Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Beneath his formal manners, there is another side to Colbert’s personality. His back is tattooed in a garish wash of color depicting a Louis Royo illustration of a warrior princess babe from Heavy Metal magazine. He pays nearly $5,000 a year in auto-motorcycle insurance due to outrageous speeding tickets. He routinely drives his Yamaha R1 racing bike at 150 miles per hour on southern California’s freeways, and his previous racing bike was rigged with model rocket engines by the exhaust pipe to shoot flames when he wanted to “scare the bejesus out of commuters.” He admits to a deep-rooted but controlled rebellious streak that was responsible for his parents sending him to military academy when he was in high school. His life, he says, is driven by a simple philosophy: “You don’t want to ever show fear or back down, because you don’t want to be embarrassed in front of the pack.”

He holds sway over the other men not through physical power or personal magnetism but through sheer force of skill, determination and a barely concealed sense of superiority. During mountain warfare training, he’s legendary for having ascended the final thousand meters of Mt. Shasta on a broken ankle, carrying 150 pounds of gear. Where other Marines speak of the special bonds of kinship between them, the mystical brotherhood formed in the crucible of shared hardship, Colbert shuns the crowd. He spends as much time as he can alone in his corner of the tent, engrossed in a military laptop, studying invasion maps and satellite imagery. While his brother Marines cavort and laugh around him, Colbert says, “I would never socialize with any of these people if we weren’t in the Marines.”

There is, of course, a widespread though usually unvoiced public perception that the military is a refuge for the socioeconomic dregs of society, people driven in by lack of jobs or paucity of social skills. Fick observes, “A lot of the people I went to school with at Dartmouth look down on the type of people who are in the Marine Corps.”

But if you examine the backgrounds of the average enlisted men in First Recon, the picture is a little more complicated. There’s no shortage of guys who came in to escape life in street gangs, sometimes with a little nudge from a local prosecutor. A Marine talking about his alcoholic dad or his crackhead mom does not raise eyebrows. But at the same time, you’re just as likely to run into Marines who joined fresh out of prep school, or who turned down math or swim scholarships at universities. The most “boot” (inexperienced) private in Second Platoon is a nineteen-year-old who rejected an appointment at Annapolis in favor of becoming an enlisted Marine. The machine gunner in Team Three is from a well-to-do Oakland Hills, California, family and has a sister at Harvard.

What unites them is an almost reckless desire to test themselves in the most extreme circumstances. In many respects the life they have chosen is a complete rejection of the hyped, consumerist American dream as it is dished out in reality TV shows and pop-song lyrics. They’ve chosen asceticism over consumption. Instead of celebrating their individualism, they’ve subjugated theirs to the collective will of an institution. Their highest aspiration is self-sacrifice over self-preservation.

There is idealism about their endeavor, but at the same time the whole point of their training is to commit the ultimate taboo: to kill. Their culture revels in this. At the end of team briefings, Marines put their hands together and shout, “Kill!” In keeping with the spirit of transgression, they also mock some of the most delicate social conventions in America. The Hispanics in the platoon refer to the white guys as “cracker-ass fucks,” the whites refer to them as “muds” and to Spanish as “dirty spic talk,” and they are the best of friends.

Person, the aspiring rock star who serves as the driver and radio operator for Colbert’s team, is among those whose feelings about the Corps seem almost conflicted. From Nevada, Missouri, a small town where “NASCAR is sort of like a state religion,” he was proudly raised working-poor by his mother. “We lived in a trailer for a few years on my grandpa’s farm, and I’d get one pair of shoes a year from Wal-Mart.” Person was a pudgy kid in high school, didn’t play sports, was on the debate team and played any musical instrument—from guitar to saxophone to piano—he could get his hands on.

Becoming a Marine was a 180-degree turn for him. “I’d planned to go to Vanderbilt on a scholarship and study philosophy,” he says. “But I had an epiphany one day. I wanted to do my life for a while, rather than think it.” Like Colbert, he’s a veteran of Afghanistan and professes absolute support of this war. Yet it often seems as if the driving force behind this formerly pudgy, nonathletic kid’s decision to enter the Corps and join one of its most elite, macho units was to mock it and everything around him.

Tonight, he entertains his fellow troops by pacing the tent, reading letters aloud sent by schoolchildren to boost morale. He opens one from a girl who writes that she is praying for world peace. He throws it down. “Hey, little tyke,” Person shouts. “What does this say on my shirt? ‘U.S. Marine!’ I wasn’t born on some hippie-faggot commune. I’m a death-dealing killer. In my free time I do push-ups until my knuckles bleed. Then I sharpen my knife.”

Doc Bryan leaps up, brandishing a Hustler. “Check this out,” he says.

“I already seen that,” a Marine says. “Pictures of those chicks pissing.”

“No, listen to this.” Doc Bryan paces the tent reading an editorial by Larry Flynt damning the coming war as a grab for oil. “He is a very cognizant man,” Doc Bryan concludes. “Gents, this is a very cognizant way of explaining what we are all doing here. We’re going to be fighting a war for oil.”

Nobody seems to care much about the point he’s making. In a weird way, external facts about the looming war don’t really seem that important to these guys. The dominant feature of their lives is simply the fact that they are all together, which they enjoy tremendously. Being around them is reminiscent of being a thirteen-year-old at a weekend sleepover with all of your very best friends in the world. Only this weekend goes on indefinitely, perpetually nurturing the mystical bonds, the warrior dreams.

There is an undeniable Peter Pan quality to the military. A Marine psychiatrist attached to the First Division says, “The whole structure of the military is designed to mature young men to function responsibly while at the same time preserving their adolescent sense of invulnerability.”

Most Marines can remember the exact moment they decided to enlist. A lot of them were sparked by a specific TV commercial. In it, a cartoonish Arthurian hero slays a fire-breathing dragon, then promptly morphs into a Marine in dress blues standing at attention with a silver sword at his side.

Sergeant Rudy Reyes, thirty-one, the platoon’s best martial-arts fighter (whom the other men continually jump and ambush in order to test themselves against his superior skills), describes his passion for the Marine Corps in terms that blend New Age mysticism with the spirit of comic-book adventure. “I joined the Marines for idealism and romance,” he says. “Idealism because it’s so hard. The Marine Corps is a wonderful tool of self-enlightenment. Discipline erases all preconceived notions, and the pain becomes a medium of self-discovery. That’s the idealistic side. The romance comes in because we are a small band of hard motherfuckers, trained to go behind enemy lines against forces twenty or forty times bigger than us. And brother, if that ain’t romantic, I don’t know what is.”

My first night with the platoon, Reyes says, “You’re lucky to be here, brother. We are the baddest, most tight-knit niggas in the battalion.”