Generation Kill - Evan Wright [159]
Aside from the complaints of the idle men, the most striking feature of the neighborhood is the hard labor performed by women. Covered in black robes, they squat beneath the sun in the empty-lot gardens, harvesting crops with knives, while children crawl at their feet. Others trudge past carrying sacks of grain on their heads. The division of labor exists even among children. Small boys run around playing soccer while little girls haul water. “Damn, the women are like mules here,” Person observes.
“If we’d have fought these women instead of men,” another Marine comments, “we might have got our asses kicked.”
The other culture shock for the Marines is that several of the men seem to be hitting on them. One asks Garza to lift up his glasses. When he does so, the man leans forward and says, “You have pretty eyes.”
Another of them asks a Marine if he likes boys or girls. When the Marine says, “Girls,” the man makes a face and says, “Girls. Blah!” Then he points to a young man standing nearby, makes an intercourse gesture with his fingers and says, “You go with my friend, you like.”
The Marines are amused. Soon Marines and Iraqis stand around the Humvees in a big, noisy klatch, laughing, trying to communicate through gestures and fractured English. They trade Marine gear, like their soft-cover hats, which Iraqis seem to universally prize, for Muslim prayer beads, which Marines all covet. After worrying that his Marines were going to indiscriminately shoot civilians, Fick has to wade in and break up the party.
The neighborhood is filled with unexploded munitions—mostly mortars and RPGs, fired by Iraqi forces, that failed to detonate. Fick roams around the area, scrupulously recording the locations of unexploded munitions in a handheld computer for a future removal effort.
Residents assail him with a list of other problems—lack of electricity and running water, broken phone lines, ransacked hospitals, bandits coming in at night and robbing homes, even the dearth of jobs. They expect the Americans, who so handily beat Saddam, will take care of everything. The Marines shake their hands, promise to see them again soon, and drive off, heroes for the day.
They never return to the neighborhood.
THE ORIGINAL PLAN Fick had briefed his men on executing—restoring stability to Baghdad by patrolling specific neighborhoods and rooting out Fedayeen and Baathists—never materializes. Instead, over the next several days, First Recon’s plans shift, as the city plunges further into chaos. The battalion moves from the cigarette factory to a wrecked children’s hospital north of the city to a looted power plant. Each time they change locations, Second Platoon is assigned new sectors to patrol. Within a few days, Fick admits to me the whole endeavor is so haphazard it seems to him at times like a “pointless exercise.”
The basic problem with the American occupation of liberated Baghdad is that the fighting is so heavy at night, most U.S. forces decide not to go out after dark. On their third day in Baghdad, Fick tells his men, “We’re not going out at night. There are too many revenge killings going on in the city. Mostly it’s Shias doing a lot of dirty work, taking out Fedayeen and Sunni Baathists.”
Lt. Col. Ferrando takes this even further, telling his senior men that the Shias are wiping out paramilitary forces through “a sort of an agreement” with the American occupiers. “We have to be careful about nighttime operations,” he tells his men, “because the Shias will be out doing the same things you are. They might want to engage you.”
An internal Marine intelligence report I come across, dated April 12, confidently predicts that the ability of hostile forces in Baghdad “to successfully and continually engage our forces will be complicated by the local Shias’ intolerance for regime paramilitary forces hiding out in their neighborhoods.”
The Americans’ assumption seems to