Generation Kill - Evan Wright [85]
Fick and the battalion surgeon, Navy Lieutenant Alex Aubin, a twenty-nine-year-old fresh out of Annapolis and the Naval medical school in Bethesda, Maryland, arrives with bad news. Ferrando has denied their request to medevac the boy.
Just then, a Predator unmanned spy plane flies low overhead. Predators, powered by gasoline engines, make a loud, annoying buzzing sound like a lawn mower with a broken muffler. Doc Bryan looks up, angrily. “We can afford to fly fucking Predators,” he says, “but we can’t take care of this kid?”
“I’m going to go ask the battalion commander again,” Aubin says.
Colbert appears, climbing over the berm. He sees the mother, the kid, the brother with the bloody leg, other members of the family who have now gathered nearby. He seems to reel back for an instant, then rights himself and approaches.
“This is what Trombley did,” Doc Bryan says. “This kid was shot with five-five-six rounds from Trombley’s SAW.” Doc Bryan has concluded that Trombley was the only one to fire a weapon using this type of bullet. “Twenty other Marines drove past those kids and didn’t shoot. Bring Trombley up here and show him what he did.”
“Don’t say that,” Colbert says. “Don’t put this on Trombley. I’m responsible for this. It was my orders.”
Colbert kneels down over the kid, right next to his mother, and starts crying. He struggles to compose himself. “What can I do here?” he asks.
“Apparently fucking nothing,” Doc Bryan says.
Aubin returns, shaking his head. “No. We can’t medevac him.”
Even though Aubin is simply the bearer of bad news, Doc Bryan glares at him accusatorily. “Well, that just sucks, don’t it?”
Aubin grew up on St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, and he gives the impression of being sort of preppy. Even in a filthy MOPP suit, he’s the type of guy you picture with a nice tan, in loafers with no socks. He’s about the last guy you would expect to come up with a plan for an insurrection. But after no one says anything for a few moments, Aubin looks up at Doc Bryan, formulating an idea. He says, “Under the rules, we have to provide him with care until he dies.”
“Yeah, so?” Doc Bryan asks.
“Put him in my care. I stay next to the battalion commander. If he’s in my care, the boy will stay with me at the headquarters. Colonel Ferrando might change his order if he has to watch him die.”
Fick approves of the plan, even though it represents an affront to his commanders and a risk to his own career, already under threat from his confrontation with Encino Man at Ar Rifa. But he endorses this effort, he later says, “because if we didn’t do something, I was going to lose Colbert and Doc Bryan. The platoon would have fallen apart. I believed we had at least ninety days of combat ahead of us, and my best men had become ineffective—angry at the command and personally devastated. We had to get this blood off the platoon’s hands. I didn’t care if we threw those kids onto a helicopter and they died thirty seconds later. My men had to do something.”
With Colbert and Doc Bryan at the front of the stretcher, the Marines carry the wounded boy nearly a kilometer to the battalion headquarters. The whole Bedouin family follows. They reach the antenna farm and the cammie nets covering a communications truck and the commander’s small, black command tent. They enter the inner sanctum beneath the nets. The Marines lower the stretcher. Several officers, sitting in their skivvies at laptop computers on MRE crates, look up, aghast. With Bedouin tribespeople now pouring in, it looks like the perimeter has been overrun.
The Coward of Khafji runs up, veins pulsing on his forehead. He comes head-to-head with the grandmother, who blows a cloud of cigarette smoke in his face.
“What the hell is going on here?” he shouts, confronting this near-mutinous breakdown of military order inside the battalion headquarters.
“We brought him here to die,” Doc Bryan says defiantly.
The Coward of Khafji looks down at the kid on the stretcher.
“Get him the fuck out of here,” he bellows.
The Marines carry the kid out in