Generation Kill - Evan Wright [149]
On its western approach to Baqubah, Bravo Company stops outside a two-story, pale-yellow stucco building that appears to be an abandoned military post. Two hundred meters behind us, Kocher leads his team into the field, advancing just thirty meters into it from the highway. While picking their way through dried brush, waist-high in places, they encounter a group of Marines from Delta Company, the reserve unit. Several of the reservists surround a dead enemy fighter, a young man in a ditch, still clutching his AK, lying with his brains spilled out of his head. While the reservists gawk at the corpse, a man on Kocher’s team notices a live, armed Iraqi hiding in a trench nearby.
Kocher and his men turn on the armed Iraqi with their weapons ready to fire. They shout at him to drop his AK. It’s a tense moment for the Marines. Strictly speaking, this armed Iraqi had gotten the drop on them and could have easily taken them out had he fired. There’s gunfire all around, and the Marines are worried more Iraqis are hidden nearby.
But the Iraqi complies, drops his weapon and rises. One of the reservist Marines, First Sergeant Robert Cottle, a thirty-seven-year-old SWAT team instructor with the LAPD, jogs over, takes out a pair of zip cuffs and binds the Iraqi’s hands behind his back—so tightly that his arms later develop dark-purple blood streaks all the way to his shoulders.
The prisoner, a low-level Republican Guard volunteer in his late forties, is overweight, dressed in civilian clothes—a sleeveless undershirt and filthy trousers—and has a droopy Saddam mustache. He looks like a guy so out of shape he’d get winded driving a taxicab in rush hour. Surrounded by Marines, the man begins to blubber and cry.
Kocher hands his rifle to another Marine, pulls out his 9mm sidearm and approaches the prisoner. With combat raging around them, this enemy takedown begins in a highly charged manner. Kocher slams the Iraqi to the ground, puts the pistol to his head and shouts, “If you move, I’ll blow your fucking head off!” Pinning the guy with his knee in his back, he pulls AK magazines and a military ID out of his pockets. The prisoner starts pleading in English, “I have a family.”
Kocher hauls him to his feet and frog-marches him to the highway. In the surrounding fields, enemy mortars continue to boom amidst the crackling of Marine machine guns. Kocher knocks the prisoner over. He falls facedown in the dirt, with his hands still bound behind his back. In Kocher’s mind, his aggressiveness fits with his philosophy of handling prisoners. “I try to keep a prisoner off-balance so he knows I’m in control.”
The Marines bring Meesh over, and he barks at the man in Arabic, repeatedly asking him where the enemy mortars are positioned. The prisoner begs for his life. They conclude he knows nothing. They tie a sack over his head—a precaution taken since they are on a battlefield and don’t want this guy to shout or signal his comrades in any way should he see them—and wait to load him onto a truck.
Cottle, from the reservist unit, walks up to Kocher and shakes his hand, saying, “Thanks for saving my life.”
The situation seems pretty much wrapped up when Captain America makes a dramatic appearance, jogging up the road, screaming, with his bayonet out. He brandishes his bayonet toward the prisoner and shouts, “We ought to cut his throat like the Chechnyans in the video.” It’s a reference to a gore video circulating on the Internet, which many of the troops had seen before the invasion. It consisted of choppy MPEG-file footage that purported to show live Russian soldiers having their throats slashed by Chechnyan guerrillas.
Captain America then jabs the prisoner several times in his ribs and neck with the tip of his bayonet. The man starts screaming through the bag on his head, pleading again about his family. “Shut up!” Captain America yells. “Shut the fuck up!”
Watching this bizarre drama, Kocher orders Redman to step off