Generation Kill - Evan Wright [124]
Espera says, “We’ve been brainwashed and trained for combat. We must say ‘Kill!’ three thousand times a day in boot camp. That’s why it’s easy.” But ever mindful of the priest’s admonishment not to enjoy killing, Espera hastily adds, “That dude I saw crawling last night, I shot him in the grape. Saw the top of his head bust off. That didn’t feel good. It makes me sick.”
BY NINEA.M. the weary Marines are again on the move, making life-and-death decisions. The first guy they almost kill is a young man identified by Captain America as a possible Fedayeen. Captain America spots the young man standing in the field several hundred meters back from the road. He thinks the guy is talking on a radio, working as an enemy observer. The convoy stops. Snipers are called out. They report that the “radio” Captain America saw him holding close to his mouth and speaking into is a cigarette that he’s trying to smoke in the wind. They move on without shooting him.
Within a couple of hours, First Recon reaches the alternate route into Muwaffaqiyah. There are farmhouses and bermed fields on either side of the road. The battalion slows to a bump-and-stop crawl, while armored units from RCT-1 move a few kilometers ahead into the town, to clear out the rubble blocking the main road.
While we wait, mortars begin to fall. But the fire is intermittent—one or two concussions every ten minutes—and inaccurate, landing hundreds of meters away in the surrounding fields.
There’s a lot of civilian traffic pulled over by the side of the road. Many of the cars seem to have been surprised by the arrival of the Marine convoy. Parked at careless angles just off the road, the cars seem to have pulled over hastily, perhaps when they saw the Marines rolling up on them in their rearview mirrors. In the space of a few kilometers, we pass more than a dozen such vehicles. Clean-shaven young men in urban apparel, similar to that worn by the Syrian ambushers, stand outside the cars and pickup trucks. They flash nervous smiles or throw their hands up when the Marine vehicles pass by. Others who have their shirts off—indicating they’ve probably just changed out of military uniforms—hide inside the cars. Several of the young men we pass have blue eyes and light or even reddish hair, which are traits not uncommon among Syrians.
The Marines are convinced these guys are foreign jihadi warriors. They’re dying to do “snatch missions”—pull over and grab some of them and find out who they are. But their requests are denied. The Marines’ objective is to enter Al Muwaffaqiyah and push north as soon as possible. They’re at the tip of the spear of Maj. Gen. Mattis’s fast-moving invasion, and they don’t have time to dally. Nevertheless, letting these guys go creates a baffling situation in the minds of the Marines. In their view, these two opposing armies—of Marines and of foreign jihadis—are passing by within meters of each other on the same road.
During one of our stops, Gunny Wynn walks over to Colbert’s vehicle, pissed off. “Isn’t stopping terrorists what this war is supposed to be about? Here we are surrounded by them, and all we’re doing is waving and smiling.”
First Recon’s convoy begins to take increasingly concentrated mortar fire. Unseen enemy snipers take potshots with AKs. Marines in Bravo are ordered to sweep the surrounding berms on foot. They find no armed men but piles of mortars, mortar tubes and RPG rounds pre-positioned in holes on both sides of the road.
In Charlie Company at the front of the convoy, Graves and Jeschke are ordered on a sniper mission. Despite the trauma of their experience a couple of nights ago of pulling the girl out of the car with her brains shot out, they are eager for their new mission. An enemy mortar landed within 150 meters of their vehicle, and Marines notice a man behaving suspiciously in a nearby field. He keeps popping up and down from behind a berm after the mortars hit, watching the Marines. They think he’s an observer, and Graves and Jeschke set up a sniper