Generation Kill - Evan Wright [108]
Despite his professed indifference, Jeschke is haunted by the memory of seeing the girl’s father walk down the road, cradling his dead daughter. Jeschke says, “I asked Meesh what he thought the father was going through, and Meesh said Arabs don’t grieve as hard as we do. I don’t really believe him. I can’t see how it would be any different for them.”
After this shooting and the others like it, Marines deal with the stress through black humor. Even guys privately broken up by the shootings circulate jokes, one of them: “What’s the first thing you feel when you shoot a civilian? The recoil of your rifle.”
THE ARTILLERY STRIKE Bravo Company called previously on vehicles fleeing the city finally starts to arrive. Since First Recon is so far north, the artillery gunners can only reach them by using rocket-assisted projectile (RAP) rounds, which give their guns a range of thirty kilometers. After RAP rounds are fired, they flash in the sky and then make a sort of fizzing sound, as a rocket motor mounted on each projectile kicks in and drives it to its target. They make for an even more spectacular show than normal artillery. We lie back in our holes and watch 164 RAP rounds shriek across the sky. Seen from a distance, the fiery explosions are beautiful and hypnotizing, just like any decent Fourth of July display. Any carnage visited on the vehicles, hamlets, farms or people is shrouded from us by the darkness. All we see are the pretty lights of the rockets’ red glare.
TWENTY-TWO
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ON MARCH 30, Capt. Patterson’s Alpha Company was ordered to temporarily detach from First Recon and go on a mission to find the body of the Marine who went missing when his supply convoy was ambushed on Route 7 outside Ash Shatrah. No one knows if rumors of his body’s public mutilation are true, but many Marines inevitably see Alpha’s task to re-cover it as a revenge mission. When Alpha Company had pulled out of First Recon’s camp for Ash Shatrah, men in Bravo had shouted after them, “Fuck the shit out of that town!”
Now, on the morning of March 31, with the rest of the battalion making its way north toward Al Hayy, the eighty Marines in Alpha Company are heading south on Route 7 toward Ash Shatrah. To Sergeant Damon Russell Fawcett, a twenty-six-year-old team leader in Alpha’s Second Platoon, the mission fills him, he later admits, with conflicting emotions. Fair-haired and blue-eyed, Fawcett grew up in Southern California, a “water baby,” surfing and playing water polo. After several semesters in college, he joined the Marines not just for adventure but because he was so “disenchanted with the human factor in society, the emphasis on technology. I came in to see if the better man will dominate.”
For the past eighteen hours since departing on the mission, Fawcett has listened to fellow Marines rage about the motherfuckers in Ash Shatrah, and their plans to get payback once their commanders clear them hot to assault the town. A lot of guys are talking not just about the lost Marine but about rumors now circulating of Iraqis abusing American female POWs. (Within the next twenty-four hours, when the tale of Jessica Lynch’s captivity and rape reaches the men, she becomes the campaign’s unofficial Helen of Troy, a rallying point for generalized anger against Arabs.) Fawcett is particularly disturbed by an acquaintance of his, a sniper, who recently bragged that after being cleared to shoot an armed Iraqi who was taking cover behind a child, the sniper fired at the man through the kid, telling Fawcett, “I just killed a future terrorist.”
Fawcett has a desire for revenge like everyone else, but at the same time he keeps thinking, as he later tells me, “When I get home people will probably ask me to speak at high schools about this. I don’t know how I’m going to explain all the dead women and children I’ve seen, the things we’ve done here.” Now he tells some of the guys he’s with, “If you’re mad about them mutilating a Marine, it’s not like this is the only country on earth with sociopaths.