Evan Wright - Generation Kill

The reason his men look up to him is probably very simple. Aside from the fact that he’s calm and articulate, Patterson respects them. His Marines came to the Middle East on a ship, and behind the backs of his men, Patterson often says, “I could have fallen overboard and they would do fine without me.”

Now, he and his men come under increasing fire at the riverbank. His Marines spot an anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) battery shooting at them from across the river. AAA guns fire large-caliber rounds from multiple barrels, like extremely high-powered machine guns. They are designed to shred aircraft flying thousands of meters overhead, but in Iraq, gunmen point the barrels down and aim them at ground targets, such as Marines. Their fire is devastating, and this one, about a kilometer and a half down the riverbank, is beyond the effective range of the heaviest weapons possessed by the Marines in First Recon.

Patterson and his men notice some Marines from Task Force Tarawa a couple hundred meters away. Among them is a Javelin team.

The Javelin is basically a big, honking, shoulder-fired missile for blowing up tanks. Patterson brings the Javelin crew forward. Within minutes they fire a missile into the AAA battery across the river. Patterson watches through his binoculars as a direct hit from the Javelin blows up the AAA battery, setting off numerous secondary explosions as nearby stocks of munitions cook off. He estimates the one strike takes out three to five Iraqis who’d been manning the AAA guns. “It felt good to get revenge for the Marines from Task Force Tarawa killed in Nasiriyah,” Patterson later admits.

Now, directly across the river, every Iraqi with an AK or machine gun seems to open up on First Recon’s position. Apparently, the Javelin strike alerted everyone in the city with a gun to the Marines’ presence here. Taking concentrated enemy fire, the men in Alpha and Charlie lose their inhibitions about possibly shooting women in the city. Up and down the line, just about every rifle, machine gun and grenade launcher roars to life. For about sixty seconds they savage the city, pouring thousands of rounds into it. Patterson later says of this first burst of wild, fairly indiscriminate fire, “They all had to pop their cherries.”

IN THE STORM OF SHOOTING set off by Alpha’s attack on the AAA gun, enemy fire rakes the area around Colbert’s Humvee, seventy-five meters back from the riverfront. Bravo Second Platoon occupies slightly elevated ground behind Alpha’s position, but luckily most of the Iraqi fire seems to be wildly high. A row of palm trees between us and the riverbank shivers as rounds rip through fronds and send puffs of smoke off the trunks. Incoming rounds, I notice as I crouch down to the ground beside Colbert’s vehicle, make a zinging sound, just as they do in Bugs Bunny cartoons.

Initially, Marines in Bravo stand outside their vehicles, milling around with stupid smiles on their faces. Several are giggling. It’s like everyone just stepped onto the set of a war movie. One of First Recon’s seniormost enlisted men struts past, shouting, “Gotta love this shit! We’re in the middle of it now, boys!” He sounds like the emcee at a pro-wrestling smackdown. “It is on!”

This senior enlisted man, in his mid-forties, is one of those thickly built, slightly overweight guys whose fat just makes him look like an even bigger bully than he is. His job is to be the grand enforcer of discipline within the enlisted ranks, to be sort of a professional dickhead. Fairly or unfairly, the Marines’ nickname for him is the “Coward of Khafji.”

Khafji, a small Saudi Arabian town south of the Kuwait border, was the setting of one of the earliest battles of the first Gulf War. In the official version, Iraqi mechanized units, probing for American weaknesses, dropped into Khafji, surprising advance Marine units occupying the town, kicking off a forty-eight-hour battle to extricate the Americans.

According to several enlisted men and officers in First Recon, the battle of Khafji was actually triggered by several Marines who veered into the town to make phone calls to their families and girlfriends at home. As incredible as this sounds, it’s true that in the current war, Marines, such as Colbert, carry international calling codes, which can be used on Iraqi land-lines to dial out to Marine satellite phones. Recon units are trained, if they’re cut off behind enemy lines and their radios are down, to break into Iraqi homes or offices and dial their units’ satellite phones.

In the legend circulating through First Recon, the senior enlisted man they’ve nicknamed the “Coward of Khafji,” then a sergeant in another unit, was among those who led the charge on Khafji’s available phones. Marines were frantically dialing home when several noticed a sizable force of Iraqi soldiers occupying a nearby building. As the story goes, the “Coward of Khafji” jumped into a Humvee and fled the town, leaving behind his buddies. He later told his fellow troops he had fled in the interest of saving a “water bull” (storage tank) attached to the rear of his Humvee and preventing it from falling into Iraqi hands. (When I ask him about the veracity of this story, he denies it happened that way but refuses to provide any details.) Whatever the truth, the Coward of Khafji name has stuck.

Now, as the Coward of Khafji walks past Colbert’s vehicle amid the rising gunfire, Person leans out the window and shouts, “Hey, where’s your Humvee? Isn’t it time for you to get out of here?”

Luckily for Person, the gunfire is increasing. The Coward of Khafji, who possesses a mighty authority to punish men within the battalion, doesn’t hear him.

A volley of enemy mortars explodes in the surrounding fields. Machine-gun fire, which previously seemed to be only coming in from the north—the direction of the city—now erupts on all sides. Currently, Second Platoon faces the river to the north. The Humvees in the platoon are pushed up beside the elevated causeway leading onto the bridge. Around us are open, dried mudflats. These extend fifty to seventy meters north toward the river, and to the west and south of us. Beyond the mudflats are fields of dry, bent grass. Several dozen Marines from Task Force Tarawa are spread out in these fields, lying prone on the ground, firing at Iraqis and outlying buildings.

Several hundred additional Marines from Task Force Tarawa are also directly across the roadway from us in a sunken field to the east. This field, perhaps a kilometer square, has high-tension power lines running through it and is bounded by a thick forest of palms and a scattering of buildings. One of these buildings, a small two-story hospital, contains Fedayeen, who have been targeting Marines in the field all afternoon. More Fedayeen have been shooting from the palm grove.

In the past few moments, heavy fire from First Recon’s Marines in Alpha and Charlie has been joined by shooting from the thousand or so Marines in Task Force Tarawa to our east, west and south. It sounds as if dozens of weapons are now firing on all sides. It’s as loud, and nearly as steady, as the sound of a river rushing over a dam. One thing you can say about intense weapons fire, it sounds like it ought to. It’s an extremely angry noise.

When I jump down, face-first into the dirt, I twist my head to the side and see the palm trees overhead shiver from multiple rounds hitting them. I also see that the grass in the field to my left is waving from the effects of low, grazing machine-gun fire. The fire is outbound, and though I can’t see the weapon, I can see a ghost of black smoke rising above what is probably the barrel. It’s my hope that most of the fire I’m hearing is outbound, from Marines. I would hate to think it’s from Iraqis massing to overrun our position.