Generation Kill - Evan Wright [96]
FOLLOWING ENCINO MAN’S pep talk, Fick now piles on more depressing news. “Yesterday, Marines in a supply convoy south of here were caught in an RPG ambush. They were cut off and surrounded by bad guys. They called in for help, but by the time it arrived one was dead and one was missing.”
No one knows for sure what happened to the missing Marine, but according to Fick (and to media reports), it’s believed that the Marine was killed, that his corpse was mutilated, dragged through a town and strung up for public display. Hearing this account, Lovell turns to his men and vows, “I am not going to be a POW, and I’m not going to die here.”
The Marines aren’t just grim now. They’re slightly freaked out by the specter of mobs attacking them. They can’t help but think of the Army Rangers who were attacked and mutilated in Somalia. By coincidence, the last movie shown to their unit at Camp Mathilda before they embarked on the invasion was Black Hawk Down, the slow-motion retelling of disaster befalling a small band of Americans trapped in a hostile third-world city they’d entered to liberate. The parallels now seem clear.
Doc Bryan leans against the wheel of a Humvee, telling his fellow Marines, in all seriousness, “What we should do is paint skulls on our faces. Come into these towns like demons. These are primitive people. We would scare the shit out of them. We need to use fear, not give in to it.”
Carazales, the twenty-one-year-old who now serves as the driver on Kocher’s team, says, “What we ought to do is send everyone off to Ace Hardware, get some chain saws, capture some Fedayeen, cut their limbs off, tie them to wheelchairs, load them in a C-130, and drop them on Baghdad. We’ll just sit back in our Humvees reading Playboys.”
Carazales is not much taller than an M-16 rifle. He has a Marine Corps eagle-globe-and-anchor tattoo on one leg and a BORN LOSER tattoo on the other. He wound up in the Corps, he says, “Because I got tricked into this motherfucker. I was eighteen, in jail, facing probation, and the DA and a Marine recruiter made a deal I couldn’t refuse.” He complains, “If I weren’t in the Marines, by now I’d be making real money. I’d’ve worked my way up to fourteen dollars an hour, working on rigs or as a welder’s assistant.”
Carazales is from Cuero, Texas, hates the Marine Corps, hates officers, hates rich people. “They should make a holiday every year where if you make less than thirty thousand dollars a year you get to drive into rich neighborhoods and fuck up rich people’s houses. Go inside and break their shit. Every blue-collar man gets to sleep in a white-collar man’s house.” Sometimes he asks fellow Marines, “Have you ever read the Communist Manifesto? That sounds ideal. How the upper classes are oppressing the lower classes. That’s how it happens back home. Rich people, corporations, get all sorts of secret government handouts they don’t tell us about.”
Not only is Carazales apparently the battalion’s leading Communist, he’s also among the most popular men in Bravo Company. He’s a POG mechanic, but he volunteered to drive for Kocher, one of his closest friends, after Kocher’s original driver, Darnold, was shot in Al Gharraf. Now, not only does he drive for Kocher’s team, he’s still responsible for maintaining the battalion’s vehicles. He seldom sleeps, and his face and hands are invariably black with axle grease, hence his nickname: “Dirty Earl.”
Volunteering to be on Kocher’s team has also spared him from one of the most onerous burdens in the company. Carazales previously had to drive for Captain America. Now, sitting around waiting to begin their hunt for ambushes