Along for the ride to Baghdad

If you want to know what it was like to race in a roofless, windowless, aging Humvee through open desert, under intense fire from front and side, from Iraqis hidden behind berms and in huts that dot the landscape, from pieces of pipe in the road that can explode under your wheels and rip off your limbs -- in other words, if you want to know what the war in Iraq was like for those who led the invasion -- the facts are all laid out in Evan Wright’s new book, “Generation Kill.”

Wright, 39, is now back in his Brentwood apartment after being embedded with the Marines for the first two months of the conflict. For all that time, the Rolling Stone writer and former Hustler film critic rode in the lead vehicle of the lead platoon at the front of the convoy that forged a path to Baghdad.

Nicknamed the “suicide battalion,” the 70-Humvee convoy traveled 10 miles ahead of the main invasion force -- a kind of exterminating advance team meant to find the positions and draw the fire of Iraqi hostiles waiting in ambush, to ferret out whatever, or whoever, might impede the progress of the main invasion.

Wright, a tall, hefty guy with pale eyes and hair, won easy acceptance from the troops because he not only fits the physical image of a Marine, he projects the same, unflappable calm and strength. And, he says, his credentials as a porn film expert didn’t hurt.

“It was a huge plus, it was like kryptonite to these hardened guys who didn’t want to mess with reporters.” Having reviewed 8,000 films for Hustler won him “more inclusion” from the 23 enlisted men in his platoon, and the four in his Humvee, “than any press card from a prestigious newspaper or TV channel ever could have.”

And he has paid them back with a book that should make them proud.

It is written from their perspective, he says -- an enlisted man’s eye view of the action. And it is a triumph of objectivity, with not a bit of tilt or spin. A warts-and-all word picture of what Wright saw and heard: The raw, dirty humor of young men on the edge, who get no sleep or change of clothes for days on end, whose every bodily function is discussed and analyzed, who find themselves intimately bound together in a series of unthinkable life or death situations.

The book is a shocker in unexpected ways. These gung-ho fighters, hyped up on instant coffee crystals and ephedrine pills to stay alert and awake, these Marines, ages 19-25 (from the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion out of Camp Pendleton), turn out to be awe-inspiring in their maturity and compassion, no matter what your perspective on this particular war, or on war itself.

Wright says he has long been obsessed with America’s youth subcultures. It was his specialty, first at the L.A. Weekly and then at Rolling Stone. “I was known as their ambassador to the nation’s underbelly,” he says. Before his latest stint, he had infiltrated and written about groups like the young neo-Nazis of the Aryan Nation, inner-city gangbangers, environmental activists, even sorority girls.

“To me, the military was one more youth subculture to study,” he says, and he approached his war assignment with an academic eye.

The book, which began as a series of articles for Rolling Stone, could just as aptly have been titled “Generation Thrill.” The enlistees were not just up for battle, they were eager for mortal combat, hankering to “go get some” -- a generation weaned on Grand Theft Auto and other shooter video games.

They were guys with nothing in common except modest backgrounds and tremendous unfocused talents -- in Wright’s words, guys who “were searching for something authentic in life. Something real, and dangerous, that won’t be co-opted by their elders and turned into a Mountain Dew commercial. That’s why they love the Marines. It’s painful and dangerous and lonely -- and they hunger for that.”

He is troubled though by the unflattering “popular perception about the kind of people who enlist in the military” -- a perception he found inaccurate.

“These guys were very sharp and smart. Many could have gone through college, could have qualified for scholarships” if their lives had led them to that. They were an elite enlisted team, picked for “their physical fortitude, their ability to think on their own, to memorize extremely complex weapons systems and commands.”

But they had more than smarts, he says. They had moral courage. A desire to save lives of innocent Iraqis that matched the fierceness of their desire to fight to the death. Wright pulls out a mini-tape recorder he carried into battle. He clicks it on and you hear the bullets and shells whizzing, screeching, pinging, booming all around his Humvee, hitting and missing, thumping into doors and helmets and the flak jackets of the Marines inside.

Because the Humvee is packed high with ammunition, a direct hit would incinerate them all. Yet there are no sounds from the Marines inside the besieged vehicle. Wright says they were completely still, straining to hear the very calm, controlled voice of Sgt. Brad Colbert, who repeats again and again: “I have no targets. I have no targets.” Meaning that the Marines must not return fire, must not shoot at where they think the enemy is hidden because they might hit civilians.

“It is not like the Hollywood movies, where guys under fire yell and scream,” Wright says. “Calmness is the hallmark of a great warrior. Each man must focus on doing what he is assigned to do. He must trust the others to do their jobs too.” He must believe in the man who calls the shots.

Wright explains the action on the tape: “There were six houses clustered together on a deserted road. We were under intense fire, taking multiple hits. You heard just three minutes of action of the kind that occurred almost every minute of every day -- with the Marines not shooting when other people might have,” Wright says.

He is worried that “this Abu Ghraib scandal has given Americans an image that enlisted people might all just be these yahoos” who commit outrageous acts simply because they can. “But that is not what I saw, it is not what occurred” among the men with whom he lived through so much trauma -- men who had every chance to commit less-than-honorable acts, with some sense of justification -- but who never did.

In fact, in one of the most bizarre aspects of Wright’s tale, it was often the enlisted men who were more astute than some of their senior officers -- a seeming cuckoo’s nest of oddballs.

There was the company commander they dubbed Encino Man, after the dimwitted caveman in the movie of the same name. Encino Man had “a seeming inability to understand the basics, like reading maps,” Wright says. Worse yet, he “actually attempted to call in an artillery strike virtually on top of the heads of his own men” to rain down artillery on his own Humvees. He had no idea that his men’s proximity to the enemy could make such a strike lethal to his own troops.

On the first night of the invasion, Encino Man decided that his Humvee (one of the few with windows) would be harder for the enemy to spot if he duct taped all the side windows, shielding the light from his computer screen. Of course, once he taped the sides, he couldn’t see anywhere but straight ahead.

“So when the entire convoy went right, Encino Man went left. The entire invasion of Iraq was halted until we could find Encino Man and get him back.”

Then there’s the unforgettable officer nicknamed Captain America, who commanded the other advance platoon with which Wright’s platoon traveled. From Day 1 of the invasion, he revealed an unfortunate tendency to become hysterical at any sign of danger. On one embattled night, he screamed on the radio, “We’re all gonna die, we’re all gonna die”-- a message transmitted to all his men.

“He always ran around with his bayonet ready, like Rambo,” Wright says.

And he once tried to use it on a bound Iraqi prisoner, yelling, “We should cut his throat.” Then he leaped out of the darkness and kicked his own sergeant in the groin, in a failed attempt to kick the prisoner.

Wright says that at one point, Captain America led his men on a treasure hunt for discarded Iraqi helmets -- ridiculous on its face, but especially so in an area suspected to have landmines. “The most obvious thing to booby trap is a helmet lying on the ground,” an irate Marine told the author.

Of course, the Marines’ biggest problems were from enemy insurgents. It was always difficult to tell exactly where they were firing from, Wright says. Often, they would be in or behind houses, shooting and launching rocket-propelled grenades.

The Marines had the firepower to evaporate the dwellings, possibly killing the shooters where they hid. But that meant they might also kill innocent civilians inside. That was against the rules of engagement, he says, but more important, it was against the moral code of the outwardly tough enlisted Marines. They could not have lived with themselves if they did that, he says. “They truly cared about who they hit.”

At roadblocks, when it was impossible to see who was in the cars and SUVs that approached, they suffered agonies over whether to shoot. If the car contained enemy suicide bombers, it could blow them up as it came near. If it contained militants trying to reach the main force behind them, it would be folly to let them through. But if they shot at the car without knowing, they might be killing the very people they were sent to protect.

At one point in a roadblock, the men in Wright’s group fired warning shots at an oncoming car. It was night and the shots arced high overhead. “The driver panicked and accelerated. He heard the gunfire, didn’t understand what it meant and couldn’t see the Marines on the road ahead.”

The Marines, with no idea why the car was speeding toward them, were forced to shoot until the car stopped. Out came an unarmed farmer, a father, who carried his 3-year-old daughter in his arms. The gunfire had blown off the top of her head. The image of the shattered man limping away with his dead daughter will haunt them the rest of their lives, he says.

It is one of dozens of incidents that each Marine could recount, where they tried their best to protect and save -- and wound up doing the opposite.

“These Marines were all jaded and cynical when they entered the war,” Wright says. “They weren’t all romantic about what they were fighting for. But I think they discovered new layers of innocence to lose in Iraq.”

The Marines in his Humvee survived without major injury. The next group to use that vehicle wasn’t so lucky. One Marine died and two suffered critical injuries. The Humvee was blown up April 6 in Fallouja.

Wright, a Vassar College graduate who studied medieval and Renaissance history, says his next book will be about the radical Christian right, which he is approaching, he adds, “with no agenda.”

He also says he is neither pro- nor antiwar. And neither is “Generation Kill.”

He says what he’s learned from his Iraq experience may be a cliche but it’s true: “War should be undertaken with a very heavy heart.” He says it doesn’t matter what the reason is for the war, what politicians are in power or how good the warriors are.

“Even the most high-tech, best-trained army in the world will always come down to the same thing: a bunch of guys on the ground, shooting at each other from 150 feet away and accidentally shooting civilians and dropping bombs on the wrong houses. Chaos and horror. This is just what war is.”

He is not saying it’s never justified, he cautions. He just feels it’s often misunderstood.

“There’s one thing I know for sure. I know these Marines care. I think that if a serious peace movement ever does develop, the most serious proponents of it will be veterans of this war.”