Generation Kill - Evan Wright [130]
“Stop!” Colbert says.
We halt between the trees and the berms in the suspected kill zone.
“What are we doing?” Person asks, his voice betraying a hint of nervousness.
“They want us to stop,” Colbert says. “I guess we’re trying to flush ’em out.”
We sit for several minutes, trying to bait the ambushers into shooting. Nobody says anything. It’s that leaden silence of old action movies where all you hear are heartbeats and watches ticking (though no one’s actually wearing a mechanical watch).
“Move up fifty meters,” Colbert says.
Again we sit in silence, broken abruptly when Trombley cuts a loud fart.
Everyone jumps. Nerves are so wired in the vehicle, some mistook it for the blast of a distant mortar.
“Jesus!” Colbert says.
“Sorry,” Trombley apologizes.
We creep forward. AKs crackle in the distance. We pick up speed, clearing the suspected ambush spot. We pass two black dogs humping in the ditch by the road. Then a billboard of a grinning Saddam.
“Hey, anybody got a Sharpie?” Person asks. “We should do some bathroom art on him, like draw a cock and balls going into his mouth. I’m serious, let’s stop and do it.” He starts laughing.
“Shush, Person. Take a deep breath,” Colbert says indulgently, like a kindergarten teacher with an unruly child.
“I can’t help it,” Person says. “I’m running solely on Ripped Fuel tonight.”
The sun is now a red disk perched just atop the horizon to the left. Several kilometers ahead, a massive fireball erupts, sending a mushroom cloud into the sky. The radios come to life, everyone debating what it is.
We stop, and for several moments the distant fireball burns more brightly than the setting sun. Now the feeling of being on a 1950s sci-fi movie is complete. Surrounded by the red, bermed fields, strange huts and now what look like two suns setting simultaneously, it’s like we’ve arrived on the alien planet.
A FEW MINUTES after the double sunset, the Marines are ordered to be on the lookout for a downed American aircraft. Later, the BBC reports that a Navy F-18 was shot down, leading Fick and others to surmise that the brilliant fireball we’d seen had been that jet crash.
We drive for several hours in the darkness, dogged by sporadic mortar fire and enemy forces that keep lighting up the sky with illume flares.
Around midnight the battalion stops a few kilometers south of Al Kut and digs in. The canal is a couple hundred meters to our right, and the ground here is saturated. Boots sink ankle-deep in the mud. It takes twenty minutes just to find a spot dry enough to dig a hole. With enemy mortars and illume flares still going off nearby, Colbert’s team excavates a massive hole, big enough for everyone, in the event of a bad artillery attack.
Machine-gun fire across the canal is heavy at times. RCT-1 is on the other side, and they are moving into position to assault into Al Kut. Low-flying American jets crisscross overhead. Bombs and artillery rumble.
I sit in the mud, eating an MRE ration I saved for dinner. After squeezing the contents from the foil pack into my mouth, I’m too tired to discern what it tastes like—a spaghetti dinner, chicken breast or chunked beefsteak. There’s not enough light to read the packaging and figure out what these chunks of food in my mouth are. It’s the first time existing in total darkness has bothered me.
The dark and sleepless conditions under which Marines operate have already caused several fatalities. Two men sleeping near their Humvee in another unit were crushed to death by a tracked vehicle, and a third was paralyzed. An infantry Marine crawled into his hole after watch and fatally shot himself in his sleep with his SAW.
Nearby in the darkness, Marines in Bravo pass around these stories. Some of them now bring up another nighttime activity: “combat jacks.” They’re trying to tally who’s masturbated the most since the invasion started. During long, fatiguing hours of watch, some Marines beat off just to keep awake and pass the time. “Dog, after that first ambush,” one of the men says, referring