Evan Wright - Generation Kill

We drive in silence. Fick sinks deeper into his state of morbid reflection, turning over the events of the previous night. “We should never be in that position again. We rolled into a three-sided ambush. That was bad tactics.”

When he stops the Humvee near Bravo’s position, Fick drops his head toward his chest and shuts his eyes. A moment later, he looks up, smiling with a profound realization. “I know what we did last night,” he says.

To explain his epiphany, Fick brings up an incident that occurred several weeks earlier at Camp Mathilda between Pappy and some other Marines. Part of the reason Marines nicknamed Sgt. Patrick “Pappy” was his style of dressing. In Camp Mathilda, he invariably wore his physical-training shorts with combat boots and socks pulled up to his knees. His fellow Marines thought the look was “old-mannish.” As he was walking past a group of them one day in his customary attire, a Marine stopped him and said, “Pappy, give us some old-man wisdom.” Pappy turned, waved his finger and said, “Don’t pet a burning dog.” It was the sort of nonsense wisdom for which Pappy is famous. In Afghanistan, he and Kocher were sitting in a Marine camp outside Kandahar when a female Marine walked past. Gazing at her, Pappy said, “If she sees something without a purpose she could chuck a stone at it.” Generally, no one knows what Pappy means when he comes up with these odd pronouncements, but this morning after the ambush on the bridge, Fick believes he’s deciphered the meaning of Pappy’s warning against petting a burning dog.

Fick turns to me and says, “Last night on the bridge we petted a burning dog.”

At around eight in the morning on April 2—following their all-night action in the ambush—the Marines in First Recon are told they will be moving into Al Muwaffaqiyah in an hour, via a southern route that avoids the damaged bridge. Given Kocher’s experience of moving freely through town early that the morning, it’s believed that the attackers have all fled or been killed.

Pappy is loaded onto a supply truck with the wounded Syrian and driven to RCT-1’s camp, where they are medevaced to a hospital in Kuwait.

The Marines in the wadi camp are in a near-hypnotic state. No one’s slept in two nights. Reyes sits by his Humvee beside the spot where Pappy’s blood has spilled over the edge of the passenger-seat compartment. “I should be thankful Pappy wasn’t hit worse,” he says. “Instead I’m feeling sorry for myself because I already miss him so badly. I don’t like being here without him at my side. It’s like I’m missing a piece of my body.”

Several Marines gather around Colbert’s vehicle, drinking water, tearing into food rations and cleaning and reloading the weapons they will likely be using again later in the day. They recount events of the previous night. Redman, who witnessed the sunrise in Al Muwaffaqiyah, walks over in a daze. “Dude, we destroyed that place,” he says, sounding morose about it. “We had one guy shot in the foot, and we blew up their whole town.”

They talk about different reactions they have to combat. Person says he felt no fear whatsoever last night at the bridge. “When I am in these situations,” he asserts confidently, “I don’t feel like I’m going to die.”

Trombley, who repeatedly fell asleep last night during breaks in the fire, seems interested in combat only during its intense moments—when the bullets are coming directly at us. This morning he says, “I had a funny combat-stress reaction. When we rolled back from the bridge the first time, I had a chubb. It wouldn’t go away. Maybe it was ’cause I didn’t get to shoot my SAW.”

Colbert is excessively cheerful this morning. It’s not like he’s maniacally energized from having escaped death. His satisfaction seems deeper and quieter, as if he’s elated to have been involved in something highly rewarding. It’s as though he’s just finished a difficult crossword puzzle or won at chess.

When Espera comes by to share one of his stinky cigars, he looks as he always does after combat, as though his eyes have sunk deeper into their sockets and the skin on his shaved skull has just tightened an extra notch. He jams the chewed, mashed tip of his cigar in my mouth without asking if I want it, and points to Colbert. “Look at that skinny-ass dude,” he says. “You’d never guess what a bad motherfucker he is.”

Espera felt sorry for Colbert when they met a few years ago. They were in different units but happened to find themselves on leave together in Australia. While other Marines were out drinking and chasing whores, Colbert went off alone to prowl electronics stores. “I thought he had no friends—he was such a loner,” Espera says. “But now that I know him better I figured out he just can’t stand people, even me. I’m only his friend to piss him off. I look up to him because the dude is a straight-up warrior. Getting bombed, shot at don’t phase him a bit. Shit, in the middle of all that madness by the bridge he observes those dudes in the trees waiting to kill us. That’s the Iceman.”

He kneels down and punches Colbert on the shoulder. “You’ve got superhuman powers, Iceman, but it comes with that freakish taint I wouldn’t want to have.”

Colbert ignores the backhanded praise. He’s just opened his one MRE of the day and discovered a horrible mistake. His burrito MRE meal contains a condiment packet of peanut butter instead of jalapeño cheese. “What kind of sadist would put peanut butter in my burrito MRE?” he fumes.

Doc Bryan walks over to make sure everyone’s doing all right. I ask him how he feels about having killed those two men in the ambush.

“It’s a funny paradox,” he says. “I would have done anything to save that shepherd kid. But I couldn’t give a fuck about those guys I just killed. It’s like you’re supposed to feel fucked-up after killing people. I don’t.”

Espera says, “We’ve been brainwashed and trained for combat. We must say ‘Kill!’ three thousand times a day in boot camp. That’s why it’s easy.” But ever mindful of the priest’s admonishment not to enjoy killing, Espera hastily adds, “That dude I saw crawling last night, I shot him in the grape. Saw the top of his head bust off. That didn’t feel good. It makes me sick.”

BY NINEA.M. the weary Marines are again on the move, making life-and-death decisions. The first guy they almost kill is a young man identified by Captain America as a possible Fedayeen. Captain America spots the young man standing in the field several hundred meters back from the road. He thinks the guy is talking on a radio, working as an enemy observer. The convoy stops. Snipers are called out. They report that the “radio” Captain America saw him holding close to his mouth and speaking into is a cigarette that he’s trying to smoke in the wind. They move on without shooting him.

Within a couple of hours, First Recon reaches the alternate route into Muwaffaqiyah. There are farmhouses and bermed fields on either side of the road. The battalion slows to a bump-and-stop crawl, while armored units from RCT-1 move a few kilometers ahead into the town, to clear out the rubble blocking the main road.

While we wait, mortars begin to fall. But the fire is intermittent—one or two concussions every ten minutes—and inaccurate, landing hundreds of meters away in the surrounding fields.

There’s a lot of civilian traffic pulled over by the side of the road. Many of the cars seem to have been surprised by the arrival of the Marine convoy. Parked at careless angles just off the road, the cars seem to have pulled over hastily, perhaps when they saw the Marines rolling up on them in their rearview mirrors. In the space of a few kilometers, we pass more than a dozen such vehicles. Clean-shaven young men in urban apparel, similar to that worn by the Syrian ambushers, stand outside the cars and pickup trucks. They flash nervous smiles or throw their hands up when the Marine vehicles pass by. Others who have their shirts off—indicating they’ve probably just changed out of military uniforms—hide inside the cars. Several of the young men we pass have blue eyes and light or even reddish hair, which are traits not uncommon among Syrians.