Generation Kill - Evan Wright [88]
The battalion contacts First Marine Division and reports a possible enemy column moving nearby. One hundred forty Iraqi military vehicles—be they tanks or even trucks filled with men—would be enough to hammer First Recon in its remote position. The division takes this threat extremely seriously. Earlier, the crew of a P-3 observation plane had spotted what they thought might be a column of twenty-five vehicles in the same area. With two independent reports, the division immediately sends all available aircraft toward the “convoy.”
When the alarm reaches Colbert’s team, everyone not on watch is woken up and told to load the Humvee and get ready to move or to fight. I made the mistake tonight of stripping out of my MOPP suit and trying to sleep in my underpants. I hadn’t removed the MOPP in ten days. It’s a near-freezing night, and sliding back into the cold, plastic-lined MOPP is a torture all its own. But just as continual hunger makes MRE food rations taste better, your own petty physical discomforts obliterate grander fears. Sitting in the darkened Humvee, shivering in my icy MOPP, I’m much more concerned about the cold than reports now popping over battalion radios of enemy tanks, or RPG teams moving in to attack. Adding to my misery is the prevailing mood of cheerfulness in the Humvee.
Colbert and his Marines are wide awake, eagerly passing around optics, peering into them, debating about what they see. The prospect of an enemy column moving their way excites them. Besides, Recon Marines like Colbert are in their hearts almost like bird-watchers. They have a passion for observing things that exists all by itself, separate from whatever thrills they get out of guns and blowing things up. They seem truly happy whenever a chance comes to puzzle out the nature of small (but potentially lethal) mysteries on the horizon. This time, in the case of these enigmatic lights, Colbert concludes, “Those are the lights of a village.” He sounds almost disappointed.
Waves of F-18s and A-10s fly over the location of the suspected enemy column. Initially there’s confusion. When Alpha’s platoon commander called in the location of the “convoy,” he used incorrect protocols in giving its location (making the same error Encino Man had committed when he’d tried to call in artillery on top of his company outside Ar Rifa). “This mistake created an entire chain of error up to the division,” Capt. Patterson later says. After the aircraft finally figure out what their pilots think are the correct coordinates of the suspected convoy, they attack the area by dropping bombs and firing Maverick air-to-ground missiles.
U.S. military doctrine is pretty straightforward in situations like this: If there even appears to be an imminent threat, bomb the shit out of it. One of First Recon’s officers, Captain Stephen Kintzley, puts it this way: “We get a few random shots, and we fire back with such overwhelming force that we stomp them. I call it disciplining the Hajjis.”
During the next few hours, attack jets drop nearly 10,000 pounds of bombs on the suspected position of the alleged enemy convoy. It’s a spectacular show. From Colbert’s vehicle we watch numerous smaller bombs flash and count two huge mushroom clouds roiling up in the night sky.
Planes flying over the target areas in daylight give conflicting reports of what they hit. Some report seeing wrecked armored vehicles; others see nothing. First Recon punches out foot patrols. They observe craters outside one village, but no sign of any bombed armor. Some villagers venture out and offer to roast the Marines a goat, apparently with the hope that an offering will propitiate them into calling off further bombing.
Maj. Shoup, who was in communication with some of the pilots during the bombing, later tells me, “I don’t think there was any armor there in the first place. Maybe the first P-3 picked up an abandoned piece of armor or some poor farmer’s tractor, and it spiraled from there.” As the bombing continued, some of the pilots reported