Evan Wright - Generation Kill

The town is set far back from the road. No fire comes from it. The most overwhelming impression Ash Shatrah makes is that it is one of the smelliest places I have ever encountered. From 200 meters away the town stinks like the inside of a garbage can. We drive four kilometers through it, and I pass the M-4 back to Person. I hand it to him barrel first, with a round in the chamber and the safety off, causing him to rethink his policy of arming the reporter.

OUTSIDE OF ASH SHATRAH we link up with a unit of Amtracs and other armored Marine vehicles parked near a rural hamlet. It’s a cluster of three or four buildings 400 meters off the road, nestled in green pastures, with some palm trees behind them. Marines in the Amtracs stopped because they thought they took shots from one of the houses.

Now Marines are out on berms watching the house through binoculars and scopes. Several sniper teams in Bravo join them. Kocher in Third Platoon observes a “mom with two kids hiding in the back of the house, nervously peeping out.”

The Marines study the house for forty minutes. Surrounded by verdant fields, with the rare quiet of all the Humvee engines having been shut off, the morning feels peaceful.

Then a 25mm Bushmaster on one of the armored vehicles up the road begins pouring rounds into the house. The women and children Recon Marines had been observing through their optics disappear in a cloud of dust, as the Bushmaster rounds blast the adobe walls.

Colbert jumps out of the Humvee. “What are they shooting at?”

“There’s civilians in there!” several Recon observers yell at once.

Colbert picks up his radio handset and shouts, “Tell those guys to cease fire! They’re shooting civilians.” But it’s a fruitless effort. Even though the vehicle doing most of the firing is only 100 meters or so ahead, First Recon Battalion has no ability to reach it on the radio.

Now a dozen or more rifles and machine guns in the nearby armored units come alive, crackling and sending red streaks of tracer rounds into the entire hamlet.

Marines with mortars jump off a tracked vehicle in front of us, yelling and cursing. They’re in such a rush to attack the village, one Marine falls off the vehicle, landing on his ass. They launch a volley of 60mm mortars, which fall short, exploding in the field immediately in front of us.

Colbert throws down his radio headset and stands outside his Humvee, screaming, “Cease fire!” The Marines shooting into the village 100 meters up from us continue unabated.

Then, behind us, Encino Man races up in his Humvee. He jumps out, so eager to get in the fight, it seems, he forgets to unplug his radio headset, which jerks his head back as the cord, still attached to the dash unit, tightens.

“Jesus Christ! There’s fucking civilians in that house! Cease fire!” Colbert says.

Encino Man pops off a 203 grenade that falls wildly short of the house. Colbert, like other Marines in Bravo, is furious. Not only do they believe Encino Man is firing on civilians, but the guy doesn’t even know how to range his 203.

Colbert gets back in the Humvee, trying to rationalize the events outside that have spiraled beyond his control: “Everyone’s just tense. Some Marine took a shot, and everyone has just followed suit.”

Outside, Marines’ heavy 81mm mortars begin to land on the homes. They make a sort of crunching sound as they detonate, sending black plumes over the huts.

“They finally got good effects on target,” Kocher says, watching them obliterate the hamlet.

THERE’S NO TIME to sit around contemplating the destruction of the little village. First Recon is ordered north again toward a town called Ar Rifa. We pass forty or fifty refugees streaming south, some on bicycles. A massive fire about a kilometer up the road sends flames and black smoke 100 meters or more into the sky. The day is chilly and gray. There’s no wind, but the air is heavy with dust particles. They coat the windshield like frost. If you wipe your finger on it, a few minutes later the mark is covered over again with powder. Through this fog we hear AK rifles cracking off rounds ahead. The convoy bumps to a halt. We are several hundred meters south of Ar Rifa.

The two Marines who ride in the back of Fick’s Humvee, which is configured sort of like a pickup truck with a canvas top over the back, stand by the tailgate singing Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” over and over.

One of the combat-stress reactions not discussed in their training is singing. A lot of Marines, when waiting for minutes or hours in a position where they expect an ambush or other trouble, will get a song stuck in their heads. Often they’ll sing it or chant the words almost as if they are saying Hail Marys.

The Marines’ choice of a Nelly song in the back of Fick’s vehicle shows the hip-hop influence of Q-tip Stafford. He rides there with nineteen-year-old Private First Class John Christeson, the newest guy in the platoon. The two of them spend twelve to twenty hours a day bouncing around in the back of the truck. Neither is sure when they both hit upon “Hot in Herre” as their combat song, but they were singing it yesterday while rolling into the ambush at Al Gharraf.

Now waiting on the ground by Fick’s truck outside of Ar Rifa, Christeson observes a house 500 meters in the distance, barely discernible across the haze and scrub brush. He’s chanting the lyrics, “Cuz I feel like bustin’ loose and I feel like touchin you/And can’t nobody stop the juice so baby… ,” when he spots three to four men moving low. They’re at least 300 meters away, moving closer to the Humvee, using the vegetation for cover. One seems to be carrying an RPG tube.

Other than a family cruise through the Caribbean, this is Christeson’s first trip out of the United States. He grew up in Lebanon, Illinois, with parents still married—a dad who works for the state college and a mom who works at a title loan company. Even though he was shot at yesterday in Al Gharraf, the whole place seems unreal to him. It’s the mud huts. He can’t believe people in the twenty-first century actually live in huts with goats and sheep all around. Christeson grew up with computers, playing Doom, a game that to him is almost ancient history. After high school he received an appointment to go to the Naval Academy at Annapolis, but in the wake of 9/11 he decided to become a grunt Marine to do something for his country—and to get in on the action. Up until the invasion, his closest brush with history was the day Jared Fogle, the guy who lost 300 pounds on the Subway Diet, came to his town, and Christeson got to meet him in person. “I thought if I punched him in the face I would be on TV,” he says, recalling the historic encounter. “But he wasn’t as big as I thought he’d be, for someone you see all the time on TV.”

Now, he’s watching Fedayeen stalk his vehicle. “I think they’ve got an RPG,” he says, trying to get a line on them through the sights of his SAW.

“Screwby,” Stafford replies.

“Gunny!” Christeson shouts to Gunny Wynn. “Those men might have an RPG.”

Gunny Wynn runs up, raises his binoculars and sees what looks to be a man setting up an RPG in some scrub. “Light ’em up!”

Christeson is so excited he’s not sure he heard Gunny Wynn right. Even though he fired several dozen rounds into Al Gharraf, all he saw was buildings, dark spots and muzzle flashes. He’s never before pulled the trigger on humans like this, cold.

Gunny Wynn repeats: “Light ’em the fuck up. They have RPGs.”

Christeson hugs his SAW and squeezes off a fifteen- to twenty-round burst at the closest of the three men. They run south, one of them limping, heading toward a line of palm trees. Christeson rips out another burst.