Generation Kill

by Evan Wright

  Those who know Espera understand he’s not a racist. He’s a humorist whose vitriol is tongue-in-cheek. Even so, Espera questions the white man’s wisdom in sending him tearing through a hostile country in an open Humvee. “Every time we roll through one of these cities, I think we’re going to die. Even now, dog, sitting here in the shade, my heart’s beating one hundred forty times per minute. For what? So some colonel can make general by throwing us into another firefight?”

  In their most paranoid moments, some Marines believe Ferrando is trying to get them killed. Sergeant Christopher Wasik, a thirty-one-year-old Marine who sometimes serves as Ferrando’s driver, comes over this day to share some coffee and gripe with his friends in Second Platoon. Before the invasion, Wasik openly rebelled against Ferrando’s Grooming Standard after having been severely upbraided for allowing his mustache to grow too far beyond the corners of his mouth. He shaved it into a perfect Hitler mustache, which he wore for weeks at Camp Mathilda. Nevertheless, his rebellion was a failure. His superiors commended his Hitler mustache for complying with the Grooming Standard. Now, he and the other Marines speculate on Ferrando’s motives in Iraq. “In some morbid realm,” Wasik says, “it may be a possibility that the commander wants some of us to die, so when he sits around with other high leaders, they don’t snicker at him and ask what kind of shit he got into.”

  WHATEVER FEELINGS Colbert has over his involvement in the shooting of the shepherds, he seems to have filed them away. His mood has been chipper since the all-night watch for the enemy column. Late in the morning, however, he receives another reminder of the incident. The tattooed grandmother and a man from the family who appears to be in his late forties walk through the perimeter toward his Humvee. Person, now on his stomach, tanning his bacne, is the first to notice their approach. “Hey,” he says, lifting his head up. “We got Hajjis. Anyone know how to say, ‘Get the fuck away from my Humvee’ in Habudabi?” he says, using Marine slang—“Habudabi”—for Arabic.

  “I’ll take care of this,” Colbert says. He scrounges in the Humvee for an English-to-Arabic cheat sheet, then walks up to the man and the old lady.

  “Al salam al’icum,” he says haltingly, reading the customary Arabic salutation from his cheat sheet.

  His greeting provokes a torrent of words and frantic gestures from the couple. Colbert queries them in Arabic, then repeats in English, “I have pain?” “I am hungry?”

  They shake their heads no. Then he asks, “Bad people?”

  They nod, point across the field and speak more urgently. Colbert tries to radio for the translator, but he can’t be found. The grandmother keeps repeating something. He can’t figure out what it is. He shakes his head. “I don’t understand. I’m sorry.”

  She shrugs. Colbert hands her several humrat packs. “I’m sorry,” he says in Arabic and English. “You have to go.”

  They walk off. He watches them, exasperated. “We can’t have civilians hanging out here. There’s nothing I can do about this.”

  DOC BRYAN RETURNS from the RCT-1’s medical unit with good news. “We got the kid stabilized and medevaced out on a bird.” Even so, Doc Bryan takes little satisfaction from the effort. “The whole drive down I was staring in the kid’s eyes,” Doc Bryan says. “He was staring at me like, ‘You just shot me, motherfucker, and now you think you’re great because you’re trying to save my life?’”

  Later that day, Encino Man walks the perimeter, talking informally with his men in an attempt to ease the tensions. Meeting with Doc Bryan and the other Marines in Team Three, he apologizes for the incident a few days earlier when he tried to fire a 203 grenade into a house where the men had observed civilians.

  His candor earns high marks from the Marines. Then he asks them to speak up about anything that’s bothering them. The funny thing is, the Marines have been laughing off hardships caused by the lack of food, the filth, the flies, the dysentery, even the uncertainty of not knowing what their next mission is. The one thing that no one laughs about is the loss of First Recon’s “colors”—a Marine Corps flag affixed with battle streamers. The colors are reputed to have been carried by Marines into combat since at least the Vietnam War. A few nights ago, they were lost on the supply truck blown up outside of Ar Rifa. One of the Marines tells Encino Man, “The colors should never leave the commander’s side. Losing them is a reflection on his leadership and on all of us.”

  The only other serious complaints the Marines air are the usual ones about the battalion commander’s continued obsession with the Grooming Standard. Ferrando recently sent the Coward of Khafji around to lecture the men about committing petty violations—from allowing their hair to grow a quarter inch too long to lying in the sun by their vehicles with their helmets off.

  One of the Marines complains to Encino Man, “They’re treating men who’ve shown discipline in combat like a bunch of six-year-olds.”

  Encino Man listens, staring cryptically from blue eyes beneath the shelf of his Cro-Magnon brow. Then he turns to Doc Bryan, who’s been lying quietly on the ground the whole time. “Doc, is there anything you want to talk about?”

  “I’m fine, sir,” Doc Bryan answers.

  “If there’s anything on your mind, now’s the time to bring it up,” Encino Man says.

  “If you insist, sir,” Doc Bryan says.

  “It’s okay, whatever it is,” Encino Man encourages him.

  “Frankly, sir, I think you’re incompetent to lead this company.”

  “I’m doing the best I can,” Encino Man says.

  “Sir, it’s just not good enough.”

  CAPTAIN AMERICA’S PLATOON is also experiencing a deepening rift, exacerbated by the shepherd-shooting incident. Marines in his platoon speculate that Trombley might have been provoked into shooting the shepherds after hearing gunfire from Captain America’s vehicle. The fact is, Trombley denies Captain America’s AK fire had anything to do with his actions. Nevertheless, the morning after the incident, Marines in Third Platoon witnessed a remarkable confrontation between Kocher and Captain America. In the belief that his commander’s antics were beginning to jeopardize the safety of the men, Kocher took it upon himself to lay down the law. He backed Captain America against the side of his Humvee and told him: “If you ever fire an AK from this truck again, I will fuck you up.” Captain America denied shooting his AK. He blamed the reckless gunfire on Crosby, riding in the back of his truck.

  Now a day later at the encampment, Crosby accosts Captain America in front of several other Marines. Crosby, not the biggest Marine in the platoon, steps up to Captain America and tells him he is asking for a “request mast.” Request mast is a formal process in which Marines, when accused of committing a serious infraction, may ask permission to appear before the commanding general and defend themselves.

  Captain America shoots Crosby an amiable smile. “On what grounds are you requesting mast?” he asks.

  “Sir, you’re telling other people I was firing an AK out of the back of the truck,” Crosby says.

  Captain America tries to calm him. “We’re under a lot of stress right now. No one’s getting any sleep.”

  “I’m not getting sleep,” Crosby says. “You’re the one who’s sleeping. You’re going around saying I’m a shitbag. I’ve never fired an AK.”

  Captain America stares at him, apparently speechless.

  “I’m not the one shooting AKs out of the vehicle,” Crosby persists. “You are.”

  Captain America walks off, having just, in his men’s opinion, “bowed down” to a lance corporal. In this moment he loses whatever remaining authority he had. As Crosby says later, “I’m only a lance corporal. In the Marine Corps, the captain is God. But in this platoon, we’ve taken over. Now, when the captain tells me to do something, I ask Kocher if I should do it, and he says, ‘Fuck no.’ Because out here, the captain hasn’t given one order that’s made sense.”

  SENSING THE GROWING RANCOR within the battalion, Ferrando calls his officers in for a meeting e
arly in the afternoon on their second day by the airfield. About thirty of them gather by a blown-up mud hut. “The men are bitching too much,” he tells his officers. In Ferrando’s opinion, his Marines’ bitching about the Grooming Standard, the loss of the battalion colors and questionable decisions he and others have made is the fault of his officers, who, he says, have poor attitudes. “I’m starting to hear some of you questioning and bitching just like the troops,” Ferrando lectures. That is a fucking no-go. Attitude is contagious. It breeds like a fucking yeast infection.”

  Ferrando’s assessment of how the invasion is going is grim. “Saddam is winning the strategic battle,” he tells his men, citing negative publicity American forces have received for killing civilians. “Major General Mattis has expressed a concern to me that division-wide, we’re shooting more civilians than we should.”

  Later, when I talk to Mattis about the invasion, he insists that the resistance the Marines met in cities and villages in central Iraq “was not much of a surprise.” Ferrando’s comments to his men on this day are at variance with Mattis’s assertions. He tells them, “The resistance in the urban areas has been stiffer than we expected. It’s caught us by surprise. We expected the resistance to be regular military, but it’s paramilitary. We’ve got to make sure we don’t let this get the best of us.”

  After dismissing his officers, Ferrando calls in Colbert and other senior enlisted men for a briefing intended to quell discontent. “The civilian engagement,” he says, referring to the shooting of the two shepherds, “was largely reflective of the ROE guidance I gave as we pushed to the airstrip—the order that everyone is declared hostile.”

  He explains, “I pushed the ROE because we had reports of enemy tanks and armored personnel carriers on the airstrip. It was a military target. I had seen no civilians. It was five in the fucking morning. The general told me to get on the field. I knew that slapping everyone together and moving onto the airfield in twenty minutes was reckless, but that was my order. It was the most rash fucking thing I’ve done. Borderline foolish. But I can’t tell the general we don’t do windows.”

  He then tries to dispel the resentment some men feel for his initial order to not medevac the wounded boy. “If that casualty had been you, I would not have medevaced you because I still thought we had armor to the south.” He expounds his interpretation of the rules of war. “Some of you seem to think we have to give wounded civilians every consideration we give ourselves. That is not true. The ROE say we have to give them the same medical care they would get by themselves. That is zero.”

  Ferrando makes a play for his men’s support. “We are going to get tasked to do things that suck,” he says. “You have to have faith in me. You may not like me. That’s okay. But you have to understand that my number-one priority is protection of our forces.” He concedes, “We’ve done a few things that could have been catastrophic, but we made it through. The bottom line is, we volunteered to fight.”

  As they walk back to their positions on the perimeter, one of the men says, “Yeah, we volunteered to be here, but we didn’t volunteer to be treated like idiots. His story always changes. ‘Protection of forces’ my fucking ass. He sent us onto an airfield where he thought there were fucking tanks. Why did we make that pell-mell fucking rush? So a colonel could score a few extra brownie points with his general.”

  NINETEEN

  °

  IT’S ANOTHER BITTERLY COLD MORNING on March 30, and the men have again been up all night. The Marines in Bravo Company spent their final hours at the airfield camp in their Humvees, crashing around in the darkness, trying to execute orders that changed every forty-five minutes or so until dawn. At around midnight, they were told enemy forces had gotten a fix on their positions and they needed to move to new ones in order to avoid mortar or artillery strikes. They kept moving a few hundred meters this way and that until four in the morning, when Fick announced, “For First Recon, the operational pause is over. We have warning orders for a new mission.”

  But even with Fick’s promise that clarity of purpose was on its way, the company kept up its hectic maneuvers until dawn. Now everyone is sitting out by some berms, watching a beautiful rose-tinted sunrise. Lovell is freezing after having fallen into a canal while retrieving a claymore mine during the frantic night moves. Reyes, who has just spent half an hour cutting concertina wire out of his Humvee’s undercarriage—after having driven through it while circling the camp in the darkness—says, “We’re Pavlov’s dogs. They condition us through rules, through repeatedly doing things that have no purpose.” He laughs. “They probably knew at midnight we would just spend the next five hours driving around aimlessly. They know it just makes us mad and gets us keyed up to do something.”

  He has a point. Despite another night of sleeplessness, spirits are soaring. Most men are elated at the prospect of another mission. It’s like they’ve forgotten the horrors of Nasiriyah and Al Gharraf, twisted Amtracs with dead Marines in them, mangled civilians on the highway. Three days of stewing in the camp, being chewed out by the Coward of Khafji for not having proper haircuts, has made them eager to get back on the road. In their minds, at least when they’re in the field, getting shot at and bombed, they don’t have to deal with retards in the rear.

  Fick now adds to their élan with good news. He tells his team leaders, “It looks like we are going to be doing interdiction and ambushes along Route 17, west of 7.”

  Instead of driving blind into enemy positions, the Recon Marines will be turning the tables. They will be setting up their own ambushes on enemy fighters. Even Pappy, among the most reserved of the men, is guardedly optimistic. “Finally, it looks like we’re going to be doing to them as they do to us.”

  “I feel like it’s Christmas morning and I’m about to open my presents,” Trombley says.

  Fick treats the Marines to a special breakfast. He distributes two meal packs of humrats to each team, for the men to divide among themselves.

  While eating hot lentil stew and rice, Espera ponders American culture. “Dog, before we came over here I watched Pocahontas with my eight-year-old daughter. Disney has taken my heritage as an American Indian and fucked it up with this typical American white-boy formula.”

  “Pocahontas. Wonderful children’s cartoon,” Colbert says. “I like the music.”

  “Dog, Pocahontas is another case of your people shitting on mine. What’s the true story of Pocahontas? White boys come to the new land, deceive a corrupt Indian chief, kill ninety percent of the men and rape all the women. What does Disney do? They make this tragedy, the genocide of my people, into a love story with a singing raccoon. I ask you, would the white man make a love story about Auschwitz where a skinny-ass inmate falls in love with a guard, with a singing raccoon and dancing swastikas? Dog, I was ashamed for my daughter to see this.”

  Trombley slides in next to Espera. “You know, my great-great-great-grandfather was a mercenary up in Michigan who had a militia where they’d kill Indians for hire. He was really good at it.”

  “You know, Trombley,” Espera says, “in the fishing village I’m from, Los Angeles, if I mention that I’m part Indian, most white motherfuckers will bring up some great-great-great-grandparent who was part Indian because they want to let me know that even though they look like white motherfuckers, they’re actually down with my people. You are the first white motherfucker I’ve ever met who’s said that.”

  “Just what race are you, Poke?” Colbert asks, referring to Espera by the nickname only his friends use. “I mean, are you Latino, Indian or white? Or are you just whatever race happens to be cool at the time?”

  “Shut up, white boy, and go eat a baloney sandwich,” Espera says.

  “No, I mean it,” Colbert continues. “Your wife is half white. I’ve met your friends from L.A. They’re all white.”

  “Bro, you’ve got a point,” Espera says. “I’m afraid to hang out with my Mexican friends at home. I’m afraid if we go to the liquor store together they’l
l stick it up. My Mexican friends are shady motherfuckers. No job, twenty-thousand-dollar entertainment system at home, more guns than a fucking armory. The only Mexicans I hang out with are in the Marine Corps.”

  Breakfast ends with Fick’s order to get in the Humvees and link up with RCT-1 in preparation for the new mission. “Finally, we get to fuck shit up again,” Person exults as we leave the road by the airfield. Colbert, however, gazes morosely out the window at Marines rolling up the road in Amtracs. They will be stationed here as guards. “That would be sweet,” Colbert says. “Guarding an airfield for three weeks.”

  FICK HAS SOME BAD NEWS when the Marines reach RCT-1 at a muddy, bomb-cratered camp at the junction of Routes 7 and 17. “Our original warning order seems to be changing,” he tells his team leaders. “Instead of staging ambushes on enemy positions along Route 17, we will bust north adjacent to Route 7 and do a movement to contact.”

  “Movement to contact” is another way of saying they will again be driving into suspected enemy positions in order to see if anybody will shoot at them. Once again they will be following the Gharraf canal on a backcountry trail. “One thing I’ve learned,” Fick tells me. “Is if we do anything involving something named ‘Gharraf,’ it’s not good.”

  Encino Man holds a company formation in an attempt to bring out the moto in his men. They stand in a sloping field at parade rest, hands clasped behind their backs, each young man looking ahead with a hard, Marine-Corps-correct thousand-yard stare. “We all know what happened to the chow,” Encino Man says, bringing up the supply truck destroyed by Iraqis. “This wasn’t our bad planning.” He tries to muster a fierce expression, but despite his apelike features, Encino Man’s face doesn’t project anger well. It remains about as placid as an oatmeal cookie as he mumbles through his attempt at a rousing speech. “They did this. The Iraqis took your food. I hope this makes you mad at the enemy. You should be really mad at them. Okay?”