Generation Kill - Evan Wright [69]
The vehicle slows and wanders to the left. “Walt?” Person calls.
I grab Hasser’s leg by the calf and shake it hard.
“I’m okay!” he says, sounding almost cheerful. He was temporarily knocked unconscious, but isn’t hurt. Person has lost his focus on moving the vehicle forward. We slow to a crawl. Person later says that he was worried one of the cables dropped on the vehicle might still have been caught on Hasser. He didn’t want to accelerate and somehow leave him hanging from a light pole by his neck in downtown Al Gharraf.
“Drive, Person!” Colbert shouts.
“Walt’s okay?” he asks, apparently not having heard him.
“Yes!” Colbert shouts.
“Go, go, go!” Colbert and I both shout in tandem.
Person finally picks up the pace, and there is silence outside. We are still in the town, but no one seems to be shooting at us.
Colbert is beside himself, laughing and shaking his head. His whole face shines, almost like there’s a halo around him. I’ve seldom seen a happier man.
“Before we start congratulating ourselves,” Person says, in his unusual role as the voice of sanity, “we’re not out of this yet.”
ESPERA, IN HIS HUMVEE about thirty meters behind ours, sees the first wall on the way into the town light lit up with enemy muzzle flashes. He sees the smoke puffs of their rounds impacting along the roof and doors of Colbert’s Humvee, and realizes he will be next. For him, it’s all too much stimulus to process. Riding shotgun in a vehicle with no roof or door or armor of any kind, seeing the wall of fire he is about to drive into, his mind goes blank. Muscle memory takes over. He hunches over his M-4 in what he calls the “gangsta curl” and begins shooting. Like most others, he sees very few enemy fighters, just blank walls and muzzle flashes popping like strobe lights.
There are four other Marines in his Humvee. Garza, who had been on our Mark-19, now stands fully upright on the back of Espera’s Humvee, manning a .50-cal, which immediately jams. Garza remains at the weapon, frantically trying to recharge it—repeatedly pulling on a lever, pounding it with his fist, squeezing the trigger. Enemy rounds shred through the rucksacks and gear piled on the Humvee and ping off the metal flooring.
Reyes, in the vehicle directly behind them, watches Espera’s Humvee getting shot up. Reyes drives for Pappy’s team, and beside him Pappy appears calm. As they turn into the fire, Pappy says, sounding almost cavalier, “Here we go, boys.”
Because of the tightness of the turn into the town, everyone is going at lazy, parking-lot speeds, maybe ten, fifteen miles an hour. Reyes watches Espera’s Humvee veer sharply as gunfire on the right pours into it. Fixating on Garza standing at the broken .50-cal, he marvels at what he later describes as “the expression of fear mixed with determination” on Garza’s face as he remains standing, battling the jammed gun.
As soon as they see Hasser knocked down by a cable while on top of Colbert’s vehicle, Pappy and Reyes realize they have the only Mark-19 operating to suppress enemy fire. The Mark-19 in their open Humvee is manned by Manimal. Due to the limited training everyone in First Recon has received on this equipment, Manimal has only fired a Mark-19 a few times. He’s never done it from a moving Humvee, and it’s not easy. Aiming a Mark-19 isn’t like a rifle, where you just point it and shoot. The Mark-19 shoots 40mm grenades fed through it on a belt like a machine gun. Each round, about the size of a roll-on deodorant stick, can travel about 2,000 meters (though they’re only considered accurate at less than half this range). They can penetrate up to two inches of armor, and when they burst, they spray shrapnel in all directions. Their shrapnel bursts have a “kill radius” of five meters and a “maiming radius” of fifteen. Mark-19 grenade rounds have an elliptical flight path, so after you point it in the proper direction, you then have to tilt the barrel up or down, depending on how far away the target is. This is done with a tiny wheel