Generation Kill - Evan Wright [117]
Colbert orders Person to continue driving into the direction of the explosions. Everyone’s life depends on Person. He’s the only one inside the Humvee with NVGs on, allowing him to see the road ahead. He hunches forward over the steering wheel, his face obscured by the apparatus. The NVGs give their wearer a bright gray-green view of the night and offer a limited, tunnel-vision perspective but no depth perception. Person is having trouble finding the bridge. It’s not quite where the map indicated it would be. Colbert radios this news to Fick.
He radios back, “Not good. Not good.”
Then Person figures out that reaching the bridge requires a sharper right turn than he’d thought. He makes it. “There’s an obstacle on the bridge,” Person says in a dull monotone that nevertheless manages to sound urgent.
“What?” asks Colbert. He has night-vision capabilities on his rifle scope but in the cramped Humvee can’t turn it forward to see what Person is looking at.
“It’s like a shipping container,” Person says. “In the middle of the road.”
It’s actually a blown-up truck turned sideways on the road several meters before the entrance to the bridge. We stop about twenty meters in front of it. To the left is that stand of tall eucalyptus trees. They’re about five meters from the edge of the road. Behind us, there’s a large segment of drainpipe that’s been dragged across part of the road.
Person drove around the pipe a moment ago. Through his NVGs it had appeared to be a small trench in the road—what he’d thought was the result of natural erosion. Now the team behind us is radioing, “You guys just drove around a pipe.”
It’s becoming clear to the team that this is not random debris. The pipe and the ruined truck in front of us were deliberately placed where they are in order to channel the vehicle into what is known in military terms as a “kill zone.” We are sitting in the middle of it.
Everyone in the Humvee (except me) has figured this out. The men remain extremely calm. “Turn the vehicle around,” Colbert says softly. The problem is, the rest of the convoy has continued pushing into the kill zone behind us. All five Humvees in the platoon are bunched together, with twenty more pressing from behind. Person gets the Humvee partially turned around; the eucalyptus trees are now on our immediate right. But the pipe, which was behind us, now prevents the Humvee from moving forward.
Person guns the engine, starting into a sharp turn, intending to cut around the pipe by going off the road.
“Halt! Stop it,” Colbert says. “Don’t go off the road. It could be mined. We’ve got to go out the way we came in.”
Colbert radios the rest of the platoon, telling them to back the fuck up, while simultaneously peering out his window through his night-vision rifle scope.
“There are people in the trees,” he says, no trace of alarm in his voice. He repeats the message over his radio, hunches more tightly over his rifle and begins shooting.
His first shot kicks off an explosion of gunfire. There are between five and ten enemy fighters crouched beneath the trees—just five meters from the edge of our Humvee. There are several more across the bridge in bunkers, manning a belt-fed machine gun and other weapons, and still more ambushers on the other side of the road with RPGs. They have the Marines surrounded on three sides, raking the kill zone with rifle and machine-gun fire and RPGs.
Why they did not start shooting first is a mystery. Colbert believes, he later tells me, that they simply didn’t understand the capabilities of American night-vision optics. The Marine rifles have night-vision scopes wedded to laser target designators—a little infrared beam that goes out and lights up the spot where the bullet will hit. Since it’s infrared, the dot can only