Generation Kill - Evan Wright [146]
“We are receiving accurate mortar fire,” Fick informs his commander over the radio.
“Remain in position,” his commander, Encino Man, radios back.
Unlike earlier in the day, when Marines rolled back during close encounters with enemy mortars, Lt. Col. Ferrando doesn’t want to lose his momentum. Now, having the benefit of robust air support, he’s divided his Marines into two columns a few kilometers apart. His plan is to rush toward Baqubah as quickly as possible, while conditions remain favorable.
When Fick passes the word that the men in Second Platoon are to remain in place, Espera turns to his men in the next Humvee over from ours and says, “Stand by to die, gents.”
The twenty-two Marines in the platoon sit in their vehicles, engines running, as per their orders, while blasts shake the ground beneath them. Everyone watches the sky. A mortar lands ten meters from Espera’s open-top Humvee, blowing a four-foot-wide hole in the ground. It’s so close, I see the column of black smoke jetting up from the blast area before I hear the boom. I look out and see Espera hunched over his weapon, his eyes darting beneath the brim of his helmet, watching for the next hit. His men appear frozen in the vehicle as the smoke rises beside them.
Before leaving on this mission, many of the men in Colbert’s platoon had said good-bye to one another by shaking hands or even by hugging. The formal farewells seemed odd considering that everyone was going to be shoulder-to-shoulder in the cramped Humvees. The good-byes almost seemed an acknowledgment of the transformations that take place in combat. Friends who lolled around together during free time talking about bands, stupid Marine Corps rules and girlfriends’ fine asses aren’t really the same people anymore once they enter the battlefield.
In combat, the change seems physical at first. Adrenaline begins to flood your system the moment the first bullet is fired. But unlike adrenaline rushes in the civilian world—a car accident or bungee jump, where the surge lasts only a few minutes—in combat, the rush can go on for hours. In time, your body seems to burn out from it, or maybe the adrenaline just runs out. Whatever the case, after a while you begin to almost lose the physical capacity for fear. Explosions go off. You cease to jump or flinch. In this moment now, everyone sits still, numbly watching the mortars thump down nearby. The only things moving are the pupils of their eyes.
This is not to say the terror goes away. It simply moves out from the twitching muscles and nerves in your body and takes up residence in your mind. If you feed it with morbid thoughts of all the terrible ways you could be maimed or die, it gets worse. It also gets worse if you think about pleasant things. Good memories or plans for the future just remind you how much you don’t want to die or get hurt. It’s best to shut down, to block everything out. But to reach that state, you have to almost give up being yourself. This is why, I believe, everyone said good-bye to each other yesterday before leaving on this mission. They would still be together, but they wouldn’t really be seeing one another for a while, since each man would, in his own way, be sort of gone.
After the platoon holds its position under close mortar fire for about fifteen minutes, the attacks cease. The platoon is ordered to move a couple more kilometers north, toward an intersection where locals have warned of an ambush.
We drive to within a kilometer of the intersection and stop. There’s a cluster of barracks-like structures, a water tower and high-tension power lines ahead where the road forks into a Y. To the left there’s a thick stand of palm trees extending west for about a kilometer. Several minutes earlier, Cobras had come under AAA fire from the buildings near the intersection. They and other aircraft decide to prep the area before the Marines roll through on the ground.
We sit