Generation Kill - Evan Wright [80]
But after several minutes in which he stands there, chatting with townspeople, and no one shoots him, several officers join him, among them Fick.
“What did they say?” Fick asks.
Meesh belches. It takes him a long time to answer. Meesh does everything at a sclerotic pace. Even rolling his eyeballs to look at you seems to tax him. He builds up his strength, taking several drags from the Marlboro hanging from his lip, and says, “The people of Ar Rifa are grateful to be liberated and welcome the Americans as friends.”
It’s the stock answer Meesh always gives after speaking to Iraqis. Meesh claims he works for the CIA—“I got into some trouble in Kuwait, working for a ‘party,’ which is what we call drug gangs in my country, but I have some friends in the royal family, and they hooked me up with the CIA”—and his translations always seem to conform to a script provided by his handlers.
“That’s all they said?” Fick asks. “You spoke to those guys for ten minutes!”
“They say they don’t want us to leave the town,” Meesh adds. “They’re afraid as soon as we go the Baath, dudes are going to come back and kill them.”
Ar Rifa is another Shia city that rose up against Saddam after President George H. W. Bush’s call to rebellion in 1991. As in Nasiriyah, the uprising was put down, and the citizens were treated to months of bloody reprisals.
Maj. Gen. Mattis’s strategy of racing north as fast as possible precludes putting forces inside towns after they’ve been “liberated.” The Marines or the CIA or whoever is actually in charge of this operation at Ar Rifa have come up with a stopgap measure to protect the citizens. Right now, Meesh is the sole agent responsible for executing this plan.
He hands out infrared chemlites to the men who’ve come out of the town waving white flags. Their job tonight, after the Marines depart, is to put these chemlites on top of buildings and other locations inside the city occupied by Baath Party members or Fedayeen. American aircraft will then fly over the town and bomb any position they see illuminated by the infrared chemlites.
Fick is as intrigued by this plan as I am. After Meesh distributes the chemlites, we both accost him. I bribe him with several more packs of Marlboros, and Fick asks him, “How do you know those guys aren’t just going to put those chemlites on the homes of people they owe money to, or have some other grudge against?”
“Believe me,” Meesh says. “They’re good dudes. We can trust ’em.” He proffers a bottle to Fick. “Beer?”
“No thanks, Meesh,” Fick says.
“Yeah,” Meesh says. “It’s not the good shit. It’s local brewed.”
AS THE SUN DROPS, muezzins call the faithful to prayer from minarets and loudspeakers across Ar Rifa. Then the city erupts with celebratory AK fire. We sit inside Colbert’s vehicle eating cold MREs in the darkness. In recent days, rations were cut from three to two meals per day. There is a silver lining to having your rations cut. When you eat MREs in abundance, they taste foul. Now, with everyone having a constant edge of hunger, meals that once tasted like dried kitchen sponges in chemical sauce are pretty tasty. Everyone plows through the ratfuck bag, eagerly retrieving meals like Chicken Jambalaya and Vegetarian Alfredo that a week ago no one would have touched.
We are happily eating when, from behind us on the highway, we hear the sound of rolling gunfire. All of us look out into the darkness and see dozens of orange tracer rounds spewing out from both sides of an approaching U.S. military convoy.
“Everybody get down!” Colbert shouts. We dive to the floor of the Humvee. The American trucks pass, mistakenly discharging a torrent of automatic weapons fire toward our Humvee and those in the rest of the company. Tracers skim over the hood. A high-caliber American round slices through the armor plates, penetrating the vehicle behind Trombley and me. The shooting lasts about twenty seconds. “It’s fucking friendlies,” Colbert says, uncurling himself from the floor.
After dark, the Marine Humvees put out infrared