Generation Kill - Evan Wright [162]
Within hours of Meesh’s meeting, the loudspeakers from the minaret blare a message from the imam: “It is against your religion to harm Americans.” Then the imam’s guards go through the neighborhood, painting messages in red on the stucco walls lining the streets. They say, “An AK used after sunset is a tool of damnation.” At least this is what Meesh claims happens as result of his meeting with the imam.
The next morning Second Platoon returns to the mosque, escorting a military tanker truck to distribute 2,000 gallons of fresh water to the residents. The Marines park the truck beside the mosque in an open dirt lot and wait beneath overcast skies. Unlike the day before, when crowds had turned out cheering the Marines, this morning there’s almost no one on the streets. The few adults and children who are out hang back, staring vacantly. The Marines stand around the truck, holding a hose up, beckoning people to come and get the free water, but in twenty minutes only two or three venture forward. “All week people have been asking for water,” Fick says. “We finally bring it to them, and nobody fucking wants it.”
Though Meesh vows to me that the messages blared from the mosque and painted on the walls by the imam’s followers were all pro-American, something has dramatically changed in the neighborhood. The people seem almost frightened of the Marines. I press Meesh about this. “Are you sure the imam said he wanted the Americans to come here?” I ask him.
“Dude, the meeting was totally cool,” Meesh assures me.
Whatever really transpired with the imam, only Meesh knows. As has been the case since the invasion began, First Recon Battalion is almost entirely dependent on Meesh for all its Arabic intelligence gathering. It’s not that Meesh is a bad guy, but it’s astonishing to me that in an elite unit of American forces, among the first to occupy the capital city of a conquered country, there’s no one within the command structure who fluently speaks the local language.
ONE WEEK after arriving in Baghdad, Second Platoon finally receives orders for a night mission. There’s a park in Baghdad that Fedayeen are suspected of using as an operations base. Second Platoon is ordered to set up observation posts near the park overnight, then move in and sweep it for signs of hostile forces in the morning.
An hour before sunset, the platoon moves into position on a high berm near the park. When the sun drops, the vast city, without any electricity, goes nearly black. Then tracers light up the sky from the gun battles raging on all sides of the berm we occupy.
What makes the spectacle of these nocturnal gun battles even stranger is the fact that a kilometer to our east, a freeway is filled with cars streaming into Baghdad. We watch the fire course over the string of headlights.
Fick and I are taking this all in when he receives a call on his radio from his commander, Encino Man, who suggests he send foot patrols out tonight into the neighborhoods below. Encino Man tells him that Lt. Col. Ferrando has decided, after a week of keeping the men off the streets at night, that it’s time for the Marines to become “more aggressive.”
Fick resists the order, telling Encino Man he’s going to keep his men in a defensive position on the berm and not move until dawn. He sits down next to Gunny Wynn and vents. “Look at this,” he says, gesturing to the hundreds of tracer lines zipping through the sky. “They want me to be ‘more aggressive,’ to send the men into this? For what? Just to be out there waving the American flag? So I can come home with nineteen men instead of twenty?”
Fick watches the ongoing destruction in the city, then adds, “If Iraq stays a flaming cesspool until the end of time, does anyone really care? Does it fucking matter?