Generation Kill - Evan Wright [9]
The absurdities of the military amuse Fick. A few weeks after 9/11, he led an infantry platoon on a clandestine helicopter mission into Pakistan to retrieve a Black Hawk downed by the Afghan border. After that, Fick and his men were among the first Marines to seize the ground in southern Afghanistan at Camp Rhino. When he returned home after weeks of living in frozen fighting holes, the Marines sent him a bill for five hundred dollars, charging him for the food rations he’d consumed during his combat deployment. He says, “We had a saying about the military in Afghanistan: ‘The incompetent leading the unwilling to do the unnecessary.’ ”
Despite his cavalier humor, Fick finished at the top of his class in Officer Candidates School and near the top of the Marine Corps’ tough Basic Reconnaissance Course. He is also something of a closet idealist. His motivation for joining the Marines is a belief about which he is quietly passionate. “At Dartmouth, there was a sense that an ROTC program, which the school did not have, would militarize the campus,” he explains. “They have it backward. ROTC programs at Ivy League campuses would liberalize the military. That can only be good for this country.”
During our first meal together, he explains the breakdown of First Recon. The 374 Marines in First Recon Battalion are spread among four companies—Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and an auxiliary Headquarters and Support company. Alpha, Bravo and Charlie are the frontline combat companies containing the battalion’s 160 actual Recon Marines. The rest of the battalion’s personnel fill support positions. Fick commands Bravo Company’s Second Platoon. He’s held the position for less than a year, having entered First Recon after his return from Afghanistan.
Platoons are the basic building block of each company. There are twenty-one enlisted Marines in each platoon, as well as a commander and a medical corpsman (who is an enlisted man provided by the Navy). Enlisted Marines—that is, those who are not officers—function within a complex web of hierarchy. Privates answer to corporals, and corporals to sergeants. Above sergeants there are staff sergeants, gunnery sergeants, first sergeants, master gunnery sergeants and sergeant majors. Above them all are officers.
Yet, as Fick explains, due to the traditional role of First Recon, in which small teams ordinarily function independently behind enemy lines, the men who are most trusted within a platoon are often the enlisted team leaders. Each platoon is divided into three teams, each led by one man, usually a sergeant. These men, like Colbert in Fick’s platoon, often have more training and experience than the officers commanding them.
“The men naturally look up to someone like Colbert,” Fick says. “He’s been in the reconnaissance community for years. If you walk in here as an officer and start throwing your weight around based on rank alone, enlisted men will look at you like you’ve got a dick growing out of your forehead. You have to earn their respect.”
First Recon, according to Fick, contains a heightened level of tensions between officers and enlisted men. “This unit fosters initiative and individual thinking. These guys are independent operators. That’s great ninety-nine percent of the time. But the flip side is they don’t play well with others.”
Despite the frictions, Fick believes in the men he commands. “I have the best platoon,” he says repeatedly. Away from his men, Fick cannot talk about them without smiling.
It’s because of his enthusiasm that I decide to join his platoon for the war. Initially, the battalion had planned for me to spend the invasion riding with the support company in the rear. But in exchange for handing over my satellite phone—severing all contact with the outside world—First Recon’s commander, Lt. Col. Ferrando, allows me to move in with Bravo Second Platoon and ride with its Team One, led by Colbert.
IT’S AFTER DARK when Fick pushes me through the entrance