Generation Kill - Evan Wright [53]
One of the helicopters fires a TOW missile. Flames splash up from the trees. For the first time today, Marines in First Recon punch their fists into the sky and scream “Get some!” The helicopters continue to vomit destruction.
Even Pappy, grim all day, smiles watching the helicopters. “I used to get a kind of semi-chubb when Cobras went past,” he says. “After today, seeing those birds overhead makes me so hard I could hammer nails.”
In the midst of this, I look up and see a shivering, dazed dog wandering through the smoke on the road. A red rag is tied around his neck, indicating that he must belong to someone.
Fick still has no word on RCT-1’s pending assault through the city. Enemy gunfire has dropped off. All we hear now is the continued booming of Marine artillery. Military ambulances are now parked across the street, picking up wounded from the field. A Humvee with loudspeakers crawls through the gloom along the edge of the palm grove, blaring surrender messages in Arabic. In the field there’s a lone captured enemy fighter, dressed in rags, sitting on his knees, hands bound behind his back. A half dozen Marines stand around him with their rifles pointed at his chest.
Colbert’s team pulls back to a reed fence, edging the field to the south. We dig holes. As I labor over mine, “Fruity Rudy” Reyes comes up behind me and pats my shoulder. The guy is so strong his fingertips feel like ball-peen hammers drumming into me. “Work it, brother,” he says. “All it takes is a little consistency every day to build those muscles.”
Reyes is relentlessly cheerful and bright in a way that brings to mind the host of a morning talk show. Adding to this impression, he is the platoon’s unofficial fitness guru, always ready with a helpful bromide. As I continue to huff and wheeze, he adds, “You know what the best workout machine is? The human body.”
Later, as we sit in the mud eating more MREs, a dirt-covered Marine from Task Force Tarawa walks out from the field. He stops in front of us, looking vaguely shell-shocked.
“How’s it going, buddy?” Colbert asks.
“They shot one of my Marines in the stomach out there.” He gestures toward the field. “We fired back. Blew a donkey’s head off. We didn’t see nothing else.”
“Buddy, you need anything—food, water?” Colbert asks.
“It’s all good, bro.” He wanders off.
AT SUNSET FIRST RECON remains at the bridge. The whole reason the battalion came here was to serve as a quick-reaction force when RCT-1’s massive convoy crossed the bridge and entered the city. But RCT-1’s commander, Col. Dowdy, who has been flip-flopping for the past thirty hours on how and when to enter the city, continues wrestling with indecision. Instead of sending the whole convoy through in the afternoon as he’d planned, a couple of hours earlier he sent a small force of Marines dashing through the city in special, high-speed armored vehicles. They reported meeting almost no resistance as they sped through to the other side of the city, where they are now waiting.
Despite some reports of light resistance in Nasiriyah, the Marines in Task Force Tarawa who entered the city the day before remain in their original positions, still under enemy attack. Their situation is so tenuous, they haven’t yet retrieved the dead Marines still lying in shot-up Amtracs. Still taking heavy fire, their commander is asking Dowdy to loan him fourteen M1A1 tanks to reinforce their positions. It’s a situation common in combat: Two different sets of Marines operating in the same city a couple of kilometers apart are reporting radically different conditions.
After receiving a visit from Lieutenant General James Conway (Maj. Gen. Mattis’s boss, commander of the entire First Marine Expeditionary Force in the Middle East),