Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Colbert’s platoon falls back from the bridge to defend the battalion’s eastern flank along the highway. Everyone digs holes in the darkness. The soil here is a waterlogged mixture of clay and rocks. It’s like chopping through partially hardened concrete. After we finish our Ranger graves, the platoon is ordered to move up the road 300 meters, where we dig a new set.

A string of headlights appears a kilometer or so to the west. It is a stream of vehicles escaping the city on a back road. It could be civilians fleeing. But using night-vision equipment, Marines observe what appear to be trucks with weapons on them.

“They’re fucking flanking us!” Fick says, worried that the enemy fighters are trying to come up and attack the battalion from the side. Marines then observe one truck with its lights off, stopping directly across from their position and unloading men and equipment, possibly guns. Fick requests an artillery strike to take out the vehicles.

Marines in Bravo who are not on watch gather around to eat their meager food rations before crawling into their wet holes to take quick “combat naps.”

“I felt cold-blooded as a motherfucker shooting those guys that popped out of the truck,” Espera says, glumly describing the details of each killing he participated in at the roadblock an hour earlier. Perhaps keeping in mind his priest’s admonishments to not enjoy killing, Espera seems to deliberately wallow in a black, self-flagellating mood. “Dog, whatever last shred of humanity I had before I came here, it’s gone,” he says.

Warning shots erupt at the roadblock manned by Charlie Company a few hundred meters to our north. Tracers light up the sky. We hear a car gunning its engine, apparently still driving toward the blockade. Marines shout. Weapons crackle. We hear the engine still whining, drawing closer, then the screeching of tires. In the silence that immediately follows, someone in our group says, “Well, that stopped him.” For some reason, everyone bursts into laughter.

UP THE ROAD FROM where we are laughing, the men in Charlie Company watch as two men run from a car the Marines have just riddled with dozens of rounds. It’s a four-door sedan. Doors are open, lights are on despite the heavy-weapons fire it took from a platoon of Marines. It’s a miracle that these two men, including the driver, have stepped out alive.

The Marines hold their fire as the men, dressed in robes, throw their hands up. They are unarmed. As Marines shout at them, they drop obediently to the side of the road.

Graves, whose team beautifully destroyed the building that shielded the enemy gunmen during the assault through Al Hayy, approaches the car with another Marine. Graves sees a little girl curled up in the backseat. She looks to be about three, the same age as his daughter at home in California. There’s a small amount of blood on the upholstery, but the girl’s eyes are open. She seems to be cowering. Graves reaches in to pick her up—thinking about what medical supplies he might need to treat her, he later says—when the top of her head slides off and her brains fall out. When Graves steps back, he nearly falls over when his boot slips in the girl’s brains. It takes a full minute before Graves can actually talk. The situation is one he can only describe in elemental terms. “I could see her throat from the top of her skull,” he says.

No weapons are found in the car. Meesh asks the father, sitting by the side of the road, why he didn’t heed the warning shots and stop. The father simply repeats, “I’m sorry,” then meekly asks permission to pick up his daughter’s body. The last the Marines see of him, he is walking down the road, carrying her corpse in his arms.

WHEN THEY TALK about this shooting later, the Marines have mixed reactions. Graves is devastated. “This is the event that is going to get to me when I go home,” he says. Prior to this shooting, when his team had passed by all those shot-up corpses on the roads, Graves says, “I felt good about it, like, ‘Yeah! Marines have been fucking shit up!’” He adds, “I cruised into this war thinking my buddy’s going to take a bullet, and I’m going to be the fucking hero pulling him out of harm’s way. Instead, I end up pulling out this little girl we shot, hiding in the backseat of her dad’s car.”

Graves’s buddy, twenty-two-year-old Corporal Ryan Jeschke, who was with him at the car, says, “War is either glamorized—like we kick their ass—or the opposite—look how horrible, we kill all these civilians. None of these people know what it’s like to be there holding that weapon. After Graves and I went up to that dead girl, I was surprised, because honestly, I was indifferent. It’s kind of disturbed me. Now, sometimes, I think, ‘Am I a bad person for feeling nothing?’”

Despite his professed indifference, Jeschke is haunted by the memory of seeing the girl’s father walk down the road, cradling his dead daughter. Jeschke says, “I asked Meesh what he thought the father was going through, and Meesh said Arabs don’t grieve as hard as we do. I don’t really believe him. I can’t see how it would be any different for them.”

After this shooting and the others like it, Marines deal with the stress through black humor. Even guys privately broken up by the shootings circulate jokes, one of them: “What’s the first thing you feel when you shoot a civilian? The recoil of your rifle.”

THE ARTILLERY STRIKE Bravo Company called previously on vehicles fleeing the city finally starts to arrive. Since First Recon is so far north, the artillery gunners can only reach them by using rocket-assisted projectile (RAP) rounds, which give their guns a range of thirty kilometers. After RAP rounds are fired, they flash in the sky and then make a sort of fizzing sound, as a rocket motor mounted on each projectile kicks in and drives it to its target. They make for an even more spectacular show than normal artillery. We lie back in our holes and watch 164 RAP rounds shriek across the sky. Seen from a distance, the fiery explosions are beautiful and hypnotizing, just like any decent Fourth of July display. Any carnage visited on the vehicles, hamlets, farms or people is shrouded from us by the darkness. All we see are the pretty lights of the rockets’ red glare.

ON MARCH 30, Capt. Patterson’s Alpha Company was ordered to temporarily detach from First Recon and go on a mission to find the body of the Marine who went missing when his supply convoy was ambushed on Route 7 outside Ash Shatrah. No one knows if rumors of his body’s public mutilation are true, but many Marines inevitably see Alpha’s task to re-cover it as a revenge mission. When Alpha Company had pulled out of First Recon’s camp for Ash Shatrah, men in Bravo had shouted after them, “Fuck the shit out of that town!”

Now, on the morning of March 31, with the rest of the battalion making its way north toward Al Hayy, the eighty Marines in Alpha Company are heading south on Route 7 toward Ash Shatrah. To Sergeant Damon Russell Fawcett, a twenty-six-year-old team leader in Alpha’s Second Platoon, the mission fills him, he later admits, with conflicting emotions. Fair-haired and blue-eyed, Fawcett grew up in Southern California, a “water baby,” surfing and playing water polo. After several semesters in college, he joined the Marines not just for adventure but because he was so “disenchanted with the human factor in society, the emphasis on technology. I came in to see if the better man will dominate.”

For the past eighteen hours since departing on the mission, Fawcett has listened to fellow Marines rage about the motherfuckers in Ash Shatrah, and their plans to get payback once their commanders clear them hot to assault the town. A lot of guys are talking not just about the lost Marine but about rumors now circulating of Iraqis abusing American female POWs. (Within the next twenty-four hours, when the tale of Jessica Lynch’s captivity and rape reaches the men, she becomes the campaign’s unofficial Helen of Troy, a rallying point for generalized anger against Arabs.) Fawcett is particularly disturbed by an acquaintance of his, a sniper, who recently bragged that after being cleared to shoot an armed Iraqi who was taking cover behind a child, the sniper fired at the man through the kid, telling Fawcett, “I just killed a future terrorist.”