Evan Wright - Generation Kill

In his late thirties, lean and dark-haired, Casey Kasem usually rides with Encino Man. Casey Kasem’s job is to ensure that the Marines have enough supplies—fuel, water and batteries for their night optics. Like Encino Man, he’s one of those rear-echelon men in a support position, who ordinarily wouldn’t have deployed with the Recon Marines.

One of the things that burn everyone up about Casey Kasem is the fact that he failed to bring enough batteries or adequate rechargers to operate the platoon’s only PAS-13 thermal-imaging device. Unlike their NVGs, which amplify existing light, the PAS-13 uses heat and can see through dust and foliage. The PAS-13 gives the platoon a critical advantage and means of survival in night operations, but largely because of a supply snafu they blame on Casey Kasem, the platoon only has enough batteries to operate the PAS-13 for a couple of hours each night. Within a few days, when they are at the height of their operations in ambush country, the men will sometimes go whole nights without any batteries at all for their PAS-13, and in at least one instance, this deficiency will nearly kill them.

Adding insult to injury, while Casey Kasem apparently failed to bring enough batteries for the Marines’ critical night-fighting gear, he did have the presence of mind to bring along a personal video camera. He is constantly sticking it in everyone’s face as part of his effort to make a war documentary that he hopes to sell after the invasion. “He’s just another king-size jackass making life more dangerous for us,” Doc Bryan says.

Tonight Casey Kasem is highly agitated because he and Encino Man have concluded that “enemy infiltrators” have moved into the Marines’ position and are preparing an attack.

“Over there. Enemy infiltrators,” he tells Doc Bryan, pointing toward the village he and others on the team have been watching.

While Doc Bryan is not technically a Marine, he is a product of the Navy’s most elite special-warfare training and could have chosen to have been placed with either Navy SEALs or a Marine Recon unit. Doc Bryan, who arguably has better combat training than many Recon Marines, is supremely confident of his judgment. “That’s a village,” Doc Bryan says.

“No. Over there,” Casey Kasem whispers excitedly, pointing along the canal. “Looks like a squad-size group of Iraqis, maybe an RPG hunter-killer team observing us.”

“Those are fucking rocks,” Doc Bryan says. “They’re not moving.”

“Not moving,” Casey Kasem says, “because those are the most disciplined Iraqis we’ve seen so far.”

Casey Kasem sounds the alert up and down the line. Marines are pushed out with weapons and optics to observe the Iraqi “squad.” Only at first light do the Marines definitively prove to Casey Kasem that the “disciplined Iraqis” are indeed rocks.

Through the heightened alert, Colbert spends the night calming his team. When Garza takes the watch on the Humvee’s Mark-19, Colbert tells him, “Garza, please make sure you don’t shoot the civilians on the other side of the canal. We are the invading army. We must be magnanimous.”

“Magna-nous?” Garza asks. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“Lofty and kinglike,” Colbert tells him.

“Sure,” Garza says after a moment’s consideration. “I’m a nice guy.”

THE MARINES ARE ALMOST EUPHORIC the next morning, March 23, when Fick briefs them on the next leg of the invasion. He doesn’t know for sure yet where they are going, but higher-ups in the battalion have insisted that today is the day all men must shave off their mustaches. “Given the Battalion Commander’s previous order regarding mustaches, I think we can all take this as a clear indication that we’re crossing the Euphrates soon,” he tells his men just after sunrise.

Later, after they’ve refueled the Humvees, Fick issues specific orders. “Our objective is a town called Nasiriyah, a crossing point on the Euphrates. The word is the Army passed through it twenty-four hours ago and declared it ‘secure.’”

At the time Fick is delivering his sunny assessment on conditions at Nasiriyah, an Army maintenance unit has just been ambushed outside of town, about four hours earlier, sustaining numerous casualties.

(Fick later speculates that the optimistic assessment he was given on the state of Nasiriyah stemmed from a foul-up fairly typical of military communications, which can take on the aspect of a game of telephone. “The Marine Corps had been expecting the Iraqis to blow the bridges in Nasiriyah,” he explains. “Someone probably reported that the bridges were ‘intact,’ and this got changed to ‘the bridges are secure,’ to ‘the whole town is secure.’”)

Colbert’s team pulls back from the canal with the rest of the battalion and drops onto a freeway, bound for Nasiriyah. They join several thousand U.S. military vehicles driving north at forty-five miles per hour, which in military convoys is lightning speed. “Look at this, gents,” Colbert says. “The First Marine Division out of Camp Pendleton rolling with impunity on Saddam’s highways.”

It’s a bright, clear day. No dust at all. Several hundred Iraqi children line the highway, shouting gleefully. “Yes, we are the conquering heroes,” Colbert says.

Everyone’s spirits are up. Colbert seems to have gotten over his disappointment at the scrubbing of his team’s bridge mission. The sense is that this campaign is unfolding like the last Gulf War, an Iraqi rout in battle followed by an American race to gobble up abandoned territory as swiftly as possible.

“As soon as we capture Baghdad,” Person says, “Lee Greenwood is going to parachute in singing ‘I’m Proud to Be an American.’”

“Watch it,” Colbert says. “You know the rule.”

One of the cardinal rules of Colbert’s Humvee is that no one is permitted to make any references to country music. He claims that the mere mention of country, which he deems “the Special Olympics of music,” makes him physically ill.

Along the highway, they pass columns of tanks and other vehicles emblazoned with American flags or moto slogans such as “Angry American” or “Get Some.” Person spots a Humvee with the 9/11 catchphrase “Let’s Roll!” stenciled on the side.

“I hate that cheesy patriotic bullshit,” Person says. He mentions Aaron Tippin’s “Where the Stars and Stripes and the Eagles Fly,” then scoffs, “Like how he sings those country white-trash images. ‘Where eagles fly.’ Fuck! They fly in Canada, too. Like they don’t fly there? My mom tried to play me that song when I came home from Afghanistan. I was like, ‘Fuck, no, Mom. I’m a Marine. I don’t need to fly a little flag on my car to show I’m patriotic.’”

“That song is straight homosexual country music, Special Olympics–gay,” Colbert says.

By noon the battalion cuts off the freeway to Route 7, a two-lane blacktop road leading into Nasiriyah. Within an hour Colbert’s team is mired in a massive traffic jam. We stop about twenty kilometers south of Nasiriyah, amidst several thousand Marine vehicles bunched up on the highway. We are parked beside approximately 200 tractor-trailers hauling bulldozers, pontoon sections and other equipment for building bridges. Among these are numerous dump trucks hauling gravel. One has to marvel at the might—or hubris—of a military force that invades a sand- and rock-strewn country but brings its own gravel.

UNBEKNOWNST TO THE MARINES stopped on the highway on this lazy afternoon, twenty kilometers ahead of them the American military is experiencing its first setback of the war. Marine units are bogged down in a series of firefights in and around Nasiriyah. A city of about 400,000, Nasiriyah lies just north of a key bridge over the Euphrates. (The bridge First Recon originally planned to seize is located in a remote area far east of Nasiriyah; that mission was called off in part because planners erroneously believed the bridge over Nasiriyah was wide open for the taking.) Several hundred Marines from a unit dubbed “Task Force Tarawa” attempted to cross the bridge into the city earlier in the day, and are now pinned down by several thousand Fedayeen guerrilla fighters around the bridge and inside the city.