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

by Evan Wright

But after no one says anything for a few moments, Aubin looks up at Doc Bryan, formulating an idea. He says, “Under the rules, we have to provide him with care until he dies.” “Yeah, so?” Doc Bryan asks. “Put him in my care. I stay next to the battalion commander. If he’s in my care, the boy will stay with me at the headquarters. Colonel Ferrando might change his order if he has to watch him die.” Fick approves of the plan, even though it represents an affront to his commanders and a risk to his own career, already under threat from his confrontation with Encino Man at Ar Rifa. But he endorses this effort, he later says, “because if we didn’t do something, I was going to lose Colbert and Doc Bryan. The platoon would have fallen apart. I believed we had at least ninety days of combat ahead of us, and my best men had become ineffective—angry at the command and personally devastated. We had to get this blood off the platoon’s hands. I didn’t care if we threw those kids onto a helicopter and they died thirty seconds later. My men had to do something.”