Generation Kill Part 1

Generation Kill.

by Evan Wright.

AUTHORaS NOTE *

Because the U.S. Military has partially embraced a conversion to the metric system, Marines measure distances in meters and kilometers, but still use inches and feet and speak of driving in amiles per hour.a My account of the invasion retains these inconsistencies, switching between the metric and English systems as the troops did. Keeping track of this is simple: A meter (which equals 39.3 inches) is roughly 10 percent longer than a yard, and a kilometer (which equals 0.6 mile) is just over half a mile.

Some men are identified in this book solely by the nicknames awarded to them by fellow Marines.

PROLOGUE.

ITaS ANOTHER IRAQI TOWN, nameless to the Marines racing down the main drag in Humvees, blowing it to pieces. Weare flanked on both sides by a jumble of walled, two-story mud-brick buildings, with Iraqi gunmen concealed behind windows, on rooftops and in alleyways, shooting at us with machine guns, AK rifles and the odd rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). Though itas nearly five in the afternoon, a sandstorm has plunged the town into a h.e.l.lish twilight of murky red dust. Winds howl at fifty miles per hour. The town stinks. Sewers, shattered from a Marine artillery bombardment that ceased moments before we entered, have overflowed, filling the streets with lagoons of human excrement. Flames and smoke pour out of holes blasted through walls of homes and apartment blocks by the Marinesa heavy weapons. Bullets, bricks, chunks of buildings, pieces of blown-up light poles and shattered donkey carts splash into the flooded road ahead.

The ambush started when the lead vehicle of Second Platoona"the one I ride ina"rounded the first corner into the town. There was a mosque on the left, with a brilliant, cobalt-blue dome. Across from this, in the upper window of a three-story building, a machine gun had opened up. Nearly two dozen rounds ripped into our Humvee almost immediately. n.o.body was. .h.i.t; none of the Marines panicked. They responded by speeding into the gunfire and attacking with their weapons. The four Marines crammed into this Humveea"among the first American troops to cross the border into Iraqa"had spent the past week wired on a combination of caffeine, sleep deprivation, tedium and antic.i.p.ation. For some of them, rolling into an ambush was almost an answered prayer.

Their war began several days ago, as a series of explosions that rumbled across the Kuwaiti desert beginning at about five in the morning of March 20. The Marines, who had been sleeping in holes dug into the sand twenty kilometers south of the border with Iraq, sat up and gazed into the empty expanse, their faces blank as they listened to the distant thundering. They had eagerly awaited the start of war since leaving their base at Camp Pendleton, California, more than six weeks earlier. Spirits couldnat have been higher. Later, when a pair of Cobra helicopter guns.h.i.+ps thumped overhead, flying north, presumably on their way to battle, Marines pumped their fists in the air and screamed, aYeah! Get some!a Get some! is the unofficial Marine Corps cheer. Itas shouted when a brother Marine is struggling to beat his personal best in a fitness run. It punctuates stories told at night about getting laid in wh.o.r.ehouses in Thailand and Australia. Itas the cry of exhilaration after firing a burst from a .50-caliber machine gun. Get some! expresses, in two simple words, the excitement, the fear, the feelings of power and the erotic-tinged thrill that come from confronting the extreme physical and emotional challenges posed by death, which is, of course, what war is all about. Nearly every Marine Iave met is hoping this war with Iraq will be his chance to get some.

Marines call exaggerated displays of enthusiasma"from shouting Get some! to waving American flags to covering their bodies with Marine Corps tattoosa"amoto.a You wonat ever catch Sergeant Brad Colbert, the twenty-eight-year-old commander of the vehicle I ride in, engaging in any moto displays. They call Colbert aThe Iceman.a Wiry and fair-haired, he makes sarcastic p.r.o.nouncements in a nasal whine that sounds like comedian David Spade. Though he considers himself a aMarine Corps killer,a heas also a nerd who listens to Barry Manilow, Air Supply and practically all the music of the 1980s except rap. He is pa.s.sionate about gadgets: He collects vintage video-game consoles and wears a ma.s.sive wrist.w.a.tch that can only properly be aconfigureda by plugging it into his PC. He is the last guy you would picture at the tip of the spear of the invasion forces in Iraq.

Now, in the midst of this ambush in a nameless town, Colbert appears utterly calm. He leans out his window in front of me, methodically pumping grenades into nearby buildings with his rifle launcher. The Humvee rocks rhythmically as the main gun on the roof turret, operated by a twenty-three-year-old corporal, thumps out explosive rounds into buildings along the street. The vehicleas machine gunner, a nineteen-year-old Marine who sits to my left, blazes up the town, firing through his window like a drive-by shooter. n.o.body speaks.

The fact that the enemy in this town has succeeded in shutting up the driver of this vehicle, Corporal Josh Ray Person, is no mean feat. A twenty-two-year-old from Missouri with a faintly hick accent and a shock of white-blond hair covering his wide, squarish heada"his blue eyes are so far apart Marines call him aHammerheada or aGoldfishaa"Person plans to be a rock star when he gets out of the Corps. The first night of the invasion, he had crossed the Iraqi border, simultaneously entertaining and annoying his fellow Marines by screeching out mocking versions of Avril Lavigne songs. Tweaking on a mix of chewing tobacco, instant coffee crystals, which he consumes dry by the mouthful, and over-the-counter stimulants like ephedra-based Ripped Fuel, Person never stops jabbering. Already heas reached a profound conclusion about this campaign: that the battlefield that is Iraq is filled with af.u.c.king r.e.t.a.r.ds.a Thereas the r.e.t.a.r.d commander in the battalion, who took a wrong turn near the border, delaying the invasion by at least an hour. Thereas another officer, a cla.s.sic r.e.t.a.r.d, who has spent much of the campaign chasing through the desert to pick up souvenirsa"helmets, Republican Guard caps and riflesa"thrown down by fleeing Iraqi soldiers. There are the hopeless r.e.t.a.r.ds in the battalion-support sections who screwed up the radios and didnat bring enough batteries to operate the Marinesa thermal-imaging devices. But in Personas eyes, one r.e.t.a.r.d reigns supreme: Saddam Hussein. aWe already kicked his a.s.s once,a he says. aThen we let him go, and he spends the next twelve years p.i.s.sing us off even more. We donat want to be in this s.h.i.+thole country. We donat want to invade it. What a f.u.c.king r.e.t.a.r.d.a Now, as enemy gunfire tears into the Humvee, Person hunches purposefully over the wheel and drives. The lives of everyone depend on him. If heas injured or killed and the Humvee stops, even for a moment in this hostile town, odds are good that everyone will be wiped out, not just the Marines in this vehicle, but the nineteen others in the rest of the platoon following behind in their Humvees. Thereas no air support from attack jets or helicopters because of the raging sandstorm. The street is filled with rubble, much of it from buildings knocked down by the Marinesa heavy weapons. We nearly slam into a blown-up car partially blocking the street. Ambushers drop cables from rooftops, trying to decapitate or knock down the Humveeas turret gunner. Person zigzags and brakes as the cables sc.r.a.pe across the Humvee, one of them striking the turret gunner who pounds on the roof, shouting, aIam okay!a At least one Marine in Colbertas Humvee seems ecstatic about being in a life-or-death gunfight. Nineteen-year-old Corporal Harold James Trombley, who sits next to me in the left rear pa.s.senger seat, has been waiting all day for permission to fire his machine gun. But no chance. The villagers Colbertas team had encountered had all been friendly until we hit this town. Now Trombley is curled over his weapon, firing away. Every time he gets a possible kill, he yells, aI got one, Sergeant!a Sometimes he adds details: aHajji in the alley. Zipped him low. I seen his knee explode!a Midway through the town, thereas a lull in enemy gunfire. For an instant, the only sound is wind whistling through the Humvee. Colbert shouts to everyone in the vehicle: aYou good? You good?a Everyoneas all right. He bursts into laughter. aHoly s.h.i.+t!a he says, shaking his head. aWe were f.u.c.king lit up!a Forty-five minutes later the Marines swing pickaxes into the hard desert pan outside of the town, setting up defensive positions. Several gather around their bullet-riddled Humvees, laughing about the dayas exploits. Their faces are covered with dust, sand, tar, gun lubricant, tobacco spittle and sewer water from the town. No oneas showered or changed out of the bulky chemical-protection suits theyave been wearing for ten days. Since all mirrors and reflective surfaces have been stripped from their Humvees to make the vehicles harder to detect, most of the men havenat seen themselves since crossing the border. Their filthy faces seem to make their teeth s.h.i.+ne even whiter as they laugh and hug one another.

The platoonas eldest member, thirty-five-year-old Gunnery Sergeant Mike aGunnya Wynn, walks among the Marines, grabbing their heads and shaking them like you would when playing with a puppy. aAll right!a he repeats in his mild Texas accent. aYou made it, man!a aWhoas the f.u.c.king r.e.t.a.r.d who sent us into that town?a Person asks, spitting a thick stream of tobacco juice, which catches in the wind and mists across the faces of several of his buddies standing nearby. aThat sure tops my list of stupid s.h.i.+t weave done.a Trombley is beside himself. aI was just thinking one thing when we drove into that ambush,a he enthuses. aGrand Theft Auto: Vice City. I felt like I was living it when I seen the flames coming out of windows, the blown-up car in the street, guys crawling around shooting at us. It was f.u.c.king cool.a CULTURALLY, these Marines would be virtually unrecognizable to their forebears in the aGreatest Generation.a They are kids raised on hip-hop, Marilyn Manson and Jerry Springer. For them, amotherf.u.c.kera is a term of endearment. For some, slain rapper Tupac is an American patriot whose writings are better known than the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. There are tough guys among them who pray to Buddha and quote Eastern philosophies and New Age precepts gleaned from watching Oprah and old kung fu movies. There are former g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers, a sprinkling of born-again Christians and quite a few guys who before entering the Corps were daily dope smokers; many of them dream of the day when they get out and are once again united with their beloved bud.

These young men represent what is more or less Americaas first generation of disposable children. More than half of the guys in the platoon come from broken homes and were raised by absentee, single, working parents. Many are on more intimate terms with video games, reality TV shows and Internet p.o.r.n than they are with their own parents. Before the aWar on Terrorisma began, not a whole lot was expected of this generation other than the hope that those in it would squeak through high school without pulling too many more ma.s.s shootings in the manner of Columbine.

But since the 9/11 attacks, the weight of Americaas aWar on Terrorisma has fallen on their shoulders. For many in the platoon, their war started within hours of the Twin Towers falling, when they were loaded onto s.h.i.+ps to begin preparing for missions in Afghanistan. They see the invasion of Iraq as simply another campaign in a war without end, which is pretty much what their commanders and their president have already told them. (Some in the military see the aWar on Terrorisma merely as an acceleration of the trend that started in the 1990s with Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo: America cementing its role as global enforcer, the worldas Dirty Harry.) In Iraq the joke among Marines is aAfter finis.h.i.+ng here, weare going to attack North Korea, and weall get there by invading Iran, Russia and China.a They are the first generation of young Americans since Vietnam to be sent into an open-ended conflict. Yet if the dominant mythology that war turns on a generationas loss of innocencea"young men reared on Davy Crockett waking up to their governmentas deceits while fighting in Southeast Asian jungles; the nation falling from the grace of Camelot to the shame of Watergatea"these young men entered Iraq predisposed toward the idea that the Big Lie is as central to American governance as taxation. This is, after all, the generation that first learned of the significance of the presidency not through an inspiring speech at the Berlin Wall but through a national obsession with s.e.m.e.n stains and a White House b.l.o.w. .j.o.b. Even though their Commander in Chief tells them they are fighting today in Iraq to protect American freedom, few would be shaken to discover that they might actually be leading a grab for oil. In a way, they almost expect to be lied to.

If thereas a question that hangs over their heads, itas the same one that has confronted every other generation sent into war: Can these young Americans fight?

As the sky turns from red to brown in the descending dust storm outside the town the Marines have just smashed apart, their platoon commander, a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant named Nathaniel Fick, leans against his Humvee, watching his men laugh. Lieutenant Fick, a Dartmouth graduate who joined the Marines in a fit of idealism, shakes his head, grinning. aIall say one thing about these guys,a he says. aWhen we take fire, not one of them hesitates to shoot back. In World War Two, when Marines. .h.i.t the beaches, a surprisingly high percentage of them didnat fire their weapons, even when faced with direct enemy contact. They hesitated. Not these guys. Did you see what they did to that town? They f.u.c.king destroyed it. These guys have no problem with killing.a Several Marines from Colbertas vehicle gather around Corporal Anthony Jacks, a twenty-three-year-old heavy-weapons gunner. Jacks is six foot two, powerfully built, and has a smile made unforgettable by his missing two front teeth (shot out in a BB-gun fight with his brother when he was sixteen). The Marinesa nickname for him is aManimal,a not so much in tribute to his size but because of his deep, booming voice, which, when he yells, is oddly reminiscent of a bellowing farm animal. The platoon credits him with pretty much saving everyoneas life during the ambush. Of the four heavy-weapons gunners in the platoon, Manimal alone succeeded in destroying the enemyas prime machine-gun position across from the mosque. For several minutes his buddies have been pounding him on the back, recounting his exploits. Howling and laughing, they almost seem like Johnny Knoxvilleas posse of suburban white homies celebrating one of his more outrageously pointless Jacka.s.s stunts. aManimal was a f.u.c.king wall of fire!a one of them shouts. aAll I seen was him dropping buildings and blowing up telephone poles!a aShut up, guys! It ainat funny!a Manimal roars, pounding the side of the Humvee with a ma.s.sive paw.

He silences his buddies. They look down, some of them suppressing guilty smiles.

aThe only reason weare all laughing now is none of us got killed,a Manimal lectures them. aThat was messed up back there.a Itas the first time anyone has seriously raised this possibility: that war is not fun, that it might, in fact, actually suck.

In the coming weeks, it will fall on the men in this platoon and their battalion to lead significant portions of the American invasion of Iraq. They belong to an elite unit, First Reconnaissance Battalion, which includes fewer than 380 Marines. Outfitted with lightly armored or open-top Humvees that resemble oversized dune buggies, they will race ahead of the much larger, better-equipped primary Marine forces in Iraq. Their mission will be to seek out enemy ambushes by literally driving into them.

Major General James Mattis, commander of the First Marine Divisiona"the bulk of the Corpsa ground forces in Iraqa"would later praise the young men of First Recon for being acritical to the success of the entire campaign.a While spearheading the American blitzkrieg in Iraq, they will often operate deep behind enemy lines and far beyond anything they have trained for. They will enter Baghdad as liberating heroes only to witness their astonis.h.i.+ng victory crumble into chaos. They will face death every day. They will struggle with fear, confusion, questions over war crimes and leaders whose competence they donat trust. Above all, they will kill a lot of people. A few of those deaths the men will no doubt think about and perhaps regret for the rest of their lives.

ONE.

MAJOR GENERAL JAMES MATTIS calls the men in First Reconnaissance Battalion ac.o.c.ky, obnoxious b.a.s.t.a.r.ds.a Recon Marines belong to a distinct military occupational specialty, and there are only about a thousand of them in the entire Marine Corps. They think of themselves, as much as this is possible within the rigid hierarchy of the military, as individualists, as the Marine Corpsa cowboys. They evolved as jacks-of-all-trades, trained to move, observe, hunt and kill in any environmenta"land, sea or air. They are its special forces.

Recon Marines go through much of the same training as do Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces soldiers. They are physical prodigies who can run twelve miles loaded with 150-pound packs, then jump in the ocean and swim several more miles, still wearing their boots and fatigues, and carrying their weapons and packs. They are trained to parachute, scuba dive, snowshoe, mountain climb and rappel from helicopters. Fewer than 2 percent of all Marines who enter in the Corps are selected for Recon training, and of those chosen, more than half wash out. Even those who make it commonly only do so after suffering bodily injury that borders on the grievous, from shattered legs to broken backs.

Recon Marines are also put through Survival Evasion Resistance Escape school (SERE), a secretive training course where Marines, fighter pilots, Navy SEALs and other military personnel in high-risk jobs are held acaptivea in a simulated prisoner-of-war camp in which the student inmates are locked in cages, beaten and subjected to psychological torture overseen by military psychiatristsa"all with the intent of training them to stand up to enemy captivity. When Gunny Wynn went through SERE, his acaptors,a playing on his Texas accent, forced him to wear a Ku Klux Klan hood for several days and pull one of his fellow ainmatea Marines, an African American, around on a leash, treating him as a slave. aTheyall think of anything to f.u.c.k you up in the head,a Gunny Wynn says.

Those who make it through Recon training in one piece, which takes several years to cycle all the way through, are by objective standards the best and toughest in the Marine Corps. Traditionally, their mission is highly specialized. Their training is geared toward stealtha"sneaking behind enemy lines in teams of four to six men, observing positions and, above all, avoiding contact with hostile forces.

The one thing they are not trained for is to fight from Humvees, maneuvering in convoys, rus.h.i.+ng headlong into enemy positions. This is exactly what they will be doing in Iraq. While the vast majority of the troops will reach Baghdad by swinging west onto modern superhighways and driving, largely unopposed, until they reach the outskirts of the Iraqi capital, Colbertas team in First Recon will get there by fighting its way through some of the crummiest, most treacherous parts of Iraq, usually far ahead of all other American forces. By the end of the campaign, Marines will dub their unit aFirst Suicide Battalion.a Mattis began hatching his plans for First Reconas unorthodox mission back in November. The General is a small man in his mid-fifties who moves and speaks quickly, with a vowel-mas.h.i.+ng speech impediment that gives him a sort of folksy charm. A bold thinker, Mattisas favorite expression is aDoctrine is the last refuge of the unimaginative.a On the battlefield, his call sign is aChaos.a His plan for the Marines in Iraq would hinge on disregarding sacred tenets of American military doctrine. His goal was not to s.h.i.+eld his Marines from chaos, but to embrace it. No unit would embody this daring philosophy more than First Recon.

In the months leading up to the war on Iraq, battles over doctrine and tactics were still raging within the military. The struggle was primarily between the more cautious aClinton generalsa in the Army, who advocated a methodical invasion with a robust force of several hundred thousand, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his acolytes, who argued for unleas.h.i.+ng a sort of American blitzkrieg on Iraq, using a much smaller invasion forcea"one that would rely on speed and mobility more than on firepower. Rumsfeldas interest in amaneuver warfare,a as the doctrine that emphasizes mobility over firepower is called, predated invasion planning for Iraq. Ever since becoming Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld had been pus.h.i.+ng his vision of a stripped-down, more mobile military force on the Pentagon as part of a sweeping transformation plan.

Mattis and the Marine Corps had been moving in that direction for nearly a decade. The Iraq campaign would showcase the Corpsa embrace of maneuver warfare. Mattis envisioned the Marinesa role in Iraq as a rush. While the U.S. Armya"all-powerful, slow-moving and cautiousa"planned its methodical, logistically robust movement up a broad, desert highway, Mattis prepared the Marines for an entirely different campaign. After seizing southern oil facilities within the first forty-eight hours of the war, Mattis planned to immediately send First Recon and a force of some 6,000 Marines into a violent a.s.sault through Iraqas Fertile Crescent. Their mission would be to seize the most treacherous route to Baghdada"the roughly 185-kilometer-long, ca.n.a.l-laced urban and agricultural corridor from Nasiriyah to Al Kut.

Saddam had viewed this route, with its almost impenetrable terrain of ca.n.a.ls, villages, rickety bridges, hidden tar swamps and dense groves of palm trees, as his not-so-secret weapon in bogging down the Americans. Thousands of Saddam loyalists, both Iraqi regulars and foreign jihadi warriors from Syria, Egypt and Palestinian refugee camps, would hunker down in towns and ambush points along the route. They had excavated thousands of bunkers along the main roads, sown mines and propositioned tens of thousands of weapons. When Saddam famously promised to sink the American invaders into a aquagmire,a he was probably thinking of the road from Nasiriyah to Al Kut. It was the worst place in Iraq to send an invading army.

Mattis planned to subvert the quagmire strategy Saddam had planned there by throwing out a basic element of military doctrine: His Marines would a.s.sault through the planned route and continue moving without pausing to establish rear security. According to conventional wisdom, invading armies take great pains to secure supply lines to their rear, or they perish. In Mattisas plan, the Marines would never stop charging.

The men in First Recon would be his ashock troops.a During key phases of the a.s.sault, First Recon would race ahead of the already swift-moving Marine battle forces to throw the Iraqis further off balance. Not only would the Marines in First Recon spearhead the invasion on the ground, they would be at the forefront of a grand American experiment in maneuver warfare. Abstract theories of transforming U.S. military doctrine would come down on their shoulders in the form of sleepless nights and driving into bullets and bombs day after day, often with no idea what their objective was. This experiment would succeed in producing an astonis.h.i.+ngly fast invasion. It would also result, in the view of some Marines who witnessed the descent of liberated Baghdad into chaos, in a Pyrrhic victory for a conquering force ill-trained and unequipped to impose order on the country it occupied.

Mattis did not reveal his radical plans for First Recon to its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Ferrando, until November 2002, a couple of months before the battalion deployed to the Middle East. Ferrando would later tell me, aMajor General Mattisas plan went against all our training and doctrine, but I canat tell a general I donat do windows.a At the time of Ferrandoas initial planning meetings with Mattis, the battalion possessed neither Humvees nor the heavy weapons that go with them. To the men in First Recon, trained to swim or parachute into enemy territory in small teams, the concept of fighting in columns of up to seventy vehicles, as they would in Iraq, was entirely new. Many didnat even have military operatorsa licenses for Humvees. The vehicles had to be scrounged from Marine Corps recycling depots and arrived in poor condition. The Marines were given only a few weeks to practice combat maneuvers in the Humvees, and just a few days to practice firing the heavy weapons mounted on them before the invasion.

What made Mattisas selection of First Recon for this daring role in the campaign even more surprising is that he had other units available to hima"specifically, Light Armored Reconnaissance (LAR) battalionsa"which are trained and equipped to fight through enemy ambushes in specialized armored vehicles. When I later ask Mattis why he put First Recon into this unorthodox role, he falls back on what sounds like romantic palaver: aWhat I look for in the people I want on the battlefield,a he says, aare not specific job t.i.tles but courage and initiative.a Mattis apparently had such faith in their skills that the Marines in First Recon were kept in the dark as to the nature of their mission in Iraq. Their commanders never told them they would be leading the way through much of the invasion, serving more or less as guinea pigs in the militaryas experiment with maneuver warfare. Most of the men in First Recon entered the war under the impression that they had been given Humvees to be used as transport vehicles to get them into position to execute conventional, stealthy recon missions on foot. Few imagined the ambush-hunting role they would play in the war. As one of the Marines in First Recon would later put it, aBunch of psycho officers sent us into s.h.i.+t we never should have gone into. But we came out okay, dog, even though all we was packing was some sac.a

TWO.

THE MARINES OF FIRST RECON have already been living in a Spartan desert camp for six weeks when I first meet them in early March, about a week before the invasion. Their home is a tent city called Camp Mathilda, located in the moonscape desert of northern Kuwait about fifty kilometers below the border with Iraq. The desert here is covered in fine, powdery sand almost like talc.u.m powder. By day it presents an endless vista of off-white tones, both dull and blinding in the harsh sun. Surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, Mathilda looks like a prison camp. About 5,000 Marines from a variety of units live in hundreds of putty-colored tents encircled by a gravel road, lots filled with hundreds of military vehicles, and rows of shower trailers and diesel-powered generators that fill the air with an incessant growling.

I arrive at about noon on March 11, on a bus from Kuwait City provided by the Marine Corps. Iam the only reporter slated to embed with First Recon. Another was supposed to come as well, but he dropped out after going through mandatory chemical warfare training provided by the Marine Corps in Kuwait City. Marine instructors had scared everyone by talking about nerve gases that, as they put it, will amake you dance the funky chicken until you diea; blistering agents that will make your skin aburst up like Jiffy Popa; and the risks of suffocating in your gas mask if you vomit. aIf itas chunky,a an instructor had said, ayou wonat be able to clear it through the drain tube of your mask. Youall have to swallow it or risk choking on it.a It was this last point that got to the other reporter. He suffered an acute attack of sanity in our hotel a few hours later and left the embed program to fly back home.

War fever, at least among reporters, has been running pretty high. Before coming to Kuwait, while staying at the main media hangout hotel by the Navyas port in Bahrain, Iad witnessed two colleagues get into a smackdown in the lobby over the issue of war and peace. A Canadian wire-service reporter, bitterly opposed to the war, knocked down a loudly patriotic American photographer in favor of it. While stunned Arab security guards looked on, the Canadian peacenik clenched the American patriot into a sort of LAPD chokehold and repeatedly slammed his head into the back of a chair. The American was saved from further humiliation only after several tough women from Reuters and AFP waded in and broke apart the one-sided combat.

When I watched the broadcast of Colin Powell making the case for war to the UN, I was aboard a Navy s.h.i.+p in the Gulf with a group of American reporters who cheered whenever Powell enumerated another point building the case for the invasion. They booed when European diplomats presented their reb.u.t.tals. Being among reporters here has sometimes felt like the buildup to a big game, Team USA versus The World.

The first Marines I encounter have other issues on their minds. I meet them in a dingy mess tent, a few guys in their late teens or early twenties killing time in the shade before dinner. As soon as I enter, one of them asks me if itas true that J.Lo is dead. Rumors of her death have been circulating through the camp for more than a week. The commanders told the men the story is not true, but one of the Marines I talk to, a twenty-year-old in an infantry unit, pesters me. aMaybe she really did die, but theyare not telling us to keep our morale up.a When I tell him the rumor is false, he shakes his head, not quite believing me. You get the idea heas clinging to this drama as something to enliven an otherwise bleak existence. Despite the fact that these Marines are poised to be at the epicenter of a world-changing event, here in the desert without phones or TVs or Internet connections, they seem a million miles away from it.

Everyone is covered in dust. When you walk through the camp, it whooshes up around your boots in clouds like moon dust. Even on days when the wind isnat blowing, it hangs in the air the way dampness does in San Francisco.

Several weeks earlier, the military brought in hundreds of pigeons and chickens, which they placed in cages between the tents to serve as early-warning detectors for gas attacks, as coal miners have used them for centuries. But the desert dust overwhelmed the birdsa fragile respiratory systems, killing nearly all of them. The only fauna thriving here are the rats that live under the plywood floorboards of the tents and come out at night to scamper around the slumbering Marines.

Every twenty-four hours the temperature fluctuates by up to fifty degrees, with frigid nights in the upper thirties turning into blazing days in the upper eighties. Throughout the day, youare either s.h.i.+vering or sweating. The sun is so intense that steel objects, such as machine-gun barrels, when left out in it for any period of time, become so hot they can be picked up only by using towels like oven mitts.

By early March the desert sandstorms known as ashamalsa have begun. Shamal winds gust at up to fifty miles an hour, sometimes blowing over the twenty-meter-long platoon tents Marines sleep in, shredding apart the canvas and burying them in several feet of sand. Itas no wonder the chickens couldnat hack it. The Marines whoave been here for weeks have runny noses and inflamed eyes from the constant dust. A lot of them walk around with rags wrapped around their faces to keep the dust out, but it doesnat seem to do any good. Several develop walking pneumonia even before the invasion begins.

Of the thousands of troops in the camp, the Recon Marines are easy to spot. Unlike infantry jarheads who work out in olive-drab s.h.i.+rts 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 crus.h.i.+ng load, his buddies pump their fists in the air and scream aGet some!a Recon Marines take pride in enduring the hostile conditions. One of the first guys I meet in the battalion brags, aWeare like Americaas little pit bull. They beat it, starve it, mistreat it, and once in a while they let it out to attack somebody.a In my first couple of days at the camp Iam placed in a tent with officers. I canat 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 heas easily recognizable. Though heas twenty-five, he has a loping, adolescent stride you can spot from a hundred meters away. Heas one of fifty men who introduce themselves to me during my first twenty-four hours at the camp, but heas the only one Iam able to call by name on my way to the mess tent and ask if I can join him for dinner.

Dinners are served on trays in a cafeteria line staffed by South Asian laborers. As we move through the line, Fick informs me that for a couple of weeks running, the only entre served has been mushy, gray chicken pieces. He speculates these might be remnants of the doomed camp chickens. Fick has one of those laughs involving a momentary loss of control that causes him to pitch forward like someone knocked him on the back of the head.

He is six foot two with light-brown hair and the pleasant, clear-eyed looks of a former altar boy, which he is. The son of a successful Baltimore attorney father and a social-worker mother, Fick admits, aMy family had a Leave It to Beaver quality.a He entered Dartmouth intending to study pre-med, but in his soph.o.m.ore year he was inspired to consider the military when he took a cla.s.s conducted by a charismatic former Special Forces soldier whoad served in Vietnam. Fick ended up double-majoring in political science and cla.s.sics, then attended the Marine Corpsa Officer Candidates School. Two years after graduating in 1999, he found himself a Marine second lieutenant on a landing craft delivering humanitarian supplies to war-torn East Timor. aI had a boatload of food rations and boxes of brand-new ThighMasters,a he says. aWe were delivering exercise devices for the oppressed, starving people of East Timor.a He throws his head forward, laughing.

The absurdities of the military amuse Fick. A few weeks after 9/11, he led an infantry platoon on a clandestine helicopter mission into Pakistan to retrieve a Black Hawk downed by the Afghan border. After that, Fick and his men were among the first Marines to seize the ground in southern Afghanistan at Camp Rhino. When he returned home after weeks of living in frozen fighting holes, the Marines sent him a bill for five hundred dollars, charging him for the food rations head consumed during his combat deployment. He says, aWe had a saying about the military in Afghanistan: aThe incompetent leading the unwilling to do the unnecessary.a a Despite his cavalier humor, Fick finished at the top of his cla.s.s in Officer Candidates School and near the top of the Marine Corpsa tough Basic Reconnaissance Course. He is also something of a closet idealist. His motivation for joining the Marines is a belief about which he is quietly pa.s.sionate. aAt Dartmouth, there was a sense that an ROTC program, which the school did not have, would militarize the campus,a he explains. aThey have it backward. ROTC programs at Ivy League campuses would liberalize the military. That can only be good for this country.a During our first meal together, he explains the breakdown of First Recon. The 374 Marines in First Recon Battalion are spread among four companiesa"Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and an auxiliary Headquarters and Support company. Alpha, Bravo and Charlie are the frontline combat companies containing the battalionas 160 actual Recon Marines. The rest of the battalionas personnel fill support positions. Fick commands Bravo Companyas Second Platoon. Heas held the position for less than a year, having entered First Recon after his return from Afghanistan.

Platoons are the basic building block of each company. There are twenty-one enlisted Marines in each platoon, as well as a commander and a medical corpsman (who is an enlisted man provided by the Navy). Enlisted Marinesa"that is, those who are not officersa"function within a complex web of hierarchy. Privates answer to corporals, and corporals to sergeants. Above sergeants there are staff sergeants, gunnery sergeants, first sergeants, master gunnery sergeants and sergeant majors. Above them all are officers.

Yet, as Fick explains, due to the traditional role of First Recon, in which small teams ordinarily function independently behind enemy lines, the men who are most trusted within a platoon are often the enlisted team leaders. Each platoon is divided into three teams, each led by one man, usually a sergeant. These men, like Colbert in Fickas platoon, often have more training and experience than the officers commanding them.

aThe men naturally look up to someone like Colbert,a Fick says. aHeas 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 youave got a d.i.c.k growing out of your forehead. You have to earn their respect.a First Recon, according to Fick, contains a heightened level of tensions between officers and enlisted men. aThis unit fosters initiative and individual thinking. These guys are independent operators. Thatas great ninety-nine percent of the time. But the flip side is they donat play well with others.a Despite the frictions, Fick believes in the men he commands. aI have the best platoon,a he says repeatedly. Away from his men, Fick cannot talk about them without smiling.

Itas because of his enthusiasm that I decide to join his platoon for the war. Initially, the battalion had planned for me to spend the invasion riding with the support company in the rear. But in exchange for handing over my satellite phonea"severing all contact with the outside worlda"First Reconas commander, Lt. Col. Ferrando, allows me to move in with Bravo Second Platoon and ride with its Team One, led by Colbert.

ITaS AFTER DARK when Fick pushes me through the entrance to his platoonas tent to introduce me to his men. Forty-two enlisted Marines sleep here, those from Bravoas Second and Third platoons. Itas lit with bare fluorescent light tubes suspended from the tent poles, which turn everyoneas skin a different shade of chartreuse. The floor of loose plywood sheeting is piled with crates of rations, gear and weapons, which the men sleep between in cramped rows. In the small amount of open s.p.a.ce, two Marines circle in flip-flops, sparring with their bare hands. One guy is in the corner, dealing cards to himself, doing push-ups according to their face values; he does the whole deck a couple of times a day. Others, a couple of whom have black eyes and sc.r.a.ped noses from their constant martial-arts fighting, recline on the floor studying invasion maps or reading dog-eared copies of Sun Tzu, Elmore Leonard, Steven Pressfieldas Greek military-historical novel Gates of Fire, and Hustler.

Before Fick makes his introduction, a couple of Marines stand nearby carrying on a loud reminiscence about great chicks they knew in high school. aEverybody called her One Pound,a a Marine in this group is saying. aA pretty little Asian girl. Her eyes were so small and tight you could have blindfolded her with dental floss. We called her One Pound acause she always looked like shead just smoked a pound of weed.a 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.

One of the first men to greet me is Navy Hospitalman Second Cla.s.s Robert Timothy aDoca Bryan, the twenty-nine-year-old medical corpsman. A tall redhead with narrow features, he approaches with a tight grin and shakes my hand. aSo you came here for a war, huh? You like war?a He continues to squeeze my hand, then puts his face about eight inches from mine and stares with unblinking, electric-blue eyes. His smile begins to twitch. aI hope you have fun in this war, reporter.a He releases my hand and smacks my shoulder. aIam just f.u.c.king with you, thatas all. No harm.a He walks off, laughing.

Several others break into laughter with him. Doc Bryan, I later find out, is always p.i.s.sed off at something, if not the presence of a reporter, then incompetent military leaders or the barbarity of war. Heas 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 scholars.h.i.+p while he earned a masteras in education. In his younger days, Doc Bryan had a lot of ambient rage he used to burn off in weekend bar fights. aIam always angry,a he later tells me. aI was born that way. Iam an a.s.shole.a 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 b.a.l.l.s.

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 profanitya"the first time I meet First Reconas battalion commander, he tells me the other reporter who dropped out probably did so because he writes for a af.u.c.king queer magazineaa"the technical jargon of the Corps is rich with off-color lingo. The term adonkey d.i.c.k,a 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 t.i.tle is listed as aReconnaissance Man.a 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 harda"having stronger muscles, being a better fighter, being more able to withstand pain and privation. They refer to extra comfortsa"foam sleeping pads, sweaters, even cold medicinea"as asnivel gear,a and relentlessly mock those who bring it as p.u.s.s.ies.

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. Thereas 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 headlocks and punch bruises into each otheras ribs. They lie in wait for one another in the shadows and leap out swinging Ka-Bar knives, flecking their buddiesa rib cages with little nicks from the knife tips, or dragging their blades lightly across a victimas 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 heas part of Bravo Third Platoon, he spends much of his time in Second Platoonas 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 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 aPappy,a and behind his back they speak of him in the most reverential terms. aYouad never think it to look at him,a a Marine tells me, abut Pappy is straight up the coldest killer in the platoon. If you saw him on the street back in the civilian world, youad just think heas the most average Joe out there. Thatas why heas so dangerous.a Colbert, the platoonas 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: aWelcome aboard. I hope your time with us is enjoyable and productive.a His politeness is so exacting it almost makes him come off like a p.r.i.c.k. 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 rect.i.tude. He grew up in an ultramodern 1970s house designed by his father, an architect. There was s.h.a.g carpet in a conversation pit. One of his fondest memories, he later tells me, is that before c.o.c.ktail 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 a.r.s.enal. 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 aCommunist Republic of California.a Beneath his formal manners, there is another side to Colbertas personality. His back is tattooed in a garish wash of color depicting a Louis Royo ill.u.s.tration 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 Californiaas freeways, and his previous racing bike was rigged with model rocket engines by the exhaust pipe to shoot flames when he wanted to ascare the bejesus out of commuters.a 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: aYou donat want to ever show fear or back down, because you donat want to be embarra.s.sed in front of the pack.a 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, heas legendary for having ascended the final thousand meters of Mt. Shasta on a broken ankle, carrying 150 pounds of gear. Where other Marines speak of the special bonds of kins.h.i.+p between them, the mystical brotherhood formed in the crucible of shared hards.h.i.+p, 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, aI would never socialize with any of these people if we werenat in the Marines.a 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, aA lot of the people I went to school with at Dartmouth look down on the type of people who are in the Marine Corps.a But if you examine the backgrounds of the average enlisted men in First Recon, the picture is a little more complicated. Thereas 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, youare just as likely to run into Marines who joined fresh out of prep school, or who turned down math or swim scholars.h.i.+ps at universities. The most aboota (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 circ.u.mstances. 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. Theyave chosen asceticism over consumption. Instead of celebrating their individualism, theyave subjugated theirs to the collective will of an inst.i.tution. 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, aKill!a 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 acracker-a.s.s f.u.c.ks,a the whites refer to them as amudsa and to Spanish as adirty spic talk,a and they are the best of friends.

Person, the aspiring rock star who serves as the driver and radio operator for Colbertas team, is among those whose feelings about the Corps seem almost conflicted. From Nevada, Missouri, a small town where aNASCAR is sort of like a state religion,a he was proudly raised working-poor by his mother. aWe lived in a trailer for a few years on my grandpaas farm, and Iad get one pair of shoes a year from Wal-Mart.a Person was a pudgy kid in high school, didnat play sports, was on the debate team and played any musical instrumenta"from guitar to saxophone to pianoa"he could get his hands on.

Becoming a Marine was a 180-degree turn for him. aIad planned to go to Vanderbilt on a scholars.h.i.+p and study philosophy,a he says. aBut I had an epiphany one day. I wanted to do my life for a while, rather than think it.a Like Colbert, heas 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 kidas 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. aHey, little tyke,a Person shouts. aWhat does this say on my s.h.i.+rt? aU.S. Marine!a I wasnat born on some hippie-f.a.ggot commune. Iam a death-dealing killer. In my free time I do push-ups until my knuckles bleed. Then I sharpen my knife.a Doc Bryan leaps up, brandis.h.i.+ng a Hustler. aCheck this out,a he says.

aI already seen that,a a Marine says. aPictures of those chicks p.i.s.sing.a aNo, listen to this.a Doc Bryan paces the tent reading an editorial by Larry Flynt d.a.m.ning the coming war as a grab for oil. aHe is a very cognizant man,a Doc Bryan concludes. aGents, this is a very cognizant way of explaining what we are all doing here. Weare going to be fighting a war for oil.a n.o.body seems to care much about the point heas making. In a weird way, external facts about the looming war donat 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, aThe 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.a 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 cartoonish 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 platoonas best martial-arts fighter (whom the other men continually jump and ambush in order to test themselves against his superior skills), describes his pa.s.sion for the Marine Corps in terms that blend New Age mysticism with the spirit of comic-book adventure. aI joined the Marines for idealism and romance,a he says. aIdealism because itas 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. Thatas the idealistic side. The romance comes in because we are a small band of hard motherf.u.c.kers, trained to go behind enemy lines against forces twenty or forty times bigger than us. And brother, if that ainat romantic, I donat know what is.a My first night with the platoon, Reyes says, aYouare lucky to be here, brother. We are the baddest, most tight-knit n.i.g.g.as in the battalion.a Just before lights out, a private approaches me and says, in polite, respectful tones, aSir, Iall get you a place to sleep.a He leads me to the wall of ponchos dividing the tent between Second and Third platoons, and widens a s.p.a.ce 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. Seminaked 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 welcoming me. Later, I know theyare 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, aI think we can take this as the clearest indication yet that weare getting ready to roll out for the invasion. They donat just feed Marines pizza for no reason.a Just after dawn on the morning of March 17, the Marines are told they have four hours to load their Humvees and trucks to pull out for a forward staging area near the Iraqi border. The men in Second Platoon clear out the tent in near silence. By eight oaclock temperatures have already reached the upper eighties. The heat is compounded by the fact that everyone has been ordered into their bulky chemical-protection suits. They lug weapons, rucksacks and crates of ammunition with sweat pouring from their faces. Everyone moves about in a feverish dream state.

By nine oaclock, First Reconas convoy of some seventy Humvees and trucks have been loaded and maneuvered into position in the sand. The 300 or so enlisted Marines line up for formation. A battalion master sergeant struts in front of the troops and shouts, aAnybody who doesnat want to be here, raise your hand.a Laughter swells from the ranks.

aGood,a the sergeant continues. aYou are going to be in the biggest show on the planet.a When formation ends, Marines jump up and down, laughing and throwing each other around in the dust. Two different men run past me, shouting exactly the same phrase, aThis is like Christmas!a Their enthusiasm for the rollout doesnat necessarily mean everyoneas a warmonger. A Marine explains the peculiar logic of troops getting ready for combat. aThe sooner the war starts,a he says, athe sooner we go home.a 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. Iam not allowed to tell her weare 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.

THREE.

FIRST RECONaS CONVOY pulls out from the gates of Camp Mathilda at noon on March 17 under an unusually clear, dust-free blue sky. The Marinesa objective is a staging area about twenty kilometers south of the Iraqi border, where they will be in position to punch into Iraq on a few hoursa notice. They have no orders yet to begin the invasion, but this is the last step. This maneuver is the battalion-wide equivalent of c.o.c.king a loaded pistol and aiming it at someoneas head.

Tens of thousands of other American and British troops are on the same path this afternoon. As soon as First Reconas convoy pulls onto the ahighwayaa"a narrow, rutted asphalt lane surrounded by open deserta"we become snarled in traffic. Some 150,000 coalition troops are camped nearby, and it looks as if all of them have poured onto the same highway at once. Thousands of vehiclesa"Humvees, tanks and trucksa"fill the road in a jam that snakes across the desert for thirty kilometers.

Traversing this portion of the Kuwait desert, you begin to get a sense of the scale of the undertaking. We crawl past fenced lots in which thousands of tanker trucks, tractor-trailers and pieces of construction machinery are parked, waiting to roll into Iraq on the heels of the combat units. There are supply depots covering acres of sand with mountains of munitions, oil drums and rations crates. Lying beside the road are steel pipe sections that military construction crews are welding together into a pipeline to supply fuel and water to the invasion force as it goes north. It all has the feel of a monumental industrial enterprise. Somehow all these pieces are being put togethera"the people and the equipmenta"to function as one large machine. Though at the small-unit level all I see is the friction among the moving partsa"Marines shouting at other vehicles to get out of the way, guys jumping out to hurriedly p.i.s.s by the road, people taking wrong turnsa"the machine works. It will roll across 580 kilometers to Baghdad. It will knock down buildings, smash cars and tanks, put holes in people, shred limbs, cut children apart. Thereas no denying it. For certain tasks, the machine put together in this desert is a very good one.

Colbertas team digs into its position in the staging area after midnight. The moon overhead is so bright it looks almost like someone is s.h.i.+ning a flashlight on us. Itas taken nearly fourteen hours to reach this spot of open desert. The battalionas seventy-odd vehicles fan out across a couple of kilometers, with the Humvees facing north, their guns oriented toward Iraq. Marines move through the moonlit gloom with pickaxes and shovels, digging aRanger gravesaa"shallow, one-man sleeping holes designed to protect their occupants from shrapnel in the event of an Iraqi attack. Then the Marines stretch acammie netsaa"camouflage nettinga"over their vehicles to make them harder to spot.

Temperatures have plunged into the lower forties. In their haste to pack up in the morning, many Marines had buried fleece vests and other warming asnivel geara in the bottoms of their rucksacks. Some left this behind altogether. While Colbertas team digs into their position, Marines whoad been so jubilant in the morning start b.i.t.c.hing, primarily to amuse themselves.

Jacks, the giant gunner in Second Platoonas team whom everyone calls Manimal, walks over to Colbert, whining, aIam sick of this war.a aIt hasnat even started yet, you p.u.s.s.y,a Colbert says.

aItas f.u.c.king cold out here,a Manimal says.

aYou canat be cold,a Colbert says. aYouare a killer.a aYeah, but I didnat pack no snivel gear,a Manimal says. aYou got a fleece I can borrow till the waras over?a A LOW-INTENSITY DUST STORM starts sometime before dawn on the first morning at the staging area. Sleeping in open holes, you wake up with your face covered in powder. The wind moans continually. By sunrise it looks like we are in a snowstorm. Marines gather underneath the cammie netting draped over their vehicles, repacking gear, cleaning weapons, waiting. Their commanders tell the men the war will probably start on the twenty-second or twenty-third.

Colbert sits upright in his Ranger grave, filling his rifle magazines with bullets, peering out at the opaqueness of the deserta"the dusty winds blowing past the cammie netsa"and says, aIt almost feels like weare at the bottom of the ocean.a Colbertas specialty within the platoon is deep-sea diving. Heas trained to lead his team through miles of ocean and penetrate coastal defenses. Despite the years heas spent on training missions in the water, he confesses to me that the deep sea terrifies him. aThe scariest thing for me is to open my eyes under the ocean, especially at night,a he says. aIam scared every time I do it.a He adds, aThatas probably why I love diving.a Colbert tells me his feelings about the upcoming venture are similar. As a professional warrior, politics and ideology donat really enter into his thoughts about why he is here in the desert, waiting to invade a country. aIam not so idealistic that I subscribe to good versus evil. We havenat had a war like that since World War II. Why are we here now? I guess itas to remove this guy from power. Iam not opposed to it, and I wasnat going to miss it.a For him, itas a grand personal challenge. aWeare going into the great unknown,a he says. aScary, isnat it?a he adds, smiling brightly. aI canat wait.a AN HOUR BEFORE DAWN on March 20, the Marines in the staging area are awakened by the thundering of distant artillery. It confuses everyone because the night before, commanders in First Recon told the men the invasion wouldnat start for a couple more days. Colbert keeps a small shortwave radio in his Humvee, and I join him in the gray morning light while he tunes in the BBC. They announce that the Americans have bombed Baghdada"in what we later learn was a failed attempt to hit Saddam. The explosions we hear in the desert are American strikes on Iraqi positions just over the border. Colbert clicks off the radio. He looks up with a grave expression. Itas probably how he looks when he opens his eyes under the ocean for the first time on a dive. aWell,a he says. aWe kicked the hornetas nest. Now we better kill all the f.u.c.king hornets.a At about ten in the morning, Fick gathers the platoon for a briefing. This is held, as all future ones will be, around the hood of his Humvee. Itas one of those weird deser