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The Killer Elite Evan Wright Rolling Stone Magazine
The Killer Elite Evan Wright Rolling Stone Magazine
Person has a squarish head and blue eyes so wide apart his
Marine buddies call him Hammerhead or Goldfish. He's from
Nevada, Missouri, a small town where "NASCAR is sort of
like a state religion." He speaks with an accent that's not
quite Southern, just rural, and he was proudly raised
working-poor by his mother. "We lived in a trailer for a few
years on my grandpa's farm, and I'd get one pair of shoes
a year from Wal-Mart." Person was a pudgy kid in high
school who didn't play sports, was on the debate team and
played any musical instrument -- from guitar to saxophone
to piano -- he could get his hands on.
"That sucks when it's runny and you have to wipe fifty
times," Trombley says conversationally.
"I'm not talking about that." Colbert assumes his stern
teacher's voice. "If it's too hard or too soft, something's not
right. You might have a problem."
"Maybe on your little bitch asshole from all the cock that's
been stuffed up it," Colbert snaps.
Fick tells his men that the Marines have been taking heavy
casualties in Nasiriyah. Yesterday, the town was declared
secure. But then an Army supply unit traveling near the city
came under attack from an Iraqi guerrilla unit of Saddam
Hussein loyalists called fedayeen. These fighters, Fick says,
wear civilian clothes and set up positions in the city among
the general populace, firing mortars, rocket-propelled
grenades (RPGs) and machine guns from rooftops,
apartments and alleys. They killed or captured twelve
soldiers from the Army supply unit, including a woman.
Overnight, a Marine combat team from Task Force Tarawa
attempted to move into the city across the main bridge
over the Euphrates. Nine Marines lost their lives, and
seventy more were injured.
The air is heavy with a fine, powdery dust that hangs like
dense fog. Cobras clatter directly overhead, swooping low
with the grace of flying sledgehammers. They circle First
Recon's convoy, nosing down through the barren scrubland
on either side of the road, hunting for enemy shooters.
Before long, we are on our own. The helicopters are called
off because fuel is short. The bulk of the Marine convoy is
held back until the Iraqi forces ahead are put down. One of
the last Marines we see standing by the road pumps his fist
as Colbert's vehicle drives past and shouts, "Get some!"
It's not just bragging. When Marines talk about the violence
they wreak, there's an almost giddy shame, an uneasy
exultation in having committed society's ultimate taboo,
and doing it with state sanction.
"Holy shit! Did you see that? We got fucking lit up!" Colbert
is beside himself, laughing and shaking his head. "Holy
shit!"
The next morning at dawn, Lt. Fick tells his Marines, "The
good news is, we will be rolling with a lot of ass today. RCT
1 will be in front of us for most of the day. The bad news is,
we're going through four more towns like the one we hit
yesterday."
"No," he answers. "My dad was once. The dog bit him, and
my dad jammed his hand down his throat and ripped up his
stomach. I did have a dog lunge at me once on the
sidewalk. I just threw it on its side, knocked the wind out of
him."
We drive on.
"I like cats," Trombley offers. "I had a cat that lived to be
sixteen. One time he ripped a dog's eye out with his claw."
Encino Man pops off a 203 grenade that falls wildly short of
the house. Colbert, like other Marines in Bravo, is furious.
Not only do they believe this Recon officer is firing on
civilians, but the guy also doesn't even know how to range
his 203.
The drive takes about three hours. On the way, the men
are informed that they will be setting up an observation
post on the field to prepare for a parachute assault that
British forces are going to execute at dawn. But plans
change again at sunrise. At 6:20, after the Bravo Marines
have slept for about ninety minutes, Colbert is awakened
and told his men have ten minutes to race onto the airfield,
six kilometers away, and assault it. At 6:28, Colbert's team
is in the Humvee driving with thirty other Recon vehicles
down a road they've never even studied on a map. They're
told over the radio they will face enemy tanks.
"Everything and everyone on the airfield is hostile," Colbert
says, passing on a direct order from his commander.
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. This morning, the sun shines and there's no dust in
the air. For the first time in a week, many of the Marines
take their boots and socks off. They unfurl camo nets for
shade and lounge beside their Humvees. A couple of Recon
Marines walk over to Trombley and tease him about
shooting camels.
"I think I got one of those Iraqis, too. I saw him go down."
Later, he'll say that he's not sure why he even walked up to
the women. In recent days, Marines have grown weary of
Iraqi civilians, who have begun accosting them, begging for
food, cigarettes, sometimes even chanting the one English
word they all seem to be learning: "Money, money,
money." When he reaches them, he notices that the
younger woman seems highly distraught, gesturing and
moving her mouth, but no words come out. Her breasts are
exposed, her robes having fallen open while she was
dragging her bundle across the fields. As Bryan approaches,
she frantically unrolls its contents, revealing what appears
to be a youth's bloody corpse. The boy looks about
fourteen. Then he opens his eyes. Bryan kneels down.
There are four small holes, two on each side of his
stomach.
"Get him the fuck out of here," the sergeant major bellows.
Ten minutes after they carry the Bedouin boy off, Ferrando
has a change of heart. He orders his men to bring the
Bedouins to the shock-trauma unit, twenty kilometers
south. Some Marines believe Ferrando reversed himself to
heal the growing rift between the officers and enlisted men
in the battalion. As Bryan climbs onto the back of an open
truck with the wounded boys and most of their clan, a
Marine walks up to him and says, "Hey, Doc. Get some."
It's not a good day for god in Iraq. Lt. Cmdr. Christopher
Bodley, chaplain for the First Reconnaissance Battalion, is
trying to minister to fighting Marines, now resting for the
first time since the invasion of Iraq began more than a
week ago. They have set up a defensive camp by the
airfield they seized near Qal'at Sukkar, in central Iraq. After
their initiation into urban-guerrilla warfare in An Nasiriyah
to the south, followed by three days of continual fighting
against an enemy they seldom actually saw, the 374
Marines of the elite battalion have been given forty-eight
hours of downtime to recuperate. Their camp is spread
across two kilometers of what looks like a fantasy Martian
landscape of dried-out, reddish mud flats and empty
canals. Each four - to six - man team lives in holes dug
beneath camouflage nets placed around its Humvee.
Throughout the day, Bodley walks around the camp and
attempts to minister to his flock of heavily armed young
men. Although the Marines in First Recon have already
killed dozens, accidentally wounded civilians and taken one
casualty of their own (a driver shot in the arm), the
chaplain encounters few troubled by war itself. "A lot of the
young men I talk to can compartmentalize the terrible
things they've seen," he says. "But many of them feel bad
because they haven't had a chance to fire their weapons.
They worry that they haven't done their jobs as Marines."
In the next few hours, wave after wave of attack jets and
bombers drop an estimated 8,000 pounds of ordnance
around the camp. The next day, Recon sends out a foot
patrol to do bomb-damage assessment. They see lots of
craters outside a village, but no sign of any armor. Sgt.
Damon Fawcett of First Recon's Alpha Company, which led
one of the patrols, says, "We could have gone farther.
Bombs fell in areas we didn't get to see, but I believe they
didn't want us to investigate too much and find out possibly
that we'd hit homes or civilians. Or just nothing at all."
On March 30th, first recon pulls back from the airfield and
joins up with the main Marine battle force in central Iraq,
Regimental Combat Team One, camped out by Highway 7,
the main road between An Nasiriyah and Al Kut. Comprising
approximately 7,000 Marines, RCT 1 is about twenty times
larger than First Recon and, with nearly 200 tanks and
armored vehicles, much better armed. Evidently feeling
secure with so much armor in the vicinity, battalion
command allows the men to go to sleep without digging the
usual holes that protect them from shrapnel in case of an
attack.
The next morning, the men are informed that they are
lucky to be alive -- they were nearly bombarded by Iraqi
artillery, not "danger-close" American rounds. Lt. Nathan
Fick, commander of Bravo Second Platoon, delivers the
news with a grimly amused smile: "That Iraqi rocket
system kills everything in an entire grid square" -- a square
kilometer. "They knew our coordinates and came within a
few hundred meters of us. We got lucky, again."
Fick also tells the men that the battalion is resuming its
drive north. "We're following the Al Gharraf canal, doing a
movement to contact." He offers another grimly amused
smile. This means the battalion will be rolling in the open
toward expected ambush points, trying to flush out the
enemy. First Recon will take the west side of the canal and
move ahead of RCT 1, which will be on the opposite bank.
First Recon's objective is Al Hayy, a town of about 40,000.
It's a Ba'ath Party headquarters and home to a large
Republican Guard unit.
Across from the building, a live Arab lies in the road. He's in
a dingy white robe, squeezed between piles of rubble. The
man is only about five feet from where our wheels pass, on
his back with both hands covering his eyes. After being
subjected to hostile fire all day, there's a kind of sick,
triumphant rush in seeing another human being, perhaps
an enemy fighter, now on his back, helplessly cowering. It's
empowering in a way that is also depressing. All the
Marines who drive past the man train their guns on him but
don't shoot. He's not a threat, childishly trying to protect
his face with his hands.
Fick walks up, grinning. Even loaded down with his vest,
flak jacket and bulky chemical-protection suit, as he is now,
he always has a sort of loping, bouncing, adolescent stride.
Today it's even more buoyant. "I feel like for the first time
we seized the initiative," he says, surveying the roadblock.
Everyone seems to be swaggering as they walk around the
bridge. After nearly two weeks of feeling hunted, the
Marines have done what they were supposed to do: They
assaulted through resistance and took an objective.This
small band, now about twenty kilometers from any friendly
American forces, controls the key exit from a town of
40,000.
But the one thing the Marines haven't trained for, or really
even thought through, is the operation of roadblocks. The
basic idea is simple enough: Put an obstacle like concertina
wire in the road and point guns at it. If a car approaches,
fire warning shots. If it keeps coming, shoot it. The
question is: Do the Iraqis understand what's going on?
When it gets dark, can Iraqi drivers actually see the
concertina wire? Even Marines have been known to drive
through concertina wire at night. The other problem is
warning shots. In the dark, a warning shot is simply a
series of loud bangs and orange flashes. It's not like this is
the international code for "Stop your vehicle and turn
around." As it turns out, many Iraqis react to warning shots
by speeding up. Maybe they just panic. Consequently, a lot
of Iraqis die at roadblocks.
The spell is broken when a Recon unit 500 meters down the
line opens up on a truck leaving the city. In the distance, a
man jumps out holding an AK. He jogs through a field on
the other side of the canal. We watch lazily from the grass
as he's gunned down by other Marines.
The birds are singing again when the man across the canal
reappears, limping and weaving like a drunk. Nobody
shoots him. He's not holding a gun anymore. The rules of
engagement are scrupulously observed. Even so, they
cannot mask the sheer brutality of the situation.
Fick, who saw Patrick med-evacked off with his shot foot,
appears to be in a morbid state of self-reflection. He walks
among his Marines saying almost nothing. They've set up
again a few kilometers back from the bridge and gather in
small groups around their Humvees going over every detail
of the previous night's actions. Several of them slap Fick on
the back, laughing about the courage he displayed by
walking through the kill zone to direct the Humvees out at
the height of the ambush. Fick sloughs off their praise,
saying, "I merely had a lack of situational awareness." He
tells me, "We should never be in a position like this again.
That was bad tactics."
The four killed are the first combatants the Marines in First
Recon have ever seen up close. The dead wear pleated
slacks, loafers and leather jackets. An officer leans down
and picks up the hand of one. Between his thumb and index
finger, there are words tattooed on his skin in English: i
love you. The officer reads it aloud for the benefit of the
other Marines nearby and says, "These guys look like
foreign university students in New York."
Kocher kneels over him and pats him down for weapons.
The man howls in pain. He's shot in the right arm and has a
two-inch chunk of his right leg missing. He carries a Syrian
passport that bears the name Ahmed Shahada. He's
twenty-six years old, and his place of address in Iraq is
listed as the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, by local standards
one of the better hotels, catering to foreign journalists and
European aid workers. He's carrying 500 Syrian pounds, a
packet of prescription painkillers in his shirt pocket and an
entry visa to Iraq dated March 23rd. He arrived barely more
than a week ago. Handwritten in the section of his visa that
asks the purpose of his visit to Iraq is one word: "Jihad."
In this case, the details seem too murky to draw any firm
conclusions. What will soon become clear, though, is that
this incident ominously foreshadows one of the more
controversial episodes of the campaign, when, a few days
later, outside Baghdad, Captain America and his bayonet
make another dramatic appearance during a prisoner
capture. And this time, ironically, Kocher and another
enlisted man critical of Captain America will be involved.
It's April 8th. Army and Marine units began their final
assault on Baghdad several hours ago. First Recon,
however, will not be heading into the Iraqi capital just yet.
It's feared that Iraqi Republican Guard units may be
massing for a counterattack in a town called Ba'qubah, fifty
kilometers north of Baghdad. First Recon receives orders to
head north and attack these forces. Sgt. Brad Colbert,
whose team I am riding with, and the rest of the Marines
stop reminiscing about Horsehead and load their Humvees.
Despite the fact that Colbert's team has been driving into
ambushes on an almost daily basis for more than two
weeks, this is the first time these Marines have started a
mission with an armored escort. "Damn! That's fucking
awesome," Person says. "We've got the Great Destroyers
with us."
"No, he's not," Colbert says, cutting off what will likely be a
bitter tirade about Captain America. In recent days, Person
has pretty much forgotten his old hatreds for pop stars
such as Justin Timberlake -- a former favorite subject of
long, tedious rants about what's wrong with the U.S. -- and
now he complains almost exclusively about Captain
America. Lack of respect for this officer is so acute among
enlisted ranks that some of his own men openly refer to
him as "dumbass" -- sometimes directly to his face."He's
just nervous," Colbert says, not quite defending the officer.
"Everyone's nervous. Everyone's just trying to do their job."
I look out and see Espera hunched over his weapon, his
eyes darting beneath the brim of his helmet, watching for
the next hit. Beside him, his twenty-three-year-old driver,
Cpl. Jason Lilley, grips the wheel, his face ashen. A few
hours before leaving on this mission, Lilley had been sitting
around with the platoon talking about the time he ate a
clown fish -- just for the hell of it -- when he worked at a
Wal-Mart in high school. Lilley joined the Marines to get out
of his hometown in Wichita, Kansas, and stop partying. "My
brains were, like, pan-fried," he says.
This is not to say the terror goes away. It simply moves out
from the twitching muscles and nerves in your body and
takes up residence in your mind. If you feed it with morbid
thoughts of all the terrible ways you could be maimed or
die, it gets worse. It also gets worse if you think about
pleasant things. Good memories or plans for the future just
remind you how much you don't want to die or get hurt.
It's best to shut down, to block everything out. But to reach
that state, you have to almost give up being yourself. This
is why, I believe, everyone had said goodbye to each other.
They would still be together, but they wouldn't really be
seeing one another for a while, since each man would in his
own way be sort of gone.
After about twenty minutes, the mortar fire ceases for the
rest of the day. Enemy resistance is beginning to wither
under the combined effects of the Marine advance on the
ground and violent airstrikes from above. Had the Iraqis
massed their armor earlier in the day when heavy clouds
inhibited airstrikes, they could have wreaked havoc. But for
some reason, they missed their chance. Clouds have
burned off, and waves of jets and Cobra helicopters
simultaneously bomb, rocket and strafe targets in all
directions. Trucks, armor, homes and entire hamlets are
being bombed and set on fire. With the dramatic increase in
firepower from the air, First Recon and War Pig rampage
north, covering the final ten kilometers to Ba'qubah in a
couple of hours. When the Iraqis finally send down a few
armored vehicles, they are blown to smithereens by attack
jets and Marines with shoulder-fired missiles.
The Iraqis who had put up fierce resistance earlier have
either fled or been slaughtered. Headless corpses --
indicating well-aimed shots from high-caliber weapons --
are sprawled out in trenches by the road. Others are
charred beyond recognition behind the wheels of burnt,
skeletonized trucks. The sole injury on the American side
occurs when a Marine in Alpha Company is hit by a piece of
flying shrapnel from a T-72 tank after it's blown up by one
of his buddies with a shoulder-fired missile. His helmet,
though partially crushed, stops the shrapnel. All the Marine
suffered was a bad headache.
With each air assault, Recon teams advance into the flames
and smoke, hunting for fleeing enemy fighters. The only
people Colbert's team encounters are terrified villagers -- a
half-dozen men and one small, extremely frightened girl
hiding in a ditch while their homes, fields and grape arbors
burn in the wake of a Cobra attack. The men, fearing for
their lives, scream, "No Saddam! No Saddam!" when
Colbert's team approaches, weapons drawn. After Colbert
and Fick pat the men on their shoulders to reassure them
that they are not going to be executed, the village elder
bursts into tears, grabs Fick's face and smothers him in
kisses.
The next day, Sgt. Cottle, the reservist who initially shook
Kocher's hand and thanked him, filed a report charging
Kocher, Redman and Captain America with assaulting the
prisoner. Cottle later tells me, "I feel bad for the enlisted
guys. They weren't really the problem. It was the officer."
One of Cottle's fellow reservists, a senior enlisted man who
also witnessed the events, says, "From what I saw, that
officer is sick. There's something wrong with him." Captain
America denies any misdeed. He simply thought his
accusers were insufficiently acquainted with the realities of
the battlefield. "They saw the beast that day, and they
didn't know how to handle it," Captain America says later.
"The prisoner was handled properly, even though they
didn't like the way it looked."
Fick walks over. "Hey, I don't want any war crimes in the
back of my truck." He says this lightly. He has no idea yet
of the brewing controversy over the man's capture. "Untie
him and give him some water."
The man's arms are swollen and purple when the Marines
cut off the zip cuffs. The angry nineteen-year-old Marine
helps give him a bottle of water and a package of military-
ration poundcake. The prisoner, snuffling his tears away,
eyes the offerings suspiciously for a moment, then eats
hungrily.
The news is only getting better. Fick walks up and tells Al-
Khizjrgee he will be driving him to Baghdad tonight.
After forty hours without sleep, more than half of this spent
in combat, nerves are on edge, and Person has just
violated Colbert's cardinal rule as team leader: No country
music is allowed in this war.
Within the first few days of their patrols, the Marines are
quickly overwhelmed by the magnitude of Baghdad's social
breakdown. There's no electricity or clean water. The
streets are filled with raw sewage. Children are dying of
disease. Bandits roam freely at night. Hospitals have been
looted. The only items in plentiful supply are AK rifles.
Locals claim that since armories and police stations were
overrun at the end of the war, an AK now costs about the
same as a couple of packs of cigarettes. Gun battles
continue to rage every night among Shias, Sunnis, bandits,
die-hard fedayeen and even Kurdish "freedom fighters" who
have been flooding into the city to hunt down Saddam
loyalists. The fighting is so bad that Marines aren't even
allowed out after dark.
During the next few days, First Recon moves from the
cigarette factory to a wrecked hospital to a looted power
plant, all the while dogged by an increasingly bitter rift over
the prisoner-handling incident that occurred outside
Ba'qubah. The first Marine to come under investigation is
Sgt. Eric Kocher, who is kicked off his team. Cpl. Dan
Redman, who placed his boot on the prisoner's neck, is also
put under investigation. Captain America is temporarily
relieved of his command.
The next day, First Recon suffers its fourth and fifth
casualties when Gunnery Sgt. David J. Dill, a combat
engineer attached to the battalion, steps on a mine and
blows his foot off. Flying shrapnel takes out the eye of
another Marine nearby. There's a bitter irony to the
confusion that follows. The three Marines cleared in the
prisoner incident work together on the rescue. Kocher runs
into the minefield to assist Dill. After loading him into a
Humvee, Captain America orders the Marines to take a
shortcut, over their strenuous objections, and the vehicle
becomes mired in a swamp. "Dude, it was awful," says
Redman, "trying to rock that Humvee out, with Dill in the
back seat, his foot blown off." They finally carried Dill to
another Humvee and got him to medical treatment. His leg
was amputated below the knee several hours later --
though through no fault of the delay caused by Captain
America's shortcut.
First recon moves to its final camp in Iraq, at a former Iraqi
military base outside the city of Ad Diwaniyah, 180
kilometers south of Baghdad. Bravo Company winds up in
one of the shittiest spots in the camp. They set up on an
exposed concrete pad next to the latrine trenches and burn
pits. Dust storms blow continually. Most Marines have only
had one shower in the past forty days. The men are beset
by flies and dysentery. Surveying this last infernal camp
with an almost satisfied smile, Cpl. Michael Stinetorf, a
Second Platoon machine-gunner, says, "One universal fact
of being in the Marine Corps is that no matter where we go
in the world, we always end up in some random shitty
place."