Evan Wright - Generation Kill

We reach the bridge over the Euphrates. Marines from Task Force Tarawa are spread out on both sides of the road in fields and dense palm groves. Rifles crack intermittently, with occasional bursts from machine guns. They’ve been dug in here for twenty-four hours now and are still taking fire from Iraqi gunmen farther out in the fields.

The bridge is a long, broad concrete structure. It spans nearly a kilometer and arches up gracefully toward the middle. The guardrails on both sides are twisted and riddled with bullet holes. The dust and smoke is so dense it’s like being in a snowstorm. We can’t even make out the city on the other side of the bridge. The span simply disappears into a gray cloud bank.

After fifteen minutes of solid tension inside the Humvee, Person cannot repress the urge to make a goofy remark. He turns to Colbert, smiling. “Hey, you think I have enough driving hours now to get my Humvee license?”

First Recon’s column cuts off the road at the causeway where the bridge starts. We take a left down a dirt trail and drive below the bridge to the banks of the Euphrates. There we finally glimpse Nasiriyah on the other side. The front of the city is a jumble of irregularly shaped two- and three-story structures. Iraqi towns are characterized by uniform dullness of color, buildings constructed somewhat haphazardly out of mud bricks or from cinder blocks covered in stucco. Everything is the shade of earth, of the dust that hangs in the air. Through the haze, the buildings appear as a series of dim, slanted outlines, like a row of crooked teeth.

To our immediate right, a dozen or so Marines from Task Force Tarawa sit between the bridge pilings beneath the elevated roadway. Some are stretched out, sleeping, despite the steady blasts of Marine artillery landing in the city on the opposite riverbank. One of the Marines sits upright, puffing on a fat cigar. His face is black with grime. He stares expressionlessly at Colbert’s Humvee. No moto greeting of Get some! from him.

First Recon’s Alpha and Charlie companies set up along the bank of the river, facing the city. Bravo pulls back about seventy-five meters from the river’s edge.

The whole maneuver—driving seventy-five meters from the riverbank—takes about fifteen minutes. The ten Humvees in Bravo Company’s two platoons run into about twenty trucks from the battalion’s Support and Headquarters Company, which are trying to drive into a field farther back from the bridge. The Humvees drive around like clown cars as everyone shouts over the radios or out their windows to direct traffic. Finally, Colbert’s Humvee stops next to the road leading onto the bridge. There’s no clear order of what Bravo is doing here yet.

Colbert can’t get over the lush greenery of the palm groves and fields around us. After two months in the desert, it’s jarring to suddenly have arrived in Mesopotamia’s fertile surroundings on the outskirts of the Garden of Eden. Even as Marine artillery rounds blow it to smithereens, Colbert keeps repeating, “Look at these fucking trees.”

An enemy mortar explodes nearby. A mortar blast is different from artillery. You hear the blast as an artillery shell is fired, then the sound of it whizzing through the sky, followed by the boom as it hits. Mortars come out of nowhere. There’s no warning, just a blast, and a column of black smoke where it hits. If they’re close you feel a sharp increase in the air pressure. The sonic vibrations make the hairs on your body tingle, and your teeth feel numb for an instant.

Another mortar bangs outside. Person smiles. “You know that feeling before a debate when you gotta piss and you’ve got that weird feeling in your stomach, then you go in and kick ass?” he says. “I don’t have that feeling now.”

A machine gun rattles up on the riverbank.

“Stand by for shit to get stupid,” Person says, sounding merely annoyed.

SEVENTY-FIVE METERS in front of us are the men in First Recon’s Alpha and Charlie companies, spread across the southern banks of the Euphrates. They form a line stretching for nearly a kilometer from the bridge on their eastern side to grassy fields on the west. The men begin taking sporadic sniper fire from Nasiriyah. As enemy shots crackle in the air, the Marines take cover behind low, dried mud berms, then scan the city, which rises one hundred meters distant on the opposite riverbank, through rifle scopes and binoculars. They search the thousands of windows and crevices and alleys for signs of enemy shooters.

The procedure when you’re getting shot at by rifles or machine guns is pretty straightforward. The Marines all hunt for muzzle flashes. If a gun is pointed toward you, even if the shooter is concealed behind a wall or berm, its flash will generally be visible. Every time an enemy gunman takes a shot, he momentarily reveals his position.

The men in Alpha and Charlie companies spot muzzle flashes coming from windows of apartments 250 meters or so across the river. But in their first twenty minutes at the riverfront, the Marines fire very few shots. There are civilians moving about in the streets of the city. Even during this low-intensity gun battle, some even stand still, trying to observe the Marines aiming at them.

The strangest, most unsettling spectacle Marines see, however, is that of armed men who dart across alleys, moving from building to building, clutching women in front of them for cover. The first time it happens, Marines shout, “Man with a weapon!”

Despite the newly aggressive ROEs, Marines down the line shout, “I’m not shooting! There’s women.”

One of the Marines witnessing this is the commander of Alpha Company, Captain Bryan Patterson, whose Humvee command post is set fifty meters back from the riverfront. Patterson, thirty-two, is from Indianapolis, Indiana, and is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. With his medium build and dark hair he tends to keep a tad longer than regulation, he looks not a day over twenty-four.

Until this afternoon Patterson has always wondered how he would react under fire. Though he’s been in the Marines his entire adult life and before joining First Recon he commanded an infantry platoon, he’s never been in combat.

Now several mortars impact within 150 meters of his position. Patterson gets on his radio and calls the battalion. His fear is that these might actually be “friendly” mortars dropped by Marines, not aware that First Recon has moved up to the western side of the bridge. Several minutes later, the battalion radios back that these are definitely not Marine mortars.

While Patterson stands there out in the open by his Humvee, talking on the radio, the area around him is raked with enemy gunfire. Marines taking cover behind surrounding berms look up to see if their commander is hit and burst into laughter. Patterson seems oblivious to the shooting and keeps talking on the radio, periodically tilting his head back, gulping down Skittles from an MRE.

Whatever indefinable qualities make a good commanding officer, Patterson has them. Unlike Encino Man and Captain America in Bravo Company, Patterson’s men speak of him in the highest terms. Patterson hardly fits the image of the swaggering, barrel-chested Marine Corps officer. He is one of the most unassuming characters you could ever meet, almost shy. He admits, “I can’t give gladiatorial speeches to my men.” His reasons for going to the Naval Academy and becoming a Marine couldn’t be more prosaic. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life,” he says. His view of being an officer is devoid of romance. “As company commander, I’m like a midlevel manager at any corporation.”

His views on the war are equally temperate. “There is not a good thing that comes out of war,” he tells me later on. “I’m not going to pretend I’m this great American savior in Iraq. We didn’t come here to liberate. We came to look out for our interests. That we are here is good. But if to liberate them means putting a Starbucks and a McDonald’s on every street corner, is that liberation? But I have to justify this to myself. It’s Saddam’s fault.” Still, he says, “the protestors have a lot of valid points. War sucks.”