Generation Kill - Evan Wright [84]
A couple of Recon Marines walk over to Trombley and tease him about shooting camels while seizing the airfield.
“I think I got one of those Iraqis, too. I saw him go down.”
“Yeah, but you killed a camel, too, and wounded another one.”
The Marines seem to have touched a nerve.
“I didn’t mean to,” Trombley says, upset. “They’re innocent.”
Then two Bedouin women appear at the edge of the perimeter, thirty meters from Colbert’s Humvee. One of the women is dressed in a purple shawl with a black scarf on her head. She seems to be in her early thirties. The other is an old woman in black. The two of them are pulling a heavy object wrapped in a blanket. They stop on top of a high berm about twenty meters away and start waving. Doc Bryan walks over to them.
The women are highly agitated. When Doc Bryan approaches, they unfurl the bundle they’ve been dragging across the berms, and what looks to be a bloody corpse rolls out. Doc Bryan thinks it’s a dead twelve-year-old boy, but when he kneels down, the “corpse” opens his eyes. Doc Bryan immediately begins to examine him. There are four small holes in his torso, two on each side of his stomach.
I walk up behind Doc Bryan. After looking at the boy, with Doc Bryan kneeling over him, the next thing I notice is the younger woman, the mother of the boy. She has a striking, beautiful face. She is half naked. Somehow, in her effort to drag her son across the fields, her shawl has come undone in front. Her breasts are exposed. She is on her knees, praying with her head tilted up, talking nonstop, though no words come out. She turns to me and continues talking, still making no sound. She looks me in the eye. I expect her to appear angry, but instead she keeps talking silently, rolling her eyes up to heaven, then back to me. She seems to be pleading.
“This kid’s been zipped with five-five-six rounds!” Doc Bryan shouts, referring to a caliber of bullet commonly used in American weapons. “Marines shot this boy!” He has his medical kit out, rubber gloves on, and is frantically cutting off the kid’s filthy clothes, checking his vital signs and railing at the top of his lungs. “These fucking jackasses,” he says. “Trigger-happy motherfuckers.”
The older Bedouin woman and I kneel down close to Doc Bryan and watch him work. The old lady’s fingers are covered in silver rings filled with jade. Her face is completely wrinkled and inked with elaborate tribal tattoos from chin to forehead. She nudges me. When I turn, she offers me a cigarette. She says something in Arabic. When I respond in English she laughs at me almost playfully. Like the mother of the boy, she displays no anger.
Meesh, the translator, shows up, groggy, not having had his first beer of the morning yet. He asks the old lady what happened. She’s the grandmother. Her two grandsons were by the road to the airfield when the Marines’ Humvees scared the camels. The boys ran out after them and were shot by the Marines. (A second, older boy is later carried into the camp with a wounded leg, a victim of the same shooting.) Bedouins don’t keep track of things like birthdays, but the grandmother thinks the youngest boy might be twelve or fourteen.
I ask Meesh why the family doesn’t appear to be angry.
He thinks a long time and says, “They are grateful to be liberated and welcome the Americans as friends.”
“We fucking shot their kids,” Doc Bryan says.
“Dude, mistakes like this are unavoidable in war,” Meesh responds.
“Bullshit,” Doc Bryan says. “We’re Recon Marines. Our whole job is to observe. We don’t shoot unarmed children.”
Doc Bryan’s examination of the boy has revealed that each of the four holes in the boy’s body is an entry wound, meaning four bullets zoomed around inside his slender stomach and chest cavity, ripping apart his organs. Now the bullets are lodged somewhere inside. If the kid doesn’t get medevaced,