Evan Wright - Generation Kill

When the convoy stops for a “short halt”—typically one expected to last less than twenty minutes—the vehicles split into two columns. They park on both sides of the road, with the rear wheels of the Humvees in the dirt, the front wheels on the pavement, all of them facing the road at a forty-five-degree angle. The parking maneuver is called a “herringbone.” At both ends of the herringboned convoy, two Humvees pull ahead of the others, park side by side in each lane of the road and face out, orienting their main guns forward to stop traffic from approaching. The procedure for stopping vehicles is for the .50-cal gunners on the Humvees to cart their weapons up and fire warning shots high over approaching cars.

Saucier is on his team’s .50-cal, mounted in the center of their open-top Humvee, when he and other Marines see a passenger car about 350 meters down the road “acting funny.” The car stops, and four clean-cut young men step out of a nearby field and approach it.

Of all the little clues Marines are hunting for to determine whether the people and objects in this alien environment are hostile or benign, some facts begin to emerge: Fighters tend to be clean-cut or have mustaches, and farmers usually have beards. The four young men Saucier observes walking up to the car are all clean-cut. They get into the car, and it begins to drive toward Saucier’s Humvee.

Rules have changed since last night when Marines allowed three civilian vans to roll through their lines unchallenged. Now Marines are under orders to keep all civilian traffic at least 200 meters from their convoy.

Saucier aims his .50-cal high over the passenger car now approaching and thunks off several warning shots, sending bright tracers coursing over it. The car keeps coming.

“Light it up!” Marines shout nearby.

Saucier rips a ten-second burst, riddling the car with 100 armor-piercing incendiary rounds. The vehicle bursts into flames about 150 meters away, then rocks up and down as secondary explosions erupt inside. Nobody gets out.

Saucier and the other team members who also fired have just killed five men. The day before, by the Euphrates, Saucier fired into buildings in the city where he saw muzzle flashes, but he never saw any people. This is the first time he has seen a bunch of guys, then helped kill them.

Saucier stares at the burning car as explosions continue to burst inside, and he is relieved. “It means they must have been carrying weapons in there,” he concludes. “Those must have been bad guys.”

AFTER CHARLIE COMPANY destroys the white car, the battalion resumes its advance.

Bravo’s Third Platoon pushes in front of us and immediately comes under fire from a sniper hidden somewhere in a gas station. Marines saturate the suspected sniper position with fire and continue north. While they roll, Captain America spots an Iraqi man running through the field outside his window and cuts him down with his East German machine gun.

After being up all night, then experiencing the adrenaline-fueled ride through Nasiriyah, the morning has a dreamy quality. Charred or colorfully mashed-up people along the road just add to the surreal impression. The mood in Colbert’s Humvee is eerily relaxed.

Next to me, Trombley opens up an MRE and furtively pulls out a pack of Charms. “Keep it a secret,” he says. In full violation of Colbert’s ironclad no-Charms-because-Charms-are-bad-luck policy, he unwraps the candies and stuffs them into his mouth.

BY TEN IN THE MORNING on March 25, First Recon has covered about twenty kilometers since passing through Nasiriyah. Neither Lt. Fick nor the Marines in Second Platoon knows what they are doing here on Route 7. Maj. Gen. Mattis’s grand scheme of sending the 6,000-strong RCT-1 from Nasiriyah to Al Kut—now about 165 kilometers north of here—is completely unknown to the men in the platoon.

Right now the only order the men are operating under is to turn off Route 7 onto a dirt trail winding through an area of dry canals. The trail loosely parallels Route 7, runs for about ten kilometers through a series of small villages and ends outside a town called Al Gharraf (named for the canal). At this point most Marines don’t even know the name of the town, or if it indeed is their final destination for the day. While the 6,000 troops in RCT-1 will continue on Route 7, the 374 Marines in lightly armed First Recon will be invading this little chunk of Mesopotamia all by themselves.

Another essential piece of information the Marines in the battalion haven’t been given is that the purpose of driving onto this trail is to draw enemy fire. Today marks their first day of serving as ambush bait in central Iraq. They will spend most of the next ten days moving north, either on Route 7 or on parallel dirt trails, frequently ten to twenty-five kilometers ahead of RCT-1, trying to scare enemy forces into attacking. The rationale makes sense when it’s explained to me by Mattis after the invasion: The small force races up back roads ahead of the big force rolling behind on the main road. The enemy orients their troops and weapons on the small force (not realizing it’s the small one), and the big force hits them where they’re not looking for it. It’s a trick that works best when you’re going up against an army like Iraq’s, which has no air assets and bad communications and will have a tough time figuring out that the small force is just a decoy. I admire the plan when Mattis and others explain it to me. And in a way, I’m glad I didn’t know about it in advance, because it would have been scarier to remain with Second Platoon. Perhaps this is why they didn’t tell the Marines in the platoon about this plan either.

Colbert’s Humvee is in on point for the company when we make the turn off Route 7. There’s a dead man lying in a ditch at the junction. Two hundred meters past the corpse, there’s a farmhouse with a family out front, waving as we drive by. At the next house, two old ladies in black whoop and clap. A bunch of bearded men shout, “Good! Good! Good!” The Marines wave back. In the span of a few minutes, they have gone from kill-anyone-that-looks-dangerous mode to smiling and waving as if they’re on a float in the Rose Bowl parade.

A kilometer or so onto the trail, we are surrounded by lush fields of grain, then small hamlets nestled beneath palm groves. Rays of sunlight poke through the clouds, turning the dust in the air silver. Fick’s impression is that the “whole place tingles.” And not in a bad way. More villagers run out from their homes, cheering. Grinning fathers hoist up their babies By one house, teenage girls in maroon dresses sneak out from behind a wall. Defying tradition, their heads are uncovered, displaying pretty faces and long black hair. They jump up and down, laughing and waving at the Marines.

“Damn! Those girls are hot,” Person says.

“Look alert,” Colbert warns.

The road dwindles to a single, rutted lane. We crawl along at a couple of miles per hour, then stop. Several boys, about nine or ten, scramble up from a dry creek bed on our right. They come within about five meters of the Humvee and start yelling, “Hello, America!” Some of them put their hands to their mouths, begging for food.

Colbert tries to ignore them. One of the kids, however, stares him down. He makes clownish faces at Colbert, trying to make him laugh.

“Fuck it,” Colbert says. “Break out the humrats,” he says, referring to humanitarian rations. “Let’s feed the ankle-biters.”

We throw several bright yellow humrat packs out the window. As kids run up to grab them, Colbert says, “You’re welcome. Vote Republican.” He gazes at them, now yelling and fighting each other for the humrat packs, and adds, “I really thank God I was born American. I mean, seriously, it’s something I lose sleep over.”