Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Espera, who’s been listening to Hossein’s analysis, offers his own take on the situation. “Let a motherfucker use an American toilet for a week and they’ll forget all about this Sunni-Shia bullshit.”

Doc Bryan sets up a medical station under some ponchos in front of his Humvee. Mothers bring children sick with giardia caused by drinking dirty water, feverish infants, a girl whose legs were burned when a cooking fire exploded. Men start pushing to the front of the line, complaining of headaches and sleeplessness. Like the guy we met in the first neighborhood, they want Valium. Another family brings a son who can’t walk, hoping that Doc Bryan can cure him like a faith healer. A fight nearly breaks out between a Marine and men in Doc Bryan’s line who are stealing candy the Marines are giving to the sick children. By this time, hundreds of people throng the Marines’ position, just trying to get a look at the Americans.

The Marines are driven out as the pandemonium grows. Farther into the neighborhood, hundreds of people descend on the Humvees. What Marines had initially viewed as jubilation begins to feel increasingly like hysteria. The mob’s incessant chanting starts to drive the men crazy. Everyone who approaches is dirty, scared and desperately in need of help, which the Marines are incapable of giving. They nearly run over children who fall in front of the Humvees while running beside them. At one stop, Fick and I get out and see kids rocking on an unexploded artillery shell, gleefully bouncing on it like a hobbyhorse. “This is madness,” Fick concludes.

As the Marines gather around their concrete sleeping area that night, some are disgusted by the behavior of the Iraqis. “What American man,” Doc Bryan asks, “would cut in a line of children with life-threatening illnesses to try to get Valium for a headache, then steal their fucking candy? I have no respect for these men.”

“Bro, it’s not that bad here,” a Marine says in the darkness. “Just think if someone invaded Los Angeles. Americans would fucking riot if their cable went out for three days. These people don’t have water, electricity, hospitals, sewers, nothing, and they’re waving and smiling.”

“They won’t be for long,” Espera says. “Iraqis have a short attention span just like the American public. As soon as they stop celebrating that we got rid of Saddam and we cut ’em off at the titty—they figure out we’re not going to be pouring money into this motherfucker, giving everyone a new car and a color TV—they’ll turn on us.”

IN AN EFFORT to reach out to community leaders, Bravo Company sends Meesh to meet with the imam at a Shia mosque during a patrol. This neighborhood in north Baghdad is marginally better off than others. There’s no sewage in the streets, and the low apartment blocks and shops near the mosque look tidy. The mosque itself is a squat, stucco building, with a small dome and a minaret not much bigger than a telephone pole. There are loudspeakers hanging from it for the prayers broadcast through the neighborhood.

Meesh enters the mosque early in the afternoon. Several young men who serve as the imam’s bodyguards train their AKs on him the moment Meesh sets foot in the gloomy anteroom. After twenty minutes of negotiating with these characters, one of them leads him into the imam’s office in the back.

The imam, a man in his early fifties who studied in Iran, looks to Meesh almost exactly like a younger version of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, with a long, pointed white beard and dark-black eyebrows. Though Meesh is a Sunni—as well as a beer-drinking dope smoker—he and the imam kneel and perform a prayer together. Then, according to Meesh, the imam tells him he welcomes the Americans, so long as they don’t expose the Iraqi people to corrupting Western influences. Meesh tells the imam the Marines will try to bring some water the next day to distribute from the grounds of the mosque. He asks for the imam’s help in controlling the people who invariably mob the Marines’ vehicles. According to Meesh, the imam tells him, “If they come too close, the Americans should hit them. These people are used to being pushed around. You have to threaten them.”

Within hours of Meesh’s meeting, the loudspeakers from the minaret blare a message from the imam: “It is against your religion to harm Americans.” Then the imam’s guards go through the neighborhood, painting messages in red on the stucco walls lining the streets. They say, “An AK used after sunset is a tool of damnation.” At least this is what Meesh claims happens as result of his meeting with the imam.

The next morning Second Platoon returns to the mosque, escorting a military tanker truck to distribute 2,000 gallons of fresh water to the residents. The Marines park the truck beside the mosque in an open dirt lot and wait beneath overcast skies. Unlike the day before, when crowds had turned out cheering the Marines, this morning there’s almost no one on the streets. The few adults and children who are out hang back, staring vacantly. The Marines stand around the truck, holding a hose up, beckoning people to come and get the free water, but in twenty minutes only two or three venture forward. “All week people have been asking for water,” Fick says. “We finally bring it to them, and nobody fucking wants it.”

Though Meesh vows to me that the messages blared from the mosque and painted on the walls by the imam’s followers were all pro-American, something has dramatically changed in the neighborhood. The people seem almost frightened of the Marines. I press Meesh about this. “Are you sure the imam said he wanted the Americans to come here?” I ask him.

“Dude, the meeting was totally cool,” Meesh assures me.

Whatever really transpired with the imam, only Meesh knows. As has been the case since the invasion began, First Recon Battalion is almost entirely dependent on Meesh for all its Arabic intelligence gathering. It’s not that Meesh is a bad guy, but it’s astonishing to me that in an elite unit of American forces, among the first to occupy the capital city of a conquered country, there’s no one within the command structure who fluently speaks the local language.

ONE WEEK after arriving in Baghdad, Second Platoon finally receives orders for a night mission. There’s a park in Baghdad that Fedayeen are suspected of using as an operations base. Second Platoon is ordered to set up observation posts near the park overnight, then move in and sweep it for signs of hostile forces in the morning.

An hour before sunset, the platoon moves into position on a high berm near the park. When the sun drops, the vast city, without any electricity, goes nearly black. Then tracers light up the sky from the gun battles raging on all sides of the berm we occupy.

What makes the spectacle of these nocturnal gun battles even stranger is the fact that a kilometer to our east, a freeway is filled with cars streaming into Baghdad. We watch the fire course over the string of headlights.

Fick and I are taking this all in when he receives a call on his radio from his commander, Encino Man, who suggests he send foot patrols out tonight into the neighborhoods below. Encino Man tells him that Lt. Col. Ferrando has decided, after a week of keeping the men off the streets at night, that it’s time for the Marines to become “more aggressive.”

Fick resists the order, telling Encino Man he’s going to keep his men in a defensive position on the berm and not move until dawn. He sits down next to Gunny Wynn and vents. “Look at this,” he says, gesturing to the hundreds of tracer lines zipping through the sky. “They want me to be ‘more aggressive,’ to send the men into this? For what? Just to be out there waving the American flag? So I can come home with nineteen men instead of twenty?”