Generation Kill - Evan Wright [10]
Before Fick makes his introduction, a couple of Marines stand nearby carrying on a loud reminiscence about great chicks they knew in high school. “Everybody called her One Pound,” a Marine in this group is saying. “A pretty little Asian girl. Her eyes were so small and tight you could have blindfolded her with dental floss. We called her One Pound ’cause she always looked like she’d just smoked a pound of weed.”
Fick clears his throat. He is younger than some of the sergeants he commands, and when he addresses the men, he often lowers his voice to a more mature and authoritative-sounding register. He introduces me in this official, Marine-officer voice, then leaves.
One of the first men to greet me is Navy Hospitalman Second Class Robert Timothy “Doc” Bryan, the twenty-nine-year-old medical corpsman. A tall redhead with narrow features, he approaches with a tight grin and shakes my hand. “So you came here for a war, huh? You like war?” He continues to squeeze my hand, then puts his face about eight inches from mine and stares with unblinking, electric-blue eyes. His smile begins to twitch. “I hope you have fun in this war, reporter.”
He releases my hand and smacks my shoulder. “I’m just fucking with you, that’s all. No harm.” He walks off, laughing.
Several others break into laughter with him. Doc Bryan, I later find out, is always pissed off at something, if not the presence of a reporter, then incompetent military leaders or the barbarity of war. He’s a self-made man, son of a steamfitter from a small town outside of Philadelphia, the first in his family to attend college. He attended Lock Haven University, then the University of Pennsylvania on a football scholarship while he earned a master’s in education. In his younger days, Doc Bryan had a lot of ambient rage he used to burn off in weekend bar fights. “I’m always angry,” he later tells me. “I was born that way. I’m an asshole.”
A diesel generator drones somewhere outside. The tent reeks of farts, sweat and the sickeningly sweet funk of fungal feet. Everyone walks around in skivvies, scratching their balls.
Vigorous public ball scratching is common in the combat-arms side of the Marine Corps, even among high-level officers in the midst of briefings. The gesture is defiantly male, as is much of the vernacular of the Marine Corps itself. Not only do officers and enlisted men take pride in their profanity—the first time I meet First Recon’s battalion commander, he tells me the other reporter who dropped out probably did so because he writes for a “fucking queer magazine”—the technical jargon of the Corps is rich with off-color lingo. The term “donkey dick,” for example, is used to describe at least three different pieces of Marine equipment: a type of fuel spout, a radio antenna and a mortar-tube cleaning brush.
Recon Marines will proudly tell you that if you look up their official Military Occupational Specialty in a Marine Corps manual, their job title is listed as “Reconnaissance Man.” Theirs is one of the few remaining fields in the military closed to women. For many, becoming a Recon Marine represents one of the last all-male adventures left