Evan Wright - Generation Kill

In this war Marine intelligence analysts will later estimate that their advance into Nasiriyah was stopped by between 3,000 and 5,000 Saddam loyalists. Despite America’s dazzling high-tech capabilities—the Marines move through Nasiriyah by blasting it to hell.

As a reporter watching this bombardment from Colbert’s Humvee, knowing we will be rolling through Nasiriyah soon, I feel relief every time I see another round burning through the sky. Each one, I imagine, ups the odds of surviving.

AT THREE IN THE MORNING, Gunny Wynn pokes his head in Colbert’s window. We were supposed to move a couple of hours ago. But things are always delayed. “We’re going at dawn,” he says.

“That’s fucking asinine,” Colbert says. “Moving under cover of darkness is our primary advantage.”

Gunny Wynn attempts to reassure him. “One thing we saw in Somalia was no matter how hard the fighting, gunmen usually sleep between four and eight. They just conk out, like clockwork. So we should be okay.”

Colbert spends his final sleepless moments in the darkness, fantasizing about all the custom gear he should have brought for his Humvee—extra power inverters to charge the batteries of his thermal nightscope, a better shortwave radio to tune in the BBC, a CD player.

“We could hook up speakers and play music to fuck with the Iraqis,” Person says.

“We could drive through Nasiriyah playing Metallica,” Trombley adds.

“Fuck that,” Person says. “We’d play GG Allin.

“Who the fuck is GG Allin?” Colbert asks.

“Like, this original punk-rock dude,” Person says. “He believes murder should be legalized. You should be able to kill people you hate. He’s fucking cool.”

No one points out that this concept already seems to be the prevailing one in greater Nasiriyah.

ON THE MORNING of March 25, the men in First Recon, most of whom have been up all night in anticipation of entering the hostile city, are finally told to start their engines. Colbert’s Humvee rolls toward the bridge at about six-thirty in the morning. The smoke has cleared, but it’s an overcast day. Just before the causeway onto the bridge, we pass Marines in gas masks standing by the side of the road. They gesture for us to don our masks, indicating there’s a gas attack.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Colbert says. He points out the window. “There’s birds flying. Fuck it. We’re not putting on our masks.”

We drive onto the bridge. The guardrails on either side are bent and tattered. There are piles of empty brass shell casings and discarded steel ammo boxes on both sides. But aside from these signs of combat, it just looks like your average concrete bridge. I’m amazed that with all the gunfire—especially mortars and artillery—it wasn’t hit. The Euphrates below is a flat ribbon of gray.

On the other side we pass several blown-up Amtracs. Marine rucksacks are scattered on the road, with clothes, bedrolls, and bloody scraps of battle dressing. Nearby are puddles of fluorescent pink engine coolant from destroyed vehicles.

The city ahead is about six kilometers across, a sprawling metropolis of mud brick and cinder block. Smoke curls from collapsed structures. Homes facing the road are pockmarked and cratered. Cobras fly overhead, spitting machine-gun fire into buildings on both sides of us. We see no civilians, just dogs roaming the ruins.

Nobody talks in Colbert’s vehicle. Reports fly over the radio that other vehicles in First Recon’s convoy are coming under fire. Then we halt on the northern end of Nasiriyah. We are surrounded by shattered gray buildings, set back about fifty meters on either side of the road. The things you look at are the thousands of gaps everywhere—windows, alleys, doorways, parapets on the roofs—to see if there are any muzzle flashes. You seldom see the guys actually doing the shooting. They hide behind walls, sticking the gun barrels over the edges to fire. All you see is a little flame spouting from the shadows. Colbert leans into his rifle scope, scanning the buildings. “Stay frosty, gents,” he says.

We are stopped because Alpha Company has halted in order to pick up a wounded Marine from Task Force Tarawa with a bullet in his leg. The best they can do is put the Marine’s stretcher on top of the Humvee. While attempting to load him, snipers in rubbled buildings on both sides of the road begin firing into the convoy. They concentrate their fire on Recon’s support trucks. The driver of one takes a bullet in the chest, but it’s stopped by his interceptor vest. An RPG round zooms over the nose of another support truck and explodes nearby. The Marines in the support trucks, derisively referred to as POGs (People Other than Grunts) by Colbert and others in the frontline units, begin launching Mark-19 grenades into a nearby building. Then a Cobra slices low and fires its machine gun directly over the heads of the men on the trucks.

SOME IN THE BATTALION are glad to come under fire and have a chance to shoot back. Few more so than the battalion’s executive officer (XO), Major Todd Eckloff. Thirty-five years old, he grew up in Enumclaw, Washington, about an hour outside Seattle. He decided to become a Marine at the age of five. He says, “My grandmother was big on patriotism and military books and songs.” She helped raise him, and Eckloff grew up singing the Marines’ Hymn the way other kids do nursery rhymes. When he was just a toddler, his grandmother participated in an adopt-a-soldier program, serving dinners for Vietnam vets in their home. Eckloff still remembers the first time he met a Marine. “I was with my grandmother at the South Center Mall, and coming toward us was a Marine in his dress blues. That’s when I knew what I wanted to be. I was a dork about becoming a Marine.” Eckloff adds, “In high school I had a license plate that said ‘First Recon.’”

But since graduating from Virginia Military Institute and joining the Marines more than a decade ago, Eckloff has never had a chance to enjoy combat. He was deployed late to the Gulf War and simply “guarded shit,” then served uneventfully in the Balkans. Finally in his dream unit, First Recon, Eckloff nevertheless has one of the most frustrating billets. “As XO, my job is really to do nothing but take over if the battalion commander is shot.”

Now under fire in the convoy, he at last has his opportunity to taste combat. He rides in a supply truck, but in his mind, as he later tells me, “It’s cool, because I’m able to shoot my weapon out of the window.”

Eckloff carries a Benelli automatic twelve-gauge shotgun. As rounds pop off outside, he slides it out the window and blasts an Iraqi fifteen meters away in an alley. He sees him disappear in a “big cloud of pink.” The next instant he spots another guy running on a balcony area and gives him several blasts. Eckloff is certain he hit him. “My aim is good,” he says.

Later, after I interview him and others riding in the support units, I tally that these Marines claim altogether to have killed between five and fifteen Iraqis during several minutes of shooting in Nasiriyah. It’s a high number given the fact that during six hours of sometimes extremely heavy gun battle by the bridge yesterday the commander of Alpha Company believes his unit of eighty Marines got somewhere between ten and twenty kills.

Kocher, the team leader in Bravo’s Third Platoon, doubts there was much of a gun battle through Nasiriyah. “A lot of this was just some officers and POGs who think it’s cool to be out here shooting up buildings,” he says.

Kocher tells me this just after we’ve cleared Nasiriyah’s outer limits. Initially, I dismiss his opinion as Recon Marine snobbery. The fact is, Recon’s Support and Headquarters elements did come under fire in Nasiriyah. At the same time, there are some in the battalion—a very small number of men—who seem to develop a penchant for driving through towns and countryside firing wildly out of their vehicles.