Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Now, midmorning on April 3, while RCT-1 is still pulling back from its diversion into Al Kut, Fick gathers the men by Colbert’s vehicle in their muddy encampment and explains what’s going on. “By coming up here, we’ve tied down two Republican Guard divisions,” he says. The swagger he had up on the bridge outside of Al Hayy is back. “And for most of the way we were out in front, rolling into these villages and towns ahead of every other American. Often, it was you guys in this platoon at the absolute tippity-tip of the spear. Not to rest on our laurels now, but every one of you should be proud.”

“But what about Al Kut?” Garza asks. “After coming all this way we ain’t going to Al Kut?”

“No,” Fick says. “The feint’s over. We’re pulling out of here later today.”

Garza, sitting by a hole, etching lines in the mud with his boot heels, digests the news. He twists his head up, annoyed. “We just spent a week getting shot at, bombing everything, all based on a fucking wrong turn?”

EVEN THOUGH THE IRAQIS have been beaten in Al Kut, they’re still dropping mortars around First Recon’s encampment, where it has remained through the morning of April 3. In the opinion of the Marines, Iraqis don’t fight very hard, but the men are beginning to notice that Iraqis never really seem to completely surrender, either.

“Damn,” Person says after another blast. “Didn’t RCT-1 already kick their ass once today?”

Everyone is waiting for orders to begin the march to Baghdad to join the final assault. It’s grown into a hot day. Earlier, Marines were ordered into their rubber MOPP boots in case of a gas attack. Still, nobody minds the added hardship too much. The platoon was resupplied with food today. Colbert’s team sits around their Humvee in the mud, gorging themselves on MREs.

Hasser is still not talking. He leans against the front wheel, writing an after-action summary on the shooting of the man in the blue car, which Fick told him to hand in in case there’s an investigation. Person walks over to him and starts dry-humping his shoulder like a dog.

“How you doing, Walt?”

“Get out of here.”

Fick walks up. “Walt, when you finish that, we’re going to see if there’s a better way to stop these cars.”

“Walt’s got a great way to stop cars,” Person says. “Shoot the driver.” Behind Hasser’s back, his buddies all talk about him in worried, hushed tones, trying to figure out if he’s okay. To his face, they tease him unmercifully. For the Marines, this is their attempt at therapy.

Espera comes to Hasser’s defense. “Maybe you were a hair too aggressive yesterday, but these motherfuckers are trying to kill us. We can’t get soft now because of a few mistakes. I’m lighting up any motherfucker who comes within one hundred meters.”

SIGNS OF THE REGIME’S unraveling greet the Marines as they pull south, away from Al Kut, later in the afternoon. We drive on a straight, narrow asphalt road through an utterly flat, thinly populated area of croplands. On the way, we pass a truck full of naked Iraqi men, waving underwear as surrender flags. They say they were robbed of their clothes by fleeing soldiers. Farther along there’s a car with two fatally shot men in it. A guy cowering by the road tells a translator the men were killed by rampaging Iraqi soldiers, who in defeat have become bandits.

First Recon sets up a camp twenty kilometers south of Al Kut. The next morning, April 4, the men confront a new, ugly side of war. Refugees begin streaming up to their roadblock on the northern end of the highway.

Second Platoon is tasked with escorting the refugees through First Recon’s lines, along a three-kilometer stretch between their roadblocks on the highway. About fifty refugees are gathered by the roadblock when Colbert’s team rolls up.

Many of the refugees have been on the road for three days now, walking and hitchhiking all the way from Baghdad, about 250 kilometers from here. The men wear Western clothes—dusty suits and sleek loafers, shredded from three days of walking. The women, mostly in black, carry infants and are surrounded by small children. Many carry sacks of grain, bags of clothing and other household possessions. There’s one little boy, maybe six, in a black and gold-lamé suit with a bow tie that makes him look like a miniature Las Vegas lounge singer. It was probably the most expensive thing he owned, and his family had likely dressed him up in it as a means of transporting it out of Baghdad. He smiles at the Marines, almost self-consciously proud to be greeting them in his finest suit. They laugh and give him candy—unlucky Charms, of course.

When the men begin to escort the first group, with the Marines on foot and in Humvees creeping behind, the little cavalcade has an almost carefree air. There’s an extremely beautiful woman among the refugees, who wears a bright green scarf. In her later twenties, she’s a biologist from Baghdad who speaks fluent English. Her name is Manal, and her beauty isn’t something that’s entirely objective. In the squalor of her current circumstances, she radiates calm and high spirits that seem almost mischievous. She accosts one of the Marine escorts with a beguiling smile and asks, “Why did you Americans come here?”

“We want to help you, ma’am,” the Marine answers.

“I love my city very much,” Manal says, referring to Baghdad. “You are bombing it, and it will be worse.”

“Why do you think we came here?” the Marine asks.

“Our country is very rich, and our president is very stupid,” Manal says. “Maybe you came for the liberation. I am not so sure.”

The exchange is cut short when the Marine notices one of the babies being carried by another woman has blood streaming out of its mouth. A little horror has returned to the war.

“Can you ask her what’s wrong?” the Marine says to Manal.

She turns to the woman, who’s shushing the bleeding baby even though it isn’t crying. She and the baby’s mother exchange a few words. Then Manal reports. “Her baby is sick.” She scolds the Marine. “All the mothers have been walking for a long time with no water or food.”

Colbert comes over to help. He instructs the mother with the bleeding baby to sit by the road, and summons a corpsman over. The bleeding, the corpsman believes, is a result of dehydration. Several other mothers come over with their sick babies. It’s already in the low nineties. Colbert dabs the infants with water, trying to cool them down. Soon, more mothers are handing him their babies, perhaps thinking he’s a doctor. One baby has chicken pox. Colbert takes the infant, kneels down and rocks him. “Is there anything we can do?” he asks the corpsman.

“Nothing, man,” he answers. “They just need lots of water.”

Colbert now wears an expression that I’ve come to see more frequently. He looks helpless. When confronted with these small human tragedies up close, some Marines shut down. Their faces go blank. Despite his Iceman reputation, Colbert doesn’t hide his feelings very well. In combat he looks almost ecstatic; now he appears overwhelmed, though still trying to deal with this situation. He hands the baby back to the mother, along with a water bottle. “Put water on the little one,” he says, speaking English into the mother’s uncomprehending face. She nods gratefully, perhaps thinking he’s done more than he actually has to help. Despite the water the Marines hand out, Doc Bryan estimates that a quarter of the infants may die in the next twenty-four hours.

In the space of an hour, two to three hundred refugees show up at the northern roadblock. Marines, who initially vowed to keep their distance, now load rotund old ladies in black robes into the backs of their Humvees and drive them the three kilometers through their lines. Others carry sacks of rice and bedrolls on their heads and shoulders. One of the men on Espera’s team, twenty-three-year-old Lance Corporal Nathan Christopher, walks down the road, crying, while carrying a baby. He later tells me what got to him was seeing the mother, weakened from days of walking, almost drop the infant. Despite bawling his eyes out, Christopher tells me helping the refugees has afforded him his best moment in Iraq. “After driving here from Kuwait, shooting every house, person, dog in our path, we finally get to do something decent.”