Generation Kill - Evan Wright [94]
He explains, “I pushed the ROE because we had reports of enemy tanks and armored personnel carriers on the airstrip. It was a military target. I had seen no civilians. It was five in the fucking morning. The general told me to get on the field. I knew that slapping everyone together and moving onto the airfield in twenty minutes was reckless, but that was my order. It was the most rash fucking thing I’ve done. Borderline foolish. But I can’t tell the general we don’t do windows.”
He then tries to dispel the resentment some men feel for his initial order to not medevac the wounded boy. “If that casualty had been you, I would not have medevaced you because I still thought we had armor to the south.” He expounds his interpretation of the rules of war. “Some of you seem to think we have to give wounded civilians every consideration we give ourselves. That is not true. The ROE say we have to give them the same medical care they would get by themselves. That is zero.”
Ferrando makes a play for his men’s support. “We are going to get tasked to do things that suck,” he says. “You have to have faith in me. You may not like me. That’s okay. But you have to understand that my number-one priority is protection of our forces.” He concedes, “We’ve done a few things that could have been catastrophic, but we made it through. The bottom line is, we volunteered to fight.”
As they walk back to their positions on the perimeter, one of the men says, “Yeah, we volunteered to be here, but we didn’t volunteer to be treated like idiots. His story always changes. ‘Protection of forces’ my fucking ass. He sent us onto an airfield where he thought there were fucking tanks. Why did we make that pell-mell fucking rush? So a colonel could score a few extra brownie points with his general.”
NINETEEN
°
IT’S ANOTHER BITTERLY COLD MORNING on March 30, and the men have again been up all night. The Marines in Bravo Company spent their final hours at the airfield camp in their Humvees, crashing around in the darkness, trying to execute orders that changed every forty-five minutes or so until dawn. At around midnight, they were told enemy forces had gotten a fix on their positions and they needed to move to new ones in order to avoid mortar or artillery strikes. They kept moving a few hundred meters this way and that until four in the morning, when Fick announced, “For First Recon, the operational pause is over. We have warning orders for a new mission.”
But even with Fick’s promise that clarity of purpose was on its way, the company kept up its hectic maneuvers until dawn. Now everyone is sitting out by some berms, watching a beautiful rose-tinted sunrise. Lovell is freezing after having fallen into a canal while retrieving a claymore mine during the frantic night moves. Reyes, who has just spent half an hour cutting concertina wire out of his Humvee’s undercarriage—after having driven through it while circling the camp in the darkness—says, “We’re Pavlov’s dogs. They condition us through rules, through repeatedly doing things that have no purpose.” He laughs. “They probably knew at midnight we would just spend the next five hours driving around aimlessly. They know it just makes us mad and gets us keyed up to do something.”
He has a point. Despite another night of sleeplessness, spirits are soaring. Most men are elated at the prospect of another mission. It’s like they’ve forgotten the horrors of Nasiriyah and Al Gharraf, twisted Amtracs with dead Marines in them, mangled civilians on the highway. Three days of stewing in the camp, being chewed out by the Coward of Khafji for not having proper haircuts, has made them eager to get back on the road. In their minds, at least when they’re in the field, getting shot at and bombed, they don’t have to deal with retards in the rear.
Fick now adds to their élan with good news. He tells his team leaders, “It looks like we are going to be doing interdiction and ambushes along Route 17, west of 7.”
Instead of driving blind into enemy positions, the Recon Marines will be turning