Generation Kill - Evan Wright [13]
Becoming a Marine was a 180-degree turn for him. “I’d planned to go to Vanderbilt on a scholarship and study philosophy,” he says. “But I had an epiphany one day. I wanted to do my life for a while, rather than think it.” Like Colbert, he’s a veteran of Afghanistan and professes absolute support of this war. Yet it often seems as if the driving force behind this formerly pudgy, nonathletic kid’s decision to enter the Corps and join one of its most elite, macho units was to mock it and everything around him.
Tonight, he entertains his fellow troops by pacing the tent, reading letters aloud sent by schoolchildren to boost morale. He opens one from a girl who writes that she is praying for world peace. He throws it down. “Hey, little tyke,” Person shouts. “What does this say on my shirt? ‘U.S. Marine!’ I wasn’t born on some hippie-faggot commune. I’m a death-dealing killer. In my free time I do push-ups until my knuckles bleed. Then I sharpen my knife.”
Doc Bryan leaps up, brandishing a Hustler. “Check this out,” he says.
“I already seen that,” a Marine says. “Pictures of those chicks pissing.”
“No, listen to this.” Doc Bryan paces the tent reading an editorial by Larry Flynt damning the coming war as a grab for oil. “He is a very cognizant man,” Doc Bryan concludes. “Gents, this is a very cognizant way of explaining what we are all doing here. We’re going to be fighting a war for oil.”
Nobody seems to care much about the point he’s making. In a weird way, external facts about the looming war don’t really seem that important to these guys. The dominant feature of their lives is simply the fact that they are all together, which they enjoy tremendously. Being around them is reminiscent of being a thirteen-year-old at a weekend sleepover with all of your very best friends in the world. Only this weekend goes on indefinitely, perpetually nurturing the mystical bonds, the warrior dreams.
There is an undeniable Peter Pan quality to the military. A Marine psychiatrist attached to the First Division says, “The whole structure of the military is designed to mature young men to function responsibly while at the same time preserving their adolescent sense of invulnerability.”
Most Marines can remember the exact moment they decided to enlist. A lot of them were sparked by a specific TV commercial. In it, a cartoonish Arthurian hero slays a fire-breathing dragon, then promptly morphs into a Marine in dress blues standing at attention with a silver sword at his side.
Sergeant Rudy Reyes, thirty-one, the platoon’s best martial-arts fighter (whom the other men continually jump and ambush in order to test themselves against his superior skills), describes his passion for the Marine Corps in terms that blend New Age mysticism with the spirit of comic-book adventure. “I joined the Marines for idealism and romance,” he says. “Idealism because it’s so hard. The Marine Corps is a wonderful tool of self-enlightenment. Discipline erases all preconceived notions, and the pain becomes a medium of self-discovery. That’s the idealistic side. The romance comes in because we are a small band of hard motherfuckers, trained to go behind enemy lines against forces twenty or forty times bigger than us. And brother, if that ain’t romantic, I don’t know what is.”
My first night with the platoon, Reyes says, “You’re lucky to be here, brother. We are the baddest, most tight-knit niggas in the battalion.”
Just before lights out, a private approaches me and says, in polite, respectful tones, “Sir, I’ll get you a place to sleep.”
He leads me to the wall of ponchos dividing the tent between Second and Third platoons, and widens a space between a machine gun and a stack of military rations boxes for me