Generation Kill - Evan Wright [73]
We climb into the Humvee. After Person starts the engine, Fick pokes his head in the window, grinning. “Present for you.” He passes in a small water bottle, filled with about two inches of amber fluid. “LSA,” he says. “I scammed it off some guys in RCT-1.”
“Sir, not to get homoerotic about this,” Colbert says. “But I could kiss you.”
WE LEAVE THE OUTSKIRTS of Al Gharraf at about nine in the morning. Two men standing by the road outside the shattered town grin and give us the thumbs-up. “This place gives me the creeps,” Colbert says.
The pattern that’s emerged—being greeted with enthusiastic cheers and waves by the people you see beside the roads, then shot at by people you don’t see behind walls and berms—is beginning to wear on the Marines. “These guys waving at us are probably the same ones who were trying to kill us yesterday,” Person says.
We pick up Route 7 and head north on the two-lane blacktop. Other than Fick’s vague instructions about passing through more towns like Al Gharraf, no one knows what the final goal is for this day, or even why they are in the Fertile Crescent. All they know is they must push north until Fick or somebody else tells them to stop.
The team’s only concern is to observe the roughly 1,000 meters on either side of the Humvee to make sure there is nobody with a weapon trying to shoot them. The surrounding landscape is a mix of grasslands and dusty plains rippling with berms. The fields are dotted with shepherds and mud-brick dwellings. Every fifty meters or so on both sides of the road there are trenches and sandbagged machine-gun bunkers—abandoned fortifications.
“RPG fire ahead,” Colbert says at about nine-thirty in the morning, passing on the first of many similar reports from the radio.
Colbert’s vehicle is the lead for the entire battalion, driving at an average speed of about fifteen miles per hour. Amtracs and other light armored vehicles from RCT-1 are rolling a few hundred meters ahead.
If you were to look at it from the air, you’d see a segmented column of American invasion vehicles—Marines in various units—stretching for several kilometers along the highway. Despite all its disparate elements, the column functions like a single machine, pulverizing anything in its path that appears to be a threat. The cogs that make up this machine are the individual teams in hundreds of vehicles, several thousand Marines scrutinizing every hut, civilian car and berm for weapons or muzzle flashes. The invasion all comes down to a bunch of extremely tense young men in their late teens and twenties, with their fingers on the triggers of rifles and machine guns.
We bump up against Amtracs 150 meters ahead pouring machine-gun fire into some huts. “They’re schwacking some guys with RPGs,” Colbert says.
Wild dogs run past.
“We ought to shoot some of these dogs,” Trombley says, eyeing the surrounding fields over the top of his SAW.
“We don’t shoot dogs,” Colbert says.
“I’m afraid of dogs,” Trombley mumbles.
I ask him if he was ever attacked by a dog when he was little.
“No,” he answers. “My dad was once. The dog bit him, and my dad jammed his hand down the dog’s throat and ripped up his stomach. I did have a dog lunge at me once on the sidewalk. I just threw it on its side, knocked the wind out of him. My aunt had a little dog. I was playing with it with one of those laser lights. The dog chased it into the street and got hit by a car. I didn’t mean to kill it.”
“Where did we find this guy?” Person asks.
We drive on.
“I like cats,” Trombley offers. “I had a cat that lived to be sixteen. One time he ripped a dog’s eye out with his claw.”
We pass dead bodies in the road again, men with RPG tubes by their sides, then more than a dozen trucks and cars burned and smoking. You find most torched vehicles have charred corpses nearby, occupants who crawled out and made it a few meters before expiring, with their grasping hands still smoldering. We pass another car with a small, mangled body outside it. It’s another child, facedown,