Evan Wright - Generation Kill

“It is not true,” Al-Khizjrgee protests. “I am afraid. If I put my gun down, the police come and beat us.” He says he and the other men in his unit received no outside information on the state of the world. They could be shot for listening to a radio.

I ask him how he thinks the war is going. He tells me his superiors told him and the other men in the unit that Iraq was winning the war. He says he and the other men holed up in Baqubah had their doubts but kept these to themselves. “Everybody under Saddam is silent,” he says. “If Saddam say we have war with America, we say, ‘Good!’ If he say no war, we say, ‘Good!’”

The Marines, who were so angry with the man a moment ago, have now warmed up to him. One of them says, “We can’t put our weapons down, either.”

“He was just doing his job,” another Marine adds, now sounding almost impressed with the guy’s tenacity in hanging on to his rifle.

The Marines smile at him and feed him more pound cake.

Al-Khizjrgee fails to catch on to the newly festive atmosphere. He leans forward and confides in me that he is desperately afraid. “How can I go home now? What if my sergeant finds me? He will know I did not fight.”

About half an hour earlier, Colbert tuned in the BBC and picked up the report that Baghdad had fallen. I pass this information on to Al-Khizjrgee. “There is no Saddam. There is no Iraqi army. You have no sergeant anymore.”

Al-Khizjrgee stares in disbelief. “It’s true,” I tell him.

He begins to cry again, only now he smiles. “I am so happy!”

The news is only getting better for Al-Khizjrgee.

Fick walks up and tells Al-Khizjrgee he will be driving him to a detention facility near Baghdad tonight.

“For free?” he asks, as if unable to believe his good fortune.

THE BATTALION’S final enemy contact outside Baqubah occurs an hour before sunset, when the men in Alpha’s Second Platoon spot a T-72 tank near their roadblock south of the city. T-72s are the most formidable tanks in the Iraqi arsenal. As soon as the Marines call it in to their platoon commander, he orders them to attack it with an AT-4 missile. Ordinarily, Marines would call in an air strike on a T-72, but no aircraft are immediately available, and Second Platoon’s commander wants this tank stopped now. One T-72 could wreak havoc on the whole battalion.

Burris, whose team led the way through the ambush at Al Gharraf, volunteers to lead the AT-4 strike on the tank. It’s potentially a highly risky mission. The shoulder-fired AT-4 missile isn’t really designed to defeat a T-72. At best, Marines believe an AT-4 can score a “mobility kill”—blowing a track off the tank—and to do this Burris will have to get in close to the tank, within 150 meters.

Nearly every engagement Burris has been in since the invasion started has somehow turned into his own personal, comic mishap. From the time he tripped on his rifle stock at Nasiriyah, giving himself a shiner, to the ambush at Al Gharraf, where he was sprayed from head to toe with human excrement when his Humvee plowed into the town’s open sewer puddle, Burris has concluded almost every firefight he’s been in knocked on his ass, laughing.

Now he approaches the T-72, with several Marines and his platoon commander by his side. They reach the stepping-off point, where Burris will continue on alone to get in close to his target, and his platoon commander, Capt. Kintzley, slaps him on the back. “Burris,” he says. “Don’t miss.”

Burris ducks down, runs across the road, dives into a berm and creeps up behind the tank. He gets even closer to the monster T-72 than his superiors had ordered him to go, crawling to within 125 meters. He sees an auxiliary fuel pod on the back of the tank and aims for it, figuring it will multiply the effects of his relatively puny AT-4 missile. He fires the missile.

Initially, Burris sees only a small flash where the missile hits. He’s worried that perhaps the missile glanced off the armor (believed to be nearly invincible on the T-72) and berates himself for not aiming at the track. An instant later, it feels like a giant fist comes out of the sky and pounds Burris on his back, slamming him to the ground. The tank erupts in a massive explosion.

Down the road, his platoon commander can actually see individual pieces of the tank—flywheels and gears—flying overhead. Several hundred kilometers farther back from the blast, twenty-three-year-old Corporal Steven Kelsaw, standing by a headquarters vehicle, is struck in the helmet by a piece of the tank and knocked down. It feels to him like someone just hurled a bowling ball at him. His Kevlar helmet is partially shattered, but all he suffers is a bad headache.

Burris’s hit on the T-72 produces one of the biggest explosions many Marines have seen in the entire war.

When Burris walks back to rejoin his team, Capt. Patterson, his company commander, walks up to congratulate him. Patterson wants to commend “this kid”—as he refers to each of his Marines—for going out there all by himself against the T-72. But as soon as he sees Burris’s dirty face and his dazed, somewhat confused-looking smile, Patterson is seized by a fit of laughter. Finally, he manages to say, “Burris, I was worried sick about you.”

“Sir, what’s so funny?” Burris asks, still shaken up, his ears still ringing from the explosion.

“Nothing, Burris,” Patterson says. “Good job.”

AFTER THE DESTRUCTION of the T-72 tank, ten Humvees from Charlie Company race into Baqubah, with A-10s flying overhead as escorts. The roads are blockaded with rubble and concertina wire. Abandoned Iraqi military positions are everywhere. The Humvees snake through the barricades and make their way toward two military command centers—headquarters for a Republican Guard division and a brigade. The division headquarters is in ruins from repeated American airstrikes. The brigade headquarters is still partially standing. A team of Recon Marines speeds up to the building. They jump out, run inside and steal the Iraqi “colors”—the enemy’s flag.

The Marines have reclaimed, in part, their honor, sullied after the loss of their own colors in their truck burned outside Ar Rifa. The Americans hightail it out of the city, and the battalion prepares to drive back to Baghdad. With hundreds of Iraqis killed or wounded during the operation, the most serious injury sustained among Marines in First Recon is Kelsaw’s headache. For the Marines it feels as if the entire mission to Baqubah has ended as an extremely bloody game of capture the flag. Weeks later, Baqubah emerges as a key center in the “Sunni Triangle” insurgency against the American occupation. But for the Marines pulling out, the mission stands as one of their more clear-cut triumphs. They seized forty kilometers of highway, probably killed more soldiers than civilians and captured the enemy’s flag.

We drive back to Baghdad in darkness. Person, at the wheel, navigating with NVGs on his helmet, begins to sing, “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.”

“Hold on, buddy!” Colbert shouts. “No goddamn country music.”

“That’s not country,” Person insists. “It’s a cowboy song.”

“I hate to break it to you, but there are no cowboys,” Colbert says.

“Yeah, there are,” Person says, his voice simultaneously flat yet defiant. “There’s tons of cowboys.”

“A cowboy isn’t some dipshit with a ten-gallon hat and a dinner plate on his belt,” Colbert says. “There haven’t been any real cowboys for almost a hundred years. Horse raising is a science now. Cattle raising is an industry.”

A report comes over the radio of enemy fire on the column. “Hold on,” Colbert says, reluctantly putting the argument aside. “I’d like to hear about this firefight.”