Evan Wright - Generation Kill

As Person drives forward, Colbert says, “I think we’re gonna take some fire when we come around the next bend.”

Colbert’s instincts are money. The first mortar of the day explodes somewhere outside the vehicle as soon as we make the turn. No one can see where it hit, and judging by its muffled sound, it was probably several hundred meters away. We stop. To the left, there’s a hamlet: four to six earthen-walled homes. They’re clustered together about fifteen meters from the road, nestled beneath low-hanging fig trees. In front there are crude fences made of dried reeds, used as paddocks for sheep and goats. It has the primitive feel of one of those Nativity sets they build in town squares at Christmas. Chickens run about, and a half dozen villagers—older women in black robes, older men in dingy white ones, all of them barefoot—stand gawking at us. Despite the almost biblical look of the place, there are power lines overhead with electric wires feeding into the huts. The Marines get out, take cover behind the hoods and open doors of the Humvees, and scan the rooftops, walls and bermed fields behind the hamlet for enemy shooters.

But after about five minutes of this standoff, the villagers approach. The Marines step out from around their vehicles. A translator is brought up. The villagers say there are no enemy forces in their hamlet. Even as they speak, there are more explosions in the distance. Person, still sitting in the Humvee, hears a report from the radio that other units in First Recon, now spread out along two kilometers or so of this narrow lane, are receiving enemy mortar fire.

A shoeless farmer approaches. His face is narrow and bony from what looks to be a lifetime of starvation. Shaking his fist, speaking in a raspy voice, he says through a translator that he’s been waiting for the Americans to come since the first Gulf War. He explains that he used to live in a Shia marshland south of here. Saddam drained the marshes and ruined the farmland to punish the people there for supporting the 1991 rebellion. “Saddam believes if he starves the people we will follow him like slaves. It’s terrorism by the system itself.”

I ask the farmer why he welcomes Americans invading his country. “We are already living in hell,” he says. “If you let us pray and don’t interfere with our women, we accept you.”

The farmer, with gray hair and his narrow face wrapped in wrinkles, looks to be about sixty, with a lot of those being hard years. I ask him when he was born. 1964. I tell him we’re the same age. He leans toward me, smiling and pointing to his face. “Compared to you, I look like an old man” he says. “This is because of my life under Saddam.”

I find his self-awareness unsettling. One of the few comforts I have when looking at images of distant suffering is the hope that the starving child with flies on his face doesn’t know how pathetic he is. If all he knows is misery, maybe his suffering isn’t as bad. But this farmer has shattered that comforting illusion. He’s wretched, and he knows it. Before going off, he warns the translator that we are entering an area where the Baath Party is strong. Then he asks if he can join the Marines and go to Baghdad with them. “I will kill Saddam with my own hands,” he says.

ABOUT 500 METERS AHEAD of Second Platoon’s position by the hamlet, Marines in Third Platoon spot a Zil bouncing through the field. There are about twenty young Iraqi men packed into the rear bed. They’re armed but wearing civilian clothes. The truck stops, and the Iraqis attempt to flee by the canal. Marines train their guns on them and they throw their arms up in surrender. The Iraqis insist they are farm laborers who have weapons because they are afraid of bandits. But before being stopped, they tossed bags into the field. The Marines retrieve them. Inside, they find Republican Guard military documents, and uniforms still drenched in sweat. Obviously, these guys just changed out of them. The men in Third Platoon take the Iraqis prisoner, bind their wrists with zip cuffs (sort of a heavy-duty version of the plastic bands used to tie trash bags) and load them into one of the battalion’s transport trucks.

THE BATTALION PUSHES FORWARD a few more kilometers. Cobra machine guns buzz in the distance. Mortars explode every few minutes now, but they’re still far off—hundreds of meters away, we guess.

In places the trail is almost like a tunnel bounded by reed fences and overhanging trees. It’s the most dangerous terrain to operate in, short of being inside a city. But the weird thing is, it’s awfully pretty, and everyone in the vehicle seems to be feeling it. A few days earlier, when the battalion raced into Al Gharraf under fire, there were Marines I talked to afterward who said that when they saw the dazzling blue dome of the mosque by the entrance, they felt peaceful, despite the heavy-weapons fire all around.

Basically, there are things you react to almost automatically, even in times of stress. A tree-lined trail bending past a canal is still pretty, even with hostile forces about. During one halt, Colbert’s team is completely distracted by several water buffalo bathing on the banks of the canal. Trombley gets out of the vehicle and walks over to them—even as several mortars boom nearby—and has to be ordered back by Colbert.

Second Platoon reaches another hamlet, a walled cluster of about seven homes. Colbert’s team and the others are ordered to dismount and clear this and the next several hamlets, going house-to-house. Higher-ups in the battalion have grown increasingly concerned about the mortar fire. The Cobras overhead haven’t been able to find the positions of those launching them. The hope is that by making the Marines more aggressive on the ground, they can scare up better information from the villagers.

Colbert leads his team into the hamlet by bounding toward it in stages, their rifles ready to fire. Several men emerge. Colbert shouts, “Down!” gesturing with his M-4. They drop to their stomachs in the dirt. Marines step toward them, rifles drawn, and force them to interlock their fingers behind their heads. Then about twenty women and children stream out. Espera is tasked with herding them toward the road.

A salvo of three mortars hits a couple hundred meters northwest, sending geysers of dirt and smoke up behind the village. The Marines pay them no heed. A much closer mortar, impacting maybe seventy-five meters to the west, seems to come out of nowhere. When they’re this close, you hear a sound —fffft!— just before the boom. Then, as a result of the sharp increase in air pressure, your body feels like it’s been zapped with a mild electric charge. But we’re stopped here, and there’s nothing to do about it. Mortars fall in a totally random pattern. It’s not like there’s a guy crouched somewhere in a field with a rifle, trying to pick you up in his scope. You’re not being individually targeted. You have to take comfort in the randomness of it all.

I walk up to Espera, guarding the hamlet’s women and children on the road. An old lady in black screams and shakes her fists at him. “This brings me back to my repo days,” Espera says. “Women are always the fiercest. You always have to look out for them. Doesn’t matter if it’s a black bitch in South Central or some rich white bitch in Beverly Hills. They always come after you screaming. Don’t matter if you’ve got a gun. It’s like women think they’re protected.”

Colbert’s team enters the first group of homes. Earthen walls are adorned with bright pictures of flowers and sunsets, artwork clipped from magazines. The day has grown hot—hitting the mid-nineties outside—but the homes are naturally cool. Trombley is impressed. “It’d be pretty neat to live in one of these,” he says.