Evan Wright - Generation Kill

But in my first experience at being in the midst of heavy gunfire—from machine guns to mortars to Marine artillery still slamming into the city over our heads—I feel surprisingly calm. While the Marines might possess that “adolescent sense of invulnerability,” I have the more adult handicap of having always lived in denial. It’s a problem for which I’ve attended therapy sessions and self-help groups in an effort to overcome, originally at the urging of a now ex-wife. But I find that in a pitched firefight, denial serves one very well. I simply refuse to believe anyone’s going to shoot me.

This is not to say I’m not scared. In fact, I’m so scared I feel not completely in my body. It’s become a thing—heavy and cumbersome—I’m keeping as close to the ground as possible, trying to take care of it as best I can, even though I don’t feel all the way in it. As I squeeze flat against the earth, so do the Marines around me in Second Platoon. Guys who’d been laughing and joking a few moments earlier drop down and embrace the earth. I look up and see Espera five meters in front of me, cursing and wiggling, trying to pull down his MOPP suit. Espera makes no show of trying to laugh off his fear. He’s wrestling his penis out of his pants so he can take a leak while lying on his side. “I don’t want to fucking piss on myself,” he grunts.

The Marines took a combat-stress class before the war. An instructor told them that 25 percent of them can expect to lose control of their bladders or bowels when they take fire. Fearing one of these embarrassing accidents, when the bullets start flying they piss and shit frantically whenever they can.

The guy on my other side is Pappy, the team leader they all look up to as “the coldest killer in the battalion.” Since my arrival with the platoon, he’s been one of the most hesitant to talk to me. Early on at Camp Mathilda, he had said in his polite, North Carolina accent, “It’s nothing personal, but I just don’t have good feelings about reporters.”

Now he catches my eye and flashes a smile. He seems neither giddy, as are some of the others, nor terrified. But he looks a lot older, suddenly, as if the lines around his eyes have deepened in the hour since we drove up here.

“How are you doing?” I ask.

“I’m not like some of these younger Marines, eager to get some,” Pappy says. “I’d be just as happy if they ordered us to turn around right now and we drove back to Mathilda. Just the same, I want to be with these guys so I can do what I can to help them live.”

I ask him what the hell we’re doing here waiting around by the entrance to the bridge while the bombs fall. I can’t figure out why Bravo company is up high by the road, where the men are exposed, yet can’t fire their weapons for fear of hitting Marines in surrounding fields.

Pappy’s response is sobering. “Our job is to kamikaze into the city and collect casualties,” he says. “We’re just waiting for the order to go.”

“How many casualties are there?” I ask.

“Casualties?” he says. “They’re not there yet. We’re the reaction force for an attack that’s coming across the bridge. RCT-1 is going to be moving up here any minute and crossing the bridge. We’re going in during the fight to pick up the wounded.”

It’s the first time anyone has told me anything about this mission that I’m accompanying them on. I don’t know why, but the idea of waiting around for casualties that don’t exist yet strikes me as more macabre than the idea of actual casualties.

Yet despite how much it sucks here, it’s kind of exciting, too. I had almost looked down on the Marines’ shows of moto, the way they shouted Get some! and acted so excited about being in a fight. But the fact is, there’s a definite sense of exhilaration every time there’s an explosion and you’re still there afterward. There’s another kind of exhilaration, too. Everyone is side by side, facing the same big fear: death. Usually, death is pushed to the fringes in the civilian world. Most people face their end pretty much alone, with a few family members if they are lucky. Here, the Marines face death together, in their youth. If anyone dies, he will do so surrounded by the very best friends he believes he will ever have.

As mortars continue to explode around us, I watch Garza pick through an MRE. He takes out a packet of Charms candies and hurls it into the gunfire. Marines view Charms as almost infernal talismans. A few days earlier, in the Humvee, Garza saw me pull Charms out of my MRE pack. His eyes lighted up and he offered me a highly prized bag of Combos cheese pretzels for my candies. He didn’t explain why. I thought he just really liked Charms until he threw the pack he’d just traded me out the window. “We don’t allow Charms anywhere in our Humvee,” Person said in a rare show of absolute seriousness. “That’s right,” Colbert said, cinching it. “They’re fucking bad luck.”

The heavy gunfire tapers off. Mortars still explode every couple of minutes, but everyone rises from the ground. Lying in the dirt becomes tedious. In a way it also becomes more terrifying because you can’t see what’s going on around you.

Now when there’s a boom, most people just drop to one knee. One Marine in another platoon has developed a fierce stutter. “P-p-p-pass m-my b-b-binoculars,” he spits out. His buddies exchange looks but say nothing to him. Not far away, an officer who took cover beneath a Humvee won’t come out. Marines don’t laugh at this, either. (Some are disturbed by this act of perceived cowardice in one of their leaders and later seek counselling.)

Colbert seems to blossom under extreme duress. He goes into full Iceman mode, becoming extra calm, alert and focused even when everyone’s just standing around waiting for another blast.

Marines tear into their MREs. They eat a lot during lulls in firefights. Most just squeeze main meals—like the pressed, crumbly steaks and chicken patties—directly from the foil pouches into their mouths.

Then a new sound erupts nearby—a rapid-fire thunking. Everyone drops to the ground except Colbert. He remains upright, eating. “Those are ours, gents,” he says between bites. Colbert informs the Marines flattened in the dirt that the “thunking” was unmistakably the sound of Marine Bushmaster weapons. No need to worry.

F-18 fighter-attack jets rip through the sky and drop low just 200 meters or so over our heads. Marines call these “moto passes.” The jets fly too high and too fast to be much help hunting down small human targets on the ground, but their dramatic appearances are intended to boost morale.

While we sit around eating, there’s a massive explosion overhead just on the other side of the causeway. Cables from high-tension electric towers snap and bounce above us, struck by a friendly artillery round, intended for Nasiriyah. It happens too quickly for anyone to duck. Shrapnel bangs into Pappy’s Humvee, but no one is hit.

Marines thirty meters across the road from us are not so lucky. We hear screams of “Corpsman!” I stand up and see one injured Marine staggering in circles. The errant round sprayed six Marines from another unit with shrapnel. Two are later reported to have been killed from wounds sustained in this incident.

CLOSER TO THE RIVER, Patterson’s men are also experiencing the chaos of fire from all directions. Patterson pushes some of his men farther west and south into surrounding fields. He’s concerned that outlying farm structures might conceal enemy gunmen.

Corporal Cody Scott, a twenty-year-old from Midland, Texas, leads a team out from Alpha’s Second Platoon to clear a building. Scott joined the Marines over his mother’s objections on his eighteenth birthday, and is a big guy with the slow-moving gravity of someone much older. The night before, while paused on the highway south of Nasiriyah, Scott took the time to record his thoughts in his diary: “I feel that the military—leading men into battle—is my calling. Some people are artists, some musicians; I was born a warrior. Since I was young I’ve felt drawn to the warrior society. This war, as of yet, is not a bloody one. The opposition is slim. Our minions are rolling in with such force that the enemy is laying down without a fight. The people of this country live like rats. Hopefully, these people will lead a better life because of what we’re doing.”