and i guess that i just don't know
(c) "Generation Kill" by Evan Wright
ранееOf the thousands of troops in the camp, the Recon Marines are easy to spot. Unlike infantry jarheads who work out in olive-drab shirts and shorts, Recon Marines appear on the gravel running track in all-black physical-training uniforms, a distinctive look augmented with black watch caps they don two hours before sunset. All day long, despite the shamal winds and choking dust, you see them practicing martial arts in the sand, or running on the gravel track, wearing combat boots, loaded down with weapons and packs weighing more than 100 pounds. Whenever a Recon Marine runs past on the track, carrying a particularly crushing load, his buddies pump their fists in the air and scream "Get some!"
In my first couple of days at the camp I'm placed in a tent with officers. I can't tell anybody apart; they all look the same in their desert camouflage fatigues. Most of the officers seem to be square-jawed, blue-eyed white guys in their mid- to late twenties. The initial reason I strike up an acquaintance with Lt. Fick, commander of the platoon I end up spending the war with, is he's easily recognizable. Though he's twenty-five, he has a loping, adolescent stride you can spot from a hundred meters away. He's one of fifty men who introduce themselves to me during my first twenty-four hours at the camp, but he's the only one I'm able to call by name on my way to the mess tent and ask if I can join him for dinner.
Вот оно чо, Михалыч
"The men naturally look up to someone like Colbert," Fick says. "He's been in the reconnaissance community for years. If you walk in here as an officer and start throwing your weight around based on rank alone, enlisted men will look at you like you've got a dick growing out of your forehead. You have to earn their respect."
Despite the frictions, Fick believes in the men he commands. "I have the best platoon," he says repeatedly. Away from his men, Fick cannot talk about them without smiling.
Fick clears his throat. He is younger than some of the sergeants he commands, and when he addresses the men, he often lowers his voice to a more mature and authoritative-sounding register. He introduces me in this official, Marine-officer voice, then leaves.
AWWWWWW
Doc Bryan, I later find out, is always pissed off at something, if not the presence of a reporter, then incompetent military leaders or the barbarity of war. He's a self-made man, son of a steamfitter from a small town outside of Philadelphia, the first in his family to attend college. He attended Lock Haven University, then the University of Pennsylvania on a football scholarship while he earned a master's in education. In his younger days, Doc Bryan had a lot of ambient rage he used to burn off in weekend bar fights. "I'm always angry," he later tells me. "I was born that way. I'm an asshole."
Док - любовь! Как метко написали на тумбе: Doc Bryan: always angry, never wrong
The top dogs in the platoon are the team leaders. You can immediately pick out these guys just by the way they move among the men. They have a swagger, a magnetism that pulls the other guys to them like rock stars. In this tent the three most revered are Sergeants Kocher, Patrick and Colbert. The three of them served on a Recon team together in Afghanistan under the leadership of Colbert.
Животный магнетизм, как говаривал Рон Уизли)
Patrick, a twenty-eight-year-old from a small mountain town in North Carolina, speaks with a mild Southern accent and has the gentle manners that go with it. With brown hair and blue eyes that have faint lines at the corners that crinkle when he smiles, he has a kindly, almost hangdog appearance. His fellow Marines call him "Pappy," and behind his back they speak of him in the most reverential terms. "You'd never think it to look at him," a Marine tells me, "but Pappy is straight up the coldest killer in the platoon. If you saw him on the street back in the civilian world, you'd just think he's the most average Joe out there. That's why
he's so dangerous."
Beneath his formal manners, there is another side to Colbert's personality. His back is tattooed in a garish wash of color depicting a Louis Royo illustration of a warrior princess babe from Heavy Metal magazine. He pays nearly $5,000 a year in auto-motorcycle insurance due to outrageous speeding tickets. He routinely drives his Yamaha R1 racing bike at 150 miles per hour on southern California's freeways, and his previous racing bike was rigged with model rocket engines by the exhaust pipe to shoot flames when he wanted to "scare the bejesus out of commuters."
В сериале, когда Брэд говорит, типа "I don't miss anything from home except for my bike", эту реплику прекрасно перевели на русский: "Я скучаю только по своему велосипеду". Велосипеду, бля. Так и вижу, как Колберт рассекает по иракским пустыням на велике Это он раньше почему такой злой был? Потому что у него велосипеда не было
There is idealism about their endeavor, but at the same time the whole point of their training is to commit the ultimate taboo: to kill. Their culture revels in this. At the end of team briefings, Marines put their hands together and shout, "Kill!" In keeping with the spirit of transgression, they also mock some of the most delicate social conventions in America. The Hispanics in the platoon refer to the white guys as "cracker-ass fucks," the whites refer to them as "muds" and to Spanish as "dirty spic talk," and they are the best of friends.
И в сериале это замечааательно показали на примере Чаффина и Гарзы) "Да ты буррито грёбаный" - "Да ты белая шваль" - "Ладно, братан, пойдём железо потягаем")
I make my last call before turning in my satellite phone to the battalion commander. The phone was provided by my editor to keep him updated on my movements, but I decide to call my girlfriend in Los Angeles instead. I'm not allowed to tell her we're leaving the camp. She says that everyone at home is expecting the war to start any day. People in Los Angeles are panicking. Her friends are driving to a cabin at Lake Arrowhead to wait out the war in safety. It seems unreal to me. I suppress the urge to ask her if J.Lo is dead.
In the platoon, Garza, twenty-two, is something of a cipher. He wears Coke bottle-lens glasses and a blue bandanna around his neck, which his grandmother, who raised him, gave him for good luck. She is an aloe picker in south Texas, and Garza always grins when he mentions her. "She used to beat me with a two-by-four when I was bad," he says. "That's 'cause she cares about me." Garza has a round head and is not particularly tall or imposing, yet he is one of the strongest Marines in the platoon. According to his buddies, he can bench-press ten repetitions of 300-pound free weights. He works out constantly. Every night at Mathilda he would follow his dinner with a glass of salt water and lemon wedges, or oranges rolled in salt. When I asked him what the point of his unusual diet was, he said, "It makes you tougher." He seldom talks, but frequently, while sitting alone, will suddenly begin shaking with quiet laughter, the only sound a whistling from his nose. Everyone in the platoon likes him. They call him the "Zen Master." But when they compliment him on his physical power, he just shrugs and says, "It's nothing. I've got retard strength."
I'm directly across from Person. Our faces are inches apart. His chest rises up and down quickly. He's breathing rapidly, too, which makes me feel better. Maybe I'm not the only one panicking.
Reyes has the insanely muscular body of a fantasy Hollywood action hero. Before joining the Marines, he lived in a dojo, competed nationally in kung fu and tai chi tournaments, and fought in exhibitions with the Chinese national team. He is the battalion's best martial artist, one of its strongest men, and seemingly one of the gayest. Though he is not gay in the sense of sexual orientation—Reyes, after all, is married—he is at least a highly evolved tough guy in touch with a well-developed feminine side. With his imposing build, dark, Mexican-American features and yet skin so pale it's almost porcelain, he is a striking figure. His fellow Marines call him "Fruity Rudy," because he is so beautiful.
"It doesn't mean you're gay if you think Rudy's hot. He's just so beautiful," Person explains. "We all think he's hot."
Еееее
While the other Marines spent their free time at Mathilda poring over porn and gun magazines, Reyes read self-affirming articles in Oprah's magazine, waxed his legs and chest and conducted afternoon yoga classes.
Руди такой Руди
The four Marines in Colbert's vehicle have already been sitting inside in total darkness, waiting for a few hours, when they receive the order.
"So we're going to go invade a country," Person says cheerily as he hits the ignition.
"I bet gas prices will be lower," says Trombley, who sits to my left in the backseat.
Luckily, Person is something of a genius when it comes to radios. The reason he's on Colbert's team is that despite his constant mockery of everything, Colbert considers him one of the most competent Marines in the platoon. He has voluminous knowledge of encryption protocols and a sixth sense for how to hot-wire bum radios, often by unplugging all the cables and licking the sockets, all while driving in the darkness. Teams in other platoons whose radio operators aren't as skilled sometimes resort to leaning out their doors and shouting.
With the effects of all the legal stimulants he's taking starting to show, Person begins to babble, a disembodied voice coming from beneath his helmet and NVGs. "I'll tell you why we're invading. Fucking NAMBLA," he says, referring to the North American Man/Boy Love Association. "Places like Thailand where they go to fuck children and shit, it's drying up. We're opening up Iraq for a whole new supply of children."
"Halt the vehicle, Person," Colbert says, passing on an order from the radio. "We're stopping for a few minutes."
"NAMBLA's infiltrated First Recon," Person continues, after bringing the vehicle to a stop. "There's a guy in Third Platoon, he's going to be collecting photographs of all the children and sending them back to NAMBLA HQ. Back at Pendleton he volunteers at a daycare center. He goes around collecting all the turds from the five-year-olds and puts them into Copenhagen tins. Out here everyone thinks he's dipping, but it's not tobacco. It's dookie from five-year-olds."
"Shut up, Person," Colbert orders.
Haha, classic
Although the Corps rates him as a fit commander and he has an admirable service record, fellow officers have expressed their alarm to me over Encino Man's seeming inability to understand the basics, like reading a map. One officer says to me, "We came out of a briefing once, after we'd been looking at a map for an hour, studying one town on it, and he came up to me and asked, 'What was the name of that place? Can you show me where it is on the map?' I was like, 'What reality was this guy in during the previous briefing?'"
He and Person spot a Marine, whom they both know and despise, taking a leak outside the Humvee. "That's that fucking pussy," Person says. "He was crying when we left Camp Pendleton." He adds in a pitying baby voice, "He didn't want to go to Iraq."
Colbert looks at him. "When we were at the airport flying out here he lost his gear. He was trying to get out of coming here."
"Yeah," Person says. "He was at the airport on the phones, calling senators and stuff to try to get them to pull strings. Fucking pussy wimp."
"A scared little bitch," Colbert says. He and Person stare together at the Marine they deem cowardly, bonding in their mutual contempt. The judgment of the pack is relentless and unmerciful.
Всё-таки общая нелюбовь к кому-то/чему-то сближает гораздо эффективнее общей любви, проверено
Colbert shouts up to Garza on the main gun. "Garza! Woman in black. What's she doing?"
The Mark-19 fills the Humvee with a clattering sound as Garza swivels the gun toward the woman. "She's carrying a bag in her hands," he shouts from the turret. "No weapons."
A moment later Garza shouts. "Hey!"
Colbert tenses on his M-4, pressing his eye against the scope. "Talk to me, Garza. What is it?"
"I just waved at an Iraqi and he waved back at me. That was cool."
"Good, Garza," Colbert says. "Keep making friends. As long they're not doing anything where we have to shoot them."
Between calling out potential targets, Colbert and Person stay awake by screeching pop songs—Avril Lavigne's "I'm with You" and "Skater Boy"—deliberately massacring them at the tops of their lungs.
Вот вроде в жизни они соблюдали субординацию (в отличие от панибратских отношений в сериале), а Аврил Лавинь-то вместе пели
The desert leading up to the tracks is littered with industrial trash—shredded tires, old fence posts, wrecked machinery, wild dogs and, every thirty meters it seems, a lone rubber flip-flop. Person calls each one out, " 'Nother flip-flop. 'Nother dude walking around somewhere with one sandal on."
"Shut the fuck up, Person," Colbert says.
"You know what happens when you get out of the Marine Corps," Person continues. "You get your brains back."
"I mean it, Person. Shut your goddamn piehole."
At times, the two of them bicker like an old married couple. Being a rank lower than Colbert, Person can never directly express anger to him, but on occasions when Colbert is too harsh and Person's feelings are hurt, his driving becomes erratic. There are sudden turns, and the brakes are hit for no reason. It will happen even in combat situations, with Colbert suddenly in the role of wooing his driver back with retractions and apologies.
Haha, classic [2] Вот ещё один момент, которого очень не хватает в сериале
The land is fertile along the canal. There are scruffy pastures, as well as little hamlets, each consisting of two or three mud huts bunched together. "Keep your eyes on the swivel," Colbert reminds his chatty team. "This is backcountry."
But villagers who come out by the trail greet the Marines with smiles. A teenage boy and girl walk ahead on the trail, holding hands.
"Kind of cute," Colbert observes. "Don't shoot them, Garza," he adds.
As they roll past the hand-holding teens, Colbert and Person wave at them and start singing the South Park version of "Loving You," with the lyrics "Loving you is easy 'cause you're bare-chested."
Tonight Casey Kasem is highly agitated because he and Encino Man have concluded that "enemy infiltrators" have moved into the Marines' position and are preparing an attack.
"Over there. Enemy infiltrators," he tells Doc Bryan, pointing toward the village he and others on the team have been watching.
While Doc Bryan is not technically a Marine, he is a product of the Navy's most elite special-warfare training and could have chosen to have been placed with either Navy SEALs or a Marine Recon unit. Doc Bryan, who arguably has better combat training than many Recon Marines, is supremely confident of his judgment. "That's a village," Doc Bryan says.
"No. Over there," Casey Kasem whispers excitedly, pointing along the canal. "Looks like a squad-size group of Iraqis, maybe an RPG hunter-killer team observing us."
"Those are fucking rocks," Doc Bryan says. "They're not moving."
Through the heightened alert, Colbert spends the night calming his team. When Garza takes the watch on the Humvee's Mark-19, Colbert tells him, "Garza, please make sure you don't shoot the civilians on the other side of the canal. We are the invading army. We must be magnanimous."
"Magna-nous?" Garza asks. "What the fuck does that mean?"
"Lofty and kinglike," Colbert tells him.
"Sure," Garza says after a moment's consideration. "I'm a nice guy."
Along the highway, they pass columns of tanks and other vehicles emblazoned with American flags or moto slogans such as "Angry American" or "Get Some." Person spots a Humvee with the 9/11 catchphrase "Let's Roll!" stenciled on the side.
"I hate that cheesy patriotic bullshit," Person says. He mentions Aaron Tippin's "Where the Stars and Stripes and the Eagles Fly," then scoffs, "Like how he sings those country white-trash images. 'Where eagles fly.' Fuck! They fly in Canada, too. Like they don't fly there? My mom tried to play me that song when I came home from Afghanistan. I was like, 'Fuck, no, Mom. I'm a Marine. I don't need to fly a little flag on my car to show I'm patriotic.'"
"That song is straight homosexual country music, Special Olympics-gay," Colbert says.
With his shaved head and deep-set eyes, Espera is one of the scariest-looking Marines in the platoon. Technically, he serves as Colbert's assistant team leader, though in actuality he commands a separate Humvee. Espera's crew of four Marines always rolls directly behind or beside Colbert's, and he is one of Colbert's closest friends in the platoon. The two men could hardly be more opposite. Espera, thirty, grew up in Riverside, California, and was, by his own account, truly a "bad motherfucker"—participating in all the violent pastimes available to a young Latino from a broken home and raised partially in state facilities. He was serving in an infantry platoon when he and Colbert met a few years earlier. Somehow they struck up a friendship, which on the face of it is odd. Colbert, with his Nordic features and upper-middle-class background, is also among those who frequently engage in routine racial humor, referring to the Spanish language as "dirty spic talk." Espera, who's part Native American, part Mexican and a quarter German, frequently rails about the dominance of America's "white masters" and the genocide of his Indian ancestors. But describing his friendship with Colbert, Espera says, "Inside we're both the same: violent warriors. Only he fights with his mind, and I fight with my strength." For his part, Colbert says that when he met Espera he was impressed by his "maturity, dedication and toughness." Even though Espera is not yet a Recon Marine, Colbert pulled strings to bring him into the elite battalion to serve as his assistant team leader.
Colbert's team settles into the Humvee and Person begins punching the dashboard and cursing. Someone higher up in the company changed radio frequencies without telling him, and now he can't use them. It's the first time I've ever seen him lose control in earnest.
Colbert calms him. "It's okay. We'll fix it. Everyone's just nervous because we lost a lot this morning," he says, referring to the news of Marine casualties.
We drive into a no-man's-land. A burning fuel depot to our right spews fire and smoke. Garbage is strewn on either side of the road as far as the eye can see. It appears that we're driving straight through the town trash dump, with shredded plastic bags littering the area like confetti after a parade. The convoy slows to a crawl, and the Humvee fills with a black cloud of flies.
"Now, this looks like Tijuana," says Person.
"And this time I get to do what I've always wanted to do in T.J.," Colbert adds. "Burn it to the ground."
Colbert can't get over the lush greenery of the palm groves and fields around us. After two months in the desert, it's jarring to suddenly have arrived in Mesopotamia's fertile surroundings on the outskirts of the Garden of Eden. Even as Marine artillery rounds blow it to smithereens, Colbert keeps repeating, "Look at these fucking trees."
As mortars continue to explode around us, I watch Garza pick through an MRE. He takes out a packet of Charms candies and hurls it into the gunfire. Marines view Charms as almost infernal talismans. A few days earlier, in the Humvee, Garza saw me pull Charms out of my MRE pack. His eyes lighted up and he offered me a highly prized bag of Combos cheese pretzels for my candies. He didn't explain why. I thought he just really liked Charms until he threw the pack he'd just traded me out the window. "We don't allow Charms anywhere in our Humvee," Person said in a rare show of absolute seriousness. "That's right," Colbert said, cinching it. "They're fucking bad luck."
Person shares an observation about his own reaction to combat. He stands by the road, pissing. "Man, I pulled my trousers down and it smells like hot dick," he says. "That sweaty hot-cock smell. I kind of smell like I just had sex."
Colbert briefs his team inside the Humvee. "The last friendly units that went through there were taking RPGs from the rooftops," he says. "I want the Mark-19 ranged high. Trombley, anything that moves on the left that looks like a weapon, shoot it."
"Gee, I hope I get to run over somebody at least," Person says, growing petulant. As the driver, he doesn't have easy access to his weapon. This fact bugs him. "I'm one of the best marksmen here. I can shoot people, too."
Colbert tells him to shut up.
Though Espera takes pride in being a "violent warrior," the philosophical implications weigh on him. "I asked a priest if it's okay to kill people in war," he tells me. "He said it's okay as long as you don't enjoy it. Before we crossed into Iraq, I fucking hated Arabs. I don't know why. I never saw too many in Afghanistan. But as soon as we got here, it's just gone. I just feel sorry for them. I miss my little girl. Dog, I don't want to kill nobody's children."
Colbert spends his final sleepless moments in the darkness, fantasizing about all the custom gear he should have brought for his Humvee—extra power inverters to charge the batteries of his thermal nightscope, a better shortwave radio to tune in the BBC, a CD player.
"We could hook up speakers and play music to fuck with the Iraqis," Person says.
"We could drive through Nasiriyah playing Metallica," Trombley adds.
"Fuck that," Person says. "We'd play GG Allin.
"Who the fuck is GG Allin?" Colbert asks.
"Like, this original punk-rock dude," Person says. "He believes murder should be legalized. You should be able to kill people you hate. He's fucking cool."
No one points out that this concept already seems to be the prevailing one in greater Nasiriyah.
At the wheel of Kocher's Humvee is a twenty-two-year-old corporal named Trevor Darnold. He grew up in Plummer, Idaho, and says the biggest influence on his joining the Marines was watching G.I. Joe on the Cartoon Network when he was a kid. He's a relatively small guy, quiet, and usually has a placid smile that gives him the face of a dreamer. He seems to spend most of his free time thinking about his wife, who gave birth to their first child, a daughter, shortly before he flew to Kuwait for the invasion. Now, while straightening the wheel after that first turn, Darnold's left arm suddenly feels like it has grown about ten sizes. It's numb and throbbing. "I'm hit!" he yells.
"Shut the fuck up!" Kocher shouts. "You haven't been hit." Kocher can see just by the way he's holding his arm that he is hit. But he wants him to believe he isn't so he'll focus on driving. For a moment, Kocher's power of suggestion works so well, Darnold not only keeps driving, he continues simultaneously firing his M-4 rifle out the side of the Humvee.
Then Darnold wavers. "I am hit!" he insists.
"Okay, you're hit, Darnold," Kocher concedes. "We're gonna fix it. Keep driving."
I study Person's face for signs of panic, fear or death. My worry is he'll get shot or freak out and we'll be stuck on this street. But Person seems fine. He's slouched over the wheel, looking through the windshield, an almost blank expression on his face. The only thing different about him is he's not babbling his opinions on Justin Timberlake or some other pussy faggot retard who bothers him.
Yesterday Colbert had traded out Garza for a Mark-19 gunner from a different team. The guy's name is Corporal Walt Hasser, twenty-three, from Taylorstown, Virginia. He bangs into the roof of the Humvee. Now his legs hang down from the turret, twisted sideways. He's been hit by a steel cable that attackers have stretched across the street to knock down turret gunners. Another cable swipes across the roof.
Colbert calls out, "Walt, are you okay?" Silence. Person turns around, taking his foot off the accelerator.
The vehicle slows and wanders to the left. "Walt?" Person calls.
I grab Hasser's leg by the calf and shake it hard.
"I'm okay!" he says, sounding almost cheerful. He was temporarily knocked unconscious, but isn't hurt. Person has lost his focus on moving the vehicle forward. We slow to a crawl. Person later says that he was worried one of the cables dropped on the vehicle might still have been caught on Hasser. He didn't want to accelerate and somehow leave him hanging from a light pole by his neck in downtown Al Gharraf.
"Drive, Person!" Colbert shouts.
"Walt's okay?" he asks, apparently not having heard him.
"Yes!" Colbert shouts.
"Go, go, go!" Colbert and I both shout in tandem.
Person finally picks up the pace, and there is silence outside. We are still in the town, but no one seems to be shooting at us.
Colbert is beside himself, laughing and shaking his head. His whole face shines, almost like there's a halo around him. I've seldom seen a happier man.
"Before we start congratulating ourselves," Person says, in his unusual role as the voice of sanity, "we're not out of this yet."
Espera orders the Marine who jumped out to get back in. They figure out Colbert's vehicle is stuck, and roll around to the right, avoiding the sabka.
Hunched down by Colbert's vehicle, I am so disoriented at this point that I actually think for a moment that the sandy field we are in is a beach. I turn around, looking for the ocean, then hear Colbert repeating, "We're in a goddamn sabka field."
I think he's saying "soccer field." I can't believe Iraqis would play on sand like this. I'm looking around for the goalposts when Trombley grabs my shoulder. "Get behind me and take cover," he says.
The battalion operations chief runs across the sand, shouting at Colbert, "Abandon your Humvee!" He orders him to set it on fire with an incendiary grenade, yelling, "Thermite the radios!"
Colbert pounds the roof of his Humvee, screaming, "I'm not abandoning this vehicle!"
One of Espera's Marines watching the spectacle from a distance glumly observes, "We're going to die because Colbert's in love with his Humvee."
On top of this mounting uncertainty, they have to deal with the men in the battalion they view as worthless incompetents. This morning they are paid a visit by Casey Kasem. In addition to not bringing enough batteries for their thermal night optics, another serious omission they blame on him became clear yesterday when the Mark-19s jammed in the ambush. To operate effectively in a dusty environment, the guns require a specialized lubricant called LSA. The men claim Casey Kasem forgot to bring it on the invasion. Without LSA, the guns jam constantly.
Casey Kasem traipses over and greets the Marines with hearty backslaps. "Outstanding job, gentlemen. The battalion commander thinks we did a stand-up job yesterday. I got some awesome footage outside the town, too," he says, referring to his effort to make a war documentary. Casey Kasem kneels down by Colbert and asks in low, confidential tones, "Are your men having any combat-stress reactions we need to talk about?"
"Nothing that a little LSA wouldn't help," Colbert says.
Wild dogs run past.
"We ought to shoot some of these dogs," Trombley says, eyeing the surrounding fields over the top of his SAW.
"We don't shoot dogs," Colbert says.
"I'm afraid of dogs," Trombley mumbles.
I ask him if he was ever attacked by a dog when he was little.
"No," he answers. "My dad was once. The dog bit him, and my dad jammed his hand down the dog's throat and ripped up his stomach. I did have a dog lunge at me once on the sidewalk. I just threw it on its side, knocked the wind out of him. My aunt had a little dog. I was playing with it with one of those laser lights. The dog chased it into the street and got hit by a car. I didn't mean to kill it."
"Where did we find this guy?" Person asks.
We drive on.
"I like cats," Trombley offers. "I had a cat that lived to be sixteen. One time he ripped a dog's eye out with his claw."
The battalion's plan is to sprint past the town as fast as possible. With Colbert's vehicle in the lead, we speed up to about forty-five miles an hour. While driving, Person reaches around and hands me his M-4.
"Put it out the window," he says.
I look at him.
"What do you think? You're just gonna eat all our food, drink all our water for free?"
I place the rifle on my lap but find it distracting. All I can think about are images of Geraldo Rivera waving his pistol around in reports he filed from Afghanistan, bragging about how he hoped to cap Osama. While rolling into Ash Shatrah, my biggest fear isn't enemy fire, it's that some reporter's going to see me holding an M-4 and I'll look like a jackass.
The two Marines who ride in the back of Fick's Humvee, which is configured sort of like a pickup truck with a canvas top over the back, stand by the tailgate singing Nelly's "Hot in Herre" over and over.
One of the combat-stress reactions not discussed in their training is singing. A lot of Marines, when waiting for minutes or hours in a position where they expect an ambush or other trouble, will get a song stuck in their heads. Often they'll sing it or chant the words almost as if they are saying Hail Marys.
The Marines' choice of a Nelly song in the back of Fick's vehicle shows the hip-hop influence of Q-tip Stafford. He rides there with nineteen-year-old Private First Class John Christeson, the newest guy in the platoon. The two of them spend twelve to twenty hours a day bouncing around in the back of the truck. Neither is sure when they both hit upon "Hot in Herre" as their combat song, but they were singing it yesterday while rolling into the ambush at Al Gharraf.
There are several loud cracks behind us—rounds from enemy snipers.
"Oh, sweet Jesus!" Colbert says, highly annoyed. He's lying on the ground, glassing the city through binoculars, listening to the company radio network on a portable unit. He turns to Fick. "Sir, our great commander," he says, referring to Encino Man, "just had the wherewithal to inform me there seem to be enemy snipers about. He suggests we ought to be on the lookout for them."
Person laughs. "Brad," he says, calling Colbert by his first name. "Check it out, over there." He points to a spot near the barricades into the city.
Colbert turns his binoculars in the direction Person is pointing.
"Person," he asks, "are those ducks...?"
"Yeah, they're fucking." Person laughs.
By midnight we have been driving for several hours. For the last forty-five minutes the Humvee has been rocking up and down like a boat. We are in the dark on a field covered in berms, each about a meter high, like waves. Despite Colbert's efforts to track the battalion's route using maps and frequent radio checks with Fick, he has no idea where we are.
"Dude, I am so lost right now," Colbert says. It's a rare admission of helplessness, a function of fatigue setting in after ninety-six hours of little or no sleep since the shooting started at Nasiriyah.
"I see where we're going, don't worry," Person says. His speech is clipped and breathless. He's tweaking on Ripped Fuel tablets, which he's been gobbling for the past several days. "Do you remember the gay dog episode on South Park, when Sparky runs away cause he's, like, humping other dogs and shit?"
"Fuck yeah," Colbert says. He and Person repeat the tagline from the episode: "'Hello there, little pup. I'm Big Gay Al!'"
"They opened a gay club in the town where I'm from in Michigan," Trombley says. "People trashed it every night. They had to close it after a month."
"Yeah," Person says, a note of belligerence in his voice. "When I get back I'm gonna start a gay club. I'll call it the Men's Room. There will be, like, a big urinal with a two-way mirror everyone pisses against. It will be, like, facing the bar, so when everyone's drinking there will be, like, these big cocks pissing at them."
"Person," Colbert says. "Give it a rest, please."
Hasser standing in the turret, begins pounding the roof of the Humvee, screaming "Fuck!"
"What is it?" Colbert shouts.
"The Mark-19 is down!" Hasser yells. "Jammed!"
"My Mark-19 is down!" Colbert screams on the radio. Being the lead vehicle of the company, racing onto an airfield to fight tanks and AAA guns without a heavy weapon is a disaster in the making. "I repeat, my Mark- 19 is down!"
It's the first time Fick has ever heard Iceman lose control on comms. "Calm the fuck down," Fick orders Colbert. "I'm putting Team Two in front."
While eating hot lentil stew and rice, Espera ponders American culture. "Dog, before we came over here I watched Pocahontas with my eight-year-old daughter. Disney has taken my heritage as an American Indian and fucked it up with this typical American white-boy formula."
"Pocahontas. Wonderful children's cartoon," Colbert says. "I like the music."
"Dog, Pocahontas is another case of your people shitting on mine. What's the true story of Pocahontas? White boys come to the new land, deceive a corrupt Indian chief, kill ninety percent of the men and rape all the women. What does Disney do? They make this tragedy, the genocide of my people, into a love story with a singing raccoon. I ask you, would the white man make a love story about Auschwitz where a skinny-ass inmate falls in love with a guard, with a singing raccoon and dancing swastikas? Dog, I was ashamed for my daughter to see this."
Trombley slides in next to Espera. "You know, my great-great-great-grandfather was a mercenary up in Michigan who had a militia where they'd kill Indians for hire. He was really good at it."
"You know, Trombley," Espera says, "in the fishing village I'm from, Los Angeles, if I mention that I'm part Indian, most white motherfuckers will bring up some great-great-great-grandparent who was part Indian because they want to let me know that even though they look like white motherfuckers, they're actually down with my people. You are the first white motherfucker I've ever met who's said that."
"Just what race are you, Poke?" Colbert asks, referring to Espera by the nickname only his friends use. "I mean, are you Latino, Indian or white? Or are you just whatever race happens to be cool at the time?"
"Shut up, white boy, and go eat a baloney sandwich," Espera says.
"No, I mean it," Colbert continues. "Your wife is half white. I've met your friends from L.A. They're all white."
"Bro, you've got a point," Espera says. "I'm afraid to hang out with my Mexican friends at home. I'm afraid if we go to the liquor store together they'll stick it up. My Mexican friends are shady motherfuckers. No job, twenty-thousand-dollar entertainment system at home, more guns than a fucking armory. The only Mexicans I hang out with are in the Marine Corps."
I've learned a few things about the Marines by now. There are certainties in their world, even in the chaos of war. As soon as a unit sets in for the night and finishes digging its Ranger graves, everyone will be moved to a slightly different position and forced to start all over again. When a team is told to be ready to move out in five minutes, they will sit for several hours. When the order is to remain in position for three hours, their next order will be to roll out in two minutes. Above all, it is a certainty that Colbert will never be able to take a crap in peace.
Two columns of inky black smoke rise on the opposite side of the river. We take no more Zeus fire. I ask Trombley why he showed no signs of fear, seemed quite calm in fact, when he sat up on the berm and located the position of the gun that seemed to be terrorizing just about every other Marine in the battalion. "I know this might sound weird," Trombley says, "but deep down inside, I want to know what it feels like to get shot. Not that I want to get shot, but the reality is, I feel more nervous watching a game show on TV at home than I do here in all this."
He tears into his plastic meal-ration bag. "All this gunfighting is making me hungry," he says with a cheerful smile.
"All this stupidity is making me want to kill myself," Person counters grimly, one of his first displays of low spirits in Iraq.
In Colbert's vehicle, the Mark-19 jammed again—as it has in two previous engagements. Hasser, who's manning the weapon, screams, "Shit! Shit! Shit!" and pounds the roof of the Humvee, trying to unjam it. He lets out a half-crazed scream. "Raaah!"
Colbert shouts up to him, "Walt! You're losing control of yourself. Shut the fuck up and take a deep breath."
"This goddamn gun!" Hasser shouts. His voice cracks. "It's a piece of shit!"
"Walt, you know I like you a lot," Colbert says, trying to calm him. "But it's not going to help if you lose control of your emotions. We just don't have enough LSA to keep it lubed properly. There's nothing we can do about it." He adds, "I'm sorry I had to yell at you."
We see the tiny heads of children poking around the corner of a small adobe hut. Several girls, maybe eight or nine, run toward us.
Ever since the shepherd-shooting incident, Colbert's demeanor has changed toward civilians, especially children. When he sees them now, he's prone to uninhibited displays of sentimentality.
"How adorable," Colbert gushes as the girls laugh playfully a few meters outside his window. "They're so cute."
He orders Trombley to dig out the last remaining humanitarian rations, hoarded by the Marines to supplement their one-MRE-a-day diet. Colbert steps out of the vehicle, holding the fluorescent-yellow humrat packs. Espera walks up, hunched over his weapon, scowling from his deep-set eyes, perspiring heavily. "Dog, I don't like being stopped here."
"Poke," Colbert says, calling him by his nickname. "Give these to the kids. I've got your back."
It's not that Colbert is afraid to walk across the yard. For some reason, he wants Espera to participate in this act of generosity. "Go on. You'll feel good," Colbert urges him.
Espera stalks up to the girls and hands them the packs. They run, squealing, back to the hut to show off their prizes to a woman in black standing outside.
"See, Poke," Colbert says. "They're happy."
In Iraq Espera spends his free moments reminiscing about his wife and eight-year-old daughter back home in Los Angeles. Outside of the Marine Corps, his family is the center of his life. He spent his final night before deploying to the Middle East camping with his daughter in a tree fort he'd built for her in his backyard. But out here, Espera doesn't seem to want to connect with civilians in any way. Most of all, he doesn't even want to look at the children. While Colbert continues to wave at the kids now opening the humrats by the hut, Espera breaks the Kodak moment. "Fuck it, dog. You think handing out some rice and candy bars is gonna change anything? It don't change nothing."
The men spend the remaining hours of daylight partially stripping out of their MOPPs and washing up. Reyes breaks out an espresso pot, which he fills with Starbucks coffee, luxury items packed in his gear for special occasions. While brewing it, he accosts Pappy, his team leader, who's just finished shaving. "Pappy, you missed a spot."
Reyes takes his razor and cleans up around the edge of Pappy's sideburns. "Sometimes before a big meeting with the boss, I have to clean him up a little," Reyes explains.
"The battalion commander thinks I'm a bum," Pappy says, tilting his head slightly.
"Brother, that's 'cause he don't know what a true warrior be," Reyes says, clowning.
The close relationship shared by Reyes and Pappy is between two men who are complete opposites. While Reyes has so much bubbly effervescence that he manages to be flamboyant even in his MOPP suit, Pappy is a rangy,
quintessentially laconic Southern man raised in a churchgoing, Baptist family in Lincolntown, North Carolina, a mountain town of a few thousand souls. Pappy jokingly describes himself as "your normal North Carolina loser," and says he'd barely ever met a Mexican before joining the Corps. Now Reyes is not just one of his best friends but his assistant team leader, his spotter when sniping, his second in battle. Reyes quips that their relationship is like that of "husband and wife." After Reyes finishes shaving him, he nudges Pappy's head to the side for a close inspection and pronounces, "Looking like a warrior, Pappy."
Colbert is excessively cheerful this morning. It's not like he's maniacally energized from having escaped death. His satisfaction seems deeper and quieter, as if he's elated to have been involved in something highly rewarding. It's as though he's just finished a difficult crossword puzzle or won at chess.
When Espera comes by to share one of his stinky cigars, he looks as he always does after combat, as though his eyes have sunk deeper into their sockets and the skin on his shaved skull has just tightened an extra notch. He jams the chewed, mashed tip of his cigar in my mouth without asking if I want it, and points to Colbert. "Look at that skinny-ass dude," he says. "You'd never guess what a bad motherfucker he is."
Espera felt sorry for Colbert when they met a few years ago. They were in different units but happened to find themselves on leave together in Australia. While other Marines were out drinking and chasing whores, Colbert went off alone to prowl electronics stores. "I thought he had no friends—he was such a loner," Espera says. "But now that I know him better I figured out he just can't stand people, even me. I'm only his friend to piss him off. I look up to him because the dude is a straight-up warrior. Getting bombed, shot at don't phase him a bit. Shit, in the middle of all that madness by the bridge he observes those dudes in the trees waiting to kill us. That's the Iceman."
He kneels down and punches Colbert on the shoulder. "You've got superhuman powers, Iceman, but it comes with that freakish taint I wouldn't want to have."
читать дальшеWe creep forward. AKs crackle in the distance. We pick up speed, clearing the suspected ambush spot. We pass two black dogs humping in the ditch by the road. Then a billboard of a grinning Saddam.
"Hey, anybody got a Sharpie?" Person asks. "We should do some bathroom art on him, like draw a cock and balls going into his mouth. I'm serious, let's stop and do it." He starts laughing.
"Shush, Person. Take a deep breath," Colbert says indulgently, like a kindergarten teacher with an unruly child.
"I can't help it," Person says. "I'm running solely on Ripped Fuel tonight."
Hasser is still not talking. He leans against the front wheel, writing an after-action summary on the shooting of the man in the blue car, which Fick told him to hand in in case there's an investigation. Person walks over to him and starts dry-humping his shoulder like a dog.
"How you doing, Walt?"
"Get out of here."
Fick walks up. "Walt, when you finish that, we're going to see if there's a better way to stop these cars."
"Walt's got a great way to stop cars," Person says. "Shoot the driver." Behind Hasser's back, his buddies all talk about him in worried, hushed tones, trying to figure out if he's okay. To his face, they tease him unmercifully. For the Marines, this is their attempt at therapy.
Ferrando turns to leave, then hesitates. He has something to confide in Colbert, one of his top team leaders.
"Ferrando thinks tanks are going to lead the way into Baghdad," he says, reverting to a habit he has of speaking of himself in the third person. "But we want to get in the game, too. That's the million-dollar question. How do we get into Baghdad?"
Ferrando walks off, working on this puzzle.
After he leaves, Espera offers his own assessment of the battalion's performance thus far in the war. "Do you realize the shit we've done here, the people we've killed? Back home in the civilian world, if we did this, we would go to prison."
The men don't have any orders today. Lt. Col. Ferrando is still working on his plan to get the battalion in on the final assault on Baghdad. Colbert, however, assembles his team for a special briefing beside his Humvee.
"There's something I've been keeping from you," Colbert says. "I wasn't sure we were going to live to share this moment." He produces a dusty plastic bag, reaches in and pulls out several cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli, one for each man on the team. "To celebrate," he says.
"What the fuck is that?" Person says, spotting something else in the bag.
"Easy there, partner," Colbert says, sliding out a virgin copy of Juggs magazine, still in its shrink-wrap.
"Fuck!" Person says. "How the fuck did you hide that from me?" Person tries to grab it.
Colbert yanks it away. "Not yet," Colbert says. "I need some time with this alone. Just calm down. You'll get your sloppy seconds."
Captain America's within easy earshot of their comment, but he sticks his head under the cammie netting and greets the men with a forced, though somewhat wobbly, smile. "Everyone enjoying the day off?" he asks.
The Marines freeze him out with blank stares.
"We're fine, sir," Kocher says.
The truth is, I feel sort of bad for Captain America. The way his men treat him reminds me of seeing a kid hazed and picked on on the playground. I sit down with him in the grass a few meters from Kocher's vehicle. One on one, he seems likable but possesses an unfocused intensity that's both charismatic and draining. When he stares at you, he doesn't blink; his pupils almost vibrate.
Then Captain America veers into Nietzschean speculation on the deadly nature of battle. "Some of us are not going to make it out of here. Each of us has to test the limits of his will to survive in this reality." He leans forward and speaks in grave tones. "Right now, at any time, we could die. It almost makes you lose your sanity." His pupils quiver with increased intensity. "The fear of dying will make you lose your sanity. But to remain calm and stay in a place where you think you will die, that is the definition of insane, too. You must become insane to survive in combat."
Капитан Америка, может, и дебил, зато он познал всю суть Уловки-22.
Their wild fire continues. Then the voice of Captain America comes over the radio, quavering and cracking. "Enemy, enemy! They've got us on both sides!"
"Oh, my God!" Person says. "Is he crying?"
"No, he's not," Colbert replies, cutting off what will likely be a bitter tirade about Captain America. In recent days, Person has pretty much forgotten his old hatreds for pop stars such as Justin Timberlake—a former favorite subject of long, tedious rants about everything that's wrong with the United States—and now he complains almost exclusively about Captain America.
"He's just nervous," Colbert says. "Everyone's nervous. Everyone's just trying to do their job."
"We're going to die if we don't get out of here!" Captain America screams over the radio. "They've sent us to die here!"
"Okay," Colbert says. "Fuck it. He is crying."
God only knows how these medications interact with the Ripped Fuel and other stimulants Person uses. The whole morning, Person has been babbling about his latest scheme. He and Hasser are going to change their last names to "Wheaten" and "Fields," respectively, in order to put out a country music album, eponymously titled Wheaten Fields.
Now, as the explosions continue, he shares their first song, much of which they composed last night on watch. It's called "Som' Bitch," and its aim, according to Person, is to hit every theme of the country-music lifestyle. Person sings:
Som' bitch an' goddamn and fuck All I ever seem to do is cuss About how life's a' fuckin' treatin' me To save my one last shred of sanity. Som' bitch and goddamn an' fuck The price of Copenhagen just went up My NASCAR won't come in on rabbit ears My broken fridge won't even chill my beer.
When he finishes, he turns to Colbert. "You like that?"
"Why don't you just quit while you're ahead," Colbert says.
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."
When I talk to Mattis the next day at Ad Diwaniyah, he heaps praise on the courage and initiative displayed by the men in First Recon, to whom he credits with a large measure of the invasion's success. "They should be very proud," he says.
After I return to Second Platoon's squalid encampment and pass on the general's praise, the men stand around in the dust, considering his glowing remarks. Finally, Garza says, "Yeah? Well, we still did a lot of stupid shit."
"War doesn't change anything," Doc Bryan says. "This place was fucked up before we came, and it's fucked up now. I personally don't believe we 'liberated' the Iraqis. Time will tell."
When Person heard through the grapevine that his unit was going back, he called Gunny Wynn at home, drunk, from Kansas City, and told him he was reenlisting. Gunny Wynn told him to shut up, go to bed and stay a civilian.
Special thanks to Nate for his wisdom, to Josh for his exceptional driving and to Brad, James, Gabe and Walt for their warm hospitality and accurate shooting.
ранееOf the thousands of troops in the camp, the Recon Marines are easy to spot. Unlike infantry jarheads who work out in olive-drab shirts and shorts, Recon Marines appear on the gravel running track in all-black physical-training uniforms, a distinctive look augmented with black watch caps they don two hours before sunset. All day long, despite the shamal winds and choking dust, you see them practicing martial arts in the sand, or running on the gravel track, wearing combat boots, loaded down with weapons and packs weighing more than 100 pounds. Whenever a Recon Marine runs past on the track, carrying a particularly crushing load, his buddies pump their fists in the air and scream "Get some!"
In my first couple of days at the camp I'm placed in a tent with officers. I can't tell anybody apart; they all look the same in their desert camouflage fatigues. Most of the officers seem to be square-jawed, blue-eyed white guys in their mid- to late twenties. The initial reason I strike up an acquaintance with Lt. Fick, commander of the platoon I end up spending the war with, is he's easily recognizable. Though he's twenty-five, he has a loping, adolescent stride you can spot from a hundred meters away. He's one of fifty men who introduce themselves to me during my first twenty-four hours at the camp, but he's the only one I'm able to call by name on my way to the mess tent and ask if I can join him for dinner.
Вот оно чо, Михалыч
"The men naturally look up to someone like Colbert," Fick says. "He's been in the reconnaissance community for years. If you walk in here as an officer and start throwing your weight around based on rank alone, enlisted men will look at you like you've got a dick growing out of your forehead. You have to earn their respect."
Despite the frictions, Fick believes in the men he commands. "I have the best platoon," he says repeatedly. Away from his men, Fick cannot talk about them without smiling.
Fick clears his throat. He is younger than some of the sergeants he commands, and when he addresses the men, he often lowers his voice to a more mature and authoritative-sounding register. He introduces me in this official, Marine-officer voice, then leaves.
AWWWWWW
Doc Bryan, I later find out, is always pissed off at something, if not the presence of a reporter, then incompetent military leaders or the barbarity of war. He's a self-made man, son of a steamfitter from a small town outside of Philadelphia, the first in his family to attend college. He attended Lock Haven University, then the University of Pennsylvania on a football scholarship while he earned a master's in education. In his younger days, Doc Bryan had a lot of ambient rage he used to burn off in weekend bar fights. "I'm always angry," he later tells me. "I was born that way. I'm an asshole."
Док - любовь! Как метко написали на тумбе: Doc Bryan: always angry, never wrong
The top dogs in the platoon are the team leaders. You can immediately pick out these guys just by the way they move among the men. They have a swagger, a magnetism that pulls the other guys to them like rock stars. In this tent the three most revered are Sergeants Kocher, Patrick and Colbert. The three of them served on a Recon team together in Afghanistan under the leadership of Colbert.
Животный магнетизм, как говаривал Рон Уизли)
Patrick, a twenty-eight-year-old from a small mountain town in North Carolina, speaks with a mild Southern accent and has the gentle manners that go with it. With brown hair and blue eyes that have faint lines at the corners that crinkle when he smiles, he has a kindly, almost hangdog appearance. His fellow Marines call him "Pappy," and behind his back they speak of him in the most reverential terms. "You'd never think it to look at him," a Marine tells me, "but Pappy is straight up the coldest killer in the platoon. If you saw him on the street back in the civilian world, you'd just think he's the most average Joe out there. That's why
he's so dangerous."
Beneath his formal manners, there is another side to Colbert's personality. His back is tattooed in a garish wash of color depicting a Louis Royo illustration of a warrior princess babe from Heavy Metal magazine. He pays nearly $5,000 a year in auto-motorcycle insurance due to outrageous speeding tickets. He routinely drives his Yamaha R1 racing bike at 150 miles per hour on southern California's freeways, and his previous racing bike was rigged with model rocket engines by the exhaust pipe to shoot flames when he wanted to "scare the bejesus out of commuters."
В сериале, когда Брэд говорит, типа "I don't miss anything from home except for my bike", эту реплику прекрасно перевели на русский: "Я скучаю только по своему велосипеду". Велосипеду, бля. Так и вижу, как Колберт рассекает по иракским пустыням на велике
Это он раньше почему такой злой был? Потому что у него велосипеда не былоThere is idealism about their endeavor, but at the same time the whole point of their training is to commit the ultimate taboo: to kill. Their culture revels in this. At the end of team briefings, Marines put their hands together and shout, "Kill!" In keeping with the spirit of transgression, they also mock some of the most delicate social conventions in America. The Hispanics in the platoon refer to the white guys as "cracker-ass fucks," the whites refer to them as "muds" and to Spanish as "dirty spic talk," and they are the best of friends.
И в сериале это замечааательно показали на примере Чаффина и Гарзы) "Да ты буррито грёбаный" - "Да ты белая шваль" - "Ладно, братан, пойдём железо потягаем")
I make my last call before turning in my satellite phone to the battalion commander. The phone was provided by my editor to keep him updated on my movements, but I decide to call my girlfriend in Los Angeles instead. I'm not allowed to tell her we're leaving the camp. She says that everyone at home is expecting the war to start any day. People in Los Angeles are panicking. Her friends are driving to a cabin at Lake Arrowhead to wait out the war in safety. It seems unreal to me. I suppress the urge to ask her if J.Lo is dead.
In the platoon, Garza, twenty-two, is something of a cipher. He wears Coke bottle-lens glasses and a blue bandanna around his neck, which his grandmother, who raised him, gave him for good luck. She is an aloe picker in south Texas, and Garza always grins when he mentions her. "She used to beat me with a two-by-four when I was bad," he says. "That's 'cause she cares about me." Garza has a round head and is not particularly tall or imposing, yet he is one of the strongest Marines in the platoon. According to his buddies, he can bench-press ten repetitions of 300-pound free weights. He works out constantly. Every night at Mathilda he would follow his dinner with a glass of salt water and lemon wedges, or oranges rolled in salt. When I asked him what the point of his unusual diet was, he said, "It makes you tougher." He seldom talks, but frequently, while sitting alone, will suddenly begin shaking with quiet laughter, the only sound a whistling from his nose. Everyone in the platoon likes him. They call him the "Zen Master." But when they compliment him on his physical power, he just shrugs and says, "It's nothing. I've got retard strength."
I'm directly across from Person. Our faces are inches apart. His chest rises up and down quickly. He's breathing rapidly, too, which makes me feel better. Maybe I'm not the only one panicking.
Reyes has the insanely muscular body of a fantasy Hollywood action hero. Before joining the Marines, he lived in a dojo, competed nationally in kung fu and tai chi tournaments, and fought in exhibitions with the Chinese national team. He is the battalion's best martial artist, one of its strongest men, and seemingly one of the gayest. Though he is not gay in the sense of sexual orientation—Reyes, after all, is married—he is at least a highly evolved tough guy in touch with a well-developed feminine side. With his imposing build, dark, Mexican-American features and yet skin so pale it's almost porcelain, he is a striking figure. His fellow Marines call him "Fruity Rudy," because he is so beautiful.
"It doesn't mean you're gay if you think Rudy's hot. He's just so beautiful," Person explains. "We all think he's hot."
Еееее
While the other Marines spent their free time at Mathilda poring over porn and gun magazines, Reyes read self-affirming articles in Oprah's magazine, waxed his legs and chest and conducted afternoon yoga classes.
Руди такой Руди
The four Marines in Colbert's vehicle have already been sitting inside in total darkness, waiting for a few hours, when they receive the order.
"So we're going to go invade a country," Person says cheerily as he hits the ignition.
"I bet gas prices will be lower," says Trombley, who sits to my left in the backseat.
Luckily, Person is something of a genius when it comes to radios. The reason he's on Colbert's team is that despite his constant mockery of everything, Colbert considers him one of the most competent Marines in the platoon. He has voluminous knowledge of encryption protocols and a sixth sense for how to hot-wire bum radios, often by unplugging all the cables and licking the sockets, all while driving in the darkness. Teams in other platoons whose radio operators aren't as skilled sometimes resort to leaning out their doors and shouting.
With the effects of all the legal stimulants he's taking starting to show, Person begins to babble, a disembodied voice coming from beneath his helmet and NVGs. "I'll tell you why we're invading. Fucking NAMBLA," he says, referring to the North American Man/Boy Love Association. "Places like Thailand where they go to fuck children and shit, it's drying up. We're opening up Iraq for a whole new supply of children."
"Halt the vehicle, Person," Colbert says, passing on an order from the radio. "We're stopping for a few minutes."
"NAMBLA's infiltrated First Recon," Person continues, after bringing the vehicle to a stop. "There's a guy in Third Platoon, he's going to be collecting photographs of all the children and sending them back to NAMBLA HQ. Back at Pendleton he volunteers at a daycare center. He goes around collecting all the turds from the five-year-olds and puts them into Copenhagen tins. Out here everyone thinks he's dipping, but it's not tobacco. It's dookie from five-year-olds."
"Shut up, Person," Colbert orders.
Haha, classic
Although the Corps rates him as a fit commander and he has an admirable service record, fellow officers have expressed their alarm to me over Encino Man's seeming inability to understand the basics, like reading a map. One officer says to me, "We came out of a briefing once, after we'd been looking at a map for an hour, studying one town on it, and he came up to me and asked, 'What was the name of that place? Can you show me where it is on the map?' I was like, 'What reality was this guy in during the previous briefing?'"
He and Person spot a Marine, whom they both know and despise, taking a leak outside the Humvee. "That's that fucking pussy," Person says. "He was crying when we left Camp Pendleton." He adds in a pitying baby voice, "He didn't want to go to Iraq."
Colbert looks at him. "When we were at the airport flying out here he lost his gear. He was trying to get out of coming here."
"Yeah," Person says. "He was at the airport on the phones, calling senators and stuff to try to get them to pull strings. Fucking pussy wimp."
"A scared little bitch," Colbert says. He and Person stare together at the Marine they deem cowardly, bonding in their mutual contempt. The judgment of the pack is relentless and unmerciful.
Всё-таки общая нелюбовь к кому-то/чему-то сближает гораздо эффективнее общей любви, проверено
Colbert shouts up to Garza on the main gun. "Garza! Woman in black. What's she doing?"
The Mark-19 fills the Humvee with a clattering sound as Garza swivels the gun toward the woman. "She's carrying a bag in her hands," he shouts from the turret. "No weapons."
A moment later Garza shouts. "Hey!"
Colbert tenses on his M-4, pressing his eye against the scope. "Talk to me, Garza. What is it?"
"I just waved at an Iraqi and he waved back at me. That was cool."
"Good, Garza," Colbert says. "Keep making friends. As long they're not doing anything where we have to shoot them."
Between calling out potential targets, Colbert and Person stay awake by screeching pop songs—Avril Lavigne's "I'm with You" and "Skater Boy"—deliberately massacring them at the tops of their lungs.
Вот вроде в жизни они соблюдали субординацию (в отличие от панибратских отношений в сериале), а Аврил Лавинь-то вместе пели
The desert leading up to the tracks is littered with industrial trash—shredded tires, old fence posts, wrecked machinery, wild dogs and, every thirty meters it seems, a lone rubber flip-flop. Person calls each one out, " 'Nother flip-flop. 'Nother dude walking around somewhere with one sandal on."
"Shut the fuck up, Person," Colbert says.
"You know what happens when you get out of the Marine Corps," Person continues. "You get your brains back."
"I mean it, Person. Shut your goddamn piehole."
At times, the two of them bicker like an old married couple. Being a rank lower than Colbert, Person can never directly express anger to him, but on occasions when Colbert is too harsh and Person's feelings are hurt, his driving becomes erratic. There are sudden turns, and the brakes are hit for no reason. It will happen even in combat situations, with Colbert suddenly in the role of wooing his driver back with retractions and apologies.
Haha, classic [2] Вот ещё один момент, которого очень не хватает в сериале
The land is fertile along the canal. There are scruffy pastures, as well as little hamlets, each consisting of two or three mud huts bunched together. "Keep your eyes on the swivel," Colbert reminds his chatty team. "This is backcountry."
But villagers who come out by the trail greet the Marines with smiles. A teenage boy and girl walk ahead on the trail, holding hands.
"Kind of cute," Colbert observes. "Don't shoot them, Garza," he adds.
As they roll past the hand-holding teens, Colbert and Person wave at them and start singing the South Park version of "Loving You," with the lyrics "Loving you is easy 'cause you're bare-chested."
Tonight Casey Kasem is highly agitated because he and Encino Man have concluded that "enemy infiltrators" have moved into the Marines' position and are preparing an attack.
"Over there. Enemy infiltrators," he tells Doc Bryan, pointing toward the village he and others on the team have been watching.
While Doc Bryan is not technically a Marine, he is a product of the Navy's most elite special-warfare training and could have chosen to have been placed with either Navy SEALs or a Marine Recon unit. Doc Bryan, who arguably has better combat training than many Recon Marines, is supremely confident of his judgment. "That's a village," Doc Bryan says.
"No. Over there," Casey Kasem whispers excitedly, pointing along the canal. "Looks like a squad-size group of Iraqis, maybe an RPG hunter-killer team observing us."
"Those are fucking rocks," Doc Bryan says. "They're not moving."
Through the heightened alert, Colbert spends the night calming his team. When Garza takes the watch on the Humvee's Mark-19, Colbert tells him, "Garza, please make sure you don't shoot the civilians on the other side of the canal. We are the invading army. We must be magnanimous."
"Magna-nous?" Garza asks. "What the fuck does that mean?"
"Lofty and kinglike," Colbert tells him.
"Sure," Garza says after a moment's consideration. "I'm a nice guy."
Along the highway, they pass columns of tanks and other vehicles emblazoned with American flags or moto slogans such as "Angry American" or "Get Some." Person spots a Humvee with the 9/11 catchphrase "Let's Roll!" stenciled on the side.
"I hate that cheesy patriotic bullshit," Person says. He mentions Aaron Tippin's "Where the Stars and Stripes and the Eagles Fly," then scoffs, "Like how he sings those country white-trash images. 'Where eagles fly.' Fuck! They fly in Canada, too. Like they don't fly there? My mom tried to play me that song when I came home from Afghanistan. I was like, 'Fuck, no, Mom. I'm a Marine. I don't need to fly a little flag on my car to show I'm patriotic.'"
"That song is straight homosexual country music, Special Olympics-gay," Colbert says.
With his shaved head and deep-set eyes, Espera is one of the scariest-looking Marines in the platoon. Technically, he serves as Colbert's assistant team leader, though in actuality he commands a separate Humvee. Espera's crew of four Marines always rolls directly behind or beside Colbert's, and he is one of Colbert's closest friends in the platoon. The two men could hardly be more opposite. Espera, thirty, grew up in Riverside, California, and was, by his own account, truly a "bad motherfucker"—participating in all the violent pastimes available to a young Latino from a broken home and raised partially in state facilities. He was serving in an infantry platoon when he and Colbert met a few years earlier. Somehow they struck up a friendship, which on the face of it is odd. Colbert, with his Nordic features and upper-middle-class background, is also among those who frequently engage in routine racial humor, referring to the Spanish language as "dirty spic talk." Espera, who's part Native American, part Mexican and a quarter German, frequently rails about the dominance of America's "white masters" and the genocide of his Indian ancestors. But describing his friendship with Colbert, Espera says, "Inside we're both the same: violent warriors. Only he fights with his mind, and I fight with my strength." For his part, Colbert says that when he met Espera he was impressed by his "maturity, dedication and toughness." Even though Espera is not yet a Recon Marine, Colbert pulled strings to bring him into the elite battalion to serve as his assistant team leader.
Colbert's team settles into the Humvee and Person begins punching the dashboard and cursing. Someone higher up in the company changed radio frequencies without telling him, and now he can't use them. It's the first time I've ever seen him lose control in earnest.
Colbert calms him. "It's okay. We'll fix it. Everyone's just nervous because we lost a lot this morning," he says, referring to the news of Marine casualties.
We drive into a no-man's-land. A burning fuel depot to our right spews fire and smoke. Garbage is strewn on either side of the road as far as the eye can see. It appears that we're driving straight through the town trash dump, with shredded plastic bags littering the area like confetti after a parade. The convoy slows to a crawl, and the Humvee fills with a black cloud of flies.
"Now, this looks like Tijuana," says Person.
"And this time I get to do what I've always wanted to do in T.J.," Colbert adds. "Burn it to the ground."
Colbert can't get over the lush greenery of the palm groves and fields around us. After two months in the desert, it's jarring to suddenly have arrived in Mesopotamia's fertile surroundings on the outskirts of the Garden of Eden. Even as Marine artillery rounds blow it to smithereens, Colbert keeps repeating, "Look at these fucking trees."
As mortars continue to explode around us, I watch Garza pick through an MRE. He takes out a packet of Charms candies and hurls it into the gunfire. Marines view Charms as almost infernal talismans. A few days earlier, in the Humvee, Garza saw me pull Charms out of my MRE pack. His eyes lighted up and he offered me a highly prized bag of Combos cheese pretzels for my candies. He didn't explain why. I thought he just really liked Charms until he threw the pack he'd just traded me out the window. "We don't allow Charms anywhere in our Humvee," Person said in a rare show of absolute seriousness. "That's right," Colbert said, cinching it. "They're fucking bad luck."
Person shares an observation about his own reaction to combat. He stands by the road, pissing. "Man, I pulled my trousers down and it smells like hot dick," he says. "That sweaty hot-cock smell. I kind of smell like I just had sex."
Colbert briefs his team inside the Humvee. "The last friendly units that went through there were taking RPGs from the rooftops," he says. "I want the Mark-19 ranged high. Trombley, anything that moves on the left that looks like a weapon, shoot it."
"Gee, I hope I get to run over somebody at least," Person says, growing petulant. As the driver, he doesn't have easy access to his weapon. This fact bugs him. "I'm one of the best marksmen here. I can shoot people, too."
Colbert tells him to shut up.
Though Espera takes pride in being a "violent warrior," the philosophical implications weigh on him. "I asked a priest if it's okay to kill people in war," he tells me. "He said it's okay as long as you don't enjoy it. Before we crossed into Iraq, I fucking hated Arabs. I don't know why. I never saw too many in Afghanistan. But as soon as we got here, it's just gone. I just feel sorry for them. I miss my little girl. Dog, I don't want to kill nobody's children."
Colbert spends his final sleepless moments in the darkness, fantasizing about all the custom gear he should have brought for his Humvee—extra power inverters to charge the batteries of his thermal nightscope, a better shortwave radio to tune in the BBC, a CD player.
"We could hook up speakers and play music to fuck with the Iraqis," Person says.
"We could drive through Nasiriyah playing Metallica," Trombley adds.
"Fuck that," Person says. "We'd play GG Allin.
"Who the fuck is GG Allin?" Colbert asks.
"Like, this original punk-rock dude," Person says. "He believes murder should be legalized. You should be able to kill people you hate. He's fucking cool."
No one points out that this concept already seems to be the prevailing one in greater Nasiriyah.
At the wheel of Kocher's Humvee is a twenty-two-year-old corporal named Trevor Darnold. He grew up in Plummer, Idaho, and says the biggest influence on his joining the Marines was watching G.I. Joe on the Cartoon Network when he was a kid. He's a relatively small guy, quiet, and usually has a placid smile that gives him the face of a dreamer. He seems to spend most of his free time thinking about his wife, who gave birth to their first child, a daughter, shortly before he flew to Kuwait for the invasion. Now, while straightening the wheel after that first turn, Darnold's left arm suddenly feels like it has grown about ten sizes. It's numb and throbbing. "I'm hit!" he yells.
"Shut the fuck up!" Kocher shouts. "You haven't been hit." Kocher can see just by the way he's holding his arm that he is hit. But he wants him to believe he isn't so he'll focus on driving. For a moment, Kocher's power of suggestion works so well, Darnold not only keeps driving, he continues simultaneously firing his M-4 rifle out the side of the Humvee.
Then Darnold wavers. "I am hit!" he insists.
"Okay, you're hit, Darnold," Kocher concedes. "We're gonna fix it. Keep driving."
I study Person's face for signs of panic, fear or death. My worry is he'll get shot or freak out and we'll be stuck on this street. But Person seems fine. He's slouched over the wheel, looking through the windshield, an almost blank expression on his face. The only thing different about him is he's not babbling his opinions on Justin Timberlake or some other pussy faggot retard who bothers him.
Yesterday Colbert had traded out Garza for a Mark-19 gunner from a different team. The guy's name is Corporal Walt Hasser, twenty-three, from Taylorstown, Virginia. He bangs into the roof of the Humvee. Now his legs hang down from the turret, twisted sideways. He's been hit by a steel cable that attackers have stretched across the street to knock down turret gunners. Another cable swipes across the roof.
Colbert calls out, "Walt, are you okay?" Silence. Person turns around, taking his foot off the accelerator.
The vehicle slows and wanders to the left. "Walt?" Person calls.
I grab Hasser's leg by the calf and shake it hard.
"I'm okay!" he says, sounding almost cheerful. He was temporarily knocked unconscious, but isn't hurt. Person has lost his focus on moving the vehicle forward. We slow to a crawl. Person later says that he was worried one of the cables dropped on the vehicle might still have been caught on Hasser. He didn't want to accelerate and somehow leave him hanging from a light pole by his neck in downtown Al Gharraf.
"Drive, Person!" Colbert shouts.
"Walt's okay?" he asks, apparently not having heard him.
"Yes!" Colbert shouts.
"Go, go, go!" Colbert and I both shout in tandem.
Person finally picks up the pace, and there is silence outside. We are still in the town, but no one seems to be shooting at us.
Colbert is beside himself, laughing and shaking his head. His whole face shines, almost like there's a halo around him. I've seldom seen a happier man.
"Before we start congratulating ourselves," Person says, in his unusual role as the voice of sanity, "we're not out of this yet."
Espera orders the Marine who jumped out to get back in. They figure out Colbert's vehicle is stuck, and roll around to the right, avoiding the sabka.
Hunched down by Colbert's vehicle, I am so disoriented at this point that I actually think for a moment that the sandy field we are in is a beach. I turn around, looking for the ocean, then hear Colbert repeating, "We're in a goddamn sabka field."
I think he's saying "soccer field." I can't believe Iraqis would play on sand like this. I'm looking around for the goalposts when Trombley grabs my shoulder. "Get behind me and take cover," he says.
The battalion operations chief runs across the sand, shouting at Colbert, "Abandon your Humvee!" He orders him to set it on fire with an incendiary grenade, yelling, "Thermite the radios!"
Colbert pounds the roof of his Humvee, screaming, "I'm not abandoning this vehicle!"
One of Espera's Marines watching the spectacle from a distance glumly observes, "We're going to die because Colbert's in love with his Humvee."
On top of this mounting uncertainty, they have to deal with the men in the battalion they view as worthless incompetents. This morning they are paid a visit by Casey Kasem. In addition to not bringing enough batteries for their thermal night optics, another serious omission they blame on him became clear yesterday when the Mark-19s jammed in the ambush. To operate effectively in a dusty environment, the guns require a specialized lubricant called LSA. The men claim Casey Kasem forgot to bring it on the invasion. Without LSA, the guns jam constantly.
Casey Kasem traipses over and greets the Marines with hearty backslaps. "Outstanding job, gentlemen. The battalion commander thinks we did a stand-up job yesterday. I got some awesome footage outside the town, too," he says, referring to his effort to make a war documentary. Casey Kasem kneels down by Colbert and asks in low, confidential tones, "Are your men having any combat-stress reactions we need to talk about?"
"Nothing that a little LSA wouldn't help," Colbert says.
Wild dogs run past.
"We ought to shoot some of these dogs," Trombley says, eyeing the surrounding fields over the top of his SAW.
"We don't shoot dogs," Colbert says.
"I'm afraid of dogs," Trombley mumbles.
I ask him if he was ever attacked by a dog when he was little.
"No," he answers. "My dad was once. The dog bit him, and my dad jammed his hand down the dog's throat and ripped up his stomach. I did have a dog lunge at me once on the sidewalk. I just threw it on its side, knocked the wind out of him. My aunt had a little dog. I was playing with it with one of those laser lights. The dog chased it into the street and got hit by a car. I didn't mean to kill it."
"Where did we find this guy?" Person asks.
We drive on.
"I like cats," Trombley offers. "I had a cat that lived to be sixteen. One time he ripped a dog's eye out with his claw."
The battalion's plan is to sprint past the town as fast as possible. With Colbert's vehicle in the lead, we speed up to about forty-five miles an hour. While driving, Person reaches around and hands me his M-4.
"Put it out the window," he says.
I look at him.
"What do you think? You're just gonna eat all our food, drink all our water for free?"
I place the rifle on my lap but find it distracting. All I can think about are images of Geraldo Rivera waving his pistol around in reports he filed from Afghanistan, bragging about how he hoped to cap Osama. While rolling into Ash Shatrah, my biggest fear isn't enemy fire, it's that some reporter's going to see me holding an M-4 and I'll look like a jackass.
The two Marines who ride in the back of Fick's Humvee, which is configured sort of like a pickup truck with a canvas top over the back, stand by the tailgate singing Nelly's "Hot in Herre" over and over.
One of the combat-stress reactions not discussed in their training is singing. A lot of Marines, when waiting for minutes or hours in a position where they expect an ambush or other trouble, will get a song stuck in their heads. Often they'll sing it or chant the words almost as if they are saying Hail Marys.
The Marines' choice of a Nelly song in the back of Fick's vehicle shows the hip-hop influence of Q-tip Stafford. He rides there with nineteen-year-old Private First Class John Christeson, the newest guy in the platoon. The two of them spend twelve to twenty hours a day bouncing around in the back of the truck. Neither is sure when they both hit upon "Hot in Herre" as their combat song, but they were singing it yesterday while rolling into the ambush at Al Gharraf.
There are several loud cracks behind us—rounds from enemy snipers.
"Oh, sweet Jesus!" Colbert says, highly annoyed. He's lying on the ground, glassing the city through binoculars, listening to the company radio network on a portable unit. He turns to Fick. "Sir, our great commander," he says, referring to Encino Man, "just had the wherewithal to inform me there seem to be enemy snipers about. He suggests we ought to be on the lookout for them."
Person laughs. "Brad," he says, calling Colbert by his first name. "Check it out, over there." He points to a spot near the barricades into the city.
Colbert turns his binoculars in the direction Person is pointing.
"Person," he asks, "are those ducks...?"
"Yeah, they're fucking." Person laughs.
By midnight we have been driving for several hours. For the last forty-five minutes the Humvee has been rocking up and down like a boat. We are in the dark on a field covered in berms, each about a meter high, like waves. Despite Colbert's efforts to track the battalion's route using maps and frequent radio checks with Fick, he has no idea where we are.
"Dude, I am so lost right now," Colbert says. It's a rare admission of helplessness, a function of fatigue setting in after ninety-six hours of little or no sleep since the shooting started at Nasiriyah.
"I see where we're going, don't worry," Person says. His speech is clipped and breathless. He's tweaking on Ripped Fuel tablets, which he's been gobbling for the past several days. "Do you remember the gay dog episode on South Park, when Sparky runs away cause he's, like, humping other dogs and shit?"
"Fuck yeah," Colbert says. He and Person repeat the tagline from the episode: "'Hello there, little pup. I'm Big Gay Al!'"
"They opened a gay club in the town where I'm from in Michigan," Trombley says. "People trashed it every night. They had to close it after a month."
"Yeah," Person says, a note of belligerence in his voice. "When I get back I'm gonna start a gay club. I'll call it the Men's Room. There will be, like, a big urinal with a two-way mirror everyone pisses against. It will be, like, facing the bar, so when everyone's drinking there will be, like, these big cocks pissing at them."
"Person," Colbert says. "Give it a rest, please."
Hasser standing in the turret, begins pounding the roof of the Humvee, screaming "Fuck!"
"What is it?" Colbert shouts.
"The Mark-19 is down!" Hasser yells. "Jammed!"
"My Mark-19 is down!" Colbert screams on the radio. Being the lead vehicle of the company, racing onto an airfield to fight tanks and AAA guns without a heavy weapon is a disaster in the making. "I repeat, my Mark- 19 is down!"
It's the first time Fick has ever heard Iceman lose control on comms. "Calm the fuck down," Fick orders Colbert. "I'm putting Team Two in front."
While eating hot lentil stew and rice, Espera ponders American culture. "Dog, before we came over here I watched Pocahontas with my eight-year-old daughter. Disney has taken my heritage as an American Indian and fucked it up with this typical American white-boy formula."
"Pocahontas. Wonderful children's cartoon," Colbert says. "I like the music."
"Dog, Pocahontas is another case of your people shitting on mine. What's the true story of Pocahontas? White boys come to the new land, deceive a corrupt Indian chief, kill ninety percent of the men and rape all the women. What does Disney do? They make this tragedy, the genocide of my people, into a love story with a singing raccoon. I ask you, would the white man make a love story about Auschwitz where a skinny-ass inmate falls in love with a guard, with a singing raccoon and dancing swastikas? Dog, I was ashamed for my daughter to see this."
Trombley slides in next to Espera. "You know, my great-great-great-grandfather was a mercenary up in Michigan who had a militia where they'd kill Indians for hire. He was really good at it."
"You know, Trombley," Espera says, "in the fishing village I'm from, Los Angeles, if I mention that I'm part Indian, most white motherfuckers will bring up some great-great-great-grandparent who was part Indian because they want to let me know that even though they look like white motherfuckers, they're actually down with my people. You are the first white motherfucker I've ever met who's said that."
"Just what race are you, Poke?" Colbert asks, referring to Espera by the nickname only his friends use. "I mean, are you Latino, Indian or white? Or are you just whatever race happens to be cool at the time?"
"Shut up, white boy, and go eat a baloney sandwich," Espera says.
"No, I mean it," Colbert continues. "Your wife is half white. I've met your friends from L.A. They're all white."
"Bro, you've got a point," Espera says. "I'm afraid to hang out with my Mexican friends at home. I'm afraid if we go to the liquor store together they'll stick it up. My Mexican friends are shady motherfuckers. No job, twenty-thousand-dollar entertainment system at home, more guns than a fucking armory. The only Mexicans I hang out with are in the Marine Corps."
I've learned a few things about the Marines by now. There are certainties in their world, even in the chaos of war. As soon as a unit sets in for the night and finishes digging its Ranger graves, everyone will be moved to a slightly different position and forced to start all over again. When a team is told to be ready to move out in five minutes, they will sit for several hours. When the order is to remain in position for three hours, their next order will be to roll out in two minutes. Above all, it is a certainty that Colbert will never be able to take a crap in peace.
Two columns of inky black smoke rise on the opposite side of the river. We take no more Zeus fire. I ask Trombley why he showed no signs of fear, seemed quite calm in fact, when he sat up on the berm and located the position of the gun that seemed to be terrorizing just about every other Marine in the battalion. "I know this might sound weird," Trombley says, "but deep down inside, I want to know what it feels like to get shot. Not that I want to get shot, but the reality is, I feel more nervous watching a game show on TV at home than I do here in all this."
He tears into his plastic meal-ration bag. "All this gunfighting is making me hungry," he says with a cheerful smile.
"All this stupidity is making me want to kill myself," Person counters grimly, one of his first displays of low spirits in Iraq.
In Colbert's vehicle, the Mark-19 jammed again—as it has in two previous engagements. Hasser, who's manning the weapon, screams, "Shit! Shit! Shit!" and pounds the roof of the Humvee, trying to unjam it. He lets out a half-crazed scream. "Raaah!"
Colbert shouts up to him, "Walt! You're losing control of yourself. Shut the fuck up and take a deep breath."
"This goddamn gun!" Hasser shouts. His voice cracks. "It's a piece of shit!"
"Walt, you know I like you a lot," Colbert says, trying to calm him. "But it's not going to help if you lose control of your emotions. We just don't have enough LSA to keep it lubed properly. There's nothing we can do about it." He adds, "I'm sorry I had to yell at you."
We see the tiny heads of children poking around the corner of a small adobe hut. Several girls, maybe eight or nine, run toward us.
Ever since the shepherd-shooting incident, Colbert's demeanor has changed toward civilians, especially children. When he sees them now, he's prone to uninhibited displays of sentimentality.
"How adorable," Colbert gushes as the girls laugh playfully a few meters outside his window. "They're so cute."
He orders Trombley to dig out the last remaining humanitarian rations, hoarded by the Marines to supplement their one-MRE-a-day diet. Colbert steps out of the vehicle, holding the fluorescent-yellow humrat packs. Espera walks up, hunched over his weapon, scowling from his deep-set eyes, perspiring heavily. "Dog, I don't like being stopped here."
"Poke," Colbert says, calling him by his nickname. "Give these to the kids. I've got your back."
It's not that Colbert is afraid to walk across the yard. For some reason, he wants Espera to participate in this act of generosity. "Go on. You'll feel good," Colbert urges him.
Espera stalks up to the girls and hands them the packs. They run, squealing, back to the hut to show off their prizes to a woman in black standing outside.
"See, Poke," Colbert says. "They're happy."
In Iraq Espera spends his free moments reminiscing about his wife and eight-year-old daughter back home in Los Angeles. Outside of the Marine Corps, his family is the center of his life. He spent his final night before deploying to the Middle East camping with his daughter in a tree fort he'd built for her in his backyard. But out here, Espera doesn't seem to want to connect with civilians in any way. Most of all, he doesn't even want to look at the children. While Colbert continues to wave at the kids now opening the humrats by the hut, Espera breaks the Kodak moment. "Fuck it, dog. You think handing out some rice and candy bars is gonna change anything? It don't change nothing."
The men spend the remaining hours of daylight partially stripping out of their MOPPs and washing up. Reyes breaks out an espresso pot, which he fills with Starbucks coffee, luxury items packed in his gear for special occasions. While brewing it, he accosts Pappy, his team leader, who's just finished shaving. "Pappy, you missed a spot."
Reyes takes his razor and cleans up around the edge of Pappy's sideburns. "Sometimes before a big meeting with the boss, I have to clean him up a little," Reyes explains.
"The battalion commander thinks I'm a bum," Pappy says, tilting his head slightly.
"Brother, that's 'cause he don't know what a true warrior be," Reyes says, clowning.
The close relationship shared by Reyes and Pappy is between two men who are complete opposites. While Reyes has so much bubbly effervescence that he manages to be flamboyant even in his MOPP suit, Pappy is a rangy,
quintessentially laconic Southern man raised in a churchgoing, Baptist family in Lincolntown, North Carolina, a mountain town of a few thousand souls. Pappy jokingly describes himself as "your normal North Carolina loser," and says he'd barely ever met a Mexican before joining the Corps. Now Reyes is not just one of his best friends but his assistant team leader, his spotter when sniping, his second in battle. Reyes quips that their relationship is like that of "husband and wife." After Reyes finishes shaving him, he nudges Pappy's head to the side for a close inspection and pronounces, "Looking like a warrior, Pappy."
Colbert is excessively cheerful this morning. It's not like he's maniacally energized from having escaped death. His satisfaction seems deeper and quieter, as if he's elated to have been involved in something highly rewarding. It's as though he's just finished a difficult crossword puzzle or won at chess.
When Espera comes by to share one of his stinky cigars, he looks as he always does after combat, as though his eyes have sunk deeper into their sockets and the skin on his shaved skull has just tightened an extra notch. He jams the chewed, mashed tip of his cigar in my mouth without asking if I want it, and points to Colbert. "Look at that skinny-ass dude," he says. "You'd never guess what a bad motherfucker he is."
Espera felt sorry for Colbert when they met a few years ago. They were in different units but happened to find themselves on leave together in Australia. While other Marines were out drinking and chasing whores, Colbert went off alone to prowl electronics stores. "I thought he had no friends—he was such a loner," Espera says. "But now that I know him better I figured out he just can't stand people, even me. I'm only his friend to piss him off. I look up to him because the dude is a straight-up warrior. Getting bombed, shot at don't phase him a bit. Shit, in the middle of all that madness by the bridge he observes those dudes in the trees waiting to kill us. That's the Iceman."
He kneels down and punches Colbert on the shoulder. "You've got superhuman powers, Iceman, but it comes with that freakish taint I wouldn't want to have."
читать дальшеWe creep forward. AKs crackle in the distance. We pick up speed, clearing the suspected ambush spot. We pass two black dogs humping in the ditch by the road. Then a billboard of a grinning Saddam.
"Hey, anybody got a Sharpie?" Person asks. "We should do some bathroom art on him, like draw a cock and balls going into his mouth. I'm serious, let's stop and do it." He starts laughing.
"Shush, Person. Take a deep breath," Colbert says indulgently, like a kindergarten teacher with an unruly child.
"I can't help it," Person says. "I'm running solely on Ripped Fuel tonight."
Hasser is still not talking. He leans against the front wheel, writing an after-action summary on the shooting of the man in the blue car, which Fick told him to hand in in case there's an investigation. Person walks over to him and starts dry-humping his shoulder like a dog.
"How you doing, Walt?"
"Get out of here."
Fick walks up. "Walt, when you finish that, we're going to see if there's a better way to stop these cars."
"Walt's got a great way to stop cars," Person says. "Shoot the driver." Behind Hasser's back, his buddies all talk about him in worried, hushed tones, trying to figure out if he's okay. To his face, they tease him unmercifully. For the Marines, this is their attempt at therapy.
Ferrando turns to leave, then hesitates. He has something to confide in Colbert, one of his top team leaders.
"Ferrando thinks tanks are going to lead the way into Baghdad," he says, reverting to a habit he has of speaking of himself in the third person. "But we want to get in the game, too. That's the million-dollar question. How do we get into Baghdad?"
Ferrando walks off, working on this puzzle.
After he leaves, Espera offers his own assessment of the battalion's performance thus far in the war. "Do you realize the shit we've done here, the people we've killed? Back home in the civilian world, if we did this, we would go to prison."
The men don't have any orders today. Lt. Col. Ferrando is still working on his plan to get the battalion in on the final assault on Baghdad. Colbert, however, assembles his team for a special briefing beside his Humvee.
"There's something I've been keeping from you," Colbert says. "I wasn't sure we were going to live to share this moment." He produces a dusty plastic bag, reaches in and pulls out several cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli, one for each man on the team. "To celebrate," he says.
"What the fuck is that?" Person says, spotting something else in the bag.
"Easy there, partner," Colbert says, sliding out a virgin copy of Juggs magazine, still in its shrink-wrap.
"Fuck!" Person says. "How the fuck did you hide that from me?" Person tries to grab it.
Colbert yanks it away. "Not yet," Colbert says. "I need some time with this alone. Just calm down. You'll get your sloppy seconds."
Captain America's within easy earshot of their comment, but he sticks his head under the cammie netting and greets the men with a forced, though somewhat wobbly, smile. "Everyone enjoying the day off?" he asks.
The Marines freeze him out with blank stares.
"We're fine, sir," Kocher says.
The truth is, I feel sort of bad for Captain America. The way his men treat him reminds me of seeing a kid hazed and picked on on the playground. I sit down with him in the grass a few meters from Kocher's vehicle. One on one, he seems likable but possesses an unfocused intensity that's both charismatic and draining. When he stares at you, he doesn't blink; his pupils almost vibrate.
Then Captain America veers into Nietzschean speculation on the deadly nature of battle. "Some of us are not going to make it out of here. Each of us has to test the limits of his will to survive in this reality." He leans forward and speaks in grave tones. "Right now, at any time, we could die. It almost makes you lose your sanity." His pupils quiver with increased intensity. "The fear of dying will make you lose your sanity. But to remain calm and stay in a place where you think you will die, that is the definition of insane, too. You must become insane to survive in combat."
Капитан Америка, может, и дебил, зато он познал всю суть Уловки-22.
Their wild fire continues. Then the voice of Captain America comes over the radio, quavering and cracking. "Enemy, enemy! They've got us on both sides!"
"Oh, my God!" Person says. "Is he crying?"
"No, he's not," Colbert replies, cutting off what will likely be a bitter tirade about Captain America. In recent days, Person has pretty much forgotten his old hatreds for pop stars such as Justin Timberlake—a former favorite subject of long, tedious rants about everything that's wrong with the United States—and now he complains almost exclusively about Captain America.
"He's just nervous," Colbert says. "Everyone's nervous. Everyone's just trying to do their job."
"We're going to die if we don't get out of here!" Captain America screams over the radio. "They've sent us to die here!"
"Okay," Colbert says. "Fuck it. He is crying."
God only knows how these medications interact with the Ripped Fuel and other stimulants Person uses. The whole morning, Person has been babbling about his latest scheme. He and Hasser are going to change their last names to "Wheaten" and "Fields," respectively, in order to put out a country music album, eponymously titled Wheaten Fields.
Now, as the explosions continue, he shares their first song, much of which they composed last night on watch. It's called "Som' Bitch," and its aim, according to Person, is to hit every theme of the country-music lifestyle. Person sings:
Som' bitch an' goddamn and fuck All I ever seem to do is cuss About how life's a' fuckin' treatin' me To save my one last shred of sanity. Som' bitch and goddamn an' fuck The price of Copenhagen just went up My NASCAR won't come in on rabbit ears My broken fridge won't even chill my beer.
When he finishes, he turns to Colbert. "You like that?"
"Why don't you just quit while you're ahead," Colbert says.
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."
When I talk to Mattis the next day at Ad Diwaniyah, he heaps praise on the courage and initiative displayed by the men in First Recon, to whom he credits with a large measure of the invasion's success. "They should be very proud," he says.
After I return to Second Platoon's squalid encampment and pass on the general's praise, the men stand around in the dust, considering his glowing remarks. Finally, Garza says, "Yeah? Well, we still did a lot of stupid shit."
"War doesn't change anything," Doc Bryan says. "This place was fucked up before we came, and it's fucked up now. I personally don't believe we 'liberated' the Iraqis. Time will tell."
When Person heard through the grapevine that his unit was going back, he called Gunny Wynn at home, drunk, from Kansas City, and told him he was reenlisting. Gunny Wynn told him to shut up, go to bed and stay a civilian.
Special thanks to Nate for his wisdom, to Josh for his exceptional driving and to Brad, James, Gabe and Walt for their warm hospitality and accurate shooting.
@темы: книги, ...is love, we pimpin'