Generation Kill - Evan Wright [111]
A FEW HOURS BEFORE SUNSET, the Marines are ordered to assault the town. The infantrymen from Third Battalion lead the way in, advancing under heavy machine-gun fire, blowing up buildings in their path with shoulder-fired missiles. They seize several military structures and clear the surrounding houses. Nearly all of the Iraqi soldiers have fled or changed out of their uniforms in order to blend in with the populace. They fire few shots. There’s no sign of Chemical Ali or the body of the missing Marine.
Fawcett’s platoon and another from Alpha drive their Humvees about 500 meters into the town, with Cobras launching Hellfire missiles ahead of them. They move into a water-purification plant, a complex of industrial structures filled with trucks and machinery. The men are ordered to stay here for the night.
By sundown, any thought that this could be a revenge mission completely disappears. Dozens of Iraqi citizens approach Alpha’s hungry Marines on the perimeter, bearing gifts of tea, bowls of rice and flat bread, which Marines refer to as “Hajji tortillas.” Some townspeople, speaking broken English, are eager to point out enemy positions. A few invite the Marines to come into their homes for a proper meal. Patterson is now forced to order his Marines, who hours before had been fantasizing about killing everyone in the town, to stop eating food brought to them by the locals.
After dark Patterson gets the clearest confirmation yet that the Baath Party and Iraqi military forces have abandoned the town. Through his NVGs he observes hundreds of people streaming in and out of government buildings “like ants, carting off everything they can carry—desks, chairs, mattresses.”
Iraqis aren’t the only ones looting. Inside the water-purification plant Fawcett watches fellow Marines “rape the buildings—smashing things up, pissing everywhere, hunting for souvenirs.” The water-purification plant must have been some sort of exemplary public-works project. Much of the equipment is new. Many of the trucks parked inside the buildings haven’t even been driven; they still have plastic on the seats. Marines use Ka-Bar knives to rip apart their interiors for material to reupholster their Humvees and trucks.
After their exciting night at the water plant, the Marines leave Ash Shatrah early in the morning. Locals cheer. To one of Patterson’s officers, “the change in the town was dramatic, like someone pulled a thumb off their backs. We liberated them.”
While the CIA mission failed, the liberation of Ash Shatrah proves to be precedent-setting in another sense. The Marines pull out of the town, leaving behind little or no civil authority, hordes of looters roaming through blown-up, trashed buildings and a scattered army of Baathists, soldiers and other loyalists, many of them still armed and all of them completely unaccounted for. The type of liberation seen at Ash Shatrah will play itself out again and again in other towns across Iraq until the U.S. military reaches Baghdad, where it will do pretty much the same, resulting in a much grander scale of anarchy.
Fawcett’s men don’t hear any word about the missing Marine until they’ve pulled out of the town. They are told that an old man in Ash Shatrah met with officers in the infantry battalion and informed them that the body of the lost Marine had been dragged through the streets and strung up, but was cut down and buried by “good Samaritans.” According to the story passed among Marines, the old man claimed that the good Samaritans did their best to give the Marine a Christian burial, then fled the city, fearing reprisals. After hearing this, Fawcett says, “All we’ve been looking for is a corpse.