Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American War

by Evan Wright

Recon Marines go through much of the same training as do Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces soldiers. They are physical prodigies

Fewer than 2 percent of all Marines who enter in the Corps are selected for Recon training, and of those chosen, more than half wash out.

Those who make it through Recon training in one piece, which takes several years to cycle all the way through, are by objective standards the best and toughest in the Marine Corps.

Mattis’s favorite expression is “Doctrine is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” On the battlefield, his call sign is “Chaos.”

Ferrando would later tell me, “Major General Mattis’s plan went against all our training and doctrine, but I can’t tell a general I don’t do windows.”

Their home is a tent city called Camp Mathilda, located in the moonscape desert of northern Kuwait about fifty kilometers below the border with Iraq.

military in Afghanistan: ‘The incompetent leading the unwilling to do the unnecessary.’ ”

Colbert says, “I would never socialize with any of these people if we weren’t in the Marines.”

What unites them is an almost reckless desire to test themselves in the most extreme circumstances. In many respects the life they have chosen is a complete rejection of the hyped, consumerist American dream as it is dished out in reality TV shows and pop-song lyrics. They’ve chosen asceticism over consumption.

“Idealism because it’s so hard. The Marine Corps is a wonderful tool of self-enlightenment. Discipline erases all preconceived notions, and the pain becomes a medium of self-discovery. That’s the idealistic side. The romance comes in because we are a small band of hard motherfuckers, trained to go behind enemy lines against forces twenty or forty times bigger than us. And brother, if that ain’t romantic, I don’t know what is.”

Fick repeats a mantra, echoed by every commander throughout the Corps. “You will be held accountable for the facts not as they are in hindsight but as they appeared to you at the time. If, in your mind, you fire to protect yourself, you are doing the right thing. It doesn’t matter if later on we find out you wiped out a family of unarmed civilians. All we are accountable for are the facts as they appear to us at the time.”

“Out here we have a pile of captains, gunnery sergeants and staff sergeants with us that can’t do jack shit. They don’t even know how to refuel vehicles, get us batteries. All they do is make us get haircuts and shaves.” For his part, Ferrando

Burayyat An Rataw. He has no idea why.

kilometer south of the railroad tracks at Burayyat An Rataw. They run east-west along an elevated roadbed that stretches as far as the eye can see. We are now approximately seventy kilometers north of the border.

civilian among them, how little these guys actually know at times about what they’re doing or what the future holds. But the more time you spend with a combat unit, the more you realize nobody cares too much about what they’re told is going to be happening in the near future because orders change constantly anyway. Besides that, most Marines’ minds are occupied with the minutiae of survival in the present, scanning the vista in this land they’ve just invaded, searching for signs of the enemy.

The railroad line runs from Basra to Nasiriyah. The soldiers, we later find out, are deserters who’ve apparently walked from Basra, about seventy kilometers east of this position, and are heading toward Nasiriyah,

Ferrando, will later say in an apparent reference to Captain America, “An officer’s job is to throw water on a fire, not gasoline.”

bullshit,” Person says. He mentions Aaron Tippin’s “Where the Stars and Stripes and the Eagles Fly,” then scoffs, “Like how he sings those country white-trash images. ‘Where eagles fly.’ Fuck! They fly in Canada, too. Like they don’t fly there? My mom tried to play me that song when I came home from Afghanistan. I was like, ‘Fuck, no, Mom. I’m a Marine. I don’t need to fly a little flag on my car to show I’m patriotic.’ ” “That song is straight homosexual country music, Special Olympics–gay,” Colbert says.

Most people face their end pretty much alone, with a few family members if they are lucky. Here, the Marines face death together, in their youth. If anyone dies, he will do so surrounded by the very best friends he believes he will ever have.

“The U.S. should just go into all these countries, here and in Africa, and set up an American government and infrastructure—with McDonald’s, Starbucks, MTV—then just hand it over. If we have to kill a hundred thousand to save twenty million, it’s worth it.” He lights a cigar. “Hell, the U.S. did it at home for two hundred years—killed Indians, used slaves, exploited immigrant labor to build a system that’s good for everybody today. What does the white man call it? ‘Manifest Destiny.’ ”