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

by Evan Wright

At the time of Ferrando’s initial planning meetings with Mattis, the battalion possessed neither Humvees nor the heavy weapons that go with them. To the men in First Recon, trained to swim or parachute into enemy territory in small teams, the concept of fighting in columns of up to seventy vehicles, as they would in Iraq, was entirely new. Many didn’t even have military operators’ licenses for Humvees. The vehicles had to be scrounged from Marine Corps recycling depots and arrived in poor condition. The Marines were given only a few weeks to practice combat maneuvers in the Humvees, and just a few days to practice firing the heavy weapons mounted on them before the invasion. What made Mattis’s selection of First Recon for this daring role in the campaign even more surprising is that he had other units available to him—specifically, Light Armored Reconnaissance (LAR) battalions—which are trained and equipped to fight through enemy ambushes in specialized armored vehicles. When I later ask Mattis why he put First Recon into this unorthodox role, he falls back on what sounds like romantic palaver: “What I look for in the people I want on the battlefield,” he says, “are not specific job titles but courage and initiative.” Mattis apparently had such faith in their skills that the Marines in First Recon were kept in the dark as to the nature of their mission in Iraq. Their commanders never told them they would be leading the way through much of the invasion, serving more or less...