Evan Wright - Generation Kill

IWAKE UP AT DAWN on March 24 to the sound of a pickax thudding into the ground near my sleeping hole. Near me, a sergeant in Second Platoon named Antonio Espera excavates a pit, sweat rolling off his face even though it’s a chilly morning. “I’m fucking ashamed, dog,” he says, huffing as he swings the pickax. “When we left Afghanistan we didn’t leave a speck of Americana behind.”

Espera gestures to the trash-strewn road. “I was trained Marines don’t litter.”

His rage at the garbage—thousands of brown plastic wrappers and green foil pouches from MREs lying along the highway—has made him irrational. He’s digging a trash pit, when there are half a dozen sleeping holes, soon to be vacated, which could serve the same purpose. But he continues digging at a furious pace.

With his shaved head and deep-set eyes, Espera is one of the scariest-looking Marines in the platoon. Technically, he serves as Colbert’s assistant team leader, though in actuality he commands a separate Humvee. Espera’s crew of four Marines always rolls directly behind or beside Colbert’s, and he is one of Colbert’s closest friends in the platoon. The two men could hardly be more opposite. Espera, thirty, grew up in Riverside, California, and was, by his own account, truly a “bad motherfucker”—participating in all the violent pastimes available to a young Latino from a broken home and raised partially in state facilities. He was serving in an infantry platoon when he and Colbert met a few years earlier. Somehow they struck up a friendship, which on the face of it is odd. Colbert, with his Nordic features and upper-middle-class background, is also among those who frequently engage in routine racial humor, referring to the Spanish language as “dirty spic talk.” Espera, who’s part Native American, part Mexican and a quarter German, frequently rails about the dominance of America’s “white masters” and the genocide of his Indian ancestors. But describing his friendship with Colbert, Espera says, “Inside we’re both the same: violent warriors. Only he fights with his mind, and I fight with my strength.” For his part, Colbert says that when he met Espera he was impressed by his “maturity, dedication and toughness.” Even though Espera is not yet a Recon Marine, Colbert pulled strings to bring him into the elite battalion to serve as his assistant team leader.

This morning, despite the ongoing boom of artillery and rumors now spreading among the ranks of a bloody fight taking place up the road, Espera and several other Marines in the platoon seem to be suffering from a low-grade case of invaders’ guilt. “Imagine how we must look to these people,” he says, disgustedly kicking a pile of trash into his freshly dug pit.

There is a cluster of mud-hut homes about thirty meters across from the platoon’s position by the road. Old ladies in black robes and scarves stand in front of the homes, staring at the pale, white ass of a Marine. He’s naked from the waist down, taking a dump in their front yard.

A Marine on Espera’s team who’s helping him pick up the trash gestures toward this odd scene and says, “Can you imagine if this was reversed, and some army came into suburbia and was crapping in everyone’s front lawns? It’s fucking wild.”

Colbert tunes in the BBC. The men receive the first hard reports of the heavy fighting in Nasiriyah, of Americans being captured, of mass casualties among the Marines.

None of the younger Marines listening to the reports shows much reaction. But the news hits Gunny Wynn, the platoon sergeant, hard.

“I can’t fucking believe it,” he says. “How did so many Marines get hit?”

Doc Bryan rants, “Marines are dying up the road, and we’re sitting back here with our thumbs up our asses.”

A while later, Doc Bryan’s prayers are answered. At twelve-thirty on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, a somber Fick gathers his team leaders for a briefing. “In approximately one hour, we are going to bust north to the bridge at the Euphrates,” he says. “Change in the ROE: Anyone with a weapon is declared hostile. If it’s a woman walking away from you with a weapon on her back, shoot her. If there is an armed Iraqi out there, shoot him. I don’t care if you hit him with a forty-millimeter grenade in the chest.”

When he finishes, Espera says, “Sir, we’re going to go home to a mess after we start wasting these villages. People aren’t going to like that.”

“I know,” Fick says. “We now risk losing the PR war. Fighting in urban terrain is exactly what Saddam wanted us to do.”

Fick has no clear idea what First Recon will be doing at the bridge. The word he’s been given from his commander is that his platoon is going to serve as a quick reaction force to rush into the city and evacuate Marines that are wounded there. But the details he has on this mission are sketchy. He’s not even certain of what route they’re going to be taking through the city, or even what their destination will be once they get there.

After his briefing, Fick does what he often does in a difficult situation: He turns to Colbert for advice. When I first met Fick and heard him extol the intelligence and character of his men, I had wondered if this was just lip service. But I’ve found in the past few days of the invasion that whenever there’s a problem—a life-and-death one, such as this mission—Fick always turns to his men for guidance. Now he and Colbert and other team leaders spread out maps of Nasiriyah on the hood of his Humvee and try to figure out where in the hell they might be going. There are several routes through the city (which is spread across approximately sixteen square kilometers), and they have no idea which their mission into the city will take.

Meanwhile, Espera gathers men from his team and Colbert’s and passes on the briefing Fick just delivered on the change in the ROE. He summarizes Fick’s briefing like this: “You see a motherfucker through a window with an AK, cap his ass.” But then he warns the men, “Don’t get buck fever like Casey Kasem did the other night at the canal. You cap an old lady sweeping her porch, ’cause you think her broom is a weapon, it’s on all of us.”

THE REASON FIRST RECON and all the rest of the Marines have been waiting on the highway south of Nasiriyah for twenty-four hours and now are venturing out with orders that are unclear is that their leaders aren’t quite sure what to do. Ever since lead elements of Task Force Tarawa were unexpectedly chewed apart and stopped in their advance through the city yesterday, Marine commanders have been waffling.

The point of taking Nasiriyah and its bridge is clear enough. The city is a gateway into central Iraq. From the start, Maj. Gen. Mattis’s invasion plan has hinged on sending a substantial Marine force through central Iraq on a route that stretches for 185 kilometers from Nasiriyah in the south to Al Kut in the north. Al Kut sits on the Tigris and commands key bridges that the invading force will need to cross in order to reach Baghdad.

The land between Nasiriyah and Al Kut is historically known as the Fertile Crescent or Mesopotamia, which is Greek for “land between two rivers”—the Euphrates and the Tigris. Mesopotamia has been inhabited for more than 5,000 years. Its terrain is a starkly contrasting patchwork of barren desert and lush, tropical growth, all interlaced with canals. It was here that humankind first invented the wheel, the written word and algebra. Some biblical scholars believe that Mesopotamia was the site of the Garden of Eden.

Mattis’s plan is to invade it with a Regimental Combat Team—designated as RCT-1—a force of about 6,000 Marines. First Recon will serve as RCT-1’s advance element. His objectives are twofold: to pin down large numbers of Republican Guard forces in and around Al Kut (thereby preventing them from defending Baghdad to the west), and to secure Al Kut’s main bridge over the Tigris.