Several others break into laughter with him. 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."
A diesel generator drones somewhere outside. The tent reeks of farts, sweat and the sickeningly sweet funk of fungal feet. Everyone walks around in skivvies, scratching their balls.
Vigorous public ball scratching is common in the combat-arms side of the Marine Corps, even among high-level officers in the midst of briefings. The gesture is defiantly male, as is much of the vernacular of the Marine Corps itself. Not only do officers and enlisted men take pride in their profanity—the first time I meet First Recon's battalion commander, he tells me the other reporter who dropped out probably did so because he writes for a "fucking queer magazine"—the technical jargon of the Corps is rich with off-color lingo. The term "donkey dick," for example, is used to describe at least three different pieces of Marine equipment: a type of fuel spout, a radio antenna and a mortar-tube cleaning brush.
Recon Marines will proudly tell you that if you look up their official Military Occupational Specialty in a Marine Corps manual, their job title is listed as "Reconnaissance Man." Theirs is one of the few remaining fields in the military closed to women. For many, becoming a Recon Marine represents one of the last all-male adventures left in America. Among them, few virtues are celebrated more than being hard—having stronger muscles, being a better fighter, being more able to withstand pain and privation. They refer to extra comforts—foam sleeping pads, sweaters, even cold medicine—as "snivel gear," and relentlessly mock those who bring it as pussies.
Nor do the men have any CD or DVD players, Game Boys or any similar entertainment devices. They were forbidden to bring such distracting items to the Middle East. They are young Americans unplugged. Their only entertainment is talking, reading and playing cards or chess. There's a chessboard set up in the center of the tent, where a company tournament has been going on for six weeks now.
At night they fight constantly. They judo-flip each other headfirst into the plywood floor of the tent. They strong-arm their buddies into head-locks and punch bruises into each other's ribs. They lie in wait for one another in the shadows and leap out swinging Ka-Bar knives, flecking their buddies' rib cages with little nicks from the knife tips, or dragging their blades lightly across a victim's throat, playfully simulating a clean kill. They do it to keep each other in shape; they do it for fun; they do it to establish dominance.
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.
Sergeants Eric Kocher and Larry Shawn Patrick are the more obvious alphas of the pack. Kocher is thickly muscled and aspires to become a professional bodybuilder. Though technically he's part of Bravo Third Platoon, he spends much of his time in Second Platoon's section. He tells dirty stories that make everyone howl, but he has the kind of eyes that never seem to smile, even when the rest of his face is laughing. Though he is twenty-three, he projects such focused intensity he seems at least a decade older.
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 green 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."
Colbert, the platoon's top team leader, is in charge of Team One. The year before, he was awarded a Navy Commendation for helping to take out an enemy missile battery in Afghanistan. He greets me with a formal handshake and a crisp salutation: "Welcome aboard. I hope your time with us is enjoyable and productive." His politeness is so exacting it almost makes him come off like a prick. Everything about him is neat, orderly and crisp, in keeping with his Iceman nickname. Colbert is decidedly not one of the big ball-scratchers in the platoon. There is about him an air of Victorian rectitude. He grew up in an ultramodern 1970s house designed by his father, an architect. There was shag carpet in a conversation pit. One of his fondest memories, he later tells me, is that before cocktail parties, his parents would let him prepare the carpet with a special rake. Colbert is a walking encyclopedia of radio frequencies and encryption protocols, and can tell you the exact details of just about any weapon in the U.S. or Iraqi arsenal. He once nearly purchased a surplus British tank, even arranged a loan through his credit union, but backed out only when he realized that just parking it might run afoul of zoning laws in his home state, the "Communist Republic of California."
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 Rl 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." He admits to a deep-rooted but controlled rebellious streak that was responsible for his parents sending him to military academy when he was in high school. His life, he says, is driven by a simple philosophy: "You don't want to ever show fear or back down, because you don't want to be embarrassed in front of the pack."
He holds sway over the other men not through physical power or personal magnetism but through sheer force of skill, determination and a barely concealed sense of superiority. During mountain warfare training, he's legendary for having ascended the final thousand meters of Mt. Shasta on a broken ankle, carrying 100 pounds of gear. Where other Marines speak of the special bonds of kinship between them, the mystical brotherhood formed in the crucible of shared hardship, Colbert shuns the crowd. He spends as much time as he can alone in his corner of the tent, engrossed in a military laptop, studying invasion maps and satellite imagery. While his brother Marines cavort and laugh around him, Colbert says, "I would never socialize with any of these people if we weren't in the Marines."
There is, of course, a widespread though usually unvoiced public perception that the military is a refuge for the socioeconomic dregs of society, people driven in by lack of jobs or paucity of social skills. Fick observes, "A lot of the people I went to school with at Dartmouth look down on the type of people who are in the Marine Corps."
But if you examine the backgrounds of the average enlisted men in First Recon, the picture is a little more complicated. There's no shortage of guys who came in to escape life in street gangs, sometimes with a little nudge from a local prosecutor. A Marine talking about his alcoholic dad or his crackhead mom does not raise eyebrows. But at the same time, you're just as likely to run into Marines who joined fresh out of prep school, or who turned down math or swim scholarships at universities. The most "boot" (inexperienced) private in Second Platoon is a nineteen-year-old who rejected an appointment at Annapolis in favor of becoming an enlisted Marine. The machine gunner in Team Three is from a well-to-do Oakland Hills, California, family and has a sister at Harvard.
What unites them is an almost reckless desire to test themselves in the most extreme circumstances. In many respects the life they have chosen is a complete rejection of the hyped, consumerist American dream as it is dished out in reality TV shows and pop-song lyrics. They've chosen asceticism over consumption. Instead of celebrating their individualism, they've subjugated theirs to the collective will of an institution. Their highest aspiration is self-sacrifice over self-preservation.
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. Person, the aspiring rock star who serves as the driver and radio operator for Colbert's team, is among those whose feelings about the Corps seem almost conflicted. From Nevada, Missouri, a small town where "NASCAR is sort of like a state religion," he was proudly raised working-poor by his mother. "We lived in a trailer for a few years on my grandpa's farm, and I'd get one pair of shoes a year from Wal-Mart." Person was a pudgy kid in high school, didn't play sports, was on the debate team and played any musical instrument—from guitar to saxophone to piano—he could get his hands on.
Becoming a Marine was a 180-degree turn for him. "I'd planned to go to Vanderbilt on a scholarship and study philosophy," he says. "But I had an epiphany one day. I wanted to do my life for a while, rather than think it." Like Colbert, he's a veteran of Afghanistan and professes absolute support of this war. Yet it often seems as if the driving force behind this formerly pudgy, nonathletic kid's decision to enter the Corps and join one of its most elite, macho units was to mock it and everything around him.
Tonight, he entertains his fellow troops by pacing the tent, reading letters aloud sent by schoolchildren to boost morale. He opens one from a girl who writes that she is praying for world peace. He throws it down. "Hey, little tyke," Person shouts. "What does this say on my shirt? 'U.S. Marine!' I wasn't born on some hippie-faggot commune. I'm a death-dealing killer. In my free time I do push-ups until my knuckles bleed. Then I sharpen my knife."
Doc Bryan leaps up, brandishing a Hustler. "Check this out," he says.
"I already seen that," a Marine says. "Pictures of those chicks pissing."
"No, listen to this." Doc Bryan paces the tent reading an editorial by Larry Flynt damning the coming war as a grab for oil. "He is a very cognizant man," Doc Bryan concludes. "Gents, this is a very cognizant way of explaining what we are all doing here. We're going to be fighting a war for oil."
Nobody seems to care much about the point he's making. In a weird way, external facts about the looming war don't really seem that important to these guys. The dominant feature of their lives is simply the fact that they are all together, which they enjoy tremendously. Being around them is reminiscent of being a thirteen-year-old at a weekend sleepover with all of your very best friends in the world. Only this weekend goes on indefinitely, perpetually nurturing the mystical bonds, the warrior dreams.
There is an undeniable Peter Pan quality to the military. A Marine psychiatrist attached to the First Division says, "The whole structure of the military is designed to mature young men to function responsibly while at the same time preserving their adolescent sense of invulnerability."
Most Marines can remember the exact moment they decided to enlist. A lot of them were sparked by a specific TV commercial. In it, a cartoon-ish Arthurian hero slays a fire-breathing dragon, then promptly morphs into a Marine in dress blues standing at attention with a silver sword at his side.
Sergeant Rudy Reyes, thirty-one, the platoon's best martial-arts fighter (whom the other men continually jump and ambush in order to test themselves against his superior skills), describes his passion for the Marine Corps in terms that blend New Age mysticism with the spirit of comicbook adventure. "I joined the Marines for idealism and romance," he says. "Idealism because it's so hard. The Marine Corps is a wonderful tool of self-enlightenment. Discipline erases all preconceived notions, and the pain becomes a medium of self-discovery. That's the idealistic side. The romance comes in because we are a small band of hard motherfuckers, trained to go behind enemy lines against forces twenty or forty times bigger than us. And brother, if that ain't romantic, I don't know what is."
My first night with the platoon, Reyes says, "You're lucky to be here, brother. We are the baddest, most tight-knit niggas in the battalion."
Just before lights out, a private approaches me and says, in polite, respectful tones, "Sir, I'll get you a place to sleep."
He leads me to the wall of ponchos dividing the tent between Second and Third platoons, and widens a space between a machine gun and a stack of military rations boxes for me to spread out my sleeping bag. Only after the lights go off do I learn that I have been placed in the walkway used by the Third Platoon Marines when they go out to the latrines at night. Semi-naked burly guys in boots or flip-flops traipse over my head all night long. My placement here, the Marines later tell me, was their way of welcom- ing me. Later, I know they're starting to warm to me when guys start jumping on my neck and sticking the tips of Ka-Bars into my ribs.
For the Marines at Camp Mathilda, the first tangible sign that the war might actually be happening soon comes in the form of Pizza Hut delivery cars that stream into the camp all the way from Kuwait City on the night of March 16. As the South Asian franchise workers haggle with Marines outside the cars, selling the pies for twenty or ten bucks apiece, Fick grimly observes, "I think we can take this as the clearest indication yet that we're getting ready to roll out for the invasion. They don't just feed Marines pizza for no reason."