Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Fick approaches the vehicle and tells Colbert that the battalion isn’t going to the bridge tonight. Instead, everyone will be heading to an elevated train track at a place called Burayyat An Rataw. He has no idea why.

The desert leading up to the tracks is littered with industrial trash—shredded tires, old fence posts, wrecked machinery, wild dogs and, every thirty meters it seems, a lone rubber flip-flop. Person calls each one out, “ ’Nother flip-flop. ’Nother dude walking around somewhere with one sandal on.”

“Shut the fuck up, Person,” Colbert says.

“You know what happens when you get out of the Marine Corps,” Person continues. “You get your brains back.”

“I mean it, Person. Shut your goddamn piehole.”

At times, the two of them bicker like an old married couple. Being a rank lower than Colbert, Person can never directly express anger to him, but on occasions when Colbert is too harsh and Person’s feelings are hurt, his driving becomes erratic. There are sudden turns, and the brakes are hit for no reason. It will happen even in combat situations, with Colbert suddenly in the role of wooing his driver back with retractions and apologies.

But late this afternoon, nearing the tracks, Colbert doesn’t have the patience to play games. He’s wrestling with profound disappointment. Since the night I met him he’d been talking about how excited he was to carry out this bridge-seizure mission. His platoon and his team had been slated to lead the way to the bridge for the entire battalion. Colbert was going to be one of the first Americans to reach the Euphrates. Back at Camp Mathilda, he had told me that this task was going to be “the recon mission of a lifetime.” But now it’s off.

We stop in the chalk-white desert about a kilometer south of the railroad tracks at Burayyat An Rataw. They run east-west along an elevated roadbed that stretches as far as the eye can see. We are now approximately seventy kilometers north of the border. The next-closest American unit is more than thirty kilometers away. First Recon is very much alone here. Earlier in the day, there were some overflights from Cobras, but there’s no air cover now.

Like a lot of civilians whose memories of the first Gulf War were shaped by gee-whiz Pentagon camera footage shown on CNN of U.S. bombs and missiles striking Iraqi targets with pinpoint accuracy, I had assumed that American spy planes and satellites could see everything on the ground. But in this war, an intelligence officer in the First Marine Division tells me, “We think we know where about seventy percent of Saddam’s armor and weapons are. That still leaves thirty percent that’s an unknown, which is a lot.” Dust and cloud cover inhibit the ability of spy planes and satellites to see on the ground, as do berms, huts and revetments. “Part of First Recon’s job,” the intel officer tells me, “is to uncover ground. Despite all the high-tech assets we have, the world is blank until you put people on the ground.”

On the ground here, the first and last lines of defense are these Marines, who haven’t slept all night. They can spot approaching hostile units from a kilometer or two out, which will only give them a few minutes to prepare. Not much time if it’s a sizable force.

Colbert’s team and the rest in the platoon are ordered to cover their Humvee in cammie nets and dig in facing the tracks. The battalion spreads out in a defensive perimeter across a couple of kilometers. Fick tells the men their job is to observe the tracks tonight, but not even he knows what they’re really supposed to be looking for, or why they’re doing it.

It amazes me, as the only civilian among them, how little these guys actually know at times about what they’re doing or what the future holds. But the more time you spend with a combat unit, the more you realize nobody cares too much about what they’re told is going to be happening in the near future because orders change constantly anyway. Besides that, most Marines’ minds are occupied with the minutiae of survival in the present, scanning the vista in this land they’ve just invaded, searching for signs of the enemy.

Still, some of the men are deeply disappointed by the apparent cancellation of the bridge mission. “No mission?” Garza asks. He steps down from the Humvee turret after spending approximately eighteen hours there—through the night and much of the day under a blazing sun. “I’ll be mad if we don’t get in this war.”

“Missions are always getting fragged,” Colbert says, resigned. “The mission isn’t important. Just doing your job is.”

His team spends forty minutes digging Ranger graves about 800 meters from the elevated train tracks. The desert pan is so hard here, where a few inches beneath the sandy topsoil it’s interlaced with vestigial coral from the era when this was underwater (specifically, as part of the Persian Gulf, which used to be a sea covering all of Kuwait and southern Iraq), that every inch has to be hacked away with pickaxes, the blades sparking with each blow to the stoney crust. As soon as we are finished, the battalion orders everyone to move forward to within thirty meters of the tracks.

“The dirt will be better where we’re going,” Colbert reassures his weary men.

But the dirt is the same. We chop a new set of graves as oil fires some twenty-five kilometers distant compete with the sunset. With the sun dropping, the temperature plummets and sweat-drenched MOPPs now feel like they’re lined with ice, not merely hard plastic. The Marines cover the Humvee in cammie nets. Half the Marines go on watch; the other half settle in for two hours of sleep.

Sleep is a sketchy proposition. Marines are not permitted to take their MOPP suits or boots off, even at night. They crawl into the Ranger graves fully dressed, with their weapons and gas masks at their sides. Some wrap themselves in ponchos. Others sleep inside “bivy sacks”—zippered pouches that have an uncanny resemblance to body bags.

After dark, the oil fires make the night sky flicker like it’s illuminated by a broken fluorescent light. American planes fly overhead, too high to be seen, but they throw out flares to repel missiles, which flash like lightning. One thing about war I’ve learned: It produces amazingly colorful night skies.

Trombley, now on watch, spots wild dogs. “I’m going to leave some food out by my hole tonight,” he says. “I’m going to shoot me a dog.”

“No, you’re not, Trombley,” Colbert says, his voice rising from his Ranger grave. “No one’s shooting any dogs in Iraq.”

IT RAINS AFTER MIDNIGHT, turning my Ranger grave into a mud pit. Temperatures have dropped into the forties. Everyone is awake, shivering cold but excited. Clumps of Iraqi soldiers—six to twenty at a time—walk along the elevated tracks in front of us. The railroad line runs from Basra to Nasiriyah. The soldiers, we later find out, are deserters who’ve apparently walked from Basra, about seventy kilometers east of this position, and are heading toward Nasiriyah, the next-nearest sizable city, about a hundred kilometers northwest of here.

The Marines watch the Iraqis through NVGs and night-vision rifle scopes. “Nobody shoot,” Colbert says. “They’re not here to fight.”

Sergeant Steven Lovell, one of Colbert’s fellow team leaders in the platoon, walks over to consult with him. Lovell, a twenty-six-year-old who grew up on a dairy farm outside Williamsport, Pennsylvania, has a bowlegged farmer’s gait and a sly, rural wit. Before joining the Corps he attended college to study chemical engineering, but found he didn’t like being around the “eggheads” on campus. “See how they’re walking all jacked-up, sore foot?” he says, pointing at the Iraqis. “They’re in a bad way.”