Generation Kill - Evan Wright [102]
The only guy I see poking his head up is Trombley. He had the presence of mind to grab the binoculars when he dove out of the Humvee. Now he scampers to the top of the berm, sits up like a gopher and scans the horizon. He looks around excitedly, eagerly taking in this terrifying new experience. I see him smile.
“That’s cool,” he says in a low voice as another salvo of Zeus rounds zings past. Then he adds, “I think I see where it is, Sergeant.”
Colbert and Person now rise over the berm, somewhat more cautiously than Trombley. Following his initial directions, they spot what they think is the enemy-gun position about a kilometer away. Colbert orders Hasser onto the vehicle’s Mark-19 grenade launcher, and with Zeus rounds still screaming in, the team methodically directs fire toward the enemy position.
A Cobra noses down over the field across the canal to join in the hunt. It rears up as AAA fire comes at it from the ground. The enemy rounds miss the helicopter, and it doubles back to renew its attack.
The Cobra strikes a white truck parked in the field with its 20mm Gatling gun, causing the truck to burst into flames. Then it fires a Hellfire missile at what the pilot thinks is one of several Zeus AAA guns. Low on fuel, the Cobra is forced to break off its attack.
Different perspectives on the ground produce radically different versions of events. Kocher, just 150 meters up from Colbert’s position, watches the white truck set on fire by the Cobra and believes this is one of the worst things he’s seen so far in the war. He later says, “I saw civilians in that truck, and I watched them burn up alive.”
Captain Daniel O’Connor, a First Recon officer also involved with controlling the air strikes that afternoon, later says, “I couldn’t prove the white vehicle the Cobra lit up was enemy, but every time it showed up, bad stuff happened. So we were okayed to take it out.”
Two columns of inky black smoke rise on the opposite side of the river. We take no more Zeus fire. I ask Trombley why he showed no signs of fear, seemed quite calm in fact, when he sat up on the berm and located the position of the gun that seemed to be terrorizing just about every other Marine in the battalion. “I know this might sound weird,” Trombley says, “but deep down inside, I want to know what it feels like to get shot. Not that I want to get shot, but the reality is, I feel more nervous watching a game show on TV at home than I do here in all this.”
He tears into his plastic meal-ration bag. “All this gunfighting is making me hungry,” he says with a cheerful smile.
“All this stupidity is making me want to kill myself,” Person counters grimly, one of his first displays of low spirits in Iraq.
Despite having wiped out several AAA guns with the help of the Cobras, the battalion is again starting to take incoming mortars by the bend in the canal. The Marines are ordered to break contact and roll back two kilometers.
The battalion pulls off the trail into a muddy depression surrounded by berms. The vehicles pull in close together. We wait for the Cobras to refuel in order to accompany the battalion on its final dash into Al Hayy.
Mortar fire grows more steady. With each wave of incoming bombs, the explosions get a little louder, a little closer. The initial volleys land more than a kilometer away, then move to within about five hundred meters of First Recon’s position. The orderly progression of the mortars suggests that an enemy observer is on the ground nearby, directing them. Marine snipers push out to the perimeter and try to spot a man or woman with a radio amidst the shepherds, farmers and other civilians in the surrounding fields.
Colbert’s vehicle is parked beside one of the battalion’s fuel trucks. I decide I don’t like sitting next to 1,000 gallons