Generation Kill - Evan Wright [86]
I catch up to Colbert walking alone through the center of the encampment. “I’m going to have to bring this home with me and live with it,” he says. “A pilot doesn’t go down and look at the civilians his bombs have hit. Artillerymen don’t see the effects of what they do. But guys on the ground do. This is killing me inside.” He walks off, privately inconsolable.
LATER, I’m passing by the battalion headquarters when Ferrando calls out to me from beneath the netting in his rasping voice. I veer under the nets and find him sitting up in his hole, wrapped in a poncho. He wants to talk about the incident with the Bedouins. Like his men, he hasn’t slept much—“an hour in the past thirty-six hours,” he tells me. He looks haggard. His face is gaunt and filthy.
“In my mind this situation is the result of the enemy’s law of war violations,” he says. “When the enemy purposely position themselves within civilians, it makes the complexity of my decision-making or that of my Marines ten times more difficult. They hope to draw more casualties on our side because of the restraint that we show. It’s a deadly situation, and we have to make twenty to thirty life-or-death decisions every hour, and often we do this without sleep. I’m amazed it’s going as well as it has.”
He brings up the moral dilemma posed by the situation the battalion was in yesterday. “At Ar Rifa,” he says, “we were lying out in front of God and everybody as an easy target. Hostile forces were on the rooftops. Based on intelligence gathered by the interpreter from townspeople, I believed we’d located a military headquarters in that town. I ordered artillery rounds dropped on that building to prevent them from organizing an attack on us. Was I right?” he asks.
“I can’t say I know for sure they were organizing for an attack, or even that the building we hit was a headquarters. What I do know is, we dropped artillery. I’m certain civilians did die as a result of my order to do so. I don’t like making this kind of choice, but I will err to protect these Marines when I can.
“Now, this morning, they requested I send those wounded civilians to the RCT for aid. Problem: Our tactical situation is extremely precarious here. I could not send a platoon to accompany them until the situation had stabilized.” He concludes, “It’s a shitty situation for these Marines. But no one put a gun to their heads and forced them to come here.”
THE TALK COLBERT DELIVERS to Trombley is considerably more concise. After returning from the battalion headquarters, he sits him down beside the Humvee and says, “Trombley, no matter what you might think, or what anybody else might say, you did your job. You were following my orders.”
Colbert then strips down to his T-shirt—the first time he’s removed his MOPP in more than a week. He crawls under the Humvee and spends several hours chipping away at the three-inch layer of tar and sand clinging to it from the sabka field.
Late in the afternoon, Fick comes by, gathers the team for a morale talk and tells them, “We made a mistake today, collectively and individually. We must get past this. We can’t sit around and call it quits now.”
Gunny Wynn is harsher. “We’re Americans,” he lectures the men. “We must be sure when we take a shot that we are threatened. You have got to see that these people are just like you. You’ve got to see past the huts, the camels, the different clothes they wear. They’re just people. This family here might lose a son. We shot their camels, too. If you kill one camel, that could be a year’s income. We’re not here to destroy their way of life.”
But then Gunny Wynn seems to almost reverse himself. “I’m not saying don’t protect yourselves. If it’s a case of losing one Marine versus one hundred civilians, I will save the Marine. You’ve just got to be goddamn careful.”
However admirable the military