Generation Kill - Evan Wright [156]
Espera bitterly recalls a past incident. Several years ago, when his father tried to patch things up by taking him on a fishing trip, his old man ended up stopping off at porn shop on their way to the lake. While Espera waited outside for his dad to finish his business in the private viewing booths, he got into an altercation with a man he believed was trying to cruise him in the parking lot, and Espera threw a brick through the windshield of the man’s car. “That was our father-son trip,” he says.
Since meeting his wife, Espera has become an avid reader, voraciously consuming everything from military histories to Chinese philosophy to Kurt Vonnegut (his favorite author). In the Middle East, he spends every free moment either reading or writing long letters to his wife, who works at an engineering firm in the San Fernando Valley. Tonight, at the cigarette factory, Espera reads me the beginning of a letter to his wife. “I’ve learned there are two types of people in Iraq,” he reads, “those who are very good and those who are dead. I’m very good. I’ve lost twenty pounds, shaved my head, started smoking, my feet have half rotted off, and I move from filthy hole to filthy hole every night. I see dead children and people everywhere and function in a void of indifference. I keep you and our daughter locked away deep down inside, and I try not to look there.” Espera stops reading and looks up at me. “Do you think that’s too harsh, dog?”
GUN BATTLES RAGE all night long in Baghdad. Marines sleep soundly on either side of me. I watch tracer rounds rising almost gracefully over the city. Some of this is probably just celebratory fire. But every fifteen minutes or so, powerful explosions go off, followed by furious bouts of weapons fire. During the lulls, ambulance sirens wail through the streets.
Occasionally rounds snap into the complex. You hear them zinging, then cracking as they strike nearby buildings.
After one of them hits, I hear a Marine in darkness say, “Is that all you’ve got?”
Ripples of laughter erupt. Between the gun battles and ambulance sirens, we hear singsong Arabic blaring through loudspeakers. It’s either muezzins calling prayers—unlikely after dark—or American psychological operations units trying to calm the people down by playing messages urging them to stop fighting. It’s not doing much good.
At around midnight I decide to use the toilet facilities. About 200 meters from where we sleep, Marines have set up a designated “shitter”—a grenade box perched over the open storm drain that encircles the cigarette factory complex. I creep over to it in the darkness. A solitary Marine is perched on the shitter. I wait a long time. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I finally make out what’s keeping him. His right arm is moving up and down. He’s getting in a late-night combat jack.
I leave him in peace and go over to another section of the storm drain. As I’m about to settle over it, I notice that on this side of the complex the wall separating us from the street is an open-stake fence. Marines had been told the complex was surrounded by a solid concrete wall, but in this corner you can look through to the street and shops just a few meters beyond. I decide to perch down anyway, but as I’m about to do so, a gun battle erupts on the street, maybe ten meters in front of me. Red lines of tracer rounds zoom past, skipping low over the pavement on the street directly before my eyes. You can’t see who’s shooting, how far away they are or what they’re aiming at. I retreat back to the Humvees.
I fall asleep to the sound of pitched street battles in Free Baghdad.
THIRTY-THREE
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EARLY THE NEXT MORNING,