Generation Kill - Evan Wright [49]
This is not to say I’m not scared. In fact, I’m so scared I feel not completely in my body. It’s become a thing—heavy and cumbersome—I’m keeping as close to the ground as possible, trying to take care of it as best I can, even though I don’t feel all the way in it. As I squeeze flat against the earth, so do the Marines around me in Second Platoon. Guys who’d been laughing and joking a few moments earlier drop down and embrace the earth. I look up and see Espera five meters in front of me, cursing and wiggling, trying to pull down his MOPP suit. Espera makes no show of trying to laugh off his fear. He’s wrestling his penis out of his pants so he can take a leak while lying on his side. “I don’t want to fucking piss on myself,” he grunts.
The Marines took a combat-stress class before the war. An instructor told them that 25 percent of them can expect to lose control of their bladders or bowels when they take fire. Fearing one of these embarrassing accidents, when the bullets start flying they piss and shit frantically whenever they can.
The guy on my other side is Pappy, the team leader they all look up to as “the coldest killer in the battalion.” Since my arrival with the platoon, he’s been one of the most hesitant to talk to me. Early on at Camp Mathilda, he had said in his polite, North Carolina accent, “It’s nothing personal, but I just don’t have good feelings about reporters.”
Now he catches my eye and flashes a smile. He seems neither giddy, as are some of the others, nor terrified. But he looks a lot older, suddenly, as if the lines around his eyes have deepened in the hour since we drove up here.
“How are you doing?” I ask.
“I’m not like some of these younger Marines, eager to get some,” Pappy says. “I’d be just as happy if they ordered us to turn around right now and we drove back to Mathilda. Just the same, I want to be with these guys so I can do what I can to help them live.”
I ask him what the hell we’re doing here waiting around by the entrance to the bridge while the bombs fall. I can’t figure out why Bravo company is up high by the road, where the men are exposed, yet can’t fire their weapons for fear of hitting Marines in surrounding fields.
Pappy’s response is sobering. “Our job is to kamikaze into the city and collect casualties,” he says. “We’re just waiting for the order to go.”
“How many casualties are there?” I ask.
“Casualties?” he says. “They’re not there yet. We’re the reaction force for an attack that’s coming across the bridge. RCT-1 is going to be moving up here any minute and crossing the bridge. We’re going in during the fight to pick up the wounded.”
It’s the first time anyone has told me anything about this mission that I’m accompanying them on. I don’t know why, but the idea of waiting around for casualties that don’t exist yet strikes me as more macabre than the idea of actual casualties.
Yet despite how much it sucks here, it’s kind of exciting, too. I had almost looked down on the Marines’ shows of moto, the way they shouted Get some! and acted so excited about being in a fight. But the fact is, there’s a definite sense of exhilaration every time there’s an explosion and you’re still there afterward. There’s another kind of exhilaration, too. Everyone is side by side, facing the same big fear: death. Usually, death is pushed to the fringes in the civilian world. Most people face their end pretty much alone, with a few family members if they are lucky. Here, the Marines face death together, in their youth. If anyone dies, he will do so surrounded by the very best friends he believes he will ever have.
As mortars continue to explode around us, I watch Garza pick through an MRE. He takes out a packet of Charms candies and hurls it into the gunfire. Marines view Charms as almost infernal talismans. A few days earlier, in the Humvee, Garza saw me pull Charms out of my MRE pack. His eyes lighted up and he offered me a highly prized bag of Combos cheese pretzels