Evan Wright - Generation Kill

“If we’d have fought these women instead of men,” another Marine comments, “we might have got our asses kicked.”

The other culture shock for the Marines is that several of the men seem to be hitting on them. One asks Garza to lift up his glasses. When he does so, the man leans forward and says, “You have pretty eyes.”

Another of them asks a Marine if he likes boys or girls. When the Marine says, “Girls,” the man makes a face and says, “Girls. Blah!” Then he points to a young man standing nearby, makes an intercourse gesture with his fingers and says, “You go with my friend, you like.”

The Marines are amused. Soon Marines and Iraqis stand around the Humvees in a big, noisy klatch, laughing, trying to communicate through gestures and fractured English. They trade Marine gear, like their soft-cover hats, which Iraqis seem to universally prize, for Muslim prayer beads, which Marines all covet. After worrying that his Marines were going to indiscriminately shoot civilians, Fick has to wade in and break up the party.

The neighborhood is filled with unexploded munitions—mostly mortars and RPGs, fired by Iraqi forces, that failed to detonate. Fick roams around the area, scrupulously recording the locations of unexploded munitions in a handheld computer for a future removal effort.

Residents assail him with a list of other problems—lack of electricity and running water, broken phone lines, ransacked hospitals, bandits coming in at night and robbing homes, even the dearth of jobs. They expect the Americans, who so handily beat Saddam, will take care of everything. The Marines shake their hands, promise to see them again soon, and drive off, heroes for the day.

They never return to the neighborhood.

THE ORIGINAL PLAN Fick had briefed his men on executing—restoring stability to Baghdad by patrolling specific neighborhoods and rooting out Fedayeen and Baathists—never materializes. Instead, over the next several days, First Recon’s plans shift, as the city plunges further into chaos. The battalion moves from the cigarette factory to a wrecked children’s hospital north of the city to a looted power plant. Each time they change locations, Second Platoon is assigned new sectors to patrol. Within a few days, Fick admits to me the whole endeavor is so haphazard it seems to him at times like a “pointless exercise.”

The basic problem with the American occupation of liberated Baghdad is that the fighting is so heavy at night, most U.S. forces decide not to go out after dark. On their third day in Baghdad, Fick tells his men, “We’re not going out at night. There are too many revenge killings going on in the city. Mostly it’s Shias doing a lot of dirty work, taking out Fedayeen and Sunni Baathists.”

Lt. Col. Ferrando takes this even further, telling his senior men that the Shias are wiping out paramilitary forces through “a sort of an agreement” with the American occupiers. “We have to be careful about nighttime operations,” he tells his men, “because the Shias will be out doing the same things you are. They might want to engage you.”

An internal Marine intelligence report I come across, dated April 12, confidently predicts that the ability of hostile forces in Baghdad “to successfully and continually engage our forces will be complicated by the local Shias’ intolerance for regime paramilitary forces hiding out in their neighborhoods.”

The Americans’ assumption seems to be that all they need to do in Baghdad is sit back and let the Shias clean house. Not only do the Americans tolerate this bloodshed, but at least one Marine commander in an infantry unit working in Saddam City allegedly distributes stocks of confiscated AKs to Shia leaders who promise to use them to rout out the “bad guys.”

FLAWS IN THE American occupation plan become apparent to the Marines in Fick’s platoon when they mount their first patrol into a vast, predominantly Shia slum on the northeast side of Baghdad. On the morning of April 13, Colbert’s Humvee leads the rest of the platoon into the slum known as Seven Castles. We roll in atop a high berm overlooking about a square kilometer of ramshackle, two-story apartment blocks. According to the translator with us, 100,000 people live here. The twenty-two Marines in Second Platoon are the first Americans to enter this neighborhood since Baghdad fell four days ago. The platoon stops in the crest of the berm overlooking the neighborhood.

Within minutes hundreds of children run up and surround the Humvees, chanting, “Bush! Bush! Bush!” They are soon joined by elders from the neighborhood.

The translator helping Fick today is a local Iraqi, Sadi Ali Hossein, a courtly man in his fifties who used to work at the factory the Marines occupy. He showed up yesterday to offer his services to the Americans as a translator. (An exceedingly polite man who wears a rumpled yet dignifying brown suit, Hossein vanishes the day after this patrol; other Iraqis who work at the factory later claim he’s a Baathist agent.) With his help as a translator today, Fick tries to find out what the neighborhood requires. Initially, elders who emerge from the mob tell Fick they need just two things: water and statues of George Bush, which they plan to erect up and down the streets as soon as the Americans help them pump out the sewage currently flowing in them.

Fick turns to the translator with a puzzled expression on his face. Hossein explains, “They think Bush is a ruler like Saddam. They don’t understand the idea of a president who maybe the next year will go out.”

The streets below not only run with sewage but are filled with uncollected garbage. In the midst of this, there are pools of stagnant rainwater. Somehow, locals differentiate between pools of stagnant rainwater and sewage, since they dip buckets into the former and drink it.

They say they haven’t had water or electricity in the neighborhood for a few years now. What the elders urgently need help with is security at night. All of them have the same story: As soon as the sun goes down, bandits roam the streets, robbing people and carrying out home invasions. Residents in the neighborhood have set up barricades on the streets to keep them out. Everyone is armed. The locals claim that since armories and police stations were overrun at the end of the war, an AK now costs about the same as a couple of packs of cigarettes.

“They kill our houses,” one of the men says.

“The Americans have let Ali Baba into Baghdad,” his friend adds.

Another man claims enemies from an outlying neighborhood have set up a mortar position behind a mosque and are randomly shelling them at night.

Even late in the morning, you can still smell cordite in the streets from all the gunfire of the previous night. What’s striking about the residents’ complaints is the fact that Marine commanders have been claiming that all the gunfire at night is a result of Shias removing Fedayeen and other enemies they share with the Americans. But this is a 100-percent Shia neighborhood, and these people are clearly distraught by the violence. They ask Fick if his Marines will stay for the night.

He tells them that is not possible, but that his men will try to bring water some other day.

Hossein tells me he has a grim view of Iraq’s future. “You have taken this country apart,” he says. “And you are not putting it together.” He believes that the violence the Americans are allowing to go on at night will only fuel conflicts between the Sunni and Shia factions. “Letting vigilantes and thieves out at night will not correct the problems of Saddam’s rule,” he says. He gestures toward the crowded slum below, teeming with people. “This is a bomb,” he says. “If it explodes, it will be bigger than the war.”