Generation Kill - Evan Wright [42]
Doc Bryan rants, “Marines are dying up the road, and we’re sitting back here with our thumbs up our asses.”
A while later, Doc Bryan’s prayers are answered. At twelve-thirty on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, a somber Fick gathers his team leaders for a briefing. “In approximately one hour, we are going to bust north to the bridge at the Euphrates,” he says. “Change in the ROE: Anyone with a weapon is declared hostile. If it’s a woman walking away from you with a weapon on her back, shoot her. If there is an armed Iraqi out there, shoot him. I don’t care if you hit him with a forty-millimeter grenade in the chest.”
When he finishes, Espera says, “Sir, we’re going to go home to a mess after we start wasting these villages. People aren’t going to like that.”
“I know,” Fick says. “We now risk losing the PR war. Fighting in urban terrain is exactly what Saddam wanted us to do.”
Fick has no clear idea what First Recon will be doing at the bridge. The word he’s been given from his commander is that his platoon is going to serve as a quick reaction force to rush into the city and evacuate Marines that are wounded there. But the details he has on this mission are sketchy. He’s not even certain of what route they’re going to be taking through the city, or even what their destination will be once they get there.
After his briefing, Fick does what he often does in a difficult situation: He turns to Colbert for advice. When I first met Fick and heard him extol the intelligence and character of his men, I had wondered if this was just lip service. But I’ve found in the past few days of the invasion that whenever there’s a problem—a life-and-death one, such as this mission—Fick always turns to his men for guidance. Now he and Colbert and other team leaders spread out maps of Nasiriyah on the hood of his Humvee and try to figure out where in the hell they might be going. There are several routes through the city (which is spread across approximately sixteen square kilometers), and they have no idea which their mission into the city will take.
Meanwhile, Espera gathers men from his team and Colbert’s and passes on the briefing Fick just delivered on the change in the ROE. He summarizes Fick’s briefing like this: “You see a motherfucker through a window with an AK, cap his ass.” But then he warns the men, “Don’t get buck fever like Casey Kasem did the other night at the canal. You cap an old lady sweeping her porch, ’cause you think her broom is a weapon, it’s on all of us.”
THE REASON FIRST RECON and all the rest of the Marines have been waiting on the highway south of Nasiriyah for twenty-four hours and now are venturing out with orders that are unclear is that their leaders aren’t quite sure what to do. Ever since lead elements of Task Force Tarawa were unexpectedly chewed apart and stopped in their advance through the city yesterday, Marine commanders have been waffling.
The point of taking Nasiriyah and its bridge is clear enough. The city is a gateway into central Iraq. From the start, Maj. Gen. Mattis’s invasion plan has hinged on sending a substantial Marine force through central Iraq on a route that stretches for 185 kilometers from Nasiriyah in the south to Al Kut in the north. Al Kut sits on the Tigris and commands key bridges that the invading force will need to cross in order to reach Baghdad.
The land between Nasiriyah and Al Kut is historically known as the Fertile Crescent or Mesopotamia, which is Greek for “land between two rivers”—the Euphrates and the Tigris. Mesopotamia has been inhabited for more than 5,000 years. Its terrain is a starkly contrasting patchwork of barren desert and lush, tropical growth, all interlaced with canals. It was here that humankind first invented the wheel, the written word and algebra. Some biblical scholars believe that Mesopotamia was the site of the Garden of Eden.
Mattis’s plan is to invade it with a Regimental Combat Team—designated as RCT-1—a force of about 6,000 Marines. First Recon will serve as RCT-1’s advance element. His objectives are twofold: to pin down