During OIF 1 Kocher used to draw smiley faces on his 40mm grenades prior to launching them at the enemy. In this phase of his recovery, Kocher's face bore a permanent smiley-face grin, like the ones he would draw on a grenade. I speculated that it was a result of the pain medication he was on, the pain he was still in despite the meds, the massive case of tinnitus that plagued him since the loss of hearing in one ear, and Kocher's perpetually sunny disposition, which I'd noticed since the first day I'd med him in 2003.
The deep flesh wounds on Kocher's broken arm needed to breathe. A doctor came to Kocher's house each morning and redressed his arm in the sheerest of bandages. They flapped in the breeze like Kleenexes, revealing deep red, weeping trenches.
Standing outside an Applebee's one Sunday waiting in line with all the other Marines taking their families there for a big night out, a woman waiting behind Kocher fell over and hit her head on the concrete. Kocher knelt over her to help. She opened her eyes, screamed, then apologized. "Oh, my God. It's your arm," she said.
Throughout dinner with his wife and several of her friends Kocher grinned, shaking his head when she talked to him. "I can't hear you, honey. I'm deaf," he repeated, grinning wider.
Doctors had told him he would need a titanium implant in his ear to restore hearing and cure his tinnitus. Kocher joked with his wife that he would delay that surgery until the very last moment before deploying to Iraq again, since he liked being deaf, not listening to all the bullshit people talked about back home.
I doubted he would make it back to Iraq anytime soon. Despite his trips to the gym, Kocher could barely walk more than a few minutes on the treadmill before losing his breath. The doctors had told him he might never be able to extend or lift his right arm again, let alone operate his trigger finger.
Kocher believed that with the right combination of willpower and exercise he would be back in shape within a few months. While I never saw Kocher use steroids, their use among troops trying to speed up recovery from injuries has become common.
Given the fact that he'd just lost his platoon commander, suffered his own injuries and witnessed the maiming of one of his best friends, Eddie Wright, I didn't want to demean Kocher's prior service by questioning his desire to return for more, but ultimately I had to say something. I told him he should just stay away from Iraq. I didn't want to see him or anybody else I knew get injured or killed over there. I told Kocher that it was obvious the war had mushroomed into a religious jihad. Maybe it was time to just pull out.
Kocher looked at me, grinning. "These aren't nationalist, religious Ji-hadist anything we're fighting over there. We're killing criminals."
By this time Fick had entered his double degree program at Harvard. He and I had begun a long-distance debate on the war. I argued that the war was lost on technical grounds, due to the failure to find WMD. This failure, I argued, proved to the world that American leaders were liars, or that the nation's intelligence services were totally incompetent. However you sliced it, failure. Fick strenuously disagreed, and in fact, continued to support the doctrine of preemptive war, however flawed its first full-blown application had been in Iraq.
Fick and I met in Washington during Bush's second inauguration. Somehow we wound up on that cold, dreary day sitting on bleachers near the parade route, which were awarded to Republican loyalists. As the president's black Cadillac DTS rolled in front of us, Fick leaned forward and peered at the gray ghostlike form of Bush's head, barely visible behind several inches of bullet-resistant glass. "His windows are rolled up?" Fick asked.
During several weeks of combat in Iraq, I'm not sure I ever heard Fick raise his voice in anger. Now, in the Republican bleacher section—seated it so happened beside a pair of young White House speechwriters—Fick let loose a stream of Marine Corps-grade epithets. In civilian life Fick tries to avoid swearing. One of his notes to me after he read an early draft of Generation Kill was "too much swearing throughout." I won't reprint what Fick said, but basically he called the president a big pussy. "What about all those Americans driving around in Iraq and Afghanistan in open Humvees?" Fick shouted. "You can't even put your window down in Washington?"
One of the White House speechwriters seated near us told Fick to shut his mouth. Fick stood up laughing. I followed him as he waltzed off the bleachers into the crowded, grim city. (Chief Justice Rehnquist, who was terminally ill with thyroid cancer, set the spooky tone that day when he administered Bush's oath of office in a death-rattle voice, which when broadcasted over the PA sounded like Darth Vader's.) Fick and I walked around for several hours gazing at the crowds, laughing.
Fick would eloquently work out his demons, while preserving his conservative instincts and his love of the Corps in his memoir of duty, One Bullet Away.
Ironically, by the time of Fick's outburst I was growing hawkish again. It wasn't a logical position. It had more to do with my sentimental attachment to Sergeant Tony Espera's worldview.
Weeks earlier U.S. forces had initiated then aborted their assault on Fal-luja. Espera showed up at my door in an emotional and slightly intoxicated state. After months of deliberation, he'd left the Marine Corps. He'd given eight years to the Corps, much of this time spent away from his family. Espera wanted to devote more time to his wife and nine-year-old-daughter, whom he barely knew.
But news images of Marines dying in the fighting in Falluja were giving him second thoughts. What pained him were the deaths of several young troops in one day. "Those are my babies dying over there," he said, using an old squad leader's term of endearment for young Marines. "Here I am sitting at home, getting fat, drinking beer."
Espera inevitably got around to blaming the White Man. He was furious that senior commanders had called off the initial assault on the city. He believed the White Man had gone "weak-titty"—soft—in Falluja. "What happened to the old-school White Man who so viciously destroyed my people and enslaved our culture? I didn't join the White Man's side for this. Negotiating with the enemy?" he said, referring to the efforts to broker peace in Falluja. "No, the White Man don't negotiate. Unconditional fucking surrender. It ain't over in Falluja until a bunch a Marines are standing on top of a pile of rubble looking down at any survivors, telling them, 'You shut the fuck up and do what I say. If you behave, maybe in a hundred years, we'll give you a casino.' "
Talking to Espera, seeing the world again in its stark contrasts of victors and vanquished, I began to shake off my doubts about the war. Of course, this new resolve came to me while sitting in my apartment with an ex-Marine drinking beer.
Eddie Wright, injured during Bravo Two's second deployment to Iraq, was given his Bronze Star with a V for valor on a glorious day at the Iwo Jima Memorial in Arlington, Virginia. Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz presented the medal to him. Wright's picture—of him resolutely saluting the flag with his bandage-wrapped stump—was splashed on the front pages of newspapers across the country.
I visited Wright at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He was living in the residential hotel later made infamous by the Washington Post expose on its intolerable living conditions. Wright thought it was a pretty nice place to stay. He walked me out to the back parking lot to show me the best part of being a double amputee. The lot was overflowing with shiny new pickup trucks. According to Wright, having a double amputation was a boon in terms of getting a cash bonus from the government, which nearly all of the amputees spent on down payments for the new trucks. "Here's how you can tell these are amputee trucks," he said, pointing to deep scratch marks along door handles, key holes, and all over dashboards visible through the windows. "That's some double amputees driving their new ve-hicles," he said, laying on a mock hick accent. "All them hooks and shit."
Wright is one of those straight-faced guys who can make anything he says sound funny. Of course, you know that already. He made Kocher laugh when his hands were blown off. Though I'm not always sure when he's kidding or not.
During my visit, we ate out at a local Cheesecake Factory. Wright immediately started bitching about antiwar protesters. He made the argument, often raised by those who support the war, that a thousand or so Americans dying in Iraq every year is nothing compared to a rough day during World War II. "What are those antiwar protesters so upset about?" Wright asked. "I mean it's actually pretty mellow over there."
Wright gesticulated with his new prosthetic devices, clumsily knocking over a giant Cheesecake Factory Coke glass with his hook, splashing the table. I struggled not to laugh as Wright caught my expression then looked at his hook hand. "Yeah, mellow," he said.
The Cheesecake waitresses, so desperately trying to act nonchalant about the giant Marine—Wright is well over six feet tall and 220 pounds—with mechanical hands he hadn't mastered yet, rushed over to wipe up the spill, yelping apologies like small dogs. Wright barely noticed. He had something more important on his mind.
He informed me that his goal was to get back to Iraq and carry a gun again, to fight as a Marine. Well, maybe it was actually several goals. First, he was trying to figure out if special prosthetics could be made that would allow him to handle a gun as proficiently as he used to. Next, there was the matter of his leg. There were complications due to his shrapnel injuries and a subsequent infection, which nearly led to its amputation. As a result, one of his feet was hanging somewhat uselessly from the end of his leg, not fully attached to everything else. In addition, there was crippling pain. The VA had him on so many drugs the past year that now he was on methadone to kick the prescribed narcotics. All of this was going to make it extremely difficult to pass the Marine Basic Fitness Test, let alone make it back into a recon unit in Iraq.
I asked Wright why of all the goals he might have set for himself he'd chosen the most impossible. (Even Paul Wolfowitz, Wright told me, was urging him to go to Arab language school and become a translator.) Wright explained that he'd never wanted a desk job. Most of all, he said, he really likes guns. In fact, that's why he joined the Marine Corps. Due to a youthful indiscretion resulting in a felony charge when he was still a teenager, Wright is not legally permitted to possess or use firearms. The only way he knows of to be able to lawfully use guns is as a United States Marine. "I wanted to be a recon Marine since I was a kid," he told me.
Wright explained the maddening frustration he felt over losing his hands in that ambush. He'd spent years working to make it into the elite recon unit. "\ finally get to go to Iraq as a recon Marine, get into my first big fight, and boom, my gun's blown out of my arms. I barely got off any rounds."
I understood then. He just wanted to go back to Iraq and relive that one moment again, but this time get it right. That's the plot, by the way, of Groundhog Day.
Kocher did make it back to Iraq in the fall of 2004, not even six months after being medevaced home. Kocher returned to Falluja to help spearhead the second assault on the city.
Several Bravo Two Marines got out of the Corps, vowing never to return—Jacks, Garza, Lilley. They spent months or years out, then rejoined. Others returned to Iraq as private contractors, among them Chaf-fin, Holsey, Hasser, and finally Espera, who is currently working as an instructor at Blackwater.
The right-wing media would have you believe that everyone who returns to Iraq is a raging patriot. Most of the people who return that I know are motivated by a sense of duty. For some, it's the duty they feel to the country, to their particular branch of the service, or simply to their buddies serving there. For many, it's a sense of duty to the Iraqi people. Right or wrong, many share the belief Kocher expressed, that the enemy is composed chiefly of criminals who are preying on the people. In Iraq, despite Abu Ghraib and Haditha, many troops persist in wanting to see themselves as the guys in the white hats.
There are other forces drawing young men back to service in Iraq. When they get out of the military after years of cycling through multiple deployments, many find they don't have the skills or patience for married life and civilian jobs. Some endure so much pain on the outside, re-enlisting becomes the easiest option. The military can almost depend on this cycle of misery for which service in places like Iraq can become a sort of refuge, or temporary cure.
As is the case across the U.S. military, many of the best operators from Bravo Second Platoon, were lured into private contracting jobs. The appeal is simple: money. Blackwater and other firms pay upwards of two hundred thousand dollars per year. While some worry about private contracting firms stripping the military of its best personnel and undermining the integrity of the nation that hires them to do its fighting, "Fruity Rudy" Reyes, who left the Corps after his second deployment to Iraq to teach martial arts, believes mercenary work corrodes the warrior ethos of those lured into it. "A true warrior can only serve others, not himself," he says. "When you become a mercenary, you're just a bully with a gun." He adds, "But these companies offer so much money, even I have almost signed up a couple of times."
Several of the men profiled in Generation Kill have left the military behind for good. After earning his Silver Star, Stafford returned to central Florida, bought a house, moved in with his girlfriend, and now works construction while pursuing an engineering degree. Lovell, one of Bravo Two's snipers and leader of Team Three, left the Corps after his second tour in Iraq. He returned to his native Pennsylvania and married his fiancee. They have two children. Lovell lives not far from Doc Bryan, who is now in medical school. The two (who rode to Baghdad on the same Humvee) see each other just about every week.
"Dirty Earl" Carisalez, the mechanic who volunteered to drive Kocher's Humvee in Bravo Three after his original driver was shot, happily left the Marine Corps in 2004. Carisalez, who spent his free time during the invasion of Iraq quoting Karl Marx and attempting to foment class war against the officer corps and rich people in general, worked his way into an honors engineering program at Texas A&M and is considering pursuing his MBA. When I recently asked him how he reconciled his contempt for rich people and college kids with attending Texas A&M, he answered, "Much as I do still hate rich people," he said, "I find I do like their daughters."