Generation Kill - Evan Wright [44]
It’s about twenty kilometers to the bridge. The funny thing I notice between all the vehicles lined up on the road is that all the trash dropped by the Marines in the preceding twenty-four hours, which Espera had been railing about earlier in the morning, has been picked up.
The air is heavy with that fog of fine, powdery dust—familiar from Camp Mathilda but which we hadn’t seen a lot of until today. Cobras clatter directly overhead. They circle First Recon’s convoy, nosing down through the barren scrubland on either side of the road, hunting for enemy shooters. Before long, we are on our own. The helicopters are called off because fuel is short.
Then we clear the last of the vehicles in RCT-1’s convoy. A Marine standing by the road pumps his fist as Colbert’s vehicle drives past and shouts, “Get some!”
No one says anything in the vehicle.
We drive into a no-man’s-land. A burning fuel depot to our right spews fire and smoke. Garbage is strewn on either side of the road as far as the eye can see. It appears that we’re driving straight through the town trash dump, with shredded plastic bags littering the area like confetti after a parade. The convoy slows to a crawl, and the Humvee fills with a black cloud of flies.
“Now, this looks like Tijuana,” says Person.
“And this time I get to do what I’ve always wanted to do in T.J.,” Colbert adds. “Burn it to the ground.”
There is a series of thunderous, tooth-rattling explosions directly to the vehicle’s right. A Marine artillery battery is set up in a field next to the road, firing into Nasiriyah. The 155mm guns in the row have six-meter-long barrels spouting flames and black smoke with each shot. We draw even with them, then move ahead. It’s a strange sensation feeling those massive guns firing behind you. Marines who so scrupulously picked up all their litter this morning are now bombing the shit out of the city.
Up ahead are wrecked U. S. military vehicles, a burned-up Dragon Wagon military transport truck, a mangled Humvee. The windshield is riddled with bullet holes. We pass a few meters from the Humvee, close enough to see pools of brown fluid—probably blood—spilled on the ground by the doors.
We drive into an increasing gloom. The hundreds if not thousands of artillery rounds and bombs poured onto the city in the past twenty-four hours have kicked up a localized dust storm over the road. Visibility drops to a few kilometers.
“Small-arms fire to the rear,” Colbert says, passing word from the battalion radio. No one reacts. It’s like a weather bulletin.
“Car coming at twelve o’clock!” someone shouts. Weapons clatter as everyone readies to shoot it.
A white Toyota passenger car with orange fenders—the markings of an Iraqi taxicab—zooms out of the black cloud ahead, toward First Recon’s convoy, where, no doubt, up and down the line hundreds of Marines take aim to shoot it.
“No weapons! No weapons!” gunners shout in Colbert’s Humvee, meaning they don’t see any weapons in the cab.
The cab squeezes past Colbert’s Humvee and continues down the line. A taxi driving into a convoy of heavily armed Marines during a firefight and artillery bombardment seems insane. The stereotype of the reckless Arab cabdriver in New York City pops into my mind. Later, Marines figure out that cabs are used by Fedayeen to move through their lines and observe or to ferry troops. They’re also used by car bombers. And they’re used by civilians to evacuate the wounded.
Ever more powerful blasts boom outside the Humvee. We pass a succession of desiccated farmsteads—crude, square huts made of mud, with starved-looking livestock in front. Locals sit outside like spectators lining a parade route. A woman walks by the road with a basket on her head, oblivious to the explosions.
We reach the bridge over the Euphrates. Marines from Task Force Tarawa are spread out