Continuing our periodically recurring current theme on eyewitness to combat, this telling snippet from Generation Kill about how troops attempt to cope with the mundane frightening rigors of combat:
When [Marine Captain Nathaniel] Fick passes the word that the men in Second Platoon are to remain in place, Espera turns to his men in the next Humvee over from our and says, "Stand by to die, gents."
The twenty-two Marines in the platoon sit in their vehicles, engines running, as per their orders, while blasts shake the ground beneath them. Everyone watches the sky. A mortar lands ten meters from Espera's open-top Humvee, blowing a four-foot-wide hole in the ground. It's so close, I see the column of black smoke jetting up from the blast area before I hear the boom. I look out and see Espera hunched over his weapon, his eyes darting beneath the brim of his helmet, watching for the next hit. His men appear frozen in the vehicle as the smoke rises beside them. Before leaving on this mission, many of the men in Colbert's platoon had said good-bye to one another by shaking hands or even hugging. The formal farewells seemed odd considering that everyone was going to be shoulder-to-shoulder in the cramped Humvees.
The good-byes almost seemed an acknowledgment of the transformations that had taken place in combat. Friends who lolled around together during free time talking about bands, stupid Marine Corps rules and girlfriends' fine asses aren't really the same people anymore once they enter the battlefield. In combat, the change seems physical at first. Adrenaline begins to flood your system the moment the first bullet is fired. But unlike adrenaline rushes in the civilian world -- a car accident or bungee jump, where the surge lasts only a few minutes -- in combat, the rush can go on for hours. In time, your body seems to burn out from it, or maybe the adrenaline just runs out.
Whatever the case, after a while you begin to almost lose the physical capacity for fear. Explosions go off. You cease to jump or flinch. In this moment now, everyone sits still, numbly watching the mortars thump down nearby. The only things moving are the pupils of their eyes. This is not to say the terror goes away. It simply moves out from the twitching muscles and nerves in your body and takes up residence in your mind. If you feed it with morbid thoughts of all the terrible ways you could be maimed or die, it ges worse. It also gets worse if you think about pleasant things. Good memories or plans for the future just remind you how much you don't want to die or get hurt.
It's best to shut down, to block everything out. But to reach that state, you almost have to give up being yourself. That is why, I believe, everyone said good-bye to each other yesterday before leaving on this mission. They would still be together, but they wouldn't really be seeing one another for a while, since each man would, in his own way, be sort of gone."
-- Evan Wright, Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American War.
Editor's note: the 1st Recon Marine platoon that Wright profiled in Generation Kill included Nate Fick and Rudy Reyes, each of whom have been mentioned multiple times on this blog.
