Mattis did not reveal his radical plans for First Recon to its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Ferrando, until November 2002, a couple of months before the battalion deployed to the Middle East.

~

Mattis apparently had such faith in their skills that the Marines in First Recon were kept in the dark as to the nature of their mission in Iraq. Their commanders never told them they would be leading the way through much of the invasion, serving more or less as guinea pigs in the military’s experiment with maneuver warfare.

Of the thousands of troops in the camp, the Recon Marines are easy to spot. Unlike infantry jarheads who work out in olive-drab shirts and shorts, Recon Marines appear on the gravel running track in all-black physical-training uniforms, a distinctive look augmented with black watch caps they don two hours before sunset. All day long, despite the shamal winds and choking dust, you see them practicing martial arts in the sand, or running on the gravel track, wearing combat boots, loaded down with weapons and packs weighing more than 100 pounds. Whenever a Recon Marine runs
past on the track, carrying a particularly crushing load, his buddies pump their fists in the air and scream “Get some!”

Recon Marines take pride in enduring the hostile conditions. One of the first guys I meet in the battalion brags, “We’re like America’s little pit-bull. They beat it, starve it, mistreat it, and once in a while they let it out to attack somebody.”

~

The 374 Marines in First Recon Battalion are spread among four companies—Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and an auxiliary Headquarters and Support company. Alpha, Bravo and Charlie are the frontline combat companies containing the battalion’s 160 actual Recon Marines. The rest of the battalion’s personnel fill support positions.

Platoons are the basic building block of each company.There are twenty one enlisted Marines in each platoon, as well as a commander and a medical corpsman (who is an enlisted man provided by the Navy). Enlisted Marines—that is, those who are not officers—function within a complex web of hierarchy. Privates answer to corporals, and corporals to sergeants. Above sergeants there are staff sergeants, gunnery sergeants, first sergeants, master gunnery sergeants and sergeant majors.Above them all are officers.

Bravo

The top dogs in the platoon are the team leaders. You can immediately pick out these guys just by the way they move among the men. They have a swagger, a magnetism that pulls the other guys to them like rock stars. In this tent (Bravo 2 + Bravo 3) the three most revered are Sergeants Kocher, Patrick and Colbert. The three of them served on a Recon team together in Afghanistan under the leadership of Colbert.

Sergeants Eric Kocher and Larry Shawn Patrick are the more obvious alphas of the pack. Kocher is thickly muscled and aspires to become a professional bodybuilder. Though technically he’s part of Bravo Third Platoon, he spends much of his time in Second Platoon’s section. He tells dirty stories that make everyone howl, but he has the kind of eyes that never seem to smile, even when the rest of his face is laughing. Though he is twenty three, he projects such focused intensity he seems at least a decade older.

Patrick, a twenty-eight-year-old from a small mountain town in North Carolina, speaks with a mild Southern accent and has the gentle manners that go with it.With brown hair and blue eyes that have faint lines at the corners that crinkle when he smiles, he has a kindly, almost hangdog appearance. His fellow Marines call him “Pappy,” and behind his back they speak of him in the most reverential terms.“You’d never think it to look at him,” a Marine tells me, “but Pappy is straight up the coldest killer in the platoon. If you saw him on the street back in the civilian world, you’d just think he’s the most average Joe out there. That’s why he’s so dangerous.”

First Lieutenant Nathaniel Fick

The initial reason I strike up an acquaintance with Lt. Fick, commander of the platoon I end up spending the war with, is he’s easily recognizable. Though he’s twenty-five, he has a loping, adolescent stride you can spot from a hundred meters away. He’s one of fifty men who introduce themselves to me during my first twenty-four hours at the camp, but he’s the only one I’m able to call by name on my way to the mess tent and ask if I can join him for dinner.

~

The son of a successful Baltimore attorney father and a social-worker mother, Fick admits, “My family had a Leave It to Beaver quality.” He entered Dartmouth intending to study pre-med, but in his sophomore year he was inspired to consider the military when he took a class conducted by a charismatic former Special Forces soldier who’d served in Vietnam. Fick ended up double-majoring in political science and classics, then attended the Marine Corps’ Officer Candidates School. Two years after graduating in 1999, he found himself a Marine second lieutenant on a landing craft delivering humanitarian supplies to war-torn East Timor.
A few weeks after 9/11, he led an infantry platoon on a clandestine helicopter mission into Pakistan to retrieve a Black Hawk downed by the Afghan border. After that, Fick and his men were among the first Marines to seize the ground in southern Afghanistan at Camp Rhino.
He says, “We had a saying about the military in Afghanistan: ‘The incompetent leading the unwilling to do the unnecessary.’ ”
Fick finished at the top of his class in Officer Candidates School and near the top of the Marine Corps’ tough Basic Reconnaissance Course. He is also something of a closet idealist. His motivation
for joining the Marines is a belief about which he is quietly passionate. “At Dartmouth, there was a sense that an ROTC program, which the school did not have, would militarize the campus,” he explains. “They have it backward. ROTC programs at Ivy League campuses would liberalize the military. That can only be good for this country.”

~

Fick believes in the men he commands. “I have the best platoon,” he says repeatedly. Away from his men, Fick cannot talk about them without smiling.

Sergeant Brad Colbert

Colbert, the platoon’s top team leader, is in charge of Team One. The year before, he was awarded a Navy Commendation for helping to take out an enemy missile battery in Afghanistan.

~

His politeness is so exacting it almost makes him come off like a prick. Everything about him is neat, orderly and crisp, in keeping with his Iceman nickname. There is about him an air of Victorian rectitude. He grew up in an ultramodern 1970s house designed by his father, an architect. Colbert is a walking encyclopedia of radio frequencies and encryption protocols, and can tell you the exact details of just about any weapon in the U.S. or Iraqi arsenal. He once nearly purchased a surplus British tank, even arranged a loan through his credit union, but backed out only when he realized that just parking it might run afoul of zoning laws in his home state, the “Communist Republic of California.”

Beneath his formal manners, there is another side to Colbert’s personality. His back is tattooed in a garish wash of color depicting a Louis Royo illustration of a warrior princess babe from Heavy Metal magazine. He pays nearly $5,000 a year in auto-motorcycle insurance due to outrageous speeding tickets. He routinely drives his Yamaha R1 racing bike at 150 miles per hour on southern California’s freeways, and his previous racing bike was rigged with model rocket engines by the exhaust pipe to shoot flames when he wanted to “scare the bejesus out of commuters.” He admits
to a deep-rooted but controlled rebellious streak that was responsible for his parents sending him to military academy when he was in high school. His life, he says, is driven by a simple philosophy: “You don’t want to ever show fear or back down, because you don’t want to be embarrassed in front of the pack.”

He holds sway over the other men not through physical power or personal magnetism but through sheer force of skill, determination and a barely concealed sense of superiority. During mountain warfare training, he’s legendary for having ascended the final thousand meters of Mt. Shasta on a broken ankle, carrying 150 pounds of gear. Where other Marines speak of the special bonds of kinship between them, the mystical brotherhood formed in the crucible of shared hardship, Colbert shuns the crowd.

He spends as much time as he can alone in his corner of the tent, engrossed in a military laptop, studying invasion maps and satellite imagery. While his brother Marines cavort and laugh around him, Colbert says, “I would never socialize with any of these people if we weren’t in the Marines.”

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.”

Nate about Brad

“The men naturally look up to someone like Colbert,” Fick says. “He’s been in the reconnaissance community for years. If you walk in here as an officer and start throwing your weight around based on rank alone, enlisted men will look at you like you’ve got a dick growing out of your forehead. You have to earn their respect.”

Corporal Josh Ray Person

Person, the aspiring rock star who serves as the driver and radio operator for Colbert’s team, is among those whose feelings about the Corps seem almost conflicted. From Nevada, Missouri, a small town where “NASCAR is sort of like a state religion,” he was proudly raised working poor by his mother.“We lived in a trailer for a few years on my grandpa’s farm, and I’d get one pair of shoes a year from Wal-Mart.” Person was a pudgy kid in high school, didn’t play sports, was on the debate team and played any musical instrument—from guitar to saxophone to piano—he could get his hands on.

Becoming a Marine was a 180-degree turn for him. “I’d planned to go to Vanderbilt on a scholarship and study philosophy,” he says. “But I had an epiphany one day. I wanted to do my life for a while, rather than think it.” He’s a veteran of Afghanistan and professes absolute support of this war. Yet it often seems as if the driving force behind this formerly pudgy, nonathletic kid’s decision to enter the Corps and join one of its most elite, macho units was to mock it and everything around him.

Navy Hospitalman Second Class Robert Timothy 'Doc' Bryan

Doc Bryan, I later find out, is always pissed off at something, if not the presence of a reporter, then incompetent military leaders or the barbarity of war. He’s a self-made man, son of a steamfitter from a small town outside of Philadelphia, the first in his family to attend college. He attended Lock Haven University, then the University of Pennsylvania on a football scholarship while he earned a
master’s in education. In his younger days, Doc Bryan had a lot of ambient rage he used to burn off in weekend bar fights. “I’m always angry,” he later tells me. “I was born that way. I’m an asshole.”

Gunnery Sergeant Mike Wynn

Gunny Wynn serves as Fick’s loyal executive. He is thirty-five, making him the oldest man in the platoon. He’s also among the more experienced men in the platoon. In Somalia he headed a sniper team and scored numerous confirmed kills, a fact that alone gives him instant macho credibility with his Marines. He has a lean coyote’s physique and speaks with a rangy Texas accent.

Gunny Wynn describes himself as a “staunch conservative” who’s never smoked marijuana. With his chiseled face and Texas accent, he fits the image, yet he likes to point out, “I’m not one of those guys driving around waving Texas flags. It’s just the place I’m from.” He almost never barks at the men the way platoon sergeants do in movies. His conservatism boils down to a rigid adherence to his own personal code. “The most important part of my job,” he tells me, “is to care about my men.” His leadership philosophy is based on “building confidence in my men by respecting them.”
He and Fick function not so much like autocrats but like parents. At times, Gunny Wynn almost seems like a worried den mother, whose role is to soften the more aggressive messages Fick gives the men.

Corporal Gabriel Garza

In the platoon, Garza, twenty-two, is something of a cipher. He wears Coke bottle–lens glasses and a blue bandanna around his neck, which his grandmother, who raised him, gave him for good luck. She is an aloe picker in south Texas, and Garza always grins when he mentions her. “She used to beat me with a two-by-four when I was bad,” he says. “That’s ’cause she cares about me.” Garza has a round head and is not particularly tall or imposing, yet he is one of the strongest Marines in the platoon. According to his buddies, he can bench-press ten repetitions of 300-pound free weights. He works out constantly. Every night at Mathilda he would follow his dinner with a glass of salt water and lemon wedges, or oranges rolled in salt. When I asked him what the point of his unusual diet was, he said, “It makes you tougher.” He seldom talks, but frequently, while sitting alone, will suddenly begin shaking with quiet laughter, the only sound a whistling from his nose. Everyone in the platoon likes him. They call him the “Zen Master.” But when they compliment him on his physical power, he just shrugs and says, “It’s nothing. I’ve got retard strength.”

Sergeant Rodolfo Reyes

The most flamboyant figure in Second Platoon is Reyes, the Marine on Team Two who on my first night in their tent talked about the romantic idealism of being in the Corps. This afternoon he sits beneath his team’s cammie netting, cleaning his rifle, dressed in an outrageous camouflage overcoat his fellow Marines call his “Chicken Suit.” Tufts of multicolored fabric hang off the arms and shoulders like feathers. He wears a similarly peacockish cover on his helmet, the ensemble complemented with heavy duty orange goggles that somehow manage to look stylish. They call them his “J.Lo glasses.”

Reyes has the insanely muscular body of a fantasy Hollywood action hero. Before joining the Marines, he lived in a dojo, competed nationally in kung fu and tai chi tournaments, and fought in exhibitions with the Chinese national team. He is the battalion’s best martial artist, one of its strongest men, and seemingly one of the gayest. Though he is not gay in the sense of sexual orientation—Reyes, after all, is married—he is at least a highly evolved tough guy in touch with a well-developed feminine side. With his imposing build, dark, Mexican-American features and yet skin so
pale it’s almost porcelain, he is a striking figure. His fellow Marines call him “Fruity Rudy,” because he is so beautiful. “It doesn’t mean you’re gay if you think Rudy’s hot. He’s just so beautiful,” Person explains. “We all think he’s hot.”

While the other Marines spent their free time at Mathilda poring over porn and gun magazines, Reyes read self-affirming articles in Oprah’s magazine, waxed his legs and chest and conducted afternoon yoga classes. His father was a Marine, but when he was three the family split apart due to drug problems. According to Reyes, a close relative of his who was a drug-addicted cop used to bust prostitutes and bring them home to babysit him and his brother. Reyes wound up in boys’ homes in Kansas City. “Those boys’ homes were gladiator academies,” Reyes says. “Darwin was
living and breathing strong. I was twelve years old and seventy pounds. I had older men making sexual advances on me. I was preyed upon by bigger, stronger people. I was always the new guy in a shitty neighborhood in a shitty school. I was inspired by Spider-Man, Speed Racer and Bruce Lee. I decided to become a warrior.”

Reyes adds, “I have very low self-esteem. I need to empower myself daily through physical training and spirituality. I identify with redemption stories like The Color Purple. I love the journey of a woman from weak and less-than to someone who is fully realized.”

Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Ferrando

Ferrando is forty-two, thin, with a narrow head and eyes slightly close together. But the thing you notice about him is his voice—a dry, whispered rasp. Seven years ago his vocal cords were removed after a bout with throat cancer. Because of his distinctive voice, his call sign is “Godfather.” Even standing fifteen meters back from him in the open desert with wind whipping through your ears, Ferrando’s croaking whisper carries. It’s kind of creepy. It sounds like someone with his lips pressed to your ear speaking directly into it.

Since assuming command of the battalion about eighteen months earlier, Ferrando has shown a relentless obsession with what he calls the “Grooming Standard”—his insistence that even in the field his troops maintain regulation haircuts, proper shaves and meticulously neat uniforms. In traditional deployments, such as Colbert’s tour in the Afghan War, Recon teams go into the field without their commanders. Ferrando and others at the top stay behind at Camp Pendleton. Usually the highest-ranking authority in the field during a Recon mission is the team leader. Some of the tension in the battalion that Fick alluded to when I first met him at Camp Mathilda stems from the fact that due to Maj. Gen. Mattis’s unorthodox plan to employ First Recon in Iraq as a unified, mobile fighting force, Ferrando and other senior commanders are now for the first time accompanying Recon Marines into the field. This stress is compounded by Ferrando’s singular obsession with maintaining the Grooming Standard.

Fick says, “I respect Lieutenant Colonel Ferrando, but for some reason he’s been unable to inspire trust in the men.”

In traditional deployments, such as Colbert’s tour in the Afghan War, Recon teams go into the field without their commanders. Ferrando and others at the top stay behind at Camp Pendleton. Usually the highest-ranking authority in the field during a Recon mission is the team leader.

Some of the tension in the battalion that Fick alluded to when I first met him at Camp Mathilda stems from the fact that due to Maj. Gen. Mattis’s unorthodox plan to employ First Recon in Iraq as a unified, mobile fighting force, Ferrando and other senior commanders are now for the first time accompanying Recon Marines into the field. This stress is compounded by Ferrando’s singular obsession with maintaining the Grooming Standard.

Humvee

Despite the imposing size Humvees appear to have when you see civilian versions on the streets, there’s barely any room inside Colbert’s. Everyone is bulked up with their helmets, vests, MOPP suits and rubber boots. The vehicle is crammed with boxes of military food rations, several fivegallon cans of water, extra diesel fuel, more than 300 grenades, a few thousand rounds of rifle and machine-gun ammunition, special smoke and thermite incendiary grenades, several pounds of C-4 plastic explosive, claymore
mines, a bale of concertina wire, cammie nets, a spare tire, extra parts, fluids and filters for the engine, a tool set, bolt cutters, map books, bags of ropes, a fire extinguisher, five rucksacks of personal gear, chemlites, several hundred extra batteries for the portable radios, shovels, a pickax, a sledgehammer and, suspended by parachute cord from the rear interior roof, an AT-4 antitank missile, which continually bangs against the back of my helmet.

Ray

Person is something of a genius when it comes to radios. The reason he’s on Colbert’s team is that despite his constant mockery of everything, Colbert considers him one of the most competent Marines in the platoon. He has voluminous knowledge of encryption protocols and a sixth sense for how to hot-wire bum radios, often by unplugging all the cables and licking the sockets, all while driving in the darkness. Teams in other platoons whose radio operators aren’t as skilled sometimes resort to leaning out their doors and shouting.

Person, like many other Marines in First Recon, has practiced driving a Humvee at night with NVGs only a few times. Nor does he have a military operating license for a Humvee.

~

Person discusses the band he formed after high school, Me or Society. A heavy-metal rap group, his band once opened for Limp Bizkit at a show in Kansas City.“We sucked, but so did they,” Person says. “The only difference is, they became famous right after we played together. I became a Marine.”

Lance Corporal Harold James Trombley

Trombley, who at nineteen is the youngest member of the team, is a thin, dark-haired and slightly pale kid from Farwell, Michigan. He speaks in a soft yet deeply resonant voice that doesn’t quite fit his boyish face. One of his eyes is bright red from an infection caused by the continual dust storms. He has spent the past couple of days trying to hide it so he doesn’t get pulled from the team. Technically, he is a “paper Recon Marine” because he has not yet completed the Basic Reconnaissance Course. He also hasn’t quite yet gelled with the rest of the platoon. In bull sessions they subtly ignore him, talking over and around him when he’s sitting among them. He accepts it silently, without backing down, studying his fellow Marines intently with his furtive, inflamed eye.

But it’s not just his youth and inexperience that keep Trombley on the outside, it’s also his relative immaturity—caressing his weapon and talking to it, wearing his ammo belts around his neck. Other Marines make fun of him for his B-movie antics. They’re also suspicious of his tall tales. He claims, for example, that his father was a CIA operative, that most of the men in the Trombley family died mysterious, violent deaths, the details of which are vague and always shifting with each telling. He looks forward to combat as “one of those fantasy things you always hoped would really happen.” In December, a month before his deployment,Trombley got married. (His bride’s father, he says, couldn’t attend the wedding, because he died in a “gunfire incident” a while before.) He spends his idle moments writing down lists of possible names for the sons he hopes to have when he gets home. “It’s up to me to carry on the Trombley name,” he says.

Despite other Marines’ reservations about Trombley, Colbert feels he has the potential to be a good Marine. Colbert is always instructing him — teaching him how to use different communications equipment, how best to keep his gun clean.Trombley is an attentive pupil, almost a teacher’s pet at times, and goes out of his way to quietly perform little favors for the entire team, like refilling everyone’s canteens each day.

Captain Craig Schwetje

But the men in Bravo are further delayed when their company commander takes a wrong turn in the darkness. The commander who makes this error is a man the men call “Encino Man,” after the movie of the same title about a hapless caveman who thaws out and comes to life in modern-day Southern California. The men nicknamed this officer Encino Man not only because of his Neanderthal features but also because of his perpetual air of tongue-tied befuddlement. A former college football star now in his early thirties, Encino Man is reputed to have a hard time articulating the simplest of orders. Encino Man’s thickly browed face often bears a pleasant smile, which makes him well enough liked by the men. But they don’t altogether trust him as a commander (he serves as Fick’s immediate superior), because he seems to be, in their eyes, something of a dimwit. Encino Man is one of those senior officers who never would have deployed on a traditional Recon mission. Prior to taking command of Bravo Company, he was an intelligence analyst.

Although the Corps rates him as a fit commander and he has an admirable service record, fellow officers have expressed their alarm to me over Encino Man’s seeming inability to understand the basics, like reading a map.

Brad & Ray

At times, the two of them bicker like an old married couple. Being a rank lower than Colbert, Person can never directly express anger to him, but on occasions when Colbert is too harsh and Person’s feelings are hurt, his driving becomes erratic. There are sudden turns, and the brakes are hit for no reason. It will happen even in combat situations, with Colbert suddenly in the role of wooing his driver back with retractions and apologies.

Sergeant Steven Lovell

Sergeant Steven Lovell, one of Colbert’s fellow team leaders in the platoon, walks over to consult with him. Lovell, a twenty-six-year-old who grew up on a dairy farm outside Williamsport, Pennsylvania, has a bowlegged farmer’s gait and a sly, rural wit. Before joining the Corps he attended college to study chemical engineering, but found he didn’t like being around the “eggheads” on campus.

Captain Dave McGraw

On what is only their second day in Iraq, the Marines in Bravo Company’s Third Platoon have concluded that their platoon commander has lost his mind. The men in Bravo’s Second and Third platoons are extremely close. Not only did they share the same tent in Kuwait, but here in the field the two platoons are usually right next to each other. Unlike the men in Second Platoon who universally respect, if not adore their commander, Lt. Fick, the men in Third Platoon view their platoon commander as a buffoon. While he is a highly rated Marine Corps officer, with stellar fitness reports and no signs in his record that he is mentally unstable or incompetent, some of his men have mockingly nicknamed him “Captain America.”

When you first meet Captain America, he’s a likable enough guy. At Camp Mathilda, when he still had a mustache, he bore an uncanny resemblance to Matt Dillon’s roguishly charming con-artist character in There’s Something About Mary. Captain America is thirty-one years old, married, and has a somewhat colorful past of having worked as a bodyguard for rock stars when he was in college. If he corners you, he’ll talk your ear off about all the wild times he had doing security for bands like U2, Depeche Mode and Duran Duran. His men feel he uses these stories as a pathetic attempt to impress them, and besides, half of them have never heard of Duran Duran.

Twenty-four hours ago, when the invasion started, Captain America revealed another side of himself, which further eroded his standing among his men. He’s prone to hysterics. Before crossing the border, he ran up to his men’s Humvees parked in the staging area and began shouting,“We’re in the shit now! It’s war!” All morning since the Iraqi army deserters first appeared by the railroad tracks, Captain America has been getting on the radio, shouting, “Enemy! Enemy! Enemy!”

While it’s perfectly fine for officers to shout dramatically in movies, in the Marines it’s frowned upon. As First Recon’s commander, Lt. Col. Ferrando, will later say in an apparent reference to Captain America, “An officer’s job is to throw water on a fire, not gasoline.”

One of Captain America’s team leaders, twenty-three-year-old Sergeant John Moreno, says, “Something twisted in him the night we crossed into Iraq. He gets on the radio and starts shouting about how we’re going to take on Iraqi tanks.We didn’t see any tanks. It’s like he just wants to exaggerate everything so he’s a bigger hero. It’s embarrassing for us.”

While rolling up to the train tracks yesterday, Captain America provoked Colbert’s wrath for leading his men on a treasure hunt for discarded Iraqi helmets.“We’re in an area suspected to have mines, and the most obvious thing to booby-trap is a helmet lying on the ground,” Colbert fumed. “It’s completely unprofessional.”

Now, while the Marines search and interrogate the surrendered Iraqis, Captain America draws the ire of his top team leader, Kocher. The sergeant and his men are guarding several Iraqis not far from Colbert’s team when a wild dog pops over a berm, barking and snarling. Behind them, Captain America races up, shouting, “Wild dog! Shoot it!” Kocher quietly tells his men, “Don’t shoot.” Instead, they open up a beef-and-mushroom MRE dinner and lure the dog, who gratefully eats and is soon allowing the Marines to pet him. It’s a small act, but by making it, Kocher directly contradicts his commander. “I don’t care who he is,” says Kocher. “The guy turns the smallest situation into chaos.We’re surrounded by Iraqis, some with weapons nearby. Some we haven’t grabbed yet. If my men start lighting up a dog, the Iraqis might panic, other Marines might open fire. Anything could happen.”

Before First Recon’s campaign is over, Captain America will lose control of his platoon when he is temporarily relieved of command. Already, some of his men are beginning to fantasize about his death. “All it takes is one dumb guy in charge to ruin everything,” says one of them. “Every time he steps out of the vehicle, I pray he gets shot.”

Gunnery Sergeant Ray Griego

In the layers of incompetence Recon Marines feel they labor under in the battalion, this company ops chief is nearly at the top with Captain America and Encino Man. They call him “Casey Kasem,” because of his warm, gravelly voice, which over the radios sounds like that of the old rock DJ. In his late thirties, lean and dark-haired, Casey Kasem usually rides with Encino Man. Casey Kasem’s job is to ensure that the Marines have enough supplies—fuel, water and batteries for their night optics. Like Encino Man, he’s one of those rear-echelon men in a support position, who ordinarily wouldn’t have deployed with the Recon Marines.

One of the things that burn everyone up about Casey Kasem is the fact that he failed to bring enough batteries or adequate rechargers to operate the platoon’s only PAS-13 thermal-imaging device. Unlike their NVGs, which amplify existing light, the PAS-13 uses heat and can see through dust and foliage. The PAS-13 gives the platoon a critical advantage and means of survival in night operations, but largely because of a supply snafu they blame on Casey Kasem, the platoon only has enough batteries to operate the PAS-13 for a couple of hours each night.Within a few days, when they are at the height of their operations in ambush country, the men will sometimes go whole nights without any batteries at all for their PAS-13, and in at least one instance, this deficiency will nearly kill them.

Adding insult to injury, while Casey Kasem apparently failed to bring enough batteries for the Marines’ critical night-fighting gear, he did have the presence of mind to bring along a personal video camera. He is constantly sticking it in everyone’s face as part of his effort to make a war documentary that he hopes to sell after the invasion. “He’s just another king-size jackass making life more dangerous for us,” Doc Bryan says.

Doc Bryan

Doc Bryan is not technically a Marine, he is a product of the Navy’s most elite special-warfare training and could have chosen to have been placed with either Navy SEALs or a Marine Recon unit. Doc Bryan, who arguably has better combat training than many Recon Marines, is supremely confident of his judgment.

Sergeant Antonio Espera

With his shaved head and deep-set eyes, Espera is one of the scariestlooking Marines in the platoon.Technically, he serves as Colbert’s assistant team leader, though in actuality he commands a separate Humvee. Espera’s crew of four Marines always rolls directly behind or beside Colbert’s, and he is one of Colbert’s closest friends in the platoon. The two men could hardly be more opposite. Espera, thirty, grew up in Riverside, California, and was, by his own account, truly a “bad motherfucker”—participating in all the violent pastimes available to a young Latino from a broken home and raised partially in state facilities. He was serving in an infantry platoon when he and Colbert met a few years earlier. Somehow they struck up a friendship, which on the face of it is odd. Colbert, with his Nordic features and upper-middle-class background, is also among those who frequently engage in routine racial humor, referring to the Spanish language as “dirty spic talk.” Espera, who’s part Native American, part Mexican and a quarter German, frequently rails about the dominance of America’s “white masters” and the genocide of his Indian ancestors. But describing his friendship with Colbert, Espera says, “Inside we’re both the same: violent warriors. Only he fights with his mind, and I fight with my strength.” For his part, Colbert says that when he met Espera he was impressed by his “maturity, dedication and toughness.” Even though Espera is not yet a Recon Marine, Colbert pulled strings to bring him into the elite battalion to serve as his assistant team leader.

Fick and platoon TLs

After his briefing, Fick does what he often does in a difficult situation: He turns to Colbert for advice. When I first met Fick and heard him extol the intelligence and character of his men, I had wondered if this was just lip service. But I’ve found in the past few days of the invasion that whenever there’s a problem—a life-and-death one, such as this mission—Fick always turns to his men for guidance.

Unfortunately, the commander of RCT-1, Colonel Joe Dowdy, whose forces have been stopped on the highway south of the city, along with First Recon’s, for the past twenty-four hours, has been unable to obtain a clear picture of what’s going on in the city with Task Force Tarawa. It’s another one of those combat situations that’s hard for a civilian, who might think of the U.S. military as an all-seeing, all-powerful, high-tech entity, to comprehend. While Dowdy is only a few kilometers south of the bridge and Task Force Tarawa’s positions, his radios can’t communicate with their radios. Task Force Tarawa, based out of Camp Lejeune in South Carolina, uses different encryption codes from those used by Dowdy’s forces, which came from Camp Pendleton.West Coast Marines can’t communicate with East Coast Marines.

Captain Bryan Patterson

Patterson, thirty-two, is from Indianapolis, Indiana, and is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy.With his medium build and dark hair he tends to keep a tad longer than regulation, he looks not a day over twenty-four.

Until this afternoon Patterson has always wondered how he would react under fire. Though he’s been in the Marines his entire adult life and before joining First Recon he commanded an infantry platoon, he’s never been in combat.

Whatever indefinable qualities make a good commanding officer, Patterson has them. Unlike Encino Man and Captain America in Bravo Company, Patterson’s men speak of him in the highest terms. Patterson hardly fits the image of the swaggering, barrel-chested Marine Corps officer. He is one of the most unassuming characters you could ever meet, almost shy. He admits, “I can’t give gladiatorial speeches to my men.” His reasons for going to the Naval Academy and becoming a Marine couldn’t be more prosaic. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life,” he says. His view of being an officer is devoid of romance. “As company commander, I’m like a midlevel manager at any corporation.”

His views on the war are equally temperate. “There is not a good thing that comes out of war,” he tells me later on. “I’m not going to pretend I’m this great American savior in Iraq. We didn’t come here to liberate. We came to look out for our interests. That we are here is good. But if to liberate them means putting a Starbucks and a McDonald’s on every street corner, is that liberation? But I have to justify this to myself. It’s Saddam’s fault.” Still, he says, “the protestors have a lot of valid points. War sucks.”

The reason his men look up to him is probably very simple. Aside from the fact that he’s calm and articulate, Patterson respects them. His Marines came to the Middle East on a ship, and behind the backs of his men, Patterson often says, “I could have fallen overboard and they would do fine without me.”

Iceman mode

Colbert seems to blossom under extreme duress. He goes into full Iceman mode, becoming extra calm, alert and focused even when everyone’s just standing around waiting for another blast.

Brad

“Never have kids, Corporal,” Colbert lectures. “One kid will cost you three hundred thousand dollars. You should never have gotten married. It’s always a mistake.” Colbert often proclaims the futility of marriage. “Women will always cost you money, but marriage is the most expensive way to go. If you want to pay for it, Trombley, go to Australia. For a hundred bucks, you can order a whore over the phone. Half an hour later, she arrives at your door, fresh and hot, like a pizza.”

Despite his bitter proclamations about women, if you catch Colbert during an unguarded moment, he’ll admit that he once loved a girl who jilted him, a junior-high-school sweetheart whom he dated on and off for ten years and was even engaged to until she left him to marry one of his closest buddies. “And we’re still all friends,” he says, sounding almost mad about it. “They’re one of those couples that likes to takes pictures of themselves doing all the fun things they do and hang them up all over their goddamn house. Sometimes I just go over there and look at the pictures of my ex-fiancée doing all those fun things I used to do with her. It’s nice having friends.”

Major Todd Eckloff

Battalion’s executive officer (XO), Major Todd Eckloff. Thirty-five years old, he grew up in Enumclaw,Washington, about an hour outside Seattle. He decided to become a Marine at the age of five. He says, “My grandmother was big on patriotism and military books and songs.” She helped raise him, and Eckloff grew up singing the Marines’ Hymn the way other kids do nursery rhymes. When he was just a toddler, his grandmother participated in an adopt-a-soldier program, serving dinners for Vietnam vets in their home. Eckloff still remembers the first time he met a Marine. “I was with my grandmother at the South Center Mall, and coming toward us was a Marine in his dress blues. That’s when I knew what I wanted to be. I was a dork about becoming a Marine.” Eckloff adds, “In high school I had a license plate that said ‘First Recon.’”

But since graduating from Virginia Military Institute and joining the Marines more than a decade ago, Eckloff has never had a chance to enjoy combat. He was deployed late to the Gulf War and simply “guarded shit,” then served uneventfully in the Balkans. Finally in his dream unit, First Recon, Eckloff nevertheless has one of the most frustrating billets. “As XO, my job is really to do nothing but take over if the battalion commander is shot.”

Now under fire in the convoy, he at last has his opportunity to taste combat. He rides in a supply truck, but in his mind, as he later tells me, “It’s cool, because I’m able to shoot my weapon out of the window.”

Strategy

Another essential piece of information the Marines in the battalion haven’t been given is that the purpose of driving onto this trail is to draw enemy fire. Today marks their first day of serving as ambush bait in central Iraq. They will spend most of the next ten days moving north, either on Route 7 or on parallel dirt trails, frequently ten to twenty-five kilometers ahead of RCT-1, trying to scare enemy forces into attacking. The rationale makes sense when it’s explained to me by Mattis after the invasion: The small force races up back roads ahead of the big force rolling behind on the main road. The enemy orients their troops and weapons on the small force (not realizing it’s the small one), and the big force hits them where they’re not looking for it. It’s a trick that works best when you’re going up against an army like Iraq’s, which has no air assets and bad communications and will have a tough time figuring out that the small force is just a decoy. I admire the plan when Mattis and others explain it to me. And in a way, I’m glad I didn’t know about it in advance, because it would have been scarier to remain with Second Platoon. Perhaps this is why they didn’t tell the Marines in the platoon about this plan either.