Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Navy Lieutenant Commander Bodley, the chaplain, consecrates this day by pounding a crude wooden cross into the mud. He drapes it with an olive-drab rag to symbolize Christ’s body on the cross.

At nine in the morning, the chaplain gathers about fifty faithful Marines—predominantly officers and personnel from battalion support units—who sit in the dirt in front of the cross, rifles propped up beside them, and leads them in a mumbling version of the hymn “He Rose from the Dead.” Then the chaplain tells them, “I have good news.” He announces that a Marine has chosen this special day to be baptized.

When Colbert hears of the good news after watching the service from his Humvee in the distance, he cannot conceal his outrage. To him, religion is right up there with country music as an expression of collective idiocy. “Give me a break,” he says. “Marines getting baptized? This used to be a place of men with pure warrior spirit. Chaplains are a goddamn waste.”

But Colbert’s disgust this morning isn’t merely about religion. He and others in the platoon are annoyed by continued threats from Encino Man and Casey Kasem to punish Fick and Gunny Wynn for disobeying orders. Encino Man remains angry at Fick and Gunny Wynn for questioning his plan to call in an artillery strike nearly on top of their position at Ar Rifa. Since that episode, Fick and Gunny Wynn have persisted in questioning Encino Man’s orders, most recently in Baghdad when Fick declined to send a patrol out at night.

Casey Kasem has complained vociferously about the “lack of obedience to orders” displayed by the leaders of Second Platoon. “Their job is to execute whatever the commander tells them,” he’s fumed, “and they don’t.”

While following orders is at the heart of good military discipline, the men have no faith in the layer of command above Fick, starting with Encino Man and his loyal enlisted helper, Casey Kasem. “Those two incompetents are dangerous out here,” one of Colbert’s friends in the platoon says. “‘Obedience to orders’ to them means they don’t want to look bad to their commanders. They’re afraid to question orders. Fick and Gunny Wynn are great men because they have the courage to do the right thing.”

THE DEBATE over questioning orders from superiors becomes far less abstract the evening of April 22, at First Recon’s camp south of Baghdad. This night a battalion watch officer, whose job is to sit in for Lt. Col. Ferrando and, in effect, babysit the battalion when he’s indisposed, mistakenly issues an order for Marines to go out in the darkness and mark the location of a minefield by the highway north of the camp. The watch officer radios Capt. Patterson and asks him to send some of his men in Alpha to escort combat engineers on the mission.

The mines were discovered a few days earlier by Patterson’s men along the highway a kilometer north of the camp. Combat engineers have been removing mines all day, but hundreds remain. The watch officer erroneously believes there’s an order to mark the location of the remaining mines with chemlites. Patterson tells him that he must be mistaken. There’s a division-wide order banning Marines from operating in minefields at night. Besides, thousands of American military vehicles have passed by the mines in recent weeks without incident. The job can wait until morning, Patterson tells him, declining to execute the order.

But the watch officer persists. He radios Encino Man and asks him to send Marines out in the dark to mark the minefield. Encino Man promises to push Marines out immediately. He later tells me, “I didn’t want to send Marines out there, but the watch officer is the voice of the battalion commander [Ferrando]. I couldn’t say no.”

The operation gets into full swing when Encino Man contacts Captain America and issues the command for his men to accompany three engineers into the minefield. In the wake of the episode in which Captain America taunted an EPW with his bayonet, he was reinstated to command of his platoon following a brief suspension but is still awaiting final disposition on possible disciplinary action from Ferrando. The enlisted men, Kocher and Redman, were cleared of wrongdoing in that matter, and Captain America now orders their team and another to transport the engineers up the road to the minefield.

The Marines reach the minefield at about nine-thirty that night, parking two Humvees on the highway, leaving their headlights on. Kocher steps onto the road with three engineers, among them Gunnery Sergeant David Dill and Staff Sergeant Ray Valdez. The plan tonight is simply for the engineers to stand on the road and toss chemlites into the minefield that runs along the side of it.

The engineers earlier spent the day in the field removing more than 150 mines. Dill, a compactly built twenty-seven-year-old with a tattoo on his right calf that says MINEFIELD MAINTENANCE is passionate about land mines. Before he was attached to First Recon he spent a year at Guantánamo in Cuba removing mines from the fields the U.S. sowed there in the 1960s. Other engineers who work with him consider Dill an inspirational figure. “He makes everybody excited about our jobs,” says a Marine who serves under him.

Combat engineers tend to be fanatical about their profession. Perhaps it’s a prerequisite. De-mining, which is usually done completely by touch—probing the earth with plastic rods, then feeling each mine to check for antihandling booby traps and removing it by hand—is highly stressful. According to their own guidelines, engineers are not supposed to pull more than twelve antitank mines a day, given the toll it takes on their nerves.

During the afternoon of April 22, Dill removed more than thirty mines from the field beside the road (with his team gathering an additional 120, which they detonated in a terrific explosion just before reentering the field after dark). Now, standing on the road in the glare of the Humvees’ headlights, Dill observes what appears to be a mine in a portion of the field believed to have been cleared. He and Valdez, twenty-eight, step off the road to investigate.

A third engineer standing far back on the road, twenty-three-year-old Sergeant Randy Weiss, sees Dill and Valdez walk off the road and is about to caution them but decides against it. Weiss later tells me, “If anyone knows what he’s doing, it’s Gunny Dill.” Not only is Dill Weiss’s mentor within the Marines, they are good friends. Both of them married, each with a young child, they live near each other off-base, and their wives are close.

There’s a tremoundous blast as Dill steps on a mine at the edge of the road. Weiss is temporarily blinded by spraying debris, even though he’s nearly ten meters back from the explosion.

Kocher, standing directly behind Dill on the road, is thrown onto his back. He goes temporarily deaf from the blast, and his eyes reflexively shut. In the immediate aftermath, only his olfactory sense still functions. He smells burning flesh. Kocher opens his eyes and sees Dill lying a few meters out in the field, thrown there by the explosion.

When Kocher rises to his feet, the ringing in his ears subsides. He hears Dill yelling, “I’m bleeding out! Throw me a tourniquet.”

Kocher and his team’s corpsman, forty-six-year-old Navy Hospitalman First Class George Graham, walk about four meters into the minefield. Dill screams, “Get the fuck out of here!”

Kocher sees that Dill’s foot hangs from his leg at a weird angle. The boot is shredded. His toes are exposed, dangling by some skin. His heel is blown off, and his tib-fib bones are sticking out, the ends charred and smoking. He stepped on the smallest mine in the field, a BS-50 Italian “toe-popper.” He and Graham tourniquet him off and carry him back to the road. (The next day, when engineers return to the field, they find two other mines a few inches from the footprints made by Kocher and Graham.)