Generation Kill - Evan Wright [70]
Fick, driving behind Manimal, says later, “I saw all those muzzle flashes along that wall. Then Manimal brought a whole building down. Whatever had been shooting at everyone there wasn’t shooting at us. It was just a pile of smoking rubble.”
IN COLBERT’S VEHICLE, as soon as we make the T-turn near the end of the town, we hear gunfire ahead. Set back from the road are several squat cinder-block buildings, forming a small industrial district. White puffs of smoke streak out from the buildings: more enemy fire. Person floors the Humvee. Colbert and Trombley start shooting again.
As we swing under a blown-up telephone pole hanging sideways in the street, Trombley glimpses an Arab in black robes crouching by the road near some sandbags. He sprays him with a long burst. “I got another one!” he shouts. “I cut him in half!”
A white haze in the distance marks the end of the city. We fly out onto a sandy plain that looks almost like a beach. The Humvee lurches to a stop, sunk up to its doors in sabka. Sabka is a geological phenomenon peculiar to the Middle East. It looks like desert on top, with a hard crust of sand an inch or so thick that a man can walk on, but break through the crust and beneath it’s the La Brea Tar Pits, quicksand made of tar.
We jump out, hunching low. The gunfire all around us sounds like trains banging down railroad tracks. There’s a row of Humvees and trucks just south of us, pouring everything they have into the city.
Espera’s vehicle halts about twenty meters behind ours. His driver can’t figure out why we stopped. Gunshots ring out from the town. Then there’s a massive explosion off the back tire of Espera’s Humvee—an errant Marine Mark-19 round. Thinking it’s enemy fire, a Marine in Espera’s vehicle jumps out to take cover in a nearby berm. Espera, “scared as a motherfucker,” ponders jumping out and abandoning the Humvee too, but he looks up and sees Garza relentlessly, almost insanely at this point, pulling the slide back and forth on his broken .50-cal, still trying to shoot it. Just before rolling through the town, Garza told Espera, “Whatever happens, just promise me you won’t leave me alone.”
Espera orders the Marine who jumped out to get back in. They figure out Colbert’s vehicle is stuck, and roll around to the right, avoiding the sabka.
Hunched down by Colbert’s vehicle, I am so disoriented at this point that I actually think for a moment that the sandy field we are in is a beach. I turn around, looking for the ocean, then hear Colbert repeating, “We’re in a goddamn sabka field.”
I think he’s saying “soccer field.” I can’t believe Iraqis would play on sand like this. I’m looking around for the goalposts when Trombley grabs my shoulder. “Get behind me and take cover,” he says.
The battalion operations chief runs across the sand, shouting at Colbert, “Abandon your Humvee!” He orders him to set it on fire with an incendiary grenade, yelling, “Thermite the radios!”
Colbert pounds the roof of his Humvee, screaming, “I’m not abandoning this vehicle!”
One of Espera’s Marines watching the spectacle from a distance glumly observes, “We’re going to die because Colbert’s in love with his Humvee.”
Still taking sporadic fire from the town, Marines in Bravo run up with shovels and pickaxes to dig it out. Meanwhile, Colbert and Trombley dive under the wheel wells with bolt cutters, slicing