Generation Kill (19 page)

An hour later, the Marines have set up a camp off the edge of the airfield. They are told they will stay here for a day or longer. For the first time in a week, many of the Marines take their boots and socks off. They unfurl cammie nets for shade and lounge beside their Humvees. The dirt here, augmented by a luxuriously thick piling of dung from camels who graze on the local scrubweed, is pillow-soft. Distant artillery thunders with a steady, calming rhythm. Half the platoon is on watch, and everybody else is snoozing.

A couple of Recon Marines walk over to Trombley and tease him about shooting camels while seizing the airfield.

"I think I got one of those Iraqis, too. I saw him go down."

"Yeah, but you killed a camel, too, and wounded another one."

The Marines seem to have touched a nerve.

"I didn't mean to," Trombley says, upset. "They're innocent."

Then two Bedouin women appear at the edge of the perimeter, thirty meters from Colbert's Humvee. One of the women is dressed in a purple shawl with a black scarf on her head. She seems to be in her early thirties. The other is an old woman in black. The two of them are pulling a heavy object wrapped in a blanket. They stop on top of a high berm about twenty meters away and start waving. Doc Bryan walks over to them.

The women are highly agitated. When Doc Bryan approaches, they unfurl the bundle they've been dragging across the berms, and what looks to

be a bloody corpse rolls out. Doc Bryan thinks it's a dead twelve-year-old boy, but when he kneels down, the "corpse" opens his eyes. Doc Bryan immediately begins to examine him. There are four small holes in his torso, two on each side of his stomach.

I walk up behind Doc Bryan. After looking at the boy, with Doc Bryan kneeling over him, the next thing I notice is the younger woman, the mother of the boy. She has a striking, beautiful face. She is half naked. Somehow, in her effort to drag her son across the fields, her shawl has come undone in front. Her breasts are exposed. She is on her knees, praying with her head tilted up, talking nonstop, though no words come out. She turns to me and continues talking, still making no sound. She looks me in the eye. I expect her to appear angry, but instead she keeps talking silently, rolling her eyes up to heaven, then back to me. She seems to be pleading.

"This kid's been zipped with five-five-six rounds!" Doc Bryan shouts, referring to a caliber of bullet commonly used in American weapons. "Marines shot this boy!" He has his medical kit out, rubber gloves on, and is frantically cutting off the kid's filthy clothes, checking his vital signs and railing at the top of his lungs. "These fucking jackasses," he says. "Trigger-happy motherfuckers."

The older Bedouin woman and I kneel down close to Doc Bryan and watch him work. The old lady's fingers are covered in silver rings filled with jade. Her face is completely wrinkled and inked with elaborate tribal tattoos from chin to forehead. She nudges me. When I turn, she offers me a cigarette. She says something in Arabic. When I respond in English she laughs at me almost playfully. Like the mother of the boy, she displays no anger.

Meesh, the translator, shows up, groggy, not having had his first beer of the morning yet. He asks the old lady what happened. She's the grandmother. Her two grandsons were by the road to the airfield when the Marines' Humvees scared the camels. The boys ran out after them and were shot by the Marines. (A second, older boy is later carried into the camp with a wounded leg, a victim of the same shooting.) Bedouins don't keep track of things like birthdays, but the grandmother thinks the youngest boy might be twelve or fourteen.

I ask Meesh why the family doesn't appear to be angry.

He thinks a long time and says, "They are grateful to be liberated and welcome the Americans as friends."

"We fucking shot their kids," Doc Bryan says.

"Dude, mistakes like this are unavoidable in war," Meesh responds.

"Bullshit," Doc Bryan says. "We're Recon Marines. Our whole job is to observe. We don't shoot unarmed children."

Doc Bryan's examination of the boy has revealed that each of the four holes in the boy's body is an entry wound, meaning four bullets zoomed around inside his slender stomach and chest cavity, ripping apart his organs. Now the bullets are lodged somewhere inside. If the kid doesn't get mede-vaced, he's going to die in a few hours.

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 lap- top computers on MRE crates, look up, aghast. With Bedouin tradespeople 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 silence and place him under a nearby cammie net. Five minutes later, word is sent back that Ferrando has had a change of heart. He orders a platoon from Alpha to bring the Bedouins to RCT-l's shock-trauma unit, twenty kilometers south.

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's attempts are to create ROE, they basically create an illusion of moral order where there is none. The Marines operate in chaos. It doesn't matter if a Marine is following orders and ROE, or disregarding them. The fact is, as soon as a Marine pulls the trigger on his rifle, he's on his own. He's entered a game of moral chance. When it's over, he's as likely to go down as a hero or as a baby killer. The only difference between Trombley and any number of other Marines who've shot or killed people they shouldn't have is that he got caught. And this only happened because the battalion stopped moving long enough for the innocent victims to catch up with it.

Before leaving, Fick and Gunny Wynn raise the possibility of there being a formal inquiry into the shooting. After they walk off, Trombley turns to Colbert and asks, "Is this going to be okay, I mean with the investigation?"

"You'll be fine, Trombley."

"No. I mean for you, Sergeant." Trombley grins. "I don't care what happens, really. I'm out in a couple of years. I mean for you. This is your career."

"I'll be fine." Colbert stares at him. "No worries."

Something's been bothering me about Trombley for a day or two, and I can't help thinking about it now. I was never quite sure if I should believe his claim that he cut up those Iraqis in Al Gharraf. But he hit those two shepherds, one of whom was extremely small, at more than 200 meters, from a Humvee bouncing down a rough road at forty miles per hour. However horrible the results, his work was textbook machine-gun shooting, and the fact is, from now on, every time I ride with Colbert's team, I feel a lot better when Trombley is by my side with the SAW.

Sunset on the night of March 27 turns the surrounding fields red. First Ream's camp by the airfield is spread across three kilometers, with the Humvees on the outer perimeter spaced about seventy-five meters apart, hidden under cammie nets. Looking out, all you see are dried mudflats, rippled with berms and sliced with dry canals. It looks like a 1950s sci-fi fantasy Martian landscape.

They tell us to dig our holes extra deep tonight. The battalion remains cut off, deep in "bad-guy country," as Pick says. To prevent hordes of RPG teams or enemy tanks from overrunning the perimeter, the Marine Division, about twenty kilometers southwest of here, has pretargeted its artillery to land within "danger-close" range of the camp should it be requested. If the enemy appears in the nearby fields, a quick SOS to division headquarters will bring dozens or hundreds of artillery rounds splashing down near where we are sleeping.

For the first time in several days, the night sky is clear. I watch shooting stars from my hole. There are more stars than you would typically see in North America because there are no streetlights. Clear skies also mean U.S. military aircraft, hampered by dust storms the past several days, now have free rein. It's a busy night in the sky. Past sunset we hear unmanned drones crisscrossing overhead, then the buzzing of propeller-driven P-3 observation planes. Antimissile flares, thrown out by unseen jets, make the whole sky blink. Bombs flash on the horizon. Iraqi AAA guns send up tracer rounds, which look like strings of pearls. I see the enemy AAA batteries firing north, east and west of us, a graphic reminder that there are hostile forces all around.

Near midnight, a team on Alpha Company's sector of the perimeter observes lights that appear to be moving about six kilometers away. The Marines count somewhere between 120 and 140 different lights. Lights could be produced by all sorts of things—a small town with electricity (south of here a few days ago we did see some towns that still had power), a bunch of civilian vehicles or an Iraqi military convoy. Since these lights seem to be moving, the Marines rule out the town option. The men on the team aren't sure what's producing the lights, but their nervous platoon commander believes they represent a possible threat. He radios the battalion that a convoy of "one hundred forty vehicles" is on the move about six kilometers from First Recon's position.

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-lOs 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 that their optics were picking up heat signatures on the ground, indicating there was armor or vehicles of some sort down there. But Shoup believes their thermal optics were actually picking up hot shrapnel from previously dropped bombs. "As soon as you drop a bomb it creates its own heat signature on the ground, which later pilots were reading as armor."

As for the lights that the Marines saw six kilometers away, Shoup believes they were actually seeing lights from a town seventeen kilometers distant. They had misread the lights of a distant city as headlamps from a much closer convoy. Shoup attributes the perception that these headlamps appeared to be moving to a phenomenon called "autokinesis." He explains, "When you stare at lights long enough in the dark, it looks like they are moving. That's autokinesis."

What it boils down to is that under clear skies, in open terrain with almost no vegetation, the Marines don't have a clue what's out there beyond the perimeter. Even with the best optics and surveillance assets in the world, no one knows what happened to nearly 10,000 pounds of bombs and missiles dropped a few kilometers outside the encampment. They may as well have been dropping them in the Bermuda Triangle. It's not that the technology is bad or its operators incompetent, but the fog of war persists on even the clearest of nights.