Hella Nation - Evan Wright [144]
As far as the troops were concerned, Dollard was now in. Says Callan, “For the younger guys he became, like, their leader. Nobody from the command ever told us he was attached to us. He just kind of went out for a ride with us one time, then said, ‘I’m gonna get my stuff,’ and he moved in.”
From a First Amendment standpoint, it’s to be applauded that commanders never sought to supervise the activities of their embedded reporter from Hollywood. But to Callan, Dollard was a constant headache. “I’m the guy that has to talk to these guys’ mothers if one of them gets killed. With Pat around, it was hard to get people to do their jobs.”
Dollard claims he was sober when he arrived in Iraq, but he soon fell off the wagon. As one Marine describes it, “One afternoon, on patrol, we bought beer from a hajji.” Later, back at the base, he says, “We all got buzzed, and Pat was like, ‘Let’s get Mohawks.’”
After Dollard shaved the word “DIE” in his chest hair, the night was immortalized in the photo he e-mailed back to friends in Hollywood. By then, Dollard was wearing Marine fatigues. Another reporter at the camp recalls, “I was there when the commander, a lieutenant colonel, saw this clown running around in cammies with a Mohawk. The colonel called over the platoon sergeant of the unit he was with and asked, ‘Is that your fucking reporter?’”
Welsh and the others were ordered to shave off their Mohawks. Shortly after the incident, the platoon Welsh and Callan belonged to was ordered to Al-Musayyib, a town of an estimated ten thousand on the Euphrates where a few days earlier insurgents had destroyed one of two main bridges with a truck bomb. Their platoon was sent in to hold the remaining bridge. Dollard accompanied them—fewer than two dozen troops in three light armored vehicles—as they rolled into the center of Al-Musayyib. At sunset, a muezzin sang calls to prayer from loudspeakers on a nearby mosque, and the Marines were ordered on foot patrols through the narrow streets surrounding their position. Dollard joined them.
Unfortunately, the patrol Dollard accompanied encountered an Iraqi selling whiskey. Dollard purchased several bottles and drank himself into a blackout. Callan says, “He was wandering around singing and spewing stupid shit. It was the middle of the night, and he was turning on the light to his camera to film us, putting a spotlight on us in the middle of our security patrols.”
Sergeant Brandon Wong, another Marine in the unit, who was then twenty-two, says, “When Pat first showed up in Iraq he was all, like, he’s an alcoholic and can’t drink.
“We saw what he meant that night. He was fucking trashed. Pat ran up to a mosque and ripped the fucking sign off it”—a cloth banner with hand-painted Arabic on it. Later that night, Wong says, “a patrol of Humvees was driving by and I look and there’s Pat just standing in the middle of the fucking road trying to wave them through, like he’s directing traffic.”
The Marines returned from their patrol before dawn and were allotted a couple of hours to sleep. Dollard continued babbling and singing—a sort of shanty that went, as Callan recalls, “‘Three bottles of whiskey and a couple of hajji sodas and just got shitty.’ ”
The antics pushed Wong to the breaking point. “I could not fucking sleep because of his ass,” he says. “I flipped out on him.” Wong, who later became friends with Dollard, regrets what happened next. “I pulled my gun on him. I put it to his head and told him he’d better shut the fuck up or I would pull the trigger.” Wong adds, “It’s fucked up to say now, but I really didn’t care if he lived or died.”
Other Marines talked Wong out of shooting Dollard. Callan wasn’t told about Wong’s threat on Dollard’s life until the next day. He recalls, “When I heard about it, I said, ‘You should have just shot him.’”
The following morning Dollard returned to the main base with another unit, while Callan’s platoon remained in Al-Musayyib. At about noon, a mob gathered in front of the mosque whose banner Dollard