Generation Kill - Evan Wright [54]
TEN
°
IT’S AFTER DARK and growing cold when First Recon pulls back from the bridge at the Euphrates River on the evening of March 24. Its convoy of seventy vehicles rolls south four kilometers from the bridge. They stop on the highway and maneuver into the single-file marching order they will take into the city. Everybody turns off their engines and waits.
When I get out of Colbert’s vehicle, I smell the town trash dump we noticed earlier in the day. A bombed oil-tank storage facility blazes in the night sky about 300 meters in front of us. Marines wander out of the vehicles in high spirits. No one says so, but I think everyone’s pretty happy they didn’t have to do the reaction-force mission into the city.
First Recon’s Alpha Company Marines killed, by their most conservative estimates, at least ten Iraqis across the river. Some of these killer Marines come up to Colbert’s vehicle to regale his team with exploits of their slaughter, bragging about one kill in particular, a fat Fedayeen in a bright orange shirt. He was one of those guys with a cell phone or radio. He kept stepping out the front door of a building directly across the river, then popping back inside. More than a dozen Marines, armed with an assortment of rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers, had been watching him, waiting to get cleared hot to shoot. When they finally did and the fat man stepped out his front door again, he was literally blown to pieces. “We shredded him,” one of Colbert’s Marine buddies says. “We fucking redecorated downtown Nasiriyah.”
It’s not just bragging. When Marines talk about the violence they wreak, there’s an almost giddy shame, an uneasy exultation in having committed society’s ultimate taboo and having done it with state sanction.
“Well, good on you,” Colbert says to his friends.
Person shares an observation about his own reaction to combat. He stands by the road, pissing. “Man, I pulled my trousers down and it smells like hot dick,” he says. “That sweaty hot-cock smell. I kind of smell like I just had sex.”
The lighthearted mood is broken when headlights appear in the darkness. It’s now about nine o’clock at night. Three civilian vans, coming from the direction of Nasiriyah, bear down on First Recon’s position on the road. Initially, Marines just sit around gabbing and joking, paying them no mind.
By now, rumors have swirled through the ranks that yesterday in Nasiriyah Iraqi forces faked surrendering—came out with white flags, then opened up on the Marines. These stories are passed by officers and picked up by the media. Later, some units that were supposedly attacked in this manner deny this ever happened. But the legends of these devious tactics, along with tales of Jessica Lynch’s alleged mutilation and rape, gain wide credence.
Despite these fears, nobody lifts a finger to stop the approaching vans. It’s extremely difficult to maintain a combat mind-set twenty-four hours a day. After being under fire for six hours at the bridge, Marines just want to goof off and revel in the triumphs of having killed and survived.
Fick runs up to remind them they are invaders in a hostile land. “Stop these fucking vehicles!” he yells.
Marines leap up, weapons clattering, and surround the vans.
The dome lights are on in the rear van. I see a man curled over in the backseat in a fetal position. He’s covered in blood-soaked rags.
A translator is brought up. He speaks to the driver of one of the vans, then tells Fick that the vans are filled with doctors and wounded civilians. They can’t get to