Generation Kill - Evan Wright [71]
WE LIMP to a desert encampment a few kilometers away, the shot-up Humvee making grinding and flapping sounds. When the platoon stops at its resting point in the broad, open desert, Marines jump out and embrace one another. Even Colbert becomes emotional, running across the sand, lunging into Reyes and giving him a bear hug.
All the Humvees in Bravo Company are riddled with bullet holes, but Darnold is the only Marine who was hit. Counting the dozens of rounds that sliced through sheet metal, tires and rucksacks, the men can’t believe they made it. In retrospect the whole engagement was like one of those cheesy action movies in which the bad guys fire thousands of rounds that all narrowly miss the hero. While everyone else stands around, slapping backs and laughing about all the buildings they shot up or knocked down, Colbert grows pensive. He confesses to me that he had absolutely no feelings going through the city. He almost seems disturbed by this. “It was just like training,” he says. “I just loaded and fired my weapon from muscle memory. I wasn’t even aware what my hands were doing.”
The shamal grows into one of the worst storms anyone has experienced so far in the Middle East. The sky looks like someone picked up a desert and is now turning it upside down on us. Then it rains, which comes down in globs of mud. To top it off, it starts to hail. A junior officer walks a few meters out into this weather to take a dump and becomes hopelessly lost. A team of Recon Marines is organized to go look for him (and he is eventually found, dazed and sheepish, several hours later).
The nice thing about artillery is that, unlike aircraft, it still works in foul weather. Marine batteries begin bombing the town. Colbert and I sit in the vehicle, watching. Through the blackness of the night, orange puffs of artillery bursts are vaguely discernible over the town. Fick slips into the vehicle with a map, to tell us that the name of the town is Al Gharraf. “Good,” Colbert says. “I hope they call it El Pancake when we’re through with it.” Marine artillery crews fire approximately 1,000 rounds into Al Gharraf and the vicinity during the next twelve hours.
Just before turning in to the hole I’ve dug outside the Humvee, I smell a sickly-sweet odor. During chemical-weapons training before the war, we were taught that some nerve agents emit unusual, fragrant odors. I put on my gas mask and sit in the dark Humvee for twenty minutes before Person tells me what I’m smelling is a cheap Swisher Sweets cigar that Espera is smoking underneath his Humvee.
FOURTEEN
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MARINES AWAKEN in their holes in the desert outside of Al Gharraf at dawn, March 26, to find the shamal has worn itself out, leaving behind a cold, overcast morning. Fick gathers his team leaders for briefing by the hood of his Humvee. “The good news,” he tells them, “is we will be rolling with a lot of ass today. RCT-1 will be in front of us for most of the day. The bad news is, we’re going through four more towns like the one we hit yesterday.”
Among the Marines this morning, the euphoria of having survived their run through the town has evaporated. Trombley gets into a dispute with another Marine after borrowing his grenade-box “shitter” and returning it with skid marks down the side.
The shitter belongs to Corporal Evan Stafford. A twenty-year-old from Tampa, Florida, Stafford is a white guy whose hair grows so blond fellow Marines call him “Q-tip.” When not in uniform, he dresses like Eminem. He identifies so strongly with black culture, notably the music and philosophies of the late Tupac Shakur, that when other Marines use terms like “Nigger Juice” to describe black coffee, or refer