Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Before First Recon’s campaign is over, Captain America will lose control of his platoon when he is temporarily relieved of command. Already, some of his men are beginning to fantasize about his death. “All it takes is one dumb guy in charge to ruin everything,” says one of them. “Every time he steps out of the vehicle, I pray he gets shot.”

AWHILE AFTER THIRD PLATOON’S dog incident, First Recon’s commander orders the Marines to begin releasing the Iraqis. Prior to the war, Maj. Gen. Mattis had told reporters that surrendered enemy prisoners “will be funneled to the rear as soon as possible. Some people get their heart back after surrendering and want to fight again, so we want to get them out of the way as quickly as possible.”

But First Recon doesn’t have the resources to ship the hundreds of Iraqis surrendering by the tracks back to rear units. The battalion’s support company trucks only have room to transport about seventy of them.

Under the Geneva Convention (articles 13 and 20), once you’ve accepted the surrender of enemy forces you are obligated to provide food, water and medical attention, and to take “all suitable precautions to ensure their safety during evacuation.” Here, those provisions are dispensed with through a simple expedient. The Iraqis taken by the Marines are unsurrendered and sent packing.

Unfortunately for the Iraqis, First Recon’s commander orders his Marines to tell these men who have just walked some seventy kilometers from Basra to go back the way they came. (From the American standpoint, a wise order, given the fact that these Iraqi soldiers had been heading to Nasiriyah, where in a few days the Marines will first confront urban war.) The prisoners are unhappy with this news. They have been saying all morning that Fedayeen death squads where they have come from have been capping their friends. And the Marines have dismantled and tossed all of their weapons into a nearby canal so they can’t defend themselves. Several wave the slips of paper promising safe passage if they surrendered. But most are too exhausted to protest and start the trek back toward the Fedayeen death squads.

Person and I sit in the Humvee, eating cheese Combo snacks, watching the Iraqis limp back along the tracks.

“That’s fucked,” Person says. “Isn’t it weird to look at those Iraqis and know that some of them are probably going to die in the next few hours?”

LATE IN THE AFTERNOON on March 22, First Recon leaves the railroad tracks at Burayyat An Rataw and pushes northwest to take up a new position along a canal. Fewer than forty-eight hours have elapsed since the invaders blew through the breaches at the border. After a few light skirmishes, Marine and British forces have captured the key oil facilities around Basra. Now, approximately 20,000 Marines in the First Division are heading west, then north onto highways that will take them into central Iraq.

First Recon’s job this early evening is to move about fifteen kilometers north of the route on which the bulk of the First Division will be rolling. The battalion is to set up along a waterway and watch for Iraqi forces to make sure that they don’t drop down unexpectedly and attack the First Division on the highway.

Colbert’s team drives along a winding canal, watching for enemy forces, while Person discusses the band he formed after high school, Me or Society. A heavy-metal rap group, his band once opened for Limp Bizkit at a show in Kansas City. “We sucked, but so did they,” Person says. “The only difference is, they became famous right after we played together. I became a Marine.”

Colbert brings up a mutual friend in the battalion who listens to death metal and hangs out in vampire clubs in Hollywood.

“You remember that time he went out dressed in diapers and a gas mask?” Person says, laughing appreciatively.

Trombley, who seldom jumps into conversations between Colbert and Person, can’t hide his disgust. “That’s sick. Can you believe we’re defending people’s freedom to do that?”

Colbert corrects him, delivering a sharp civics lesson. “No, Trombley. That’s good that people have the freedom to do that. We’re even defending people like Corporal Person, too.”

The land is fertile along the canal. There are scruffy pastures, as well as little hamlets, each consisting of two or three mud huts bunched together. “Keep your eyes on the swivel,” Colbert reminds his chatty team. “This is backcountry.”

But villagers who come out by the trail greet the Marines with smiles. A teenage boy and girl walk ahead on the trail, holding hands.

“Kind of cute,” Colbert observes. “Don’t shoot them, Garza,” he adds.

As they roll past the hand-holding teens, Colbert and Person wave at them and start singing the South Park version of “Loving You,” with the lyrics “Loving you is easy ’cause you’re bare-chested.”

We bump onto a set of rail tracks and follow them toward a narrow bridge across the canal. The battalion has chosen a train bridge as its crossing point over the canal. According to Colbert, spy planes have observed the train bridge for several days, and everyone is reasonably sure that no freight trains will appear around the bend on the other side. The Humvee jiggles so intensely on the railroad ties, it feels like someone is sawing my teeth. We pull onto the bridge. It’s about seventy-five meters long and just wide enough for the Humvee. I look out my window and see pebbles kicked up by the tires tumble into the water five meters below.

“Just think how easy it would be to drive off the edge right now,” Person says.

“Yeah,” Colbert says. “You could have an epileptic fit, a bee could sting you or one of your zits could explode.”

“That’s why I popped them all this morning, so we would be safe.”

WE REACH THE OBSERVATION POSITION by the canal after dark. Lights twinkle from a town several kilometers west. Obviously, electricity still works in parts of Iraq. When the Humvee stops, we hear crickets and frogs. The place seems untouched by war. Colbert’s team sets up in line with the platoon along a low berm running in front of the canal. The men prepare for another chilly, sleepless night. Through their night optics they observe villagers moving around huts a few hundred meters away on the other side of the canal. Iraqi armored forces are suspected of being on the move somewhere beyond the villages. At about nine o’clock, orange flashes burst on the horizon several kilometers northeast of the canal. U.S. warplanes are bombing targets.

Greater numbers of Iraqis appear on the other side of the canal—bunches of them moving—and the Marines judge them to be military deserters fleeing the American bombing. But some Marines grow edgy.

A few vehicles down the line from Colbert’s, Doc Bryan is nearly shot by a nervous Marine, a senior enlisted man. Doc Bryan rides with Lovell’s Team Three. He is crouching by his team’s vehicle, observing the village on the other side, when he feels a burning sensation in his eyeball. It takes him a moment to figure out: Someone is pointing an infrared-laser aiming device from a rifle into the side of his eye. The laser’s invisible, but he feels its heat. Just as Doc Bryan turns, a senior enlisted Marine tramps out of the darkness, aiming his rifle at him, cursing. “Jesus, I thought you guys were enemy,” the senior enlisted man says. “I almost shot you.”

The senior enlisted man, a company operations chief, tells Doc Bryan he had trained his weapon on him and almost fired, believing he was an enemy infiltrator.

In the layers of incompetence Recon Marines feel they labor under in the battalion, this company ops chief is nearly at the top with Captain America and Encino Man. They call him “Casey Kasem,” because of his warm, gravelly voice, which over the radios sounds like that of the old rock DJ.