• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1224 0

tractor-trailers and pieces of construction machinery are parked, waiting to roll into Iraq on the heels of the combat units. There are supply depots covering acres of sand with mountains of munitions, oil drums and rations crates. Lying beside the road are steel pipe sections that military construction crews are welding together into a pipeline to supply fuel and water to the invasion force as it goes north. It all has the feel of a monumental industrial enterprise. Somehow all these pieces are being put together—the people and the equipment—to function as one large machine. Though at the small-unit level all I see is the friction among the moving parts—Marines shouting at other vehicles to get out of the way, guys jumping out to hurriedly piss by the road, people taking wrong turns—the machine works. It will roll across 580 kilometers to Baghdad. It will knock down buildings, smash cars and tanks, put holes in people, shred limbs, cut children apart. There’s no denying it. For certain tasks, the machine put together in this desert is a very good one.

Colbert’s team digs into its position in the staging area after midnight. The moon overhead is so bright it looks almost like someone is shining a flashlight on us. It’s taken nearly fourteen hours to reach this spot of open desert. The battalion’s seventy-odd vehicles fan out across a couple of kilometers, with the Humvees facing north, their guns oriented toward Iraq. Marines move through the moonlit gloom with pickaxes and shovels, digging “Ranger graves”—shallow, one-man sleeping holes designed to protect their occupants from shrapnel in the event of an Iraqi attack. Then the Marines stretch “cammie nets”—camouflage netting—over their vehicles to make them harder to spot.

Temperatures have plunged into the lower forties. In their haste to pack up in the morning, many Marines had buried fleece vests and other warming “snivel gear” in the bottoms of their rucksacks. Some left this behind altogether. While Colbert’s team digs into their position, Marines who’d been so jubilant in the morning start bitching, primarily to amuse themselves.

Jacks, the giant gunner in Second Platoon’s team whom everyone calls Manimal, walks over to Colbert, whining, “I’m sick of this war.”

“It hasn’t even started yet, you pussy,” Colbert says.

“It’s fucking cold out here,” Manimal says.

“You can’t be cold,” Colbert says. “You’re a killer.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t pack no snivel gear,” Manimal says. “You got a fleece I can borrow till the war’s over?”

A LOW-INTENSITY DUST STORM starts sometime before dawn on the first morning at the staging area. Sleeping in open holes, you wake up with your face covered in powder. The wind moans continually. By sunrise it looks like we are in a snowstorm. Marines gather underneath the cammie netting draped over their vehicles, repacking gear, cleaning weapons, waiting. Their commanders tell the men the war will probably start on the twenty-second or twenty-third.

Colbert sits upright in his Ranger grave, filling his rifle magazines with bullets, peering out at the opaqueness of the desert—the dusty winds blowing past the cammie nets—and says, “It almost feels like we’re at the bottom of the ocean.”

Colbert’s specialty within the platoon is deep-sea diving. He’s trained to lead his team through miles of ocean and penetrate coastal defenses. Despite the years he’s spent on training missions in the water, he confesses to me that the deep sea terrifies him. “The scariest thing for me is to open my eyes under the ocean, especially at night,” he says. “I’m scared every time I do it.” He adds, “That’s probably why I love diving.”

Colbert tells me his feelings about the upcoming venture are similar. As a professional warrior, politics and ideology don’t really enter into his thoughts about why he is here in the desert, waiting to invade a country. “I’m not so idealistic that I subscribe to good versus evil. We haven’t had a war like that since World War II. Why are we here now? I guess it’s to remove this guy from power. I’m not opposed to it, and I wasn’t going