Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Every twenty-four hours the temperature fluctuates by up to fifty degrees, with frigid nights in the upper thirties turning into blazing days in the upper eighties. Throughout the day, you’re either shivering or sweating. The sun is so intense that steel objects, such as machine-gun barrels, when left out in it for any period of time, become so hot they can be picked up only by using towels like oven mitts.

By early March the desert sandstorms known as “shamals” have begun. Shamal winds gust at up to fifty miles an hour, sometimes blowing over the twenty-meter-long platoon tents Marines sleep in, shredding apart the canvas and burying them in several feet of sand. It’s no wonder the chickens couldn’t hack it. The Marines who’ve been here for weeks have runny noses and inflamed eyes from the constant dust. A lot of them walk around with rags wrapped around their faces to keep the dust out, but it doesn’t seem to do any good. Several develop walking pneumonia even before the invasion begins.

Of the thousands of troops in the camp, the Recon Marines are easy to spot. Unlike infantry jarheads who work out in olive-drab shirts and shorts, Recon Marines appear on the gravel running track in all-black physical-training uniforms, a distinctive look augmented with black watch caps they don two hours before sunset. All day long, despite the shamal winds and choking dust, you see them practicing martial arts in the sand, or running on the gravel track, wearing combat boots, loaded down with weapons and packs weighing more than 100 pounds. Whenever a Recon Marine runs past on the track, carrying a particularly crushing load, his buddies pump their fists in the air and scream “Get some!”

Recon Marines take pride in enduring the hostile conditions. One of the first guys I meet in the battalion brags, “We’re like America’s little pit bull. They beat it, starve it, mistreat it, and once in a while they let it out to attack somebody.”

In my first couple of days at the camp I’m placed in a tent with officers. I can’t tell anybody apart; they all look the same in their desert camouflage fatigues. Most of the officers seem to be square-jawed, blue-eyed white guys in their mid- to late twenties. The initial reason I strike up an acquaintance with Lt. Fick, commander of the platoon I end up spending the war with, is he’s easily recognizable. Though he’s twenty-five, he has a loping, adolescent stride you can spot from a hundred meters away. He’s one of fifty men who introduce themselves to me during my first twenty-four hours at the camp, but he’s the only one I’m able to call by name on my way to the mess tent and ask if I can join him for dinner.

Dinners are served on trays in a cafeteria line staffed by South Asian laborers. As we move through the line, Fick informs me that for a couple of weeks running, the only entrée served has been mushy, gray chicken pieces. He speculates these might be remnants of the doomed camp chickens. Fick has one of those laughs involving a momentary loss of control that causes him to pitch forward like someone knocked him on the back of the head.

He is six foot two with light-brown hair and the pleasant, clear-eyed looks of a former altar boy, which he is. The son of a successful Baltimore attorney father and a social-worker mother, Fick admits, “My family had a Leave It to Beaver quality.” He entered Dartmouth intending to study pre-med, but in his sophomore year he was inspired to consider the military when he took a class conducted by a charismatic former Special Forces soldier who’d served in Vietnam. Fick ended up double-majoring in political science and classics, then attended the Marine Corps’ Officer Candidates School. Two years after graduating in 1999, he found himself a Marine second lieutenant on a landing craft delivering humanitarian supplies to war-torn East Timor. “I had a boatload of food rations and boxes of brand-new ThighMasters,” he says. “We were delivering exercise devices for the oppressed, starving people of East Timor.” He throws his head forward, laughing.

The absurdities of the military amuse Fick. A few weeks after 9/11, he led an infantry platoon on a clandestine helicopter mission into Pakistan to retrieve a Black Hawk downed by the Afghan border. After that, Fick and his men were among the first Marines to seize the ground in southern Afghanistan at Camp Rhino. When he returned home after weeks of living in frozen fighting holes, the Marines sent him a bill for five hundred dollars, charging him for the food rations he’d consumed during his combat deployment. He says, “We had a saying about the military in Afghanistan: ‘The incompetent leading the unwilling to do the unnecessary.’”

Despite his cavalier humor, Fick finished at the top of his class in Officer Candidates School and near the top of the Marine Corps’ tough Basic Reconnaissance Course. He is also something of a closet idealist. His motivation for joining the Marines is a belief about which he is quietly passionate. “At Dartmouth, there was a sense that an ROTC program, which the school did not have, would militarize the campus,” he explains. “They have it backward. ROTC programs at Ivy League campuses would liberalize the military. That can only be good for this country.”

During our first meal together, he explains the breakdown of First Recon. The 374 Marines in First Recon Battalion are spread among four companies—Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and an auxiliary Headquarters and Support company. Alpha, Bravo and Charlie are the frontline combat companies containing the battalion’s 160 actual Recon Marines. The rest of the battalion’s personnel fill support positions. Fick commands Bravo Company’s Second Platoon. He’s held the position for less than a year, having entered First Recon after his return from Afghanistan.

Platoons are the basic building block of each company. There are twenty-one enlisted Marines in each platoon, as well as a commander and a medical corpsman (who is an enlisted man provided by the Navy). Enlisted Marines—that is, those who are not officers—function within a complex web of hierarchy. Privates answer to corporals, and corporals to sergeants. Above sergeants there are staff sergeants, gunnery sergeants, first sergeants, master gunnery sergeants and sergeant majors. Above them all are officers.

Yet, as Fick explains, due to the traditional role of First Recon, in which small teams ordinarily function independently behind enemy lines, the men who are most trusted within a platoon are often the enlisted team leaders. Each platoon is divided into three teams, each led by one man, usually a sergeant. These men, like Colbert in Fick’s platoon, often have more training and experience than the officers commanding them.

“The men naturally look up to someone like Colbert,” Fick says. “He’s been in the reconnaissance community for years. If you walk in here as an officer and start throwing your weight around based on rank alone, enlisted men will look at you like you’ve got a dick growing out of your forehead. You have to earn their respect.”

First Recon, according to Fick, contains a heightened level of tensions between officers and enlisted men. “This unit fosters initiative and individual thinking. These guys are independent operators. That’s great ninety-nine percent of the time. But the flip side is they don’t play well with others.”

Despite the frictions, Fick believes in the men he commands. “I have the best platoon,” he says repeatedly. Away from his men, Fick cannot talk about them without smiling.

It’s because of his enthusiasm that I decide to join his platoon for the war. Initially, the battalion had planned for me to spend the invasion riding with the support company in the rear. But in exchange for handing over my satellite phone—severing all contact with the outside world—First Recon’s commander, Lt. Col. Ferrando, allows me to move in with Bravo Second Platoon and ride with its Team One, led by Colbert.