Generation Kill - Evan Wright [61]
Saucier is on his team’s .50-cal, mounted in the center of their open-top Humvee, when he and other Marines see a passenger car about 350 meters down the road “acting funny.” The car stops, and four clean-cut young men step out of a nearby field and approach it.
Of all the little clues Marines are hunting for to determine whether the people and objects in this alien environment are hostile or benign, some facts begin to emerge: Fighters tend to be clean-cut or have mustaches, and farmers usually have beards. The four young men Saucier observes walking up to the car are all clean-cut. They get into the car, and it begins to drive toward Saucier’s Humvee.
Rules have changed since last night when Marines allowed three civilian vans to roll through their lines unchallenged. Now Marines are under orders to keep all civilian traffic at least 200 meters from their convoy.
Saucier aims his .50-cal high over the passenger car now approaching and thunks off several warning shots, sending bright tracers coursing over it. The car keeps coming.
“Light it up!” Marines shout nearby.
Saucier rips a ten-second burst, riddling the car with 100 armor-piercing incendiary rounds. The vehicle bursts into flames about 150 meters away, then rocks up and down as secondary explosions erupt inside. Nobody gets out.
Saucier and the other team members who also fired have just killed five men. The day before, by the Euphrates, Saucier fired into buildings in the city where he saw muzzle flashes, but he never saw any people. This is the first time he has seen a bunch of guys, then helped kill them.
Saucier stares at the burning car as explosions continue to burst inside, and he is relieved. “It means they must have been carrying weapons in there,” he concludes. “Those must have been bad guys.”
AFTER CHARLIE COMPANY destroys the white car, the battalion resumes its advance.
Bravo’s Third Platoon pushes in front of us and immediately comes under fire from a sniper hidden somewhere in a gas station. Marines saturate the suspected sniper position with fire and continue north. While they roll, Captain America spots an Iraqi man running through the field outside his window and cuts him down with his East German machine gun.
After being up all night, then experiencing the adrenaline-fueled ride through Nasiriyah, the morning has a dreamy quality. Charred or colorfully mashed-up people along the road just add to the surreal impression. The mood in Colbert’s Humvee is eerily relaxed.
Next to me, Trombley opens up an MRE and furtively pulls out a pack of Charms. “Keep it a secret,” he says. In full violation of Colbert’s ironclad no-Charms-because-Charms-are-bad-luck policy, he unwraps the candies and stuffs them into his mouth.
TWELVE
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BY TEN IN THE MORNING on March 25, First Recon has covered about twenty kilometers since passing through Nasiriyah. Neither Lt. Fick nor the Marines in Second Platoon knows what they are doing here on Route 7. Maj. Gen. Mattis’s grand scheme of sending the 6,000-strong RCT-1 from Nasiriyah to Al Kut—now about 165 kilometers north of here—is completely unknown to the men in the platoon.
Right now the only order the men are operating under is to turn off Route 7 onto a dirt trail winding through an area of dry canals. The trail loosely parallels Route 7, runs for about ten kilometers through a series of small villages and ends outside a town called Al Gharraf (named for the canal). At this point most Marines