Porn Valley- In a way, Evan Wright says, his approach to journalism is a lot like a good military commander's approach to combat.
"I do bond with people," Wright says, "but I actually am kind of a heartless [SOB] with my subjects, in the same way that an officer can love his men and spend time with them and then send them to their deaths. I can like them, but if there's something worthy and truthful, I will write it."
Wright, on assignment for Rolling Stone, rode into battle during the 2003 Iraq invasion with an elite platoon of reconnaissance Marines who drove open-top Humvees deep behind enemy lines. The resulting book, Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American War, is an unusually raw and honest portrait of men in battle.
And the story, which HBO is developing as a mini-series with director Ridley Scott, should dispel the notion that being "embedded" with soldiers in war necessarily means being co-opted by them.
Wright, 39 - a former porn reviewer for Hustler magazine who has plumbed the cultures of skinheads and sorority girls - describes the Marines' astonishing courage and competence. But he also details their off-color rantings, their masturbatory habits, their questionable killings of civilians, and the hair-raising incompetence of some of their officers.
There have been several well-received "embedded-in-Iraq" books, but none better captures the personalities and idiosyncrasies of what Wright calls the "hip-hop, Jerry Springer and Marilyn Manson" generation of American warrior.
We meet Cpl. John Person, jazzed on instant-coffee crystals and ephedra, singing Avril Lavigne songs and griping about his "retard" superiors; Cpl. Harold Trombley, who muses that spraying machine-gun fire into an Iraqi town reminded him of the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City; and Robert "Doc" Bryan, a Navy medical officer from Philadelphia who dismisses the war as a grab for oil, then fights it ferociously, even as he goes out of his way to treat wounded Iraqis.
Wright also was blessed with his share of buffoonish villains, including a commander identified only as Captain America, who repeatedly loses his cool under fire and abuses Iraqi prisoners.
"I wanted to tell this story through the voices of the Marines, as much as possible in their own words," said Wright, who grew up outside of Cleveland and studied Renaissance history at Vassar College. "That was something that I started back at Hustler - I would write about porn stars in their own voices and from their own perspectives... . The voices of actual people in the military are voices that society tends to ignore."
The book evolved from a three-part Rolling Stone series in June 2003 that won the National Magazine Award. Sent to join hundreds of journalists embedded with the military, Wright landed one of the sexiest slots.
He found himself with the First Reconnaissance Battalion, a Marines version of the Special Forces. He didn't know it at the time, but the battalion's mission would be to drive a column of Humvees miles ahead of the main armored invasion group, taking a different route to draw out ambushes and fool the enemy. In other words, they would be lightly armed bait.
Wright had covered the Army in Afghanistan, and early on in the Iraq invasion he made a crucial decision: Instead of embedding with senior officers to the rear of the action, as many reporters did, he agreed to give up his satellite phone in exchange for a spot with the grunts, on the tippety-tip of the spear.
He hooked up with a platoon led by Lt. Nathaniel Fick, a Dartmouth graduate who chuckled over military absurdities. And he found a seat in a Humvee with Staff Sgt. Brad Colbert, a fan of bad '80s music who comported himself with quiet valor.
For the next three weeks, the platoon drove up from Kuwait through the small towns of southern Iraq, running into so many ambushes and so much hostile fire that even Wright became numb to the crack of enemy AK-47 rounds.
"The competence they displayed when we were under fire was extraordinary, and it was part of the reason I didn't just bolt," Wright said.
Instead, he kept his tape recorder running, and when the tapes ran out, he filled several large notebooks. He bonded with the men who were protecting his life, he said, but he didn't flinch from writing about their weak or embarrassing human moments.
Wright's prose is spare - "I'm not capable of being a beautiful writer," he says - but just by bearing witness he was able to offer a moving look at how the brash, irreverent Marines reacted to the killing they did and the horror they witnessed.
When the platoon comes upon a column of refugees, Wright shows us a lance corporal walking down the road weeping, a baby in his hands. The mother, weakened from days of walking, had almost dropped the infant.
"After driving here from Kuwait, shooting every house, person, dog in our path, we finally get to do something decent," the Marine says, a line that never would have made it past the public affairs officer.
Amazingly, the 374-person First Recon battalion completed its mission with only two serious casualties. But its experiences foreshadowed much that would go wrong with the United States' plans for a quick victory in Iraq.
As they do today, the Americans found it difficult to tell civilians from combatants on a battlefield where Saddam Hussein's agents shed their uniforms and attacked from populated areas. Wright writes of seeing the Marines shoot into a car that fails to stop at a checkpoint, only to find they have killed a 3-year-old girl. That kind of thing happened dozens of times until the military got serious about clearly marking its roadblocks.
Most infuriating for anyone who has closely followed events in Iraq, though, was the disillusionment felt by Fick and other Marines when they arrived in chaotic Baghdad primed to begin rebuilding. They quickly realized, as Fick put it, that "as far as I can see, there is no American plan for Baghdad."
"I kept thinking, surely the massive units of civil affairs troops are on their way," Wright said. But there were no such massive units. The forces that occupied Iraq - tank divisions, mainly - were not large enough to impose order, but they were lethal enough to alienate a lot of civilians.
The First Recon is now back in Iraq, but without Wright; he is working on a book about Christian fundamentalists. He keeps in touch with his Marine subjects, though, and many of them have praised the book.
"I think it's a very powerful work that really peels back the veil and shows what most civilians never get to see," Colbert said. "He didn't pull any punches - he didn't gloss over what I think a lot of other authors might have: the atrocities, the gore, the chaos. But he also portrays the humanity."
Wright, who lives in Los Angeles, says he's a bit mystified as to why Generation Kill hasn't gotten more attention from the antiwar camp, since it shows how flawed and messy even a successful military campaign can be.
That may be because Wright captures the kind of moral ambiguities that don't settle political arguments but are the essence of U.S. involvement in Iraq. He shows Marines acting with good intentions, even when things go horribly wrong.
Iraq war veterans say Wright's account rings truer than the sanitized, gung-ho news coverage they saw when they returned home.
"The American public is fed this diet of 'We have a clean, high-tech military,' but these guys know that even with the best high-tech military, at times it's like a free-for-all," Wright says. "The scales are removed from their eyes, and they have to come back to a society that still believes in all the illusions."
