Generation Kill - Evan Wright [62]
Another essential piece of information the Marines in the battalion haven’t been given is that the purpose of driving onto this trail is to draw enemy fire. Today marks their first day of serving as ambush bait in central Iraq. They will spend most of the next ten days moving north, either on Route 7 or on parallel dirt trails, frequently ten to twenty-five kilometers ahead of RCT-1, trying to scare enemy forces into attacking. The rationale makes sense when it’s explained to me by Mattis after the invasion: The small force races up back roads ahead of the big force rolling behind on the main road. The enemy orients their troops and weapons on the small force (not realizing it’s the small one), and the big force hits them where they’re not looking for it. It’s a trick that works best when you’re going up against an army like Iraq’s, which has no air assets and bad communications and will have a tough time figuring out that the small force is just a decoy. I admire the plan when Mattis and others explain it to me. And in a way, I’m glad I didn’t know about it in advance, because it would have been scarier to remain with Second Platoon. Perhaps this is why they didn’t tell the Marines in the platoon about this plan either.
Colbert’s Humvee is in on point for the company when we make the turn off Route 7. There’s a dead man lying in a ditch at the junction. Two hundred meters past the corpse, there’s a farmhouse with a family out front, waving as we drive by. At the next house, two old ladies in black whoop and clap. A bunch of bearded men shout, “Good! Good! Good!” The Marines wave back. In the span of a few minutes, they have gone from kill-anyone-that-looks-dangerous mode to smiling and waving as if they’re on a float in the Rose Bowl parade.
A kilometer or so onto the trail, we are surrounded by lush fields of grain, then small hamlets nestled beneath palm groves. Rays of sunlight poke through the clouds, turning the dust in the air silver. Fick’s impression is that the “whole place tingles.” And not in a bad way. More villagers run out from their homes, cheering. Grinning fathers hoist up their babies By one house, teenage girls in maroon dresses sneak out from behind a wall. Defying tradition, their heads are uncovered, displaying pretty faces and long black hair. They jump up and down, laughing and waving at the Marines.
“Damn! Those girls are hot,” Person says.
“Look alert,” Colbert warns.
The road dwindles to a single, rutted lane. We crawl along at a couple of miles per hour, then stop. Several boys, about nine or ten, scramble up from a dry creek bed on our right. They come within about five meters of the Humvee and start yelling, “Hello, America!” Some of them put their hands to their mouths, begging for food.
Colbert tries to ignore them. One of the kids, however, stares him down. He makes clownish faces at Colbert, trying to make him laugh.
“Fuck it,” Colbert says. “Break out the humrats,” he says, referring to humanitarian rations. “Let’s feed the ankle-biters.”
We throw several bright yellow humrat packs out the window. As kids run up to grab them, Colbert says, “You’re welcome. Vote Republican.” He gazes at them, now yelling and fighting each other for the humrat packs, and adds, “I really thank God I was born American. I mean, seriously, it’s something I lose sleep over.”
By now, a shamal dust storm has begun to brew. Obliteration of sunlight in a true shamal, as this one is, is nearly complete. A typical Iraqi shamal produces a dust cloud that extends three to six kilometers from the Earth’s surface into the upper atmosphere. The sky turns brown or red or yellow, depending on the complexion of the dust. Our sky is the color of bile—brown tinged with yellow. Winds now gust up to fifty miles an hour. We hear thunder.
First Recon’s convoy