Evan Wright - Generation Kill

A couple of Recon Marines walk over to Trombley and tease him about shooting camels while seizing the airfield.

“I think I got one of those Iraqis, too. I saw him go down.”

“Yeah, but you killed a camel, too, and wounded another one.”

The Marines seem to have touched a nerve.

“I didn’t mean to,” Trombley says, upset. “They’re innocent.”

Then two Bedouin women appear at the edge of the perimeter, thirty meters from Colbert’s Humvee. One of the women is dressed in a purple shawl with a black scarf on her head. She seems to be in her early thirties. The other is an old woman in black. The two of them are pulling a heavy object wrapped in a blanket. They stop on top of a high berm about twenty meters away and start waving. Doc Bryan walks over to them.

The women are highly agitated. When Doc Bryan approaches, they unfurl the bundle they’ve been dragging across the berms, and what looks to be a bloody corpse rolls out. Doc Bryan thinks it’s a dead twelve-year-old boy, but when he kneels down, the “corpse” opens his eyes. Doc Bryan immediately begins to examine him. There are four small holes in his torso, two on each side of his stomach.

I walk up behind Doc Bryan. After looking at the boy, with Doc Bryan kneeling over him, the next thing I notice is the younger woman, the mother of the boy. She has a striking, beautiful face. She is half naked. Somehow, in her effort to drag her son across the fields, her shawl has come undone in front. Her breasts are exposed. She is on her knees, praying with her head tilted up, talking nonstop, though no words come out. She turns to me and continues talking, still making no sound. She looks me in the eye. I expect her to appear angry, but instead she keeps talking silently, rolling her eyes up to heaven, then back to me. She seems to be pleading.

“This kid’s been zipped with five-five-six rounds!” Doc Bryan shouts, referring to a caliber of bullet commonly used in American weapons. “Marines shot this boy!” He has his medical kit out, rubber gloves on, and is frantically cutting off the kid’s filthy clothes, checking his vital signs and railing at the top of his lungs. “These fucking jackasses,” he says. “Trigger-happy motherfuckers.”

The older Bedouin woman and I kneel down close to Doc Bryan and watch him work. The old lady’s fingers are covered in silver rings filled with jade. Her face is completely wrinkled and inked with elaborate tribal tattoos from chin to forehead. She nudges me. When I turn, she offers me a cigarette. She says something in Arabic. When I respond in English she laughs at me almost playfully. Like the mother of the boy, she displays no anger.

Meesh, the translator, shows up, groggy, not having had his first beer of the morning yet. He asks the old lady what happened. She’s the grandmother. Her two grandsons were by the road to the airfield when the Marines’ Humvees scared the camels. The boys ran out after them and were shot by the Marines. (A second, older boy is later carried into the camp with a wounded leg, a victim of the same shooting.) Bedouins don’t keep track of things like birthdays, but the grandmother thinks the youngest boy might be twelve or fourteen.

I ask Meesh why the family doesn’t appear to be angry.

He thinks a long time and says, “They are grateful to be liberated and welcome the Americans as friends.”

“We fucking shot their kids,” Doc Bryan says.

“Dude, mistakes like this are unavoidable in war,” Meesh responds.

“Bullshit,” Doc Bryan says. “We’re Recon Marines. Our whole job is to observe. We don’t shoot unarmed children.”

Doc Bryan’s examination of the boy has revealed that each of the four holes in the boy’s body is an entry wound, meaning four bullets zoomed around inside his slender stomach and chest cavity, ripping apart his organs. Now the bullets are lodged somewhere inside. If the kid doesn’t get medevaced, he’s going to die in a few hours.

Fick and the battalion surgeon, Navy Lieutenant Alex Aubin, a twenty-nine-year-old fresh out of Annapolis and the Naval medical school in Bethesda, Maryland, arrives with bad news. Ferrando has denied their request to medevac the boy.

Just then, a Predator unmanned spy plane flies low overhead. Predators, powered by gasoline engines, make a loud, annoying buzzing sound like a lawn mower with a broken muffler. Doc Bryan looks up, angrily. “We can afford to fly fucking Predators,” he says, “but we can’t take care of this kid?”

“I’m going to go ask the battalion commander again,” Aubin says.

Colbert appears, climbing over the berm. He sees the mother, the kid, the brother with the bloody leg, other members of the family who have now gathered nearby. He seems to reel back for an instant, then rights himself and approaches.

“This is what Trombley did,” Doc Bryan says. “This kid was shot with five-five-six rounds from Trombley’s SAW.” Doc Bryan has concluded that Trombley was the only one to fire a weapon using this type of bullet. “Twenty other Marines drove past those kids and didn’t shoot. Bring Trombley up here and show him what he did.”

“Don’t say that,” Colbert says. “Don’t put this on Trombley. I’m responsible for this. It was my orders.”

Colbert kneels down over the kid, right next to his mother, and starts crying. He struggles to compose himself. “What can I do here?” he asks.

“Apparently fucking nothing,” Doc Bryan says.

Aubin returns, shaking his head. “No. We can’t medevac him.”

Even though Aubin is simply the bearer of bad news, Doc Bryan glares at him accusatorily. “Well, that just sucks, don’t it?”

Aubin grew up on St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, and he gives the impression of being sort of preppy. Even in a filthy MOPP suit, he’s the type of guy you picture with a nice tan, in loafers with no socks. He’s about the last guy you would expect to come up with a plan for an insurrection. But after no one says anything for a few moments, Aubin looks up at Doc Bryan, formulating an idea. He says, “Under the rules, we have to provide him with care until he dies.”

“Yeah, so?” Doc Bryan asks.

“Put him in my care. I stay next to the battalion commander. If he’s in my care, the boy will stay with me at the headquarters. Colonel Ferrando might change his order if he has to watch him die.”

Fick approves of the plan, even though it represents an affront to his commanders and a risk to his own career, already under threat from his confrontation with Encino Man at Ar Rifa. But he endorses this effort, he later says, “because if we didn’t do something, I was going to lose Colbert and Doc Bryan. The platoon would have fallen apart. I believed we had at least ninety days of combat ahead of us, and my best men had become ineffective—angry at the command and personally devastated. We had to get this blood off the platoon’s hands. I didn’t care if we threw those kids onto a helicopter and they died thirty seconds later. My men had to do something.”

With Colbert and Doc Bryan at the front of the stretcher, the Marines carry the wounded boy nearly a kilometer to the battalion headquarters. The whole Bedouin family follows. They reach the antenna farm and the cammie nets covering a communications truck and the commander’s small, black command tent. They enter the inner sanctum beneath the nets. The Marines lower the stretcher. Several officers, sitting in their skivvies at laptop computers on MRE crates, look up, aghast. With Bedouin tribespeople now pouring in, it looks like the perimeter has been overrun.

The Coward of Khafji runs up, veins pulsing on his forehead. He comes head-to-head with the grandmother, who blows a cloud of cigarette smoke in his face.

“What the hell is going on here?” he shouts, confronting this near-mutinous breakdown of military order inside the battalion headquarters.