Generation Kill - Evan Wright [76]
Now, he’s watching Fedayeen stalk his vehicle. “I think they’ve got an RPG,” he says, trying to get a line on them through the sights of his SAW.
“Screwby,” Stafford replies.
“Gunny!” Christeson shouts to Gunny Wynn. “Those men might have an RPG.”
Gunny Wynn runs up, raises his binoculars and sees what looks to be a man setting up an RPG in some scrub. “Light ’em up!”
Christeson is so excited he’s not sure he heard Gunny Wynn right. Even though he fired several dozen rounds into Al Gharraf, all he saw was buildings, dark spots and muzzle flashes. He’s never before pulled the trigger on humans like this, cold.
Gunny Wynn repeats: “Light ’em the fuck up. They have RPGs.”
Christeson hugs his SAW and squeezes off a fifteen- to twenty-round burst at the closest of the three men. They run south, one of them limping, heading toward a line of palm trees. Christeson rips out another burst.
Fick runs up to his side. “Keep shooting,” he says.
Christeson blazes away.
“You’re shooting too high,” Fick says, calmly now, like he’s teaching a kid how to cast a fishing rod. Christeson is still firing bursts toward the tree line where the men in the field took cover when the platoon is ordered forward. He jumps in the truck, while Stafford provides covering fire with his 203 and M-4. As they bounce onto the road, Christeson fires the last of nearly 200 rounds toward the RPG team.
The war is suddenly real to him. “You know what?” he says to Stafford. “We were just fighting actual guerrillas.”
“Screwby.”
THE CONVOY HALTS just 200 meters up from where Fick’s crew engaged the RPG team. That huge fire we saw earlier was an electrical substation. It’s now a hundred meters in front of Colbert’s vehicle. The flames have subsided; now it spews an acrid smoke that hangs over the area.
We are just fifty meters from the edge of a large, grim town. The outer buildings form a wall on the other side of the highway. There’s a broad street into the city, but defenders have cut down palm trees, dragged the trunks across it and piled it with rubble, making barricades. Rifles and machine guns crackle intermittently from within.
But directly across from Colbert’s vehicle, no one sees any muzzle flashes. All we see are hundreds of doors and windows, dark gaps in the stucco buildings, places for bad guys to hide.
“Get out of the vehicle,” Colbert says.
Everyone takes cover on the ground, setting up their weapons. The whole platoon is out in the open here, high on the elevated road, with a hostile town on one side and fields on the other where there is believed to have been at least one RPG team operating. “I don’t know what the fuck we’re doing here,” Colbert says.
Fick trots over, keeping his head low, staying behind Humvees as much as he can to avoid the intermittent sniper fire. Colbert asks him what the orders are.
“I don’t fucking know either. He just told us to pull over,” Fick says, referring to his commander, Encino Man.
In a combat zone, military convoys aren’t supposed to just aimlessly pull over. When they stop, someone is supposed to issue orders—tell the men where to orient their vehicles, their weapons, whether to turn their engines off or keep them running. All of these details are supposed to flow down from command.
But right now command in Bravo Company is in a state of confusion. A few moments ago, Fick radioed Encino Man about contact with