Generation Kill - Evan Wright [45]
The bridge is a long, broad concrete structure. It spans nearly a kilometer and arches up gracefully toward the middle. The guardrails on both sides are twisted and riddled with bullet holes. The dust and smoke is so dense it’s like being in a snowstorm. We can’t even make out the city on the other side of the bridge. The span simply disappears into a gray cloud bank.
After fifteen minutes of solid tension inside the Humvee, Person cannot repress the urge to make a goofy remark. He turns to Colbert, smiling. “Hey, you think I have enough driving hours now to get my Humvee license?”
First Recon’s column cuts off the road at the causeway where the bridge starts. We take a left down a dirt trail and drive below the bridge to the banks of the Euphrates. There we finally glimpse Nasiriyah on the other side. The front of the city is a jumble of irregularly shaped two- and three-story structures. Iraqi towns are characterized by uniform dullness of color, buildings constructed somewhat haphazardly out of mud bricks or from cinder blocks covered in stucco. Everything is the shade of earth, of the dust that hangs in the air. Through the haze, the buildings appear as a series of dim, slanted outlines, like a row of crooked teeth.
To our immediate right, a dozen or so Marines from Task Force Tarawa sit between the bridge pilings beneath the elevated roadway. Some are stretched out, sleeping, despite the steady blasts of Marine artillery landing in the city on the opposite riverbank. One of the Marines sits upright, puffing on a fat cigar. His face is black with grime. He stares expressionlessly at Colbert’s Humvee. No moto greeting of Get some! from him.
First Recon’s Alpha and Charlie companies set up along the bank of the river, facing the city. Bravo pulls back about seventy-five meters from the river’s edge.
The whole maneuver—driving seventy-five meters from the riverbank—takes about fifteen minutes. The ten Humvees in Bravo Company’s two platoons run into about twenty trucks from the battalion’s Support and Headquarters Company, which are trying to drive into a field farther back from the bridge. The Humvees drive around like clown cars as everyone shouts over the radios or out their windows to direct traffic. Finally, Colbert’s Humvee stops next to the road leading onto the bridge. There’s no clear order of what Bravo is doing here yet.
Colbert can’t get over the lush greenery of the palm groves and fields around us. After two months in the desert, it’s jarring to suddenly have arrived in Mesopotamia’s fertile surroundings on the outskirts of the Garden of Eden. Even as Marine artillery rounds blow it to smithereens, Colbert keeps repeating, “Look at these fucking trees.”
An enemy mortar explodes nearby. A mortar blast is different from artillery. You hear the blast as an artillery shell is fired, then the sound of it whizzing through the sky, followed by the boom as it hits. Mortars come out of nowhere. There’s no warning, just a blast, and a column of black smoke where it hits. If they’re close you feel a sharp increase in the air pressure. The sonic vibrations make the hairs on your body tingle, and your teeth feel numb for an instant.
Another mortar bangs outside. Person smiles. “You know that feeling before a debate when you gotta piss and you’ve got that weird feeling in your stomach, then you go in and kick ass?” he says. “I don’t have that feeling now.”
A machine gun rattles up on the riverbank.
“Stand by for shit to get stupid,” Person says, sounding merely annoyed.
SEVENTY-FIVE METERS in front of us are the men in First Recon’s Alpha and Charlie companies, spread across the southern banks of the Euphrates. They form a line stretching for nearly a kilometer from the bridge on their eastern side to grassy fields on the west. The men begin taking sporadic sniper