Generation Kill (25 page)

The body of this Marine is discovered a week later by other American forces. They find it buried in Ash Shatrah's trash dump.

On the morning of April i, the Marines of First Recon—less Alpha Company, not yet returned from its mission—greet the new day from their wet, muddy holes dug alongside the highway, north of Al Hayy. Few of the troops slept much the night before. After the fatal shooting of the little girl at Charlie Company's roadblock, the Marines fired warning shots at several more vehicles, and also killed the occupant of one car, a heavyset man in a twenty-year-old Buick, which had failed to stop. Later the Marines came under attack from a BM-21, which saturated a nearby field with bombs, though no one was hit. The destruction continues after sunrise.

Below our position on the highway, slow-moving A-10 jets circle the fringes of Al Hayy, belching out machine-gun fire. The airframe of the A-10 is essentially built around a twenty-one-foot-long, seven-barreled Gattling gun—the largest such weapon in the U.S. arsenal. When it fires, it makes a ripping sound like someone is tearing the sky in half. The A-lOs wrap up their performance by dropping four phosphorous bombs on the city. These are chemical-incendiary bombs that burst in the sky, sending long tendrils of white, sparkling flames onto targets below.

The air attacks are part of RCT-l's advance into Al Hayy from the south. Now, in coordination with that effort, First Recon is ordered to move to a canal on the western side of the town and seal off another escape route.

Civilians line up by the side of the road when First Recon's convoy assembles for its departure. The morning's show of American airpower has whipped them into a frenzy. They greet the Marines like visiting celebrities. "Hello, my friend!" some of them shout. "I love you!" It doesn't seem to matter that these young men have just witnessed portions of their city being destroyed. Or maybe this is the very appeal of the Marines. One of the promises made by the Bush administration before the war started was that the Iraqi populace would be pacified by a "shock and awe" air-bombing campaign. The strange thing is, these people appear to be entertained by it. "They think we're cool," says Person, "because we're so good at blowing shit up."

First Recon's convoy pauses on the road by the bridge. Waving and jumping up and down, kids gathered by the tractor-trailer shot up the night before pay no heed to the corpses scattered not far from their feet. Farther on, there's another shot-up car, with a male corpse next to it in the dirt. More kids dance around the carnage, giving thumbs-up to the Americans, shouting, "Bush! Bush! Bush!"

I walk up to Espera's vehicle. He gazes out at the grinning, impoverished children with dirty feet and says, "How these people live makes me want to puke."

Garza, standing at his vehicle's .50-cal, says, "They live just like Mexicans in Mexico." He smiles at the children and throws them some candy. His grandmother is from Mexico, and by the way he is grinning, you get the idea that to him living like Mexicans is not all bad.

Espera turns away in disgust. "That's why I fucking can't stand Mexico. I hate third-world countries."

Despite Espera's harsh critique of the white man—he derides English as the "master's language"—his worldview reflects his self-avowed role as servant in the white man's empire, a job he seems to relish with equal parts pride, cynicism and self-loathing. He says, "The U.S. should just go into all these countries, here and in Africa, and set up an American government and infrastructure—with McDonald's, Starbucks, MTV—then just hand it over. If we have to kill a hundred thousand to save twenty million, it's worth it." He lights a cigar. "Hell, the U.S. did it at home for two

hundred years—killed Indians, used slaves, exploited immigrant labor to build a system that's good for everybody today What does the white man call it? 'Manifest Destiny.' "

Within a half hour, First Recon's convoy is again creeping north on an agricultural back road. Colbert's Humvee passes a tree-shaded hamlet on the left as a series of explosions issues from it. The blasts sounds like mortars being launched, perhaps from inside the village. Ten days ago, being within a couple hundred meters of an enemy position would have sent the entire team into a high state of alert, but this morning nobody says a word. Colbert wearily picks up his radio handset and passes on the location of the suspected enemy position.

Once the initial excitement wears off, invading a country becomes repetitive and stressful, like working on an old industrial assembly line: The task seldom varies, but if your attention wanders, you are liable to get injured or killed. Colbert's team stops in a grassy field a few hundred meters down from the village. There's a canal directly across from his Humvee, with a paved road running along it on the other side.

That canal road, another route out of Al Hayy, is the one the battalion is tasked with observing. Marines are to shoot any armed Iraqis fleeing the road.

Despite the lethal mission, the grassy field we stop in is idyllic. Half of Colbert's team—those who were up all night on watch—take advantage of the tall grass to stretch out and doze. It's a beautiful day, warm and clear, a bit humid. There's a stand of palm trees nearby. Birds fill the air with a loud, musical chattering. Trombley counts off ducks and turtles he observes in the canal with his binoculars. "We're in safari land," Colbert says.

The spell is broken when a Recon unit 500 meters down the line opens up on a truck leaving the city, putting an end to the birdsong in the trees. In the distance, a man jumps out holding an AK. He jogs through a field on the other side of the canal. We watch lazily from the grass as he's gunned down by other Marines.

The birds have resumed their singing when the man shot by the Marines reappears across the canal, limping and weaving like a drunk. Nobody shoots him. He's not holding a gun anymore. The ROE are scrupulously observed. Even so, they cannot mask the sheer brutality of the situation.

A few vehicles down from Colbert's, Team Three monitors the hamlet from where mortars seemed to have been launched when we rolled in. Doc Bryan and the others on the team have been watching the village through binoculars and sniper scopes for about an hour now. They have seen no signs of enemy activity, just a group of civilians—men, women and children—going about their business outside a small cluster of huts. But it's possible that rounds were fired from there. The Fedayeen often drive into a town, launch a few mortars and leave.

In any case, the place is quiet when, at about eleven o'clock in the morning, a lone 1,000-pound bomb dropped from an F-18 blows the hamlet to smithereens. The blast is so powerful that Fick jumps over a berm to avoid flying debris and lands on Encino Man. As the shock wave rolls through Colbert's position, I feel the concussion in my chest as if my internal organs are being picked up and slammed against my rib cage. A perfectly shaped black mushroom cloud rises up where the huts had been.

The only survivor observed by the Marines is a singed dog that runs out of the smoke, making crazy circles—indicative of blown eardrums and a subsequent loss of balance. Team Three's Corporal Michael Stinetorf, twenty-one, who was watching when the bomb hit, is livid: "I just saw seven people vaporized right before my very eyes!" Behind Team Three's position, the men observe the commanders who called in the strike smoking cigars and laughing. One of them gripes, "Those fuckheads are celebrating. They're laughing like it's a game."

But as in other bombing and shooting incidents, Marines don't all agree on what happened. Maj. Shoup, the air officer who helped coordinate the strike, sees it as a good hit. Prior to the bombing, Shoup was communicating with the F-18's backseater, a friend of his whose call sign is "Curly." Before releasing the bomb, Shoup says, "Curly reported seeing puffs of smoke coming from the courtyard of the village. These looked like mortars being launched." Shoup adds, "You want to improve the morale of Marines? They see that thousand-pound bomb go off, it really improves their morale."

By noon RCT-i has completed its thrust through Al Hayy, and several thousand of its Marines now occupy positions north of the highway bridge seized by First Recon. RCT-1 met with only light resistance through the city, and its signal teams tasked with picking up enemy radio transmissions overhear Iraqi commanders telling their men, "Retreat north."

First Recon is moving north as well. The plan is for the battalion to continue pushing ahead of RCT-1 and move into Al Muwaffaqiyah, a town of 5,000 people, about five kilometers north of the field where we spent the morning.

The battalion convoy pulls onto a dirt lane and enters a series of shaded agricultural hamlets. We stop, and the residents pour out from their homes, waving and smiling. To the Marines, the villagers' warm welcome is confusing, given the fact that less than two kilometers down the road their neighbors were just wiped out by a 1,000-pound bomb dropped by an American F-18.

"They're probably just glad we're not blowing up their houses," Person observes.

We see the tiny heads of children poking around the corner of a small adobe hut. Several girls, maybe eight or nine, run toward us.

Ever since the shepherd-shooting incident, Colbert's demeanor has changed toward civilians, especially children. When he sees them now, he's prone to uninhibited displays of sentimentality.

"How adorable," Colbert gushes as the girls laugh playfully a few meters outside his window. "They're so cute."

He orders Trombley to dig out the last remaining humanitarian rations, hoarded by the Marines to supplement their one-MRE-a-day diet. Colbert steps out of the vehicle, holding the fluorescent-yellow humrat packs. Es-pera walks up, hunched over his weapon, scowling from his deep-set eyes, perspiring heavily. "Dog, I don't like being stopped here."

"Poke," Colbert says, calling him by his nickname. "Give these to the kids. I've got your back."

It's not that Colbert is afraid to walk across the yard. For some reason,

he wants Espera to participate in this act of generosity. "Go on. You'll feel good," Colbert urges him.

Espera stalks up to the girls and hands them the packs. They run, squealing, back to the hut to show off their prizes to a woman in black standing outside.

"See, Poke," Colbert says. "They're happy."

In Iraq Espera spends his free moments reminiscing about his wife and eight-year-old daughter back home in Los Angeles. Outside of the Marine Corps, his family is the center of his life. He spent his final night before deploying to the Middle East camping with his daughter in a tree fort he'd built for her in his backyard. But out here, Espera doesn't seem to want to connect with civilians in any way. Most of all, he doesn't even want to look at the children. While Colbert continues to wave at the kids now opening the humrats by the hut, Espera breaks the Kodak moment. "Fuck it, dog. You think handing out some rice and candy bars is gonna change anything? It don't change nothing."

A few hundred meters up from Colbert's team, Meesh meets with villagers, who warn the Marines against trying to enter Al Muwaffaqiyah. They give Meesh detailed information about paramilitary forces that are setting up an ambush on the main bridge leading into the town.

When this report is passed over the radio to Colbert's team, Person speculates that the villagers might be helping because they are genuinely on our side.

"They're not on anybody's side," Colbert says. "These are simple people. They don't care about war. They'd probably tell the Iraqis where we were if they rolled through here. They just want to farm and raise sheep."

Because of the villagers' warnings, First Recon's commander orders the battalion to leave the trail and set up in a wadi—a dry riverbed—four kilometers back from the bridge, where the ambush is supposedly being planned for them.

The Marines dig Ranger graves and set up a defensive perimeter. The battalion orders an artillery strike on the area around the bridge, then a couple of hours before sunset, RCT-1 sends Marines in several light armored vehicles (LAVs) to try to cross the bridge. They are turned back by heavy enemy gunfire. When the LAVs return down the road past the wadi we're in, Gunny Wynn spots one moving slowly with its rear hatch open and a wounded Marine in the back. "Guess the locals were right about that bridge," he says.

The Marines are told to prepare to stay here for the night. Despite the civilian deaths they've witnessed or caused in the past twenty-four hours, most Marines are still on a high from seizing the bridge the night before. Being told they're going to stay in one place for the next twelve hours or so adds to the morale boost.

The men spend the remaining hours of daylight partially stripping out of their MOPPs and washing up. Reyes breaks out an espresso pot, which he fills with Starbucks coffee, luxury items packed in his gear for special occasions. While brewing it, he accosts Pappy, his team leader, who's just finished shaving. "Pappy, you missed a spot."

Reyes takes his razor and cleans up around the edge of Pappy's sideburns. "Sometimes before a big meeting with the boss, I have to clean him up a little," Reyes explains.

"The battalion commander thinks I'm a bum," Pappy says, tilting his head slightly.

"Brother, that's 'cause he don't know what a true warrior be," Reyes says, clowning.

The close relationship shared by Reyes and Pappy is between two men who are complete opposites. While Reyes has so much bubbly effervescence that he manages to be flamboyant even in his MOPP suit, Pappy is a rangy, quintessentially laconic Southern man raised in a churchgoing, Baptist family in Lincolntown, North Carolina, a mountain town of a few thousand souls. Pappy jokingly describes himself as "your normal North Carolina loser," and says he'd barely ever met a Mexican before joining the Corps. Now Reyes is not just one of his best friends but his assistant team leader, his spotter when sniping, his second in battle. Reyes quips that their relationship is like that of "husband and wife." After Reyes finishes shaving him, he nudges Pappy's head to the side for a close inspection and pronounces, "Looking like a warrior, Pappy."

Everyone sits around enjoying the waning moments of daylight, as artillery booms into Al Muwaffaqiyah. One of the senior men in the platoon walks up and announces, "Looks like there's a big meeting going on with the battalion commander. I just hope he isn't coming up with some stupid-ass plan."