Generation Kill - Evan Wright [112]
The body of this Marine is discovered a week later by other American forces. They find it buried in Ash Shatrah’s trash dump.
TWENTY-THREE
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ON THE MORNING OF APRIL 1, the Marines of First Recon—less Alpha Company, not yet returned from its mission—greet the new day from their wet, muddy holes dug alongside the highway, north of Al Hayy. Few of the troops slept much the night before. After the fatal shooting of the little girl at Charlie Company’s roadblock, the Marines fired warning shots at several more vehicles, and also killed the occupant of one car, a heavyset man in a twenty-year-old Buick, which had failed to stop. Later the Marines came under attack from a BM-21, which saturated a nearby field with bombs, though no one was hit. The destruction continues after sunrise.
Below our position on the highway, slow-moving A-10 jets circle the fringes of Al Hayy, belching out machine-gun fire. The airframe of the A-10 is essentially built around a twenty-one-foot-long, seven-barreled Gattling gun—the largest such weapon in the U.S. arsenal. When it fires, it makes a ripping sound like someone is tearing the sky in half. The A-10s wrap up their performance by dropping four phosphorous bombs on the city. These are chemical-incendiary bombs that burst in the sky, sending long tendrils of white, sparkling flames onto targets below.
The air attacks are part of RCT-1’s advance into Al Hayy from the south. Now, in coordination with that effort, First Recon is ordered to move to a canal on the western side of the town and seal off another escape route.
Civilians line up by the side of the road when First Recon’s convoy assembles for its departure. The morning’s show of American airpower has whipped them into a frenzy. They greet the Marines like visiting celebrities. “Hello, my friend!” some of them shout. “I love you!” It doesn’t seem to matter that these young men have just witnessed portions of their city being destroyed. Or maybe this is the very appeal of the Marines. One of the promises made by the Bush administration before the war started was that the Iraqi populace would be pacified by a “shock and awe” air-bombing campaign. The strange thing is, these people appear to be entertained by it. “They think we’re cool,” says Person, “because we’re so good at blowing shit up.”
First Recon’s convoy pauses on the road by the bridge. Waving and jumping up and down, kids gathered by the tractor-trailer shot up the night before pay no heed to the corpses scattered not far from their feet. Farther on, there’s another shot-up car, with a male corpse next to it in the dirt. More kids dance around the carnage, giving thumbs-up to the Americans, shouting, “Bush! Bush! Bush!”
I walk up to Espera’s vehicle. He gazes out at the grinning, impoverished children with dirty feet and says, “How these people live makes me want to puke.”
Garza, standing at his vehicle’s .50-cal, says, “They live just like Mexicans in Mexico.” He smiles at the children and throws them some candy. His grandmother is from Mexico, and by the way he is grinning, you get the idea that to him living like Mexicans is not all bad.
Espera turns away in disgust. “That’s why I fucking can’t stand Mexico. I hate third-world countries.”
Despite Espera’s harsh critique of the white man—he derides English as the “master’s language”—his worldview reflects his self-avowed role as servant in the white man’s empire, a job he seems to relish with equal parts pride, cynicism and self-loathing. He says, “The U.S. should just go into all these countries, here and in Africa, and set up an American government and infrastructure—with McDonald’s, Starbucks, MTV—then just hand it over. If we have to kill a hundred thousand to save twenty million, it’s worth it.” He lights a cigar. “Hell, the U.S. did it at home for two hundred years—killed Indians, used slaves, exploited immigrant labor to build a system that’s good for everybody today. What does the white man call it? ‘Manifest Destiny.’ ”
Within a half hour, First Recon’s convoy