Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Trombley, who at nineteen is the youngest member of the team, is a thin, dark-haired and slightly pale kid from Farwell, Michigan. He speaks in a soft yet deeply resonant voice that doesn’t quite fit his boyish face. One of his eyes is bright red from an infection caused by the continual dust storms. He has spent the past couple of days trying to hide it so he doesn’t get pulled from the team. Technically, he is a “paper Recon Marine” because he has not yet completed the Basic Reconnaissance Course. He also hasn’t quite yet gelled with the rest of the platoon. In bull sessions they subtly ignore him, talking over and around him when he’s sitting among them. He accepts it silently, without backing down, studying his fellow Marines intently with his furtive, inflamed eye.

But it’s not just his youth and inexperience that keep Trombley on the outside, it’s also his relative immaturity—caressing his weapon and talking to it, wearing his ammo belts around his neck. Other Marines make fun of him for his B-movie antics. They’re also suspicious of his tall tales. He claims, for example, that his father was a CIA operative, that most of the men in the Trombley family died mysterious, violent deaths, the details of which are vague and always shifting with each telling. He looks forward to combat as “one of those fantasy things you always hoped would really happen.” In December, a month before his deployment, Trombley got married. (His bride’s father, he says, couldn’t attend the wedding, because he died in a “gunfire incident” a while before.) He spends his idle moments writing down lists of possible names for the sons he hopes to have when he gets home. “It’s up to me to carry on the Trombley name,” he says.

Despite other Marines’ reservations about Trombley, Colbert feels he has the potential to be a good Marine. Colbert is always instructing him—teaching him how to use different communications equipment, how best to keep his gun clean. Trombley is an attentive pupil, almost a teacher’s pet at times, and goes out of his way to quietly perform little favors for the entire team, like refilling everyone’s canteens each day.

Through some unspoken arrangement, Trombley has decided that since I am the only civilian in the group, I’m even lower on the totem pole than he is. “Good chance we’ll run over a mine,” he says in the darkness. “Don’t worry, there’s ways to survive. Soon as you hear the blast, curl up like a little bitch.” He nudges me with his elbow. “You can curl up like a little bitch, can’t you?”

FIRST RECON SPENDS SEVERAL HOURS halting and starting, zigzagging back and forth just south of the border beneath the fiery, rocket-streaked sky. Light from burning oil facilities set ablaze by Iraqis near Rumaylah begin to create a false dawn. Higher-ups in the division keep ordering First Recon to move toward different breach points in the border.

At four in the morning, the battalion finally receives definitive orders about which breach to enter. But the men in Bravo are further delayed when their company commander takes a wrong turn in the darkness. The commander who makes this error is a man the men call “Encino Man,” after the movie of the same title about a hapless caveman who thaws out and comes to life in modern-day Southern California. The men nicknamed this officer Encino Man not only because of his Neanderthal features but also because of his perpetual air of tongue-tied befuddlement. A former college football star now in his early thirties, Encino Man is reputed to have a hard time articulating the simplest of orders. Encino Man’s thickly browed face often bears a pleasant smile, which makes him well enough liked by the men. But they don’t altogether trust him as a commander (he serves as Fick’s immediate superior), because he seems to be, in their eyes, something of a dimwit. Encino Man is one of those senior officers who never would have deployed on a traditional Recon mission. Prior to taking command of Bravo Company, he was an intelligence analyst.

Although the Corps rates him as a fit commander and he has an admirable service record, fellow officers have expressed their alarm to me over Encino Man’s seeming inability to understand the basics, like reading a map. One officer says to me, “We came out of a briefing once, after we’d been looking at a map for an hour, studying one town on it, and he came up to me and asked, ‘What was the name of that place? Can you show me where it is on the map?’ I was like, ‘What reality was this guy in during the previous briefing?’”

A few hours before the invasion, Encino Man had covered over the side windows of his command vehicle with duct tape. He believed this would mask light seeping out from a computer screen in his vehicle, making it “extratactical”—harder to spot by enemy forces. Unfortunately, the covered windows seem to have diminished his already feeble navigation abilities.

While we sit, pulled over by a desert trail, waiting for the battalion to “unfuck” itself in the wake of Encino Man’s blunder, Colbert observes, “The fucking idiot. If the enemy’s going to spot you, they’ll see the light coming through the windshield. You can’t tape that up.” He shakes his head. “This is the man leading me into me battle.”

“Fucking dumbass,” Person agrees.

The sky begins to lighten. We’re stopped in a no-man’s-land a few kilometers south of the border. Convoys of armored vehicles race past. Having now been up for twenty-four hours, watching others enter Iraq ahead of them sours the mood of Colbert’s team.

He and Person spot a Marine, whom they both know and despise, taking a leak outside the Humvee. “That’s that fucking pussy,” Person says. “He was crying when we left Camp Pendleton.” He adds in a pitying baby voice, “He didn’t want to go to Iraq.”

Colbert looks at him. “When we were at the airport flying out here he lost his gear. He was trying to get out of coming here.”

“Yeah,” Person says. “He was at the airport on the phones, calling senators and stuff to try to get them to pull strings. Fucking pussy wimp.”

“A scared little bitch,” Colbert says. He and Person stare together at the Marine they deem cowardly, bonding in their mutual contempt. The judgment of the pack is relentless and unmerciful.

At about seven in the morning on March 21, the battalion is ordered into the breach. The early-morning light glares through the smudged windshield. The earthen berms, seven meters high, loom ahead. Beyond, black smoke from oil fires seems to fold over the horizon like a blanket. We enter the breach zone, small mountains of sand, littered with scraps of metal piled on either side. Beside me, Trombley slumps over his SAW, snoring.

“Wake up, Trombley,” Colbert says. “You’re missing the invasion.”

COLBERT’S FIRST IMPRESSION of Iraq is that it looks like “fucking Tijuana.” We’ve pulled onto a two-lane asphalt road rolling through a border town north of the breach. There’s a row of shops on one side—cinder-block structures with colorful hand-painted signs and steel shutters pulled over their fronts, with a smashed-up Toyota truck pushed off on the side of the road, probably by a tank. It’s ghostville.

All of the major Marine combat forces are racing east or hugging the border, leaving no other friendly combat forces in First Recon’s area of operation. The battalion pushes north in a single-file line alone on unpaved trails through what has become open, almost lunar desert, periodically dotted with mud huts, small flocks of sheep and clusters of starved-looking, stick-figure cattle grazing on scrub brush. Once in a while you see wrecked vehicles: burnt-out tanks and car frames, perhaps left over from the first Gulf War. Plumes of smoke clog the horizon to the east from the oil fires in Rumaylah.