Generation Kill - Evan Wright [148]
THIRTY-ONE
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BY THREE O’CLOCK in the afternoon of April 9, First Recon and War Pig have come to within about ten kilometers of Baqubah, advancing in two columns spaced several kilometers apart. While Bravo Company clears through the burning hamlets reconned by fire to the west, Alpha Company, led by Patterson, is pushing north on a trail that follows a canal to the east. The canal runs north-south, and the Marines in Alpha are pushed up against the edge of it to their right. Ahead of them is an expanse of bermed fields. Even as they creep forward—eighty Marines in about fifteen Humvees and trucks—shepherds dot the fields around them, tending flocks of sheep.
While the company is halted, a volley of mortars lands in their midst. A blast detonates so close to Capt. Patterson, standing beside his Humvee, that it knocks him against the side of his vehicle and rips up his pack with shrapnel but misses him. Then his column comes under machine-gun fire from a lone hut 200 meters ahead. Beyond the hut, Iraqis concealed in ditches, some fortified with sandbags, begin firing at them with AKs.
The lead Marines in Alpha begin to take fire from heavy, 73mm guns on BMPs—light Iraqi tanks—that seem to be about a kilometer ahead of them. The Marines in Alpha dive for cover. Patterson estimates there are as many as 150 Iraqi soldiers entrenched in the fields. With his unit hemmed in by the canal on the right side and by Iraqis to the left and in front, for the first time of the war, Patterson thinks, as he later tells me, “We are really on the brink here.”
Fawcett, whose team is near the front of Alpha’s position, takes cover behind a berm. The enemy BMP continues blasting at his men with its main gun, which fires shells about half the size of a Marine heavy artillery round. Fawcett and Sutherby, the sniper, peek up and observe more enemy troops pouring into the fields ahead of them. The Iraqi soldiers are being ferried in aboard military trucks, hopping out, then scrambling behind berms to fire on the Marines, whom they will soon outnumber about three to one.
Battalion forward air controllers contact an Air Force F-15 Strike Eagle in the vicinity to take out the BMPs. Marines are wary of working with jets, especially those flown by the Air Force. The fear is that jet pilots, moving too fast and far removed from Marines on the ground, will end up striking friendly positions. This fear is borne out when the F-15 drops its first 500-pound bomb intended to hit the BMP. The pilot misses by nearly a kilometer. The bomb lands fewer than 200 meters from Fawcett’s position. The men are buffeted by the shock wave, and temporarily deafened by the blast, but unharmed.
The pilot drops a second bomb directly on the BMP, destroying it, then moves on to take others farther north. Cobras linger to wipe out enemy machine-gun positions with Hellfire missiles.
Alpha’s Marines climb into their Humvees and advance on the Iraqis in the fields ahead. The Iraqis put out a lot of AK fire but seem incapable of hitting the Marines. Many put their rifles over their heads and shoot indiscriminately, without looking. Marine snipers steadily pick them off, while the .50-cal and Mark-19 gunners saturate their positions with lethal fire. The thing that amazes Sutherby is seeing shepherds run onto the field amidst the shooting, to drag off wounded sheep caught in the crossfire.
Alpha’s pace quickens. Marine gunners begin competing with one another to cut down the enemy fighters. Over the course of the next two hours, they advance approximately ten kilometers, destroying or routing all hostile forces ahead of them. When I run into Fawcett a short while later, he greets me with a blissed-out, ashram grin. After weeks of complaining about the war, fretting over its moral implications, he enthuses about slaughtering squads of uniformed Iraqi soldiers in the fields with the nearly 250 Mark-19 rounds he fired. “I feel invincible,” he tells me. “I had rounds skipping in the dirt right next me, a BMP shooting straight at us, Cobras