Evan Wright - Generation Kill

As if on cue, Person leans out the window of his Humvee and starts singing a Creedence Clearwater Revival song, a Vietnam anthem. Then he stops abruptly. “This war will need its own theme music,” he tells me. “That fag Justin Timberlake will make a soundtrack for it,” he says. Then adds with disgust, “I just read that all these pussy faggot pop stars like Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears were going to make an antiwar song. When I become a pop star, I’m just going to make pro-war songs.”

One of the helicopters fires a TOW missile. Flames splash up from the trees. For the first time today, Marines in First Recon punch their fists into the sky and scream “Get some!” The helicopters continue to vomit destruction.

Even Pappy, grim all day, smiles watching the helicopters. “I used to get a kind of semi-chubb when Cobras went past,” he says. “After today, seeing those birds overhead makes me so hard I could hammer nails.”

In the midst of this, I look up and see a shivering, dazed dog wandering through the smoke on the road. A red rag is tied around his neck, indicating that he must belong to someone.

Fick still has no word on RCT-1’s pending assault through the city. Enemy gunfire has dropped off. All we hear now is the continued booming of Marine artillery. Military ambulances are now parked across the street, picking up wounded from the field. A Humvee with loudspeakers crawls through the gloom along the edge of the palm grove, blaring surrender messages in Arabic. In the field there’s a lone captured enemy fighter, dressed in rags, sitting on his knees, hands bound behind his back. A half dozen Marines stand around him with their rifles pointed at his chest.

Colbert’s team pulls back to a reed fence, edging the field to the south. We dig holes. As I labor over mine, “Fruity Rudy” Reyes comes up behind me and pats my shoulder. The guy is so strong his fingertips feel like ball-peen hammers drumming into me. “Work it, brother,” he says. “All it takes is a little consistency every day to build those muscles.”

Reyes is relentlessly cheerful and bright in a way that brings to mind the host of a morning talk show. Adding to this impression, he is the platoon’s unofficial fitness guru, always ready with a helpful bromide. As I continue to huff and wheeze, he adds, “You know what the best workout machine is? The human body.”

Later, as we sit in the mud eating more MREs, a dirt-covered Marine from Task Force Tarawa walks out from the field. He stops in front of us, looking vaguely shell-shocked.

“How’s it going, buddy?” Colbert asks.

“They shot one of my Marines in the stomach out there.” He gestures toward the field. “We fired back. Blew a donkey’s head off. We didn’t see nothing else.”

“Buddy, you need anything—food, water?” Colbert asks.

“It’s all good, bro.” He wanders off.

AT SUNSET FIRST RECON remains at the bridge. The whole reason the battalion came here was to serve as a quick-reaction force when RCT-1’s massive convoy crossed the bridge and entered the city. But RCT-1’s commander, Col. Dowdy, who has been flip-flopping for the past thirty hours on how and when to enter the city, continues wrestling with indecision. Instead of sending the whole convoy through in the afternoon as he’d planned, a couple of hours earlier he sent a small force of Marines dashing through the city in special, high-speed armored vehicles. They reported meeting almost no resistance as they sped through to the other side of the city, where they are now waiting.

Despite some reports of light resistance in Nasiriyah, the Marines in Task Force Tarawa who entered the city the day before remain in their original positions, still under enemy attack. Their situation is so tenuous, they haven’t yet retrieved the dead Marines still lying in shot-up Amtracs. Still taking heavy fire, their commander is asking Dowdy to loan him fourteen M1A1 tanks to reinforce their positions. It’s a situation common in combat: Two different sets of Marines operating in the same city a couple of kilometers apart are reporting radically different conditions.

After receiving a visit from Lieutenant General James Conway (Maj. Gen. Mattis’s boss, commander of the entire First Marine Expeditionary Force in the Middle East), who urges him to take action, Dowdy finally decides he will send RCT-1 through Nasiriyah at midnight. First Recon is ordered back from the bridge. Their mission to serve as a quick-reaction force has been scrubbed. The six hours they spent at the bridge under fire was basically a waste of time (though Marines in Alpha and Charlie did take out perhaps two dozen or more hostile fighters, as well as the AAA battery). First Recon will now roll through Nasiriyah sometime after midnight, simply as part of the convoy with RCT-1.

IT’S AFTER DARK and growing cold when First Recon pulls back from the bridge at the Euphrates River on the evening of March 24. Its convoy of seventy vehicles rolls south four kilometers from the bridge. They stop on the highway and maneuver into the single-file marching order they will take into the city. Everybody turns off their engines and waits.

When I get out of Colbert’s vehicle, I smell the town trash dump we noticed earlier in the day. A bombed oil-tank storage facility blazes in the night sky about 300 meters in front of us. Marines wander out of the vehicles in high spirits. No one says so, but I think everyone’s pretty happy they didn’t have to do the reaction-force mission into the city.

First Recon’s Alpha Company Marines killed, by their most conservative estimates, at least ten Iraqis across the river. Some of these killer Marines come up to Colbert’s vehicle to regale his team with exploits of their slaughter, bragging about one kill in particular, a fat Fedayeen in a bright orange shirt. He was one of those guys with a cell phone or radio. He kept stepping out the front door of a building directly across the river, then popping back inside. More than a dozen Marines, armed with an assortment of rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers, had been watching him, waiting to get cleared hot to shoot. When they finally did and the fat man stepped out his front door again, he was literally blown to pieces. “We shredded him,” one of Colbert’s Marine buddies says. “We fucking redecorated downtown Nasiriyah.”

It’s not just bragging. When Marines talk about the violence they wreak, there’s an almost giddy shame, an uneasy exultation in having committed society’s ultimate taboo and having done it with state sanction.

“Well, good on you,” Colbert says to his friends.

Person shares an observation about his own reaction to combat. He stands by the road, pissing. “Man, I pulled my trousers down and it smells like hot dick,” he says. “That sweaty hot-cock smell. I kind of smell like I just had sex.”

The lighthearted mood is broken when headlights appear in the darkness. It’s now about nine o’clock at night. Three civilian vans, coming from the direction of Nasiriyah, bear down on First Recon’s position on the road. Initially, Marines just sit around gabbing and joking, paying them no mind.

By now, rumors have swirled through the ranks that yesterday in Nasiriyah Iraqi forces faked surrendering—came out with white flags, then opened up on the Marines. These stories are passed by officers and picked up by the media. Later, some units that were supposedly attacked in this manner deny this ever happened. But the legends of these devious tactics, along with tales of Jessica Lynch’s alleged mutilation and rape, gain wide credence.

Despite these fears, nobody lifts a finger to stop the approaching vans. It’s extremely difficult to maintain a combat mind-set twenty-four hours a day. After being under fire for six hours at the bridge, Marines just want to goof off and revel in the triumphs of having killed and survived.