Generation Kill - Evan Wright [31]
At this point in the day, the Marines in Colbert’s vehicle are pretty much in the dark as to what they’re doing. They’ve been pushing north for hours, but they’re not heading in the right direction to begin the mission they have all trained for: seizing the bridge on the Euphrates.
Colbert tries to tune in the BBC during a brief halt. The BBC will emerge as the best source of information on the invasion in which the Marines are participating—even Battalion Commander Lt. Col. Ferrando relies on it. But during this stop, reception is too spotty to pick up any news. “I have no intel, no big picture,” Colbert tells his team.
Fick approaches the vehicle and tells Colbert that the battalion isn’t going to the bridge tonight. Instead, everyone will be heading to an elevated train track at a place called Burayyat An Rataw. He has no idea why.
The desert leading up to the tracks is littered with industrial trash—shredded tires, old fence posts, wrecked machinery, wild dogs and, every thirty meters it seems, a lone rubber flip-flop. Person calls each one out, “ ’Nother flip-flop. ’Nother dude walking around somewhere with one sandal on.”
“Shut the fuck up, Person,” Colbert says.
“You know what happens when you get out of the Marine Corps,” Person continues. “You get your brains back.”
“I mean it, Person. Shut your goddamn piehole.”
At times, the two of them bicker like an old married couple. Being a rank lower than Colbert, Person can never directly express anger to him, but on occasions when Colbert is too harsh and Person’s feelings are hurt, his driving becomes erratic. There are sudden turns, and the brakes are hit for no reason. It will happen even in combat situations, with Colbert suddenly in the role of wooing his driver back with retractions and apologies.
But late this afternoon, nearing the tracks, Colbert doesn’t have the patience to play games. He’s wrestling with profound disappointment. Since the night I met him he’d been talking about how excited he was to carry out this bridge-seizure mission. His platoon and his team had been slated to lead the way to the bridge for the entire battalion. Colbert was going to be one of the first Americans to reach the Euphrates. Back at Camp Mathilda, he had told me that this task was going to be “the recon mission of a lifetime.” But now it’s off.
We stop in the chalk-white desert about a kilometer south of the railroad tracks at Burayyat An Rataw. They run east-west along an elevated roadbed that stretches as far as the eye can see. We are now approximately seventy kilometers north of the border. The next-closest American unit is more than thirty kilometers away. First Recon is very much alone here. Earlier in the day, there were some overflights from Cobras, but there’s no air cover now.
Like a lot of civilians whose memories of the first Gulf War were shaped by gee-whiz Pentagon camera footage shown on CNN of U.S. bombs and missiles striking Iraqi targets with pinpoint accuracy, I had assumed that American spy planes and satellites could see everything on the ground. But in this war, an intelligence officer in the First Marine Division tells me, “We think we know where about seventy percent