Generation Kill - Evan Wright [59]
While traveling on paved roads, First Recon rolls in a single-file convoy, vehicles spaced roughly twenty-five meters apart. The average convoy speed out of Nasiriyah is about twenty miles an hour, though we tend to stop every ten minutes or so. Currently, other units from RCT-1, convoys of fifty to two hundred, are advancing on the same road, or pulled off beside it, with Marines dismounted in fields firing at targets—huts or berms—in the distance. These forces, along with First Recon, are the first Americans to invade this portion of Iraq.
Just north of Nasiriyah, we pass through a light industrial zone of cement factories, machine shops and yards full of tractors and excavating equipment. It almost looks like the outskirts of a Midwestern farm town, except for all the dead bodies. Corpses are scattered along the edges of the road. Most are men, enemy fighters, some with RPG launchers still in their hands, rounds scattered nearby. A few hours earlier, just before dawn, while the Light Armored Reconnaissance (LAR) units Col. Dowdy sent through the city the previous afternoon had been parked out here waiting for First Recon and the rest of the RCT-1 to clear Nasiriyah and catch up with them, waves of two- and three-man RPG teams had come out of the surrounding fields and industrial buildings to attack them. Few ever got off a shot.
LAR units ride in eight-wheeled amphibious, black-armored vehicles that resemble upside-down bathtubs. Each has a Bushmaster 25mm rapid-fire canon mounted in a top turret. Unlike the open turret in a Humvee, which requires a man standing in it to fire the weapon, the Bushmasters are fully enclosed. They resemble small tank guns and are operated by a crewman sitting below inside the vehicle, controlling the weapon with a sort of joystick. Not only do the Bushmasters lay down devastating fire—hundreds of explosive, armor-penetrating rounds per minute—but the guns are also linked to Forward-Looking Infrared Radar scopes, which combine both thermal imaging and light amplification to easily pick out targets 1,000 meters distant in the darkness, well beyond the effective range of Iraqi RPGs and AKs. When the Iraqi RPG teams attempted to assault them in the hours before dawn on the road north of Nasiriyah, the LAR units decimated them, killing an estimated 400 to 500. Because it was dark, many of the Iraqis kept coming out of the fields, apparently unaware that their comrades were being cut to pieces all around them.
Corpses of the Iraqi attackers who fell in the road have been run over repeatedly by tracked vehicles. They are flattened, with their entrails squished out. Marines in First Recon nickname one corpse Tomato Man, because from a distance he looks like a smashed crate of tomatoes in the road. There are shot-up cars and trucks with bodies hanging over the edges. We pass a bus, smashed and burned, with charred human remains sitting upright in some windows. There’s a man in the road with no head and a dead little girl, too, about three or four, lying on her back. She’s wearing a dress and has no legs.
Twenty-one-year-old Lance Corporal Jeffrey Carazales from Cuero, Texas, has a profound realization as he cruises through the destruction at the wheel of a Humvee in Bravo’s Third Platoon. “Everything in life is overrated except death. All that shit goes out the window—college, nice cars, pussy. I just don’t want to end up looking like that dude who looks like a box of smashed tomatoes.”
COLBERT HAS his own problems. His radio is on the same network with Bravo’s Third Platoon under the command of Captain America. All morning Captain America has been tying up the network shouting that his vehicle is coming under fire. “I am so sick of him spazzing out,” Colbert yells, throwing down his headset. “He’s running over rocks and reporting it’s enemy fire.”