by Evan Wright
In Vietnam the U.S. military sometimes designated certain areas “free-fire zones.” Because of the large numbers of civilian casualties produced by these, the term fell out of vogue. Ferrando’s order amounts to the same thing. Declaring everyone hostile means the Marines may or should shoot any human they encounter. When Capt. Patterson is issued the order, he says, “There’s no fucking way I’m going to pass that to my men.” In his mind, he later explains, turning the airfield into a free-fire zone does not help his men. Their problem is physics. AAA guns and tanks outrange and overpower everything they have on the Humvees. If his Marines race onto the field cutting people down, regardless of whether or not they’re armed, it’s not going to help them battle heavy guns. Besides this, in Patterson’s opinion, Ferrando “doesn’t have the right to change the Rules of Engagement.” Patterson tells his top enlisted man, “Don’t pass the word of the changed ROE over the radio. Our guys are smart enough to evaluate the situation within the existing ROE.”
IN COLBERT’S VEHICLE we are getting up to about forty miles per hour when word comes over the radio of the change in the ROE. “Everyone is declared hostile on the field,” Colbert shouts. “You see anybody, shoot ’em!” he adds.
Colbert is multitasking like a madman. He’s got his weapon out the window, looking for targets. He’s on the radio, communicating with Fick and the other teams. They’re trying to figure out how to contact the A-10 attack jets overhead. The Marines don’t have the right comms to reach them. “I don’t want to get schwacked by the A-10s,” Colbert shouts. “They’re goddamn Army. They shoot Marines.” (As they did three days ago at Nasiriyah.) On top of this, Colbert has maps out, and is trying to figure out where the airfield actually is with respect to the road we are driving down. His maps indicate there are fences around the field. He and Person debate whether to smash through the fences or to stop and cut through them with bolt cutters.
“The bolt cutters are under the seat in the back,” Person says. “We can’t get at them.”
“Smash through the fence, then.”
Next to me in the rear seat, Trombley says, “I see men running two hundred meters. Ten o’clock!”
“Are they armed?” Colbert asks.
“There’s something,” Trombley says. “A white truck.”
“Everyone’s declared hostile,” Colbert says. “Light them the fuck up.”
Trombley fires two short bursts from the SAW. “Shooting motherfuckers like it’s cool,” he says, amused with himself.
A Marine machine gun behind us kicks in.
I look out Trombley’s window and see a mud hut and a bunch of camels. The camels are running madly in all directions, some just a couple of meters from our Humvee. I can’t figure out what the hell Trombley was shooting at.
Hasser standing in the turret, begins pounding the roof of the Humvee, screaming “Fuck!”
“What is it?” Colbert shouts.
“The Mark-19 is down!” Hasser yells. “Jammed!”
“My Mark-19 is down!” Colbert screams on the radio. Being the lead vehicle of the company, racing onto an airfield to fight tanks and AAA guns without a heavy weapon is a disaster in the making. “I repeat, my Mark- 19 is down!”
It’s the first time Fick has ever heard Iceman lose control on comms. “Calm the fuck down,” Fick orders Colbert. “I’m putting Team Two in front.”
THOUGH MARINES in Bravo Company have fired only three short machine-gun bursts so far, Captain America, rolling directly behind us, gets on the comms, screaming, “They’re shooting everywhere! We are under fire!”
Seemingly caught up in the spirit of the free-fire zone, Captain America sticks his East German AK out the window and begins shooting. Riding in the back of Captain America’s Humvee is twenty-one year-old Lance Corporal Andy Crosby. He sees a hut outside with people and animals. “What the fuck are you doing?” he yells at his commander. But Captain America continues blazing away. At one point, ricochets from his weapon ping off scrap metal by the road and zing back toward his men in the Humvee. “We’re getting ricochets!” Crosby shouts.
THERE’S NO FENCE at the airfield. It’s just long swaths of concrete tarmac concealed behind low berms. We don’t even see the airfield until we’ve nearly driven on top of it. There are weeds growing out of cracks in the tarmac and bomb craters in the middle. There’s nothing on it. The Humvees fan out and race into the bermed fields, searching for enemy positions.
“Oh, my God!” Person laughs. “He’s got his bayonet out.”
Captain America runs across the field ahead of his Humvee, bayonet fixed on his M-16, ready to savage enemy forces. He turns every few paces and dramatically waves his men forward, like an action hero.
“He thinks he’s Rambo,” Person guffaws. “That retard is in charge of people?”
We stop. Marines observe low huts far in the distance that could be either primitive barracks or homes. Captain America runs up to Kocher’s team and shouts, “Engage the buildings!”
Redman, the .50-cal gunner, looks at him, deadpanning to hide his contempt. A veteran of Afghanistan, he’s a big, placid guy and talks like a surfer even though he’s originally from Phoenix, Arizona. “Dude,” Redman says, “that building is four thousand meters away.” He adds a remark that pretty much anyone in boot camp knows. “The range on my .50-cal is two thousand meters.”
“Well, move into position, then. Engage it.” He stalks off.
They roll forward. Kocher observes the building through binoculars. “No, Redman. We’re not engaging. There’s women and children inside.”
We roll back from the field. A-10s cut down low directly overhead. The British never come. The Marines beat them to the field. It’s a beautiful, clear day. In the sunlight—the first we’ve seen in days—dust, impregnated in everyone’s MOPP suits, curls off like cigarette smoke. Everyone looks like they’re smoldering. “Gentlemen, we just seized an airfield,” Colbert says. “That was pretty ninja.”
SIXTEEN
°
AN HOUR LATER, the Marines have set up a camp off the edge of the airfield. They are told they will stay here for a day or longer. For the first time in a week, many of the Marines take their boots and socks off. They unfurl cammie nets for shade and lounge beside their Humvees. The dirt here, augmented by a luxuriously thick piling of dung from camels who graze on the local scrubweed, is pillow-soft. Distant artillery thunders with a steady, calming rhythm. Half the platoon is on watch, and everybody else is snoozing.
A couple of Recon Marines walk over to Trombley and tease him about shooting camels while seizing the airfield.
“I think I got one of those Iraqis, too. I saw him go down.”
“Yeah, but you killed a camel, too, and wounded another one.”
The Marines seem to have touched a nerve.
“I didn’t mean to,” Trombley says, upset. “They’re innocent.”
Then two Bedouin women appear at the edge of the perimeter, thirty meters from Colbert’s Humvee. One of the women is dressed in a purple shawl with a black scarf on her head. She seems to be in her early thirties. The other is an old woman in black. The two of them are pulling a heavy object wrapped in a blanket. They stop on top of a high berm about twenty meters away and start waving. Doc Bryan walks over to them.
The women are highly agitated. When Doc Bryan approaches, they unfurl the bundle they’ve been dragging across the berms, and what looks to be a bloody corpse rolls out. Doc Bryan thinks it’s a dead twelve-year-old boy, but when he kneels down, the “corpse” opens his eyes. Doc Bryan immediately begins to examine him. There are four small holes in his torso, two on each side of his stomach.
I walk up behind Doc Bryan. After looking at the boy, with Doc Bryan kneeling over him, the next thing I notice is the younger woman, the mother of the boy. She has a striking, beautiful face. She is half naked. Somehow, in her effort to drag her son across the fields, her shawl has come undone in front. Her breasts are exposed. She is on her knees, prayin
g with her head tilted up, talking nonstop, though no words come out. She turns to me and continues talking, still making no sound. She looks me in the eye. I expect her to appear angry, but instead she keeps talking silently, rolling her eyes up to heaven, then back to me. She seems to be pleading.
“This kid’s been zipped with five-five-six rounds!” Doc Bryan shouts, referring to a caliber of bullet commonly used in American weapons. “Marines shot this boy!” He has his medical kit out, rubber gloves on, and is frantically cutting off the kid’s filthy clothes, checking his vital signs and railing at the top of his lungs. “These fucking jackasses,” he says. “Trigger-happy motherfuckers.”
The older Bedouin woman and I kneel down close to Doc Bryan and watch him work. The old lady’s fingers are covered in silver rings filled with jade. Her face is completely wrinkled and inked with elaborate tribal tattoos from chin to forehead. She nudges me. When I turn, she offers me a cigarette. She says something in Arabic. When I respond in English she laughs at me almost playfully. Like the mother of the boy, she displays no anger.
Meesh, the translator, shows up, groggy, not having had his first beer of the morning yet. He asks the old lady what happened. She’s the grandmother. Her two grandsons were by the road to the airfield when the Marines’ Humvees scared the camels. The boys ran out after them and were shot by the Marines. (A second, older boy is later carried into the camp with a wounded leg, a victim of the same shooting.) Bedouins don’t keep track of things like birthdays, but the grandmother thinks the youngest boy might be twelve or fourteen.
I ask Meesh why the family doesn’t appear to be angry.
He thinks a long time and says, “They are grateful to be liberated and welcome the Americans as friends.”
“We fucking shot their kids,” Doc Bryan says.
“Dude, mistakes like this are unavoidable in war,” Meesh responds.
“Bullshit,” Doc Bryan says. “We’re Recon Marines. Our whole job is to observe. We don’t shoot unarmed children.”
Doc Bryan’s examination of the boy has revealed that each of the four holes in the boy’s body is an entry wound, meaning four bullets zoomed around inside his slender stomach and chest cavity, ripping apart his organs. Now the bullets are lodged somewhere inside. If the kid doesn’t get medevaced, he’s going to die in a few hours.
Fick and the battalion surgeon, Navy Lieutenant Alex Aubin, a twenty-nine-year-old fresh out of Annapolis and the Naval medical school in Bethesda, Maryland, arrives with bad news. Ferrando has denied their request to medevac the boy.
Just then, a Predator unmanned spy plane flies low overhead. Predators, powered by gasoline engines, make a loud, annoying buzzing sound like a lawn mower with a broken muffler. Doc Bryan looks up, angrily. “We can afford to fly fucking Predators,” he says, “but we can’t take care of this kid?”
“I’m going to go ask the battalion commander again,” Aubin says.
Colbert appears, climbing over the berm. He sees the mother, the kid, the brother with the bloody leg, other members of the family who have now gathered nearby. He seems to reel back for an instant, then rights himself and approaches.
“This is what Trombley did,” Doc Bryan says. “This kid was shot with five-five-six rounds from Trombley’s SAW.” Doc Bryan has concluded that Trombley was the only one to fire a weapon using this type of bullet. “Twenty other Marines drove past those kids and didn’t shoot. Bring Trombley up here and show him what he did.”
“Don’t say that,” Colbert says. “Don’t put this on Trombley. I’m responsible for this. It was my orders.”
Colbert kneels down over the kid, right next to his mother, and starts crying. He struggles to compose himself. “What can I do here?” he asks.
“Apparently fucking nothing,” Doc Bryan says.
Aubin returns, shaking his head. “No. We can’t medevac him.”
Even though Aubin is simply the bearer of bad news, Doc Bryan glares at him accusatorily. “Well, that just sucks, don’t it?”
Aubin grew up on St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, and he gives the impression of being sort of preppy. Even in a filthy MOPP suit, he’s the type of guy you picture with a nice tan, in loafers with no socks. He’s about the last guy you would expect to come up with a plan for an insurrection. But after no one says anything for a few moments, Aubin looks up at Doc Bryan, formulating an idea. He says, “Under the rules, we have to provide him with care until he dies.”
“Yeah, so?” Doc Bryan asks.
“Put him in my care. I stay next to the battalion commander. If he’s in my care, the boy will stay with me at the headquarters. Colonel Ferrando might change his order if he has to watch him die.”
Fick approves of the plan, even though it represents an affront to his commanders and a risk to his own career, already under threat from his confrontation with Encino Man at Ar Rifa. But he endorses this effort, he later says, “because if we didn’t do something, I was going to lose Colbert and Doc Bryan. The platoon would have fallen apart. I believed we had at least ninety days of combat ahead of us, and my best men had become ineffective—angry at the command and personally devastated. We had to get this blood off the platoon’s hands. I didn’t care if we threw those kids onto a helicopter and they died thirty seconds later. My men had to do something.”
With Colbert and Doc Bryan at the front of the stretcher, the Marines carry the wounded boy nearly a kilometer to the battalion headquarters. The whole Bedouin family follows. They reach the antenna farm and the cammie nets covering a communications truck and the commander’s small, black command tent. They enter the inner sanctum beneath the nets. The Marines lower the stretcher. Several officers, sitting in their skivvies at laptop computers on MRE crates, look up, aghast. With Bedouin tribespeople now pouring in, it looks like the perimeter has been overrun.
The Coward of Khafji runs up, veins pulsing on his forehead. He comes head-to-head with the grandmother, who blows a cloud of cigarette smoke in his face.
“What the hell is going on here?” he shouts, confronting this near-mutinous breakdown of military order inside the battalion headquarters.
“We brought him here to die,” Doc Bryan says defiantly.
The Coward of Khafji looks down at the kid on the stretcher.
“Get him the fuck out of here,” he bellows.
The Marines carry the kid out in silence and place him under a nearby cammie net. Five minutes later, word is sent back that Ferrando has had a change of heart. He orders a platoon from Alpha to bring the Bedouins to RCT-1’s shock-trauma unit, twenty kilometers south.
I catch up to Colbert walking alone through the center of the encampment. “I’m going to have to bring this home with me and live with it,” he says. “A pilot doesn’t go down and look at the civilians his bombs have hit. Artillerymen don’t see the effects of what they do. But guys on the ground do. This is killing me inside.” He walks off, privately inconsolable.
LATER, I’m passing by the battalion headquarters when Ferrando calls out to me from beneath the netting in his rasping voice. I veer under the nets and find him sitting up in his hole, wrapped in a poncho. He wants to talk about the incident with the Bedouins. Like his men, he hasn’t slept much—“an hour in the past thirty-six hours,” he tells me. He looks haggard. His face is gaunt and filthy.
“In my mind this situation is the result of the enemy’s law of war violations,” he says. “When the enemy purposely position themselves within civilians, it makes the complexity of my decision-making or that of my Marines ten times more difficult. They hope to draw more casualties on our side because of the restraint that we show. It’s a deadly situation, and we have to make twenty to thirty life-or-death decisions every hour, and often we do this without sleep. I’m amazed it’s going as well as it has.”
He brings up the moral dilemma posed by the situation the battalion was in yesterday. “At Ar Rifa,” he says, “we were lying out in front of God and everybody as an easy target. Hostile forces were on
the rooftops. Based on intelligence gathered by the interpreter from townspeople, I believed we’d located a military headquarters in that town. I ordered artillery rounds dropped on that building to prevent them from organizing an attack on us. Was I right?” he asks.
“I can’t say I know for sure they were organizing for an attack, or even that the building we hit was a headquarters. What I do know is, we dropped artillery. I’m certain civilians did die as a result of my order to do so. I don’t like making this kind of choice, but I will err to protect these Marines when I can.
“Now, this morning, they requested I send those wounded civilians to the RCT for aid. Problem: Our tactical situation is extremely precarious here. I could not send a platoon to accompany them until the situation had stabilized.” He concludes, “It’s a shitty situation for these Marines. But no one put a gun to their heads and forced them to come here.”
THE TALK COLBERT DELIVERS to Trombley is considerably more concise. After returning from the battalion headquarters, he sits him down beside the Humvee and says, “Trombley, no matter what you might think, or what anybody else might say, you did your job. You were following my orders.”
Colbert then strips down to his T-shirt—the first time he’s removed his MOPP in more than a week. He crawls under the Humvee and spends several hours chipping away at the three-inch layer of tar and sand clinging to it from the sabka field.
Late in the afternoon, Fick comes by, gathers the team for a morale talk and tells them, “We made a mistake today, collectively and individually. We must get past this. We can’t sit around and call it quits now.”
Gunny Wynn is harsher. “We’re Americans,” he lectures the men. “We must be sure when we take a shot that we are threatened. You have got to see that these people are just like you. You’ve got to see past the huts, the camels, the different clothes they wear. They’re just people. This family here might lose a son. We shot their camels, too. If you kill one camel, that could be a year’s income. We’re not here to destroy their way of life.”