Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Just before lights out, a private approaches me and says, in polite, respectful tones, “Sir, I’ll get you a place to sleep.”

He leads me to the wall of ponchos dividing the tent between Second and Third platoons, and widens a space between a machine gun and a stack of military rations boxes for me to spread out my sleeping bag. Only after the lights go off do I learn that I have been placed in the walkway used by the Third Platoon Marines when they go out to the latrines at night. Seminaked burly guys in boots or flip-flops traipse over my head all night long. My placement here, the Marines later tell me, was their way of welcoming me. Later, I know they’re starting to warm to me when guys start jumping on my neck and sticking the tips of Ka-Bars into my ribs.

FOR THE MARINES at Camp Mathilda, the first tangible sign that the war might actually be happening soon comes in the form of Pizza Hut delivery cars that stream into the camp all the way from Kuwait City on the night of March 16. As the South Asian franchise workers haggle with Marines outside the cars, selling the pies for twenty or ten bucks apiece, Fick grimly observes, “I think we can take this as the clearest indication yet that we’re getting ready to roll out for the invasion. They don’t just feed Marines pizza for no reason.”

Just after dawn on the morning of March 17, the Marines are told they have four hours to load their Humvees and trucks to pull out for a forward staging area near the Iraqi border. The men in Second Platoon clear out the tent in near silence. By eight o’clock temperatures have already reached the upper eighties. The heat is compounded by the fact that everyone has been ordered into their bulky chemical-protection suits. They lug weapons, rucksacks and crates of ammunition with sweat pouring from their faces. Everyone moves about in a feverish dream state.

By nine o’clock, First Recon’s convoy of some seventy Humvees and trucks have been loaded and maneuvered into position in the sand. The 300 or so enlisted Marines line up for formation. A battalion master sergeant struts in front of the troops and shouts, “Anybody who doesn’t want to be here, raise your hand.”

Laughter swells from the ranks.

“Good,” the sergeant continues. “You are going to be in the biggest show on the planet.”

When formation ends, Marines jump up and down, laughing and throwing each other around in the dust. Two different men run past me, shouting exactly the same phrase, “This is like Christmas!”

Their enthusiasm for the rollout doesn’t necessarily mean everyone’s a warmonger. A Marine explains the peculiar logic of troops getting ready for combat. “The sooner the war starts,” he says, “the sooner we go home.”

I make my last call before turning in my satellite phone to the battalion commander. The phone was provided by my editor to keep him updated on my movements, but I decide to call my girlfriend in Los Angeles instead. I’m not allowed to tell her we’re leaving the camp. She says that everyone at home is expecting the war to start any day. People in Los Angeles are panicking. Her friends are driving to a cabin at Lake Arrowhead to wait out the war in safety. It seems unreal to me. I suppress the urge to ask her if J.Lo is dead.

FIRST RECON’S CONVOY pulls out from the gates of Camp Mathilda at noon on March 17 under an unusually clear, dust-free blue sky. The Marines’ objective is a staging area about twenty kilometers south of the Iraqi border, where they will be in position to punch into Iraq on a few hours’ notice. They have no orders yet to begin the invasion, but this is the last step. This maneuver is the battalion-wide equivalent of cocking a loaded pistol and aiming it at someone’s head.

Tens of thousands of other American and British troops are on the same path this afternoon. As soon as First Recon’s convoy pulls onto the “highway”—a narrow, rutted asphalt lane surrounded by open desert—we become snarled in traffic. Some 150,000 coalition troops are camped nearby, and it looks as if all of them have poured onto the same highway at once. Thousands of vehicles—Humvees, tanks and trucks—fill the road in a jam that snakes across the desert for thirty kilometers.

Traversing this portion of the Kuwait desert, you begin to get a sense of the scale of the undertaking. We crawl past fenced lots in which thousands of tanker trucks, tractor-trailers and pieces of construction machinery are parked, waiting to roll into Iraq on the heels of the combat units. There are supply depots covering acres of sand with mountains of munitions, oil drums and rations crates. Lying beside the road are steel pipe sections that military construction crews are welding together into a pipeline to supply fuel and water to the invasion force as it goes north. It all has the feel of a monumental industrial enterprise. Somehow all these pieces are being put together—the people and the equipment—to function as one large machine. Though at the small-unit level all I see is the friction among the moving parts—Marines shouting at other vehicles to get out of the way, guys jumping out to hurriedly piss by the road, people taking wrong turns—the machine works. It will roll across 580 kilometers to Baghdad. It will knock down buildings, smash cars and tanks, put holes in people, shred limbs, cut children apart. There’s no denying it. For certain tasks, the machine put together in this desert is a very good one.

Colbert’s team digs into its position in the staging area after midnight. The moon overhead is so bright it looks almost like someone is shining a flashlight on us. It’s taken nearly fourteen hours to reach this spot of open desert. The battalion’s seventy-odd vehicles fan out across a couple of kilometers, with the Humvees facing north, their guns oriented toward Iraq. Marines move through the moonlit gloom with pickaxes and shovels, digging “Ranger graves”—shallow, one-man sleeping holes designed to protect their occupants from shrapnel in the event of an Iraqi attack. Then the Marines stretch “cammie nets”—camouflage netting—over their vehicles to make them harder to spot.

Temperatures have plunged into the lower forties. In their haste to pack up in the morning, many Marines had buried fleece vests and other warming “snivel gear” in the bottoms of their rucksacks. Some left this behind altogether. While Colbert’s team digs into their position, Marines who’d been so jubilant in the morning start bitching, primarily to amuse themselves.

Jacks, the giant gunner in Second Platoon’s team whom everyone calls Manimal, walks over to Colbert, whining, “I’m sick of this war.”

“It hasn’t even started yet, you pussy,” Colbert says.

“It’s fucking cold out here,” Manimal says.

“You can’t be cold,” Colbert says. “You’re a killer.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t pack no snivel gear,” Manimal says. “You got a fleece I can borrow till the war’s over?”

ALOW-INTENSITY DUST STORM starts sometime before dawn on the first morning at the staging area. Sleeping in open holes, you wake up with your face covered in powder. The wind moans continually. By sunrise it looks like we are in a snowstorm. Marines gather underneath the cammie netting draped over their vehicles, repacking gear, cleaning weapons, waiting. Their commanders tell the men the war will probably start on the twenty-second or twenty-third.

Colbert sits upright in his Ranger grave, filling his rifle magazines with bullets, peering out at the opaqueness of the desert—the dusty winds blowing past the cammie nets—and says, “It almost feels like we’re at the bottom of the ocean.”

Colbert’s specialty within the platoon is deep-sea diving. He’s trained to lead his team through miles of ocean and penetrate coastal defenses. Despite the years he’s spent on training missions in the water, he confesses to me that the deep sea terrifies him. “The scariest thing for me is to open my eyes under the ocean, especially at night,” he says. “I’m scared every time I do it.” He adds, “That’s probably why I love diving.”