Generation Kill - Evan Wright [99]
Listening to this mini-firefight taking place outside the doors of our Humvee, Colbert leans out his window and peers at the action through his rifle scope. He leans back in his seat and says, annoyed, “I just hope they don’t orient their fire onto us.”
We wait.
“Fuck it,” Colbert says amidst the sporadic machine-gun fire. “I’m gonna do it.”
He jumps out into the scrub vegetation beside the vehicle, squats and takes care of business.
Person starts singing Country Joe McDonald’s antiwar song, “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die,” with the lyrics, “And it’s one, two, three/ What are we fighting for?” He’s interrupted by an order sent over the radio to move out. He shouts at Colbert, squatting in the field. “Hey! We’re moving again!”
Colbert hops in, suspenders from his partially disassembled MOPP flapping. “I made it.” He sighs.
As Person drives forward, Colbert says, “I think we’re gonna take some fire when we come around the next bend.”
Colbert’s instincts are money. The first mortar of the day explodes somewhere outside the vehicle as soon as we make the turn. No one can see where it hit, and judging by its muffled sound, it was probably several hundred meters away. We stop. To the left, there’s a hamlet: four to six earthen-walled homes. They’re clustered together about fifteen meters from the road, nestled beneath low-hanging fig trees. In front there are crude fences made of dried reeds, used as paddocks for sheep and goats. It has the primitive feel of one of those Nativity sets they build in town squares at Christmas. Chickens run about, and a half dozen villagers—older women in black robes, older men in dingy white ones, all of them barefoot—stand gawking at us. Despite the almost biblical look of the place, there are power lines overhead with electric wires feeding into the huts. The Marines get out, take cover behind the hoods and open doors of the Humvees, and scan the rooftops, walls and bermed fields behind the hamlet for enemy shooters.
But after about five minutes of this standoff, the villagers approach. The Marines step out from around their vehicles. A translator is brought up. The villagers say there are no enemy forces in their hamlet. Even as they speak, there are more explosions in the distance. Person, still sitting in the Humvee, hears a report from the radio that other units in First Recon, now spread out along two kilometers or so of this narrow lane, are receiving enemy mortar fire.
A shoeless farmer approaches. His face is narrow and bony from what looks to be a lifetime of starvation. Shaking his fist, speaking in a raspy voice, he says through a translator that he’s been waiting for the Americans to come since the first Gulf War. He explains that he used to live in a Shia marshland south of here. Saddam drained the marshes and ruined the farmland to punish the people there for supporting the 1991 rebellion. “Saddam believes if he starves the people we will follow him like slaves. It’s terrorism by the system itself.”
I ask the farmer why he welcomes Americans invading his country. “We are already living in hell,” he says. “If you let us pray and don’t interfere with our women, we accept you.”
The farmer, with gray hair and his narrow face wrapped in wrinkles, looks to be about sixty, with a lot of those being hard years. I ask him when he was born. 1964. I tell him we’re the same age. He leans toward me, smiling and pointing to his face. “Compared to you, I look like an old man” he says. “This is because of my life under Saddam.”
I find his self-awareness unsettling. One of the few comforts I have when looking at images of distant suffering is the hope that the starving child with flies on his face doesn’t know how pathetic he is. If all he knows is misery, maybe his suffering isn’t as bad. But this farmer has shattered that comforting illusion. He’s wretched, and he knows it. Before going off, he warns the translator that we are entering