Evan Wright - Generation Kill

They cook the Chef Boyardee on a C-4 fire, in the cans, cutting them open with Ka-Bar knives. The team is more closely knit than it’s ever been. Even Trombley has found acceptance. In the wake of the incident in which he accidentally machine-gunned the shepherds, the men have honored him with a nickname: “Whopper.” I don’t get it when they first reveal it to me. “We call him the Whopper,” one of them explains, “because they’re sold at Burger King.” When I look up, still not understanding, the nearby Marines shake their heads at my ignorance. “Like, Whoppers, Burger King, BK—Baby Killer,” one of them says, spelling it out. “Trombley’s our little Whopper BK.”

They call him this to his face, and Trombley laughs appreciatively. He admits, “When I shot those kids I felt the same way as when I shoot a deer. I felt lucky, like I got the Easter egg.” Then adds, “I wanted to look at the kid I shot. It felt weird.”

Lilley nudges him affectionately. “That’s because you’re the Whopper, our little BK Baby Killer.”

Person, sitting shirtless partway underneath the cammie netting, slurps the ravioli juice from the jagged can and starts babbling about his NAMBLA-conspiracy theories behind the war.

Hasser, who has maintained his distant silence for days since shooting the man in the blue car, breaks into laughter. “Look at you, Ray,” he says, pointing at Person. “You’re a fucking mess, man.”

Person’s face is smeared with ravioli sauce, fluorescent orange in the sunlight. More of it’s splattered down his pale white chest, with drippings on his toes. “What?” Person asks, perplexed.

“You’re a fucking messed-up hick who can’t even eat ravioli.” Hasser doubles over, facedown in the grass, laughing.

LATER THAT DAY, the Marines in Bravo are reunited with an old friend, Gunnery Sergeant Jason Swarr. A thirty-two-year-old Recon Marine who works as the battalion’s parachute rigger, Swarr nearly missed the war. He only arrived outside Baghdad a couple of days ago. Now, he comes over to Colbert’s position with a tale of his strange odyssey through Iraq and his remarkable first experience of combat.

Swarr is one of the more eccentric characters in the battalion. Tall and square-jawed, he looks like your average Marine, but in his off-hours Swarr is an artist who writes and directs ultra-low-budget videos. “I’m like the Ed Wood of my generation,” he says. “My goal in life is, people will go in the video store and find my movies in the Cult Film section by Toxic Avenger. ”

Swarr is also a warrior. He served in Somalia, and when this war came along, he vowed he wasn’t going to miss it. But the battalion had other plans. When the invasion began, Swarr and two other Marines from First Recon were ordered to remain behind at the Al Jabar airfield in Kuwait to serve as liaisons to the Marine Corps Air Wing. Within a few days, he and his two comrades figured out their assignment was a bullshit job. “They didn’t give a fuck about us at Jabar,” Gunny Swarr says. “There was nothing to do.”

They pulled some strings, got permission to leave and hitchhiked up to Camp Mathilda with some Pakistani laborers. The battalion had already left for the invasion, but Swarr and his cohorts found out there was a company of reservist Recon Marines still in the camp, who were getting ready to enter Iraq and link up with the battalion in a few days. Swarr and the others figured they’d get a ride with the reservists.

The reservist unit is called Delta Company, and it has three platoons with a total of about ninety Marines and commanders. It’s made up of guys who work regular jobs in civilian life, some as software engineers or teachers, but the majority in law enforcement—from LAPD cops to DEA agents to air marshals. In Swarr’s opinion, “Delta was the most unorganized thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

The reservists’ problems weren’t necessarily caused through any fault of their own. Due to its low standing in the pecking order as a reserve unit, Delta Company was short on trucks, guns, food, flak vests, radios. Nevertheless, the reservists crossed into Iraq nearly a week after the war started. “It was madness from day one,” Swarr says. They had no idea where the battalion was and no ability to reach it on comms. Their navigation gear was so poor they nearly bumbled into Nasiriyah at the height of the fighting there. Many of the reservists in Delta had never fired the heavy weapons on their Humvees prior to entering Iraq.

Wandering around highways in southern Iraq, unable to find out where the battalion was, the reservists began running low on food. They were assigned convoy escort duty by the division and, according to Swarr, they turned this into a gold mine. At the time, lightly armed supply convoys were rolling through the area, their drivers terrified of being ambushed. So, Swarr says, “We put a sign out: ‘Need Convoy Security? Stop Here.’ As soon as they’d stop, we’d bullshit the drivers, tell ’em, ‘Hey, two hours ago a convoy passing through here got ambushed.’ Then we’d ask ’em, ‘What do you got for us? Any MREs, flak vests, water? Hand it over, and we’ll escort you.’”

According to Swarr, Delta Company made out pretty well for a while. Then, in his opinion, the company started going out of control. “Some of the cops in Delta started doing this cowboy stuff. They put cattle horns on their Humvees. They’d roll into these hamlets, doing shows of force—kicking down doors, doing sweeps—just for the fuck of it. There was this little clique of them. Their ringleader was this beat cop, who’s like a corporal back home and a commander out here. He’s like five feet tall, talks like Joe Friday and everyone calls him ‘Napoleon.’ We started to get the idea these guys didn’t want to find the battalion. They knew they’d get their balls stepped on. They were having too much fun being cowboys.

“Some of the other reservists were coming up to us, saying, ‘You’ve got to help us find the battalion. These guys are going to get us killed.’ But there was nothing we could do.”

Finally, it all came to a head a couple of days ago. “We’re guarding an airfield for chow and water,” Swarr says. “These kids come up selling soda and cigarettes. The ringleaders in Delta decide it would be funny to trade them some porn magazines, which these Iraqi kids had never seen. About an hour later, this elder comes out of a hamlet 400 meters away, yelling and shaking his fist. The kids all scatter. One of them tells us the old man is pissed. He didn’t like kids having porn magazines. The kid says he’s going to get an RPG. Sure enough, the old man comes out of this hut with an RPG, just kind of waving it around.”

Swarr takes a deep breath. “Delta fucking freaks! They lob like twenty-six Mark-19 rounds at the guy. He’s two hundred meters away, and they all miss him. Instead, they light up this friendly village behind him that’s been passing us information.

“I’m just watching this. I didn’t have nothing to shoot at, and I see this old dude dressed like a Marine running past with a flak vest and camera, huffing and puffing. ‘What are they lighting up?’ he asks. ‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Just some pissed-off Iraqi with an RPG.’ Then I look at the guy I’m talking to, and it’s Ollie North.” (North served as a correspondent for Fox News in Iraq.)

“I’m like, ‘Ollie, how you doing?’” Swarrs continues.

“‘Fucking great.’ He takes a dip and says, ‘This war’s going to be over in seventy-two hours. Saddam’s dead.’

“I’m like, ‘Good to go, Ollie.’

“He huffs off, and this colonel comes out who’s in charge of the airfield, and he’s mad. He’s like, ‘You guys just lit up a friendly village.’