Generation Kill - Evan Wright [41]
Just before sundown, Marine artillery batteries, dug in a few kilometers ahead, begin to pound the city. As darkness falls, Colbert’s team excavates Ranger graves by the Humvee. The ground trembles as a column of massive M1A1 tanks rolls past, a few feet from where the Marines are resting. Out of the darkness, someone shouts, “Hey, if you lay down with your cock on the ground, it feels good.”
I WAKE UP AT DAWN on March 24 to the sound of a pickax thudding into the ground near my sleeping hole. Near me, a sergeant in Second Platoon named Antonio Espera excavates a pit, sweat rolling off his face even though it’s a chilly morning. “I’m fucking ashamed, dog,” he says, huffing as he swings the pickax. “When we left Afghanistan we didn’t leave a speck of Americana behind.”
Espera gestures to the trash-strewn road. “I was trained Marines don’t litter.”
His rage at the garbage—thousands of brown plastic wrappers and green foil pouches from MREs lying along the highway—has made him irrational. He’s digging a trash pit, when there are half a dozen sleeping holes, soon to be vacated, which could serve the same purpose. But he continues digging at a furious pace.
With his shaved head and deep-set eyes, Espera is one of the scariest-looking Marines in the platoon. Technically, he serves as Colbert’s assistant team leader, though in actuality he commands a separate Humvee. Espera’s crew of four Marines always rolls directly behind or beside Colbert’s, and he is one of Colbert’s closest friends in the platoon. The two men could hardly be more opposite. Espera, thirty, grew up in Riverside, California, and was, by his own account, truly a “bad motherfucker”—participating in all the violent pastimes available to a young Latino from a broken home and raised partially in state facilities. He was serving in an infantry platoon when he and Colbert met a few years earlier. Somehow they struck up a friendship, which on the face of it is odd. Colbert, with his Nordic features and upper-middle-class background, is also among those who frequently engage in routine racial humor, referring to the Spanish language as “dirty spic talk.” Espera, who’s part Native American, part Mexican and a quarter German, frequently rails about the dominance of America’s “white masters” and the genocide of his Indian ancestors. But describing his friendship with Colbert, Espera says, “Inside we’re both the same: violent warriors. Only he fights with his mind, and I fight with my strength.” For his part, Colbert says that when he met Espera he was impressed by his “maturity, dedication and toughness.” Even though Espera is not yet a Recon Marine, Colbert pulled strings to bring him into the elite battalion to serve as his assistant team leader.
This morning, despite the ongoing boom of artillery and rumors now spreading among the ranks of a bloody fight taking place up the road, Espera and several other Marines in the platoon seem to be suffering from a low-grade case of invaders’ guilt. “Imagine how we must look to these people,” he says, disgustedly kicking a pile of trash into his freshly dug pit.
There is a cluster of mud-hut homes about thirty meters across from the platoon’s position by the road. Old ladies in black robes and scarves stand in front of the homes, staring at the pale, white ass of a Marine. He’s naked from the waist down, taking a dump in their front yard.
A Marine on Espera’s team who’s helping him pick up the trash gestures toward this odd scene and says, “Can you imagine if this was reversed, and some army came into suburbia and was crapping in everyone’s front lawns? It’s fucking wild.”
Colbert tunes in the BBC. The men receive the first hard reports of the heavy fighting in Nasiriyah, of Americans being captured, of mass casualties among the Marines.
None of the younger Marines listening to the reports shows much reaction. But the news hits Gunny Wynn, the platoon sergeant, hard.
“I can’t fucking believe it,” he says. “How did so many Marines