Generation Kill - Evan Wright [118]
Now, in the kill zone, Marines looking through their scopes are seeing the heads and torsos of enemy fighters lit up by two or three laser dots at once, as they pick them off tag-team style, carefully transitioning from target to target. The Marines have to be careful. Their advantage in night optics is precarious. Bunched up as they are together, if they start shooting wildly, they risk killing one another. The other problem is, while the Marines are getting in good shots, their vehicles are so jammed up, no one’s able to move out.
Fick can feel his truck jolting as enemy rounds rip through the sheet-metal sides. Through his window, he sees muzzles spitting flames in the darkness like a bunch of camera flashes going off at once. Then he sees an RPG streak right over the rear hatch of Colbert’s Humvee and explode. He decides to jump out of his vehicle and try to direct the Humvees out of the kill zone. Fick’s own coping mechanism for combat is what he calls the “Dead Man Walking Method.” Instead of reassuring himself, as some do, that he’s invincible or that his fate is in God’s hands (which wouldn’t work for him since he leans toward agnosticism), he operates on the assumption that he’s already a dead man, so getting shot makes no difference. This is the mode he’s in when he hops out of his Humvee, armed only with his 9mm pistol, and strides into the melee. Marines on Humvees shoot past his head while low-enfilade rounds from the enemy machine gun across the bridge skip past his feet. To the Marines seeing him approach, their lieutenant almost appears to be dancing. Fick later says he felt like he was in a shoot-out from The Matrix.
In our vehicle, Colbert seems to have entered a private realm. He fires bursts and, for some inexplicable reason, hums “Sundown,” the depressing 1970s Gordon Lightfoot anthem. His M-4 jams repeatedly, but each time he calmly clears the chamber and resumes firing, while mumbling the chorus: “Sometimes I think it’s a sin/When I feel like I’m winnin’ when I’m losin’ again.”
Meanwhile, Person, frustrated by the traffic jam, opens his door and, with shots crackling all around, shouts, “Would you back the fuck up!” In the heat of battle, his Missouri accent comes out extra hick. He repeats himself and climbs back in, his movements almost lackadaisical.
Two Marines are hit in the first couple of minutes of shooting. Q-tip Stafford is knocked down in the back of Fick’s truck by a piece of shrapnel to his leg. He ties his leg off with a tourniquet, gets back up and continues firing.
Pappy has a bullet rip through his foot and come out the other side, his torn boot gushing blood from both holes. He tourniquets the wound, resumes firing, gets on the radio and says, “Team Two has a man hit.” He speaks of himself in the third person, he says, because he doesn’t want to panic the rest of the platoon. Beside him in the driver’s seat, Reyes, often teased for being the platoon’s pretty boy, narrowly escapes a bullet that shatters the windshield and passes within an inch of his beautiful head. But Reyes feels oddly calm. He later says, “Wearing NVGs blocks your peripheral vision. You feel cocooned in this tunnel. It gives a false feeling of safety.” He concentrates on executing a three-point turn, surrounded by four other Humvees all trying to do the same, each with Marines on top blazing away. But one of Reyes’s tires is shot out. Driving on rims makes the Humvee wobble like a circus clown car. Pappy, riding beside him and shooting out his door, with his wounded foot elevated over the dashboard, repeatedly shouts, “You’re going off the damn road!”
When Team Three’s .50-caliber machine gun opens up over Doc Bryan’s head where he’s perched on the back of the Humvee, the concussive blasting is so intense that his nose starts bleeding. With his weapon growing sticky with blood and