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

by Evan Wright

Marines supplement their diets of caffeine, dip and ephedra (technically banned in the Corps, but liberally consumed) with candy and junk food. Military rations, called “meals ready to eat” (MREs), come in brown plastic bags about three quarters of the size of a phone book. Each contains a main meal like spaghetti, stew or “chunked and formed” meat patties in a foil pouch. You heat these pouches by shoving them inside a plastic bag with chemicals in it. When you add water, the chemicals immediately boil, emitting noxious and (according to warnings on the package) explosive fumes. The main entrées are prepared through a mysterious desiccation process. Even though your meat patty might be swimming in juices, when you bite into it, it’s dry and crumbly and brings to mind chewing on a kitchen sponge. In flush times like now, at the start of the invasion, when every Marine is rationed three MREs a day, most push aside the main meals and eat the extras. In addition to entrées, MREs are loaded with junk food—pound cakes, brownies, “Toaster Oven Pastries” (identical to Pop-Tarts), cookies, Skittles, M&M’s, Tootsie Rolls, Charms hard candies, Combos cheese-filled pretzels, and powdered grape-drink mix and cocoa powder, which Marines eat straight out of the packages, like the instant coffee. The process of tearing through an MRE and picking out the goodies is called “ratfucking.” Colbert’s team maintains a ratfuck bag in their Humvee for all the discarded MRE entrées, saving them fo...