Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Kocher hauls him to his feet and frog-marches him to the highway. In the surrounding fields, enemy mortars continue to boom amidst the crackling of Marine machine guns. Kocher knocks the prisoner over. He falls facedown in the dirt, with his hands still bound behind his back. In Kocher’s mind, his aggressiveness fits with his philosophy of handling prisoners. “I try to keep a prisoner off-balance so he knows I’m in control.”

The Marines bring Meesh over, and he barks at the man in Arabic, repeatedly asking him where the enemy mortars are positioned. The prisoner begs for his life. They conclude he knows nothing. They tie a sack over his head—a precaution taken since they are on a battlefield and don’t want this guy to shout or signal his comrades in any way should he see them—and wait to load him onto a truck.

Cottle, from the reservist unit, walks up to Kocher and shakes his hand, saying, “Thanks for saving my life.”

The situation seems pretty much wrapped up when Captain America makes a dramatic appearance, jogging up the road, screaming, with his bayonet out. He brandishes his bayonet toward the prisoner and shouts, “We ought to cut his throat like the Chechnyans in the video.” It’s a reference to a gore video circulating on the Internet, which many of the troops had seen before the invasion. It consisted of choppy MPEG-file footage that purported to show live Russian soldiers having their throats slashed by Chechnyan guerrillas.

Captain America then jabs the prisoner several times in his ribs and neck with the tip of his bayonet. The man starts screaming through the bag on his head, pleading again about his family. “Shut up!” Captain America yells. “Shut the fuck up!”

Watching this bizarre drama, Kocher orders Redman to step off the Humvee and guard the prisoner. They both figure the move will be a way of calming down Captain America. Redman picks up his M-4 and approaches the prisoner. He says to Captain America, “Dude, I’ve got him.”

Redman stands over the prisoner, placing his boot heel on his neck. Captain America shouts at the guy a few more times, then backs off.

Fick arrives. He exchanges a few words with Captain America, who’s now smiling and chuckling nervously, as he often does after a good outburst. Fick has no idea that anything out of the usual just occurred. He loads the prisoner into his Humvee and drives off.

A while later some of the reservist Marines approach Kocher and Redman. Cottle, who’d thanked Kocher a few minutes earlier for saving his life, now says, “You guys abused that prisoner. I should never have let you take custody of him. I ought to kick your fucking ass.”

Within twenty-four hours, the reservists file a report charging Kocher, Redman and Captain America with assaulting the prisoner. Captain America is temporarily suspended from command. Kocher is relieved of his job as team leader and ordered to ride with a support unit. Redman, who’s allowed to remain on the team, is dismayed. “Dude, when I put my boot on the prisoner’s neck, there were people out there still shooting at us. I wanted to control the prisoner and still be able to see what was happening.” He adds, “Kocher and I were trying to calm the situation down. I didn’t stomp or kick the guy. Dude, we just wanted Captain America to go away.”

Even Cottle later confesses, “I feel bad for the enlisted guys. They weren’t really the problem. It was the officer.” One of Cottle’s fellow reservists, a senior enlisted man who also witnessed the events, says, “From what I saw, that officer is sick. There’s something wrong with him.”

Captain America denies committing a misdeed. He later tells me he simply thinks his accusers in the reserve unit were insufficiently acquainted with the realities of the battlefield. “The prisoner was handled properly, even though they didn’t like the way it looked,” Captain America says. “They saw the beast that day, and they didn’t know how to handle it.”

BY FIVE O’CLOCK in the afternoon, the Iraqis who had earlier put up determined-though-inept resistance have either fled or been slaughtered. Colbert’s team, along with the rest of the platoon, speeds up the road toward the outskirts of Baqubah. Headless corpses—indicating well-aimed shots from high-caliber weapons—are sprawled out in trenches by the road. Others are charred beyond recognition, still sitting at the wheels of burned, skeletized trucks. Some of the smoking wreckage emits the odor of barbecuing chicken—the smell of slow-roasting human corpses inside. An LAV rolling a few meters in front of us stops by a shot-up Toyota pickup truck. A man inside appears to be moving. A Marine jumps out of the LAV, walks over to the pickup truck, sticks his rifle through the passenger window and sprays the inside of the vehicle with machine-gun fire.

Watching this apparent execution unfold, I wonder if shooting the Iraqi in the truck ahead of us was an act of barbarity or a mercy killing along the lines of the one Doc Bryan had tried to perform on the wounded man outside Al Muwaffaqiyah. There’s no time to sort this out.

We advance a few more kilometers, and Colbert’s team sets up a roadblock. We are now within four kilometers of Baqubah. My first encounter with the enemy prisoner whom Captain America had taunted and abused earlier takes place in the back of Fick’s Humvee parked nearby.

The prisoner is squirming on the truck bed, the burlap sack tied over his head, when I approach. A few Marines have gathered around and are taunting him. “What do you think you’d be doing to us if we were your prisoner?” a nineteen-year-old Marine rails at him.

Fick walks over. “Hey, I don’t want any war crimes in the back of my truck.” He says this lightly, having no idea yet of the brewing controversy surrounding the man’s capture. “Untie him and give him some water.”

The man’s arms are swollen and purple when the Marines cut off the zip cuffs. The angry nineteen-year-old Marine helps give him a bottle of water and a package of MRE pound cake. The prisoner, snuffling his tears away, eyes the offerings suspiciously for a moment, then eats hungrily.

“Just ’cause we’re feeding you doesn’t mean I don’t hate you,” the young Marine says, still trying to keep up his edge of hostility. “I hate you. Do you hear me?”

I study the man closely while he eats. He wears a torn, grimy wife-beater undershirt with his fat belly protruding. I look for bleeding or bayonet marks on his body—to see if Captain America penetrated his skin—but see no evidence of this. The worst signs of mistreatment on his body are gruesome bruises on his arms from the zip cuffs. While eating, the man periodically grabs his shoulders and winces in pain. I ask him how badly he hurts. He speaks English reasonably well.

“I need medicine,” he says, then bursts into tears, sniffling loudly.

“For your wounds?” I ask.

“No, I need medicine for my heart,” he says. “It is bad.”

He tells me his name is Ahmed Al-Khizjrgee. Despite his suffering, the more we talk he gives the impression of being both buffoonish and crafty. With his considerable girth, he brings to mind Sergeant Schultz in the old Hogan’s Heroes series. He tries to convince me that he is not actually a soldier. “It is your imagination that I am a fighter,” he says.

When I point out that he was found with military ID documents, carrying a loaded rifle in an enemy-ambush position, he finally admits, shrugging and stroking his Saddam mustache, “I am a very low soldier.”

Al-Khizjrgee says he is forty-seven years old, with two sons and five daughters. He claims he was originally a shoemaker and joined the Republican Guard late in life. His brother is a cabdriver in Baghdad. He is a peace-loving man. One of the Marines points out that a lot of other Iraqis threw down their weapons and fled. “You were waiting to kill us,” the Marine says. “You didn’t put your weapon down until we made you.”