Generation Kill - Evan Wright [67]
ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES elapse from the time Alpha Company hits Al Gharraf until Bravo Company is ordered into the town. Bravo’s Third Platoon is the first to enter. By now, the attackers have set up several ambush positions in the town. Kocher’s team sees six different muzzle flashes as they make the first turn by the mosque. Most come from gaps in the walls or windows in the buildings on the right side. This is a good spot to start the ambush, since the Humvees have to slow down while rounding the initial corner.
At the wheel of Kocher’s Humvee is a twenty-two-year-old corporal named Trevor Darnold. He grew up in Plummer, Idaho, and says the biggest influence on his joining the Marines was watching G.I. Joe on the Cartoon Network when he was a kid. He’s a relatively small guy, quiet, and usually has a placid smile that gives him the face of a dreamer. He seems to spend most of his free time thinking about his wife, who gave birth to their first child, a daughter, shortly before he flew to Kuwait for the invasion. Now, while straightening the wheel after that first turn, Darnold’s left arm suddenly feels like it has grown about ten sizes. It’s numb and throbbing. “I’m hit!” he yells.
“Shut the fuck up!” Kocher shouts. “You haven’t been hit.” Kocher can see just by the way he’s holding his arm that he is hit. But he wants him to believe he isn’t so he’ll focus on driving. For a moment, Kocher’s power of suggestion works so well, Darnold not only keeps driving, he continues simultaneously firing his M-4 rifle out the side of the Humvee.
Then Darnold wavers. “I am hit!” he insists.
“Okay, you’re hit, Darnold,” Kocher concedes. “We’re gonna fix it. Keep driving.”
Enemy fire is now coming at the Humvee from both sides of the street, but the vehicle’s primary gunner, Corporal Dan Redman, a twenty-year-old who stands on the .50-cal mount, decides he’ll try to bandage Darnold. Redman rips out a dressing pack, and the white bandages immediately flutter away in the wind.
Kocher, who’s pumping 203 grenades at muzzle flashes he sees in alleys and windows on both sides of the street, feels the Humvee weaving, then sees Redman’s bandages flying from his hands.
“Get your weapon up!” Kocher shouts at Redman. Then Kocher climbs over the roll bar to get at Darnold’s left arm. While hanging onto the roll bar, with the vehicle now careening half out of control and Redman’s .50-cal blasting inches over his head, Kocher ties off Darnold’s arm with a tourniquet (Recon Marines all carry tourniquets on their chest rigs).
Darnold still has his foot on the gas, but his head is turned down, watching the blood soak through the sleeve of his MOPP suit.
“You watch the fucking road!” Kocher shouts. “I’ll watch your arm.”
They bump out of the town, and twelve hours later Darnold is medevaced to a Kuwait hospital, with a small-caliber bullet lodged between the bones of his forearm. They let the bullet stay where it is, and a couple weeks later they give Darnold the option of going home or rejoining Kocher’s team in Baghdad. He goes to Baghdad.
BY THE TIME Colbert’s men start off toward Al Gharraf, reports fly over the radio telling us that we are about to drive into an ambush. “Make sure your weapons are red con one,” Colbert says, instructing his team members to have their weapons loaded and safeties off. Everyone’s guns