Evan Wright - Generation Kill

By now, a shamal dust storm has begun to brew. Obliteration of sunlight in a true shamal, as this one is, is nearly complete. A typical Iraqi shamal produces a dust cloud that extends three to six kilometers from the Earth’s surface into the upper atmosphere. The sky turns brown or red or yellow, depending on the complexion of the dust. Our sky is the color of bile—brown tinged with yellow. Winds now gust up to fifty miles an hour. We hear thunder.

First Recon’s convoy becomes twisted up on the back trails winding through the hamlets and palm groves. One set of vehicles takes a wrong turn. A bridge indicated on the map turns out not to exist. A couple of the battalion’s seven-ton trucks nearly tumble into a dry canal when the roadway gives out. It takes about an hour for the convoy to “unfuck” itself. When it does, Bravo Company, which had been in the lead, ends up at the rear. The battalion convoy is cut in two, with Alpha, Charlie and Headquarters in front, and Bravo a few kilometers back.

Colbert’s vehicle creeps forward, hugging the edge of a dry canal. Here the canal is about seven meters deep and an equal distance across. The Humvee is squeezed between a two-meter-high berm on the left and the canal on the right. We’re on a donkey path, on the verge of slipping into the canal. We find out from the battalion radio that RCT-1, moving several kilometers west of here on the highway, is in contact with suspected Republican Guard units.

We round a bend. A village directly across from us on the other side of the dry canal looks like something out of a Sergio Leone Western. Tumbleweed blows past crude adobe huts. One of them has a peaked roof and arches in the entrance, making it resemble a small Spanish church. Villagers stream south (against the direction in which we are moving) on the opposite side of the canal. There are dozens of them—women carrying bundles on their heads, children and old ladies pulling handcarts loaded with household goods. Whereas an hour earlier villagers had been waving and smiling, the demeanor of these people is radically different. Most avoid eye contact with us. Some on the other side of the canal break into a run when they see us approach. Watching them go, Colbert concludes, “These people are fleeing.”

On our side of the canal, an Iraqi man walks briskly past Bravo Company’s first sergeant and gives him the thumbs-down, indicating trouble ahead. Then a villager tells a Marine translator that they are fleeing because enemy forces are preparing for an attack in the town north of here.

Inside Colbert’s vehicle we hear the news of a possible attack over the radio while watching the continued exodus of villagers. Black clouds roll overhead. Lightning flashes. The winds are so strong now, the palm fronds on the surrounding trees have flipped backward. We’re riding directly into the wind. Colbert shakes his head, laughing. “Could it look any worse than this? Every sign is telling us something bad is going to happen.”

Moments later, gunfire erupts ahead. The five Humvees from Bravo’s Third Platoon are directly in front of us, squeezed onto the donkey trail in a single-file column. The weird Spanish-looking village remains beside us across the canal on our right. To the left over a berm, there’s a small cluster of two-story adobe huts, with palm trees growing between them. Unseen people inside this mini-hamlet seem to be shooting at Third Platoon.

We stop. More rifle shots crackle.

“There’s incoming rounds to our rear,” Person says, sounding almost bored as he passes on a report from the radio.

“Damn it,” says Colbert. “I have to take a shit.”

Instead, Colbert picks up a 40mm grenade, kisses the nose of it and slides it into the 203 launcher on his rifle. He opens the door and climbs up the embankment on the left to observe the homes on the other side. He signals for all the Marines to come out of the vehicle and join him. Marines from other vehicles fire into the hamlet with rifles, machine guns and Mark-19s. There are about forty-five seconds of popping and booming, then it stops.

“They say we’re taking fire from those huts,” Colbert says, eyeing the hamlet through binoculars. “I see no targets.”

“There’s people poking their heads out behind a palm tree!” another Marine on the berm shouts.

Trombley lies next to Colbert with his SAW poised to fire. “Should I light ’em up?” he asks Colbert.

“No, not yet, Trombley. Those are civilians.”

ALPHA AND CHARLIE COMPANIES are currently about two kilometers ahead of us on the same trail on the outskirts of the town where locals have warned of an enemy attack. The Marines are surrounded by open fields on the right and a row of huts and two-story houses about 300 meters back from them on the left. As the lead Humvees in Alpha (who are at the front of the battalion) draw alongside these structures, they come under heavy machine-gun and AK fire. Then enemy mortars burst in the fields to the right.

The lead troops in Alpha immediately dismount and take cover behind a meter-high, mud-brick wall on the left side of the road. The fire is coming from the village structures a few hundred meters beyond this wall.

The main road into Al Gharraf is about 300 meters farther ahead of them. Though the sky has darkened from the gathering sandstorm, the cobalt-blue dome of a mosque is visible ahead, rising over the town. It’s about the only color that can be seen anywhere.

Behind Alpha on the same trail, the Marines in Charlie Company come under fire. Saucier, the .50-cal gunner with Jesus tattooed on his chest, is among those taking cover. Everyone is crouched low, frantically looking around, trying to figure out where the shooting is coming from. Saucier, however, becomes distracted. A couple hundred meters away there’s a woman in black walking through the field. The winds are so powerful she leans into them, her robe billowing behind her. She’s using both hands to drag a large child—maybe a six- or seven-year-old boy—across the berms. The kid has obviously been shot or wounded—Saucier thinks from an enemy mortar burst, since several of these hit near where the woman had been walking. He observes her for several seconds, then struggles to turn away and refocus on his own survival. “You can’t dwell on this stuff here,” he later says. “But I’ll definitely take it home with me.”

Capt. Patterson believes there are at least two dozen enemy fighters holed up in the huts to the left, firing on his men. The Marines saturate the area with heavy-weapons fire, but they can’t silence the enemy machine guns, which have everyone pinned down.

He makes the difficult decision of calling in an artillery strike on the huts. Any artillery strike within 600 meters of your position is called “danger close,” given the wide kill radius of artillery shells. With the huts 300 meters away, Patterson is almost calling in a strike on top of his own men. But on their own, they can’t get past them.

Since Alpha is spread across a couple hundred meters, not all the men get the word that there is a danger-close artillery strike on its way. Corporal John Burris, a twenty-one-year-old in Alpha Second Platoon, is among those kept in the dark.

Burris is one of those guys who could have done any number of things besides join the Marine Corps. His family owns a construction equipment and supply company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “My family goes to college and then joins the family business,” Burris says. A talented swimmer, he was offered scholarships at several universities, but opted for the Marines. His choice of the military didn’t stem from any special patriotic urge. He wanted to buck family tradition, and besides, he was worried he’d party too hard in college. Even in full battle fatigue, toting his rifle, Burris barely looks old enough to drive, an impression that is added to by his perpetually cheerful disposition. For him, the whole campaign so far has been an oddly slapstick affair. Yesterday, by the Euphrates, he was ordered to advance on a suspected enemy gun position and drop a 203 round into it, but when he jumped up and ran toward it, he tripped and cut his face open on his rifle stock. In the midst of all the shooting, his fellow Marines fell over laughing.