Evan Wright - Generation Kill

“Mistakes happen,” Colbert says, climbing into the Humvee. Despite his attempt to slough it off, his face appears almost silver from the perspiration drenching it.

BY EARLY AFTERNOON the Marines have advanced more than twenty-five kilometers past the magic line and are fifteen kilometers south of their destination, Baqubah. In keeping with the poor judgment the Iraqis have shown in other situations, they only start to move their armor down to attack toward the middle of the day. But by now the clouds have burned off, and waves of British and American jets and Marine Cobras simultaneously bomb, rocket and strafe targets in all directions. Trucks, armor, homes and entire hamlets are being attacked from the air, blown up and set on fire. The Iraqis’ one chance to wipe out the Marines with a mass formation of armor evaporated with the vanishing cloud cover.

Right now, the world’s attention is focused on televised pictures of American Marines in the center of Baghdad, pulling down a statue of Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile, where we are, enemy mortars start exploding within fifty meters of Bravo Company’s position. From a raw-fear standpoint, this is among the worst moments for the platoon.

The Marines in Second Platoon have been ordered to hold a position in a barren field by the highway. Their five Humvees are bunched within a few meters of one another when the mortars begin to land.

“We are receiving accurate mortar fire,” Fick informs his commander over the radio.

“Remain in position,” his commander, Encino Man, radios back.

Unlike earlier in the day, when Marines rolled back during close encounters with enemy mortars, Lt. Col. Ferrando doesn’t want to lose his momentum. Now, having the benefit of robust air support, he’s divided his Marines into two columns a few kilometers apart. His plan is to rush toward Baqubah as quickly as possible, while conditions remain favorable.

When Fick passes the word that the men in Second Platoon are to remain in place, Espera turns to his men in the next Humvee over from ours and says, “Stand by to die, gents.”

The twenty-two Marines in the platoon sit in their vehicles, engines running, as per their orders, while blasts shake the ground beneath them. Everyone watches the sky. A mortar lands ten meters from Espera’s open-top Humvee, blowing a four-foot-wide hole in the ground. It’s so close, I see the column of black smoke jetting up from the blast area before I hear the boom. I look out and see Espera hunched over his weapon, his eyes darting beneath the brim of his helmet, watching for the next hit. His men appear frozen in the vehicle as the smoke rises beside them.

Before leaving on this mission, many of the men in Colbert’s platoon had said good-bye to one another by shaking hands or even by hugging. The formal farewells seemed odd considering that everyone was going to be shoulder-to-shoulder in the cramped Humvees. The good-byes almost seemed an acknowledgment of the transformations that take place in combat. Friends who lolled around together during free time talking about bands, stupid Marine Corps rules and girlfriends’ fine asses aren’t really the same people anymore once they enter the battlefield.

In combat, the change seems physical at first. Adrenaline begins to flood your system the moment the first bullet is fired. But unlike adrenaline rushes in the civilian world—a car accident or bungee jump, where the surge lasts only a few minutes—in combat, the rush can go on for hours. In time, your body seems to burn out from it, or maybe the adrenaline just runs out. Whatever the case, after a while you begin to almost lose the physical capacity for fear. Explosions go off. You cease to jump or flinch. In this moment now, everyone sits still, numbly watching the mortars thump down nearby. The only things moving are the pupils of their eyes.

This is not to say the terror goes away. It simply moves out from the twitching muscles and nerves in your body and takes up residence in your mind. If you feed it with morbid thoughts of all the terrible ways you could be maimed or die, it gets worse. It also gets worse if you think about pleasant things. Good memories or plans for the future just remind you how much you don’t want to die or get hurt. It’s best to shut down, to block everything out. But to reach that state, you have to almost give up being yourself. This is why, I believe, everyone said good-bye to each other yesterday before leaving on this mission. They would still be together, but they wouldn’t really be seeing one another for a while, since each man would, in his own way, be sort of gone.

After the platoon holds its position under close mortar fire for about fifteen minutes, the attacks cease. The platoon is ordered to move a couple more kilometers north, toward an intersection where locals have warned of an ambush.

We drive to within a kilometer of the intersection and stop. There’s a cluster of barracks-like structures, a water tower and high-tension power lines ahead where the road forks into a Y. To the left there’s a thick stand of palm trees extending west for about a kilometer. Several minutes earlier, Cobras had come under AAA fire from the buildings near the intersection. They and other aircraft decide to prep the area before the Marines roll through on the ground.

We sit back and watch them bomb and strafe the intersection for about ten minutes. Colbert tunes in the Air Wing’s radio channels. We listen as the pilots call in intended targets—from Iraqi military personnel hiding behind garden walls and in berms to trucks and armored vehicles—then watch as the aircraft nose down and destroy them. Orange rosettes flash ahead of us from powerful bombs dropped by jets.

“We’ve never had this much air,” Colbert says, eyes gleaming, pleased with all the destruction we are witnessing. “It’s all about having some air and LAV escorts,” he concludes with a grand smile.

Pilots over the radio now discuss their next move, doing a “recon by fire” on the palm grove to the left of the intersection. The pilots can’t see what’s in the palm grove, nor have they taken any hostile fire from positions inside it. Nevertheless, they request permission to do a recon by fire, which simply means they’re going to rocket and machine-gun the fuck out of it and see if anything shoots back. The battalion’s forward air controller on the ground approves the plan. Helicopters skim low over the trees, stitching the ground with machine guns, setting off a storm of white fire with their rockets. It’s a real Apocalypse Now moment.

Colbert’s team and the rest of the platoon are ordered to drive up to the intersection, take the Y left and enter the palm grove while it’s still burning.

We drive into a bank of smoke, glimpsing a succession of small horrors. There’s a truckful of shot-up cows in the field, nearby several slaughtered sheep, their guts smeared out around them. Two charred human corpses by the road are still smoking. There’s a dog with his head buried up to his ears in the stomach of a cow he’s eating. We are again in Dog Land.

We come alongside the palm grove on our left. Fences made of dried reeds crackle and burn outside the vehicle. We continue on, pull upwind of the smoke and now see there’s a hamlet nestled between the trees—a series of farmhouses, interconnected by walls, animal pens and grape arbors. Thatched roofs and fences burn. These are what were reconned by fire.

“I hope there’s no people in there,” Colbert says. The gleam that had been in his eyes moments earlier during the bombing has been replaced with his worried, helpless look.

Republican Guard berets, uniforms and other pieces of military gear are scattered by the road across from the palm grove. Iraqi forces—legitimate military targets—have obviously been in the area. Colbert stops the Humvee. He and other Marines get out. Iraqi military communications lines—cables from field phones—lie by the side of the road. Colbert’s men cut them apart with their Leatherman tools.