Evan Wright - Generation Kill

IT’S AFTER DARK when Fick pushes me through the entrance to his platoon’s tent to introduce me to his men. Forty-two enlisted Marines sleep here, those from Bravo’s Second and Third platoons. It’s lit with bare fluorescent light tubes suspended from the tent poles, which turn everyone’s skin a different shade of chartreuse. The floor of loose plywood sheeting is piled with crates of rations, gear and weapons, which the men sleep between in cramped rows. In the small amount of open space, two Marines circle in flip-flops, sparring with their bare hands. One guy is in the corner, dealing cards to himself, doing push-ups according to their face values; he does the whole deck a couple of times a day. Others, a couple of whom have black eyes and scraped noses from their constant martial-arts fighting, recline on the floor studying invasion maps or reading dog-eared copies of Sun Tzu, Elmore Leonard, Steven Pressfield’s Greek military-historical novel Gates of Fire, and Hustler.

Before Fick makes his introduction, a couple of Marines stand nearby carrying on a loud reminiscence about great chicks they knew in high school. “Everybody called her One Pound,” a Marine in this group is saying. “A pretty little Asian girl. Her eyes were so small and tight you could have blindfolded her with dental floss. We called her One Pound ’cause she always looked like she’d just smoked a pound of weed.”

Fick clears his throat. He is younger than some of the sergeants he commands, and when he addresses the men, he often lowers his voice to a more mature and authoritative-sounding register. He introduces me in this official, Marine-officer voice, then leaves.

One of the first men to greet me is Navy Hospitalman Second Class Robert Timothy “Doc” Bryan, the twenty-nine-year-old medical corpsman. A tall redhead with narrow features, he approaches with a tight grin and shakes my hand. “So you came here for a war, huh? You like war?” He continues to squeeze my hand, then puts his face about eight inches from mine and stares with unblinking, electric-blue eyes. His smile begins to twitch. “I hope you have fun in this war, reporter.”

He releases my hand and smacks my shoulder. “I’m just fucking with you, that’s all. No harm.” He walks off, laughing.

Several others break into laughter with him. Doc Bryan, I later find out, is always pissed off at something, if not the presence of a reporter, then incompetent military leaders or the barbarity of war. He’s a self-made man, son of a steamfitter from a small town outside of Philadelphia, the first in his family to attend college. He attended Lock Haven University, then the University of Pennsylvania on a football scholarship while he earned a master’s in education. In his younger days, Doc Bryan had a lot of ambient rage he used to burn off in weekend bar fights. “I’m always angry,” he later tells me. “I was born that way. I’m an asshole.”

A diesel generator drones somewhere outside. The tent reeks of farts, sweat and the sickeningly sweet funk of fungal feet. Everyone walks around in skivvies, scratching their balls.

Vigorous public ball scratching is common in the combat-arms side of the Marine Corps, even among high-level officers in the midst of briefings. The gesture is defiantly male, as is much of the vernacular of the Marine Corps itself. Not only do officers and enlisted men take pride in their profanity—the first time I meet First Recon’s battalion commander, he tells me the other reporter who dropped out probably did so because he writes for a “fucking queer magazine”—the technical jargon of the Corps is rich with off-color lingo. The term “donkey dick,” for example, is used to describe at least three different pieces of Marine equipment: a type of fuel spout, a radio antenna and a mortar-tube cleaning brush.

Recon Marines will proudly tell you that if you look up their official Military Occupational Specialty in a Marine Corps manual, their job title is listed as “Reconnaissance Man.” Theirs is one of the few remaining fields in the military closed to women. For many, becoming a Recon Marine represents one of the last all-male adventures left in America. Among them, few virtues are celebrated more than being hard—having stronger muscles, being a better fighter, being more able to withstand pain and privation. They refer to extra comforts—foam sleeping pads, sweaters, even cold medicine—as “snivel gear,” and relentlessly mock those who bring it as pussies.

Nor do the men have any CD or DVD players, Game Boys or any similar entertainment devices. They were forbidden to bring such distracting items to the Middle East. They are young Americans unplugged. Their only entertainment is talking, reading and playing cards or chess. There’s a chessboard set up in the center of the tent, where a company tournament has been going on for six weeks now.

At night they fight constantly. They judo-flip each other headfirst into the plywood floor of the tent. They strong-arm their buddies into headlocks and punch bruises into each other’s ribs. They lie in wait for one another in the shadows and leap out swinging Ka-Bar knives, flecking their buddies’ rib cages with little nicks from the knife tips, or dragging their blades lightly across a victim’s throat, playfully simulating a clean kill. They do it to keep each other in shape; they do it for fun; they do it to establish dominance.

The top dogs in the platoon are the team leaders. You can immediately pick out these guys just by the way they move among the men. They have a swagger, a magnetism that pulls the other guys to them like rock stars. In this tent the three most revered are Sergeants Kocher, Patrick and Colbert. The three of them served on a Recon team together in Afghanistan under the leadership of Colbert.

Sergeants Eric Kocher and Larry Shawn Patrick are the more obvious alphas of the pack. Kocher is thickly muscled and aspires to become a professional bodybuilder. Though technically he’s part of Bravo Third Platoon, he spends much of his time in Second Platoon’s section. He tells dirty stories that make everyone howl, but he has the kind of eyes that never seem to smile, even when the rest of his face is laughing. Though he is twenty-three, he projects such focused intensity he seems at least a decade older.

Patrick, a twenty-eight-year-old from a small mountain town in North Carolina, speaks with a mild Southern accent and has the gentle manners that go with it. With brown hair and blue eyes that have faint lines at the corners that crinkle when he smiles, he has a kindly, almost hangdog appearance. His fellow Marines call him “Pappy,” and behind his back they speak of him in the most reverential terms. “You’d never think it to look at him,” a Marine tells me, “but Pappy is straight up the coldest killer in the platoon. If you saw him on the street back in the civilian world, you’d just think he’s the most average Joe out there. That’s why he’s so dangerous.”

Colbert, the platoon’s top team leader, is in charge of Team One. The year before, he was awarded a Navy Commendation for helping to take out an enemy missile battery in Afghanistan. He greets me with a formal handshake and a crisp salutation: “Welcome aboard. I hope your time with us is enjoyable and productive.”

His politeness is so exacting it almost makes him come off like a prick. Everything about him is neat, orderly and crisp, in keeping with his Iceman nickname. Colbert is decidedly not one of the big ball-scratchers in the platoon. There is about him an air of Victorian rectitude. He grew up in an ultramodern 1970s house designed by his father, an architect. There was shag carpet in a conversation pit. One of his fondest memories, he later tells me, is that before cocktail parties, his parents would let him prepare the carpet with a special rake. Colbert is a walking encyclopedia of radio frequencies and encryption protocols, and can tell you the exact details of just about any weapon in the U.S. or Iraqi arsenal. He once nearly purchased a surplus British tank, even arranged a loan through his credit union, but backed out only when he realized that just parking it might run afoul of zoning laws in his home state, the “Communist Republic of California.”