Generation Kill - Evan Wright [91]
“This is all the tough-guy shit I need,” he says. “I don’t like nothing about combat. I don’t like the shooting. I don’t like the action.”
Espera believes the whole war is being fought for the same reason all others have for the past several hundred years. “White man’s gotta rule the world,” he says.
Though Espera is one quarter Caucasian, he grew up mistrusting “the white man.” A few years ago, he deliberately avoided earning his community-college degree, though he was just a couple of credits short of receiving it, because, he says, “I didn’t want some piece of paper from the white master saying I was qualified to function in his world.”
Before joining the Marines, Espera worked as a car repo man in South Central Los Angeles. While in a job he hated, he watched his friends and one close family member go to prison for violent crimes, which were fairly routine in his world. Then one day, after four years of repoing cars in L.A.’s poorest neighborhoods, Espera had an epiphany: “I was getting shot at, making chump change, so I could protect the assets of a bunch of rich white bankers. The whole time I’m hating on these motherfuckers, and I realized I’m their slave, doing their bidding. I thought, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”
So he enlisted in the Marines. Espera reasoned that as a Marine he might still be serving the white man, but he’d be doing so with “purity and honor.”
As he’s gotten older, Espera’s begun to accept that maybe the white man’s system isn’t all that bad. Travelling the world as a Marine has opened his eyes to stark differences between the way Americans and those in less fortunate parts of the planet live. “All these countries around the world, nobody’s fat,” he says. “Back home, fat motherfuckers are everywhere. Seventy-five percent of all Americans are fat. Do you know how hard it is to put on thirty pounds? A motherfucker has to sit on the couch and do nothing but eat all day. In America, white trash and poor Mexicans are all fat as motherfuckers. The white man created a system with so much excess, even the poor motherfuckers are fat.”
Those who know Espera understand he’s not a racist. He’s a humorist whose vitriol is tongue-in-cheek. Even so, Espera questions the white man’s wisdom in sending him tearing through a hostile country in an open Humvee. “Every time we roll through one of these cities, I think we’re going to die. Even now, dog, sitting here in the shade, my heart’s beating one hundred forty times per minute. For what? So some colonel can make general by throwing us into another firefight?”
In their most paranoid moments, some Marines believe Ferrando is trying to get them killed. Sergeant Christopher Wasik, a thirty-one-year-old Marine who sometimes serves as Ferrando’s driver, comes over this day to share some coffee and gripe with his friends in Second Platoon. Before the invasion, Wasik openly rebelled against Ferrando’s Grooming Standard after having been severely upbraided for allowing his mustache to grow too far beyond the corners of his mouth. He shaved it into a perfect Hitler mustache, which he wore for weeks at Camp Mathilda. Nevertheless, his rebellion was a failure. His superiors commended his Hitler mustache for complying with the Grooming Standard. Now, he and the other Marines speculate on Ferrando’s motives in Iraq. “In some morbid realm,” Wasik says, “it may be a possibility that the commander wants some of us to die, so when he sits around with other high leaders, they don’t snicker at him and ask what kind of shit he got into.”
WHATEVER FEELINGS Colbert has over his involvement in the shooting of the shepherds, he seems to have filed them away. His mood has been chipper since the all-night watch for the enemy