Generation Kill - Evan Wright [64]
The lead troops in Alpha immediately dismount and take cover behind a meter-high, mud-brick wall on the left side of the road. The fire is coming from the village structures a few hundred meters beyond this wall.
The main road into Al Gharraf is about 300 meters farther ahead of them. Though the sky has darkened from the gathering sandstorm, the cobalt-blue dome of a mosque is visible ahead, rising over the town. It’s about the only color that can be seen anywhere.
Behind Alpha on the same trail, the Marines in Charlie Company come under fire. Saucier, the .50-cal gunner with Jesus tattooed on his chest, is among those taking cover. Everyone is crouched low, frantically looking around, trying to figure out where the shooting is coming from. Saucier, however, becomes distracted. A couple hundred meters away there’s a woman in black walking through the field. The winds are so powerful she leans into them, her robe billowing behind her. She’s using both hands to drag a large child—maybe a six- or seven-year-old boy—across the berms. The kid has obviously been shot or wounded—Saucier thinks from an enemy mortar burst, since several of these hit near where the woman had been walking. He observes her for several seconds, then struggles to turn away and refocus on his own survival. “You can’t dwell on this stuff here,” he later says. “But I’ll definitely take it home with me.”
Capt. Patterson believes there are at least two dozen enemy fighters holed up in the huts to the left, firing on his men. The Marines saturate the area with heavy-weapons fire, but they can’t silence the enemy machine guns, which have everyone pinned down.
He makes the difficult decision of calling in an artillery strike on the huts. Any artillery strike within 600 meters of your position is called “danger close,” given the wide kill radius of artillery shells. With the huts 300 meters away, Patterson is almost calling in a strike on top of his own men. But on their own, they can’t get past them.
Since Alpha is spread across a couple hundred meters, not all the men get the word that there is a danger-close artillery strike on its way. Corporal John Burris, a twenty-one-year-old in Alpha Second Platoon, is among those kept in the dark.
Burris is one of those guys who could have done any number of things besides join the Marine Corps. His family owns a construction equipment and supply company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “My family goes to college and then joins the family business,” Burris says. A talented swimmer, he was offered scholarships at several universities, but opted for the Marines. His choice of the military didn’t stem from any special patriotic urge. He wanted to buck family tradition, and besides, he was worried he’d party too hard in college. Even in full battle fatigue, toting his rifle, Burris barely looks old enough to drive, an impression that is added to by his perpetually cheerful disposition. For him, the whole campaign so far has been an oddly slapstick affair. Yesterday, by the Euphrates, he was ordered to advance on a suspected enemy gun position and drop a 203 round into it, but when he jumped up and ran toward it, he tripped and cut his face open on his rifle stock. In the midst of all the shooting, his fellow Marines fell over laughing.
Now, as the first danger-close artillery rounds scream in and burst over the nearby field, Burris pops his head over the berm. He thinks it’s enemy fire, and his first instinct is to get up and see where it’s coming from. A piece of shrapnel thuds into the ground behind him. Someone yells at him to get the fuck down. He rolls over, laughing, while the artillery strike of twelve DPICM cluster munitions saturates