Evan Wright - Generation Kill

“We brought him here to die,” Doc Bryan says defiantly.

The Coward of Khafji looks down at the kid on the stretcher.

“Get him the fuck out of here,” he bellows.

The Marines carry the kid out in silence and place him under a nearby cammie net. Five minutes later, word is sent back that Ferrando has had a change of heart. He orders a platoon from Alpha to bring the Bedouins to RCT-1’s shock-trauma unit, twenty kilometers south.

I catch up to Colbert walking alone through the center of the encampment. “I’m going to have to bring this home with me and live with it,” he says. “A pilot doesn’t go down and look at the civilians his bombs have hit. Artillerymen don’t see the effects of what they do. But guys on the ground do. This is killing me inside.” He walks off, privately inconsolable.

LATER, I’m passing by the battalion headquarters when Ferrando calls out to me from beneath the netting in his rasping voice. I veer under the nets and find him sitting up in his hole, wrapped in a poncho. He wants to talk about the incident with the Bedouins. Like his men, he hasn’t slept much—“an hour in the past thirty-six hours,” he tells me. He looks haggard. His face is gaunt and filthy.

“In my mind this situation is the result of the enemy’s law of war violations,” he says. “When the enemy purposely position themselves within civilians, it makes the complexity of my decision-making or that of my Marines ten times more difficult. They hope to draw more casualties on our side because of the restraint that we show. It’s a deadly situation, and we have to make twenty to thirty life-or-death decisions every hour, and often we do this without sleep. I’m amazed it’s going as well as it has.”

He brings up the moral dilemma posed by the situation the battalion was in yesterday. “At Ar Rifa,” he says, “we were lying out in front of God and everybody as an easy target. Hostile forces were on the rooftops. Based on intelligence gathered by the interpreter from townspeople, I believed we’d located a military headquarters in that town. I ordered artillery rounds dropped on that building to prevent them from organizing an attack on us. Was I right?” he asks.

“I can’t say I know for sure they were organizing for an attack, or even that the building we hit was a headquarters. What I do know is, we dropped artillery. I’m certain civilians did die as a result of my order to do so. I don’t like making this kind of choice, but I will err to protect these Marines when I can.

“Now, this morning, they requested I send those wounded civilians to the RCT for aid. Problem: Our tactical situation is extremely precarious here. I could not send a platoon to accompany them until the situation had stabilized.” He concludes, “It’s a shitty situation for these Marines. But no one put a gun to their heads and forced them to come here.”

THE TALK COLBERT DELIVERS to Trombley is considerably more concise. After returning from the battalion headquarters, he sits him down beside the Humvee and says, “Trombley, no matter what you might think, or what anybody else might say, you did your job. You were following my orders.”

Colbert then strips down to his T-shirt—the first time he’s removed his MOPP in more than a week. He crawls under the Humvee and spends several hours chipping away at the three-inch layer of tar and sand clinging to it from the sabka field.

Late in the afternoon, Fick comes by, gathers the team for a morale talk and tells them, “We made a mistake today, collectively and individually. We must get past this. We can’t sit around and call it quits now.”

Gunny Wynn is harsher. “We’re Americans,” he lectures the men. “We must be sure when we take a shot that we are threatened. You have got to see that these people are just like you. You’ve got to see past the huts, the camels, the different clothes they wear. They’re just people. This family here might lose a son. We shot their camels, too. If you kill one camel, that could be a year’s income. We’re not here to destroy their way of life.”

But then Gunny Wynn seems to almost reverse himself. “I’m not saying don’t protect yourselves. If it’s a case of losing one Marine versus one hundred civilians, I will save the Marine. You’ve just got to be goddamn careful.”

However admirable the military’s attempts are to create ROE, they basically create an illusion of moral order where there is none. The Marines operate in chaos. It doesn’t matter if a Marine is following orders and ROE, or disregarding them. The fact is, as soon as a Marine pulls the trigger on his rifle, he’s on his own. He’s entered a game of moral chance. When it’s over, he’s as likely to go down as a hero or as a baby killer. The only difference between Trombley and any number of other Marines who’ve shot or killed people they shouldn’t have is that he got caught. And this only happened because the battalion stopped moving long enough for the innocent victims to catch up with it.

Before leaving, Fick and Gunny Wynn raise the possibility of there being a formal inquiry into the shooting. After they walk off, Trombley turns to Colbert and asks, “Is this going to be okay, I mean with the investigation?”

“You’ll be fine, Trombley.”

“No. I mean for you, Sergeant.” Trombley grins. “I don’t care what happens, really. I’m out in a couple of years. I mean for you. This is your career.”

“I’ll be fine.” Colbert stares at him. “No worries.”

Something’s been bothering me about Trombley for a day or two, and I can’t help thinking about it now. I was never quite sure if I should believe his claim that he cut up those Iraqis in Al Gharraf. But he hit those two shepherds, one of whom was extremely small, at more than 200 meters, from a Humvee bouncing down a rough road at forty miles per hour. However horrible the results, his work was textbook machine-gun shooting, and the fact is, from now on, every time I ride with Colbert’s team, I feel a lot better when Trombley is by my side with the SAW.

SUNSET ON THE NIGHT of March 27 turns the surrounding fields red. First Recon’s camp by the airfield is spread across three kilometers, with the Humvees on the outer perimeter spaced about seventy-five meters apart, hidden under cammie nets. Looking out, all you see are dried mudflats, rippled with berms and sliced with dry canals. It looks like a 1950s sci-fi fantasy Martian landscape.

They tell us to dig our holes extra deep tonight. The battalion remains cut off, deep in “bad-guy country,” as Fick says. To prevent hordes of RPG teams or enemy tanks from overrunning the perimeter, the Marine Division, about twenty kilometers southwest of here, has pretargeted its artillery to land within “danger-close” range of the camp should it be requested. If the enemy appears in the nearby fields, a quick SOS to division headquarters will bring dozens or hundreds of artillery rounds splashing down near where we are sleeping.

For the first time in several days, the night sky is clear. I watch shooting stars from my hole. There are more stars than you would typically see in North America because there are no streetlights. Clear skies also mean U.S. military aircraft, hampered by dust storms the past several days, now have free rein. It’s a busy night in the sky. Past sunset we hear unmanned drones crisscrossing overhead, then the buzzing of propeller-driven P-3 observation planes. Antimissile flares, thrown out by unseen jets, make the whole sky blink. Bombs flash on the horizon. Iraqi AAA guns send up tracer rounds, which look like strings of pearls. I see the enemy AAA batteries firing north, east and west of us, a graphic reminder that there are hostile forces all around.