Generation Kill - Evan Wright [58]
We are stopped because Alpha Company has halted in order to pick up a wounded Marine from Task Force Tarawa with a bullet in his leg. The best they can do is put the Marine’s stretcher on top of the Humvee. While attempting to load him, snipers in rubbled buildings on both sides of the road begin firing into the convoy. They concentrate their fire on Recon’s support trucks. The driver of one takes a bullet in the chest, but it’s stopped by his interceptor vest. An RPG round zooms over the nose of another support truck and explodes nearby. The Marines in the support trucks, derisively referred to as POGs (People Other than Grunts) by Colbert and others in the frontline units, begin launching Mark-19 grenades into a nearby building. Then a Cobra slices low and fires its machine gun directly over the heads of the men on the trucks.
SOME IN THE BATTALION are glad to come under fire and have a chance to shoot back. Few more so than the battalion’s executive officer (XO), Major Todd Eckloff. Thirty-five years old, he grew up in Enumclaw, Washington, about an hour outside Seattle. He decided to become a Marine at the age of five. He says, “My grandmother was big on patriotism and military books and songs.” She helped raise him, and Eckloff grew up singing the Marines’ Hymn the way other kids do nursery rhymes. When he was just a toddler, his grandmother participated in an adopt-a-soldier program, serving dinners for Vietnam vets in their home. Eckloff still remembers the first time he met a Marine. “I was with my grandmother at the South Center Mall, and coming toward us was a Marine in his dress blues. That’s when I knew what I wanted to be. I was a dork about becoming a Marine.” Eckloff adds, “In high school I had a license plate that said ‘First Recon.’ ”
But since graduating from Virginia Military Institute and joining the Marines more than a decade ago, Eckloff has never had a chance to enjoy combat. He was deployed late to the Gulf War and simply “guarded shit,” then served uneventfully in the Balkans. Finally in his dream unit, First Recon, Eckloff nevertheless has one of the most frustrating billets. “As XO, my job is really to do nothing but take over if the battalion commander is shot.”
Now under fire in the convoy, he at last has his opportunity to taste combat. He rides in a supply truck, but in his mind, as he later tells me, “It’s cool, because I’m able to shoot my weapon out of the window.”
Eckloff carries a Benelli automatic twelve-gauge shotgun. As rounds pop off outside, he slides it out the window and blasts an Iraqi fifteen meters away in an alley. He sees him disappear in a “big cloud of pink.” The next instant he spots another guy running on a balcony area and gives him several blasts. Eckloff is certain he hit him. “My aim is good,” he says.
Later, after I interview him and others riding in the support units, I tally that these Marines claim altogether to have killed between five and fifteen Iraqis during several minutes of shooting in Nasiriyah. It’s a high number given the fact that during six hours of sometimes extremely heavy gun battle by the bridge yesterday the commander of Alpha Company believes his unit of eighty Marines got somewhere between ten and twenty kills.
Kocher, the team leader in Bravo’s Third Platoon, doubts there was much of a gun battle through Nasiriyah. “A lot of this was just some officers and POGs who think it’s cool to be out here shooting up buildings,” he says.
Kocher tells me this just after we’ve cleared Nasiriyah’s outer limits. Initially, I dismiss his opinion as Recon Marine snobbery. The fact is, Recon’s Support and Headquarters elements did come under fire in Nasiriyah. At the same time, there are some in the battalion—a very small number of men—who seem to develop a penchant for driving through towns and countryside firing wildly out of their vehicles.
FIRST RECON remains on Route 7 after leaving Nasiriyah. The Marines will take this road, two lanes of unmarked asphalt, all the way to Al Kut. Aside from the berms