Evan Wright - Generation Kill

In spite of the austerities at the platoon’s encampent, spirits are high. The men build an open-air gym. They scavenge gears and drive shafts from wrecked Iraqi tanks and turn them into free weights and chin-up bars they hang from concrete pilings. They run for kilometers in the 115-degree heat. They practice hand-to-hand combat in the dirt. They pace back and forth barefoot through gravel to build calluses on their feet. The Marines sleep through each night for the first time in weeks, boil coffee every morning on fires started with C-4 explosive, play cards, dip tin after tin of Copenhagen and spend days, when they are not working out, engaging in endless bull sessions. “Man, this is fucking awesome,” Second Platoon’s twenty-two-year-old Corporal James Chaffin declares one morning. “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to work out, dip and hang out with the best guys in the world.”

Up until now, no one has known the name of the war they’ve been fighting. Gunny Wynn passes on the rumor that he thinks they might be calling it “Iraqi Freedom.” Hearing the news, Carazales scoffs. “Fuck that. I’ll tell you what ‘freedom’ was, Phase Three Iraq,” he says, referring to the military’s term for the combat-operations phase of the invasion. “That was fucking Iraqi freedom. Rip through this bitch shooting anything that moves from your window. That’s what I call freedom.”

THE SENIOR OFFICERS, set up in nicer quarters across the camp, are basking in the glow of victory. First Recon, one of the smallest, most lightly armed battalions in the Corps, led the way for much of the Marines’ blitzkrieg to Baghdad. “No other military in the world can do what we do,” Ferrando tells me. “We are America’s shock troops.”

I meet Lt. Col. Ferrando in a small office that formerly belonged to an Iraqi officer. The one-story building is shaded by sycamore trees and has thick adobe walls, keeping it relatively cool even on this hot afternoon. One of the issues still dogging the battalion is Captain America’s behavior. After a lengthy investigation into the incident in which he taunted an EPW with his bayonet, Ferrando returned him to command but hesitated to fully exonerate him. He finally does in late April, about the time I meet with him. He tells me he thinks Captain America walked a fine line but was still “within the box” of acceptable behavior. But he adds, “In my mind, when you allow that behavior to progress, you end up with a My Lai Massacre.” Then he leans across his desk and asks me if I think he should have taken harsher action toward Captain America.

I honestly can’t answer him. In the past six weeks, I have been on hand while this comparatively small unit of Marines has killed quite a few people. I personally saw three civilians shot, one of them fatally with a bullet in the eye. These were just the tip of the iceberg. The Marines killed dozens, if not hundreds, in combat through direct fire and through repeated, at times almost indiscriminate, artillery strikes. And no one will probably ever know how many died from the approximately 30,000 pounds of bombs First Recon ordered dropped from aircraft. I can’t imagine how the man ultimately responsible for all of these deaths—at least on the battalion level—sorts it all out and draws the line between what is wanton killing and what is civilized military conduct. I suppose if it were up to me, I might let Captain America keep his job, but I would take away his rifle and bayonet and give him a cap gun.

As I’m about to leave his office, Ferrando stops me. “Something I’m struggling with internally is it’s exciting to get shot at,” he says, sounding almost confessional. “It’s an excitement that I hadn’t thought about before.” He hastily adds, “But at the same time it’s a terrible feeling to be the man sending other people into combat.”

Earlier, in a talk to his men, Ferrando referred to his order to send them onto the airfield at Qalat Sukhar with no preparation as “reckless.” Many of his men feel the whole campaign of rushing into ambushes was characterized by recklessness. But in the end, he’s been vindicated. He became, in a sense, Maj. Gen. Mattis’s go-to guy in central Iraq. While Col. Dowdy, commander of the much larger regimental force in the region, sometimes appeared to hesitate, as he had in entering Nasiriyah, and was removed from command in early April, Ferrando seldom if ever turned down a chance to race his forces into another hairy situation. Much of the time during the dash to Al Kut, Ferrando’s battalion set the pace. He shrugged off the fact that his men weren’t adequately equipped or specifically trained for the kinds of assaults they were doing. (By contrast, after Dowdy was relieved of his command he was reportedly castigated in a subsequent fitness report for being “overly concerned about the welfare” of his men, with the idea being that this concern got in the way of mission accomplishment.) In the end, Ferrando’s battalion exemplified the virtues of maneuver warfare, employing speed over firepower to throw Iraqi defenders off balance.

As much as some of the enlisted men despise Ferrando for what they saw as his dangerous haste (not to mention his obsession with the Grooming Standard), Fick praises him. “He got the job done for Major General Mattis, and in the Marine Corps that’s all that matters. It’s mission accomplishment first, troop welfare second. Ferrando has no problem with that.”

When I talk to Mattis the next day at Ad Diwaniyah, he heaps praise on the courage and initiative displayed by the men in First Recon, to whom he credits with a large measure of the invasion’s success. “They should be very proud,” he says.

After I return to Second Platoon’s squalid encampment and pass on the general’s praise, the men stand around in the dust, considering his glowing remarks. Finally, Garza says, “Yeah? Well, we still did a lot of stupid shit.”

“War doesn’t change anything,” Doc Bryan says. “This place was fucked up before we came, and it’s fucked up now. I personally don’t believe we ‘liberated’ the Iraqis. Time will tell.”

“The American people ought to know the price we pay to maintain their standard of living,” Espera says. Despite his avowals of being a complete cynic, he continually turns back to the incident at Al Hayy, where he shot and killed three unarmed men fleeing a truck at the Marines’ roadblock. “I wish I could go back in time and see if they were enemy, or just confused civilians,” he says.

“It could have been a truckful of babies, and with our Rules of Engagement you did the right thing,” Fick says.

“I’m not saying I care,” Espera says. “I don’t give a fuck. But I keep thinking about what the priest said. It’s not a sin to kill with a purpose, as long you don’t enjoy it. My question is, is indifference the same as enjoyment?”

“All religious stuff aside,” Colbert cuts in. “The fact is people who can’t kill will be subject to those who can.”

Despite their moral qualms—or lack thereof—about killing, most Marines unabashedly love the action. “You really can’t top it,” Redman says. “Combat is the supreme adrenaline rush. You take rounds. Shoot back, shit starts blowing up. It’s sensory overload. It’s the one thing that’s not overrated in the military.”

“The fucked thing,” Doc Bryan says, “is the men we’ve been fighting probably came here for the same reasons we did, to test themselves, to feel what war is like. In my view it doesn’t matter if you oppose or support war. The machine goes on.”

ILEAVE First Recon’s camp at Ad Diwaniyah in a Navy helicopter at dawn on May 4. We fly low and fast to avoid enemy ground fire. Our flight path takes us directly over the tank repair yard, where I see the men of Second Platoon stirring from their sleep on the concrete pad. They will remain here for more than a month, returning to Camp Pendleton on June 3, 2003.