Generation Kill - Evan Wright [107]
Marines in Bravo who are not on watch gather around to eat their meager food rations before crawling into their wet holes to take quick “combat naps.”
“I felt cold-blooded as a motherfucker shooting those guys that popped out of the truck,” Espera says, glumly describing the details of each killing he participated in at the roadblock an hour earlier. Perhaps keeping in mind his priest’s admonishments to not enjoy killing, Espera seems to deliberately wallow in a black, self-flagellating mood. “Dog, whatever last shred of humanity I had before I came here, it’s gone,” he says.
Warning shots erupt at the roadblock manned by Charlie Company a few hundred meters to our north. Tracers light up the sky. We hear a car gunning its engine, apparently still driving toward the blockade. Marines shout. Weapons crackle. We hear the engine still whining, drawing closer, then the screeching of tires. In the silence that immediately follows, someone in our group says, “Well, that stopped him.” For some reason, everyone bursts into laughter.
UP THE ROAD FROM where we are laughing, the men in Charlie Company watch as two men run from a car the Marines have just riddled with dozens of rounds. It’s a four-door sedan. Doors are open, lights are on despite the heavy-weapons fire it took from a platoon of Marines. It’s a miracle that these two men, including the driver, have stepped out alive.
The Marines hold their fire as the men, dressed in robes, throw their hands up. They are unarmed. As Marines shout at them, they drop obediently to the side of the road.
Graves, whose team beautifully destroyed the building that shielded the enemy gunmen during the assault through Al Hayy, approaches the car with another Marine. Graves sees a little girl curled up in the backseat. She looks to be about three, the same age as his daughter at home in California. There’s a small amount of blood on the upholstery, but the girl’s eyes are open. She seems to be cowering. Graves reaches in to pick her up—thinking about what medical supplies he might need to treat her, he later says—when the top of her head slides off and her brains fall out. When Graves steps back, he nearly falls over when his boot slips in the girl’s brains. It takes a full minute before Graves can actually talk. The situation is one he can only describe in elemental terms. “I could see her throat from the top of her skull,” he says.
No weapons are found in the car. Meesh asks the father, sitting by the side of the road, why he didn’t heed the warning shots and stop. The father simply repeats, “I’m sorry,” then meekly asks permission to pick up his daughter’s body. The last the Marines see of him, he is walking down the road, carrying her corpse in his arms.
WHEN THEY TALK about this shooting later, the Marines have mixed reactions. Graves is devastated. “This is the event that is going to get to me when I go home,” he says. Prior to this shooting, when his team had passed by all those shot-up corpses on the roads, Graves says, “I felt good about it, like, ‘Yeah! Marines have been fucking shit up!’ ” He adds, “I cruised into this war thinking my buddy’s going to take a bullet, and I’m going to be the fucking hero pulling him out of harm’s way. Instead, I end up pulling out this little girl we shot, hiding in the backseat of her dad’s car.”
Graves’s buddy, twenty-two-year-old Corporal Ryan Jeschke, who was with him at the car, says, “War is either glamorized—like we kick their ass—or the opposite—look how horrible, we kill all these civilians. None of these people know what it’s like to be there holding that weapon. After Graves and I went up to that dead girl, I was surprised, because honestly, I was indifferent. It’s kind of disturbed me. Now, sometimes,