Evan Wright - Generation Kill

For whatever reason this night, Ferrando allows his men to sleep in the open beside their Humvees. It’s the first time in two weeks we haven’t dug Ranger graves. At about midnight, I awaken to see the fields and palm trees across from our Humvee lit up by illumination flares. Suspended from parachutes, the chemical flames drift slowly down into the field.

I wake Person, who is sleeping next to me, and ask him what’s going on.

“It’s illume,” he mumbles. “Ours.”

“Why are we lighting up our own position?” I ask.

Person snores.

I fall back asleep. Then I awaken again a few minutes later to the sound of artillery or rockets shrieking through the sky, exploding a few hundred meters directly in front of us. The blasts turn the field into a sea of molten orange and blue liquid, with waves splashing up against the palms in the background. In my effort to roll underneath the Humvee for cover, I bang into Person.

“Shit!” I yell, panicking about the explosions.

“Don’t worry about that,” Person says over the continuing roar. “That’s our artillery.” He lifts his head up and observes the firestorm. “It’s just danger close.” He falls back asleep.

The next morning, we are informed that we are lucky to be alive. “That was an enemy artillery strike from a BM-21 multiple-launch rocket system,” Fick says, delivering the news with a grimly amused smile. “That system kills everything in an entire grid square”—a square kilometer. “They knew our coordinates and came within a few hundred meters of us. We got lucky, again.”

ON THE MORNING OF MARCH 31, at about nine, Colbert’s team and the rest of First Recon, leave their encampment at the intersection of Routes 7 and 17 in central Mesopotamia to begin the next mission. Today’s objective is a town of about 50,000 called Al Hayy. It’s a Baath Party headquarters and home to a Republican Guard unit of several thousand about thirty kilometers to the north.

RCT-1’s force of 6,000 Marines is planning to assault through the center of Al Hayy sometime in the next twenty-four hours. But the Recon Marines will go there first. As it did on its movement to the town of Al Gharraf, the battalion will leave Route 7 and use a dirt trail hugging the edge of a canal. Initially, RCT-1 will parallel First Recon’s movement on the other side of the canal. Then First Recon will race ahead, cross a series of canal bridges into Al Hayy, speed north and seize the main highway bridge out of the city in order to block the retreat of enemy forces during RCT-1’s attack.

On this mission, First Recon will be an even smaller force than it usually is. Alpha Company has been temporarily detached from the battalion to go on a separate mission in search of the lost Marine believed to have been lynched in an Iraqi town.

We drive across a low, narrow bridge over the canal, and First Recon’s reduced force of 290-odd Marines in fifty vehicles again becomes the northernmost unit in central Iraq. It’s the first warm morning in several days. Rain clouds blow across the sky, but the sun pokes out and the air is dust-free. The canal flows past us on the right, about thirty meters wide in some places.

The battalion rolls single-file on a one-lane, unpaved road that passes through the now familiar patchwork of grassy fields, mudflats crisscrossed with trenches and berms, palm groves and small hamlets. Some have walls that come right up to the edge of the road, channeling the Humvees between the villages on the left and the canal on the right. Perfect terrain for ambushes.

We pass farmers in a field to our left. Colbert regards them warily and says, “These are a simple people. These are the people I’m here to liberate.”

“Small-arms fire ahead,” Person says, passing word from the radio.

We hit a hard bump at about twenty miles per hour. A wild dog appears out of nowhere, lunging and snarling against the windows on the right side of the vehicle. “Jesus Christ!” Colbert jumps, more startled than I have ever seen him.

Despite the fear and stress, Colbert remains an extremely polite invader. When we pass more farmers on the road, he pulls the barrel of his M-4 up, so as not to point it directly at them.

A pair of Cobras drops low to our left. The armored helicopters, which we haven’t seen in a few days, soar overhead with the grace of flying sledgehammers. They make a distinctive clattering sound—as ugly and mean as they look. “Cobras spotted a blue Zil”—Russian military truck—“ahead, carrying uniformed Iraqis,” Colbert says, passing along a report from the radio. We stop.

A machine gun buzzes somewhere up the road. “Shots fired on our lead vehicle,” he says. We remain halted. Colbert gazes longingly at some weeds beside his window. “This would have been the perfect shitting opportunity,” he says. “I should have done it when we first stopped.” Colbert’s initial attempt to clear his bowels this morning was interrupted when the team’s mission was unexpectedly moved up by two hours. Now, at ten in the morning, with the gunfire starting, this problem is foremost on his mind.

I’ve learned a few things about the Marines by now. There are certainties in their world, even in the chaos of war. As soon as a unit sets in for the night and finishes digging its Ranger graves, everyone will be moved to a slightly different position and forced to start all over again. When a team is told to be ready to move out in five minutes, they will sit for several hours. When the order is to remain in position for three hours, their next order will be to roll out in two minutes. Above all, it is a certainty that Colbert will never be able to take a crap in peace.

Fick walks up. “They found RPGs two hundred meters up the road in a ditch. There is a dismounted Iraqi platoon ahead that we know about.”

A ripping sound fills the air. Cobras skim low over palm trees about a kilometer ahead, firing machine guns and rockets into a hamlet on the other side of the canal.

“They’re smoking some technicals”—civilian trucks with weapons on them—“in a cluster of buildings up ahead,” Colbert says.

Directly across the canal from us—on our right about seventy-five meters away—Amtracs from RCT-1 rumble through some scrub brush outside some mud-hut homes. When moving, Amtracs produce an unmistakable sound—sort of like what you’d hear if you went to a Laundromat and filled all the dryers with nuts and bolts and pieces of junk and turned them on high. Driving next to one is deafening. Even creeping at low speed through the weeds across the canal from us, they make a ferocious racket. Then their machine guns start spitting at targets by some huts. Mark-19s boom. We have no idea what they’re shooting at. All we see are the gray vehicles rising from the brush, bumping forward a few meters, stopping, then little orange flashes.

Listening to this mini-firefight taking place outside the doors of our Humvee, Colbert leans out his window and peers at the action through his rifle scope. He leans back in his seat and says, annoyed, “I just hope they don’t orient their fire onto us.”

We wait.

“Fuck it,” Colbert says amidst the sporadic machine-gun fire. “I’m gonna do it.”

He jumps out into the scrub vegetation beside the vehicle, squats and takes care of business.

Person starts singing Country Joe McDonald’s antiwar song, “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die,” with the lyrics, “And it’s one, two, three/ What are we fighting for?” He’s interrupted by an order sent over the radio to move out. He shouts at Colbert, squatting in the field. “Hey! We’re moving again!”

Colbert hops in, suspenders from his partially disassembled MOPP flapping. “I made it.” He sighs.