Generation Kill - Evan Wright [161]
Espera, who’s been listening to Hossein’s analysis, offers his own take on the situation. “Let a motherfucker use an American toilet for a week and they’ll forget all about this Sunni-Shia bullshit.”
Doc Bryan sets up a medical station under some ponchos in front of his Humvee. Mothers bring children sick with giardia caused by drinking dirty water, feverish infants, a girl whose legs were burned when a cooking fire exploded. Men start pushing to the front of the line, complaining of headaches and sleeplessness. Like the guy we met in the first neighborhood, they want Valium. Another family brings a son who can’t walk, hoping that Doc Bryan can cure him like a faith healer. A fight nearly breaks out between a Marine and men in Doc Bryan’s line who are stealing candy the Marines are giving to the sick children. By this time, hundreds of people throng the Marines’ position, just trying to get a look at the Americans.
The Marines are driven out as the pandemonium grows. Farther into the neighborhood, hundreds of people descend on the Humvees. What Marines had initially viewed as jubilation begins to feel increasingly like hysteria. The mob’s incessant chanting starts to drive the men crazy. Everyone who approaches is dirty, scared and desperately in need of help, which the Marines are incapable of giving. They nearly run over children who fall in front of the Humvees while running beside them. At one stop, Fick and I get out and see kids rocking on an unexploded artillery shell, gleefully bouncing on it like a hobbyhorse. “This is madness,” Fick concludes.
As the Marines gather around their concrete sleeping area that night, some are disgusted by the behavior of the Iraqis. “What American man,” Doc Bryan asks, “would cut in a line of children with life-threatening illnesses to try to get Valium for a headache, then steal their fucking candy? I have no respect for these men.”
“Bro, it’s not that bad here,” a Marine says in the darkness. “Just think if someone invaded Los Angeles. Americans would fucking riot if their cable went out for three days. These people don’t have water, electricity, hospitals, sewers, nothing, and they’re waving and smiling.”
“They won’t be for long,” Espera says. “Iraqis have a short attention span just like the American public. As soon as they stop celebrating that we got rid of Saddam and we cut ’em off at the titty—they figure out we’re not going to be pouring money into this motherfucker, giving everyone a new car and a color TV—they’ll turn on us.”
IN AN EFFORT to reach out to community leaders, Bravo Company sends Meesh to meet with the imam at a Shia mosque during a patrol. This neighborhood in north Baghdad is marginally better off than others. There’s no sewage in the streets, and the low apartment blocks and shops near the mosque look tidy. The mosque itself is a squat, stucco building, with a small dome and a minaret not much bigger than a telephone pole. There are loudspeakers hanging from it for the prayers broadcast through the neighborhood.
Meesh enters the mosque early in the afternoon. Several young men who serve as the imam’s bodyguards train their AKs on him the moment Meesh sets foot in the gloomy anteroom. After twenty minutes of negotiating with these characters, one of them leads him into the imam’s office in the back.
The imam, a man in his early fifties who studied in Iran, looks to Meesh almost exactly like a younger version of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, with a long, pointed white beard and dark-black eyebrows. Though Meesh is a Sunni—as well as a beer-drinking dope smoker—he and the imam kneel and perform a prayer together. Then, according to Meesh, the imam tells him he welcomes the Americans, so long as they don’t expose the Iraqi people to corrupting Western influences. Meesh tells the imam the Marines will try to bring some water the next