Generation Kill - Evan Wright [134]
In the space of an hour, two to three hundred refugees show up at the northern roadblock. Marines, who initially vowed to keep their distance, now load rotund old ladies in black robes into the backs of their Humvees and drive them the three kilometers through their lines. Others carry sacks of rice and bedrolls on their heads and shoulders. One of the men on Espera’s team, twenty-three-year-old Lance Corporal Nathan Christopher, walks down the road, crying, while carrying a baby. He later tells me what got to him was seeing the mother, weakened from days of walking, almost drop the infant. Despite bawling his eyes out, Christopher tells me helping the refugees has afforded him his best moment in Iraq. “After driving here from Kuwait, shooting every house, person, dog in our path, we finally get to do something decent.”
Lt. Col. Ferrando makes an appearance by the northern roadblock. Greater numbers of refugees are flowing in. “We’re going to have a fucking humanitarian disaster on our hands if we stay here,” he says. “We don’t have enough food and water for ourselves.”
An hour later, First Recon clears out of its position. Ferrando has finally received orders. First Recon Battalion is instructed to hightail it to Baghdad for the final assault. To get there, the Marines will backtrack down Route 7, then cut west on a circuitous path that covers nearly 300 kilometers.
THE BATTALION SPENDS two days on the road. Huge, cheering crowds turn out in towns Marines smashed through just days ago. Kids run around in muddy lots beside the road, playing soccer, screaming “Bush! Bush! Bush!” or “America! America!” It’s the Marines’ moment to be hailed as conquerors, or liberators or heroes. No one’s really sure what they are. Adoring as the crowds are, Marines know that at any moment seriously bad things can happen. As we drive past the insanely chanting mobs, Colbert waves at them, repeating in a mechanical voice, “You’re free now. Good luck. Time for us to go home.”
During the two-day journey the men continue to wrestle with the issue of deadly roadblocks. Marines in Alpha Company have also instituted what they hope will be a less lethal approach to warding off traffic by firing smoke grenades. In one of their early attempts to employ the new technique, a team in Alpha successfully stops a civilian passenger by launching a smoke grenade. Before they can call the effort a success, however, the Marines watch in horror as a second smoke grenade fired by the team skips off the pavement and, against all odds, slams into the face of an Arab walking by the road carrying a white flag. He goes down hard, dropping from their view. The men are ordered forward without having a chance to examine the guy or render aid. Later, men in the unit are told by their superiors that the man they hit in the face with the smoke grenade was okay and was even observed eating a meal when they left him. After hearing this good news, one of the Marines says, “That probably just means someone threw an MRE next to the guy’s body as we drove past.”
FIRST RECON REACHES the outskirts of Baghdad early in the morning of April 6. Hastily erected oil pipelines zigzag along the highway. They were built by Saddam to flood adjacent trenches with oil so they could be set ablaze. As a result, smoke hangs everywhere. Saddam intended these flaming oil trenches as some sort of half-assed defense,