Fick walks a delicate line with his men. A good officer should be eager to take calculated risks. Despite the men’s complaints against Ferrando for ordering them into an ambush at Al Gharraf, the fact is, only one Marine was injured, and the enemy’s plans to halt the Marines’ advance were thwarted. Fick privately admits that there have been times when he’s actually resisted sending his troops on missions because, as he says, “I care a lot about these guys, and I don’t like the idea of sending them into something where somebody isn’t going to come back.” While acting on these sentiments might make him a good person, they perhaps make him a less good officer.Tonight he seems uncharacteristically on edge, as if he’s fighting his tendencies to be overly protective. He admonishes his team leaders, saying, “I’m not hearing the aggressiveness I’d like to.” His voice sounds hollow, like he’s not convinced himself.

“Reconnaissance,” Doc Bryan points out, “is what Recon Marines do.”

Al Muwaffaqiyah

Colbert radios the rest of the platoon, telling them to back the fuck up, while simultaneously peering out his window through his night-vision rifle scope. “There are people in the trees,” he says, no trace of alarm in his voice. He repeats the message over his radio, hunches more tightly over his rifle and begins shooting. His first shot kicks off an explosion of gunfire. There are between five and ten enemy fighters crouched beneath the trees—just five meters from the edge of our Humvee. There are several more across the bridge in bunkers, manning a belt-fed machine gun and other weapons, and still more ambushers on the other side of the road with RPGs. They have the Marines surrounded on three sides, raking the kill zone with rifle and machine-gun fire and RPGs.

Why they did not start shooting first is a mystery. Colbert believes, he later tells me, that they simply didn’t understand the capabilities of American night-vision optics. The Marine rifles have night-vision scopes wedded to laser target designators—a little infrared beam that goes out and lights up the spot where the bullet will hit. Since it’s infrared, the dot can only be seen through a night-vision scope or NVGs. What each Marine sees is not only his own laser dot lighting up a target, but those emitted by his buddies’ weapons as well. The effect is sort of like a one-sided game of laser tag.

Now, in the kill zone, Marines looking through their scopes are seeing the heads and torsos of enemy fighters lit up by two or three laser dots at once, as they pick them off tag-team style, carefully transitioning from target to target. The Marines have to be careful. Their advantage in night optics is precarious. Bunched up as they are together, if they start shooting wildly, they risk killing one another. The other problem is, while the Marines are getting in good shots, their vehicles are so jammed up, no
one’s able to move out.

Fick can feel his truck jolting as enemy rounds rip through the sheet metal sides. Through his window, he sees muzzles spitting flames in the darkness like a bunch of camera flashes going off at once. Then he sees an RPG streak right over the rear hatch of Colbert’s Humvee and explode. He decides to jump out of his vehicle and try to direct the Humvees out of the kill zone. Fick’s own coping mechanism for combat is what he calls the “Dead Man Walking Method.” Instead of reassuring himself, as some do, that he’s invincible or that his fate is in God’s hands (which wouldn’t work for him since he leans toward agnosticism), he operates on the assumption that he’s already a dead man, so getting shot makes no difference. This is the mode he’s in when he hops out of his Humvee, armed only with his 9mm pistol, and strides into the melee. Marines on Humvees shoot past his head while low-enfilade rounds from the enemy machine gun across the bridge skip past his feet. To the Marines seeing him approach, their lieutenant almost appears to be dancing. Fick later says he felt like he was in a shoot-out from The Matrix.

In our vehicle, Colbert seems to have entered a private realm. He fires bursts and, for some inexplicable reason, hums “Sundown,” the depressing 1970s Gordon Lightfoot anthem. His M-4 jams repeatedly, but each time he calmly clears the chamber and resumes firing, while mumbling the chorus: “Sometimes I think it’s a sin/When I feel like I’m winnin’ when I’m losin’ again.”

Meanwhile, Person, frustrated by the traffic jam, opens his door and, with shots crackling all around, shouts,“Would you back the fuck up!” In the heat of battle, his Missouri accent comes out extra hick. He repeats himself and climbs back in, his movements almost lackadaisical.

Two Marines are hit in the first couple of minutes of shooting. Q-tip Stafford is knocked down in the back of Fick’s truck by a piece of shrapnel to his leg. He ties his leg off with a tourniquet, gets back up and continues firing.

Pappy has a bullet rip through his foot and come out the other side, his torn boot gushing blood from both holes. He tourniquets the wound, resumes firing, gets on the radio and says, “Team Two has a man hit.” He speaks of himself in the third person, he says, because he doesn’t want to panic the rest of the platoon. Beside him in the driver’s seat, Reyes, often teased for being the platoon’s pretty boy, narrowly escapes a bullet that shatters the windshield and passes within an inch of his beautiful head. But Reyes feels oddly calm. He later says, “Wearing NVGs blocks your peripheral vision. You feel cocooned in this tunnel. It gives a false feeling of safety.” He concentrates on executing a three-point turn, surrounded by four other Humvees all trying to do the same, each with Marines on top blazing away. But one of Reyes’s tires is shot out. Driving on rims makes the Humvee wobble like a circus clown car. Pappy, riding beside him and shooting out his door, with his wounded foot elevated over the dashboard, repeatedly shouts, “You’re going off the damn road!”

When Team Three’s .50-caliber machine gun opens up over Doc Bryan’s head where he’s perched on the back of the Humvee, the concussive blasting is so intense that his nose starts bleeding.With his weapon growing sticky with blood and snot, he squeezes off two separate, very effective bursts, getting head shots on a pair of enemy ambushers.

Through it all, Espera fights from his Humvee beside ours while saying Hail Marys. In his NVGs he sees a man cut down in the extremities by a blast from Garza’s .50-cal. When he sees the guy attempt to crawl off, Espera fires a burst, clipping the top of his head, and resumes his Hail Marys.

It takes five to ten minutes for the platoon to extricate itself from the kill zone, leaving most of the would-be ambushers either dead or in flight.

Sergeant Eric Kocher

Kocher is determined to find a route through the town. Much as he dislikes his immediate superior, Captain America, Kocher loves his job. He grew up outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania, and spent his youth “running around in the backwoods.” He hunted deer, wrestled and listened to tales of war adventure from relatives who had served in World War II and in the Korean conflict. He knew from the time he was very little he would be a Navy SEAL or a Recon Marine. He likes being out on his own in a dark, alien town. After the Cobras fire a final Hellfire into a building in front of him, the place grows silent. All he can think of, Kocher later tells me, is a basic rule of combat reconnaissance: “The lead element’s expendable. Guess I’m it.”

He carries a Syrian passport that bears the name Ahmed Shahada. He’s twenty-six years old, and his address in Iraq is listed as the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, which is by local standards one of the better hotels, catering to foreign journalists and European aid workers. He’s carrying 500 Syrian pounds, a packet of prescription painkillers in his shirt pocket and an entry visa to Iraq dated March 23. He arrived barely more than a week ago. Handwritten in the section of his visa that asks the purpose of his visit to
Iraq is one word: “Jihad.”

Later, intelligence officers in First Marine Division will estimate that as many as 50 percent of all combatants in central Iraq were foreigners. “Saddam offered these men land, money and wives to come and fight for him,” one officer tells me. He adds that foreign fighters were simply dropped off at intersections by Iraqi Fedayeen, given weapons and told to attack the Americans when they came up the road. At times, the foreign jihadis were simply used to buy time for Iraqi soldiers to change out of their uniforms
and flee.

Given the Syrians’ poor performance at the bridge—trying to use skinny eucalyptus trees for cover, being wholly unaware that they could be observed through American night optics—Eckloff concludes, “The concept of being a guerrilla fighter was like something they’d gotten out of the movies.”

Nevertheless, Fick is grim. Unlike the others who’d been cheered by capturing a foreign jihadi, Fick thinks it’s an ominous development.While Fick had never been avidly pro-war, he’d always radiated quiet confidence about the Americans—at least the Marines—reaching their basic objective: regime change. The arrival of Syrians has shaken him. “Isn’t this the absolute opposite of what we wanted to have happen here?” he asks. “I can see this effort”—as he refers to the war—“becoming seriously complicated.”

Pappy

Part of the reason Marines nicknamed Sgt. Patrick “Pappy” was his style of dressing. In Camp Mathilda, he invariably wore his physical-training shorts with combat boots and socks pulled up to his knees. His fellow Marines thought the look was “old-mannish.” As he was walking past a group of them one day in his customary attire, a Marine stopped him and said, “Pappy, give us some old-man wisdom.” Pappy turned, waved his finger and said, “Don’t pet a burning dog.” It was the sort of nonsense wisdom for which Pappy is famous. In Afghanistan, he and Kocher were sitting in a Marine camp outside Kandahar when a female Marine walked past. Gazing at her, Pappy said, “If she sees something without a purpose she could chuck a stone at it.” Generally, no one knows what Pappy means when he comes up with these odd pronouncements.

Brad & Poke

Colbert is excessively cheerful this morning. It’s not like he’s maniacally energized from having escaped death. His satisfaction seems deeper and quieter, as if he’s elated to have been involved in something highly rewarding. It’s as though he’s just finished a difficult crossword puzzle or won at chess.

When Espera comes by to share one of his stinky cigars, he looks as he always does after combat, as though his eyes have sunk deeper into their sockets and the skin on his shaved skull has just tightened an extra notch. He jams the chewed, mashed tip of his cigar in my mouth without asking if I want it, and points to Colbert. “Look at that skinny-ass dude,” he says. “You’d never guess what a bad motherfucker he is.”

Espera felt sorry for Colbert when they met a few years ago. They were in different units but happened to find themselves on leave together in Australia. While other Marines were out drinking and chasing whores, Colbert went off alone to prowl electronics stores. “I thought he had no friends—he was such a loner,” Espera says. “But now that I know him better I figured out he just can’t stand people, even me. I’m only his friend to piss him off. I look up to him because the dude is a straight-up warrior. Getting bombed, shot at don’t phase him a bit. Shit, in the middle of all that madness by the bridge he observes those dudes in the trees waiting to kill us. That’s the Iceman.”

He kneels down and punches Colbert on the shoulder. “You’ve got superhuman powers, Iceman, but it comes with that freakish taint I wouldn’t want to have.”

Corporal Walt Hasser

Walter Hasser is one of the most well-liked Marines in the platoon. He’s twenty-three years old, six feet two inches tall and knows the lyrics to just about every hit country song recorded between 1960 and 1974.Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash are his heroes. He has a beautiful country singing voice, and in his case Colbert makes a special exemption to his “no country music” rule. Following the ZSU AAA gun attack south of Al Hayy during which Hasser had climbed into the turret under fire and had taken out the enemy gun position, the team had seized the bridge north of the town to the accompaniment of his singing Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy.”

Raised in a rented farmhouse in Louden County, Virginia (Taylorstown), by a single mom who, he says, “didn’t have no college,” Hasser grew up working on farms and hunting. He seems like your basic country good old boy, but what he enjoys most about the Marine Corps is both the brotherhood and the diversity. “Back home you pal around with your own kind,” he says. “I never thought my best friends would be Mexicans. Here, we’re brothers, and we all look out for each other. That’s the best part of being in a war. We all get to be together.”

Earlier in the morning, when everyone had been complaining about the sorry state of MREs, Hasser had explained his basic philosophy of life. “Every chance you have, you should try to hook people up. People in the MRE factory don’t understand that. Hell, if I worked there I’d be sneaking in extra pound cakes, jalapeño cheese packs,Tootsie Rolls.You gotta throw things to people when you can.”

Now, driving out of Al Muwaffaqiyah, with the sound of that dying man’s gasping still fresh in everyone’s mind, Hasser stares out the window into a blazing sunset. The SAW is loose on his lap. His wrists are draped across the top of the weapon, but his fingers aren’t touching it, almost like he’s ignoring it.

“How are you doing?” I ask him.

“Just taking it all in,” he says.

The dark and sleepless conditions under which Marines operate have already caused several fatalities.Two men sleeping near their Humvee in another unit were crushed to death by a tracked vehicle, and a third was paralyzed. An infantry Marine crawled into his hole after watch and fatally shot himself in his sleep with his SAW.

Nearby in the darkness, Marines in Bravo pass around these stories. Some of them now bring up another nighttime activity: “combat jacks.” They’re trying to tally who’s masturbated the most since the invasion started. During long, fatiguing hours of watch, some Marines beat off just to keep awake and pass the time. “Dog, after that first ambush,” one of the men says, referring to a fevered night of combat jacks after the attack at Al Gharraf, “I get into my hole, and I had to go three times, bam, bam, bam! Couldn’t stop. Hadn’t happened like that since I was seventeen. I thought something was broken.”

Swarr and Delta Company

Marines in Bravo are reunited with an old friend, Gunnery Sergeant Jason Swarr. A thirty-two-year-old Recon Marine who works as the battalion’s parachute rigger, Swarr nearly missed the war. He only arrived outside Baghdad a couple of days ago. Now, he comes over to Colbert’s position with a tale of his strange odyssey through Iraq and his remarkable first experience of combat.

Swarr is one of the more eccentric characters in the battalion. Tall and square-jawed, he looks like your average Marine, but in his off-hours Swarr is an artist who writes and directs ultra-low-budget videos. “I’m like the Ed Wood of my generation,” he says. “My goal in life is, people will go in the video store and find my movies in the Cult Film section by Toxic Avenger.”

Swarr is also a warrior. He served in Somalia, and when this war came along, he vowed he wasn’t going to miss it. But the battalion had other plans. When the invasion began, Swarr and two other Marines from First Recon were ordered to remain behind at the Al Jabar airfield in Kuwait to serve as liaisons to the Marine Corps Air Wing.Within a few days, he and his two comrades figured out their assignment was a bullshit job. “They didn’t give a fuck about us at Jabar,” Gunny Swarr says. “There was nothing to do.”

They pulled some strings, got permission to leave and hitchhiked up to Camp Mathilda with some Pakistani laborers. The battalion had already left for the invasion, but Swarr and his cohorts found out there was a company of reservist Recon Marines still in the camp, who were getting ready to enter Iraq and link up with the battalion in a few days. Swarr and the others figured they’d get a ride with the reservists. The reservist unit is called Delta Company, and it has three platoons with a total of about ninety Marines and commanders. It’s made up of guys who work regular jobs in civilian life, some as software engineers or teachers, but the majority in law enforcement—from LAPD cops to DEA agents to air marshals. In Swarr’s opinion, “Delta was the most unorganized thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

The reservists’ problems weren’t necessarily caused through any fault of their own. Due to its low standing in the pecking order as a reserve unit, Delta Company was short on trucks, guns, food, flak vests, radios. Nevertheless, the reservists crossed into Iraq nearly a week after the war started. “It was madness from day one,” Swarr says. They had no idea where the battalion was and no ability to reach it on comms. Their navigation gear was so poor they nearly bumbled into Nasiriyah at the height of the fighting there. Many of the reservists in Delta had never fired the heavy weapons on their Humvees prior to entering Iraq. Wandering around highways in southern Iraq, unable to find out where the battalion was, the reservists began running low on food. They were assigned convoy escort duty by the division and, according to Swarr, they turned this into a gold mine. At the time, lightly armed supply convoys were rolling through the area, their drivers terrified of being ambushed. So, Swarr says, “We put a sign out: ‘Need Convoy Security? Stop Here.’ As soon as they’d stop, we’d bullshit the drivers, tell ’em, ‘Hey, two hours ago a convoy passing through here got ambushed.’ Then we’d ask ’em, ‘What do you got for us? Any MREs, flak vests, water? Hand it over, and we’ll escort you.’ ” According to Swarr, Delta Company made out pretty well for a while.

Then, in his opinion, the company started going out of control. “Some of the cops in Delta started doing this cowboy stuff. They put cattle horns on their Humvees. They’d roll into these hamlets, doing shows of force— kicking down doors, doing sweeps—just for the fuck of it. There was this little clique of them. Their ringleader was this beat cop, who’s like a corporal back home and a commander out here. He’s like five feet tall, talks like Joe Friday and everyone calls him ‘Napoleon.’ We started to get the idea these guys didn’t want to find the battalion. They knew they’d get their
balls stepped on. They were having too much fun being cowboys. “Some of the other reservists were coming up to us, saying, ‘You’ve got to help us find the battalion. These guys are going to get us killed.’ But there was nothing we could do.”

Finally, it all came to a head a couple of days ago. “We’re guarding an airfield for chow and water,” Swarr says. “These kids come up selling soda and cigarettes. The ringleaders in Delta decide it would be funny to trade them some porn magazines, which these Iraqi kids had never seen. About an hour later, this elder comes out of a hamlet 400 meters away, yelling and shaking his fist. The kids all scatter. One of them tells us the old man is pissed. He didn’t like kids having porn magazines. The kid says he’s going to get an RPG. Sure enough, the old man comes out of this hut with an
RPG, just kind of waving it around.”

Swarr takes a deep breath. “Delta fucking freaks! They lob like twenty-six Mark-19 rounds at the guy. He’s two hundred meters away, and they all miss him. Instead, they light up this friendly village behind him that’s been passing us information.

“I’m just watching this. I didn’t have nothing to shoot at, and I see this old dude dressed like a Marine running past with a flak vest and camera, huffing and puffing. ‘What are they lighting up?’ he asks. ‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Just some pissed-off Iraqi with an RPG.’ Then I look at the guy I’m talking to, and it’s Ollie North.” (North served as a correspondent for Fox News in Iraq.)

“I’m like, ‘Ollie, how you doing?’” Swarrs continues.

“ ‘Fucking great.’ He takes a dip and says, ‘This war’s going to be over in seventy-two hours. Saddam’s dead.’

“I’m like, ‘Good to go, Ollie.’

“He huffs off, and this colonel comes out who’s in charge of the airfield, and he’s mad. He’s like, ‘You guys just lit up a friendly village.’

“I don’t think Delta killed any of the villagers, but they blew up a few of their huts.We gave ’em a few cases of humrats and got out of there.”

When Colbert hears the story, he just shakes his head. “This is so colossally retarded I can’t even say anything about it.”

I’m not convinced that Gunny Swarr is the most reliable source. I set out to find other people who were there. One of the men from First Recon who was with him is a captain in the battalion, with a reputation for being levelheaded and forthright. He tells me Gunny Swarr’s tale is “on the money.” Later, I talk to Ferrando, who admits, “There was a comm problem for about a week with Delta.” I go over to Delta’s position in the camp and talk to more than a half dozen of the reservists, including the Mark-19 gunner, Lance Corporal Bryan Andrews, twenty-two, who fired on the village.They corroborate essential details of Swarr’s story. Andrews adds, “I guess it worked out okay. I scared off the old man. He ran away.”

Kocher

“I could be a lot more personal about my feelings toward the Iraqis,” Kocher says. “My wife is here. Her civil affairs unit is in Nasiriyah. I think about her every day and the things that could happen to her. But I don’t lose control over it.”

Against his powerful forearms, the pen Kocher holds looks puny. The log he writes in is an account of the war he calls his “Bitter Journal.”

“If something happens to me, I want my wife to know the truth,” he says. “If they say we fought valiantly here, I want her to know we fought retarded. They haven’t used us right—sending us into these towns, onto the airfield, with no observation.”

Captain America

“Each man sees things differently in combat,” he says.

Then Captain America veers into Nietzschean speculation on the deadly nature of battle. “Some of us are not going to make it out of here. Each of us has to test the limits of his will to survive in this reality.” He leans forward and speaks in grave tones. “Right now, at any time, we could die. It almost makes you lose your sanity.” His pupils quiver with increased intensity. “The fear of dying will make you lose your sanity. But to remain calm and stay in a place where you think you will die, that is the definition of insane, too. You must become insane to survive in combat.”

Brad

He sounds tired. I think this war has lost its allure for him. It’s not that he can’t take it. During the past hour or so of shooting, he still seemed excited by the action. But I think after mourning the loss of his friend Horsehead, trying to care for dehydrated, sick babies among the refugees the other day, the shot-up kids by the airfield before that, and having seen so many civilians blown apart, he’s connected the dots between the pleasure he takes in participating in this invasion and its consequences. He hasn’t turned against the aims of this war; he still supports the idea of regime change. But the side of him that loves war—his inner warrior—keeps bumping against the part of him that is basically a decent, average suburban guy who likes bad eighties music and Barry Manilow and believes in
the American Way.

Ray

Colbert and Person are beginning to have personal problems. There’s no particular reason for the strain; it’s more like they’re two rock stars who have been touring a little bit too long together.

About noon, when a salvo of six to eight enemy mortars lands a few hundred meters from the Humvee, Colbert begins harping on Person’s driving. The platoon is ordered to scatter into a berm by the road and wait out further mortar strikes. The idea is for Person to pull between two high berms for cover, but Colbert is not satisfied. As the next salvo begins to blow up in the vicinity, Colbert starts giving Person a driving lesson, ordering him to back up and maneuver the Humvee repeatedly. “You see that pile of dirt by the trail we’re on?” Colbert says, his voice cracking. “That is a berm, Person. Berms make me feel warm and fuzzy inside because they protect me from shrapnel. So when I say, ‘Pull up next to the goddamn berm,’ I mean pull the fucking Humvee up next to the fucking berm. Don’t leave it sitting in the middle of the fucking field.” Person responds by alternately pumping the gas and brakes.We slam into the berm. Cans of ammo and AT-4 rockets piled in the rear shoot forward through the compartment. “Sorry about that,” Person mumbles, not sounding very sorry.

A Hellfire missile blows up something 500 meters across the field. Mortars boom. Person begins belting out his latest song, one he and Hasser have been composing. It’s a country song, which he sings in flagrant violation of Colbert’s ban. Colbert doesn’t even try to shut him up anymore. It’s tough to reach Person these days. He’s had a severe allergic reaction to Iraq. His eyes have swollen to red slits. They ooze tears constantly, which mix with the snot pouring from his nose. Doc Bryan has put him on a regimen of antihistamines and other medications to combat the allergies. God
only knows how these medications interact with the Ripped Fuel and other stimulants Person uses. The whole morning, Person has been babbling about his latest scheme. He and Hasser are going to change their last names to “Wheaten” and “Fields,” respectively, in order to put out a country music album, eponymously titled Wheaten Fields.

Now, as the explosions continue, he shares their first song, much of which they composed last night on watch. It’s called “Som’ Bitch,” and its aim, according to Person, is to hit every theme of the country-music lifestyle. Person sings:

Som’ bitch an’ goddamn and fuck
All I ever seem to do is cuss
About how life’s a’ fuckin’ treatin’ me
To save my one last shred of sanity.

Som’ bitch and goddamn an’ fuck
The price of Copenhagen just went up
My NASCAR won’t come in on rabbit ears
My broken fridge won’t even chill my beer.

When he finishes, he turns to Colbert. “You like that?”

“Why don’t you just quit while you’re ahead,” Colbert says.

Combat

Before leaving on this mission, many of the men in Colbert’s platoon had said good-bye to one another by shaking hands or even by hugging. The formal farewells seemed odd considering that everyone was going to be shoulder-to-shoulder in the cramped Humvees. The good-byes almost seemed an acknowledgment of the transformations that take place in combat. Friends who lolled around together during free time talking about bands, stupid Marine Corps rules and girlfriends’ fine asses aren’t really the same people anymore once they enter the battlefield.

In combat, the change seems physical at first. Adrenaline begins to flood your system the moment the first bullet is fired. But unlike adrenaline rushes in the civilian world—a car accident or bungee jump, where the surge lasts only a few minutes—in combat, the rush can go on for hours. In time, your body seems to burn out from it, or maybe the adrenaline just runs out. Whatever the case, after a while you begin to almost lose the physical capacity for fear. Explosions go off. You cease to jump or flinch. In this moment now, everyone sits still, numbly watching the mortars thump down nearby. The only things moving are the pupils of their eyes.

This is not to say the terror goes away. It simply moves out from the twitching muscles and nerves in your body and takes up residence in your mind. If you feed it with morbid thoughts of all the terrible ways you could be maimed or die, it gets worse. It also gets worse if you think about pleasant things. Good memories or plans for the future just remind you how much you don’t want to die or get hurt. It’s best to shut down, to block everything out. But to reach that state, you have to almost give up being yourself. This is why, I believe, everyone said good-bye to each other yesterday
before leaving on this mission. They would still be together, but they wouldn’t really be seeing one another for a while, since each man would, in his own way, be sort of gone.

Poke

While most got to sleep, Espera leans against the wheel of his Humvee parked by Colbert’s, composing a letter to his wife back home in Los Angeles. He uses a red lens flashlight, which emits a dim glow, not easily spotted by potential enemy shooters, to write on a tattered legal pad. Espera’s wife was a sophomore at Loyola Marymount College when they met.At the time, he was a nineteen-year-old laborer with no future. They married shortly after she got pregnant, and much of Espera’s life since has been an effort to better himself in order to meet her high standards.“You see, dog,”
he explains, “my wife is smart, but she fucked up big-time when she married me. I was a piece of shit. I remember my wife talking about all the books she’d read, and it hit me there was a whole world I’d missed. Before I met her I used to think, I’ve got a shitload of hand skills—welding, pipefitting— any pussy can read a book. See, I didn’t grow up with no understanding. My mom tried, but my dad is a psycho ex-MarineVietnam vet.” Espera uses the term “psycho ex-Marine Vietnam vet” with the utmost respect. He aspires to possess warrior skills equal to those of his father,
who won a bronze star in Vietnam, and believes if he’s lucky, he himself will retire one day as a “proud, psycho ex-Marine.” Despite his reverence for his father’s combat valor, the man abandoned him at a young age (after an incident, according to Espera, in which his dad was shot in their home by a jealous girlfriend), and their relationship remains rocky. Espera bitterly recalls a past incident. Several years ago, when his father tried to patch things up by taking him on a fishing trip, his old man ended up stopping off at porn shop on their way to the lake. While Espera waited outside for his dad to finish his business in the private viewing booths, he got into an altercation with a man he believed was trying to cruise him in the parking lot, and Espera threw a brick through the windshield of the man’s car. “That was our father-son trip,” he says.

Since meeting his wife, Espera has become an avid reader, voraciously consuming everything from military histories to Chinese philosophy to Kurt Vonnegut (his favorite author). In the Middle East, he spends every free moment either reading or writing long letters to his wife, who works at an engineering firm in the San Fernando Valley.Tonight, at the cigarette factory, Espera reads me the beginning of a letter to his wife. “I’ve learned there are two types of people in Iraq,” he reads, “those who are very good and those who are dead. I’m very good. I’ve lost twenty pounds, shaved my
head, started smoking, my feet have half rotted off, and I move from filthy hole to filthy hole every night. I see dead children and people everywhere and function in a void of indifference. I keep you and our daughter locked away deep down inside, and I try not to look there.” Espera stops reading and looks up at me. “Do you think that’s too harsh, dog?

Minefield maintenance

Combat engineers tend to be fanatical about their profession. Perhaps it a prerequisite. De-mining, which is usually done completely by touch— probing the earth with plastic rods, then feeling each mine to check for anti-handling 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.

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.”

“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.”

Epilogue

Pappy was awarded a Bronze Star for his actions in the invasion.

Upon his return, Colbert received one of the highest honors in the Marine Corps, a combat meritorious promotion to staff sergeant. He was nominated to enter a two-year exchange program with the British Royal Marines, with whom he is now serving.

Person got out of the Marines and moved to Kansas City, Missouri, to pursue his career as a rock star while working at the front desk of a twenty-four-hour fitness club.

After being promoted to the rank of captain, Fick left the Marine Corps in August to pursue graduate degrees in business and foreign relations at Harvard. For several months he debated whether he had been a good officer, or whether his concern for his men colored his judgment. He concluded, “My feelings made me a more conflicted officer. There was no celebratory cigar smoking on the battlefield for me. But we achieved every mission objective. I did my job.” Under his command, the men in Second Platoon received more combat citations and awards than any other platoon in First Reconnaissance Battalion.

Capt. Patterson also left the Marine Corps, after being promoted to major, in order to study environmental engineering at the University of Washington. After more than ten years of distinguished military service, Patterson departed following a loss of control in front of his men—one that only raised their opinion of him. In my last conversation with Patterson, he confessed that he was still troubled by the episode in which Encino Man had mistakenly followed an incorrect order to send men out to mark a minefield at night. One of the engineers injured, Valdez, who lost an eye, had served with Patterson’s company. “Valdez was my man,” Patterson said to me. “What the fuck happened?” Despite his anger, he refused to cast blame on any individual. “It happened as a result of dysfunction in the battalion, not because of what a single officer did.”

Captain America departed from his command a few weeks after the battalion’s return. Some thought the move was a demotion, until he was reassigned to a prestigious command staff position in another unit.

Doc Bryan had a sad parting from the Middle East. While waiting at a desert camp in Kuwait to fly home, he was on hand at a football game held among Marines in other units when one of the players went berserk with his M-16 and shot a young man on the opposing team, hitting him in the chest and neck. Doc Bryan and other corpsmen were unable to save the Marine. The incident only added fuel to Doc Bryan’s bitter complaints about war. Later, Doc Bryan had been engaging in one of his typical bitch sessions about the incompetence of superiors when, he says, he suddenly heard his voice as if it belonged to someone else. Something snapped in him, and he realized, “You know what, I’m just not cut out for the military.” But the feeling didn’t last. His first week home, he was happily recruited out of First Recon into a secretive Special Forces unit. He has been training for a mission he is not at liberty to talk about.

Trombley finally completed the Basic Reconnaissance Course and is now a full-fledged Recon Marine. In the autumn he also participated in an LAPD training program. He’s thinking of joining the LAPD when he gets out in a year.

Reyes achieved the dream of a lifetime when his temporary promotion to team leader after Pappy’s wounding at Muwaffaqiyah was made permanent at Camp Pendleton. A week later, he was suspended following a hazing incident that occurred under his supervision. While training a Marine new to First Recon, one who was having trouble keeping up on a fitness run, Garza ordered the kid to dig a Ranger grave. Then Garza and others buried him, leaving only a small breathing space. Reyes had approved of the disciplinary measure, telling me later, “That was the kind of hard
training we did under Horsehead.” Reyes was immediately docked a month’s pay. The rest of the men in the platoon took money from their paychecks to make up the difference in his lost salary, while he awaited formal punishment proceedings.

A few weeks after Espera returned from Iraq he had an eerie experience while driving with his family down Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles. Espera was at the wheel of a new SUV, purchased to celebrate his homecoming, when he glimpsed a man on the street who looked exactly like an Iraqi civilian the platoon had fatally shot at a roadblock in Iraq. In an instant he realized it wasn’t the pedestrian on the street who had reminded him of the dead man; the light was glancing off the windshield of his new SUV the same way it had in his Humvee when he’d witnessed the shooting. A short while after this flashback, Espera was invited to a party at a gated community in Malibu where residents wanted to toast a war hero. In civilian clothes, with his hair grown out, and having gained the weight that he’d lost in Iraq, Espera cut a handsome figure. As the guests repeatedly praised his heroism in serving his country, Espera hung his head with an almost embarrassed smile. Then, after his fifth or sixth glass of wine, he rose to his feet. “I’m not a hero,” he said. The guests nodded, their smiles stretching even wider at this hero’s show of humility. “Guys like me are just a necessary part of things,” Espera continued. “To maintain this way of life in a fine community like this, you need psychos like us to go out and drop a bomb on somebody’s house.”

In November the men were told First Recon would be returning to Iraq. Reyes was reinstated as team leader. Gunny Wynn, who was still facing disciplinary action for his disobedience to Encino Man in Iraq, was also cleared. “In the end,” Reyes says, “they need bodies for the war.” Reyes adds, “This is the way the Corps is. You join for the idealism, but eventually you see the flaws in it. You might fight this for a while. Then you accept that one man isn’t going to change the Marine Corps. If you love the Corps, you give up some of the ideals which motivated you to join in the
first place.”

When Person heard through the grapevine that his unit was going back, he called Gunny Wynn at home, drunk, from Kansas City, and told him he was reenlisting. Gunny Wynn told him to shut up, go to bed and stay a civilian.

As this book goes to press, the men in Bravo Second Platoon, along with the rest of First Recon, are in Fallujah, Iraq.