Generation Kill - Evan Wright [47]
Now, he and his men come under increasing fire at the riverbank. His Marines spot an anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) battery shooting at them from across the river. AAA guns fire large-caliber rounds from multiple barrels, like extremely high-powered machine guns. They are designed to shred aircraft flying thousands of meters overhead, but in Iraq, gunmen point the barrels down and aim them at ground targets, such as Marines. Their fire is devastating, and this one, about a kilometer and a half down the riverbank, is beyond the effective range of the heaviest weapons possessed by the Marines in First Recon.
Patterson and his men notice some Marines from Task Force Tarawa a couple hundred meters away. Among them is a Javelin team.
The Javelin is basically a big, honking, shoulder-fired missile for blowing up tanks. Patterson brings the Javelin crew forward. Within minutes they fire a missile into the AAA battery across the river. Patterson watches through his binoculars as a direct hit from the Javelin blows up the AAA battery, setting off numerous secondary explosions as nearby stocks of munitions cook off. He estimates the one strike takes out three to five Iraqis who’d been manning the AAA guns. “It felt good to get revenge for the Marines from Task Force Tarawa killed in Nasiriyah,” Patterson later admits.
Now, directly across the river, every Iraqi with an AK or machine gun seems to open up on First Recon’s position. Apparently, the Javelin strike alerted everyone in the city with a gun to the Marines’ presence here. Taking concentrated enemy fire, the men in Alpha and Charlie lose their inhibitions about possibly shooting women in the city. Up and down the line, just about every rifle, machine gun and grenade launcher roars to life. For about sixty seconds they savage the city, pouring thousands of rounds into it. Patterson later says of this first burst of wild, fairly indiscriminate fire, “They all had to pop their cherries.”
IN THE STORM OF SHOOTING set off by Alpha’s attack on the AAA gun, enemy fire rakes the area around Colbert’s Humvee, seventy-five meters back from the riverfront. Bravo Second Platoon occupies slightly elevated ground behind Alpha’s position, but luckily most of the Iraqi fire seems to be wildly high. A row of palm trees between us and the riverbank shivers as rounds rip through fronds and send puffs of smoke off the trunks. Incoming rounds, I notice as I crouch down to the ground beside Colbert’s vehicle, make a zinging sound, just as they do in Bugs Bunny cartoons.
Initially, Marines in Bravo stand outside their vehicles, milling around with stupid smiles on their faces. Several are giggling. It’s like everyone just stepped onto the set of a war movie. One of First Recon’s seniormost enlisted men struts past, shouting, “Gotta love this shit! We’re in the middle of it now, boys!” He sounds like the emcee at a pro-wrestling smackdown. “It is on!”
This senior enlisted man, in his mid-forties, is one of those thickly built, slightly overweight guys whose fat just makes him look like an even bigger bully than he is. His job is to be the grand enforcer of discipline within the enlisted ranks, to be sort of a professional dickhead. Fairly or unfairly, the Marines’ nickname for him is the “Coward of Khafji.”
Khafji, a small Saudi Arabian town south of the Kuwait border, was the setting of one of the earliest battles of the first Gulf War. In the official version, Iraqi mechanized units, probing for American weaknesses, dropped into Khafji, surprising advance Marine units occupying the town, kicking off a forty-eight-hour battle to extricate the Americans.
According to several enlisted men and officers in First Recon, the battle of Khafji was actually triggered by several Marines who veered into the town to make phone calls to their families and girlfriends at home. As incredible as this sounds, it’s