Generation Kill - Evan Wright [36]
Colbert’s team drives along a winding canal, watching for enemy forces, while Person discusses the band he formed after high school, Me or Society. A heavy-metal rap group, his band once opened for Limp Bizkit at a show in Kansas City. “We sucked, but so did they,” Person says. “The only difference is, they became famous right after we played together. I became a Marine.”
Colbert brings up a mutual friend in the battalion who listens to death metal and hangs out in vampire clubs in Hollywood.
“You remember that time he went out dressed in diapers and a gas mask?” Person says, laughing appreciatively.
Trombley, who seldom jumps into conversations between Colbert and Person, can’t hide his disgust. “That’s sick. Can you believe we’re defending people’s freedom to do that?”
Colbert corrects him, delivering a sharp civics lesson. “No, Trombley. That’s good that people have the freedom to do that. We’re even defending people like Corporal Person, too.”
The land is fertile along the canal. There are scruffy pastures, as well as little hamlets, each consisting of two or three mud huts bunched together. “Keep your eyes on the swivel,” Colbert reminds his chatty team. “This is backcountry.”
But villagers who come out by the trail greet the Marines with smiles. A teenage boy and girl walk ahead on the trail, holding hands.
“Kind of cute,” Colbert observes. “Don’t shoot them, Garza,” he adds.
As they roll past the hand-holding teens, Colbert and Person wave at them and start singing the South Park version of “Loving You,” with the lyrics “Loving you is easy ’cause you’re bare-chested.”
We bump onto a set of rail tracks and follow them toward a narrow bridge across the canal. The battalion has chosen a train bridge as its crossing point over the canal. According to Colbert, spy planes have observed the train bridge for several days, and everyone is reasonably sure that no freight trains will appear around the bend on the other side. The Humvee jiggles so intensely on the railroad ties, it feels like someone is sawing my teeth. We pull onto the bridge. It’s about seventy-five meters long and just wide enough for the Humvee. I look out my window and see pebbles kicked up by the tires tumble into the water five meters below.
“Just think how easy it would be to drive off the edge right now,” Person says.
“Yeah,” Colbert says. “You could have an epileptic fit, a bee could sting you or one of your zits could explode.”
“That’s why I popped them all this morning, so we would be safe.”
WE REACH THE OBSERVATION POSITION by the canal after dark. Lights twinkle from a town several kilometers west. Obviously, electricity still works in parts of Iraq. When the Humvee stops, we hear crickets and frogs. The place seems untouched by war. Colbert’s team sets up in line with the platoon along a low berm running in front of the canal. The men prepare for another chilly, sleepless night. Through their night optics they observe villagers moving around huts a few hundred meters away on the other side of the canal. Iraqi armored forces are suspected of being on the move somewhere beyond the villages. At about nine o’clock, orange flashes burst on the horizon several kilometers northeast of the canal. U.S. warplanes are bombing targets.
Greater numbers of Iraqis appear on the other side of the canal—bunches of them moving—and the Marines judge them to be military deserters fleeing the American bombing. But some Marines grow edgy.
A few vehicles down the line from Colbert’s, Doc Bryan is nearly shot by a nervous Marine, a senior enlisted man. Doc Bryan rides with Lovell’s Team Three. He is crouching by his team’s vehicle, observing the village on the other side, when he feels a burning sensation in his eyeball. It takes him a moment to figure out: Someone is pointing an infrared-laser aiming device from a rifle into the side of his eye. The laser’s invisible, but he feels its