Evan Wright - Generation Kill

“Just what race are you, Poke?” Colbert asks, referring to Espera by the nickname only his friends use. “I mean, are you Latino, Indian or white? Or are you just whatever race happens to be cool at the time?”

“Shut up, white boy, and go eat a baloney sandwich,” Espera says.

“No, I mean it,” Colbert continues. “Your wife is half white. I’ve met your friends from L.A. They’re all white.”

“Bro, you’ve got a point,” Espera says. “I’m afraid to hang out with my Mexican friends at home. I’m afraid if we go to the liquor store together they’ll stick it up. My Mexican friends are shady motherfuckers. No job, twenty-thousand-dollar entertainment system at home, more guns than a fucking armory. The only Mexicans I hang out with are in the Marine Corps.”

Breakfast ends with Fick’s order to get in the Humvees and link up with RCT-1 in preparation for the new mission. “Finally, we get to fuck shit up again,” Person exults as we leave the road by the airfield. Colbert, however, gazes morosely out the window at Marines rolling up the road in Amtracs. They will be stationed here as guards. “That would be sweet,” Colbert says. “Guarding an airfield for three weeks.”

FICK HAS SOME BAD NEWS when the Marines reach RCT-1 at a muddy, bomb-cratered camp at the junction of Routes 7 and 17. “Our original warning order seems to be changing,” he tells his team leaders. “Instead of staging ambushes on enemy positions along Route 17, we will bust north adjacent to Route 7 and do a movement to contact.”

“Movement to contact” is another way of saying they will again be driving into suspected enemy positions in order to see if anybody will shoot at them. Once again they will be following the Gharraf canal on a backcountry trail. “One thing I’ve learned,” Fick tells me. “Is if we do anything involving something named ‘Gharraf,’ it’s not good.”

Encino Man holds a company formation in an attempt to bring out the moto in his men. They stand in a sloping field at parade rest, hands clasped behind their backs, each young man looking ahead with a hard, Marine-Corps-correct thousand-yard stare. “We all know what happened to the chow,” Encino Man says, bringing up the supply truck destroyed by Iraqis. “This wasn’t our bad planning.” He tries to muster a fierce expression, but despite his apelike features, Encino Man’s face doesn’t project anger well. It remains about as placid as an oatmeal cookie as he mumbles through his attempt at a rousing speech. “They did this. The Iraqis took your food. I hope this makes you mad at the enemy. You should be really mad at them. Okay?”

FOLLOWING ENCINO MAN’S pep talk, Fick now piles on more depressing news. “Yesterday, Marines in a supply convoy south of here were caught in an RPG ambush. They were cut off and surrounded by bad guys. They called in for help, but by the time it arrived one was dead and one was missing.”

No one knows for sure what happened to the missing Marine, but according to Fick (and to media reports), it’s believed that the Marine was killed, that his corpse was mutilated, dragged through a town and strung up for public display. Hearing this account, Lovell turns to his men and vows, “I am not going to be a POW, and I’m not going to die here.”

The Marines aren’t just grim now. They’re slightly freaked out by the specter of mobs attacking them. They can’t help but think of the Army Rangers who were attacked and mutilated in Somalia. By coincidence, the last movie shown to their unit at Camp Mathilda before they embarked on the invasion was Black Hawk Down, the slow-motion retelling of disaster befalling a small band of Americans trapped in a hostile third-world city they’d entered to liberate. The parallels now seem clear.

Doc Bryan leans against the wheel of a Humvee, telling his fellow Marines, in all seriousness, “What we should do is paint skulls on our faces. Come into these towns like demons. These are primitive people. We would scare the shit out of them. We need to use fear, not give in to it.”

Carazales, the twenty-one-year-old who now serves as the driver on Kocher’s team, says, “What we ought to do is send everyone off to Ace Hardware, get some chain saws, capture some Fedayeen, cut their limbs off, tie them to wheelchairs, load them in a C-130, and drop them on Baghdad. We’ll just sit back in our Humvees reading Playboys .”

Carazales is not much taller than an M-16 rifle. He has a Marine Corps eagle-globe-and-anchor tattoo on one leg and a BORN LOSER tattoo on the other. He wound up in the Corps, he says, “Because I got tricked into this motherfucker. I was eighteen, in jail, facing probation, and the DA and a Marine recruiter made a deal I couldn’t refuse.” He complains, “If I weren’t in the Marines, by now I’d be making real money. I’d’ve worked my way up to fourteen dollars an hour, working on rigs or as a welder’s assistant.”

Carazales is from Cuero, Texas, hates the Marine Corps, hates officers, hates rich people. “They should make a holiday every year where if you make less than thirty thousand dollars a year you get to drive into rich neighborhoods and fuck up rich people’s houses. Go inside and break their shit. Every blue-collar man gets to sleep in a white-collar man’s house.” Sometimes he asks fellow Marines, “Have you ever read the Communist Manifesto ? That sounds ideal. How the upper classes are oppressing the lower classes. That’s how it happens back home. Rich people, corporations, get all sorts of secret government handouts they don’t tell us about.”

Not only is Carazales apparently the battalion’s leading Communist, he’s also among the most popular men in Bravo Company. He’s a POG mechanic, but he volunteered to drive for Kocher, one of his closest friends, after Kocher’s original driver, Darnold, was shot in Al Gharraf. Now, not only does he drive for Kocher’s team, he’s still responsible for maintaining the battalion’s vehicles. He seldom sleeps, and his face and hands are invariably black with axle grease, hence his nickname: “Dirty Earl.”

Volunteering to be on Kocher’s team has also spared him from one of the most onerous burdens in the company. Carazales previously had to drive for Captain America. Now, sitting around waiting to begin their hunt for ambushes on the route north, Carazales brings up the subject of Captain America. “Driving for that motherfucker was jacked. Every time we’d come across more of them fucked-up civilians—he had to jump around getting pictures, worried my driving was too fast for his Canon stabilization system to work right.”

“Man, I’m glad I didn’t see any dead little children,” Garza says.

“How do you think we would feel if someone came into our country and lit us up like this?” Carazales says. “South of Al Gharraf I know I shot a building with a bunch of civilians in it. Everyone else was lighting it up. Then we found out there were civilians in there. It’s fucked up.” Carazales works himself into a rage. “I think it’s bullshit how these fucking civilians are dying! They’re worse off than the guys that are shooting at us. They don’t even have a chance. Do you think people at home are going to see this—all these women and children we’re killing? Fuck no. Back home they’re glorifying this motherfucker, I guarantee you. Saying our president is a fucking hero for getting us into this bitch. He ain’t even a real Texan.”

Carazales slumps back in the dirt. No one says anything. Then he brightens. “I just thought of a tight angle. All the pictures Captain America’s taking of shot-up, dead Iraqi kids? I’ll get my hands on those. I’m going to go back home and put them in Seven-Elevens and collect money for my own adopt-an-Iraqi-kid program. Shit, I’ll be rolling in it. A war veteran helping out the kids. I ought to run for office.”