Evan Wright - Generation Kill

While standing outside, we hear a babble of voices. Men whom we can’t see are chanting something. Their voices come from ditches by the road across from the burning hamlet. An old man now rises from behind a berm ten meters away. His hands are up. His eyes are wild and his face covered with tears as he shrieks, “No Saddam! No Saddam!”

A couple of other men rise behind him, all of them chanting the same words. One has his shirt off and is waving it as a surrender flag. Another man climbs out of a ditch carrying a small frightened girl, about five or six. She stares at the Marines in shock. They’re all civilians—probably residents of the hamlet reconned by fire.

The Marines lift their rifles high and gesture for the now-homeless villagers to step forward. The men keep chanting.

“Okay, okay!” Fick shouts. He gives them an exaggerated smile, trying to reassure them.

The eldest man approaches, still chanting insanely. Fick pats his arm. The man begins to shout. “George Bush! George Bush!” he says, pronouncing the first name like “Jor.” The Marines offer the little girl some candy but she turns away in mute fear.

Fick grabs the old man’s shoulder, steadying him. “Yes, George Bush,” Fick says. “No problem. Okay?”

The old man finally stops shouting. He stares at Fick, perhaps finally recognizing that this American is not going to kill him. He breaks down sobbing, grabs Fick’s face and smothers him in kisses.

BY THREE O’CLOCK in the afternoon of April 9, First Recon and War Pig have come to within about ten kilometers of Baqubah, advancing in two columns spaced several kilometers apart. While Bravo Company clears through the burning hamlets reconned by fire to the west, Alpha Company, led by Patterson, is pushing north on a trail that follows a canal to the east. The canal runs north-south, and the Marines in Alpha are pushed up against the edge of it to their right. Ahead of them is an expanse of bermed fields. Even as they creep forward—eighty Marines in about fifteen Humvees and trucks—shepherds dot the fields around them, tending flocks of sheep.

While the company is halted, a volley of mortars lands in their midst. A blast detonates so close to Capt. Patterson, standing beside his Humvee, that it knocks him against the side of his vehicle and rips up his pack with shrapnel but misses him. Then his column comes under machine-gun fire from a lone hut 200 meters ahead. Beyond the hut, Iraqis concealed in ditches, some fortified with sandbags, begin firing at them with AKs.

The lead Marines in Alpha begin to take fire from heavy, 73mm guns on BMPs—light Iraqi tanks—that seem to be about a kilometer ahead of them. The Marines in Alpha dive for cover. Patterson estimates there are as many as 150 Iraqi soldiers entrenched in the fields. With his unit hemmed in by the canal on the right side and by Iraqis to the left and in front, for the first time of the war, Patterson thinks, as he later tells me, “We are really on the brink here.”

Fawcett, whose team is near the front of Alpha’s position, takes cover behind a berm. The enemy BMP continues blasting at his men with its main gun, which fires shells about half the size of a Marine heavy artillery round. Fawcett and Sutherby, the sniper, peek up and observe more enemy troops pouring into the fields ahead of them. The Iraqi soldiers are being ferried in aboard military trucks, hopping out, then scrambling behind berms to fire on the Marines, whom they will soon outnumber about three to one.

Battalion forward air controllers contact an Air Force F-15 Strike Eagle in the vicinity to take out the BMPs. Marines are wary of working with jets, especially those flown by the Air Force. The fear is that jet pilots, moving too fast and far removed from Marines on the ground, will end up striking friendly positions. This fear is borne out when the F-15 drops its first 500-pound bomb intended to hit the BMP. The pilot misses by nearly a kilometer. The bomb lands fewer than 200 meters from Fawcett’s position. The men are buffeted by the shock wave, and temporarily deafened by the blast, but unharmed.

The pilot drops a second bomb directly on the BMP, destroying it, then moves on to take others farther north. Cobras linger to wipe out enemy machine-gun positions with Hellfire missiles.

Alpha’s Marines climb into their Humvees and advance on the Iraqis in the fields ahead. The Iraqis put out a lot of AK fire but seem incapable of hitting the Marines. Many put their rifles over their heads and shoot indiscriminately, without looking. Marine snipers steadily pick them off, while the .50-cal and Mark-19 gunners saturate their positions with lethal fire. The thing that amazes Sutherby is seeing shepherds run onto the field amidst the shooting, to drag off wounded sheep caught in the crossfire.

Alpha’s pace quickens. Marine gunners begin competing with one another to cut down the enemy fighters. Over the course of the next two hours, they advance approximately ten kilometers, destroying or routing all hostile forces ahead of them. When I run into Fawcett a short while later, he greets me with a blissed-out, ashram grin. After weeks of complaining about the war, fretting over its moral implications, he enthuses about slaughtering squads of uniformed Iraqi soldiers in the fields with the nearly 250 Mark-19 rounds he fired. “I feel invincible,” he tells me. “I had rounds skipping in the dirt right next me, a BMP shooting straight at us, Cobras lighting stuff up all around, a five-hundred-pound bomb blow up almost on top of us, and nothing hit me. Maybe it’s karma.”

On its western approach to Baqubah, Bravo Company stops outside a two-story, pale-yellow stucco building that appears to be an abandoned military post. Two hundred meters behind us, Kocher leads his team into the field, advancing just thirty meters into it from the highway. While picking their way through dried brush, waist-high in places, they encounter a group of Marines from Delta Company, the reserve unit. Several of the reservists surround a dead enemy fighter, a young man in a ditch, still clutching his AK, lying with his brains spilled out of his head. While the reservists gawk at the corpse, a man on Kocher’s team notices a live, armed Iraqi hiding in a trench nearby.

Kocher and his men turn on the armed Iraqi with their weapons ready to fire. They shout at him to drop his AK. It’s a tense moment for the Marines. Strictly speaking, this armed Iraqi had gotten the drop on them and could have easily taken them out had he fired. There’s gunfire all around, and the Marines are worried more Iraqis are hidden nearby.

But the Iraqi complies, drops his weapon and rises. One of the reservist Marines, First Sergeant Robert Cottle, a thirty-seven-year-old SWAT team instructor with the LAPD, jogs over, takes out a pair of zip cuffs and binds the Iraqi’s hands behind his back—so tightly that his arms later develop dark-purple blood streaks all the way to his shoulders.

The prisoner, a low-level Republican Guard volunteer in his late forties, is overweight, dressed in civilian clothes—a sleeveless undershirt and filthy trousers—and has a droopy Saddam mustache. He looks like a guy so out of shape he’d get winded driving a taxicab in rush hour. Surrounded by Marines, the man begins to blubber and cry.

Kocher hands his rifle to another Marine, pulls out his 9mm sidearm and approaches the prisoner. With combat raging around them, this enemy takedown begins in a highly charged manner. Kocher slams the Iraqi to the ground, puts the pistol to his head and shouts, “If you move, I’ll blow your fucking head off!” Pinning the guy with his knee in his back, he pulls AK magazines and a military ID out of his pockets. The prisoner starts pleading in English, “I have a family.”