Generation Kill - Evan Wright [29]
“A scared little bitch,” Colbert says. He and Person stare together at the Marine they deem cowardly, bonding in their mutual contempt. The judgment of the pack is relentless and unmerciful.
At about seven in the morning on March 21, the battalion is ordered into the breach. The early-morning light glares through the smudged windshield. The earthen berms, seven meters high, loom ahead. Beyond, black smoke from oil fires seems to fold over the horizon like a blanket. We enter the breach zone, small mountains of sand, littered with scraps of metal piled on either side. Beside me, Trombley slumps over his SAW, snoring.
“Wake up, Trombley,” Colbert says. “You’re missing the invasion.”
SIX
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COLBERT’S FIRST IMPRESSION of Iraq is that it looks like “fucking Tijuana.” We’ve pulled onto a two-lane asphalt road rolling through a border town north of the breach. There’s a row of shops on one side—cinder-block structures with colorful hand-painted signs and steel shutters pulled over their fronts, with a smashed-up Toyota truck pushed off on the side of the road, probably by a tank. It’s ghostville.
All of the major Marine combat forces are racing east or hugging the border, leaving no other friendly combat forces in First Recon’s area of operation. The battalion pushes north in a single-file line alone on unpaved trails through what has become open, almost lunar desert, periodically dotted with mud huts, small flocks of sheep and clusters of starved-looking, stick-figure cattle grazing on scrub brush. Once in a while you see wrecked vehicles: burnt-out tanks and car frames, perhaps left over from the first Gulf War. Plumes of smoke clog the horizon to the east from the oil fires in Rumaylah.
At the small-unit level, everyone’s survival boils down to simple human observation. Each Marine in the vehicle is charged with watching a specific sector. To my left, Trombley keeps his SAW machine gun trained out his window. In front of me, Colbert rides leaning into the scope of his M-4 pointed out the passenger window on the right. The Humvees are vulnerable to small arms—AK rifles, RPGs and light machine guns from up to about 600 meters distant, and heavier weapons beyond this range. With each vehicle’s main gun—the Mark-19 grenade launcher or the .50-cal machine gun—accurate to about 1,000 meters, the goal is to identify and destroy any hostile threats before they come within range of the Humvee.
The Marines chatter constantly, calling out everything they see in the surrounding desert—a pipe 300 meters off that could be the barrel of a gun, a shepherd in the distance whose staff could be an AK—while passing binoculars back and forth, and trading information with the other Humvee teams over the radio.
Berms are the dominant feature of Iraq, whether here in the southern desert or in the greener farmlands north of the Euphrates. Berms are man-made piles of sand or earth, ranging in height from a couple of meters to a couple of stories. They are built on the sides of the dry canals, which are scratched throughout the desert. They are built as walls, to contain pastures, to demarcate grazing lands, as windbreaks or as military fortifications. They go in all directions. People have been digging berms here pretty much continually for the past 5,000 years.
The newest berms, which seem to have been excavated in the past few months, hide deep bulldozed pits called revetments, intended to conceal tanks. Every few hundred meters along the berms in some stretches of the desert there are two-meter-high conical towers capped with sandbags, to serve as machine-gun nests. All fortifications appear to have been abandoned.
Colbert’s team passes through them warily. Small groups of hostile forces could be concealed anywhere. In addition, Fick keeps passing down reports he’s receiving from higher-ups in the battalion—rumors of stray Iraqi tank units allegedly operating somewhere in the desert. But no one sees any signs