Generation Kill - Evan Wright [153]
We drive back to Baghdad in darkness. Person, at the wheel, navigating with NVGs on his helmet, begins to sing, “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.”
“Hold on, buddy!” Colbert shouts. “No goddamn country music.”
“That’s not country,” Person insists. “It’s a cowboy song.”
“I hate to break it to you, but there are no cowboys,” Colbert says.
“Yeah, there are,” Person says, his voice simultaneously flat yet defiant. “There’s tons of cowboys.”
“A cowboy isn’t some dipshit with a ten-gallon hat and a dinner plate on his belt,” Colbert says. “There haven’t been any real cowboys for almost a hundred years. Horse raising is a science now. Cattle raising is an industry.”
A report comes over the radio of enemy fire on the column. “Hold on,” Colbert says, reluctantly putting the argument aside. “I’d like to hear about this firefight.”
War Pig, driving ahead of us on the same highway the battalion fought its way up earlier, is again taking fire from both sides of the road. Tracers stream through the night sky. We drive into the gunfire. Enemy muzzle flashes jet toward us from the right side of the road no more than five meters from my window. Colbert opens up on the position, his rifle clattering. Spent shell casings ejected from the side of his M-4 rain down inside the Humvee. If his past performances in these types of situations are any guide, there’s a strong likelihood he hit his target. I picture an enemy fighter bleeding in a cold, dark ditch and feel no remorse—at this time.
We drive the next ten kilometers in near silence, while the Marines search for additional targets, until we leave the ambush zone. Colbert pulls his weapon back in from the window and resumes his discussion with Person. “The point is, Josh, people that sing about cowboys are annoying and stupid.”
THIRTY-TWO
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BY THE NIGHT OF APRIL 9, offensive U.S. military operations in Baghdad have ceased. The city is taken. Crowds have toppled Saddam statues. American military units are pouring into the city to begin the occupation.
We reach the outskirts of Baghdad at about eleven o’clock, having driven straight from Baqubah. We arrive in the same industrial suburbs we passed through the day before. The looters are gone, the streets are empty, the city is black. A few fires rage in the distance, sending columns of flame over Baghdad, but given the level of destruction Marines have witnessed recently, the place seems relatively tranquil. The American artillery that was pounding continuously for the past several days is silent. We pass construction sites where military bulldozers, with floodlights mounted on them, are laboring in the night. The military machine that crushes everything in its path is quickly followed by armies of worker-ant battalions, who’ve already marched up and begun smoothing out the rubble and building infrastructure. We drive into a sprawling supply depot and fueling station erected in the past several hours to service thousands of American vehicles. There’s a sense in the air tonight that Baghdad is pacified, the Americans are now quietly, efficiently in control. It’s perhaps the only time things will ever appear this way to the men in First Recon.
FIRST RECON enters central Baghdad on April 10, at about three in the afternoon. Colbert’s team drives with Hasser at the wheel, singing the hobo classic “King of the Road.” We approach the