Generation Kill (29 page)

Sometime after the schoolchildren of Al Muwaffaqiyah celebrated Valentine's Day, a battalion-size force of Republican Guard soldiers moved into the town and turned their school into a military headquarters. They shoved all the desks into one room and filled the others with military supplies. Marines find maps, uniforms, gas masks, as well as recently cooked, partially consumed bowls of rice, peanut shells and chicken bones. Apparently, the Republican Guard soldiers stayed back here eating peanuts and chicken while the Syrian jihadis were sent out to the bridge to delay the Americans.

The Marines also find several classrooms piled to the ceilings with weapons and munitions, including 600 mortar shells, 10,000 AK rounds and a couple dozen launchers and rifles. They rig the weapons caches with explosives and prepare to blow the school complex sky-high.

Watching the town's only school blow up—which we see as a funnel of black smoke jetting up from the western side of the town—comes as a relief to Colbert's team. Its destruction means they can finally roll north and get out of Al Muwaffaqiyah. The atmosphere in the town has changed markedly. Locals have warned Marines in other teams that foreign jihadis have infiltrated the area and plan to attack the Americans with suicide car bombs. The civilians who'd come out earlier to greet the Marines have fled.

Colbert's team is ordered to move to the front of the battalion and set up a roadblock at the north end of the town. We stop near a large industrial complex that looks like a cement factory or machine shop. There are some houses beyond that, then open fields.

Espera pulls his vehicle up beside Colbert's on the road. The two of them orient their guns north. With the battalion and all of RCT-1 behind them, their two Humvees constitute the northernmost Marine unit in central Iraq. Their job is to turn away any cars that come down the road from the north. It's a little before six in the evening. There are tall, leafy trees to our left casting blue shadows over us in the fading daylight.

In the past few hours Colbert and other team leaders in the battalion have developed what they hope will be less lethal means of stopping cars at roadblocks. Instead of firing warning shots from machine guns, they will launch colored smoke grenades. The hope is that drivers will be more likely to heed billowing clouds of colored smoke blocking the road than warning shots fired over their vehicles. Fick and other commanders had initially opposed this kinder, gentler method to halting traffic, with Fick arguing, "Marines are supposed to be an aggressive force. If our stance is less aggressive, we're more likely to be challenged by bad guys." But the enlisted Marines, tired of shooting unarmed civilians, fought to be allowed to use smoke grenades.

Now, when the first vehicle, a white pickup truck, approaches, Colbert strides into the road, ahead of the Humvees.

"Do not engage this truck!" he shouts to his men.

He fires a smoke grenade from his 203 launcher. It makes a plunking sound almost like a champagne cork popping, then bounces into the road, spewing green smoke. Three or four hundred meters down the road, the white pickup truck turns around and drives off.

A couple of cars arrive. The second is a taxi. It speeds up after the launching of the smoke grenade. The Marines by the Humvees hunch lower on their weapons, getting ready to fire.

"Do not engage!" Colbert shouts. He fires another smoke grenade.

The taxi drives through the smoke; then moments before the Marines are about to light it up, the driver cuts a tight, wheel-squealing U-turn. Even on good days, Arab motorists tend to drive like kamikaze pilots. It's not easy for a Marine to differentiate between run-of-the-mill reckless Arab driving and erratic behavior that would indicate a suicide bomber.

The Marines discuss the taxi—debating whether the driver's nearly fatal game of chicken with them was a result of his poor judgment, or the possibility that he's a Fedayeen scouting Marine lines. Their conversation distracts them from the next car's approach.

The blue sedan seems to appear out of nowhere. Perhaps it came from a side street behind the cement factory. In any case, Colbert doesn't step into the road to launch his first smoke grenade until the car is less than 200 meters away.

"Do not engage!" Colbert repeats.

As soon as Colbert fires his smoke grenade, a Marine SAW roars to life, spitting out a short burst. The car, maybe a hundred meters away now, rolls to a stop, green smoke blowing past it. The windshield is frosted. Two men in white robes jump out. One, who looks to be a young man in his early twenties, has blood streaming from his shoulder. The men run hastily toward a mud-brick house by the road and disappear behind a wall.

Hasser stands to the left of Colbert, with the butt of his SAW pressed to his shoulder. It was his gun that fired.

"That was a wounding shot, motherfucker!" Colbert yells, uncharacteristically pissed. "What the fuck were you doing? I said, 'Do not en-gage'!"

Hasser remains frozen on his SAW.

Colbert walks around to him. He lowers his voice. "Walt, you okay?"

Hasser lowers his SAW and stares at the car.

Colbert squeezes his arm. "Walt, talk to me."

"The car kept coming," Hasser says, mechanically.

The smoke disperses in the breeze, and Marines make out the outline of a man's head behind the shattered windshield. He is sitting upright, as if still holding the wheel. Passenger doors on the right side of the car hang open. The driver seems to be alive, rolling his head from side to side.

None of the Marines say anything for a moment. Colbert looks at the car, then down. He breathes deeply, as if struggling to put his emotions aside. Having watched him cry a few days ago after the shooting of the shepherd, I suspect it's not always easy being the Iceman.

"It's okay, Walt," Colbert says. "You were doing your job."

Since the Marines on these vehicles are at this moment in history the foremost units of the American invasion here, there's a burden that comes with that. They're not allowed to simply run up to the car and see if they can help the guy. Colbert radios Fick, who's a couple hundred meters behind, and tells him there's a man shot in the car ahead. He requests permission to go up to it and render aid to the driver.

"Negative," Fick tells him. The battalion has ordered the platoon to advance a few hundred meters past the car.

We drive toward the blue car. The shot man behind the wheel appears to be in his forties. He sits upright with good posture, his hands on his lap as if they slipped off the steering wheel. He wears a white shirt. His right eye stares ahead; his left eye is covered in blood dripping down from the crown of his head. He's alive. When we pass within about a meter of him, we hear his rapid breathing—a shushing sound.

Due to a temporary rotation in the team, Trombley is on the Mark-19 and Hasser is in the seat to the left of me. He rides closest to the man he just shot, and stares ahead, refusing to look as we drive past, listening to his dying gasps: Shhhh! Shhhh! Shhhh!

Nobody in the Humvee says anything.

As Team Three rolls behind us, Doc Bryan raises his M-4 and tries to get a bead on the man. Without telling anyone else, he has decided to shoot the man in the head and give him a mercy execution. But his Humvee bounces, and he misses his chance for a clean shot.

We stop several hundred meters up the road and get out. There are some huts ahead. Fick and I see a pregnant woman walking toward them. Fick gets a bright yellow pack of humrats from his truck to give to her, and we walk toward her, with Fick holding the humrats high. The woman sees us and veers toward the huts. We walk faster. She starts running, and we do too. Then Fick stops abruptly. "This is ridiculous," he says. "We're terrorizing a pregnant woman."

We watch her flee. "Given the way things are going," Fick says, "it's probably wise of her to run when she sees Americans."

About twenty minutes later, First Recon's headquarters units roll past the blue car with the wounded man it. Navy Lieutenant Aubin, the battalion physician, insists on stopping so he can examine the driver.

What Aubin finds is yet another testament to the skills of the Marine Corps rifleman. Of the three rounds Hasser fired, one hit an occupant in the shoulder (whom we saw jump out), one skimmed into the hood and the third entered the driver's left eye. The 5.56mm round then did a ninety-degree turn through the man's brain and went straight up, exiting through the top of his skull. Basically, the man has been lobotomized. Aubin pokes and pinches the skin on the man's upper body and finds he is totally unresponsive, a vegetable. But no arteries were hit. The light, venous bleeding from the entry and exit wounds is not enough to kill him. His breathing and heart rate are good.

Aubin concludes that in a hospital a man with these wounds could live indefinitely. Here, without care, he will die of starvation, infection or swelling of the brain. Unlike Doc Bryan, who was ready to shoot the man, acting as a vigilante mercy killer falls outside of everything Aubin believes in as a doctor. He administers morphine and Valium to quell any pain in case the victim comes to (which is medically possible), but not enough to kill him. He is torn by the dilemma posed by this patient. Aubin later tells me, "In the States we don't practice euthanasia. If we remove someone from life support, I don't make that decision. We have committees of doctors, lawyers, family members, clergy who all debate it."

Aubin knows that to leave the man is a death sentence, but he decides not to call in a medevac. Marine resources are stretched thin. He leaves the man in the care of medical personnel with RCT-1, who will be holding the town. The wounded man dies, unclaimed by anyone, a day later. Marines don't know anything about him other than that he was unarmed, behind the wheel of a blue car, when he drove onto a narrow, blacktop road where an American shot him in the eye.

Walter Hasser, who shot the man in the blue car, is one of the most well-liked Marines in the platoon. He's twenty-three years old, six feet two inches tall and knows the lyrics to just about every hit country song recorded between 1960 and 1974. Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash are his heroes. He has a beautiful country singing voice, and in his case Colbert makes a special exemption to his "no country music" rule. Following the ZSU AAA gun attack south of Al Hayy during which Hasser had climbed into the turret under fire and had taken out the enemy gun position, the team had seized the bridge north of the town to the accompaniment of his singing Glen Campbell's "Rhinestone Cowboy."

Raised in a rented farmhouse in Louden County, Virginia, by a single mom who, he says, "didn't have no college," Hasser grew up working on farms and hunting. He seems like your basic country good old boy, but what he enjoys most about the Marine Corps is both the brotherhood and the diversity. "Back home you pal around with your own kind," he says. "I never thought my best friends would be Mexicans. Here, we're brothers, and we all look out for each other. That's the best part of being in a war. We all get to be together."

Earlier in the morning, when everyone had been complaining about the sorry state of MREs, Hasser had explained his basic philosophy of life. "Every chance you have, you should try to hook people up. People in the MRE factory don't understand that. Hell, if I worked there I'd be sneaking in extra pound cakes, jalapeno cheese packs, Tootsie Rolls. You gotta throw things to people when you can."

Now, driving out of Al Muwaffaqiyah, with the sound of that dying man's gasping still fresh in everyone's mind, Hasser stares out the window into a blazing sunset. The SAW is loose on his lap. His wrists are draped across the top of the weapon, but his fingers aren't touching it, almost like he's ignoring it.

"How are you doing?" I ask him.

"Just taking it all in," he says.

The objective tonight on April 2 is to reach the outskirts of Al Kut, the Marine Corps' goal in central Iraq. It's about thirty kilometers north of Al Muwaffaqiyah. Before the Marines set out from Al Muwaffaqiyah, several old men on the road stopped Second Platoon, offering detailed information about ambushes ahead. Fick, Meesh and I talked to them for several minutes. One of the old men caught my eye. He pointed up the road and dragged his finger across his neck, making a throat-slashing gesture to indicate danger ahead.

Now, as we drive up the route in convoy with the battalion, Colbert picks up reports of sporadic gunfire from the radio. "We're expecting enemy contact at the intersection two clicks up the road," he says. "Person, get your NVGs out. This could go past dark."

"One thing about the Marines," Person says. "We always know how to wrap up a day."

"Small-arms fire to the rear," Colbert says.

"Yeah. Game on!" Trombley says excitedly from the turret. It's his first time on the Mark-19, and he's eager for the chance to blow stuff up with it.

"Stay frosty, Walt," Colbert says.

"Yeah," Hasser says.

I look over at him next to me. He's still not touching the SAW. He's just listlessly staring out the window. I'm glad of his humanity. The fact that

he's clearly so broken up by his shooting of that civilian just confirms what a decent guy he is. But I wish he wasn't showing it right now.

We hit the intersection—the suspected ambush point, with berms on the left, a stand of palm trees on the right. No shots are fired.

"Stop!" Colbert says.

We halt between the trees and the berms in the suspected kill zone.

"What are we doing?" Person asks, his voice betraying a hint of nervousness.

"They want us to stop," Colbert says. "I guess we're trying to flush 'em out."

We sit for several minutes, trying to bait the ambushers into shooting. Nobody says anything. It's that leaden silence of old action movies where all you hear are heartbeats and watches ticking (though no one's actually wearing a mechanical watch).

"Move up fifty meters," Colbert says.

Again we sit in silence, broken abruptly when Trombley cuts a loud fart.

Everyone jumps. Nerves are so wired in the vehicle, some mistook it for the blast of a distant mortar.

"Jesus!" Colbert says.

"Sorry," Trombley apologizes.

We creep forward. AKs crackle in the distance. We pick up speed, clearing the suspected ambush spot. We pass two black dogs humping in the ditch by the road. Then a billboard of a grinning Saddam.

"Hey, anybody got a Sharpie?" Person asks. "We should do some bathroom art on him, like draw a cock and balls going into his mouth. I'm serious, let's stop and do it." He starts laughing.

"Shush, Person. Take a deep breath," Colbert says indulgently, like a kindergarten teacher with an unruly child.

"I can't help it," Person says. "I'm running solely on Ripped Fuel tonight."

The sun is now a red disk perched just atop the horizon to the left. Several kilometers ahead, a massive fireball erupts, sending a mushroom cloud into the sky. The radios come to life, everyone debating what it is.

We stop, and for several moments the distant fireball burns more brightly than the setting sun. Now the feeling of being on a 1950s sci-fi movie is complete. Surrounded by the red, bermed fields, strange huts and now what look like two suns setting simultaneously, it's like we've arrived on the alien planet.

A few minutes after the double sunset, the Marines are ordered to be on the lookout for a downed American aircraft. Later, the BBC reports that a Navy F-18 was shot down, leading Fick and others to surmise that the brilliant fireball we'd seen had been that jet crash.

We drive for several hours in the darkness, dogged by sporadic mortar fire and enemy forces that keep lighting up the sky with illume flares.

Around midnight the battalion stops a few kilometers south of Al Kut and digs in. The canal is a couple hundred meters to our right, and the ground here is saturated. Boots sink ankle-deep in the mud. It takes twenty minutes just to find a spot dry enough to dig a hole. With enemy mortars and illume flares still going off nearby, Colbert's team excavates a massive hole, big enough for everyone, in the event of a bad artillery attack.

Machine-gun fire across the canal is heavy at times. RCT-1 is on the other side, and they are moving into position to assault into Al Kut. Low-flying American jets crisscross overhead. Bombs and artillery rumble.

I sit in the mud, eating an MRE ration I saved for dinner. After squeezing the contents from the foil pack into my mouth, I'm too tired to discern what it tastes like—a spaghetti dinner, chicken breast or chunked beefsteak. There's not enough light to read the packaging and figure out what these chunks of food in my mouth are. It's the first time existing in total darkness has bothered me.

The dark and sleepless conditions under which Marines operate have already caused several fatalities. Two men sleeping near their Humvee in another unit were crushed to death by a tracked vehicle, and a third was paralyzed. An infantry Marine crawled into his hole after watch and fatally shot himself in his sleep with his SAW.

Nearby in the darkness, Marines in Bravo pass around these stories.

Some of them now bring up another nighttime activity: "combat jacks." They're trying to tally who's masturbated the most since the invasion started. During long, fatiguing hours of watch, some Marines beat off just to keep awake and pass the time. "Dog, after that first ambush," one of the men says, referring to a fevered night of combat jacks after the attack at Al Gharraf, "I get into my hole, and I had to go three times, bam, bam, bam! Couldn't stop. Hadn't happened like that since I was seventeen. I thought something was broken."

On this night, April 2, five kilometers south of Al Kut, First Recon is alone on the western side of the canal. Given the fact that Al Kut is home to thousands of Republican Guard forces and is now being bombed from above by American aircraft while being attacked on the ground by RCT-1 (as well as other Marine units from the west), commanders in First Recon are concerned that enemy forces, fleeing the city, might overrun its encampment on this night of chaos. The battalion pushes foot patrols out beyond the perimeter in order to set up observation posts and watch for approaching Iraqis. Kocher, who spent the previous night reconnoitering the ruins of Al Muwaffaqiyah, now leads a patrol out.

The moon hasn't risen yet. Creeping through a field in near-absolute darkness, Kocher and two of his men spot an Arab through their NVGs about twenty meters away. The Arab, wearing a robe, is sitting cross-legged in a low spot between some broad, undulating berms.

Kocher's first impulse is to shoot him. He's upset about Pappy being hit the night before and wouldn't mind exacting some revenge. But as he later explains, Kocher doesn't shoot for fear of giving away his position. Iraqi soldiers are still launching illume flares less than a kilometer away, presumably looking for Americans.

With two of his men covering him, Kocher approaches the lone Arab, confident the guy can't see him in the darkness. Speaking rudimentary Arabic, learned from his Marine cheat sheets, Kocher tells him to put his hands up and stand.

The Arab complies. As he rises, an AK slides out from under his robes and clatters to the ground. Kocher draws nearer. Then he hears footsteps, someone shouting "Ahhhl"

Captain America runs past, making a bayonet charge for the Arab. He slams him in the chest, and the two of them tumble over with a meaty thud.

"I fucked that guy up!" Captain America shouts, rising triumphantly.

Kocher is pissed. It's not just that his commanding officer is running around in the darkness, screaming and bayoneting a prisoner who had been completely under control. Now Kocher figures he's going to have to get out his medical kit and render aid to the Arab if he's not dead.

He rolls the Arab, zip-cuffing his hands behind his back, then spins him around to examine his chest for wounds. He's unharmed. The Arab wears a chest rig beneath his robe, loaded with ammo. Captain America's bayonet smashed apart a rifle magazine in the Arab's vest but failed to penetrate his chest.

"Nice going, Captain," Kocher says. "You missed him."

"That guy was resisting," Captain America says. "I just wanted to jab him."

Kocher strips off the Arab's ammo vest and pulls him to his feet. Captain America curses and tries kicking the Arab in the groin. Instead, he hits Kocher in the stomach.

"Fuck! Did I hit you?"

"Yeah," Kocher says. He doesn't say anything else. Kocher finds that speaking with his commander just adds to the aggravation. Following this night's latest escapade, some of Kocher's men begin fantasizing about capping their captain, talking about it openly among themselves. Kocher doesn't. He tries to maintain a balanced view of his commander. "He's got personal problems," he says. "I've got no problem with being aggressive, but he's bloodthirsty toward the wrong people, unarmed people."

The bombardment of Al Kut continues into the morning of April 3. RCT-l's advance into the city is well under way on the other side of the canal. We hear Amtracs clanking past, machine guns, explosions. Some are less than a kilometer away, but from where we're sitting the nearby action has a remote feel, similar to being in a cheap multiplex where you hear sounds of a war movie seeping out from the next theater. First Recon is sitting out this assault.

Within a couple of hours, the Marines in RCT-1 blast their way to the main bridge over the Tigris. But as soon as they reach it, they will pull back and depart the city. Their mission and First Recon's in Central Iraq will be over. After having sent them all the way here, Maj. Gen. Mattis has decided not to seize Al Kut. First Recon and RCT-1 are ordered to turn around and leave.

First Recon's entire campaign since leaving Nasiriyah has been part of a feint—a false movement designed to convince the Iraqi leadership that the main U.S. invasion would be coming through Al Kut. The strategy has been a success. The Iraqis left a key division and other forces in and around Al Kut in order to fight off a Marine advance that now has been abruptly called off. With so many Iraqi forces tied down near Al Kut, Baghdad has been left relatively undefended for the combined Army and Marine assault now gathering on the outskirts.

Mattis, a key architect of this grand diversion, later boasts to me, "The Iraqis expected us to go all the way through Al Kut—that the 'dumb Marines' would fight their way through the worst terrain to Baghdad." While the plan worked brilliantly, Mattis adds, with characteristic modesty, "I'm not a great general. I was just up against other generals who don't know shit."

The Marines have known nothing about this feint strategy until the past couple of days, when Fick began guessing that this was his platoon's purpose, based on hints he'd received from other officers.

Now, midmorning on April 3, while RCT-1 is still pulling back from its diversion into Al Kut, Fick gathers the men by Colbert's vehicle in their muddy encampment and explains what's going on. "By coming up here, we've tied down two Republican Guard divisions," he says. The swagger he had up on the bridge outside of Al Hayy is back. "And for most of the way we were out in front, rolling into these villages and towns ahead of every

other American. Often, it was you guys in this platoon at the absolute tippity-tip of the spear. Not to rest on our laurels now, but every one of you should be proud."

"But what about Al Kut?" Garza asks. "After coming all this way we ain't going to Al Kut?"

"No," Fick says. "The feint's over. We're pulling out of here later today."

Garza, sitting by a hole, etching lines in the mud with his boot heels, digests the news. He twists his head up, annoyed. "We just spent a week getting shot at, bombing everything, all based on a fucking wrong turn?"