Generation Kill - Evan Wright [128]
None of the Marines say anything for a moment. Colbert looks at the car, then down. He breathes deeply, as if struggling to put his emotions aside. Having watched him cry a few days ago after the shooting of the shepherd, I suspect it’s not always easy being the Iceman.
“It’s okay, Walt,” Colbert says. “You were doing your job.”
Since the Marines on these vehicles are at this moment in history the foremost units of the American invasion here, there’s a burden that comes with that. They’re not allowed to simply run up to the car and see if they can help the guy. Colbert radios Fick, who’s a couple hundred meters behind, and tells him there’s a man shot in the car ahead. He requests permission to go up to it and render aid to the driver.
“Negative,” Fick tells him. The battalion has ordered the platoon to advance a few hundred meters past the car.
We drive toward the blue car. The shot man behind the wheel appears to be in his forties. He sits upright with good posture, his hands on his lap as if they slipped off the steering wheel. He wears a white shirt. His right eye stares ahead; his left eye is covered in blood dripping down from the crown of his head. He’s alive. When we pass within about a meter of him, we hear his rapid breathing—a shushing sound.
Due to a temporary rotation in the team, Trombley is on the Mark-19 and Hasser is in the seat to the left of me. He rides closest to the man he just shot, and stares ahead, refusing to look as we drive past, listening to his dying gasps: Shhhh! Shhhh! Shhhh!
Nobody in the Humvee says anything.
As Team Three rolls behind us, Doc Bryan raises his M-4 and tries to get a bead on the man. Without telling anyone else, he has decided to shoot the man in the head and give him a mercy execution. But his Humvee bounces, and he misses his chance for a clean shot.
We stop several hundred meters up the road and get out. There are some huts ahead. Fick and I see a pregnant woman walking toward them. Fick gets a bright yellow pack of humrats from his truck to give to her, and we walk toward her, with Fick holding the humrats high. The woman sees us and veers toward the huts. We walk faster. She starts running, and we do too. Then Fick stops abruptly. “This is ridiculous,” he says. “We’re terrorizing a pregnant woman.”
We watch her flee. “Given the way things are going,” Fick says, “it’s probably wise of her to run when she sees Americans.”
ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES LATER, First Recon’s headquarters units roll past the blue car with the wounded man it. Navy Lieutenant Aubin, the battalion physician, insists on stopping so he can examine the driver.
What Aubin finds is yet another testament to the skills of the Marine Corps rifleman. Of the three rounds Hasser fired, one hit an occupant in the shoulder (whom we saw jump out), one skimmed into the hood and the third entered the driver’s left eye. The 5.56mm round then did a ninety-degree turn through the man’s brain and went straight up, exiting through the top of his skull. Basically, the man has been lobotomized. Aubin pokes and pinches the skin on the man’s upper body and finds he is totally unresponsive, a vegetable. But no arteries were hit. The light, venous bleeding from the entry and exit wounds is not enough to kill him. His breathing and heart rate are good.
Aubin concludes that in a hospital a man with these wounds could live indefinitely. Here, without care, he will die of starvation, infection or swelling of the brain. Unlike Doc Bryan, who was ready to shoot the man, acting as a vigilante mercy killer falls outside of everything Aubin believes in as a doctor. He administers morphine and Valium to quell any pain in case the victim comes to (which is medically possible), but not enough to kill him. He is torn by the dilemma posed by this patient. Aubin later tells me, “In the States we don’t practice euthanasia. If we remove someone from life support, I don