Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Everyone is coughing and has runny noses and weeping, swollen eyes caused by the dust storms. About a quarter of the Marines in Colbert’s platoon have come down with vomiting and diarrhea. Now, with the time to dig through packs and retrieve mirrors, many are amazed by the gaunt reflections staring back at them. In just a short time in the field, most have already shed five to ten pounds. Colbert finds what he thinks is an enormous blackhead on his ear. When he digs it out, he discovers it’s a bullet fragment.

It’s not a good day for God in Iraq. The battalion chaplain, Navy Lieutenant Commander Bodley, takes advantage of the downtime by circulating among his flock. He finds ministering to Recon Marines a daunting task. “I’ve been around other Marines and sailors before,” he says. “But I’d never heard such profanity—the offensive put-downs—so commonly used until I came to First Recon.”

The chaplain was attached to the unit shortly before the invasion. He never swears, seldom drinks. He grew up on Chicago’s South Side, and from a young age he felt called to do the work of the Lord. He was ordained a Lutheran minister after attending Concordia Theological Seminary in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and shortly after became a chaplain in the Navy Reserves. (The Navy provides the Marines with chaplains.) Married with three children, and a minister in a church in Orlando, Florida, his first immersion in Marine culture didn’t occur until he was called up before the war and attached to First Recon at Camp Mathilda. He has labored to open his heart to the profane young men in First Recon. “I’ve come to understand that they use the language to harden themselves,” he says. “But my question is, once they’ve turned it on, can they turn it off?”

Today, circulating among the Marines, he has only grown more disturbed. “Many of them have sought my counsel because they feel guilty,” he tells me. “But when I ask them why, they say they feel bad because they haven’t had a chance to fire their weapons. They worry that they haven’t done their jobs as Marines. I’ve had to counsel them that if you don’t have to shoot somebody, that’s a good thing. The zeal these young men have for killing surprises me,” Bodley admits. “It instills in me a sense of disbelief and rage. People here think Jesus is a doormat.”

THE CHAPLAIN has no takers in Colbert’s team when he approaches to offer his counselling. After being up all night dealing with the phantom enemy convoy, Colbert’s Marines loll under the cammie nets, attempting to nap. Person lounges outside on a poncho, naked but for skivvies and a pair of golden Elvis-impersonator sunglasses. He’s trying to roast the “chacne”—chest zits—off in the harsh Iraqi sun, while busting bass beats with his lips, chanting Ice Cube’s lyrics, “Today I didn’t even have to use my AK/I gotta say it was a good day.”

Gunny Wynn stops by to pass on the latest gossip. “Word is we might go to the Iranian border to interdict smugglers.”

“Fuck, no!” Person shouts from beneath his Elvis glasses. “I want to go to Baghdad and kill people.”

A couple of Marines nearby pass the time naming illustrious former jarheads—Oliver North, Captain Kangaroo, Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wayne Bobbit. “After they sewed his dick back on, didn’t he make porn movies where he fucked a midget?” one of them asks.

Gunny Wynn chuckles, beaming with a sort of fatherly pride. “Yeah, he probably did. A Marine will fuck anything.”

Gunny Wynn, along with Fick, is still facing threat of disciplinary action for his role in trying to stop Encino Man from dropping danger-close artillery by the platoon’s position the other day outside Ar Rifa. Casey Kasem has told me he is attempting to have Gunny Wynn removed from his job. “It’s wrong to question the commander,” Casey Kasem says. “Lieutenant Fick and Gunny Wynn don’t understand that. Their job is to execute whatever the commander tells them to do. By questioning his orders or his actions, they risk their men’s lives by slowing down the commander. Discipline is instinct, a willingness and obedience to orders. What Fick and Gunny Wynn have is the opposite of discipline.”

When I ask Gunny Wynn if he’s worried about the action brewing against him—Casey Kasem and Encino Man are drafting a memo detailing his “disobedience to orders”—he laughs. “Some guys care about advancing in the Marine Corps. Me, I don’t give a fuck. I care about my men being happy, shielding them from the bullshit, and keeping them alive.” He adds, “Guys that believe no orders ever should be questioned are usually the same ones who are too dumb to explain them. They just don’t want to look stupid in front of their men. I encourage my men to question orders.”

This morning, looking out at the expanse beyond the perimeter, Gunny Wynn says he has only one fear in his mind. “Man, I hope this doesn’t turn into another Somalia.”

DESPITE THE CHAPLAIN’S DESPAIR over the Marines’ seeming insensitivity to the suffering brought on by war, discussing it among themselves, Marines express deep misgivings. I join Espera’s team, dug in by his Humvee several meters down from Colbert’s. He’s enjoying his first cup of hot coffee in more than a week, brewed on a fire made from dried camel dung mixed with C-4 plastic explosive (which, when ignited, blazes intensely).

“This is all the tough-guy shit I need,” he says. “I don’t like nothing about combat. I don’t like the shooting. I don’t like the action.”

Espera believes the whole war is being fought for the same reason all others have for the past several hundred years. “White man’s gotta rule the world,” he says.

Though Espera is one quarter Caucasian, he grew up mistrusting “the white man.” A few years ago, he deliberately avoided earning his community-college degree, though he was just a couple of credits short of receiving it, because, he says, “I didn’t want some piece of paper from the white master saying I was qualified to function in his world.”

Before joining the Marines, Espera worked as a car repo man in South Central Los Angeles. While in a job he hated, he watched his friends and one close family member go to prison for violent crimes, which were fairly routine in his world. Then one day, after four years of repoing cars in L.A.’s poorest neighborhoods, Espera had an epiphany: “I was getting shot at, making chump change, so I could protect the assets of a bunch of rich white bankers. The whole time I’m hating on these motherfuckers, and I realized I’m their slave, doing their bidding. I thought, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

So he enlisted in the Marines. Espera reasoned that as a Marine he might still be serving the white man, but he’d be doing so with “purity and honor.”

As he’s gotten older, Espera’s begun to accept that maybe the white man’s system isn’t all that bad. Travelling the world as a Marine has opened his eyes to stark differences between the way Americans and those in less fortunate parts of the planet live. “All these countries around the world, nobody’s fat,” he says. “Back home, fat motherfuckers are everywhere. Seventy-five percent of all Americans are fat. Do you know how hard it is to put on thirty pounds? A motherfucker has to sit on the couch and do nothing but eat all day. In America, white trash and poor Mexicans are all fat as motherfuckers. The white man created a system with so much excess, even the poor motherfuckers are fat.”

Those who know Espera understand he’s not a racist. He’s a humorist whose vitriol is tongue-in-cheek. Even so, Espera questions the white man’s wisdom in sending him tearing through a hostile country in an open Humvee. “Every time we roll through one of these cities, I think we’re going to die. Even now, dog, sitting here in the shade, my heart’s beating one hundred forty times per minute. For what? So some colonel can make general by throwing us into another firefight?”