(Evan Wright. New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 2004). Review by Kevin Miller.

“I’ll say one thing about these guys: When we take fire, not
one of them hesitates to shoot back. In World War Two, when Marines hit the
beaches, a surprisingly high percentage of them didn’t fire their weapons, even
when faced with direct enemy contact. They hesitated.[1]
Not these guys…. These guys have no problem with killing.”

That’s how Lieutenant Nathaniel Fick describes his fellow
Marines in First Recon, the elite unit that spearheaded the invasion of Iraq in
May 2003. If you ever worried that perhaps this war and the men who fight it
are less than virtuous, Evan Wright’s gripping firsthand account of the early
days of battle will definitely put a chill in your bones.

p>An Ivy League graduate who joined the Marines in “a fit of
idealism,” Fick is the most grounded individual you will meet in this book. It
only goes downhill from there. There’s Sgt. Brad Colbert, “the Iceman” who can
spout a litany against country music one moment, lean out the window and shoot
somebody, and then resume his tirade without missing a beat; Cpl. Harold James
Trombley, who gets excited when he sees his bullets rip into an Iraqi man’s
legs, cutting him in half; “Captain America,” Fick’s commanding officer who
shoots or stabs anything that moves; Cpl. Josh Ray Person, who thinks everyone
and everything in Iraq is a “retard”; and Sgt. Eric Kocher who likes to draw
smiley faces on his 40mm grenade rounds before he goes into battle. A far cry
from the “Greatest Generation” who stormed the beaches in World War II. If that
war was characterized by idealism, you could say the new face of war is
ambivalence, a “Who gives a *censored*? Let’s frag this town!” attitude. But what
else would you expect from a group of guys who, as author Wright says,
“represent what is more or less America’s first generation of disposable
children”?

Not that every Marine profiled comes from a dysfunctional
background. Many, like Fick, are Ivy Leaguers looking for more adventure than
corporate American could offer. But just as many come from broken homes and
criminal or at least deviant backgrounds. Raised on hip-hop, Marilyn Manson,
and Jerry Springer, these guys “are on more intimate terms with video games,
reality TV shows and Internet porn than they are with their own parents.” Just
imagine them rolling into your town, kicking in your door, and announcing that
your liberators had arrived. Would you like Freedom Fries with that?

And yet, as much as these men are products of their culture,
the very fact that they have joined the Marines can be seen as a rejection of
that culture. Says Wright, “They’ve chosen asceticism over consumption. Instead
of celebrating their individualism, they’ve subjugated theirs to the collective
will of an institution. Their highest aspiration is self-sacrifice over
self-preservation.”

So maybe these men are more idealistic than they seem at
first blush, more human, too. As much as some of them get off on the killing,
for others it is merely a job, the zinging bullets an annoyance. For still
others, war is a traumatizing experience that will likely scar them until they
bite their own “smiley faced” bullet. Take the Marine who fired on a civilian
vehicle that didn’t stop at a military checkpoint. After confirming that the
two men in the front seat were dead, he opened the back door and saw a
three-year-old girl apparently cowering in the back seat. When he went to pick
her up though, the top of her head slid off, spilling her brains out onto the
ground. He was silent for days afterwards while everyone wondered if he would
finally crack. I was traumatized just reading about it.

The frightening thing is, the majority of the casualties
recorded in this book are civilians. Mistaken identity, misguided bombs,
overzealous recruits… I can tell you one thing: This book made me more
skeptical than ever when I hear the words “smart” and “surgical” used in
reference to American military strikes. Time to come up with some new terms,
boys. How about “wanton killing,” “total devastation” and “blitzkrieg”
for starters?

The bloodshed isn’t just breeding cynics like me back at
home either. Even the guys lighting up the Iraqi countryside are ambivalent
about what they’re doing and why. Consider these words from Captain Bryan
Patterson, Commander of Alpha Company: “There is not one good thing that comes
out of war. I’m not going to pretend I’m this great American savior in Iraq. We
didn’t come here to liberate. We came to look out for our interests. That we
are here is good. But if to liberate means putting a Starbucks and a McDonald’s
on every street corner, is that liberation? But I have to justify this to
myself. It’s Saddam’s fault… Still, the protestors have a lot of valid points.
War sucks.”

“The *censored*ed thing,”
adds Sgt. “Doc” Bryan, “is the men we’ve been fighting probably came here for
the same reasons we did, to test themselves, to feel what war is like. In my
view it doesn’t matter if you oppose or support war. The machine goes on.”

Not the most hopeful point of view, but one born of
experience serving on the frontlines of American foreign policy as it has taken
shape in Somalia, Afghanistan, and now Iraq. Kind of takes the sheen off words
like “freedom” and “liberation” that seem to flow so easily from the Bush
Administration. My question is, if the guys who are on the frontlines of
America’s War On Terror don’t believe what Bush and co. are selling, why should
we?

If you want to know what America is really exporting to
Iraq, I urge you to turn off your television and read this book. Hats off to
author Evan Wright for having the courage to step inside the machine and the
integrity to describe the machine as it really is.

[1] This fact is
well documented by Lieutenant Dave Grossman in “The Problem: A Resistance to
Killing,” http://www.killology.com/art_beh_problem.htm.