Generation Kill - Evan Wright [28]
Through some unspoken arrangement, Trombley has decided that since I am the only civilian in the group, I’m even lower on the totem pole than he is. “Good chance we’ll run over a mine,” he says in the darkness. “Don’t worry, there’s ways to survive. Soon as you hear the blast, curl up like a little bitch.” He nudges me with his elbow. “You can curl up like a little bitch, can’t you?”
FIRST RECON SPENDS SEVERAL HOURS halting and starting, zigzagging back and forth just south of the border beneath the fiery, rocket-streaked sky. Light from burning oil facilities set ablaze by Iraqis near Rumaylah begin to create a false dawn. Higher-ups in the division keep ordering First Recon to move toward different breach points in the border.
At four in the morning, the battalion finally receives definitive orders about which breach to enter. But the men in Bravo are further delayed when their company commander takes a wrong turn in the darkness. The commander who makes this error is a man the men call “Encino Man,” after the movie of the same title about a hapless caveman who thaws out and comes to life in modern-day Southern California. The men nicknamed this officer Encino Man not only because of his Neanderthal features but also because of his perpetual air of tongue-tied befuddlement. A former college football star now in his early thirties, Encino Man is reputed to have a hard time articulating the simplest of orders. Encino Man’s thickly browed face often bears a pleasant smile, which makes him well enough liked by the men. But they don’t altogether trust him as a commander (he serves as Fick’s immediate superior), because he seems to be, in their eyes, something of a dimwit. Encino Man is one of those senior officers who never would have deployed on a traditional Recon mission. Prior to taking command of Bravo Company, he was an intelligence analyst.
Although the Corps rates him as a fit commander and he has an admirable service record, fellow officers have expressed their alarm to me over Encino Man’s seeming inability to understand the basics, like reading a map. One officer says to me, “We came out of a briefing once, after we’d been looking at a map for an hour, studying one town on it, and he came up to me and asked, ‘What was the name of that place? Can you show me where it is on the map?’ I was like, ‘What reality was this guy in during the previous briefing?’ ”
A few hours before the invasion, Encino Man had covered over the side windows of his command vehicle with duct tape. He believed this would mask light seeping out from a computer screen in his vehicle, making it “extratactical”—harder to spot by enemy forces. Unfortunately, the covered windows seem to have diminished his already feeble navigation abilities.
While we sit, pulled over by a desert trail, waiting for the battalion to “unfuck” itself in the wake of Encino Man’s blunder, Colbert observes, “The fucking idiot. If the enemy’s going to spot you, they’ll see the light coming through the windshield. You can’t tape that up.” He shakes his head. “This is the man leading me into me battle.”
“Fucking dumbass,” Person agrees.
The sky begins to lighten. We’re stopped in a no-man’s-land a few kilometers south of the border. Convoys of armored vehicles race past. Having now been up for twenty-four hours, watching others enter Iraq ahead of them sours the mood of Colbert’s team.
He and Person spot a Marine, whom they both know and despise, taking a leak outside the Humvee. “That’s that fucking pussy,” Person says. “He was crying when we left Camp Pendleton.” He adds in a pitying baby voice, “He didn’t want to go to Iraq.”
Colbert looks at him. “When we were at the airport flying out here he lost his gear. He was trying to get out of coming here.”
“Yeah,” Person says.