Generation Kill - Evan Wright [120]
“There’s a hole in the bridge,” Colbert says. “Bravo Three is stuck. We’re turning around.”
KOCHER’S TEAM makes it across the bridge with Carazales flooring the vehicle, bitching the entire way. “This is fucking bullshit, man. We’ve got no armor.” Somehow, he manages to swerve around the meter-wide hole blown through the middle of the bridge by a Marine artillery round.
Just after clearing the hole, Redman, standing at the vehicle’s .50-cal, is thrown down by a low-hanging wire from a blown-up utility pole. He slams his head on an ammo box at the rear of the Humvee and is knocked out. Redman comes to moments later and sees smashed buildings on either side of him. A Cobra, flying so low it looks like he could reach up and touch it, is dumping machine-gun fire into one of the structures. Redman smells a powerful odor of burning flesh. They have arrived in Al Muwaffaqiyah.
Two other teams make it across the bridge before a Humvee towing a trailer becomes hung up in the hole, blocking it off. The fourteen Marines who made it across are now cut off, alone in the town. Kocher’s team pushes forward about seventy-five meters, then is forced to halt. Buildings on both sides of the road are collapsed into it. Rubble in some places is piled higher than the hood of their vehicle. “There’s nowhere to go, dude,” Redman observes.
Another Cobra strafing run sends Carazales diving down to the floor. The rounds impact so close that he thinks it’s enemy fire. When he gets back up, he sees Kocher on the ground, walking alone into the demolished city. Carazales says, “Kocher’s happy now because he’s got his own little suicide mission.”
Kocher is determined to find a route through the town. Much as he dislikes his immediate superior, Captain America, Kocher loves his job. He grew up outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania, and spent his youth “running around in the backwoods.” He hunted deer, wrestled and listened to tales of war adventure from relatives who had served in World War II and in the Korean conflict. He knew from the time he was very little he would be a Navy SEAL or a Recon Marine. He likes being out on his own in a dark, alien town. After the Cobras fire a final Hellfire into a building in front of him, the place grows silent. All he can think of, Kocher later tells me, is a basic rule of combat reconnaissance: “The lead element’s expendable. Guess I’m it.”
He picks his way through the rubble and tries to clear a path for the Humvees by pulling twisted rebars from fallen buildings out of the street. Then he sees movement in an alley and fires several shots at it. He and the other men on his team take cover, but no fire is returned. The town is about a kilometer long. Kocher soon figures that the Marine artillery leveled only about a quarter of the town. One strip of buildings close to the bridge was left standing, and near them there’s a clear alley that the Humvees could pass through. He returns to the Humvee with the news.
When Carazales hears it, he tells the radio operator, “Don’t pass that word up to the battalion. They’ll probably want to send us through this bitch.”
But the radio operator sends the news. They’re ordered to remain in position.
SEVERAL VEHICLES FROM BRAVO COMPANY remain stuck on the bridge behind a Humvee trailer with one wheel hanging through the hole in the roadway. Encino Man originally took charge of the effort to free the trailer, but repeated attempts to rock it out have only succeeded in making the hole larger.
When Maj. Shoup comes up to the bridge to help out, he sees that nothing is happening. Several Marines stand around doing nothing, while Encino Man and Captain America shout excitedly into their radios. To Shoup it looks like they’ve lost focus of the situation and are “stuck on their radios, not commanding.”
As an air officer, Shoup has no authority within Bravo Company. But in his mind, having three teams