Generation Kill - Evan Wright [166]
The engineers earlier spent the day in the field removing more than 150 mines. Dill, a compactly built twenty-seven-year-old with a tattoo on his right calf that says MINEFIELD MAINTENANCE is passionate about land mines. Before he was attached to First Recon he spent a year at Guantánamo in Cuba removing mines from the fields the U.S. sowed there in the 1960s. Other engineers who work with him consider Dill an inspirational figure. “He makes everybody excited about our jobs,” says a Marine who serves under him.
Combat engineers tend to be fanatical about their profession. Perhaps it’s a prerequisite. De-mining, which is usually done completely by touch—probing the earth with plastic rods, then feeling each mine to check for antihandling booby traps and removing it by hand—is highly stressful. According to their own guidelines, engineers are not supposed to pull more than twelve antitank mines a day, given the toll it takes on their nerves.
During the afternoon of April 22, Dill removed more than thirty mines from the field beside the road (with his team gathering an additional 120, which they detonated in a terrific explosion just before reentering the field after dark). Now, standing on the road in the glare of the Humvees’ headlights, Dill observes what appears to be a mine in a portion of the field believed to have been cleared. He and Valdez, twenty-eight, step off the road to investigate.
A third engineer standing far back on the road, twenty-three-year-old Sergeant Randy Weiss, sees Dill and Valdez walk off the road and is about to caution them but decides against it. Weiss later tells me, “If anyone knows what he’s doing, it’s Gunny Dill.” Not only is Dill Weiss’s mentor within the Marines, they are good friends. Both of them married, each with a young child, they live near each other off-base, and their wives are close.
There’s a tremoundous blast as Dill steps on a mine at the edge of the road. Weiss is temporarily blinded by spraying debris, even though he’s nearly ten meters back from the explosion.
Kocher, standing directly behind Dill on the road, is thrown onto his back. He goes temporarily deaf from the blast, and his eyes reflexively shut. In the immediate aftermath, only his olfactory sense still functions. He smells burning flesh. Kocher opens his eyes and sees Dill lying a few meters out in the field, thrown there by the explosion.
When Kocher rises to his feet, the ringing in his ears subsides. He hears Dill yelling, “I’m bleeding out! Throw me a tourniquet.”
Kocher and his team’s corpsman, forty-six-year-old Navy Hospitalman First Class George Graham, walk about four meters into the minefield. Dill screams, “Get the fuck out of here!”
Kocher sees that Dill’s foot hangs from his leg at a weird angle. The boot is shredded. His toes are exposed, dangling by some skin. His heel is blown off, and his tib-fib bones are sticking out, the ends charred and smoking. He stepped on the smallest mine in the field, a BS-50 Italian “toe-popper.” He and Graham tourniquet him off and carry him back to the road. (The next day, when engineers return to the field, they find two other mines a few inches from the footprints made by Kocher and Graham.)
Redman had been manning the Humvee’s .50-cal ten meters back on the road when the explosion went off. The first thing Redman heard in the aftermath was Captain America screaming, “I’m hit! I’m hit!”
For an instant, Redman, he later admits, is flooded with a sense of relief. If Captain America were indeed taken out of action, a lot of Marines’ prayers would be answered. But it turns out the shrapnel Captain America thinks is in his arm is nothing but an imaginary pain.
Redman leaps into the front of the Humvee and joins Carazales, the driver. They try to radio the battalion for medical assistance. First Recon’s camp is only one or two kilometers distant, but the radios aren’t functioning.
Redman jumps onto the highway. He sees Valdez