Evan Wright - Generation Kill

To try to cool things down, a lot of Marines are “free-balling” in their MOPPs, going buck naked in them, but the scouring-pad liners make this an extremely uncomfortable option.

MOPP boots are the coup de grâce to making the whole ensemble a torturous experience. These are rubber galoshes worn on top of Marine combat boots. The rubber boots must be worn with the rest of the MOPP at all times, even when Marines sleep at night. They are so clammy and sweaty and wobbly that at every step you take it feels like your boots are stuffed full of dead fish.

In a gas attack, there’s a specific order in which Marines are trained to seal up their MOPPs. The very first thing you’re supposed to do is shut your eyes and stop breathing. Then, with your eyes closed, within the next nine seconds, you’re supposed to dig your mask out of the carrying bag strapped to your leg and put it on your head, making sure you have a good seal around your face. Then you can open your eyes and start breathing.

The bag the mask comes in is loaded with all kinds of other vital junk, too. Squeezed up next to the mask are Cipro packets (for battling Anthrax), charcoal pads (for neutralizing those nasty skin-blistering agents) and seven autoinjector syringes, each about half the size of a turkey baster. Three of these contain nerve antidotes, three more contain antidotes to the antidotes (since they are themselves toxic) and the seventh contains Valium. Marines are trained to use the antidotes on themselves. The Valium is there to be used on a buddy, in case he’s already too far gone from a nerve-agent attack—it will prevent him from twitching and flopping around as badly while he dies. It won’t save him, but it will probably improve the morale of everyone else nearby.

The problem with gas-mask kits is that when you reach in and grab the mask—in a panic, not breathing and with your eyes squeezed shut—all the autoinjectors tend to fly out. In my spare time over the past two weeks I’ve been practicing putting my mask on and have gotten reasonably good at it.

Now, in this alert, I throw it on in under nine seconds. The first breath is scary. When I open my eyes, I imagine that I might see spastic Marines suffering from nerve-agent exposure, that my hands and ears and other parts of my body still exposed will start burning and my skin will start popping off. But it’s all good. I see the other Marines by Fick’s vehicle, with their masks on, now calmly sealing up their MOPPs, closing everything up with snaps, Velcro and drawstrings. Then everyone puts on giant rubber kitchen gloves.

I manage to get it all put together about as quickly as the Marines nearby. We stand around looking at each other through the warping, fisheye lenses of our gas masks. I can’t conceal my feeling of triumph. Not only am I glad that I don’t seem to be showing any symptoms of exposure to gas, but I’m also not a little proud that I’ve gotten fully MOPPed up without panicking. Unlike these Marines, I haven’t spent the last few years of my life in wars or training exercises with bombs going off, jumping out of airplanes and helicopters. In my civilian world at home in Los Angeles, half the people I know are on antidepressants or anti–panic attack drugs because they can’t handle the stress of a mean boss or a crowd at the 7-Eleven when buying a Slurpee. That’s my world, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if, thrust into this one, in the first moments of what we all believe to be a real gas attack, I’d just flipped out and started autoinjecting myself with Valium.

No doubt, some of the Marines expected this of me as well. Ever since the platoon showed its hospitality by putting me in the walkway of their tent the first night I arrived, some have let it be known that they regard reporters as “pussy faggot lefties,” wimps who can’t hold up to the rigors of combat. But I’ve passed this test with flying colors.

Only when we’re trudging back to Colbert’s vehicle, everyone in full MOPP, do I realize I made a critical error while donning my mask.

One of the bad habits I picked up covering the military is “dipping”—chewing tobacco. Smokeless tobacco is the universal drug of American fighting men (and women, too, in integrated units). You don’t actually chew dip. Instead, you pinch a wad about half the size of a golf ball and shove it under your front lower lip. In the process of destroying your gums and teeth, it also wallops you with a nicotine buzz that makes filterless Camels seem like candy cigarettes.

Dip’s only side effect is that it causes you to salivate like a rabid dog. You constantly expectorate thick streams of brown goo. And this is my problem now. Right before the gas alert I had put a fat dip in my lip. It always makes you a little bit nauseated. Now I have this reservoir of spittle building in my mouth. There’s a drain tube in my mask, but I fear the slimy mass of spit and tobacco will clog it.

I drop into the sand by Colbert’s vehicle. Other Marines are sitting around nearby. I lie back and swallow the plug of tobacco, hoping nobody notices in case I become really sick or start acting strangely.

According to military chemical-weapons experts, these are the symptoms of exposure to toxic agents:

1. Unexplained runny nose

2. Sudden headache

3. Sudden drooling

4. Difficulty seeing; dimness of vision

5. Tightness of throat

6. Localized sweating

7. Nausea

I immediately cycle through all of these symptoms as the plug slides down my throat. I fight the urge to throw up, ever mindful of warnings we have received about the dangers of “chunky vomit.” As the waves of nausea subside, I become aware of a new sensation: wind blowing inside my pant legs. When the Marines issued my MOPP, I had complained to the sergeant who gave it to me that it looked kind of small. She had dismissed this as another example of a prima-donna reporter’s whining, and had told me, “The suit fits good.” But fully tied up, there’s about an inch gap between my pant legs and my boot tops, and this is not good.

The culprit is my suit’s g-string—a strap that you take from behind the jacket, pull between your legs and snap in the front. It’s designed to keep the jacket snugly sealed over the pants. Mine is so tight that it has jammed my pants up my crack and is letting air in over my boots.

I lie back and try unsnapping the g-string, but it’s stuck. The harder I pull—my fingers extra clumsy in my rubber clown gloves—the tighter it gets. Marines seem not to notice as I sit back in the sand, struggling with the g-string. My lenses start to fog from my heavy breathing. Then I glimpse a gas-masked figure leering over me. It’s Corporal Gabriel Garza, a heavy-weapons gunner on Colbert’s team.

In the platoon, Garza, twenty-two, is something of a cipher. He wears Coke bottle–lens glasses and a blue bandanna around his neck, which his grandmother, who raised him, gave him for good luck. She is an aloe picker in south Texas, and Garza always grins when he mentions her. “She used to beat me with a two-by-four when I was bad,” he says. “That’s ’cause she cares about me.” Garza has a round head and is not particularly tall or imposing, yet he is one of the strongest Marines in the platoon. According to his buddies, he can bench-press ten repetitions of 300-pound free weights. He works out constantly. Every night at Mathilda he would follow his dinner with a glass of salt water and lemon wedges, or oranges rolled in salt. When I asked him what the point of his unusual diet was, he said, “It makes you tougher.” He seldom talks, but frequently, while sitting alone, will suddenly begin shaking with quiet laughter, the only sound a whistling from his nose. Everyone in the platoon likes him. They call him the “Zen Master.” But when they compliment him on his physical power, he just shrugs and says, “It’s nothing. I’ve got retard strength.”