Generation Kill - Evan Wright [27]
“This is the shit,” Person says as he takes in the destruction in his NVGs, which are exponentially intensifying every flash. “I wish I had some shrooms.”
“Yeah, it’s the shiznit,” Colbert says. “Now, watch the fucking vehicle in front of you.”
With the effects of all the legal stimulants he’s taking starting to show, Person begins to babble, a disembodied voice coming from beneath his helmet and NVGs. “I’ll tell you why we’re invading. Fucking NAMBLA,” he says, referring to the North American Man/Boy Love Association. “Places like Thailand where they go to fuck children and shit, it’s drying up. We’re opening up Iraq for a whole new supply of children.”
“Halt the vehicle, Person,” Colbert says, passing on an order from the radio. “We’re stopping for a few minutes.”
“NAMBLA’s infiltrated First Recon,” Person continues, after bringing the vehicle to a stop. “There’s a guy in Third Platoon, he’s going to be collecting photographs of all the children and sending them back to NAMBLA HQ. Back at Pendleton he volunteers at a daycare center. He goes around collecting all the turds from the five-year-olds and puts them into Copenhagen tins. Out here everyone thinks he’s dipping, but it’s not tobacco. It’s dookie from five-year-olds.”
“Shut up, Person,” Colbert orders.
Next to me, Trombley breaks the silence, speaking in low tones. “I wonder if she’s ever killed anyone,” Trombley says, stroking the barrel of the SAW machine gun, which he holds on his lap, pointed out the window. The SAW, which stands for “squad automatic weapon,” is a portable machine gun capable of firing up to 1,000 rounds per minute. Ammunition comes in 200-round belts, which are several feet long. They fit into a drum beneath the barrel of the SAW, but Trombley likes to take the belts out of the drums and drape them around his neck like Rambo, which provokes sharp rebukes from Colbert whenever he catches him.
Trombley, who at nineteen is the youngest member of the team, is a thin, dark-haired and slightly pale kid from Farwell, Michigan. He speaks in a soft yet deeply resonant voice that doesn’t quite fit his boyish face. One of his eyes is bright red from an infection caused by the continual dust storms. He has spent the past couple of days trying to hide it so he doesn’t get pulled from the team. Technically, he is a “paper Recon Marine” because he has not yet completed the Basic Reconnaissance Course. He also hasn’t quite yet gelled with the rest of the platoon. In bull sessions they subtly ignore him, talking over and around him when he’s sitting among them. He accepts it silently, without backing down, studying his fellow Marines intently with his furtive, inflamed eye.
But it’s not just his youth and inexperience that keep Trombley on the outside, it’s also his relative immaturity—caressing his weapon and talking to it, wearing his ammo belts around his neck. Other Marines make fun of him for his B-movie antics. They’re also suspicious of his tall tales. He claims, for example, that his father was a CIA operative, that most of the men in the Trombley family died mysterious, violent deaths, the details of which are vague and always shifting with each telling. He looks forward to combat as “one of those fantasy things you always hoped would really happen.” In December, a month before his deployment, Trombley got married. (His bride’s father, he says, couldn’t attend the wedding, because he died in a “gunfire incident” a while before.) He spends his idle moments writing down lists of possible names for the sons he hopes to have when he gets home. “It’s up to me to carry on the Trombley name,” he says.
Despite other Marines’ reservations about Trombley, Colbert feels he has the potential to be a good Marine. Colbert is always