Generation Kill - Evan Wright [78]
Enemy fighters in the town continue to take potshots. Person is manning the SAW set up outside the Humvee when he spots muzzle flashes coming from a window, fortified with barbed wire and sandbags, seventy-five meters away. He shoots into it, and Marines up the road join in. They saturate it with Mark-19 rounds, bringing down a wall of the building.
“Damn sucka!” Person says, watching dust rise from the partially destroyed structure.
Wild dogs run out from a gap in the town’s walls. Women and children stand in an alley beside the building the Marines just hit. A rooster starts to cockledoodledo even though it’s afternoon. There are several loud bangs behind us. Marine snipers set up facing the fields to the rear have no idea what caused the explosions.
Fick approaches, sprinting to the Humvee, low to the ground to avoid enemy snipers, and smiles when he reaches me behind Colbert’s vehicle. Both he and Gunny Wynn are being threatened with disciplinary action because of the incident with Encino Man an hour ago. Fick has been told he might be relieved of his command for “disobeying orders.” (The Marine who actually called the commander a “dumb motherfucker” never receives reprimand.)
Nevertheless, Fick has grown suddenly gabby. He crouches behind a Humvee tire beside me and says, “This truly illustrates how safety is entirely relative.” Then, while machine guns rip and sniper rifles bang up and down the line, he launches into a discussion more appropriate for an all-night cram session at the Dartmouth library than for a low-intensity firefight.
“Most people in America right now probably think Iraq is a dangerous country.” He gestures to a patch of dirt in the open, two meters from the Humvee. “Now, if I were to stand up there, I would probably get killed. But to us, behind this Humvee it’s pretty safe. So relatively speaking, to us Iraq is a safe country right here behind this tire. I feel pretty safe here. Do you feel safe?”
“Pretty safe, I guess.”
“See!” He laughs. “If you were to call somebody at home right now and say, ‘Hey, I’m in Iraq right now. I’m with a handful of Marines. We’re isolated on the south end of a hostile city, and there are people shooting at us on both sides, but I feel pretty safe right now because I’m on this patch of dirt behind a Humvee,’ they’d think you were nuts.” He laughs. “People don’t understand how relative everything is on the battlefield.” He laughs again. “Or it could be we invent this relativism in our minds to comfort ourselves.” He taps the wheel well. “Because we both know this Humvee isn’t going to stop an RPG or any number of other very bad things that could happen here at any moment.”
Espera crawls up. “Sir, my men are all worried about the people in that ville organizing mass RPG volleys against us, like they did to those Amtracs we saw blown on the way up here.”
“Just keep your men dispersed from the vehicles,” Fick says.
“Roger that, sir,” Espera says. “But we’re still worried, sir.”
“We’re going to be here for a long time,” Fick says. “I don’t like it. But there’s nothing you or I or anyone can do about it.”
There are several loud cracks behind us—rounds from enemy snipers.
“Oh, sweet Jesus!” Colbert says, highly annoyed. He’s lying on the ground, glassing the city through binoculars, listening to the company radio network on a portable unit. He turns to Fick. “Sir, our great commander,” he says, referring to Encino Man, “just had the wherewithal to inform me there seem to be enemy snipers about. He suggests we ought to be on the lookout for them.”
Person laughs. “Brad,” he says, calling Colbert by his first name. “Check it out, over there.” He points to a spot near the barricades into the city.
Colbert turns his binoculars in the direction Person is pointing.
“Person,” he asks, “are those ducks . . . ?”
“Yeah, they’re fucking.” Person laughs.
TWO KILOMETERS up the road