momecat | GK re-read: week 1.

I've yet to figure out the exact shape of the 'book club' - so I'll be trying to work it out as we go. If anyone has suggestions feel free to leave a comment. For Week 1, I'll just be summarizing my thoughts and quoting some passages that I thought were interesting. I encourage you to jump on stuff that interested you or start your own discussions/summary in the comments.

I'm reading a reissue from 2009. Corgi book: 9780552158930. If you're reading a different version the page numbers probably won't line up, but I'm mostly using them as a point of reference for myself.

10 May: Prologue – Chapter 3 (Pages 1-54)

Wright does this clever thing where he lets the Prologue be in medias res, painting a very vivid picture of the invasion as Wright experienced it in Hitman Two One's vehicle. He goes straight into describing the energy and attitude of the Marines, as well as some of the Marine jargon. But he also wastes no time challenging preconceptions about the Military - quickly juxtaposing them with things that don't fit as neatly into that narrative.

It's fitting that the first person we're introduced to is Sergeant Brad Colbert – someone who is, as Wright describes it, "the last guy you would picture at the tip of the spear of the invasion forces in Iraq." (p. 15) a guy who considers himself a "Marine Cops killer" but simultaneously is a massive nerd that listens to 80s music, loves gadgets, and collects vintage video games - and explicitly doesn't engage in Moto displays. Wright manages to convey his competence despite this - immediately challenging a narrowly defined jarhead stereotype.

A bit of a digression, but I think it's doubly fascinating that Evan Wright didn't initially like Brad Colbert, but through seeing his actions made his into one of the central voices in the book.

The second Marine to be introduced is Corporal Josh Ray Person (p. 15). He's a motormouth humorist wannabe-rockstar delivering often irreverent and offensive, but always blunt commentary on allies and enemies alike; (p. 16)

Already he's reached a profound conclusion about this campaign: that the battlefield that is Iraq is filled with "fucking retards." There's the retard commander in the battalion, who took a wrong turn near the border, delaying the invasion by at least an hour. There's another officer, a classic retard, who has spent much of the campaign chasing through the desert to pick up souvenirs—helmets, Republican Guard caps and rifles—thrown down by fleeing Iraqi soldiers.

(Not mentioned by name but watching the mini we supposedly know who these officers are.)

The third Marine to be introduced by name is Corporal Harold James Trombley. His quote on the following page (p. 18) about feeling like he was living in "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" somehow rounds off what is to become a complex portrayal of a generation raised on video games, whose relationship to war and violence at least appears quite different to that of previous ones. (p. 18-19)

Culturally, these Marines would be virtually unrecognizable to their forebears in the "Greatest Generation." [...] These young men represent what is more or less America's first generation of disposable children.

(p. 19)

In Iraq the joke among Marines is "After finishing here, we're going to attack North Korea, and we'll get there by invading Iran, Russia and China."

This quote just feels eerie in 2020, where we were a Presidential tweet away from war with Iran. An attack on Iran or China in particular feels depressingly less unrealistic now than it did then I imagine (granted the Marines joking about it probably wouldn't have been surprised in 2003 either).

(p. 22)

They will enter Baghdad as liberating heroes only to witness their astonishing 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 don't 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.

What a way to end the prologue. I don't really have much to add - I just think it's interesting how this bit comes after Major General James Mattis' praise of First Recon. More than illustrating the complications of a questionable war it points to the cost it has on the men that fight it.

(p. 24)

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. [...] The one thing they are not trained for is to fight from Humvees, maneuvering in convoys, rushing headlong into enemy positions. This is exactly what they will be doing in Iraq.

The idea of maneuver warfare was hardly new, the book even mentions that Mattis and the Marine Corps had been moving towards it for nearly a decade. The thing that seems most maddening (even more so than not using the LAR battalion trained for it) is how First Recon was to be "shock troops" - assaulting through without stopping - without ever finding out. As much as you're expected to be flexible, I imagine a lot of confusion could have been avoided if they had understood their part a bit better. I guess they didn't call Mattis "Chaos" for nothing...

(p.31)

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 birds' fragile respiratory systems, killing nearly all of them.

Truly the exemplary "the best-laid plans of mice and men" - someone genuinely thought it was a good idea to keep birds in cages in a desert?

(p.32)

The Marines who've been here for weeks have runny noses and inflamed eyes from the constant dust. [...] Several develop walking pneumonia even before the invasion begins.

It just sounds like such a miserable place to prepare for war. But the ideal place to make you 'hard' I suppose?

Although quoted in the prologue, Lieutenant Nate Fick gets a proper introduction in chapter 2, where Wright further explores the Darthmouth graduate who joined the Marine Corps 'in a fit of idealism'. (p. 33-34)

Though he's twenty-five, he has a loping, adolescent stride you can spot from a hundred meters away. [...] The absurdities of the military amuse Fick. [...] 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 he'd consumed during his combat deployment. He says, "We had a saying about the military in Afghanistan: 'The incompetent leading the unwilling to do the unnecessary.' "

I can't believe they billed him five hundred dollars for food rations. I wonder if he ended up having to pay for it...
There's a few interesting factoids about Nate that gets mentioned here.
His gait - apparently Stark Sands coincidentally has a similar one (they apparently shared a lot of similar mannerisms. Nothing Stark had trained for since he hadn't met the man. Just good casting!).
His opinions of the Military - Iraq definitely delivered the final blow and cemented his decision to part ways but, idealist or not, the absurdity of it was nothing new. I had forgotten that he actually double majored in political science and classics, which surely explains his interest in the political reasons behind invading Iraq, and furthermore his frustrations with the lack of a cohesive political plan once they have taken Baghdad.

(p.34)

[Fick's] motivation for joining the Marines is a belief about which he is quietly passionate. "At Dartmouth, there was a sense that an ROTC program, which the school did not have, would militarize the campus," he explains. "They have it backward. ROTC programs at Ivy League campuses would liberalize the military. That can only be good for this country."

This reminds me of the Veterans for Obama campaign, where Fick is quoted as saying he hopes it will have "elevated the national-security discussion above simplistic one-liners about victory or defeat and helped to end the fiction that only Republicans can talk about defense in a credible way". He might be idealistic, but it's firmly grounded in the reality of modern politics.

(p. 35-36)

First Recon, according to Fick, contains a heightened level of tensions between officers and enlisted men. "This unit fosters initiative and individual thinking. These guys are independent operators. That's great ninety-nine percent of the time. But the flip side is they don't play well with others."
Despite the frictions, Fick believes in the men he commands. "I have the best platoon," he says repeatedly. Away from his men, Fick cannot talk about them without smiling.

I love how this quote manages to mention the tension between officer and enlisted, how fiercely individualistic (within military constraints!) Recon is - and also how much Fick likes and respects the men in his Platoon. ♥

(p. 37)

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.

I don't know why I like this detail so much.

Navy Hospitalman Second Class Robert Timothy "Doc" Bryan gets a fitting introduction (p. 37)

Doc Bryan, I later find out, is always pissed off at something, if not the presence of a reporter, then incompetent military leaders or the barbarity of war. [...] In his younger days, Doc Bryan had a lot of ambient rage he used to burn off in weekend bar fights. "I'm always angry," he later tells me. "I was born that way. I'm an asshole."

Holy shit Jonah Lotan really nails this portrayal. I had completely forgotten that Doc Bryan had a master's in education. It makes sense that he went on to become a doctor.

(p. 38)

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. [...] Recon Marines will proudly tell you that if you look up their official Military Occupational Specialty in a Marine Corps manual, their job title is listed as "Reconnaissance Man." Theirs is one of the few remaining fields in the military closed to women.

None of this is surprising. Least of all the casual misogyny. I do wonder how it is these days, ever since combat roles opened up to women (2016 I believe?) and USMC dropped "man" from multiple of their MOS (such as 0321, which is now called Reconnaissance Marine). Apparently a Lance Corporal recently became the first female Recon Marine. Hoo-rah!

(p. 39)

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 leadership of Colbert.

I had forgotten that Pappy was part of Colbert's Recon team in Afghanistan. I love how Wright describes these guys like rock stars - with the other enlisted men clamoring around them life fans or groupies. But even more than that I love how he goes on to say that while Sergeant Eric Kocher and Sergeant Larry Shawn Patrick are obvious "alphas of the pack", he points out that Colbert definitely isn't one of the big ball-scratchers in the platoon.

[Colbert's] politeness is so exacting it almost makes him come off like a prick. I really get why he'd rub Wright the wrong way at first. Wright really paints Colbert in such vivid clarity. (p. 40)

There is about him an air of Victorian rectitude. He grew up in an ultramodern 1970s house designed by his father, an architect. There was shag carpet in a conversation pit. One of his fondest memories, he later tells me, is that before cocktail parties, his parents would let him prepare the carpet with a special rake.

HA! The anecdote about the shag carpet!! What an absolute nerd! Seems like he had a good childhood despite having a "deep-rooted but controlled rebellious streak" responsible of sending him to military academy.
Not to mention how he on one hand has a "barely concealed sense of superiority" but then his life philosophy is "You don't want to ever show fear or back down, because you don't want to be embarrassed in front of the pack." Like how is he simultaneously so cocksure and confident in himself while also apparently extremely hung up on how he is perceived by others??? Talk about a walking contradiction - I love it! It's so fascinating.

(p. 43) I had completely forgotten that Person could play basically any musical instruments and had received a philosophy scholarship. None of it surprising however! His childhood sounded pretty rough being raised by a single working-class mother.

(p.44)

In a weird way, external facts about the looming war don't 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.

What a weirdly apt way of summarizing the invasion, and being a soldier. It's just missing the "and you kill people".

(p. 44-45) Sergeant Rudy Reyes waxing poetically about the brotherhood of Marines - saying he joined for idealism and romance" is so quintessentially him??

"Idealism because it's 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. That's the idealistic side. The romance comes in because we are a small band of hard motherfuckers, trained to go behind enemy lines against forces twenty or forty times bigger than us. And brother, if that ain't romantic, I don't know what is."

Me neither Rudy, me neither.

(p. 48-49)

Traversing this portion of the Kuwait desert, you begin to get a sense of the scale of the undertaking. [...] Somehow all these pieces are being put together—the people and the equipment—to function as one large machine. [...] 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. There's no denying it. For certain tasks, the machine put together in this desert is a very good one.

The description of tanker trucks, tractor-trailers, and all of the the "rear echelon" that keeps the motor of this machine humming - it all seems so messy on the smaller scale, but one has to admit that it somehow worked.

(p. 50)

Jacks, the giant gunner in Second Platoon's team whom everyone calls Manimal, walks over to Colbert, whining, "I'm sick of this war."
"It hasn't even started yet, you pussy," Colbert says.
"It's fucking cold out here," Manimal says.
"You can't be cold," Colbert says. "You're a killer."
"Yeah, but I didn't pack no snivel gear," Manimal says. "You got a fleece I can borrow till the war's over?"

Fucking love this quote! They are such big babies underneath all the posturing. But it also shows a level of trust that Corporal Anthony "Manimal" Jacks could openly complain and ask for snivel gear. As much as they give each other shit - they also support each other.

(p. 50) Colbert's opinions (or lack there of) about the war, not getting caught up with the politics and ideologies, is such a stark contrast to Fick's view of war. I guess that really is, in a sense, the difference between enlisted and officer? Whether you have the ability to actually enact change as an officer notwithstanding. No doubt enlisted men are more focused on being "professional warriors" than the legitimacy of the fight.

(p. 52-54)

"The most important part of my job," [Wynn] tells me, "is to care about my men." His leadership philosophy is based on "building confidence in my men by respecting them." He and Fick function not so much like autocrats but like parents. At times, Gunny Wynn almost seems like a worried den mother, whose role is to soften the more aggressive messages Fick gives the men.

Fick holding a brief with his Platoon - encouraging them to be aggressive, and then Gunnery Sergeant Mike "Gunny" Wynn follows on with wisdom from Somalia and telling them not to engage without clear targets. It's so interesting seeing how well balanced they were as a team, one always offering a counter without undermining the other. And still leading the Platoon together.
This passage also directly addresses the challenges with interpreting an ROE that doesn't account for guerilla warfare vs civilian populace very well. I can't imagine the challenges of being a commander in such a situation. It's clear that Fick's main concern throughout is mostly about protecting his Marines. As illustrated by his quote "If we kill civilians, we're going to turn the populace against us and lose the war. But I don't want to lose Marines because the ROE have taken away their aggressiveness."

Alright!!! That's it for the first few chapters. I went into a bit more detail than I expected - but there's just so much of note! In terms of Wright's writing I was reminded how much I enjoyed his writing style - particularly letting the prologue jump-start the action, only to rewind it a bit in chapter 1. And he's got a way of describing the Marines that makes them jump off the page. One can truly understand why David Simon and Ed Burns wanted to make this into a show.

Hopefully this is a good and interesting start to discussions about the book?

What do you think? Did I forget to mention something memorable? Anything that surprised or resonated? What quotes stood out to you? Please share your thoughts!

GK re-read: week 1.

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