Generation Kill

by Evan Wright

  “For once,” Doc Bryan observes, “we were saved by the man’s incompetence.”

  AFTER THE ARTILLERY STRIKE is scratched, Encino Man finally issues orders. The Marines are to remain by the road—on the south end of Ar Rifa—and form defensive lines as best they can in this vulnerable place. Their job is to prevent enemy forces from advancing from the town and attacking RCT-1’s convoys now rolling past on Route 7.

  Enemy fighters in the town continue to take potshots. Person is manning the SAW set up outside the Humvee when he spots muzzle flashes coming from a window, fortified with barbed wire and sandbags, seventy-five meters away. He shoots into it, and Marines up the road join in. They saturate it with Mark-19 rounds, bringing down a wall of the building.

  “Damn sucka!” Person says, watching dust rise from the partially destroyed structure.

  Wild dogs run out from a gap in the town’s walls. Women and children stand in an alley beside the building the Marines just hit. A rooster starts to cockledoodledo even though it’s afternoon. There are several loud bangs behind us. Marine snipers set up facing the fields to the rear have no idea what caused the explosions.

  Fick approaches, sprinting to the Humvee, low to the ground to avoid enemy snipers, and smiles when he reaches me behind Colbert’s vehicle. Both he and Gunny Wynn are being threatened with disciplinary action because of the incident with Encino Man an hour ago. Fick has been told he might be relieved of his command for “disobeying orders.” (The Marine who actually called the commander a “dumb motherfucker” never receives reprimand.)

  Nevertheless, Fick has grown suddenly gabby. He crouches behind a Humvee tire beside me and says, “This truly illustrates how safety is entirely relative.” Then, while machine guns rip and sniper rifles bang up and down the line, he launches into a discussion more appropriate for an all-night cram session at the Dartmouth library than for a low-intensity firefight.

  “Most people in America right now probably think Iraq is a dangerous country.” He gestures to a patch of dirt in the open, two meters from the Humvee. “Now, if I were to stand up there, I would probably get killed. But to us, behind this Humvee it’s pretty safe. So relatively speaking, to us Iraq is a safe country right here behind this tire. I feel pretty safe here. Do you feel safe?”

  “Pretty safe, I guess.”

  “See!” He laughs. “If you were to call somebody at home right now and say, ‘Hey, I’m in Iraq right now. I’m with a handful of Marines. We’re isolated on the south end of a hostile city, and there are people shooting at us on both sides, but I feel pretty safe right now because I’m on this patch of dirt behind a Humvee,’ they’d think you were nuts.” He laughs. “People don’t understand how relative everything is on the battlefield.” He laughs again. “Or it could be we invent this relativism in our minds to comfort ourselves.” He taps the wheel well. “Because we both know this Humvee isn’t going to stop an RPG or any number of other very bad things that could happen here at any moment.”

  Espera crawls up. “Sir, my men are all worried about the people in that ville organizing mass RPG volleys against us, like they did to those Amtracs we saw blown on the way up here.”

  “Just keep your men dispersed from the vehicles,” Fick says.

  “Roger that, sir,” Espera says. “But we’re still worried, sir.”

  “We’re going to be here for a long time,” Fick says. “I don’t like it. But there’s nothing you or I or anyone can do about it.”

  There are several loud cracks behind us—rounds from enemy snipers.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus!” Colbert says, highly annoyed. He’s lying on the ground, glassing the city through binoculars, listening to the company radio network on a portable unit. He turns to Fick. “Sir, our great commander,” he says, referring to Encino Man, “just had the wherewithal to inform me there seem to be enemy snipers about. He suggests we ought to be on the lookout for them.”

  Person laughs. “Brad,” he says, calling Colbert by his first name. “Check it out, over there.” He points to a spot near the barricades into the city.

  Colbert turns his binoculars in the direction Person is pointing.

  “Person,” he asks, “are those ducks…?”

  “Yeah, they’re fucking.” Person laughs.

  TWO KILOMETERS up the road a group of townspeople waving white flags climb around the barricades carrying a five- or six-year-old girl with a sucking chest wound. Capt. Patterson’s Marines in Alpha Company have been taking sporadic mortar hits all afternoon at their position on the northern end of Ar Rifa. But seeing the townspeople come out carrying the small body with limp, dangling legs, the Marines hold their fire.

  Despite all the stories circulating among Marines of Iraqis posing as civilians and using false surrenders to lure them into ambushes, a corpsman and several enlisted Marines race up to the street to treat the wounded girl.

  Patterson summons a translator, and the townspeople tell him that the girl was shot by Saddam loyalists. They say there are 1,500 to 2,000 of them in the city, with many of them concentrated around one building. Patterson checks the location of the building on his map. It corresponds with preexisting intelligence that had identified it as a Baath Party headquarters. He calls an artillery strike, with high-explosive (HE) rounds capable of destroying large structures. The first rounds scream in and fall 300 meters short of the target. Landing as they do in a dense urban area, Patterson is pretty certain they caused civilian casualties—and later this suspicion is corroborated when he hears ambulance sirens wailing in the city.

  But Patterson’s men adjust several more rounds onto the correct target, wiping it out. News that the Americans have destroyed the main Baath headquarters in Ar Rifa appears to spread quickly through the town.

  Within several minutes of the final artillery blasts, people fill the streets and rooftops across the city. What appears to be happening is almost a textbook case of liberation. A show of American force, coupled with a somewhat pinpoint hit on a military headquarters, has caused a rout of hostile forces. Shooting on Marine positions ceases almost immediately.

  Across from Colbert’s position we see the outpouring of people. Initially, Marines who’ve been hunkered down receiving sniper fire and occasionally shooting up buildings across the street are wary. Old women in black robes rise up on rooftops where previously Marines had been trying to pick off enemy snipers.

  “Don’t shoot the old ladies,” Colbert warns his team.

  Then young men waving white flags walk onto the road. Bravo Company sends out its translator to greet them. The translator is a seriously overweight nineteen-year-old Kuwaiti who goes by the nickname “Meesh.” I’ve gotten to know Meesh in the past few days. Beneath his MOPP suit he wears a tie-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirt and has a long ponytail he folds under his helmet. He speaks in colloquial American English and is a heavy dope smoker. The whole invasion he’s been bumming because the night before we left Kuwait he got so stoned that, as he says, “Dude, I lost all my chronic in my tent. I’m hurtin’.”

  Despite his MTV American English, Meesh is Kuwaiti to the core. The first time I try speaking with him he refuses to talk until I bribe him with several packs of Marlboro Reds. The Marine utility vest he wears, designed to carry up to sixty pounds of ammunition, is instead loaded with baksheesh. Meesh hates Iraqis, who he claims killed one of his relatives during their invasion of Kuwait, and every time he interrogates civilians or soldiers on behalf of the Marines, he forces them to hand over any cigarettes, cash, valuable trinkets, liquor or beer they might be carrying. (Under Saddam’s secular rule, Iraq operated numerous breweries and distilleries.) Given the fact that Meesh is invariably backed up by heavily armed Marines, Iraqis eagerly shower him with tribute. Meesh carries so many bottles of beer, liquor, cigarettes and other sundries in his vest, he looks like a walking kiosk.

  The thing about Meesh that earns him the undying respect of Marines is his total obliviousness to danger. Outside Ar Rifa, he walks alone on the hi
ghway to greet the townspeople who’ve come out with surrender flags. Behind him, Marines tensely watch through their scopes and gun sights, half expecting Meesh to go down in a hail of ambush fire.

  But after several minutes in which he stands there, chatting with townspeople, and no one shoots him, several officers join him, among them Fick.

  “What did they say?” Fick asks.

  Meesh belches. It takes him a long time to answer. Meesh does everything at a sclerotic pace. Even rolling his eyeballs to look at you seems to tax him. He builds up his strength, taking several drags from the Marlboro hanging from his lip, and says, “The people of Ar Rifa are grateful to be liberated and welcome the Americans as friends.”

  It’s the stock answer Meesh always gives after speaking to Iraqis. Meesh claims he works for the CIA—“I got into some trouble in Kuwait, working for a ‘party,’ which is what we call drug gangs in my country, but I have some friends in the royal family, and they hooked me up with the CIA”—and his translations always seem to conform to a script provided by his handlers.

  “That’s all they said?” Fick asks. “You spoke to those guys for ten minutes!”

  “They say they don’t want us to leave the town,” Meesh adds. “They’re afraid as soon as we go the Baath, dudes are going to come back and kill them.”

  Ar Rifa is another Shia city that rose up against Saddam after President George H. W. Bush’s call to rebellion in 1991. As in Nasiriyah, the uprising was put down, and the citizens were treated to months of bloody reprisals.

  Maj. Gen. Mattis’s strategy of racing north as fast as possible precludes putting forces inside towns after they’ve been “liberated.” The Marines or the CIA or whoever is actually in charge of this operation at Ar Rifa have come up with a stopgap measure to protect the citizens. Right now, Meesh is the sole agent responsible for executing this plan.

  He hands out infrared chemlites to the men who’ve come out of the town waving white flags. Their job tonight, after the Marines depart, is to put these chemlites on top of buildings and other locations inside the city occupied by Baath Party members or Fedayeen. American aircraft will then fly over the town and bomb any position they see illuminated by the infrared chemlites.

  Fick is as intrigued by this plan as I am. After Meesh distributes the chemlites, we both accost him. I bribe him with several more packs of Marlboros, and Fick asks him, “How do you know those guys aren’t just going to put those chemlites on the homes of people they owe money to, or have some other grudge against?”

  “Believe me,” Meesh says. “They’re good dudes. We can trust ’em.” He proffers a bottle to Fick. “Beer?”

  “No thanks, Meesh,” Fick says.

  “Yeah,” Meesh says. “It’s not the good shit. It’s local brewed.”

  AS THE SUN DROPS, muezzins call the faithful to prayer from minarets and loudspeakers across Ar Rifa. Then the city erupts with celebratory AK fire. We sit inside Colbert’s vehicle eating cold MREs in the darkness. In recent days, rations were cut from three to two meals per day. There is a silver lining to having your rations cut. When you eat MREs in abundance, they taste foul. Now, with everyone having a constant edge of hunger, meals that once tasted like dried kitchen sponges in chemical sauce are pretty tasty. Everyone plows through the ratfuck bag, eagerly retrieving meals like Chicken Jambalaya and Vegetarian Alfredo that a week ago no one would have touched.

  We are happily eating when, from behind us on the highway, we hear the sound of rolling gunfire. All of us look out into the darkness and see dozens of orange tracer rounds spewing out from both sides of an approaching U.S. military convoy.

  “Everybody get down!” Colbert shouts. We dive to the floor of the Humvee. The American trucks pass, mistakenly discharging a torrent of automatic weapons fire toward our Humvee and those in the rest of the company. Tracers skim over the hood. A high-caliber American round slices through the armor plates, penetrating the vehicle behind Trombley and me. The shooting lasts about twenty seconds. “It’s fucking friendlies,” Colbert says, uncurling himself from the floor.

  After dark, the Marine Humvees put out infrared strobe lights invisible to the naked eye. Their rhythmic flashing is designed to be seen through NVGs, to help other drivers locate the position of your vehicle. The problem is, to nervous, inexperienced personnel the infrared strobes look like enemy muzzle flashes. Fick later finds out that we were shot at by Navy reservist surgeons on their way to set up a mobile shock-trauma unit on the road ahead. “Those were fucking doctors who a few weeks ago were doing nose and tit jobs in Santa Fe Springs,” Fick tells his men, laughing. “The fucking POGest of the POGs. Luckily, they’re not the best sharpshooters.”

  Several Humvees up the line are hit, but no Marines are injured. Within minutes of the latest near-death episode, Trombley is snoring, sound asleep.

  FIFTEEN

  °

  AFTER THE FRIENDLY-FIRE incident outside Ar Rifa on the evening of March 26, Fick pokes his head into Colbert’s vehicle to inform him that the Marines’ night is just getting started. During the next six hours the battalion is going to race across open roads and desert trails, advancing twenty-five to thirty kilometers behind enemy lines, in order to set up observation on an Iraqi military airfield near a town called Qalat Sukhar. All of this has to be done as quickly as possible. A British parachute brigade is planning to seize the airfield at dawn. But reports have come in from U.S. spy planes that the airfield may be defended with AAA batteries and T-72 tanks. First Recon will go there to make sure the way is clear for the British.

  The mission is plagued with snafus from the start. A battalion supply truck becomes stuck in the mud outside Ar Rifa. First Recon halts for forty-five minutes, while higher-ups debate whether or not to extract the truck. They decide to leave it and come back for it later. Shortly after we pull out, the truck is looted, hit by at least one RPG and burned to the ground. It had been carrying the battalion’s main supply of food rations. As a result of this incident, everyone will be reduced to about one and a half meals per day until we reach Baghdad.

  By midnight we have been driving for several hours. For the last forty-five minutes the Humvee has been rocking up and down like a boat. We are in the dark on a field covered in berms, each about a meter high, like waves. Despite Colbert’s efforts to track the battalion’s route using maps and frequent radio checks with Fick, he has no idea where we are.

  “Dude, I am so lost right now,” Colbert says. It’s a rare admission of helplessness, a function of fatigue setting in after ninety-six hours of little or no sleep since the shooting started at Nasiriyah.

  “I see where we’re going, don’t worry,” Person says. His speech is clipped and breathless. He’s tweaking on Ripped Fuel tablets, which he’s been gobbling for the past several days. “Do you remember the gay dog episode on South Park, when Sparky runs away cause he’s, like, humping other dogs and shit?”

  “Fuck yeah,” Colbert says. He and Person repeat the tagline from the episode: “‘Hello there, little pup. I’m Big Gay Al!’”

  “They opened a gay club in the town where I’m from in Michigan,” Trombley says. “People trashed it every night. They had to close it after a month.”

  “Yeah,” Person says, a note of belligerence in his voice. “When I get back I’m gonna start a gay club. I’ll call it the Men’s Room. There will be, like, a big urinal with a two-way mirror everyone pisses against. It will be, like, facing the bar, so when everyone’s drinking there will be, like, these big cocks pissing at them.”

  “Person,” Colbert says. “Give it a rest, please.”

  AT THREE-THIRTY in the morning on March 27, the battalion reaches the edge of the enemy airfield, stopping about two kilometers from it. The Humvees set up a defensive perimeter. Colbert’s team pulls down the cammie nets and we dig Ranger graves in the darkness. It’s nearly freezing. Most of the Marines are kept up on watch. Two Recon teams are pushed out on foot to observe the airfield for what they have been
told is the coming British paratrooper landing. But they are called back at dawn.

  Sometime around six in the morning First Recon’s commander, Lt. Col. Ferrando, receives a phone call from Maj. Gen. Mattis asking him what’s on the airfield. The British are set to begin their air assault at seven-thirty. The latest reports from American observation planes say there are up to four T-72 tanks on the field and perhaps several batteries of AAA, enough to wreak havoc on the British. Ferrando is forced to tell Mattis he still doesn’t know what’s on the airfield. His Recon teams were unable to reach it within the allotted time.

  Ferrando tells Mattis his battalion will seize the field. It’s a bold decision, since Ferrando believes that if reports of armor on the field are true, the mission will result in “tens or hundreds of casualties among my men.”

  AT SIX-TWENTY in the morning, Colbert, who’d crawled into his Ranger grave ninety minutes earlier to catch some shut-eye, is awakened by Fick. “We are assaulting the airfield,” he tells him. “We have ten minutes to get on the field.”

  The Marines race around the Humvee, pulling down the cammie nets, throwing gear inside. It’s a clear, cold morning. Frost comes out of everyone’s mouths as they jump in the vehicle, weapons clattering. Everyone’s fumbling around, still trying to wake up and shake off that ache that comes from sleeplessness. In my case, just seeing the morning light hurts. “Well,” Colbert tells his team. “We’re assaulting an airfield. I know as much about this as any of you do.” He laughs, shaking his head. “Person, do we have a map?”

  By six twenty-eight the roughly forty vehicles from Alpha, Bravo and Charlie companies begin rolling out of the encampment to assault the airfield.

  STILL EXTREMELY WORRIED about the prospect of his men encountering armor or AAA on the field, Ferrando changes the ROE. He radios his company commanders and tells them, “Everyone on the field is declared hostile.”