Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Fick runs up to remind them they are invaders in a hostile land. “Stop these fucking vehicles!” he yells.

Marines leap up, weapons clattering, and surround the vans.

The dome lights are on in the rear van. I see a man curled over in the backseat in a fetal position. He’s covered in blood-soaked rags.

A translator is brought up. He speaks to the driver of one of the vans, then tells Fick that the vans are filled with doctors and wounded civilians. They can’t get to hospitals in Nasiriyah, so they’re driving south looking for one.

Fick radios the battalion requesting permission to send the vans south down the highway. Permission is granted, but it’s a futile exercise. The Marine convoy these vans are attempting to drive through stretches for twenty or more kilometers. Since all the units are on different comms, it’s impossible to pass word to them to allow these vans through. In the best-case scenario, the vans will be repeatedly stopped and won’t reach a hospital for a day or two. In the worst case, they will be shot up by nervous Marines.

“It sucks,” Fick says as we watch the vans creep off south through the Marine convoy. “This is what happens in war. For all we know, those wounded were the same guys shooting at us all day. They can’t use the hospital up the road, because Iraqis were using it to fire on Marines.”

But Fick has other concerns. In a couple of hours his men will roll through the city. Marines have dubbed the route through Nasiriyah “sniper alley,” though within a few weeks the same nickname will apply to any street in an Iraqi town.

Colbert briefs his team inside the Humvee. “The last friendly units that went through there were taking RPGs from the rooftops,” he says. “I want the Mark-19 ranged high. Trombley, anything that moves on the left that looks like a weapon, shoot it.”

“Gee, I hope I get to run over somebody at least,” Person says, growing petulant. As the driver, he doesn’t have easy access to his weapon. This fact bugs him. “I’m one of the best marksmen here. I can shoot people, too.”

Colbert tells him to shut up. “Look,” he tells his team. “There’s nothing to worry about. Everyone just do your job. We’re going to have a lot of ass rolling in front of us.”

“Ass” in the Marine Corps refers to heavily armed units, such as tanks. The Marines have been told that some armored elements of RCT-1 will move through the city ahead of them.

Espera, who drives behind Colbert with his team in a Humvee with no roof or doors on it, is worried. “I can understand a mission to assault a city, but to run a gauntlet through it?” he says, leaning into Colbert’s window. “I hope these generals know what they’re doing.”

AT MIDNIGHT, Espera and I share a last cigarette. Marines, unable to sleep, stand around by their Humvees wrapped in ponchos to ward off the bitter cold, some of them jumping in place to warm up. Espera and I climb under a Humvee to conceal the light of the cigarette and lie on our backs, passing it back and forth.

Espera reenlisted in the Marines on his way back from Afghanistan. While there, he and his squad of Marines spent forty-five days living in a three-meter-deep hole somewhere in the desert. The only action they saw occurred on the night their perimeter was overrun by camels. Espera and his men opened up on them with machine guns. “After three weeks out there, no sleep, living in those holes, I was fucking hallucinating,” he explains. “We thought those camels were fucking Hajjis coming over the wire. When we lit those motherfuckers up, it was fucking raining camel meat. It was a mess, dog. Motherfuckers even did a story on it in the L.A. Times. ”

Now Espera admits he sometimes regrets reenlisting. “To come to this motherfucker?” He adds, “I’ve been so up and down today. I guess this is how a woman feels.”

Though Espera takes pride in being a “violent warrior,” the philosophical implications weigh on him. “I asked a priest if it’s okay to kill people in war,” he tells me. “He said it’s okay as long as you don’t enjoy it. Before we crossed into Iraq, I fucking hated Arabs. I don’t know why. I never saw too many in Afghanistan. But as soon as we got here, it’s just gone. I just feel sorry for them. I miss my little girl. Dog, I don’t want to kill nobody’s children.”

NO ONE’S SLEEPING in Colbert’s Humvee, either. When I get back in, Trombley once again talks about his hopes of having a son with his new young bride when he returns home.

“Never have kids, Corporal,” Colbert lectures. “One kid will cost you three hundred thousand dollars. You should never have gotten married. It’s always a mistake.” Colbert often proclaims the futility of marriage. “Women will always cost you money, but marriage is the most expensive way to go. If you want to pay for it, Trombley, go to Australia. For a hundred bucks, you can order a whore over the phone. Half an hour later, she arrives at your door, fresh and hot, like a pizza.”

Despite his bitter proclamations about women, if you catch Colbert during an unguarded moment, he’ll admit that he once loved a girl who jilted him, a junior-high-school sweetheart whom he dated on and off for ten years and was even engaged to until she left him to marry one of his closest buddies. “And we’re still all friends,” he says, sounding almost mad about it. “They’re one of those couples that likes to takes pictures of themselves doing all the fun things they do and hang them up all over their goddamn house. Sometimes I just go over there and look at the pictures of my ex-fiancée doing all those fun things I used to do with her. It’s nice having friends.”

IWATCH THE ARTILLERY streak through the sky toward Nasiriyah. Marine howitzers have been pounding the city for about thirty-six hours now. Each 155mm projectile they fire weighs about 100 pounds. There are several different types, but two are most commonly employed in Iraq: high-explosive (HE) rounds to blast through steel and concrete; and dual-purpose improved conventional munitions (DPICM) rounds, which burst overhead, dispersing dozens of grenade-size bomblets intended to shred people below.

The bulk of those flying into Nasiriyah are HE rounds. A single HE round can knock down a small building, send a car flying ten meters into the air, or blast a four-meter-wide crater in the ground. They spray shrapnel in a burst that’s considered lethal within a fifty-meter radius and has a high probability of maiming anyone within an additional 150 meters.

The Marines’ artillery guns have a range of thirty kilometers. But even in the best of circumstances, artillery fire is an imprecise art. Rounds can veer off by twenty meters or more, as we witnessed today when one burst overhead. Despite the improvements in munitions and the use of computers and radar to help target them, the basic principles of artillery haven’t changed much since Napoleon’s time.

For some reason reporters and antiwar groups concerned about collateral damage in war seldom pay much attention to artillery. The beauty of aircraft, coupled with their high-tech destructive power, captures the imagination. From a news standpoint, jets flying through the sky make for much more dramatic footage than images of cannons parked in the mud, intermittently belching puffs of smoke.

But the fact is, the Marines rely much more on artillery bombardment than on aircraft dropping precision-guided munitions. During our thirty-six hours outside Nasiriyah they have already lobbed an estimated 2,000 rounds into the city. The impact of this shelling on its 400,000 residents must be devastating.

It’s not the first time the citizens of Nasiriyah have been screwed by the Americans. On February 15, 1991, during the first Gulf War, George H. W. Bush gave a speech at the UN in which he urged “the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” The U.S. military also dropped thousands of leaflets on the country, urging the same. Few heeded this call more than the citizens of Nasiriyah. While the Iraqi army was routed in Kuwait, the mostly Shia populace of Nasiriyah led a coup against Baathist leaders controlling the city. When Saddam’s armed forces subsequently came in to put down the uprising, they did so with the tacit approval of the Americans, who allowed them to use helicopters against the rebels. (The American administration at the time didn’t want to see Iraq torn apart by rebellion; Bush’s call for an overthrow of the government had merely been a ploy to tie up Iraq’s armed forces while the U.S. military prepared to battle them in Kuwait.) After the resistance was quashed in Nasiriyah, months of bloody reprisals followed, in which thousands of its citizens are believed to have been killed.