Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Sometime after the schoolchildren of Al Muwaffaqiyah celebrated Valentine’s Day, a battalion-size force of Republican Guard soldiers moved into the town and turned their school into a military headquarters. They shoved all the desks into one room and filled the others with military supplies. Marines find maps, uniforms, gas masks, as well as recently cooked, partially consumed bowls of rice, peanut shells and chicken bones. Apparently, the Republican Guard soldiers stayed back here eating peanuts and chicken while the Syrian jihadis were sent out to the bridge to delay the Americans.

The Marines also find several classrooms piled to the ceilings with weapons and munitions, including 600 mortar shells, 10,000 AK rounds and a couple dozen launchers and rifles. They rig the weapons caches with explosives and prepare to blow the school complex sky-high.

WATCHING THE TOWN’S only school blow up—which we see as a funnel of black smoke jetting up from the western side of the town—comes as a relief to Colbert’s team. Its destruction means they can finally roll north and get out of Al Muwaffaqiyah. The atmosphere in the town has changed markedly. Locals have warned Marines in other teams that foreign jihadis have infiltrated the area and plan to attack the Americans with suicide car bombs. The civilians who’d come out earlier to greet the Marines have fled.

Colbert’s team is ordered to move to the front of the battalion and set up a roadblock at the north end of the town. We stop near a large industrial complex that looks like a cement factory or machine shop. There are some houses beyond that, then open fields.

Espera pulls his vehicle up beside Colbert’s on the road. The two of them orient their guns north. With the battalion and all of RCT-1 behind them, their two Humvees constitute the northernmost Marine unit in central Iraq. Their job is to turn away any cars that come down the road from the north. It’s a little before six in the evening. There are tall, leafy trees to our left casting blue shadows over us in the fading daylight.

In the past few hours Colbert and other team leaders in the battalion have developed what they hope will be less lethal means of stopping cars at roadblocks. Instead of firing warning shots from machine guns, they will launch colored smoke grenades. The hope is that drivers will be more likely to heed billowing clouds of colored smoke blocking the road than warning shots fired over their vehicles. Fick and other commanders had initially opposed this kinder, gentler method to halting traffic, with Fick arguing, “Marines are supposed to be an aggressive force. If our stance is less aggressive, we’re more likely to be challenged by bad guys.” But the enlisted Marines, tired of shooting unarmed civilians, fought to be allowed to use smoke grenades.

Now, when the first vehicle, a white pickup truck, approaches, Colbert strides into the road, ahead of the Humvees.

“Do not engage this truck!” he shouts to his men.

He fires a smoke grenade from his 203 launcher. It makes a plunking sound almost like a champagne cork popping, then bounces into the road, spewing green smoke. Three or four hundred meters down the road, the white pickup truck turns around and drives off.

A couple of cars arrive. The second is a taxi. It speeds up after the launching of the smoke grenade. The Marines by the Humvees hunch lower on their weapons, getting ready to fire.

“Do not engage!” Colbert shouts. He fires another smoke grenade.

The taxi drives through the smoke; then moments before the Marines are about to light it up, the driver cuts a tight, wheel-squealing U-turn. Even on good days, Arab motorists tend to drive like kamikaze pilots. It’s not easy for a Marine to differentiate between run-of-the-mill reckless Arab driving and erratic behavior that would indicate a suicide bomber.

The Marines discuss the taxi—debating whether the driver’s nearly fatal game of chicken with them was a result of his poor judgment, or the possibility that he’s a Fedayeen scouting Marine lines. Their conversation distracts them from the next car’s approach.

The blue sedan seems to appear out of nowhere. Perhaps it came from a side street behind the cement factory. In any case, Colbert doesn’t step into the road to launch his first smoke grenade until the car is less than 200 meters away.

“Do not engage!” Colbert repeats.

As soon as Colbert fires his smoke grenade, a Marine SAW roars to life, spitting out a short burst. The car, maybe a hundred meters away now, rolls to a stop, green smoke blowing past it. The windshield is frosted. Two men in white robes jump out. One, who looks to be a young man in his early twenties, has blood streaming from his shoulder. The men run hastily toward a mud-brick house by the road and disappear behind a wall.

Hasser stands to the left of Colbert, with the butt of his SAW pressed to his shoulder. It was his gun that fired.

“That was a wounding shot, motherfucker!” Colbert yells, uncharacteristically pissed. “What the fuck were you doing? I said, ‘Do not engage’!”

Hasser remains frozen on his SAW.

Colbert walks around to him. He lowers his voice. “Walt, you okay?”

Hasser lowers his SAW and stares at the car.

Colbert squeezes his arm. “Walt, talk to me.”

“The car kept coming,” Hasser says, mechanically.

The smoke disperses in the breeze, and Marines make out the outline of a man’s head behind the shattered windshield. He is sitting upright, as if still holding the wheel. Passenger doors on the right side of the car hang open. The driver seems to be alive, rolling his head from side to side.

None of the Marines say anything for a moment. Colbert looks at the car, then down. He breathes deeply, as if struggling to put his emotions aside. Having watched him cry a few days ago after the shooting of the shepherd, I suspect it’s not always easy being the Iceman.

“It’s okay, Walt,” Colbert says. “You were doing your job.”

Since the Marines on these vehicles are at this moment in history the foremost units of the American invasion here, there’s a burden that comes with that. They’re not allowed to simply run up to the car and see if they can help the guy. Colbert radios Fick, who’s a couple hundred meters behind, and tells him there’s a man shot in the car ahead. He requests permission to go up to it and render aid to the driver.

“Negative,” Fick tells him. The battalion has ordered the platoon to advance a few hundred meters past the car.

We drive toward the blue car. The shot man behind the wheel appears to be in his forties. He sits upright with good posture, his hands on his lap as if they slipped off the steering wheel. He wears a white shirt. His right eye stares ahead; his left eye is covered in blood dripping down from the crown of his head. He’s alive. When we pass within about a meter of him, we hear his rapid breathing—a shushing sound.

Due to a temporary rotation in the team, Trombley is on the Mark-19 and Hasser is in the seat to the left of me. He rides closest to the man he just shot, and stares ahead, refusing to look as we drive past, listening to his dying gasps: Shhhh! Shhhh! Shhhh!

Nobody in the Humvee says anything.

As Team Three rolls behind us, Doc Bryan raises his M-4 and tries to get a bead on the man. Without telling anyone else, he has decided to shoot the man in the head and give him a mercy execution. But his Humvee bounces, and he misses his chance for a clean shot.

We stop several hundred meters up the road and get out. There are some huts ahead. Fick and I see a pregnant woman walking toward them. Fick gets a bright yellow pack of humrats from his truck to give to her, and we walk toward her, with Fick holding the humrats high. The woman sees us and veers toward the huts. We walk faster. She starts running, and we do too. Then Fick stops abruptly. “This is ridiculous,” he says. “We’re terrorizing a pregnant woman.”