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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Evan Wright
Read between
March 27 - April 1, 2019
Get some! expresses, in two simple words, the excitement, the fear, the feelings of power and the erotic-tinged thrill that come from confronting the extreme physical and emotional challenges posed by death, which is, of course, what war is all about.
“I was just thinking one thing when we drove into that ambush,” he enthuses. “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I felt like I was living it when I seen the flames coming out of windows, the blown-up car in the street, guys crawling around shooting at us. It was fucking cool.”
These young men represent what is more or less America’s first generation of disposable children. More than half of the guys in the platoon come from broken homes and were raised by absentee, single, working parents. Many are on more intimate terms with video games, reality TV shows and Internet porn than they are with their own parents.
Before the “War on Terrorism” began, not a whole lot was expected of this generation other than the hope that those in it would squeak through high school without pulling too many more mass shootings in the manner of Columbine.
They are the first generation of young Americans since Vietnam to be sent into an open-ended conflict.
these young men entered Iraq predisposed toward the idea that the Big Lie is as central to American governance as taxation. This is, after all, the generation that first learned of the significance of the presidency not through an inspiring speech at the Berlin Wall but through a national obsession with semen stains and a White House blow job.
“When we take fire, not one of them hesitates to shoot back. In World War Two, when Marines hit the beaches, a surprisingly high percentage of them didn’t fire their weapons, even when faced with direct enemy contact. They hesitated. Not these guys. Did you see what they did to that town? They fucking destroyed it. These guys have no problem with killing.”
They will face death every day. They will struggle with fear, confusion, questions over war crimes and leaders whose competence they don’t trust. Above all, they will kill a lot of people. A few of those deaths the men will no doubt think about and perhaps regret for the rest of their lives.
Every twenty-four hours the temperature fluctuates by up to fifty degrees, with frigid nights in the upper thirties turning into blazing days in the upper eighties. Throughout the day, you’re either shivering or sweating. The sun is so intense that steel objects, such as machine-gun barrels, when left out in it for any period of time, become so hot they can be picked up only by using towels like oven mitts.
“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.”
“We had a saying about the military in Afghanistan: ‘The incompetent leading the unwilling to do the unnecessary.’ ”
“So you came here for a war, huh? You like war?” He continues to squeeze my hand, then puts his face about eight inches from mine and stares with unblinking, electric-blue eyes. His smile begins to twitch. “I hope you have fun in this war, reporter.”
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.”
Vigorous public ball scratching is common in the combat-arms side of the Marine Corps, even among high-level officers in the midst of briefings. The gesture is defiantly male, as is much of the vernacular of the Marine Corps itself.
Not only do officers and enlisted men take pride in their profanity—the first time I meet First Recon’s battalion commander, he tells me the other reporter who dropped out probably did so because he writes for a “fucking queer magazine”—the technical jargon of the Corps is rich with off-color lingo.
For many, becoming a Recon Marine represents one of the last all-male adventures left in America. Among them, few virtues are celebrated more than being hard—having stronger muscles, being a better fighter, being more able to withstand pain and privation. They refer to extra comforts—foam sleeping pads, sweaters, even cold medicine—as “snivel gear,” and relentlessly mock those who bring it as pussies.
At night they fight constantly. They judo-flip each other headfirst into the plywood floor of the tent. They strong-arm their buddies into headlocks and punch bruises into each other’s ribs. They lie in wait for one another in the shadows and leap out swinging Ka-Bar knives, flecking their buddies’ rib cages with little nicks from the knife tips, or dragging their blades lightly across a victim’s throat, playfully simulating a clean kill. They do it to keep each other in shape; they do it for fun; they do it to establish dominance.
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
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.”
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. Instead of celebrating their individualism, they’ve subjugated theirs to the collective will of an institution. Their highest aspiration is self-sacrifice over self-preservation.
Being around them is reminiscent of being a thirteen-year-old at a weekend sleepover with all of your very best friends in the world.
“The whole structure of the military is designed to mature young men to function responsibly while at the same time preserving their adolescent sense of invulnerability.”
“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.”
When formation ends, Marines jump up and down, laughing and throwing each other around in the dust. Two different men run past me, shouting exactly the same phrase, “This is like Christmas!”
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.”
By Colbert’s Humvee, a twenty-year-old redheaded corporal jumps up as more helicopters fly north. “Get some!” he screams. Then he adds, “They kill hundreds of people, those pilots. I would have loved to have flown the plane that dropped the bomb on Japan. A couple dudes killed hundreds of thousands. That fucking rules! Yeah!”
