Generation Kill - Evan Wright [74]
“Whoa!” Trombley says. “That guy in that car was shot through the stomach. He just looked at me, then raised his arm, like he was asking for help. He looked at me right there,” Trombley says, pointing to his inflamed eye.
I see the car Trombley’s talking about, a bullet-riddled sedan by the road, doors hanging open, with at least one body in it.
“He was unarmed,” Trombley says. “So I didn’t shoot him.”
I imagine that man in the car, an entire life lived, and the last thing in the world he sees is the face of an eager nineteen-year-old with a red, infected eye looking at him down the barrel of a SAW.
LATE IN THE MORNING Colbert’s team reaches the outskirts of the first big town we are passing through: Ash Shatrah. We pull even with Marine artillery guns pounding away, their snouts blazing flames and smoke. One of the guns has the words BOB MARLEY stenciled along the barrel, a somewhat incongruous tribute to the bard of Jah Love and reefer.
“Thump ’em, boys,” Colbert says darkly as he watches them fire. They’re striking targets in and around Ash Shatrah, prepping it for our drive through. We wait for several minutes, then go.
The battalion’s plan is to sprint past the town as fast as possible. With Colbert’s vehicle in the lead, we speed up to about forty-five miles an hour. While driving, Person reaches around and hands me his M-4.
“Put it out the window,” he says.
I look at him.
“What do you think? You’re just gonna eat all our food, drink all our water for free?”
I place the rifle on my lap but find it distracting. All I can think about are images of Geraldo Rivera waving his pistol around in reports he filed from Afghanistan, bragging about how he hoped to cap Osama. While rolling into Ash Shatrah, my biggest fear isn’t enemy fire, it’s that some reporter’s going to see me holding an M-4 and I’ll look like a jackass.
The town is set far back from the road. No fire comes from it. The most overwhelming impression Ash Shatrah makes is that it is one of the smelliest places I have ever encountered. From 200 meters away the town stinks like the inside of a garbage can. We drive four kilometers through it, and I pass the M-4 back to Person. I hand it to him barrel first, with a round in the chamber and the safety off, causing him to rethink his policy of arming the reporter.
OUTSIDE OF ASH SHATRAH we link up with a unit of Amtracs and other armored Marine vehicles parked near a rural hamlet. It’s a cluster of three or four buildings 400 meters off the road, nestled in green pastures, with some palm trees behind them. Marines in the Amtracs stopped because they thought they took shots from one of the houses.
Now Marines are out on berms watching the house through binoculars and scopes. Several sniper teams in Bravo join them. Kocher in Third Platoon observes a “mom with two kids hiding in the back of the house, nervously peeping out.”
The Marines study the house for forty minutes. Surrounded by verdant fields, with the rare quiet of all the Humvee engines having been shut off, the morning feels peaceful.
Then a 25mm Bushmaster on one of the armored vehicles up the road begins pouring rounds into the house. The women and children Recon Marines had been observing through their optics disappear in a cloud of dust, as the Bushmaster rounds blast the adobe walls.
Colbert jumps out of the Humvee. “What are they shooting at?”
“There’s civilians in there!” several Recon observers yell at once.
Colbert picks up his radio handset and shouts, “Tell those guys to cease fire! They’re shooting civilians.” But it’s a fruitless effort. Even though the vehicle doing most of the firing is only 100 meters or so ahead, First Recon Battalion has no ability to reach it on the radio.
Now a dozen or more rifles and machine guns in the nearby armored units come alive, crackling and sending red streaks of