Generation Kill - Evan Wright [158]
FIRST RECON BATTALION only launches one patrol on its first full day in Baghdad. The problem is, the battalion has just one translator, Meesh. While looting and burning continues unabated in the city, the Marines, with nothing to do in First Recon’s “occupation force,” kill the day by exploring the factories, warehouses and offices in the complex.
I follow along with several on a mission to ratfuck the main office tower. Marines are hoping to find cool souvenirs to bring home. On the way in, the Marines grab giant crescent wrenches from one of the cigarette-factory buildings to break down doors.
The main office tower has already been claimed by the First Battalion, Fourth Marines. They guard the front entrances, but the ratfuck crew I’m with smashes through some of the side windows with their monkey wrenches and circumvents the sentries. We take stairs up to the eighth floor. Some of the outer offices are occupied by the SEAL sniper teams, still busily shooting Iraqis every few minutes.
We sneak into rooms containing vast rows of low cubicles. The Marines are simultaneously freaked out and disappointed. It looks like any boring American office. You can see some workers have gone to a lot of trouble to decorate the drab cubicle walls with family photos, framed kitschy pictures of peaceful sunsets, beaches, forests, as well Christmas and Valentine’s cards with holiday sentiments written on them in English.
Marines rifle through everything, looking for souvenirs, but all they find are colored pens and coffee mugs. “It’s all stupid crap,” one of them says, slamming his wrench into a computer screen.
The Marines kick down the door to what looks like the boss’s office in the corner. One of them sits behind the expansive wooden desk, punches buttons on the speakerphone and plays boss. “Have my secretary send in my next appointment,” he says in an obnoxiously official voice.
Then he starts smashing the phone and the desk apart with his wrench. The Marines destroy the boss’s office with gleeful vengeance, throwing stuff at the walls, pissing in the corner, all of them maniacally laughing. In a weird way, they’re living out the fantasy Carazales often talks about—in which one day a year the blue-collar man gets to go into rich neighborhoods and smash apart expensive homes.
AFTER TWO DAYS of aimless waiting, the Marines in Second Platoon finally get a mission in Baghdad. Their job is to enter a neighborhood north of Saddam City and drive through the streets. The goals are simple: to talk to locals who’ve never seen Americans before and to not get into any gunfights. Before leaving, Fick briefs his men. “If we take a potshot, don’t open up with a machine gun on a crowd. The days of running and gunning through towns are over.”
His precautionary briefing seems unnecessary when the Marines roll into the neighborhood. Compared to Saddam City, the place they enter seems almost bucolic. Broad, unpaved roads lead to large stucco homes that would not be out of place in San Diego. Lush gardens grow from vacant lots. Young men line the street and greet the Marines in halting, yet formal English. “Good morning, sir,” they say.
The Humvees drive for about 500 meters until a cluster of residents blocks the road. They stream out of their homes bearing jugs of water and hot tea, which they offer the Marines. Small girls emerge carrying roses for the Americans.
The neighborhood men gather around the Humvees, puffing cigarettes and bitching about life under Saddam. Most of their complaints are economic—the lack of jobs, the bribes that had to be paid to get basic services. “We have nothing to do but smoke, talk, play dominoes,” a wiry chain-smoking man in his late thirties tells me. “Saddam was an asshole. Life