Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Espera orders the Marine who jumped out to get back in. They figure out Colbert’s vehicle is stuck, and roll around to the right, avoiding the sabka.

Hunched down by Colbert’s vehicle, I am so disoriented at this point that I actually think for a moment that the sandy field we are in is a beach. I turn around, looking for the ocean, then hear Colbert repeating, “We’re in a goddamn sabka field.”

I think he’s saying “soccer field.” I can’t believe Iraqis would play on sand like this. I’m looking around for the goalposts when Trombley grabs my shoulder. “Get behind me and take cover,” he says.

The battalion operations chief runs across the sand, shouting at Colbert, “Abandon your Humvee!” He orders him to set it on fire with an incendiary grenade, yelling, “Thermite the radios!”

Colbert pounds the roof of his Humvee, screaming, “I’m not abandoning this vehicle!”

One of Espera’s Marines watching the spectacle from a distance glumly observes, “We’re going to die because Colbert’s in love with his Humvee.”

Still taking sporadic fire from the town, Marines in Bravo run up with shovels and pickaxes to dig it out. Meanwhile, Colbert and Trombley dive under the wheel wells with bolt cutters, slicing away the steel cables—a gift of the defenders of Al Gharraf—wrapped around the axle. They try pulling it with a towing cable attached to another Humvee, but it snaps. Finally, a truck full of Marines from the battalion’s maintenance unit rolls up. Support Marines—the POGs so often belittled by Colbert and others—jump out under fire, attach chains to the trapped Humvee and yank it out.

WE LIMP to a desert encampment a few kilometers away, the shot-up Humvee making grinding and flapping sounds. When the platoon stops at its resting point in the broad, open desert, Marines jump out and embrace one another. Even Colbert becomes emotional, running across the sand, lunging into Reyes and giving him a bear hug.

All the Humvees in Bravo Company are riddled with bullet holes, but Darnold is the only Marine who was hit. Counting the dozens of rounds that sliced through sheet metal, tires and rucksacks, the men can’t believe they made it. In retrospect the whole engagement was like one of those cheesy action movies in which the bad guys fire thousands of rounds that all narrowly miss the hero. While everyone else stands around, slapping backs and laughing about all the buildings they shot up or knocked down, Colbert grows pensive. He confesses to me that he had absolutely no feelings going through the city. He almost seems disturbed by this. “It was just like training,” he says. “I just loaded and fired my weapon from muscle memory. I wasn’t even aware what my hands were doing.”

The shamal grows into one of the worst storms anyone has experienced so far in the Middle East. The sky looks like someone picked up a desert and is now turning it upside down on us. Then it rains, which comes down in globs of mud. To top it off, it starts to hail. A junior officer walks a few meters out into this weather to take a dump and becomes hopelessly lost. A team of Recon Marines is organized to go look for him (and he is eventually found, dazed and sheepish, several hours later).

The nice thing about artillery is that, unlike aircraft, it still works in foul weather. Marine batteries begin bombing the town. Colbert and I sit in the vehicle, watching. Through the blackness of the night, orange puffs of artillery bursts are vaguely discernible over the town. Fick slips into the vehicle with a map, to tell us that the name of the town is Al Gharraf. “Good,” Colbert says. “I hope they call it El Pancake when we’re through with it.” Marine artillery crews fire approximately 1,000 rounds into Al Gharraf and the vicinity during the next twelve hours.

Just before turning in to the hole I’ve dug outside the Humvee, I smell a sickly-sweet odor. During chemical-weapons training before the war, we were taught that some nerve agents emit unusual, fragrant odors. I put on my gas mask and sit in the dark Humvee for twenty minutes before Person tells me what I’m smelling is a cheap Swisher Sweets cigar that Espera is smoking underneath his Humvee.

MARINES AWAKEN in their holes in the desert outside of Al Gharraf at dawn, March 26, to find the shamal has worn itself out, leaving behind a cold, overcast morning. Fick gathers his team leaders for briefing by the hood of his Humvee. “The good news,” he tells them, “is we will be rolling with a lot of ass today. RCT-1 will be in front of us for most of the day. The bad news is, we’re going through four more towns like the one we hit yesterday.”

Among the Marines this morning, the euphoria of having survived their run through the town has evaporated. Trombley gets into a dispute with another Marine after borrowing his grenade-box “shitter” and returning it with skid marks down the side.

The shitter belongs to Corporal Evan Stafford. A twenty-year-old from Tampa, Florida, Stafford is a white guy whose hair grows so blond fellow Marines call him “Q-tip.” When not in uniform, he dresses like Eminem. He identifies so strongly with black culture, notably the music and philosophies of the late Tupac Shakur, that when other Marines use terms like “Nigger Juice” to describe black coffee, or refer to Arabs as “Dune Coons”—as a couple do—Stafford shakes his head and mutters, “Racist ofay motherfuckers.” While the one black guy in the platoon laughs off these slurs as Marine humor, Stafford is always ready to throw down and take on the “oppressors.” The few heated arguments that ever take place in the platoon about racism are always between Stafford and another white guy who accuses him of being a “fucking wigger.” (The arguments seldom last long, since Stafford and the wigger-hater are also best friends.) When Stafford isn’t standing up for his chosen race, he seldom speaks, other than to say, “Screwby.” No one’s quite certain what “screwby” means, not even Stafford. “I guess it means, ‘this sucks,’ or ‘kind of cool,’” he tells me.

This morning, as Trombley hands him back his fouled shitter, the usually unflappable Stafford seems on the verge of tears. “You shit on my shitter!” Stafford says, inspecting it at arm’s length, being careful not to touch the offending marks.

“Wipe ’em off or something,” Trombley says, trying to laugh it off.

“No.” Stafford stares at the shit stains, struggling to come to grips with the enormity of this offense.

Trombley starts to look worried. Stafford is one of the Marines in the platoon guys like Trombley look up to. Not only is he a full-fledged Recon Marine, but Stafford is one of those people who simply project absolute cool, no matter what—except for now.

“This shitter is the only luxury I have out here.” He looks at Trombley, deeply saddened.

“I could try to clean it,” Trombley offers.

“Whatever, dog.” Stafford cold-shoulders past him. “Screwby.”

In the final hour before stepping off, other Marines fix up their Humvees, test-fire their weapons—nearly half of which jammed yesterday—and question their leadership. “Why the fuck would Ferrando send us through that town?” one Marine in the platoon says, cleaning his M-4. “RCT-1 wouldn’t go through there with armor. No doubt Ferrando is basking in the glory of us having made it through. But we only made it because we got lucky.”

The lack of information provided to the Marines about their role in the grand scheme of things is beginning to erode morale. They simply don’t know that brazenly driving into ambushes is part of the plan.

“I’ll tell you why we’re being used like this,” a Marine in Second Platoon complains. “Our commander is a politician. He’ll do anything to kiss the general’s ass. The reason Dowdy didn’t go through that town yesterday is he probably cares about his men. Ferrando is trying to get promoted on our backs.”