Generation Kill - Evan Wright [60]
The enlisted Marines riding with Captain America are becoming alarmed. Several days ago, back at the railroad tracks, he picked up weapons discarded by the surrendering Iraqis, among them a small East German machine gun. Now, rolling north of Nasiriyah, he’s begun firing out the window of his Humvee, even when nobody else in his platoon sees any enemy threats.
While driving past an Iraqi home with an unoccupied Chevy Suburban parked in front, he sprays it with machine-gun fire.
One of the enlisted men in his vehicle challenges him. “What are you shooting at?” he asks him.
“The enemy uses SUVs all the time,” he answers. “Any chance to take one out, I will.”
The Marines don’t necessarily disagree with his logic. It’s the random unexpectedness of his firing. They are trained to call in targets over the radio, not just to verify them but to alert everyone else. Marines aren’t just supposed to run around the countryside shooting guns out the window. One of the Marines who ride in the Humvee with him concludes, “The guy is not right in the head.”
BUT WHATEVER FAULTS emerge among some commanders and enlisted Marines, everything about racing up a highway in a country you’re invading is baffling. You pass three dead men by the road, surrounded by weapons, then shepherds in the field behind them waving and smiling. There’s a car with a dead woman shot in the backseat—no hint why Marines or helicopters shot her—followed by a burned-up SUV packed with AAA guns in the rear. Many houses we pass have white flags hanging over their front doors, which Marines take to be surrender flags. Then we pass homes with black flags on them. The radios up and down the battalion come to life. Everyone wants to know, are these special flags used to signal enemy fighters? Marines train their weapons on homes flying black flags until word is passed down the net that these are flown by Shia households.
Marines in Alpha Company spot a BM-21, an Iraqi mobile rocket launcher, moving toward First Recon’s convoy. The battalion halts and calls in an air strike on it.
While they’re waiting, two men pop up from a berm in the field beside Colbert’s vehicle and take off running. Marines train their guns in on them to shoot, but neither of them have weapons, so they let them go.
Gunny Wynn spots two men lying down in another berm about 300 meters distant. One seems to be holding something in his hands that glints—binoculars or a gun sight. Pappy and Reyes, who serve as one of the platoon’s sniper teams, set up by the road, with Reyes spotting.
They observe the two men for about ten minutes. An object continues to glint in one of the men’s hands. Pappy is cleared hot to take him out and fires a single shot. Pappy doesn’t dwell much on the details of his kill. When I ask him about it a short while later, he says, “The man dropped down and did not come up.”
For his part in the killing, Reyes says, “I pray I’m making the right decisions. My fate is all in the Tao I’ve tried to live by.”
WHILE WE REMAIN HALTED, waiting for the air strike on the Iraqi rocket launcher, Corporal Michael Saucier from First Recon’s Charlie Company is helping pull road security on the convoy. Saucier, a twenty-year-old from Savage, Minnesota, operates a .50-caliber heavy machine gun and is one of several young Christians in the battalion. In bull sessions with other Recon Marines, he freely talks about his belief in “God, Jesus, the whole nine yards.” At the same time, he’s not really a big Bible-thumper. He counts among his closest friends one of the most profane nonbelievers in the battalion, and plans, when he gets out of the Corps, to go with him on a “Fear and Loathing” tour of Europe. Despite his relaxed attitudes about doctrine—Saucier believes “Christianity should be about sincerity, not a bunch of rules and denominations”—he’s come to war covered in kick-ass Christian tattoos. There’s a cross on his back, a dove on one leg, and the face of Jesus adorns his chest.
When the convoy stops for a “short halt”—typically one expected to last less than twenty minutes—the vehicles