Generation Kill - Evan Wright [150]
Redman stands over the prisoner, placing his boot heel on his neck. Captain America shouts at the guy a few more times, then backs off.
Fick arrives. He exchanges a few words with Captain America, who’s now smiling and chuckling nervously, as he often does after a good outburst. Fick has no idea that anything out of the usual just occurred. He loads the prisoner into his Humvee and drives off.
A while later some of the reservist Marines approach Kocher and Redman. Cottle, who’d thanked Kocher a few minutes earlier for saving his life, now says, “You guys abused that prisoner. I should never have let you take custody of him. I ought to kick your fucking ass.”
Within twenty-four hours, the reservists file a report charging Kocher, Redman and Captain America with assaulting the prisoner. Captain America is temporarily suspended from command. Kocher is relieved of his job as team leader and ordered to ride with a support unit. Redman, who’s allowed to remain on the team, is dismayed. “Dude, when I put my boot on the prisoner’s neck, there were people out there still shooting at us. I wanted to control the prisoner and still be able to see what was happening.” He adds, “Kocher and I were trying to calm the situation down. I didn’t stomp or kick the guy. Dude, we just wanted Captain America to go away.”
Even Cottle later confesses, “I feel bad for the enlisted guys. They weren’t really the problem. It was the officer.” One of Cottle’s fellow reservists, a senior enlisted man who also witnessed the events, says, “From what I saw, that officer is sick. There’s something wrong with him.”
Captain America denies committing a misdeed. He later tells me he simply thinks his accusers in the reserve unit were insufficiently acquainted with the realities of the battlefield. “The prisoner was handled properly, even though they didn’t like the way it looked,” Captain America says. “They saw the beast that day, and they didn’t know how to handle it.”
BY FIVE O’CLOCK in the afternoon, the Iraqis who had earlier put up determined-though-inept resistance have either fled or been slaughtered. Colbert’s team, along with the rest of the platoon, speeds up the road toward the outskirts of Baqubah. Headless corpses—indicating well-aimed shots from high-caliber weapons—are sprawled out in trenches by the road. Others are charred beyond recognition, still sitting at the wheels of burned, skeletized trucks. Some of the smoking wreckage emits the odor of barbecuing chicken—the smell of slow-roasting human corpses inside. An LAV rolling a few meters in front of us stops by a shot-up Toyota pickup truck. A man inside appears to be moving. A Marine jumps out of the LAV, walks over to the pickup truck, sticks his rifle through the passenger window and sprays the inside of the vehicle with machine-gun fire.
Watching this apparent execution unfold, I wonder if shooting the Iraqi in the truck ahead of us was an act of barbarity or a mercy killing along the lines of the one Doc Bryan had tried to perform on the wounded man outside Al Muwaffaqiyah. There’s no time to sort this out.
We advance a few more kilometers, and Colbert’s team sets up a roadblock. We are now within four kilometers of Baqubah. My first encounter with the enemy prisoner whom Captain America had taunted and abused earlier takes place in the back of Fick’s Humvee parked nearby.
The prisoner is squirming on the truck bed, the burlap sack tied over his head, when I approach. A few Marines have gathered around and are taunting him. “What do you think you’d be doing to us if we were your prisoner?” a nineteen-year-old Marine rails at him.
Fick walks over. “Hey, I don’t want any war crimes in the back of my truck.” He says this lightly, having no idea yet of the brewing controversy surrounding the man’s capture. “Untie him and give him some water.”
The man’s arms are swollen