Generation Kill - Evan Wright [126]
Colbert’s team is ordered to advance farther into the town. In sections that are not destroyed you can see how it had been a nice place until eighteen hours ago. There are walled gardens with metal gates painted bright colors. To our right there’s a wrecked café, decorated with azure highlights around its smashed windows. Lying along the waterfront of the broad canal, the town almost has the Mediterranean feel of a Greek fishing village.
Colbert orders most of his men out of the Humvee. The Marine Corps has spent years studying the Russian experience in Afghanistan and Chechnya. Among the mistakes they made was to stay inside their vehicles when they entered urban terrain. As Colbert says, “If you cocoon in your vehicle, you get schwacked. Even if it’s a tank, they’ll find a way to blow it up.”
Colbert and his men stalk through the streets, peering over walls and around corners. Even though increasing numbers of civilians are straying out, the Marines are tense. It’s a hot day, and the Marines’ faces—recessed behind puffy MOPP suits, helmets and radio mics—have that throbbing, blotchy look people get after running a marathon.
Colbert stands on the corner by a building, scanning an alley. An old man in brown robes, sitting cross-legged in front of a building, smiles at him. Colbert smiles back, while still mumbling the words “Sometimes I think it’s a sin/When I feel like I’m winnin’ when I’m losin’ again.” He pauses. “I wish I knew the rest of the words.”
WE REMAIN IN AL MUWAFFAQIYAH because engineers attached to First Recon have discovered a large cache of weapons in the town. One of the few public buildings not destroyed by Marine artillery in Al Muwaffaqiyah is the schoolhouse. It’s an L-shaped, two-story brick building with a basketball court in the middle.
The schoolhouse was taken over by the Iraqi military sometime after Valentine’s Day. Marine engineers know this because the walls of one classroom are covered in childish drawings of pink hearts, some with the words “Happy Valentine’s” scrawled in English. The fact that schoolchildren in an Arab dictatorship commemorate Valentine’s Day comes as a surprise to the Marines, but previously, in a rural school south of Al Hayy, they found drawings done by children depicting girls with blue eyes and blond hair—suggesting that somehow Western pop culture and its idealization of blondness had seeped into the minds of kids living in primitive hamlets. You find surprising things about the private life of a country when you invade it. It’s not unlike breaking into someone’s home, ransacking the occupants’ possessions and learning the ordinary secrets of their lives.
Sometime after the schoolchildren of Al Muwaffaqiyah celebrated Valentine’s Day, a battalion-size force of Republican Guard soldiers moved into the town and turned their school into a military headquarters. They shoved all the desks into one room and filled the others with military supplies. Marines find maps, uniforms, gas masks, as well as recently cooked, partially consumed bowls of rice, peanut shells and chicken bones. Apparently, the Republican Guard soldiers stayed back here eating peanuts and chicken while the Syrian jihadis were sent out to the bridge to delay the Americans.
The Marines also find several classrooms piled to the ceilings with weapons and munitions, including 600 mortar shells, 10,000 AK rounds and a couple dozen launchers and rifles. They rig the weapons caches with explosives and prepare to blow the school complex sky-high.
WATCHING THE TOWN’S only school blow up—which we see as a funnel of black smoke jetting up from the western side of the town—comes as a relief to Colbert’s team. Its destruction means they can finally roll north and get out of Al Muwaffaqiyah. The atmosphere in the town has changed markedly. Locals have warned Marines in other teams that foreign jihadis have infiltrated the area and plan to attack the Americans with suicide car bombs. The civilians who’d come out earlier to greet the Marines have