Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Fick gathers the men for a briefing. “Marines have been here for more than twenty-four hours,” he says. “They’re set up on the other side of this warehouse. They’ve had one killed and one wounded from sniper or mortar fire.” He then adds, “Compared to where we’ve been, I think it’s pretty safe here. We should all get a good rest tonight.”

A few minutes after his pronouncement, the complex is rocked by a powerful explosion. Someone has set off a car bomb outside the main gate. A furious firefight ensues outside, involving Marines from other units. The gun battle is only a couple hundred meters away, but the complex is surrounded by a three-meter-high cement fence so we can’t see anything. We just hear a torrent of shots.

Fick walks up to me and smiles, deeply amused by the crescendo of gunfire. “I was wrong about that good night’s rest,” he says. Moments later, a random bullet falls from the sky and skips onto the concrete, sparking behind Fick’s back. He laughs. “This is definitely not good.”

We both watch a casevac helicopter flying past the complex. Skimming low over rooftops, it suddenly rears up to avoid enemy tracer rounds fired at it from the ground. We watch the life-and-death drama playing out in the sky for several moments. The helicopter escapes. “Not good at all,” Fick says.

But to the men, racking out on pavement—no holes to dig here—surrounded by concrete walls, with all the gunfighting being handled by Marines from other units, this war-torn complex represents five-star luxury. They lie back, eating, talking, smoking. For many, it’s the first time they’ve rested since the mission to Baqubah started seventy-two hours ago.

WHILE MOST GOT TO SLEEP, Espera leans against the wheel of his Humvee parked by Colbert’s, composing a letter to his wife back home in Los Angeles. He uses a red lens flashlight, which emits a dim glow, not easily spotted by potential enemy shooters, to write on a tattered legal pad. Espera’s wife was a sophomore at Loyola Marymount College when they met. At the time, he was a nineteen-year-old laborer with no future. They married shortly after she got pregnant, and much of Espera’s life since has been an effort to better himself in order to meet her high standards. “You see, dog,” he explains, “my wife is smart, but she fucked up big-time when she married me. I was a piece of shit. I remember my wife talking about all the books she’d read, and it hit me there was a whole world I’d missed. Before I met her I used to think, I’ve got a shitload of hand skills—welding, pipefitting—any pussy can read a book. See, I didn’t grow up with no understanding. My mom tried, but my dad is a psycho ex-Marine Vietnam vet.”

Espera uses the term “psycho ex-Marine Vietnam vet” with the utmost respect. He aspires to possess warrior skills equal to those of his father, who won a bronze star in Vietnam, and believes if he’s lucky, he himself will retire one day as a “proud, psycho ex-Marine.” Despite his reverence for his father’s combat valor, the man abandoned him at a young age (after an incident, according to Espera, in which his dad was shot in their home by a jealous girlfriend), and their relationship remains rocky.

Espera bitterly recalls a past incident. Several years ago, when his father tried to patch things up by taking him on a fishing trip, his old man ended up stopping off at porn shop on their way to the lake. While Espera waited outside for his dad to finish his business in the private viewing booths, he got into an altercation with a man he believed was trying to cruise him in the parking lot, and Espera threw a brick through the windshield of the man’s car. “That was our father-son trip,” he says.

Since meeting his wife, Espera has become an avid reader, voraciously consuming everything from military histories to Chinese philosophy to Kurt Vonnegut (his favorite author). In the Middle East, he spends every free moment either reading or writing long letters to his wife, who works at an engineering firm in the San Fernando Valley. Tonight, at the cigarette factory, Espera reads me the beginning of a letter to his wife. “I’ve learned there are two types of people in Iraq,” he reads, “those who are very good and those who are dead. I’m very good. I’ve lost twenty pounds, shaved my head, started smoking, my feet have half rotted off, and I move from filthy hole to filthy hole every night. I see dead children and people everywhere and function in a void of indifference. I keep you and our daughter locked away deep down inside, and I try not to look there.” Espera stops reading and looks up at me. “Do you think that’s too harsh, dog?”

GUN BATTLES RAGE all night long in Baghdad. Marines sleep soundly on either side of me. I watch tracer rounds rising almost gracefully over the city. Some of this is probably just celebratory fire. But every fifteen minutes or so, powerful explosions go off, followed by furious bouts of weapons fire. During the lulls, ambulance sirens wail through the streets.

Occasionally rounds snap into the complex. You hear them zinging, then cracking as they strike nearby buildings.

After one of them hits, I hear a Marine in darkness say, “Is that all you’ve got?”

Ripples of laughter erupt. Between the gun battles and ambulance sirens, we hear singsong Arabic blaring through loudspeakers. It’s either muezzins calling prayers—unlikely after dark—or American psychological operations units trying to calm the people down by playing messages urging them to stop fighting. It’s not doing much good.

At around midnight I decide to use the toilet facilities. About 200 meters from where we sleep, Marines have set up a designated “shitter”—a grenade box perched over the open storm drain that encircles the cigarette factory complex. I creep over to it in the darkness. A solitary Marine is perched on the shitter. I wait a long time. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I finally make out what’s keeping him. His right arm is moving up and down. He’s getting in a late-night combat jack.

I leave him in peace and go over to another section of the storm drain. As I’m about to settle over it, I notice that on this side of the complex the wall separating us from the street is an open-stake fence. Marines had been told the complex was surrounded by a solid concrete wall, but in this corner you can look through to the street and shops just a few meters beyond. I decide to perch down anyway, but as I’m about to do so, a gun battle erupts on the street, maybe ten meters in front of me. Red lines of tracer rounds zoom past, skipping low over the pavement on the street directly before my eyes. You can’t see who’s shooting, how far away they are or what they’re aiming at. I retreat back to the Humvees.

I fall asleep to the sound of pitched street battles in Free Baghdad.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, April 11, at the cigarette factory, Fick gathers his Marines to brief them on their mission in Baghdad. He reads from the official statement: “First Recon will conduct military operations in and around Saddam City to include patrols establishing the American presence, stop the looting, and restore a sense of security in order to allow critical, life-sustaining functions to take place. The intent is to locate key facilities in our zones, such as schools and hospitals, to collect intelligence on Fedayeen and Baath loyalists who are still at large and to prevent lawlessness and to disarm the populace. The end state is a humble, competent force occupying this area, ensuring security and mutual trust between us and the local populace.”

After reading the official statement, Fick adds, “We have rolled through this country fucking things up. Now we have to show these people what we liberated them from.”