"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."
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. His father was a Marine, but when he was three the family split apart due to drug problems. According to Reyes, a close relative of his who was a drug-addicted cop used to bust prostitutes and bring them home to babysit him and his brother. Reyes wound up in boys' homes in Kansas City. "Those boys' homes were gladiator academies," Reyes says. "Darwin was living and breathing strong. I was twelve years old and seventy pounds. I had older men making sexual advances on me. I was preyed upon by bigger, stronger people. I was always the new guy in a shitty neighborhood in a shitty school. I was inspired by Spider-Man, Speed Racer and Bruce Lee. I decided to become a warrior."
Reyes adds, "I have very low self-esteem. I need to empower myself daily through physical training and spirituality. I identify with redemption stories like The Color Purple. I love the journey of a woman from weak and less-than to someone who is fully realized."
This day, on the eve of invading Iraq, Reyes is concerned about his body. "I am going to hell out here," he says, handing a belt of machine-gun rounds to Manimal, his teammate. "I eat terribly in the field."
"We've had plenty of chow," Manimal says.
"Back home I only eat sushi and vegetables," Reyes counters. "The food we eat here is garbage, that awful American diet. Someday, I think Sheree and I will live in San Francisco," he says, referring to his wife of five years.
"What's so great about San Francisco?" Manimal asks.
"There's no fat people there," Reyes answers. "And Chinese martial arts are very much a part of the culture there."
"Why would you give a fuck if there are fat people where you live?" Manimal laughs. "People are people."
"I want to live in a place where people care about themselves."
"Jesus Christ, Rudy," Colbert says, slipping in under the cammie net. "When are you going to realize you're fucking gay? When we're on libo," he says, referring to liberty port calls Marines make around the world, "you wear Banana Republic Daisy Duke shorts, and now you're rolling into battle with your goddamn chicken suit and J.Lo glasses. You dress like a pimp queen."
"Brother, I wear clothes that are body-conscious, but I don't dress like no goddamn pimp queen. I've got too much respect for myself." Reyes howls with laughter. He and Colbert tap knuckles after a successful exchange of put-downs.
About two hours before sunset, First Recon's commander, Lt. Col. Fer-rando, gathers his men for a final briefing. In the chain of command, Ferran-do is at the top of the battalion. As officers go, platoon commanders like Fick are at the bottom. Each platoon commander answers to his respective company commander, and each of these—the commanders for Alpha, Bravo and Charlie—answer to Ferrando. For all practical purposes, within the battalion, Ferrando is God. In war, especially, his authority is absolute.
Every Marine is indoctrinated with a simple saying that clearly states the Corps' priority in achieving its aims in war: "Mission accomplishment, then troop welfare." One thing about the Marine Corps is it doesn't bullshit the troops about their place in the scheme of things. The responsibility of deciding when their lives might become expendable for the sake of a mission falls on Ferrando.
Ferrando's command post out in the field is a small black tent set up by a movable antenna farm of seven-meter towers held up with guy lines and stakes. It looks like the deck rigging of a sailing ship washed up on the desert. About a hundred of his officers and senior enlisted men and team leaders gather by his command post. Ferrando is forty-two, thin, with a narrow head and eyes slightly close together. But the thing you notice about him is his voice—a dry, whispered rasp. Seven years ago his vocal cords were removed after a bout with throat cancer. Because of his distinctive voice, his call sign is "Godfather."
Even standing fifteen meters back from him in the open desert with wind whipping through your ears, Ferrando's croaking whisper carries. It's kind of creepy. It sounds like someone with his lips pressed to your ear speaking directly into it, clear as Satan's whisper to Eve.
"Good news," Ferrando rasps to the men. He arches his eyebrows, not really smiling but still making a sort of happy face. "The BBC reported we struck Baghdad. The outcome of this war has already been determined. Iraq will go down." He gazes out at the rows of Marines standing before him, bulked up with their MOPP suits, toting their weapons. "If you bump into an Iraqi who wants to fight, you will kick his fucking ass."
Marines generally love this kind of tough talk from their commanders. The men in the crowd grin and nod enthusiastically. But then Ferrando loses some of them. He turns from the excitement of impending combat to the topic that often seems to obsess him more than anything: the Marines' personal grooming. "I don't know when we are going to get to the Euphrates," he says, "but we will, and when we cross the Euphrates all mustaches will come off. That is the rule. Make sure your men shave their mustaches." It's an adage among officers that "a bitching Marine is a happy Marine." By this standard, no officer makes the Marines in First Recon happier than Ferrando. Since assuming command of the battalion about eighteen months earlier, Ferrando has shown a relentless obsession with what he calls the "Grooming Standard"—his insistence that even in the field his troops maintain regulation haircuts, proper shaves and meticulously neat uniforms.
In traditional deployments, such as Colbert's tour in the Afghan War, Recon teams go into the field without their commanders. Ferrando and others at the top stay behind at Camp Pendleton. Usually the highest-ranking authority in the field during a Recon mission is the team leader.
Some of the tension in the battalion that Fick alluded to when I first met him at Camp Mathilda stems from the fact that due to Maj. Gen. Mattis's unorthodox plan to employ First Recon in Iraq as a unified, mobile fighting force, Ferrando and other senior commanders are now for the first time accompanying Recon Marines into the field. This stress is compounded by Ferrando's singular obsession with maintaining the Grooming Standard.
Experienced team leaders in Bravo Company—like Colbert and Kocher— think they did a fine job in Afghanistan without always keeping their shirts tucked in and wearing color-coordinated running uniforms as Ferrando made them do at Mathilda. Kocher complains, "Out here we have a pile of captains, gunnery sergeants and staff sergeants with us that can't do jack shit. They don't even know how to refuel vehicles, get us batteries. All they do is make us get haircuts and shaves."
For his part, Ferrando seems bent on stamping out the uniquely individualistic nature of Recon Marines. "These men who don't like the Grooming Standard probably don't belong in the Recon community," he told me earlier. "They are the ones who gravitated here because of the myth that as Recon Marines they would become cowboys, exempt from standards everyone else in the Corps maintains."
One of his senior enlisted men, tasked with enforcing the Grooming Standard, is more blunt. "These Marines are incorrectable [sic]," he tells me. "They are cocky. They are not as good as they think they are."
The hostility is mutual. To some Marines their battalion commander's obsession with appearances makes him seem like a careerist out of touch with the men he leads. "The problem is, higher-ups like Ferrando aren't warriors, they're Marine Corps politicians," a Marine in Second Platoon gripes. "They're terrified some general's going to walk over here and see someone running around with his shirt untucked."
Prior to commanding First Recon, Ferrando was the parade commander at the Marine Corps' headquarters in Washington, D.C., a position he himself admits is "the most ceremonial billet in the Corps." He has never been deployed in combat before, and while his job turns on his ability to inspire and lead several hundred young men, he admits, "My temper and personality are not suited for today's youth."
Away from his men, Ferrando displays a dry humor. When I ask him about his cancer—if he ever smoked, chewed tobacco or had other bad habits—he tells me he was a runner and a fitness nut, then adds, smiling, "I guess I'm just lucky." At Camp Mathilda, Ferrando spent much of his time agonizing over the ROE, perfecting ways to strike a balance between protecting his Marines and not harming civilians. He also sincerely believes the Grooming Standard will give his men better odds of surviving in combat. "Discipline in all its forms enhances the survivability of troops," he tells me.
Despite his virtues, he has a tough time getting these across to his Marines. Fick says, "I respect Lieutenant Colonel Ferrando, but for some reason he's been unable to inspire trust in the men."
Following his prewar invasion briefing this afternoon, Colbert expresses disappointment in his commander. Walking back from the briefing, even Colbert, who seldom complains, says, "Why would he bring up mustaches tonight of all nights?" He shakes his head, laughing. The order for Marines to shave their mustaches at the Euphrates originated with Mattis, not Ferrando. But what bugs Colbert is Ferrando's timing. "We're getting ready to invade a country, and this is what our commander talks to us about? Mustaches?"
Just before the sun drops, Colbert and his team pull down the cam-mie nets from their vehicle and prepare to move out. The wind has died down, and it looks like it's going to be a clear night for the invasion. Nearby, the battalion chaplain, Navy Lieutenant Commander Christopher Bodley, walks among the platoons, offering final prayers. Bodley is a tall, dark-skinned. African American with a gentle manner and a high, melodious voice. Though several Marines in Colbert's Second Platoon profess religious beliefs, they treat the chaplain with the polite disinterest you'd show a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman.
"Uh, oh. Here he comes," Colbert says, glimpsing the chaplain traipsing across the sand with a smile, a Bible and a Marine bodyguard toting an assault rifle. "Another nuisance to waste my time."
Manimal walks over, shooting the chaplain suspicious glances. "Back at Mathilda I went to a service to get communion, but the priest gave a fucking moto speech on why we are fighting this war. It was fucking bullshit."
Fifty meters from Colbert's vehicle, the chaplain gathers a small crowd of faithful in the sand. A huge, lumbering, bald Marine gunnery sergeant removes his helmet, kneels and reads Psalm 91. Then the chaplain delivers a sermon. Marines call themselves "Devil Dogs"—according to lore, German soldiers in World War I nicknamed them this, "Teufel Hunden," in grudging praise of their tenacity—and the chaplain incorporates this into his sermons. "They nickname you Devil Dogs," he tells his flock. "But Jesus was the original Devil Dog. He faced evil, and he beat it. Jesus is the Devil Dog you will want on your side going into battle."
By Colbert's Humvee, a twenty-year-old redheaded corporal jumps up as more helicopters fly north. "Get some!" he screams. Then he adds, "They kill hundreds of people, those pilots. I would have loved to have flown the plane that dropped the bomb on Japan. A couple dudes killed hundreds of thousands. That fucking rules! Yeah!"
At seven o'clock on the night of March 20, the Marines in First Recon are ordered into their vehicles, to load their rifles and drop belts of ammo into the feed trays of their machine guns and to prepare to move out. At this time, more than 25,000 Marines, 20,000 British troops and 30,000 U.S. Army soldiers in the northern Kuwait desert are all doing the same. The 242-kilometer-long Iraqi border with Kuwait is fortified with fences, minefields and seven-meter-high earthen berms. On the other side there are some 50,000 Iraqi troops equipped with more than 1,000 tanks and other types of armor.
The booming we've heard since the morning has been the American bombardment of Iraqi positions near the border. According to officers I've spoken to, Marine intelligence personnel hacked into the computer of the Iraqi general in command of forces there, and Maj. Gen. Mattis has been personally e-mailing him, urging him to surrender. But the Iraqis have not. They have spent the day firing artillery intermittently and ineffectively toward American units in the desert. Earlier in the morning, Iraqi soldiers were observed out in the open by the border, laying more mines.
In a couple of hours, Marine and Army engineers in armored units are going to race up to the border, supported by heavy American artillery, rocket and aerial bombardment, and blow breaches through the berms. The U.S. Army's Third Infantry Division will push north to a broad su- perhighway that goes for nearly 600 kilometers all the way to Baghdad, then travel on it largely unopposed until coming to within about 150 kilometers of the capital.
The Marines and British forces will be in a race the moment they blast through the berms. Their objectives are to reach and secure the oil facilities and ports around Rumaylah, Basra and Um Qasr some seventy kilometers to the east of the border crossing. The American fear is that the Iraqis will begin blowing up these oil and port facilities, causing an environmental disaster. Coalition forces hope to secure them within the first forty-eight hours of the invasion.
First Recon will enter the breach at the border following mechanized Marine elements. But while they cut to the east toward Basra, First Recon will race ninety kilometers north, on its own, to secure a bridge over the Euphrates. The biggest concern for First Recon after crossing the border is that the battalion will be operating solo. Unlike the Army and other Marine units that include thousands of troops, armored vehicles and heavy artillery guns all moving together, First Recon's 374 Marines in Humvees and trucks will move alone on a trek through open desert believed to contain tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers. While most enemy forces are expected to scatter, even a few rogue Iraqi tanks with crews willing to fight could wreak havoc on First Recon.
The point of Mattis's plan to send First Recon ahead of his main battle forces is that this battalion will be among the fastest on the battlefield. As beat-up as First Recon's Humvees are, they are quicker than tanks and, due to their small numbers, they can outmaneuver large concentrations of enemy forces. According to the doctrine of maneuver warfare, their relative speed, not their meager firepower, is their primary weapon. True to his radio call sign, "Chaos," Mattis will use First Recon as his main agent for causing disorder on the battlefield by sending the Recon Marines into places where no one is expecting them. At this time in the invasion, none of the enlisted men in First Recon fully understand that this is the plan. They think they are embarking on a fairly conventional recon mission to seize a remote bridge on the Euphrates. Many believe they will have no role in the invasion following this mission.
At about eight-thirty on the night of the twentieth, engineers in Marine Regimental Combat Team Five (one of the three regimental forces, each composed of about 6,000 troops, that belong to the First Division) begin blasting breach holes through the berms at the Iraqi border. An hour later, at First Recon's staging area twenty kilometers south, the Marines are told to start their engines.
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.
Adding to the natural stimulation everyone feels at starting an invasion, quite a few Marines have begun eating Nescafe instant coffee crystals straight from foil packets and popping ephedra and other over-the-counter go pills for what is expected to be an all-night mission. Everyone's already tired. They've been up since four or five in the morning, when the explosions started in the desert, and they spent the day diving in and out of holes during all the gas-attack and Scud alerts.
Unlike the Humvees used by elite Army units, which have armor and air-conditioning, most of First Recon's Humvees don't even have doors or roofs. Some teams modified them by welding in extra racks for ammo and removing windshields so they can fire their rifles through them. The Humvees are so stuffed full of weapons and supplies, the men hang their rucksacks filled with personal gear on the sides of the vehicles. One Marine observes that the Humvees look like the truck driven by the Clampers in The Beverly Hillbillies. Given the age and battered condition of the vehicles when they arrived, it's a little like the Marines who will be leading the invasion in them are entering a Formula One race in demolition derby cars.
Colbert's place in the Humvee is the front passenger seat directly in front of me. His personal weapon is an M-4 rifle, the shortened version of the M-16. His M-4 also has an auxiliary tube below the barrel, called a 203, which is a single-shot grenade launcher. He keeps this between his knees. "Let's go, Person," he says. "We're on the move."
The Humvee lurches forward, banging and creaking. Garza, who earlier in the day helped me wrestle free from my MOPP suit, stands on a raised metal platform in the center of the vehicle between the seats. His boots, legs and ass are constantly in everyone's face as he swivels around in the turret, manning the MK-19 automatic grenade launcher on the roof.
Each Humvee is equipped with either a .50-caliber machine gun or an MK-19 (usually referred to as a "Mark-19"). The .50-cal, as the machine gun is called, is a heavy weapon, with a barrel about a meter long, that fires steel-penetrating rounds that will rip apart cars or trucks a kilometer away but won't do much against a tank. The Mark-19, which resembles one of those machines that fire tennis balls on a practice court, launches grenades at a rate of about one per second. These grenade rounds also have an effective range of about a kilometer. The heavy weapons can devastate infantry on the ground, destroy bunkers and wreck mud-brick or cement structures in Iraqi towns, but they're not really meant to stop tanks or take on large mechanized forces.
Despite the imposing size Humvees appear to have when you see civilian versions on the streets, there's barely any room inside Colbert's. Everyone is bulked up with their helmets, vests, MOPP suits and rubber boots. The vehicle is crammed with boxes of military food rations, several five-gallon cans of water, extra diesel fuel, more than 300 grenades, a few thousand rounds of rifle and machine-gun ammunition, special smoke and thermite incendiary grenades, several pounds of C-4 plastic explosive, claymore mines, a bale of concertina wire, cammie nets, a spare tire, extra parts, fluids and filters for the engine, a tool set, bolt cutters, map books, bags of ropes, a fire extinguisher, five rucksacks of personal gear, chemlites, several hundred extra batteries for the portable radios, shovels, a pickax, a sledgehammer and, suspended by parachute cord from the rear interior roof, an AT-4 antitank missile, which continually bangs against the back of my helmet.
It is pitch black inside and out. For obvious reasons, nobody uses headlights during an invasion. All mirrors have been removed. You can barely see over the dashboard, since the center console is stacked with three radios, each about the size of an old VCR.
Both Person and Colbert have radio transceivers clipped to their helmets to communicate with vehicles in the platoon, as well as with the battalion and with pilots when there is air cover. It's arguable that comms—radio communications—are as important to a team's survival as its weapons. But comms seldom work as they should.
Dust, magnetism and sun spots all interfere with the radios constantly. In addition, the radios in the various battalion networks rely on encryption codes that constantly need to be loaded and synchronized. The system is prone to bad connections, dead batteries, software crashes and, as Person explains, "retards in the battalion who keep changing the frequencies without telling us." Even in the best of times, the radios blink out. Colbert and Person often end up shouting the same commands and queries into their microphones until the signals go through.
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.
Moving in a pitch-black vehicle, bobbing over a rutted desert, unable to see much outside the window except the occasional blob shape of another vehicle, is disorienting, like sitting backward on a train or being in an elevator that drops unexpectedly. You have the nagging sense that you're about to run into something.
Person sees through the darkness with a set of night-vision goggles (NVGs) clipped over the front of his helmet. NVGs, which weigh a couple of pounds, consist of two lenses that cover each eye, then bend into a barrel that protrudes about five inches. The whole thing looks like a crazy monocular scope you look through during an exam at the eye doctor. They provide a foggy, greenish display of the road ahead, with no depth perception—it's hard to tell if a vehicle is ten feet or fifty feet in front of you, or if a black shape in the road is a barrel or a hole. If a light flashes, from a fire by the road, a bomb exploding or oncoming headlights, the wearer of NVGs is temporarily blinded.
Since there are no mirrors or rear window on the Humvee, in order to back up or make a sharp turn, Person shouts up to Garza, who stands in the turret wearing his own set of NVGs, to ask him what's there. Because the Humvee's diesel is loud, the wind is always blowing, the radios are crackling in and out and there are more and more explosions as we near the border, just keeping the Humvee in the convoy requires continual shouting from everyone inside.
Person, like many other Marines in First Recon, has practiced driving a Humvee at night with NVGs only a few times. Nor does he have a military operating license for a Humvee. There are right now some 75,000 soldiers and Marines in thousands of vehicles converging on a handful of breaches in the berms at the border. There is as much traffic rolling as there is on sections of the San Diego Freeway at rush hour, only it's dark and everyone's in tanks and heavily armed Humvees. It's a wonder the whole invasion doesn't end in a gigantic pileup by the border. Most of the drivers are amped-up nineteen- and twenty-year-olds, wrestling with the same problems Person has—the limitations of NVGs, screwy comms and orders that change constantly.
All of this is happening beneath a sky that has turned pink, red and orange from the ferocious bombardment being unleashed on Iraqi border positions ten to twenty kilometers in front of us. Rockets and artillery shells fly overhead, filling the air with a cacophony of strange sounds—whistling, rumbling; some rockets make a sizzling sound. The horizon flashes as they impact.
"This is the shit," Person says as he takes in the destruction in his NVGs, which are exponentially intensifying every flash. "I wish I had some shrooms."
"Yeah, it's the shiznit," Colbert says. "Now, watch the fucking vehicle in front of you." 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.
Next to me, Trombley breaks the silence, speaking in low tones. "I wonder if she's ever killed anyone," Trombley says, stroking the barrel of the SAW machine gun, which he holds on his lap, pointed out the window. The SAW, which stands for "squad automatic weapon," is a portable machine gun capable of firing up to 1,000 rounds per minute. Ammunition comes in 200-round belts, which are several feet long. They fit into a drum beneath the barrel of the SAW, but Trombley likes to take the belts out of the drums and drape them around his neck like Rambo, which provokes sharp rebukes from Colbert whenever he catches him.
Trombley, who at nineteen is the youngest member of the team, is a thin, dark-haired and slightly pale kid from Farwell, Michigan. He speaks in a soft yet deeply resonant voice that doesn't quite fit his boyish face. One of his eyes is bright red from an infection caused by the continual dust storms. He has spent the past couple of days trying to hide it so he doesn't get pulled from the team. Technically, he is a "paper Recon Marine" because he has not yet completed the Basic Reconnaissance Course. He also hasn't quite yet gelled with the rest of the platoon. In bull sessions they subtly ignore him, talking over and around him when he's sitting among them. He accepts it silently/ without backing down, studying his fellow Marines intently with his furtive, inflamed eye.