Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Nevertheless, Fick has grown suddenly gabby. He crouches behind a Humvee tire beside me and says, “This truly illustrates how safety is entirely relative.” Then, while machine guns rip and sniper rifles bang up and down the line, he launches into a discussion more appropriate for an all-night cram session at the Dartmouth library than for a low-intensity firefight.

“Most people in America right now probably think Iraq is a dangerous country.” He gestures to a patch of dirt in the open, two meters from the Humvee. “Now, if I were to stand up there, I would probably get killed. But to us, behind this Humvee it’s pretty safe. So relatively speaking, to us Iraq is a safe country right here behind this tire. I feel pretty safe here. Do you feel safe?”

“Pretty safe, I guess.”

“See!” He laughs. “If you were to call somebody at home right now and say, ‘Hey, I’m in Iraq right now. I’m with a handful of Marines. We’re isolated on the south end of a hostile city, and there are people shooting at us on both sides, but I feel pretty safe right now because I’m on this patch of dirt behind a Humvee,’ they’d think you were nuts.” He laughs. “People don’t understand how relative everything is on the battlefield.” He laughs again. “Or it could be we invent this relativism in our minds to comfort ourselves.” He taps the wheel well. “Because we both know this Humvee isn’t going to stop an RPG or any number of other very bad things that could happen here at any moment.”

Espera crawls up. “Sir, my men are all worried about the people in that ville organizing mass RPG volleys against us, like they did to those Amtracs we saw blown on the way up here.”

“Just keep your men dispersed from the vehicles,” Fick says.

“Roger that, sir,” Espera says. “But we’re still worried, sir.”

“We’re going to be here for a long time,” Fick says. “I don’t like it. But there’s nothing you or I or anyone can do about it.”

There are several loud cracks behind us—rounds from enemy snipers.

“Oh, sweet Jesus!” Colbert says, highly annoyed. He’s lying on the ground, glassing the city through binoculars, listening to the company radio network on a portable unit. He turns to Fick. “Sir, our great commander,” he says, referring to Encino Man, “just had the wherewithal to inform me there seem to be enemy snipers about. He suggests we ought to be on the lookout for them.”

Person laughs. “Brad,” he says, calling Colbert by his first name. “Check it out, over there.” He points to a spot near the barricades into the city.

Colbert turns his binoculars in the direction Person is pointing.

“Person,” he asks, “are those ducks…?”

“Yeah, they’re fucking.” Person laughs.

TWO KILOMETERS up the road a group of townspeople waving white flags climb around the barricades carrying a five- or six-year-old girl with a sucking chest wound. Capt. Patterson’s Marines in Alpha Company have been taking sporadic mortar hits all afternoon at their position on the northern end of Ar Rifa. But seeing the townspeople come out carrying the small body with limp, dangling legs, the Marines hold their fire.

Despite all the stories circulating among Marines of Iraqis posing as civilians and using false surrenders to lure them into ambushes, a corpsman and several enlisted Marines race up to the street to treat the wounded girl.

Patterson summons a translator, and the townspeople tell him that the girl was shot by Saddam loyalists. They say there are 1,500 to 2,000 of them in the city, with many of them concentrated around one building. Patterson checks the location of the building on his map. It corresponds with preexisting intelligence that had identified it as a Baath Party headquarters. He calls an artillery strike, with high-explosive (HE) rounds capable of destroying large structures. The first rounds scream in and fall 300 meters short of the target. Landing as they do in a dense urban area, Patterson is pretty certain they caused civilian casualties—and later this suspicion is corroborated when he hears ambulance sirens wailing in the city.

But Patterson’s men adjust several more rounds onto the correct target, wiping it out. News that the Americans have destroyed the main Baath headquarters in Ar Rifa appears to spread quickly through the town.

Within several minutes of the final artillery blasts, people fill the streets and rooftops across the city. What appears to be happening is almost a textbook case of liberation. A show of American force, coupled with a somewhat pinpoint hit on a military headquarters, has caused a rout of hostile forces. Shooting on Marine positions ceases almost immediately.

Across from Colbert’s position we see the outpouring of people. Initially, Marines who’ve been hunkered down receiving sniper fire and occasionally shooting up buildings across the street are wary. Old women in black robes rise up on rooftops where previously Marines had been trying to pick off enemy snipers.

“Don’t shoot the old ladies,” Colbert warns his team.

Then young men waving white flags walk onto the road. Bravo Company sends out its translator to greet them. The translator is a seriously overweight nineteen-year-old Kuwaiti who goes by the nickname “Meesh.” I’ve gotten to know Meesh in the past few days. Beneath his MOPP suit he wears a tie-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirt and has a long ponytail he folds under his helmet. He speaks in colloquial American English and is a heavy dope smoker. The whole invasion he’s been bumming because the night before we left Kuwait he got so stoned that, as he says, “Dude, I lost all my chronic in my tent. I’m hurtin’.”

Despite his MTV American English, Meesh is Kuwaiti to the core. The first time I try speaking with him he refuses to talk until I bribe him with several packs of Marlboro Reds. The Marine utility vest he wears, designed to carry up to sixty pounds of ammunition, is instead loaded with baksheesh. Meesh hates Iraqis, who he claims killed one of his relatives during their invasion of Kuwait, and every time he interrogates civilians or soldiers on behalf of the Marines, he forces them to hand over any cigarettes, cash, valuable trinkets, liquor or beer they might be carrying. (Under Saddam’s secular rule, Iraq operated numerous breweries and distilleries.) Given the fact that Meesh is invariably backed up by heavily armed Marines, Iraqis eagerly shower him with tribute. Meesh carries so many bottles of beer, liquor, cigarettes and other sundries in his vest, he looks like a walking kiosk.

The thing about Meesh that earns him the undying respect of Marines is his total obliviousness to danger. Outside Ar Rifa, he walks alone on the highway to greet the townspeople who’ve come out with surrender flags. Behind him, Marines tensely watch through their scopes and gun sights, half expecting Meesh to go down in a hail of ambush fire.

But after several minutes in which he stands there, chatting with townspeople, and no one shoots him, several officers join him, among them Fick.

“What did they say?” Fick asks.

Meesh belches. It takes him a long time to answer. Meesh does everything at a sclerotic pace. Even rolling his eyeballs to look at you seems to tax him. He builds up his strength, taking several drags from the Marlboro hanging from his lip, and says, “The people of Ar Rifa are grateful to be liberated and welcome the Americans as friends.”

It’s the stock answer Meesh always gives after speaking to Iraqis. Meesh claims he works for the CIA—“I got into some trouble in Kuwait, working for a ‘party,’ which is what we call drug gangs in my country, but I have some friends in the royal family, and they hooked me up with the CIA”—and his translations always seem to conform to a script provided by his handlers.