Generation Kill - Evan Wright [38]
Later, after they’ve refueled the Humvees, Fick issues specific orders. “Our objective is a town called Nasiriyah, a crossing point on the Euphrates. The word is the Army passed through it twenty-four hours ago and declared it ‘secure.’ ”
At the time Fick is delivering his sunny assessment on conditions at Nasiriyah, an Army maintenance unit has just been ambushed outside of town, about four hours earlier, sustaining numerous casualties.
(Fick later speculates that the optimistic assessment he was given on the state of Nasiriyah stemmed from a foul-up fairly typical of military communications, which can take on the aspect of a game of telephone. “The Marine Corps had been expecting the Iraqis to blow the bridges in Nasiriyah,” he explains. “Someone probably reported that the bridges were ‘intact,’ and this got changed to ‘the bridges are secure,’ to ‘the whole town is secure.’ ”)
Colbert’s team pulls back from the canal with the rest of the battalion and drops onto a freeway, bound for Nasiriyah. They join several thousand U.S. military vehicles driving north at forty-five miles per hour, which in military convoys is lightning speed. “Look at this, gents,” Colbert says. “The First Marine Division out of Camp Pendleton rolling with impunity on Saddam’s highways.”
It’s a bright, clear day. No dust at all. Several hundred Iraqi children line the highway, shouting gleefully. “Yes, we are the conquering heroes,” Colbert says.
Everyone’s spirits are up. Colbert seems to have gotten over his disappointment at the scrubbing of his team’s bridge mission. The sense is that this campaign is unfolding like the last Gulf War, an Iraqi rout in battle followed by an American race to gobble up abandoned territory as swiftly as possible.
“As soon as we capture Baghdad,” Person says, “Lee Greenwood is going to parachute in singing ‘I’m Proud to Be an American.’ ”
“Watch it,” Colbert says. “You know the rule.”
One of the cardinal rules of Colbert’s Humvee is that no one is permitted to make any references to country music. He claims that the mere mention of country, which he deems “the Special Olympics of music,” makes him physically ill.
Along the highway, they pass columns of tanks and other vehicles emblazoned with American flags or moto slogans such as “Angry American” or “Get Some.” Person spots a Humvee with the 9/11 catchphrase “Let’s Roll!” stenciled on the side.
“I hate that cheesy patriotic bullshit,” Person says. He mentions Aaron Tippin’s “Where the Stars and Stripes and the Eagles Fly,” then scoffs, “Like how he sings those country white-trash images. ‘Where eagles fly.’ Fuck! They fly in Canada, too. Like they don’t fly there? My mom tried to play me that song when I came home from Afghanistan. I was like, ‘Fuck, no, Mom. I’m a Marine. I don’t need to fly a little flag on my car to show I’m patriotic.’ ”
“That song is straight homosexual country music, Special Olympics–gay,” Colbert says.
By noon the battalion cuts off the freeway to Route 7, a two-lane blacktop road leading into Nasiriyah. Within an hour Colbert’s team is mired in a massive traffic jam. We stop about twenty kilometers south of Nasiriyah, amidst several thousand Marine vehicles bunched up on the highway. We are parked beside approximately 200 tractor-trailers hauling bulldozers, pontoon sections and other equipment for building bridges. Among these are numerous dump trucks hauling gravel. One has to marvel at the might—or hubris—of a military force that invades a sand- and rock-strewn country but brings its own gravel.
UNBEKNOWNST TO THE MARINES stopped on the highway on this lazy afternoon, twenty kilometers ahead of them the American military is experiencing its first setback of the war. Marine units are bogged down in a series of firefights