Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Pappy has a bullet rip through his foot and come out the other side, his torn boot gushing blood from both holes. He tourniquets the wound, resumes firing, gets on the radio and says, “Team Two has a man hit.” He speaks of himself in the third person, he says, because he doesn’t want to panic the rest of the platoon. Beside him in the driver’s seat, Reyes, often teased for being the platoon’s pretty boy, narrowly escapes a bullet that shatters the windshield and passes within an inch of his beautiful head. But Reyes feels oddly calm. He later says, “Wearing NVGs blocks your peripheral vision. You feel cocooned in this tunnel. It gives a false feeling of safety.” He concentrates on executing a three-point turn, surrounded by four other Humvees all trying to do the same, each with Marines on top blazing away. But one of Reyes’s tires is shot out. Driving on rims makes the Humvee wobble like a circus clown car. Pappy, riding beside him and shooting out his door, with his wounded foot elevated over the dashboard, repeatedly shouts, “You’re going off the damn road!”

When Team Three’s .50-caliber machine gun opens up over Doc Bryan’s head where he’s perched on the back of the Humvee, the concussive blasting is so intense that his nose starts bleeding. With his weapon growing sticky with blood and snot, he squeezes off two separate, very effective bursts, getting head shots on a pair of enemy ambushers.

Through it all, Espera fights from his Humvee beside ours while saying Hail Marys. In his NVGs he sees a man cut down in the extremities by a blast from Garza’s .50-cal. When he sees the guy attempt to crawl off, Espera fires a burst, clipping the top of his head, and resumes his Hail Marys.

It takes five to ten minutes for the platoon to extricate itself from the kill zone, leaving most of the would-be ambushers either dead or in flight. Doc Bryan counts nine bodies scattered on both sides of the road. Corporal Teren Holsey, a twenty-year-old on Team Three, gets in the platoon’s final kill. He rides hanging off the back of the last Humvee to leave the zone. After his vehicle makes it about fifty meters away from the pipe in the road, he looks back to see if anyone is following. He observes a man limping by the road and cuts him down with a burst from his M-4.

JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT on April 1, the platoon falls back a couple of kilometers from the ambush zone, then turns around on the road, orienting its Humvees toward the bridge. Unlike after the ambush at Al Gharraf, when the team became giddy at the cessation of fire, everyone is now subdued. Colbert is concerned about a loud scraping sound the Humvee had made while pulling back from the bridge. He and Person climb out and find cables tangled around the axles—debris from the road. The team spends several minutes cutting them away, then clambers back in. No one says anything in the darkness. They are ordered to prepare for another attempt on the bridge. Trombley falls asleep, snoring loudly in the seat next to me.

Pappy, now in a lot of pain from his wounded foot, is unloaded and sent back to the battalion’s rear for medical aid. Reyes is promoted to team leader, and takes Pappy’s seat in the Humvee. Q-tip Stafford, wounded in the leg, decides to stick around for the second assault.

At about twelve-thirty, we witness a monster artillery barrage. Marine batteries lob numerous HE rounds into the city on the far side of the bridge, trying to break apart the machine-gun bunkers. Helicopters fire their chain guns, rockets, then a TOW missile into the obstacle blocking the entrance to the bridge. All the missile blast does is lift the obstacle up, then drop it in the same place.

RCT-1 sends up two M1A1 tanks and eight LAVs. When we hear them rumble past, everyone’s spirits lift, then soar when the LAVs maneuver up to the bridge and rip into the city with their Bushmasters. The cannons thunder, spouting red fireballs. The sky sounds like it’s cracking. With their heavy weapons flashing in the darkness, the armored vehicles resemble fire-breathing dragons. “Look at them, dog,” Espera says, poking his head into Colbert’s vehicle. “Pouring down hate and discontent like a motherfucker.”

The tanks roll forward and push the obstacle out of the way, but their commanders decide the bridge is too unstable to cross. The armor pulls back.

Bravo Company is sent back to the bridge. This time, due to the two wounded in Second Platoon, Third Platoon is ordered into the lead. I experience a sinking feeling as we approach the bridge behind them. I keep myself wrapped tightly in a poncho. I’ve been freezing all night. Earlier, when we pulled back from the ambush, I was shivering so badly that my feet were bouncing off the floor. Doc Bryan later tells me this was likely a physical reaction to excessive adrenaline, which cuts the flow of blood to the extremities, resulting in a sensation of extreme cold. It starts again when we pass the last tank on our way to the bridge. I can’t keep my feet flat on the floor. My heels keep bouncing up like they’re spring-loaded.

Next to me, I hear Trombley snoring again, slumped over his SAW, asleep. I nudge him and whisper, “We’re at the bridge.”

The bridge appears directly in front of us in a blinding flash. Cobras fire zuni rockets, skimming them low over the roadway a few meters in front of our hood. This close, the rockets make a shrill, ear-stabbing sound. They smash into bunkers across the water. In the light of their explosions, I see the outlines of the Humvees in Third Platoon ahead of us.

“There’s a hole in the bridge,” Colbert says. “Bravo Three is stuck. We’re turning around.”

KOCHER’S TEAM makes it across the bridge with Carazales flooring the vehicle, bitching the entire way. “This is fucking bullshit, man. We’ve got no armor.” Somehow, he manages to swerve around the meter-wide hole blown through the middle of the bridge by a Marine artillery round.

Just after clearing the hole, Redman, standing at the vehicle’s .50-cal, is thrown down by a low-hanging wire from a blown-up utility pole. He slams his head on an ammo box at the rear of the Humvee and is knocked out. Redman comes to moments later and sees smashed buildings on either side of him. A Cobra, flying so low it looks like he could reach up and touch it, is dumping machine-gun fire into one of the structures. Redman smells a powerful odor of burning flesh. They have arrived in Al Muwaffaqiyah.

Two other teams make it across the bridge before a Humvee towing a trailer becomes hung up in the hole, blocking it off. The fourteen Marines who made it across are now cut off, alone in the town. Kocher’s team pushes forward about seventy-five meters, then is forced to halt. Buildings on both sides of the road are collapsed into it. Rubble in some places is piled higher than the hood of their vehicle. “There’s nowhere to go, dude,” Redman observes.

Another Cobra strafing run sends Carazales diving down to the floor. The rounds impact so close that he thinks it’s enemy fire. When he gets back up, he sees Kocher on the ground, walking alone into the demolished city. Carazales says, “Kocher’s happy now because he’s got his own little suicide mission.”

Kocher is determined to find a route through the town. Much as he dislikes his immediate superior, Captain America, Kocher loves his job. He grew up outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania, and spent his youth “running around in the backwoods.” He hunted deer, wrestled and listened to tales of war adventure from relatives who had served in World War II and in the Korean conflict. He knew from the time he was very little he would be a Navy SEAL or a Recon Marine. He likes being out on his own in a dark, alien town. After the Cobras fire a final Hellfire into a building in front of him, the place grows silent. All he can think of, Kocher later tells me, is a basic rule of combat reconnaissance: “The lead element’s expendable. Guess I’m it.”