuck” itself. When it does, Bravo Company, which had been in the lead, ends up at the rear. The battalion convoy is cut in two, with Alpha, Charlie and Headquarters in front, and Bravo a few kilometers back.

  Colbert’s vehicle creeps forward, hugging the edge of a dry canal. Here the canal is about seven meters deep and an equal distance across. The Humvee is squeezed between a two-meter-high berm on the left and the canal on the right. We’re on a donkey path, on the verge of slipping into the canal. We find out from the battalion radio that RCT-1, moving several kilometers west of here on the highway, is in contact with suspected Republican Guard units.

  We round a bend. A village directly across from us on the other side of the dry canal looks like something out of a Sergio Leone Western. Tumbleweed blows past crude adobe huts. One of them has a peaked roof and arches in the entrance, making it resemble a small Spanish church. Villagers stream south (against the direction in which we are moving) on the opposite side of the canal. There are dozens of them—women carrying bundles on their heads, children and old ladies pulling handcarts loaded with household goods. Whereas an hour earlier villagers had been waving and smiling, the demeanor of these people is radically different. Most avoid eye contact with us. Some on the other side of the canal break into a run when they see us approach. Watching them go, Colbert concludes, “These people are fleeing.”

  On our side of the canal, an Iraqi man walks briskly past Bravo Company’s first sergeant and gives him the thumbs-down, indicating trouble ahead. Then a villager tells a Marine translator that they are fleeing because enemy forces are preparing for an attack in the town north of here.

  Inside Colbert’s vehicle we hear the news of a possible attack over the radio while watching the continued exodus of villagers. Black clouds roll overhead. Lightning flashes. The winds are so strong now, the palm fronds on the surrounding trees have flipped backward. We’re riding directly into the wind. Colbert shakes his head, laughing. “Could it look any worse than this? Every sign is telling us something bad is going to happen.”

  Moments later, gunfire erupts ahead. The five Humvees from Bravo’s Third Platoon are directly in front of us, squeezed onto the donkey trail in a single-file column. The weird Spanish-looking village remains beside us across the canal on our right. To the left over a berm, there’s a small cluster of two-story adobe huts, with palm trees growing between them. Unseen people inside this mini-hamlet seem to be shooting at Third Platoon.

  We stop. More rifle shots crackle.

  “There’s incoming rounds to our rear,” Person says, sounding almost bored as he passes on a report from the radio.

  “Damn it,” says Colbert. “I have to take a shit.”

  Instead, Colbert picks up a 40mm grenade, kisses the nose of it and slides it into the 203 launcher on his rifle. He opens the door and climbs up the embankment on the left to observe the homes on the other side. He signals for all the Marines to come out of the vehicle and join him. Marines from other vehicles fire into the hamlet with rifles, machine guns and Mark-19s. There are about forty-five seconds of popping and booming, then it stops.

  “They say we’re taking fire from those huts,” Colbert says, eyeing the hamlet through binoculars. “I see no tar
gets.”

  “There’s people poking their heads out behind a palm tree!” another Marine on the berm shouts.

  Trombley lies next to Colbert with his SAW poised to fire. “Should I light ’em up?” he asks Colbert.

  “No, not yet, Trombley. Those are civilians.”

  ALPHA AND CHARLIE COMPANIES are currently about two kilometers ahead of us on the same trail on the outskirts of the town where locals have warned of an enemy attack. The Marines are surrounded by open fields on the right and a row of huts and two-story houses about 300 meters back from them on the left. As the lead Humvees in Alpha (who are at the front of the battalion) draw alongside these structures, they come under heavy machine-gun and AK fire. Then enemy mortars burst in the fields to the right.

  The lead troops in Alpha immediately dismount and take cover behind a meter-high, mud-brick wall on the left side of the road. The fire is coming from the village structures a few hundred meters beyond this wall.

  The main road into Al Gharraf is about 300 meters farther ahead of them. Though the sky has darkened from the gathering sandstorm, the cobalt-blue dome of a mosque is visible ahead, rising over the town. It’s about the only color that can be seen anywhere.

  Behind Alpha on the same trail, the Marines in Charlie Company come under fire. Saucier, the .50-cal gunner with Jesus tattooed on his chest, is among those taking cover. Everyone is crouched low, frantically looking around, trying to figure out where the shooting is coming from. Saucier, however, becomes distracted. A couple hundred meters away there’s a woman in black walking through the field. The winds are so powerful she leans into them, her robe billowing behind her. She’s using both hands to drag a large child—maybe a six- or seven-year-old boy—across the berms. The kid has obviously been shot or wounded—Saucier thinks from an enemy mortar burst, since several of these hit near where the woman had been walking. He observes her for several seconds, then struggles to turn away and refocus on his own survival. “You can’t dwell on this stuff here,” he later says. “But I’ll definitely take it home with me.”