Evan Wright - Generation Kill

A bedroom in one hut stuns the Marines. Against the bare walls, there’s a CD player, a TV with DVD, mirrors, a painting of a horse on velvet, electric lamps and what looks to be a California King bed—chrome and black-lacquered frame with leopard-print covers. It looks like they’ve stumbled into the crib of an East L.A. drug lord.

Nearby, there’s a locked windowless hut. Marines try to kick the door in, but it’s padlocked with a chain. They chop it off with bolt cutters and find the village stash: two AK rifles, piles of weed and some bags with white powder that looks like either cocaine or heroin. Colbert confiscates the rifles but leaves the drugs. “We’re not here to fuck with their livelihoods,” he says.

Mortars continue to fall for the next hour while we slowly bump up the trail. With the rising heat, and Marines in their MOPP suits bounding across fields, scrambling up walls and kicking in doors, everyone is pouring sweat. Tiny gnats swarm everywhere. They seem to have miniature teeth. Black clouds of them descend, then you feel your neck and eyelids and ears being chewed on.

Colbert slumps against the Humvee, taking a rest, his face throbbing red. “I almost went down in that last village. I’m at my limit.” He sucks water from a drinking tube attached to a CamelBak pouch and starts to sing, “I’m Sailing Away!” He stops. “This is dangerous as hell,” he says.

There’s a shot ahead. Person picks up a report from the radio. “A dog tried to attack a friendly, so he shot him.”

“That was needless,” Colbert says.

Two mortars explode somewhere.

Captain America struts past with his bayonet out. “Charlie’s in the trees!” Colbert calls after him, quoting a line from Platoon.

BY THREE-THIRTY in the afternoon we have reached a bend in the canal, approximately ten kilometers south of the Marines’ objective, Al Hayy. There is a mosque ahead. A few moments earlier, Cobras shot up the fields beside it, pulverizing suspected ambush points, but all is quiet now. The battalion halts while officers plan the final push to Al Hayy.

Everyone remains sitting inside Colbert’s Humvee, waiting. After six hours of searching for an elusive enemy on this back trail, the men on Colbert’s team are worn down, their nerves frayed. The chatter and happy pro-fanities and inside jokes have ceased. Even Person just stares vacantly out the window.

The silence is broken by an unusual new sound, a series of high-pitched zings. Orange-red tracers streak through the air and slam into the berms in front of and behind the Humvee. Large-caliber rounds are being fired at us from across the canal. You can actually see some bounce and tumble after they strike the ground just a few meters from us. For a moment, we simply watch, mesmerized.

“Person, get out of the vehicle,” Colbert orders.

All of us dive out of the left side of the Humvee to avoid the incoming fire on the right. We scramble up and then down a meter-high berm, which shields us from the attack.

Rounds rake across the row of Humvees, making that weird noise —zip zip zing. They sound like the screaming cartoon bullets fired by Yosemite Sam. Up and down the line, Marines jump out of their vehicles and take cover.

Behind our berm, Colbert says, “That’s a goddamn Zeus!” Zeus, the nickname for a ZSU, is a powerful, multi-barreled Russian anti-aircraft gun. (Other Marines later posit that the Iraqis were using a slightly different weapon, a ZPU.)

Several Marines in the battalion fire rifles and .50-cal machine guns wildly and ineffectually across the river. But as more Zeus rounds streak in, they dive for cover, too. No one can figure out where the enemy position is located. Marines, who often laugh off other forms of gunfire, now burrow facedown in the nearest comforting patch of mother earth. The entire battalion is pinned down.

The only guy I see poking his head up is Trombley. He had the presence of mind to grab the binoculars when he dove out of the Humvee. Now he scampers to the top of the berm, sits up like a gopher and scans the horizon. He looks around excitedly, eagerly taking in this terrifying new experience. I see him smile.

“That’s cool,” he says in a low voice as another salvo of Zeus rounds zings past. Then he adds, “I think I see where it is, Sergeant.”

Colbert and Person now rise over the berm, somewhat more cautiously than Trombley. Following his initial directions, they spot what they think is the enemy-gun position about a kilometer away. Colbert orders Hasser onto the vehicle’s Mark-19 grenade launcher, and with Zeus rounds still screaming in, the team methodically directs fire toward the enemy position.

A Cobra noses down over the field across the canal to join in the hunt. It rears up as AAA fire comes at it from the ground. The enemy rounds miss the helicopter, and it doubles back to renew its attack.

The Cobra strikes a white truck parked in the field with its 20mm Gatling gun, causing the truck to burst into flames. Then it fires a Hellfire missile at what the pilot thinks is one of several Zeus AAA guns. Low on fuel, the Cobra is forced to break off its attack.

Different perspectives on the ground produce radically different versions of events. Kocher, just 150 meters up from Colbert’s position, watches the white truck set on fire by the Cobra and believes this is one of the worst things he’s seen so far in the war. He later says, “I saw civilians in that truck, and I watched them burn up alive.”

Captain Daniel O’Connor, a First Recon officer also involved with controlling the air strikes that afternoon, later says, “I couldn’t prove the white vehicle the Cobra lit up was enemy, but every time it showed up, bad stuff happened. So we were okayed to take it out.”

Two columns of inky black smoke rise on the opposite side of the river. We take no more Zeus fire. I ask Trombley why he showed no signs of fear, seemed quite calm in fact, when he sat up on the berm and located the position of the gun that seemed to be terrorizing just about every other Marine in the battalion. “I know this might sound weird,” Trombley says, “but deep down inside, I want to know what it feels like to get shot. Not that I want to get shot, but the reality is, I feel more nervous watching a game show on TV at home than I do here in all this.”

He tears into his plastic meal-ration bag. “All this gunfighting is making me hungry,” he says with a cheerful smile.

“All this stupidity is making me want to kill myself,” Person counters grimly, one of his first displays of low spirits in Iraq.

Despite having wiped out several AAA guns with the help of the Cobras, the battalion is again starting to take incoming mortars by the bend in the canal. The Marines are ordered to break contact and roll back two kilometers.

The battalion pulls off the trail into a muddy depression surrounded by berms. The vehicles pull in close together. We wait for the Cobras to refuel in order to accompany the battalion on its final dash into Al Hayy.

Mortar fire grows more steady. With each wave of incoming bombs, the explosions get a little louder, a little closer. The initial volleys land more than a kilometer away, then move to within about five hundred meters of First Recon’s position. The orderly progression of the mortars suggests that an enemy observer is on the ground nearby, directing them. Marine snipers push out to the perimeter and try to spot a man or woman with a radio amidst the shepherds, farmers and other civilians in the surrounding fields.

Colbert’s vehicle is parked beside one of the battalion’s fuel trucks. I decide I don’t like sitting next to 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel during a mortar attack. I walk over to the truck holding the roughly twenty enemy prisoners of war (EPWs) Third Platoon picked up earlier in the day.