Evan Wright - Generation Kill

“See, Poke,” Colbert says. “They’re happy.”

In Iraq Espera spends his free moments reminiscing about his wife and eight-year-old daughter back home in Los Angeles. Outside of the Marine Corps, his family is the center of his life. He spent his final night before deploying to the Middle East camping with his daughter in a tree fort he’d built for her in his backyard. But out here, Espera doesn’t seem to want to connect with civilians in any way. Most of all, he doesn’t even want to look at the children. While Colbert continues to wave at the kids now opening the humrats by the hut, Espera breaks the Kodak moment. “Fuck it, dog. You think handing out some rice and candy bars is gonna change anything? It don’t change nothing.”

AFEW HUNDRED METERS up from Colbert’s team, Meesh meets with villagers, who warn the Marines against trying to enter Al Muwaffaqiyah. They give Meesh detailed information about paramilitary forces that are setting up an ambush on the main bridge leading into the town.

When this report is passed over the radio to Colbert’s team, Person speculates that the villagers might be helping because they are genuinely on our side.

“They’re not on anybody’s side,” Colbert says. “These are simple people. They don’t care about war. They’d probably tell the Iraqis where we were if they rolled through here. They just want to farm and raise sheep.”

Because of the villagers’ warnings, First Recon’s commander orders the battalion to leave the trail and set up in a wadi—a dry riverbed—four kilometers back from the bridge, where the ambush is supposedly being planned for them.

The Marines dig Ranger graves and set up a defensive perimeter. The battalion orders an artillery strike on the area around the bridge, then a couple of hours before sunset, RCT-1 sends Marines in several light armored vehicles (LAVs) to try to cross the bridge. They are turned back by heavy enemy gunfire. When the LAVs return down the road past the wadi we’re in, Gunny Wynn spots one moving slowly with its rear hatch open and a wounded Marine in the back. “Guess the locals were right about that bridge,” he says.

The Marines are told to prepare to stay here for the night. Despite the civilian deaths they’ve witnessed or caused in the past twenty-four hours, most Marines are still on a high from seizing the bridge the night before. Being told they’re going to stay in one place for the next twelve hours or so adds to the morale boost.

The men spend the remaining hours of daylight partially stripping out of their MOPPs and washing up. Reyes breaks out an espresso pot, which he fills with Starbucks coffee, luxury items packed in his gear for special occasions. While brewing it, he accosts Pappy, his team leader, who’s just finished shaving. “Pappy, you missed a spot.”

Reyes takes his razor and cleans up around the edge of Pappy’s sideburns. “Sometimes before a big meeting with the boss, I have to clean him up a little,” Reyes explains.

“The battalion commander thinks I’m a bum,” Pappy says, tilting his head slightly.

“Brother, that’s ’cause he don’t know what a true warrior be,” Reyes says, clowning.

The close relationship shared by Reyes and Pappy is between two men who are complete opposites. While Reyes has so much bubbly effervescence that he manages to be flamboyant even in his MOPP suit, Pappy is a rangy, quintessentially laconic Southern man raised in a churchgoing, Baptist family in Lincolntown, North Carolina, a mountain town of a few thousand souls. Pappy jokingly describes himself as “your normal North Carolina loser,” and says he’d barely ever met a Mexican before joining the Corps. Now Reyes is not just one of his best friends but his assistant team leader, his spotter when sniping, his second in battle. Reyes quips that their relationship is like that of “husband and wife.” After Reyes finishes shaving him, he nudges Pappy’s head to the side for a close inspection and pronounces, “Looking like a warrior, Pappy.”

Everyone sits around enjoying the waning moments of daylight, as artillery booms into Al Muwaffaqiyah. One of the senior men in the platoon walks up and announces, “Looks like there’s a big meeting going on with the battalion commander. I just hope he isn’t coming up with some stupid-ass plan.”

AT ABOUT EIGHT O’CLOCK that night, Fick returns from his meeting with his superiors and gathers his team leaders for a briefing. “The bad news is, we won’t get much sleep tonight,” he says. “The good news is, we get to kill people.”

It’s rare for Fick to sound so “moto,” regaling his men with enthusiastic talk of killing. He goes on to present Lt. Col. Ferrando’s ambitious last-minute plan to cross the bridge into Al Muwaffaqiyah, push north of the town and set up ambushes on a road believed to be heavily travelled by Fedayeen. “The goal is to terrorize the Fedayeen,” he says, looking around, smiling expectantly.

His men are skeptical. They’re all aware that when Marines approached the bridge a few hours ago in LAVs, they were hammered by enemy ambushers. Pappy repeatedly questions Fick about the enemy situation on the bridge. “It’s been pounded all day by artillery,” Fick answers, waving off his objections, sounding almost glib, like a salesman—all of this unusual for him. “I think the chances of a serious threat are low.”

Fick walks a delicate line with his men. A good officer should be eager to take calculated risks. Despite the men’s complaints against Ferrando for ordering them into an ambush at Al Gharraf, the fact is, only one Marine was injured, and the enemy’s plans to halt the Marines’ advance were thwarted. Fick privately admits that there have been times when he’s actually resisted sending his troops on missions because, as he says, “I care a lot about these guys, and I don’t like the idea of sending them into something where somebody isn’t going to come back.” While acting on these sentiments might make him a good person, they perhaps make him a less good officer. Tonight he seems uncharacteristically on edge, as if he’s fighting his tendencies to be overly protective. He admonishes his team leaders, saying, “I’m not hearing the aggressiveness I’d like to.” His voice sounds hollow, like he’s not convinced himself.

The men, who ultimately have no choice in the matter, reluctantly voice their support of Fick’s orders—ones that he has no choice but to follow, either. After he goes off, Pappy says, “The people running this can fuck things up all they want. But as long as we keep getting lucky and making it through alive, they’ll just keep repeating the same mistakes.”

What galls the men is the fact that they are situated just a few kilometers from the bridge. To them, it seems like a no-brainer to send a foot patrol out and observe the bridge before driving onto it. “Reconnaissance,” Doc Bryan points out, “is what Recon Marines do.”

Confidence is not bolstered when an Iraqi artillery unit—thought to have been wiped out by this point—sends numerous rounds kabooming into the surrounding mudflats. The men break up their discussion. However beautiful artillery might look when it’s arcing across the sky onto enemy positions, when it’s aimed at you, it sounds like somebody’s hurling freight trains at your head. Everyone runs for the nearest hole and takes cover.

Following the Iraqi strike, we watch Marine batteries pour about 100 DPICM rounds onto the town side of the bridge four kilometers distant. Each DPICM round, loaded with either 66 or 89 submunitions, produces spectacular starbursts as it explodes over the city.

FOR TONIGHT’S MISSION, Colbert’s team wins the honor of driving the lead vehicle onto the bridge. The team climbs into the Humvee just before eleven o’clock, some gobbling ephedra for what’s expected to be an all-night mission. Colbert is not especially sanguine about the condition of the team’s equipment. Due to the shortage of LSA lubricant, his vehicle’s Mark-19 keeps going down. On top of this, on a night when they are going to be rolling through a hostile town, then setting up ambushes on back roads, there’s almost no moon, which makes the operation of NVGs less than ideal. Ordinarily, the team would turn on its PAS-13 thermal-imaging scope, but tonight they have no batteries for it. (Fick does not hide his anger toward Casey Kasem for failing to keep the teams supplied with these items. “That guy’s either running around with his video camera shooting his war documentary or sitting in his hole reading Maxim, while my men don’t get what they need,” he complained earlier.) Even though the team will be moving with impaired night-vision and a faulty main gun, Colbert tries to put a good spin on things. “We’ll be okay,” he says as they start the engine. “Just make sure you look sharp through those NVGs, Person.”