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

by Evan Wright

There’s a tremoundous blast as Dill steps on a mine at the edge of the road. Weiss is temporarily blinded by spraying debris, even though he’s nearly ten meters back from the explosion. Kocher, standing directly behind Dill on the road, is thrown onto his back. He goes temporarily deaf from the blast, and his eyes reflexively shut. In the immediate aftermath, only his olfactory sense still functions. He smells burning flesh. Kocher opens his eyes and sees Dill lying a few meters out in the field, thrown there by the explosion. When Kocher rises to his feet, the ringing in his ears subsides. He hears Dill yelling, “I’m bleeding out! Throw me a tourniquet.” Kocher and his team’s corpsman, forty-six-year-old Navy Hospitalman First Class George Graham, walk about four meters into the minefield. Dill screams, “Get the fuck out of here!” Kocher sees that Dill’s foot hangs from his leg at a weird angle. The boot is shredded. His toes are exposed, dangling by some skin. His heel is blown off, and his tib-fib bones are sticking out, the ends charred and smoking. He stepped on the smallest mine in the field, a BS-50 Italian “toe-popper.” He and Graham tourniquet him off and carry him back to the road. (The next day, when engineers return to the field, they find two other mines a few inches from the footprints made by Kocher and Graham.)