Generation Kill - Evan Wright [115]
The Marines are told to prepare to stay here for the night. Despite the civilian deaths they’ve witnessed or caused in the past twenty-four hours, most Marines are still on a high from seizing the bridge the night before. Being told they’re going to stay in one place for the next twelve hours or so adds to the morale boost.
The men spend the remaining hours of daylight partially stripping out of their MOPPs and washing up. Reyes breaks out an espresso pot, which he fills with Starbucks coffee, luxury items packed in his gear for special occasions. While brewing it, he accosts Pappy, his team leader, who’s just finished shaving. “Pappy, you missed a spot.”
Reyes takes his razor and cleans up around the edge of Pappy’s sideburns. “Sometimes before a big meeting with the boss, I have to clean him up a little,” Reyes explains.
“The battalion commander thinks I’m a bum,” Pappy says, tilting his head slightly.
“Brother, that’s ’cause he don’t know what a true warrior be,” Reyes says, clowning.
The close relationship shared by Reyes and Pappy is between two men who are complete opposites. While Reyes has so much bubbly effervescence that he manages to be flamboyant even in his MOPP suit, Pappy is a rangy, quintessentially laconic Southern man raised in a churchgoing, Baptist family in Lincolntown, North Carolina, a mountain town of a few thousand souls. Pappy jokingly describes himself as “your normal North Carolina loser,” and says he’d barely ever met a Mexican before joining the Corps. Now Reyes is not just one of his best friends but his assistant team leader, his spotter when sniping, his second in battle. Reyes quips that their relationship is like that of “husband and wife.” After Reyes finishes shaving him, he nudges Pappy’s head to the side for a close inspection and pronounces, “Looking like a warrior, Pappy.”
Everyone sits around enjoying the waning moments of daylight, as artillery booms into Al Muwaffaqiyah. One of the senior men in the platoon walks up and announces, “Looks like there’s a big meeting going on with the battalion commander. I just hope he isn’t coming up with some stupid-ass plan.”
TWENTY-FOUR
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AT ABOUT EIGHT O’CLOCK that night, Fick returns from his meeting with his superiors and gathers his team leaders for a briefing. “The bad news is, we won’t get much sleep tonight,” he says. “The good news is, we get to kill people.”
It’s rare for Fick to sound so “moto,” regaling his men with enthusiastic talk of killing. He goes on to present Lt. Col. Ferrando’s ambitious last-minute plan to cross the bridge into Al Muwaffaqiyah, push north of the town and set up ambushes on a road believed to be heavily travelled by Fedayeen. “The goal is to terrorize the Fedayeen,” he says, looking around, smiling expectantly.
His men are skeptical. They’re all aware that when Marines approached the bridge a few hours ago in LAVs, they were hammered by enemy ambushers. Pappy repeatedly questions Fick about the enemy situation on the bridge. “It’s been pounded all day by artillery,” Fick answers, waving off his objections, sounding almost glib, like a salesman—all of this unusual for him. “I think the chances of a serious threat are low.”
Fick walks a delicate line with his men. A good officer should be eager to take calculated risks. Despite the men’s complaints against Ferrando for ordering them into an ambush at Al Gharraf, the fact is, only one Marine was injured, and the enemy’s plans to halt the Marines’ advance were thwarted. Fick privately admits that there have been times when he’s actually resisted sending his troops