Evan Wright - Generation Kill

Redman had been manning the Humvee’s .50-cal ten meters back on the road when the explosion went off. The first thing Redman heard in the aftermath was Captain America screaming, “I’m hit! I’m hit!”

For an instant, Redman, he later admits, is flooded with a sense of relief. If Captain America were indeed taken out of action, a lot of Marines’ prayers would be answered. But it turns out the shrapnel Captain America thinks is in his arm is nothing but an imaginary pain.

Redman leaps into the front of the Humvee and joins Carazales, the driver. They try to radio the battalion for medical assistance. First Recon’s camp is only one or two kilometers distant, but the radios aren’t functioning.

Redman jumps onto the highway. He sees Valdez wandering beside the road, holding his hands over his eyes, moaning.

Redman pulls Valdez onto the pavement. They kneel facing each other and Redman grabs him by the shoulders to steady him. “Dude, you’re gonna be okay,” Redman says. “Let go of your eyes.”

Redman gently pulls Valdez’s hands away from his face.

“Are my eyelids there?” Valdez asks.

“Yeah,” Redman says, not really certain if they are there. He shines a flashlight into his face.

“Are my eyes there?” Valdez asks. “I can’t see nothing.”

Redman suppresses the urge to vomit. Both of Valdez’s eyes are filled with pebbles and debris. His left eye is packed. Bloody tissue puffs out around it like a blossom.

“Dude, your eye is gone,” Redman says.

Redman carefully plucks out the debris from the mangled hole that used to be Valdez’s left eye. As he shines the light into it in order to put a dressing on it, Valdez says, “I can see your light. My eye must be okay.”

“I guess I was wrong,” Redman says. “I’m really sorry.”

But Valdez’s eye is gone. The nerves are sending false signals to his brain, fooling him into thinking he can see the light.

They load the two men into the Humvees, one in each. Getting Valdez in is easy. He can sit upright. Loading Dill in with his toes and foot hanging by the skin, and charred bones sticking out, is not so easy. They have to drape him sideways across the backseats in Kocher’s Humvee, while trying not to jiggle his loose foot too much. Dill curses steadily, “Fuck, fuck, fuck it hurts.”

“Give him morphine,” Captain America says.

Everyone ignores him. Even the most boot Marine knows you don’t give morphine to a guy with an unstabilized, bleeding wound. It can make his blood pressure drop and kill him.

Captain America jumps in Kocher’s vehicle. The camp is about a kilometer due south on the perfectly straight highway. Driving back there should be a simple proposition. But Captain America manages to screw this up.

“Turn off here,” he says. “I know a shortcut.”

“Let’s take the road we know,” Kocher says.

After weeks of having his authority mocked and stripped away by his men, Captain America decides to assert himself. He orders Carazales to make the turn. “Do what I say,” he says. “I know this shortcut.”

Fifty meters into Captain America’s shortcut, the Humvee drops into a sabka patch. Carazales tries rocking the vehicle out from the tar and quicksand, but it only sinks deeper. Dill, lying in the back with his partially connected foot and toes bouncing around, howls in agony.

The Marines are forced to carry him out to the second Humvee. They make it back to the camp and medevac the two engineers. Dill loses his right leg up to the knee, including his tattoo. Valdez loses his left eye.

The next morning, April 23, Weiss, whose face is polka-dotted with cuts from the blast but who is otherwise fine, returns to the minefield with another engineer. He clears twelve more mines, and they finish marking the field.

When I ask Encino Man about this episode a few days later, he insists he did the right thing in not questioning the order to send the men out there. “Gunny Dill was the mistake in the whole thing,” he says. “He’s the one that stepped off the road.”

AT TEN IN THE MORNING on April 23, First Recon drives south on Highway 8 to its final camp in Iraq outside of Ad Diwaniyah, 180 kilometers from Baghdad. The battalion joins about 18,000 other Marines from the First Division occupying a former Iraqi military complex—barracks, supply depots and training fields spread across fifteen square kilometers. While most of First Recon’s Marines wind up occupying brick barracks, through the luck of the draw those in Bravo Company end up in a former tank repair yard in a windswept corner of the camp. For the next six weeks, they will sleep in the open on a four-by-forty-meter concrete strip.

Surveying this infernal spot with an almost satisfied smile the afternoon he arrives, one of the men in Second Platoon says, “One universal fact of being in the Marine Corps is that no matter where we go in the world, we always end up in some random shitty place.”

Bravo’s Second and Third platoons spend most of their daytime hours here, as well as their nights, as if they’re living on a ship. The camp’s burn pits and latrines are located adjacent to this sleeping/living area. Plastic MRE wrappings and human excrement, mixed with diesel fuel in steel barrels, are burned round the clock just ten meters from the men. When the wind is still, they live in a haze of flies, mosquitoes and pungent, black smoke. When it blows, they’re inundated with dust. Shamal storms, with fifty-mile-per-hour winds, strike every day, usually lasting three to six hours. During them, Marines just lie on the concrete pad with ponchos wrapped around their heads. Daytime temperatures now typically hover around 115 degrees. Wild dogs are kept at bay by a Marine gunnery sergeant who roams the camp with a shotgun, blasting away at them.

According to Navy Commander Kevin Moore, the division surgeon, injuries among Marines at the camp are running high from guys picking up the unexploded ordnance littering the place. Numerous cases of malaria have occurred, and everyone is becoming ill with what Moore calls “ass-to-hand” disease. A few Marines have undergone psychotic episodes and have been picked up running around the wire, screaming at imaginary Fedayeen. Moore attributes most of these cases to temporary psychosis induced by overuse of stimulants like Ripped Fuel.

One Marine in First Recon’s support unit freaks out early in the stay at this camp. The episode is prompted after a Game Boy (which he brought into Iraq in violation of battalion regulations) disappeared from his rucksack. Early one afternoon following the battalion’s arrival at Ad Diwaniyah, he runs into the warehouse serving as a chow hall with his M-16, puts it to the head of the suspected thief, racks a round into the chamber and screams, “Give me back my Game Boy!” Other Marines talk him out of pulling the trigger. The battalion isolates him for a few days, then returns him to his unit. The Game Boy is never recovered.

On my third morning here, I’m sitting with Colbert’s team, eating an MRE breakfast. Most Marines still haven’t had a proper shower since they left Camp Mathilda more than a month ago. A few rinsed off by spraying themselves with a fire hose in a warehouse they occupied in Baghdad, but not everyone had a chance to use it. Fick washes up for breakfast by spitting in his hands and wiping them on his dirty fatigues.

Colbert says, “You know, I don’t miss anything from home. The only exception is my bike. I miss that. Speed, solitude and no one can touch me.”

“You mean you’re out here in the middle of nowhere, and you miss being alone?” Person laughs quietly. He doesn’t say anything else, which is kind of amazing. After a month of insane, nonstop chattering in the Humvee, he barely talks now. When Person detoxes from Ripped Fuel, endless days of mortar fire, ambushes and sleepless nights behind the wheel of the Humvee, he turns into a soft-spoken guy from Nevada, Missouri, pop. 8,607. He now admits to me, despite his relentless mockery of the Corps, “When I get out of the Marines in November, I’m going to miss it.”