Generation Kill - Evan Wright [48]
In the legend circulating through First Recon, the senior enlisted man they’ve nicknamed the “Coward of Khafji,” then a sergeant in another unit, was among those who led the charge on Khafji’s available phones. Marines were frantically dialing home when several noticed a sizable force of Iraqi soldiers occupying a nearby building. As the story goes, the “Coward of Khafji” jumped into a Humvee and fled the town, leaving behind his buddies. He later told his fellow troops he had fled in the interest of saving a “water bull” (storage tank) attached to the rear of his Humvee and preventing it from falling into Iraqi hands. (When I ask him about the veracity of this story, he denies it happened that way but refuses to provide any details.) Whatever the truth, the Coward of Khafji name has stuck.
Now, as the Coward of Khafji walks past Colbert’s vehicle amid the rising gunfire, Person leans out the window and shouts, “Hey, where’s your Humvee? Isn’t it time for you to get out of here?”
Luckily for Person, the gunfire is increasing. The Coward of Khafji, who possesses a mighty authority to punish men within the battalion, doesn’t hear him.
A volley of enemy mortars explodes in the surrounding fields. Machine-gun fire, which previously seemed to be only coming in from the north—the direction of the city—now erupts on all sides. Currently, Second Platoon faces the river to the north. The Humvees in the platoon are pushed up beside the elevated causeway leading onto the bridge. Around us are open, dried mudflats. These extend fifty to seventy meters north toward the river, and to the west and south of us. Beyond the mudflats are fields of dry, bent grass. Several dozen Marines from Task Force Tarawa are spread out in these fields, lying prone on the ground, firing at Iraqis and outlying buildings.
Several hundred additional Marines from Task Force Tarawa are also directly across the roadway from us in a sunken field to the east. This field, perhaps a kilometer square, has high-tension power lines running through it and is bounded by a thick forest of palms and a scattering of buildings. One of these buildings, a small two-story hospital, contains Fedayeen, who have been targeting Marines in the field all afternoon. More Fedayeen have been shooting from the palm grove.
In the past few moments, heavy fire from First Recon’s Marines in Alpha and Charlie has been joined by shooting from the thousand or so Marines in Task Force Tarawa to our east, west and south. It sounds as if dozens of weapons are now firing on all sides. It’s as loud, and nearly as steady, as the sound of a river rushing over a dam. One thing you can say about intense weapons fire, it sounds like it ought to. It’s an extremely angry noise.
When I jump down, face-first into the dirt, I twist my head to the side and see the palm trees overhead shiver from multiple rounds hitting them. I also see that the grass in the field to my left is waving from the effects of low, grazing machine-gun fire. The fire is outbound, and though I can’t see the weapon, I can see a ghost of black smoke rising above what is probably the barrel. It’s my hope that most of the fire I’m hearing is outbound, from Marines. I would hate to think it’s from Iraqis massing to overrun our position.
But in my first experience at being in the midst of heavy gunfire—from machine guns to mortars to Marine artillery still slamming into the city over our heads—I feel surprisingly calm. While the Marines might possess that “adolescent sense of invulnerability,” I have the more adult handicap of having always lived in denial. It’s a problem for which I’ve attended therapy sessions and self-help groups in an effort to overcome, originally at the urging of a now ex-wife.