by Evan Wright
Their final night in Baghdad is spent camped in the playing field of the soccer stadium that once belonged to Saddam’s son Uday. Tonight, the usual gun battles fought by locals start before sunset. Recon Marines keeping watch high up on the bleachers come under fire. As rounds zing past, one of the men up in the bleachers, caught by surprise, stumbles as he tries to pull his machine gun off the fence and take cover. His arms flail while he tries to regain his balance. More gunshots ring out. Marines watching on the grass below burst into laughter.
Later, several Marines in First Recon gather in a dark corner of the stadium to drink toasts to a one-armed Iraqi man in Baghdad who sold them locally distilled gin for five American dollars per fifth. Generally, it doesn’t require any alcohol to lower the Marines’ inhibitions. But now, with the gin flowing, a Marine brings up a subject so taboo I doubt he’d ever broach it sober among his buddies. “You know,” he says, “I’ve fired 203-grenade rounds into windows, through a door once. But the thing I wish I’d seen—I wish I could have seen a grenade go into someone’s body and blow it up. You know what I’m saying?” The other Marines just listen silently in the darkness.
THIRTY-FOUR
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AT FIRST LIGHT ON APRIL 19, the battalion leaves Baghdad on a deserted super-highway and sets up camp sixty kilometers south of the city. The encampment offers a familiar setting—Humvees nestled beneath cammie nets in a barren field surrounded by low berms. The next morning, April 20, is Easter Sunday. It’s almost like Florida weather this morning. It’s humid and bright, but there are clouds in the sky as well, and it rains periodically through the sunlight.
Navy Lieutenant Commander Bodley, the chaplain, consecrates this day by pounding a crude wooden cross into the mud. He drapes it with an olive-drab rag to symbolize Christ’s body on the cross.
At nine in the morning, the chaplain gathers about fifty faithful Marines—predominantly officers and personnel from battalion support units—who sit in the dirt in front of the cross, rifles propped up beside them, and leads them in a mumbling version of the hymn “He Rose from the Dead.” Then the chaplain tells them, “I have good news.” He announces that a Marine has chosen this special day to be baptized.
When Colbert hears of the good news after watching the service from his Humvee in the distance, he cannot conceal his outrage. To him, religion is right up there with country music as an expression of collective idiocy. “Give me a break,” he says. “Marines getting baptized? This used to be a place of men with pure warrior spirit. Chaplains are a goddamn waste.”
But Colbert’s disgust this morning isn’t merely about religion. He and others in the platoon are annoyed by continued threats from Encino Man and Casey Kasem to punish Fick and Gunny Wynn for disobeying orders. Encino Man remains angry at Fick and Gunny Wynn for questioning his plan to call in an artillery strike nearly on top of their position at Ar Rifa. Since that episode, Fick and Gunny Wynn have persisted in questioning Encino Man’s orders, most recently in Baghdad when Fick declined to send a patrol out at night.
Casey Kasem has complained vociferously about the “lack of obedience to orders” displayed by the leaders of Second Platoon. “Their job is to execute whatever the commander tells them,” he’s fumed, “and they don’t.”
While following orders is at the heart of good military discipline, the men have no faith in the layer of command above Fick, starting with Encino Man and his loyal enlisted helper, Casey Kasem. “Those two incompetents are dangerous out here,” one of Colbert’s friends in the platoon says. “‘Obedience to orders’ to them means they don’t want to look bad to their commanders. They’re afraid to question orders. Fick and Gunny Wynn are great men because they have the courage to do the right thing.”
THE DEBATE over questioning orders from superiors becomes far less abstract the evening of April 22, at First Recon’s camp south of Baghdad. This night a battalion watch officer, whose job is to sit in for Lt. Col. Ferrando and, in effect, babysit the battalion when he’s indisposed, mistakenly issues an order for Marines to go out in the darkness and mark the location of a minefield by the highway north of the camp. The watch officer radios Capt. Patterson and asks him to send some of his men in Alpha to escort combat engineers on the mission.
The mines were discovered a few days earlier by Patterson’s men along the highway a kilometer north of the camp. Combat engineers have been removing mines all day, but hundreds remain. The watch officer erroneously believes there’s an order to mark the location of the remaining mines with chemlites. Patterson tells him that he must be mistaken. There’s a division-wide order banning Marines from operating in minefields at night. Besides, thousands of American military vehicles have passed by the mines in recent weeks without incident. The job can wait until morning, Patterson tells him, declining to execute the order.
But the watch officer persists. He radios Encino Man and asks him to send Marines out in the dark to mark the minefield. Encino Man promises to push Marines out immediately. He later tells me, “I didn’t want to send Marines out there, but the watch officer is the voice of the battalion commander [Ferrando]. I couldn’t say no.”
The operation gets into full swing when Encino Man contacts Captain America and issues the command for his men to accompany three engineers into the minefield. In the wake of the episode in which Captain America taunted an EPW with his bayonet, he was reinstated to command of his platoon following a brief suspension but is still awaiting final disposition on possible disciplinary action from Ferrando. The enlisted men, Kocher and Redman, were cleared of wrongdoing in that matter, and Captain America now orders their team and another to transport the engineers up the road to the minefield.
The Marines reach the minefield at about nine-thirty that night, parking two Humvees on the highway, leaving their headlights on. Kocher steps onto the road with three engineers, among them Gunnery Sergeant David Dill and Staff Sergeant Ray Valdez. The plan tonight is simply for the engineers to stand on the road and toss chemlites into the minefield that runs along the side of it.
The engineers earlier spent the day in the field removing more than 150 mines. Dill, a compactly built twenty-seven-year-old with a tattoo on his right calf that says MINEFIELD MAINTENANCE is passionate about land mines. Before he was attached to First Recon he spent a year at Guantánamo in Cuba removing mines from the fields the U.S. sowed there in the 1960s. Other engineers who work with him consider Dill an inspirational figure. “He makes everybody excited about our jobs,” says a Marine who serves under him.
Combat engineers tend to be fanatical about their profession. Perhaps it’s a prerequisite. De-mining, which is usually done completely by touch—probing the earth with plastic rods, then feeling each mine to check for antihandling booby traps and removing it by hand—is highly stressful. According to their own guidelines, engineers are not supposed to pull more than twelve antitank mines a day, given the toll it takes on their nerves.
During the afternoon of April 22, Dill removed more than thirty mines from the field beside the road (with his team gathering an additional 120, which they detonated in a terrific explosion just before reentering the field after dark). Now, standing on the road in the glare of the Humvees’ headlights, Dill observes what appears to be a mine in a portion of the field believed to have been cleared. He and Valdez, twenty-eight, step off the road to investigate.
A third engineer standing far back on the road, twenty-three-year-old Sergeant Randy Weiss, sees Dill and Valdez walk off the road and is about to caution them but decides against it. Weiss later tells me, “If anyone knows what he’s doing, it’s Gunny Dill.” Not only is Dill Weiss’s mentor within the Marines, they are good friends. Both of them married, each with a young child, they live near each other off-base, and their wives are close.
There’s a tremoundous blast as Dill steps on a mine at the edge of the road. Weiss is temporarily blinded by spraying debris, even though he’s nearly ten meters back from the explosion.
Kocher, standing directly behind Dill on the road, is thrown onto his back. He goes temporarily deaf from the blast, and his eyes reflexively shut. In the immediate aftermath, only his olfactory sense still functions. He smells burning flesh. Kocher opens his eyes and sees Dill lying a few meters out in the field, thrown there by the explosion.
When Kocher rises to his feet, the ringing in his ears subsides. He hears Dill yelling, “I’m bleeding out! Throw me a tourniquet.”
Kocher and his team’s corpsman, forty-six-year-old Navy Hospitalman First Class George Graham, walk about four meters into the minefield. Dill screams, “Get the fuck out of here!”
Kocher sees that Dill’s foot hangs from his leg at a weird angle. The boot is shredded. His toes are exposed, dangling by some skin. His heel is blown off, and his tib-fib bones are sticking out, the ends charred and smoking. He stepped on the smallest mine in the field, a BS-50 Italian “toe-popper.” He and Graham tourniquet him off and carry him back to the road. (The next day, when engineers return to the field, they find two other mines a few inches from the footprints made by Kocher and Graham.)
Redman had been manning the Humvee’s .50-cal ten meters back on the road when the explosion went off. The first thing Redman heard in the aftermath was Captain America screaming, “I’m hit! I’m hit!”
For an instant, Redman, he later admits, is flooded with a sense of relief. If Captain America were indeed taken out of action, a lot of Marines’ prayers would be answered. But it turns out the shrapnel Captain America thinks is in his arm is nothing but an imaginary pain.
Redman leaps into the front of the Humvee and joins Carazales, the driver. They try to radio the battalion for medical assistance. First Recon’s camp is only one or two kilometers distant, but the radios aren’t functioning.
Redman jumps onto the highway. He sees Valdez wandering beside the road, holding his hands over his eyes, moaning.
Redman pulls Valdez onto the pavement. They kneel facing each other and Redman grabs him by the shoulders to steady him. “Dude, you’re gonna be okay,” Redman says. “Let go of your eyes.”
Redman gently pulls Valdez’s hands away from his face.
“Are my eyelids there?” Valdez asks.
“Yeah,” Redman says, not really certain if they are there. He shines a flashlight into his face.
“Are my eyes there?” Valdez asks. “I can’t see nothing.”
Redman suppresses the urge to vomit. Both of Valdez’s eyes are filled with pebbles and debris. His left eye is packed. Bloody tissue puffs out around it like a blossom.
“Dude, your eye is gone,” Redman says.
Redman carefully plucks out the debris from the mangled hole that used to be Valdez’s left eye. As he shines the light into it in order to put a dressing on it, Valdez says, “I can see your light. My eye must be okay.”
“I guess I was wrong,” Redman says. “I’m really sorry.”
But Valdez’s eye is gone. The nerves are sending false signals to his brain, fooling him into thinking he can see the light.
They load the two men into the Humvees, one in each. Getting Valdez in is easy. He can sit upright. Loading Dill in with his toes and foot hanging by the skin, and charred bones sticking out, is not so easy. They have to drape him sideways across the backseats in Kocher’s Humvee, while trying not to jiggle his loose foot too much. Dill curses steadily, “Fuck, fuck, fuck it hurts.”
“Give him morphine,” Captain America says.
Everyone ignores him. Even the most boot Marine knows you don’t give morphine to a guy with an unstabilized, bleeding wound. It can make his blood pressure drop and kill him.
Captain America jumps in Kocher’s vehicle. The camp is about a kilometer due south on the perfectly straight highway. Driving back there should be a simple proposition. But Captain America manages to screw this up.
“Turn off here,” he says. “I know a shortcut.”
“Let’s take the road we know,” Kocher says.
After weeks of having his authority mocked and stripped away by his men, Captain America decides to assert himself. He orders Carazales to make the turn. “Do what I say,” he says. “I know this shortcut.”
Fifty meters into Captain America’s shortcut, the Humvee drops into a sabka patch. Carazales tries rocking the vehicle out from the tar and quicksand, but it only sinks deeper. Dill, lying in the back with his partially connected foot and toes bouncing around, howls in agony.
The Marines are forced to carry him out to the second Humvee. They make it back to the camp and medevac the two engineers. Dill loses his right leg up to the knee, including his tattoo. Valdez loses his left eye.
The next morning, April 23, Weiss, whose face is polka-dotted with cuts from the blast but who is otherwise fine, returns to the minefield with another engineer. He clears twelve more mines, and they finish marking the field.
When I ask Encino Man about this episode a few days later, he insists he did the right thing in not questioning the order to send the men out there. “Gunny Dill was the mistake in the whole thing,” he says. “He’s the one that stepped off the road.”
THIRTY-FIVE
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AT TEN IN THE MORNING on April 23, First Recon drives south on Highway 8 to its final camp in Iraq outside of Ad Diwaniyah, 180 kilometers from Baghdad. The battalion joins about 18,000 other Marines from the First Division occupying a former Iraqi military complex—barracks, supply depots and training fields spread across fifteen square kilometers. While most of First Recon’s Marines wind up occupying brick barracks, through the luck of the draw those in Bravo Company end up in a former tank repair yard in a windswept corner of the camp. For the next six weeks, they will sleep in the open on a four-by-forty-meter concrete strip.
Surveying this infernal spot with an almost satisfied smile the afternoon he arrives, one of the men in Second Platoon says, “One universal fact of being in the Marine Corps is that no matter where we go in the world, we always end up in some random shitty place.”
Bravo’s Second and Third platoons spend most of their daytime hours here, as well as their nights, as if they’re living on a ship. The camp’s burn pits and latrines are located adjacent to this sleeping/living area. Plastic MRE wrappings and human excrement, mixed with diesel fuel in steel barrels, are burned round the clock just ten meters from the men. When the wind is still, they live in a haze of flies, mosquitoes and pungent, black smoke. When it blows, they’re inundated with dust. Shamal storms, with fifty-mile-per-hour winds, strike every day, usually lasting three to six hours. During them, Marines just lie on the concrete pad with ponchos wrapped around their heads. Daytime temperatures now typically hover around 115 degrees. Wild dogs are kept at bay by a Marine gunnery sergeant who roams the camp with a shotgun, blasting away at them.
According to Navy Commander Kevin Moore, the division surgeon, injuries among Marines at the camp are running high from guys picking up the unexploded ordnance littering the place. Numerous cases of malaria have occurred, and everyone is becoming ill with what Moore calls “ass-to-hand” disease. A few Marines have undergone psychotic episodes and have been picked up running around the wire, screaming at imaginary Fedayeen. Moore attributes most of these cases to temporary psychosis induced by overuse of stimulants like Ripped Fuel.
One Marine in First Recon’s support unit freaks out early in the stay at this camp. The episode is prompted after a Game Boy (which he brought into Iraq in violation of battalion regulations) disappeared from his rucksack. Early one afternoon following the battalion’s arrival at Ad Diwaniyah, he runs into the warehouse serving as a chow hall with his M-16, puts it to the head of the suspected thief, racks a round into the chamber and screams, “Give me back my Game Boy!” Other Marines talk him out of pulling the trigger. The battalion isolates him for a few days, then returns him to his unit. The Game Boy is never recovered.
On my third morning here, I’m sitting with Colbert’s team, eating an MRE breakfast. Most Marines still haven�
�t had a proper shower since they left Camp Mathilda more than a month ago. A few rinsed off by spraying themselves with a fire hose in a warehouse they occupied in Baghdad, but not everyone had a chance to use it. Fick washes up for breakfast by spitting in his hands and wiping them on his dirty fatigues.
Colbert says, “You know, I don’t miss anything from home. The only exception is my bike. I miss that. Speed, solitude and no one can touch me.”
“You mean you’re out here in the middle of nowhere, and you miss being alone?” Person laughs quietly. He doesn’t say anything else, which is kind of amazing. After a month of insane, nonstop chattering in the Humvee, he barely talks now. When Person detoxes from Ripped Fuel, endless days of mortar fire, ambushes and sleepless nights behind the wheel of the Humvee, he turns into a soft-spoken guy from Nevada, Missouri, pop. 8,607. He now admits to me, despite his relentless mockery of the Corps, “When I get out of the Marines in November, I’m going to miss it.”
In spite of the austerities at the platoon’s encampent, spirits are high. The men build an open-air gym. They scavenge gears and drive shafts from wrecked Iraqi tanks and turn them into free weights and chin-up bars they hang from concrete pilings. They run for kilometers in the 115-degree heat. They practice hand-to-hand combat in the dirt. They pace back and forth barefoot through gravel to build calluses on their feet. The Marines sleep through each night for the first time in weeks, boil coffee every morning on fires started with C-4 explosive, play cards, dip tin after tin of Copenhagen and spend days, when they are not working out, engaging in endless bull sessions. “Man, this is fucking awesome,” Second Platoon’s twenty-two-year-old Corporal James Chaffin declares one morning. “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to work out, dip and hang out with the best guys in the world.”
