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

by Evan Wright

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. “I had a boatload of food rations and boxes of brand-new ThighMasters,” he says. “We were delivering exercise devices for the oppressed, starving people of East Timor.” He throws his head forward, laughing. The absurdities of the military amuse Fick. 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. When he returned home after weeks of living in frozen fighting holes, the Marines sent him a bill for five hundred dollars, charging him for the food rations he’d consumed during his combat deployment. He says, “We had a saying about the military in Afghanistan: ‘The incompetent leading the unwilling to do the unnecessary.’ ”