Hella Nation - Evan Wright [164]
This time in Iraq, Dollard does not engage in the antics that had so entertained and enraged troops on his first tour. In the course of nearly five months, Dollard films Marines on well over two hundred combat patrols. Says Lieutenant Awtry, “Nobody covered the war like he did.”
While in Iraq, Dollard sends me an e-mail, revisiting his Hollywood past:
“I was like a junkie who never kicked because someone kept throwing me a bag of heroin every Friday. Who loves you, baby? If you’re an agent, you really don’t want to know the answer. . . . You ever watch terrified 55-year-old men begging for praise every week in a staff meeting . . . ? It’s not pretty. Any Hollywood agent or executive who criticizes my career doesn’t understand how much of a geek they sound like. ‘He wasn’t really one of us.’ No shit, Maynard, I didn’t want to be a geek like you. Go back to your cappuccino, auto-fellatio, and faux tough-guy posturing. It took me forever to escape, and that’s arguably pathetic, but I have the whole third act of my life left, and there’s an old Hollywood maxim: The first two acts of a movie can suck, but if the third act rocks, everyone leaves the theater saying, ‘Damn, that was a great movie.’”
All of Dollard’s efforts seem geared toward that third act. When he survives the February 18 bombing that killed two Marines, Dollard continues to join patrols, surviving yet another vehicle bombing on March 9. At the ceremony troops hold in Iraq for their brother Marines killed there, Dollard is given a place of respect.
HOMECOMING
IN LATE MARCH, Dollard flies home with the Marines. An ex-girlfriend of Dollard’s drives to the base at Twentynine Palms, California, to join military families at the welcoming ceremony. Dollard had phoned her asking if she would take him back to L.A., promising that he had cleaned up his act. “The parents of the boy Pat was with when he died met him and were hugging him and it was so powerful,” she says. “Then we went out to a restaurant and Pat started drinking and told me he wasn’t coming back to L.A., and he disappeared.”
In April he calls me from an undisclosed location. Dollard says he is not doing well, and insists he must tell me about the February 18 bombing that killed Second Lieutenant Almar L. Fitzgerald, twenty-three, and Corporal Matthew D. Conley, twenty-one. Dollard says he was in the lead Humvee of a patrol going through Ramadi when a bomb hit the Humvee behind his. The patrol stopped. Nobody could see what was going on, because it was the middle of the night and the city, with no electricity, was pitch-black. Adding to the confusion, the Marines’ radios stopped working. Lieutenant Fitzgerald, the officer seated next to Dollard, ordered Conley, the radioman, to exit the vehicle and see what was going on with the Humvee behind them that had just been hit. As Conley stepped out, insurgents detonated a second bomb buried in the asphalt, underneath their Humvee. Conley was blown to pieces. Dollard’s armored door flew open, and he was thrown from the Humvee. A four-inch piece of shrapnel had penetrated his calf muscle, and he was covered in diesel fuel, but he was otherwise OK. As insurgents began to rake the area with machine-gun fire, he crawled back to the crumpled, smoking Humvee and climbed inside for cover.
I ask him what happened to Fitzgerald. “He was next to me,” Dollard says, “pushed forward in a prone position, dying.” Over the phone he emits a series of sharp noises. He’s sobbing. He hangs up, then phones back about half an hour later. “This is why I’ve got to stop doing drugs and finish this project,” he says, sounding desperate. “It’s their film.”
He turns to two former Marines to help him complete his project. Sergeant Brandon Welsh, honorably discharged in early 2006, and another young vet offer Dollard a place to stay at a town house they rent in a Sun Belt metropolis. (Dollard