Generation Kill

by Evan Wright

  FOLLOWING ENCINO MAN’S pep talk, Fick now piles on more depressing news. “Yesterday, Marines in a supply convoy south of here were caught in an RPG ambush. They were cut off and surrounded by bad guys. They called in for help, but by the time it arrived one was dead and one was missing.”

  No one knows for sure what happened to the missing Marine, but according to Fick (and to media reports), it’s believed that the Marine was killed, that his corpse was mutilated, dragged through a town and strung up for public display. Hearing this account, Lovell turns to his men and vows, “I am not going to be a POW, and I’m not going to die here.”

  The Marines aren’t just grim now. They’re slightly freaked out by the specter of mobs attacking them. They can’t help but think of the Army Rangers who were attacked and mutilated in Somalia. By coincidence, the last movie shown to their unit at Camp Mathilda before they embarked on the invasion was Black Hawk Down, the slow-motion retelling of disaster befalling a small band of Americans trapped in a hostile third-world city they’d entered to liberate. The parallels now seem clear.

  Doc Bryan leans against the wheel of a Humvee, telling his fellow Marines, in all seriousness, “What we should do is paint skulls on our faces. Come into these towns like demons. These are primitive people. We would scare the shit out of them. We need to use fear, not give in to it.”

  Carazales, the twenty-one-year-old who now serves as the driver on Kocher’s team, says, “What we ought to do is send everyone off to Ace Hardware, get some chain saws, capture some Fedayeen, cut their limbs off, tie them to wheelchairs, load them in a C-130, and drop them on Baghdad. We’ll just sit back in our Humvees reading Playboys.”

  Carazales is not much taller than an M-16 rifle. He has a Marine Corps eagle-globe-and-anchor tattoo on one leg and a BORN LOSER tattoo on the other. He wound up in the Corps, he says, “Because I got tricked into this motherfucker. I was eighteen, in jail, facing probation, and the DA and a Marine recruiter made a deal I couldn’t refuse.” He complains, “If I weren’t in the Marines, by now I’d be making real money. I’d’ve worked my way up to fourteen dollars an hour, working on rigs or as a welder’s assistant.”

  Carazales is from Cuero, Texas, hates the Marine Corps, hates officers, hates rich people. “They should make a holiday every year where if you make less than thirty thousand dollars a year you get to drive into rich neighborhoods and fuck up rich people’s houses. Go inside and break their shit. Every blue-collar man gets to sleep in a white-collar man’s house.” Sometimes he asks fellow Marines, “Have you ever read the Communist Manifesto? That sounds ideal. How the upper classes are oppressing the lower classes. That’s how it happens back home. Rich people, corporations, get all sorts of secret government handouts they don’t tell us about.”

  Not only is Carazales apparently the battalion’s leading Communist, he’s also among the most popular men in Bravo Company. He’s a POG mechanic, but he volunteered to drive for Kocher, one of his closest friends, after Kocher’s original driver, Darnold, was shot in Al Gharraf. Now, not only does he drive for Kocher’s team, he’s still responsible for maintaining the battalion’s vehicles. He seldom sleeps, and his face and hands are invariably black with axle grease, hence his nickname: “Dirty Earl.”

  Volunteering to be on Kocher’s team has also spared him from one of the most onerous burdens in the company. Carazales previously had to drive for Captain America. Now, sitting around waiting to begin their hunt for ambushes on the route north, Carazales brings up the subject of Captain America. “Driving for that motherfucker was jacked. Every time we’d come across more of them fucked-up civilians—he had to jump around getting pictures, worried my driving was too fast for his Canon stabilization system to work right.”

  “Man, I’m glad I didn’t see any dead little children,” Garza says.

  “How do you think we would feel if someone came into our country and lit us up like this?” Carazales says. “South of Al Gharraf I know I shot a building with a bunch of civilians in it. Everyone else was lighting it up. Then we found out there were civilians in there. It’s fucked up.” Carazales works himself into a rage. “I think it’s bullshit how these fucking civilians are dying! They’re worse off than the guys that are shooting at us. They don’t even have a chance. Do you think people at home are going to see this—all these women and children we’re killing? Fuck no. Back home they’re glorifying this motherfucker, I guarantee you. Saying our president is a fucking hero for getting us into this bitch. He ain’t even a real Texan.”

  Carazales slumps back in the dirt. No one says anything. Then he brightens. “I just thought of a tight angle. All the pictures Captain America’s taking of shot-up, dead Iraqi kids? I’ll get my hands on those. I’m going to go back home and put them in Seven-Elevens and collect money for my own adopt-an-Iraqi-kid program. Shit, I’ll be rolling in it. A war veteran helping out the kids. I ought to run for office.”

  For whatever reason this night, Ferrando allows his men to sleep in the open beside their Humvees. It’s the first time in two weeks we haven’t dug Ranger graves. At about midnight, I awaken to see the fields and palm trees across from our Humvee lit up by illumination flares. Suspended from parachutes, the chemical flames drift slowly down into the field.

  I wake Person, who is sleeping next to me, and ask him what’s going on.

  “It’s illume,” he mumbles. “Ours.”

  “Why are we lighting up our own position?” I ask.

  Person snores.

  I fall back asleep. Then I awaken again a few minutes later to the sound of artillery or rockets shrieking through the sky, exploding a few hundred meters directly in front of us. The blasts turn the field into a sea of molten orange and blue liquid, with waves splashing up against the palms in the background. In my effort to roll underneath the Humvee for cover, I bang into Person.

  “Shit!” I yell, panicking about the explosions.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Person says over the continuing roar. “That’s our artillery.” He lifts his head up and observes the firestorm. “It’s just danger close.” He falls back asleep.

  The next morning, we are informed that we are lucky to be alive. “That was an enemy artillery strike from a BM-21 multiple-launch rocket system,” Fick says, delivering the news with a grimly amused smile. “That system kills everything in an entire grid square”—a square kilometer. “They knew our coordinates and came within a few hundred meters of us. We got lucky, again.”

  TWENTY

  °

  ON THE MORNING OF MARCH 31, at about nine, Colbert’s team and the rest of First Recon, leave their encampment at the intersection of Routes 7 and 17 in central Mesopotamia to begin the next mission. Today’s objective is a town of about 50,000 called Al Hayy. It’s a Baath Party headquarters and home to a Republican Guard unit of several thousand about thirty kilometers to the north.

  RCT-1’s force of 6,000 Marines is planning to assault through the center of Al Hayy sometime in the next twenty-four hours. But the Recon Marines will go there first. As it did on its movement to the town of Al Gharraf, the battalion will leave Route 7 and use a dirt trail hugging the edge of a canal. Initially, RCT-1 will parallel First Recon’s movement on the other side of the canal. Then First Recon will race ahead, cross a series of canal bridges into Al Hayy, speed north and seize the main highway bridge out of the city in order to block the retreat of enemy forces during RCT-1’s attack.

  On this mission, First Recon will be an even smaller force than it usually is. Alpha Company has been temporarily detached from the battalion to go on a separate mission in search of the lost Marine believed to have been lynched in an Iraqi town.

  We drive across a low, narrow bridge over the canal, and First Recon’s reduced force of 290-odd Marines in fifty vehicles again becomes the northernmost unit in central Iraq. It’s the first warm morning in several days. Rain clouds blow across the sky, but the sun pokes out and the air is dust-free. The canal flows past us on the rig
ht, about thirty meters wide in some places.

  The battalion rolls single-file on a one-lane, unpaved road that passes through the now familiar patchwork of grassy fields, mudflats crisscrossed with trenches and berms, palm groves and small hamlets. Some have walls that come right up to the edge of the road, channeling the Humvees between the villages on the left and the canal on the right. Perfect terrain for ambushes.

  We pass farmers in a field to our left. Colbert regards them warily and says, “These are a simple people. These are the people I’m here to liberate.”

  “Small-arms fire ahead,” Person says, passing word from the radio.

  We hit a hard bump at about twenty miles per hour. A wild dog appears out of nowhere, lunging and snarling against the windows on the right side of the vehicle. “Jesus Christ!” Colbert jumps, more startled than I have ever seen him.

  Despite the fear and stress, Colbert remains an extremely polite invader. When we pass more farmers on the road, he pulls the barrel of his M-4 up, so as not to point it directly at them.

  A pair of Cobras drops low to our left. The armored helicopters, which we haven’t seen in a few days, soar overhead with the grace of flying sledgehammers. They make a distinctive clattering sound—as ugly and mean as they look. “Cobras spotted a blue Zil”—Russian military truck—“ahead, carrying uniformed Iraqis,” Colbert says, passing along a report from the radio. We stop.

  A machine gun buzzes somewhere up the road. “Shots fired on our lead vehicle,” he says. We remain halted. Colbert gazes longingly at some weeds beside his window. “This would have been the perfect shitting opportunity,” he says. “I should have done it when we first stopped.” Colbert’s initial attempt to clear his bowels this morning was interrupted when the team’s mission was unexpectedly moved up by two hours. Now, at ten in the morning, with the gunfire starting, this problem is foremost on his mind.

  I’ve learned a few things about the Marines by now. There are certainties in their world, even in the chaos of war. As soon as a unit sets in for the night and finishes digging its Ranger graves, everyone will be moved to a slightly different position and forced to start all over again. When a team is told to be ready to move out in five minutes, they will sit for several hours. When the order is to remain in position for three hours, their next order will be to roll out in two minutes. Above all, it is a certainty that Colbert will never be able to take a crap in peace.

  Fick walks up. “They found RPGs two hundred meters up the road in a ditch. There is a dismounted Iraqi platoon ahead that we know about.”

  A ripping sound fills the air. Cobras skim low over palm trees about a kilometer ahead, firing machine guns and rockets into a hamlet on the other side of the canal.

  “They’re smoking some technicals”—civilian trucks with weapons on them—“in a cluster of buildings up ahead,” Colbert says.

  Directly across the canal from us—on our right about seventy-five meters away—Amtracs from RCT-1 rumble through some scrub brush outside some mud-hut homes. When moving, Amtracs produce an unmistakable sound—sort of like what you’d hear if you went to a Laundromat and filled all the dryers with nuts and bolts and pieces of junk and turned them on high. Driving next to one is deafening. Even creeping at low speed through the weeds across the canal from us, they make a ferocious racket. Then their machine guns start spitting at targets by some huts. Mark-19s boom. We have no idea what they’re shooting at. All we see are the gray vehicles rising from the brush, bumping forward a few meters, stopping, then little orange flashes.

  Listening to this mini-firefight taking place outside the doors of our Humvee, Colbert leans out his window and peers at the action through his rifle scope. He leans back in his seat and says, annoyed, “I just hope they don’t orient their fire onto us.”

  We wait.

  “Fuck it,” Colbert says amidst the sporadic machine-gun fire. “I’m gonna do it.”

  He jumps out into the scrub vegetation beside the vehicle, squats and takes care of business.

  Person starts singing Country Joe McDonald’s antiwar song, “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die,” with the lyrics, “And it’s one, two, three/ What are we fighting for?” He’s interrupted by an order sent over the radio to move out. He shouts at Colbert, squatting in the field. “Hey! We’re moving again!”

  Colbert hops in, suspenders from his partially disassembled MOPP flapping. “I made it.” He sighs.

  As Person drives forward, Colbert says, “I think we’re gonna take some fire when we come around the next bend.”

  Colbert’s instincts are money. The first mortar of the day explodes somewhere outside the vehicle as soon as we make the turn. No one can see where it hit, and judging by its muffled sound, it was probably several hundred meters away. We stop. To the left, there’s a hamlet: four to six earthen-walled homes. They’re clustered together about fifteen meters from the road, nestled beneath low-hanging fig trees. In front there are crude fences made of dried reeds, used as paddocks for sheep and goats. It has the primitive feel of one of those Nativity sets they build in town squares at Christmas. Chickens run about, and a half dozen villagers—older women in black robes, older men in dingy white ones, all of them barefoot—stand gawking at us. Despite the almost biblical look of the place, there are power lines overhead with electric wires feeding into the huts. The Marines get out, take cover behind the hoods and open doors of the Humvees, and scan the rooftops, walls and bermed fields behind the hamlet for enemy shooters.

  But after about five minutes of this standoff, the villagers approach. The Marines step out from around their vehicles. A translator is brought up. The villagers say there are no enemy forces in their hamlet. Even as they speak, there are more explosions in the distance. Person, still sitting in the Humvee, hears a report from the radio that other units in First Recon, now spread out along two kilometers or so of this narrow lane, are receiving enemy mortar fire.

  A shoeless farmer approaches. His face is narrow and bony from what looks to be a lifetime of starvation. Shaking his fist, speaking in a raspy voice, he says through a translator that he’s been waiting for the Americans to come since the first Gulf War. He explains that he used to live in a Shia marshland south of here. Saddam drained the marshes and ruined the farmland to punish the people there for supporting the 1991 rebellion. “Saddam believes if he starves the people we will follow him like slaves. It’s terrorism by the system itself.”

  I ask the farmer why he welcomes Americans invading his country. “We are already living in hell,” he says. “If you let us pray and don’t interfere with our women, we accept you.”

  The farmer, with gray hair and his narrow face wrapped in wrinkles, looks to be about sixty, with a lot of those being hard years. I ask him when he was born. 1964. I tell him we’re the same age. He leans toward me, smiling and pointing to his face. “Compared to you, I look like an old man” he says. “This is because of my life under Saddam.”

  I find his self-awareness unsettling. One of the few comforts I have when looking at images of distant suffering is the hope that the starving child with flies on his face doesn’t know how pathetic he is. If all he knows is misery, maybe his suffering isn’t as bad. But this farmer has shattered that comforting illusion. He’s wretched, and he knows it. Before going off, he warns the translator that we are entering an area where the Baath Party is strong. Then he asks if he can join the Marines and go to Baghdad with them. “I will kill Saddam with my own hands,” he says.

  ABOUT 500 METERS AHEAD of Second Platoon’s position by the hamlet, Marines in Third Platoon spot a Zil bouncing through the field. There are about twenty young Iraqi men packed into the rear bed. They’re armed but wearing civilian clothes. The truck stops, and the Iraqis attempt to flee by the canal. Marines train their guns on them and they throw their arms up in surrender. The Iraqis insist they are farm laborers who have weapons because they are afraid of bandits. But before being stopped, they tossed bags into the field. The Marines retrie
ve them. Inside, they find Republican Guard military documents, and uniforms still drenched in sweat. Obviously, these guys just changed out of them. The men in Third Platoon take the Iraqis prisoner, bind their wrists with zip cuffs (sort of a heavy-duty version of the plastic bands used to tie trash bags) and load them into one of the battalion’s transport trucks.

  THE BATTALION PUSHES FORWARD a few more kilometers. Cobra machine guns buzz in the distance. Mortars explode every few minutes now, but they’re still far off—hundreds of meters away, we guess.

  In places the trail is almost like a tunnel bounded by reed fences and overhanging trees. It’s the most dangerous terrain to operate in, short of being inside a city. But the weird thing is, it’s awfully pretty, and everyone in the vehicle seems to be feeling it. A few days earlier, when the battalion raced into Al Gharraf under fire, there were Marines I talked to afterward who said that when they saw the dazzling blue dome of the mosque by the entrance, they felt peaceful, despite the heavy-weapons fire all around.

  Basically, there are things you react to almost automatically, even in times of stress. A tree-lined trail bending past a canal is still pretty, even with hostile forces about. During one halt, Colbert’s team is completely distracted by several water buffalo bathing on the banks of the canal. Trombley gets out of the vehicle and walks over to them—even as several mortars boom nearby—and has to be ordered back by Colbert.