Generation Kill - Evan Wright [101]
Colbert’s team enters the first group of homes. Earthen walls are adorned with bright pictures of flowers and sunsets, artwork clipped from magazines. The day has grown hot—hitting the mid-nineties outside—but the homes are naturally cool. Trombley is impressed. “It’d be pretty neat to live in one of these,” he says.
A bedroom in one hut stuns the Marines. Against the bare walls, there’s a CD player, a TV with DVD, mirrors, a painting of a horse on velvet, electric lamps and what looks to be a California King bed—chrome and black-lacquered frame with leopard-print covers. It looks like they’ve stumbled into the crib of an East L.A. drug lord.
Nearby, there’s a locked windowless hut. Marines try to kick the door in, but it’s padlocked with a chain. They chop it off with bolt cutters and find the village stash: two AK rifles, piles of weed and some bags with white powder that looks like either cocaine or heroin. Colbert confiscates the rifles but leaves the drugs. “We’re not here to fuck with their livelihoods,” he says.
Mortars continue to fall for the next hour while we slowly bump up the trail. With the rising heat, and Marines in their MOPP suits bounding across fields, scrambling up walls and kicking in doors, everyone is pouring sweat. Tiny gnats swarm everywhere. They seem to have miniature teeth. Black clouds of them descend, then you feel your neck and eyelids and ears being chewed on.
Colbert slumps against the Humvee, taking a rest, his face throbbing red. “I almost went down in that last village. I’m at my limit.” He sucks water from a drinking tube attached to a CamelBak pouch and starts to sing, “I’m Sailing Away!” He stops. “This is dangerous as hell,” he says.
There’s a shot ahead. Person picks up a report from the radio. “A dog tried to attack a friendly, so he shot him.”
“That was needless,” Colbert says.
Two mortars explode somewhere.
Captain America struts past with his bayonet out. “Charlie’s in the trees!” Colbert calls after him, quoting a line from Platoon.
BY THREE-THIRTY in the afternoon we have reached a bend in the canal, approximately ten kilometers south of the Marines’ objective, Al Hayy. There is a mosque ahead. A few moments earlier, Cobras shot up the fields beside it, pulverizing suspected ambush points, but all is quiet now. The battalion halts while officers plan the final push to Al Hayy.
Everyone remains sitting inside Colbert’s Humvee, waiting. After six hours of searching for an elusive enemy on this back trail, the men on Colbert’s team are worn down, their nerves frayed. The chatter and happy pro-fanities and inside jokes have ceased. Even Person just stares vacantly out the window.
The silence is broken by an unusual new sound, a series of high-pitched zings. Orange-red tracers streak through the air and slam into the berms in front of and behind the Humvee. Large-caliber rounds are being fired at us from across the canal. You can actually see some bounce and tumble after they strike the ground just a few meters from us. For a moment, we simply watch, mesmerized.
“Person, get out of the vehicle,” Colbert orders.
All of us dive out of the left side of the Humvee to avoid the incoming fire on the right. We scramble up and then down a meter-high berm, which shields us from the attack.
Rounds rake across the row of Humvees, making that weird noise—zip zip zing. They sound like the screaming cartoon bullets fired by Yosemite Sam. Up and down the line, Marines jump out of their vehicles and take cover.
Behind our berm, Colbert says, “That’s a goddamn Zeus!” Zeus, the nickname for a ZSU, is a powerful, multi-barreled Russian anti-aircraft gun. (Other Marines later posit that the Iraqis were using a slightly different weapon, a ZPU.)
Several Marines in the battalion fire rifles and .50-cal machine guns wildly and ineffectually