Generation Kill - Evan Wright [14]
FOR THE MARINES at Camp Mathilda, the first tangible sign that the war might actually be happening soon comes in the form of Pizza Hut delivery cars that stream into the camp all the way from Kuwait City on the night of March 16. As the South Asian franchise workers haggle with Marines outside the cars, selling the pies for twenty or ten bucks apiece, Fick grimly observes, “I think we can take this as the clearest indication yet that we’re getting ready to roll out for the invasion. They don’t just feed Marines pizza for no reason.”
Just after dawn on the morning of March 17, the Marines are told they have four hours to load their Humvees and trucks to pull out for a forward staging area near the Iraqi border. The men in Second Platoon clear out the tent in near silence. By eight o’clock temperatures have already reached the upper eighties. The heat is compounded by the fact that everyone has been ordered into their bulky chemical-protection suits. They lug weapons, rucksacks and crates of ammunition with sweat pouring from their faces. Everyone moves about in a feverish dream state.
By nine o’clock, First Recon’s convoy of some seventy Humvees and trucks have been loaded and maneuvered into position in the sand. The 300 or so enlisted Marines line up for formation. A battalion master sergeant struts in front of the troops and shouts, “Anybody who doesn’t want to be here, raise your hand.”
Laughter swells from the ranks.
“Good,” the sergeant continues. “You are going to be in the biggest show on the planet.”
When formation ends, Marines jump up and down, laughing and throwing each other around in the dust. Two different men run past me, shouting exactly the same phrase, “This is like Christmas!”
Their enthusiasm for the rollout doesn’t necessarily mean everyone’s a warmonger. A Marine explains the peculiar logic of troops getting ready for combat. “The sooner the war starts,” he says, “the sooner we go home.”
I make my last call before turning in my satellite phone to the battalion commander. The phone was provided by my editor to keep him updated on my movements, but I decide to call my girlfriend in Los Angeles instead. I’m not allowed to tell her we’re leaving the camp. She says that everyone at home is expecting the war to start any day. People in Los Angeles are panicking. Her friends are driving to a cabin at Lake Arrowhead to wait out the war in safety. It seems unreal to me. I suppress the urge to ask her if J.Lo is dead.
THREE
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FIRST RECON’S CONVOY pulls out from the gates of Camp Mathilda at noon on March 17 under an unusually clear, dust-free blue sky. The Marines’ objective is a staging area about twenty kilometers south of the Iraqi border, where they will be in position to punch into Iraq on a few hours’ notice. They have no orders yet to begin the invasion, but this is the last step. This maneuver is the battalion-wide equivalent of cocking a loaded pistol and aiming it at someone’s head.
Tens of thousands of other American and British troops are on the same path this afternoon. As soon as First Recon’s convoy pulls onto the “highway”—a narrow, rutted asphalt lane surrounded by open desert—we become snarled in traffic. Some 150,000 coalition troops are camped nearby, and it looks as if all of them have poured onto the same highway at once. Thousands of vehicles—Humvees, tanks and trucks—fill the road in a jam that snakes across the desert for thirty kilometers.
Traversing this portion of the Kuwait desert, you begin to get a sense of the scale of the undertaking. We crawl past fenced lots in which thousands of tanker trucks,