Hella Nation - Evan Wright [145]
No Marines were injured in the engagement. Among some, affection for Dollard actually grew. “It wouldn’t make sense to anyone who wasn’t there,” says Welsh, “but Pat brought this civilian craziness to our lives. He made being in Iraq fun.”
Among troops, Dollard’s next stunt gave him almost mythic status as a wild man. For several weeks an urban legend circulated on the base that a derelict former palace beyond their perimeter was a whorehouse. Marines talked of seeing attractive young women, dressed in provocative clothes and makeup, coming and going from it. But given the abductions and beheadings meted out to unaccompanied Westerners, no one dared leave their fortified perimeter to investigate—until Dollard informed them that he was going out alone to search for the alleged whorehouse.
According to Wong, he and other young Marines decided to help. “We gave him a pistol and a grenade and showed him how to work the shit. We told him, ‘If you start shooting, we’ll come running after you,’ but, you know, we weren’t allowed to leave the patrol base.”
As Marines watched from the base, Dollard walked alone into the city. He says all he found in the shattered palace was a family living in the rubble. Walking to the rear of the building, he found a hole blasted through the back wall, which offered a view into the city, where something caught his eye. “It was like this blue sign. I don’t remember if there was a crescent on it or not,” Dollard says, “but something about it said ‘pharmacy’ to me.”
He set off into the city toward the blue sign. His instincts proved correct. The shop with the sign was a pharmacy, where Dollard lived out a drug addict’s dream. Armed, dressed in American military attire, he entered the shop to take anything he wanted. “The man at the counter just looked at me,” Dollard says. “I showed my weapons and pointed at the stuff on the shelves. The man started speaking in Arabic, but I heard the word ‘analgesics.’ I knew that was the shit I wanted.”
Dollard left with several bottles of liquid Valium and other substances he wasn’t quite sure of. “I never pointed my gun at the guy,” he explains. “But it was robbery at gunpoint by implication.”
Dollard at one point claimed that his dealer in L.A. sent him an unsolicited care package of coke through military mail. Later, he retracts this story and denies robbing a pharmacy of Valium. But several Marines I interview confirm that Dollard shared liquid Valium and other substances with men in the unit, and say he told them they were legally acquired in Iraq. Two Marines claim to have done rails of coke provided by Dollard on top of their armored vehicle after their tour of duty on the way back to Kuwait. “The shit we got into with Pat was crazy,” says one.
Dollard himself contradicts one of his retractions later while showing me raw footage he shot. “You can tell we’re all on Valium,” he says, “because everyone is heavy-tongued when we talk.”
Hours of tape Dollard has shown me reveal an embedded reporter verging out of control. In one sequence, filmed at a checkpoint where Marines are stopping civilian cars, Dollard cuts in front of the Marines to accost the occupants. A Marine shouts at the driver, “You got any bombs, dickface? Any booms? Any women?”
Dollard backs away, laughing, then shouts to nearby Marines, “Will you fucking kill something while I am here?”
Dollard argues that his reckless behavior was calculated to get the Marines to loosen up in front of his camera. Leaving aside whatever damage he did to the combat effectiveness of the unit by distributing drugs, as well as the harm he did to American-Iraqi relations by vandalizing a mosque and robbing a drugstore while dressed as a U.S. soldier, his footage from Iraq stands as a peculiar and often