Generation Kill - Evan Wright [4]
“Shut up, guys! It ain’t funny!” Manimal roars, pounding the side of the Humvee with a massive paw.
He silences his buddies. They look down, some of them suppressing guilty smiles.
“The only reason we’re all laughing now is none of us got killed,” Manimal lectures them. “That was messed up back there.”
It’s the first time anyone has seriously raised this possibility: that war is not fun, that it might, in fact, actually suck.
In the coming weeks, it will fall on the men in this platoon and their battalion to lead significant portions of the American invasion of Iraq. They belong to an elite unit, First Reconnaissance Battalion, which includes fewer than 380 Marines. Outfitted with lightly armored or open-top Humvees that resemble oversized dune buggies, they will race ahead of the much larger, better-equipped primary Marine forces in Iraq. Their mission will be to seek out enemy ambushes by literally driving into them.
Major General James Mattis, commander of the First Marine Division—the bulk of the Corps’ ground forces in Iraq—would later praise the young men of First Recon for being “critical to the success of the entire campaign.” While spearheading the American blitzkrieg in Iraq, they will often operate deep behind enemy lines and far beyond anything they have trained for. They will enter Baghdad as liberating heroes only to witness their astonishing victory crumble into chaos. They will face death every day. They will struggle with fear, confusion, questions over war crimes and leaders whose competence they don’t trust. Above all, they will kill a lot of people. A few of those deaths the men will no doubt think about and perhaps regret for the rest of their lives.
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MAJOR GENERAL JAMES MATTIS calls the men in First Reconnaissance Battalion “cocky, obnoxious bastards.” Recon Marines belong to a distinct military occupational specialty, and there are only about a thousand of them in the entire Marine Corps. They think of themselves, as much as this is possible within the rigid hierarchy of the military, as individualists, as the Marine Corps’ cowboys. They evolved as jacks-of-all-trades, trained to move, observe, hunt and kill in any environment—land, sea or air. They are its special forces.
Recon Marines go through much of the same training as do Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces soldiers. They are physical prodigies who can run twelve miles loaded with 150-pound packs, then jump in the ocean and swim several more miles, still wearing their boots and fatigues, and carrying their weapons and packs. They are trained to parachute, scuba dive, snowshoe, mountain climb and rappel from helicopters. Fewer than 2 percent of all Marines who enter in the Corps are selected for Recon training, and of those chosen, more than half wash out. Even those who make it commonly only do so after suffering bodily injury that borders on the grievous, from shattered legs to broken backs.
Recon Marines are also put through Survival Evasion Resistance Escape school (SERE), a secretive training course where Marines, fighter pilots, Navy SEALs and other military personnel in high-risk jobs are held “captive” in a simulated prisoner-of-war camp in which the student inmates are locked in cages, beaten and subjected to psychological torture overseen by military psychiatrists—all with the intent of training them to stand up to enemy captivity. When Gunny Wynn went through SERE, his “captors,” playing on his Texas accent, forced him to wear a Ku Klux Klan hood for several days and pull one of his fellow “inmate” Marines, an