Generation Kill - Evan Wright [113]
Once the initial excitement wears off, invading a country becomes repetitive and stressful, like working on an old industrial assembly line: The task seldom varies, but if your attention wanders, you are liable to get injured or killed. Colbert’s team stops in a grassy field a few hundred meters down from the village. There’s a canal directly across from his Humvee, with a paved road running along it on the other side.
That canal road, another route out of Al Hayy, is the one the battalion is tasked with observing. Marines are to shoot any armed Iraqis fleeing the road.
Despite the lethal mission, the grassy field we stop in is idyllic. Half of Colbert’s team—those who were up all night on watch—take advantage of the tall grass to stretch out and doze. It’s a beautiful day, warm and clear, a bit humid. There’s a stand of palm trees nearby. Birds fill the air with a loud, musical chattering. Trombley counts off ducks and turtles he observes in the canal with his binoculars. “We’re in safari land,” Colbert says.
The spell is broken when a Recon unit 500 meters down the line opens up on a truck leaving the city, putting an end to the birdsong in the trees. In the distance, a man jumps out holding an AK. He jogs through a field on the other side of the canal. We watch lazily from the grass as he’s gunned down by other Marines.
The birds have resumed their singing when the man shot by the Marines reappears across the canal, limping and weaving like a drunk. Nobody shoots him. He’s not holding a gun anymore. The ROE are scrupulously observed. Even so, they cannot mask the sheer brutality of the situation.
A few vehicles down from Colbert’s, Team Three monitors the hamlet from where mortars seemed to have been launched when we rolled in. Doc Bryan and the others on the team have been watching the village through binoculars and sniper scopes for about an hour now. They have seen no signs of enemy activity, just a group of civilians—men, women and children—going about their business outside a small cluster of huts. But it’s possible that rounds were fired from there. The Fedayeen often drive into a town, launch a few mortars and leave.
In any case, the place is quiet when, at about eleven o’clock in the morning, a lone 1,000-pound bomb dropped from an F-18 blows the hamlet to smithereens. The blast is so powerful that Fick jumps over a berm to avoid flying debris and lands on Encino Man. As the shock wave rolls through Colbert’s position, I feel the concussion in my chest as if my internal organs are being picked up and slammed against my rib cage. A perfectly shaped black mushroom cloud rises up where the huts had been.
The only survivor observed by the Marines is a singed dog that runs out of the smoke, making crazy circles—indicative of blown eardrums and a subsequent loss of balance. Team Three’s Corporal Michael Stinetorf, twenty-one, who was watching when the bomb hit, is livid: “I just saw seven people vaporized right before my very eyes!” Behind Team Three’s position, the men observe the commanders who called in the strike smoking cigars and laughing. One of them gripes, “Those fuckheads are celebrating. They’re laughing like it’s a game.”
But as in other bombing and shooting incidents, Marines don’t all agree on what happened. Maj. Shoup, the air officer who helped coordinate the strike, sees it as a good hit. Prior to the bombing, Shoup was communicating with the F-18’s backseater, a friend of his whose call sign is “Curly.” Before releasing the bomb, Shoup says, “Curly reported seeing puffs of smoke coming from the