Evan Wright - Generation Kill

On top of this mounting uncertainty, they have to deal with the men in the battalion they view as worthless incompetents. This morning they are paid a visit by Casey Kasem. In addition to not bringing enough batteries for their thermal night optics, another serious omission they blame on him became clear yesterday when the Mark-19s jammed in the ambush. To operate effectively in a dusty environment, the guns require a specialized lubricant called LSA. The men claim Casey Kasem forgot to bring it on the invasion. Without LSA, the guns jam constantly.

Casey Kasem traipses over and greets the Marines with hearty backslaps. “Outstanding job, gentlemen. The battalion commander thinks we did a stand-up job yesterday. I got some awesome footage outside the town, too,” he says, referring to his effort to make a war documentary. Casey Kasem kneels down by Colbert and asks in low, confidential tones, “Are your men having any combat-stress reactions we need to talk about?”

“Nothing that a little LSA wouldn’t help,” Colbert says.

Casey Kasem frowns. “As you all know, that was out of my hands.”

Casey Kasem has made reasonable-sounding arguments to me about why the shortages in the company are a result of matters beyond his control, but the men aren’t buying them.

As he walks off, Colbert observes, “People that were just annoying in the rear, out here their stupidity can kill you. It’s going to be awkward when we get home. I don’t know how I’ll be pleasant to these guys when we’re all together again back at the office at Pendleton. I’m not going to forget any of this.”

We climb into the Humvee. After Person starts the engine, Fick pokes his head in the window, grinning. “Present for you.” He passes in a small water bottle, filled with about two inches of amber fluid. “LSA,” he says. “I scammed it off some guys in RCT-1.”

“Sir, not to get homoerotic about this,” Colbert says. “But I could kiss you.”

WE LEAVE THE OUTSKIRTS of Al Gharraf at about nine in the morning. Two men standing by the road outside the shattered town grin and give us the thumbs-up. “This place gives me the creeps,” Colbert says.

The pattern that’s emerged—being greeted with enthusiastic cheers and waves by the people you see beside the roads, then shot at by people you don’t see behind walls and berms—is beginning to wear on the Marines. “These guys waving at us are probably the same ones who were trying to kill us yesterday,” Person says.

We pick up Route 7 and head north on the two-lane blacktop. Other than Fick’s vague instructions about passing through more towns like Al Gharraf, no one knows what the final goal is for this day, or even why they are in the Fertile Crescent. All they know is they must push north until Fick or somebody else tells them to stop.

The team’s only concern is to observe the roughly 1,000 meters on either side of the Humvee to make sure there is nobody with a weapon trying to shoot them. The surrounding landscape is a mix of grasslands and dusty plains rippling with berms. The fields are dotted with shepherds and mud-brick dwellings. Every fifty meters or so on both sides of the road there are trenches and sandbagged machine-gun bunkers—abandoned fortifications.

“RPG fire ahead,” Colbert says at about nine-thirty in the morning, passing on the first of many similar reports from the radio.

Colbert’s vehicle is the lead for the entire battalion, driving at an average speed of about fifteen miles per hour. Amtracs and other light armored vehicles from RCT-1 are rolling a few hundred meters ahead.

If you were to look at it from the air, you’d see a segmented column of American invasion vehicles—Marines in various units—stretching for several kilometers along the highway. Despite all its disparate elements, the column functions like a single machine, pulverizing anything in its path that appears to be a threat. The cogs that make up this machine are the individual teams in hundreds of vehicles, several thousand Marines scrutinizing every hut, civilian car and berm for weapons or muzzle flashes. The invasion all comes down to a bunch of extremely tense young men in their late teens and twenties, with their fingers on the triggers of rifles and machine guns.

We bump up against Amtracs 150 meters ahead pouring machine-gun fire into some huts. “They’re schwacking some guys with RPGs,” Colbert says.

Wild dogs run past.

“We ought to shoot some of these dogs,” Trombley says, eyeing the surrounding fields over the top of his SAW.

“We don’t shoot dogs,” Colbert says.

“I’m afraid of dogs,” Trombley mumbles.

I ask him if he was ever attacked by a dog when he was little.

“No,” he answers. “My dad was once. The dog bit him, and my dad jammed his hand down the dog’s throat and ripped up his stomach. I did have a dog lunge at me once on the sidewalk. I just threw it on its side, knocked the wind out of him. My aunt had a little dog. I was playing with it with one of those laser lights. The dog chased it into the street and got hit by a car. I didn’t mean to kill it.”

“Where did we find this guy?” Person asks.

We drive on.

“I like cats,” Trombley offers. “I had a cat that lived to be sixteen. One time he ripped a dog’s eye out with his claw.”

We pass dead bodies in the road again, men with RPG tubes by their sides, then more than a dozen trucks and cars burned and smoking. You find most torched vehicles have charred corpses nearby, occupants who crawled out and made it a few meters before expiring, with their grasping hands still smoldering. We pass another car with a small, mangled body outside it. It’s another child, facedown, and the clothes are too ripped to determine the gender. Seeing this is almost no longer a big deal. Since the shooting started in Nasiriyah forty-eight hours ago, firing weapons and seeing dead people has become almost routine.

“Whoa!” Trombley says. “That guy in that car was shot through the stomach. He just looked at me, then raised his arm, like he was asking for help. He looked at me right there,” Trombley says, pointing to his inflamed eye.

I see the car Trombley’s talking about, a bullet-riddled sedan by the road, doors hanging open, with at least one body in it.

“He was unarmed,” Trombley says. “So I didn’t shoot him.”

I imagine that man in the car, an entire life lived, and the last thing in the world he sees is the face of an eager nineteen-year-old with a red, infected eye looking at him down the barrel of a SAW.

LATE IN THE MORNING Colbert’s team reaches the outskirts of the first big town we are passing through: Ash Shatrah. We pull even with Marine artillery guns pounding away, their snouts blazing flames and smoke. One of the guns has the words BOB MARLEY stenciled along the barrel, a somewhat incongruous tribute to the bard of Jah Love and reefer.

“Thump ’em, boys,” Colbert says darkly as he watches them fire. They’re striking targets in and around Ash Shatrah, prepping it for our drive through. We wait for several minutes, then go.

The battalion’s plan is to sprint past the town as fast as possible. With Colbert’s vehicle in the lead, we speed up to about forty-five miles an hour. While driving, Person reaches around and hands me his M-4.

“Put it out the window,” he says.

I look at him.

“What do you think? You’re just gonna eat all our food, drink all our water for free?”

I place the rifle on my lap but find it distracting. All I can think about are images of Geraldo Rivera waving his pistol around in reports he filed from Afghanistan, bragging about how he hoped to cap Osama. While rolling into Ash Shatrah, my biggest fear isn’t enemy fire, it’s that some reporter’s going to see me holding an M-4 and I’ll look like a jackass.