Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Garza, standing at his vehicle’s .50-cal, says, “They live just like Mexicans in Mexico.” He smiles at the children and throws them some candy. His grandmother is from Mexico, and by the way he is grinning, you get the idea that to him living like Mexicans is not all bad.

Espera turns away in disgust. “That’s why I fucking can’t stand Mexico. I hate third-world countries.”

Despite Espera’s harsh critique of the white man—he derides English as the “master’s language”—his worldview reflects his self-avowed role as servant in the white man’s empire, a job he seems to relish with equal parts pride, cynicism and self-loathing. He says, “The U.S. should just go into all these countries, here and in Africa, and set up an American government and infrastructure—with McDonald’s, Starbucks, MTV—then just hand it over. If we have to kill a hundred thousand to save twenty million, it’s worth it.” He lights a cigar. “Hell, the U.S. did it at home for two hundred years—killed Indians, used slaves, exploited immigrant labor to build a system that’s good for everybody today. What does the white man call it? ‘Manifest Destiny.’”

Within a half hour, First Recon’s convoy is again creeping north on an agricultural back road. Colbert’s Humvee passes a tree-shaded hamlet on the left as a series of explosions issues from it. The blasts sounds like mortars being launched, perhaps from inside the village. Ten days ago, being within a couple hundred meters of an enemy position would have sent the entire team into a high state of alert, but this morning nobody says a word. Colbert wearily picks up his radio handset and passes on the location of the suspected enemy position.

Once the initial excitement wears off, invading a country becomes repetitive and stressful, like working on an old industrial assembly line: The task seldom varies, but if your attention wanders, you are liable to get injured or killed. Colbert’s team stops in a grassy field a few hundred meters down from the village. There’s a canal directly across from his Humvee, with a paved road running along it on the other side.

That canal road, another route out of Al Hayy, is the one the battalion is tasked with observing. Marines are to shoot any armed Iraqis fleeing the road.

Despite the lethal mission, the grassy field we stop in is idyllic. Half of Colbert’s team—those who were up all night on watch—take advantage of the tall grass to stretch out and doze. It’s a beautiful day, warm and clear, a bit humid. There’s a stand of palm trees nearby. Birds fill the air with a loud, musical chattering. Trombley counts off ducks and turtles he observes in the canal with his binoculars. “We’re in safari land,” Colbert says.

The spell is broken when a Recon unit 500 meters down the line opens up on a truck leaving the city, putting an end to the birdsong in the trees. In the distance, a man jumps out holding an AK. He jogs through a field on the other side of the canal. We watch lazily from the grass as he’s gunned down by other Marines.

The birds have resumed their singing when the man shot by the Marines reappears across the canal, limping and weaving like a drunk. Nobody shoots him. He’s not holding a gun anymore. The ROE are scrupulously observed. Even so, they cannot mask the sheer brutality of the situation.

A few vehicles down from Colbert’s, Team Three monitors the hamlet from where mortars seemed to have been launched when we rolled in. Doc Bryan and the others on the team have been watching the village through binoculars and sniper scopes for about an hour now. They have seen no signs of enemy activity, just a group of civilians—men, women and children—going about their business outside a small cluster of huts. But it’s possible that rounds were fired from there. The Fedayeen often drive into a town, launch a few mortars and leave.

In any case, the place is quiet when, at about eleven o’clock in the morning, a lone 1,000-pound bomb dropped from an F-18 blows the hamlet to smithereens. The blast is so powerful that Fick jumps over a berm to avoid flying debris and lands on Encino Man. As the shock wave rolls through Colbert’s position, I feel the concussion in my chest as if my internal organs are being picked up and slammed against my rib cage. A perfectly shaped black mushroom cloud rises up where the huts had been.

The only survivor observed by the Marines is a singed dog that runs out of the smoke, making crazy circles—indicative of blown eardrums and a subsequent loss of balance. Team Three’s Corporal Michael Stinetorf, twenty-one, who was watching when the bomb hit, is livid: “I just saw seven people vaporized right before my very eyes!” Behind Team Three’s position, the men observe the commanders who called in the strike smoking cigars and laughing. One of them gripes, “Those fuckheads are celebrating. They’re laughing like it’s a game.”

But as in other bombing and shooting incidents, Marines don’t all agree on what happened. Maj. Shoup, the air officer who helped coordinate the strike, sees it as a good hit. Prior to the bombing, Shoup was communicating with the F-18’s backseater, a friend of his whose call sign is “Curly.” Before releasing the bomb, Shoup says, “Curly reported seeing puffs of smoke coming from the courtyard of the village. These looked like mortars being launched.” Shoup adds, “You want to improve the morale of Marines? They see that thousand-pound bomb go off, it really improves their morale.”

BY NOON RCT-1 has completed its thrust through Al Hayy, and several thousand of its Marines now occupy positions north of the highway bridge seized by First Recon. RCT-1 met with only light resistance through the city, and its signal teams tasked with picking up enemy radio transmissions overhear Iraqi commanders telling their men, “Retreat north.”

First Recon is moving north as well. The plan is for the battalion to continue pushing ahead of RCT-1 and move into Al Muwaffaqiyah, a town of 5,000 people, about five kilometers north of the field where we spent the morning.

The battalion convoy pulls onto a dirt lane and enters a series of shaded agricultural hamlets. We stop, and the residents pour out from their homes, waving and smiling. To the Marines, the villagers’ warm welcome is confusing, given the fact that less than two kilometers down the road their neighbors were just wiped out by a 1,000-pound bomb dropped by an American F-18.

“They’re probably just glad we’re not blowing up their houses,” Person observes.

We see the tiny heads of children poking around the corner of a small adobe hut. Several girls, maybe eight or nine, run toward us.

Ever since the shepherd-shooting incident, Colbert’s demeanor has changed toward civilians, especially children. When he sees them now, he’s prone to uninhibited displays of sentimentality.

“How adorable,” Colbert gushes as the girls laugh playfully a few meters outside his window. “They’re so cute.”

He orders Trombley to dig out the last remaining humanitarian rations, hoarded by the Marines to supplement their one-MRE-a-day diet. Colbert steps out of the vehicle, holding the fluorescent-yellow humrat packs. Espera walks up, hunched over his weapon, scowling from his deep-set eyes, perspiring heavily. “Dog, I don’t like being stopped here.”

“Poke,” Colbert says, calling him by his nickname. “Give these to the kids. I’ve got your back.”

It’s not that Colbert is afraid to walk across the yard. For some reason, he wants Espera to participate in this act of generosity. “Go on. You’ll feel good,” Colbert urges him.

Espera stalks up to the girls and hands them the packs. They run, squealing, back to the hut to show off their prizes to a woman in black standing outside.