Free Generation Kill by Evan Wright Page B

breach holes through the berms at the Iraqi border. An hour later, at First Recon's staging area twenty kilometers south, the Marines are told to start their engines.
    The four Marines in Colbert's vehicle have already been sitting inside in total darkness, waiting for a few hours, when they receive the order.
    "So we're going to go invade a country," Person says cheerily as he hits the ignition.
    "I bet gas prices will be lower," says Trombley, who sits to my left in the backseat.
    Adding to the natural stimulation everyone feels at starting an invasion, quite a few Marines have begun eating Nescafe instant coffee crystals straight from foil packets and popping ephedra and other over-the-counter go pills for what is expected to be an all-night mission. Everyone's already tired. They've been up since four or five in the morning, when the explosions started in the desert, and they spent the day diving in and out of holes during all the gas-attack and Scud alerts.
    Unlike the Humvees used by elite Army units, which have armor and air-conditioning, most of First Recon's Humvees don't even have doors or roofs. Some teams modified them by welding in extra racks for ammo and removing windshields so they can fire their rifles through them. The Humvees are so stuffed full of weapons and supplies, the men hang their rucksacks filled with personal gear on the sides of the vehicles. One Marine observes that the Humvees look like the truck driven by the Clampers in The Beverly Hillbillies. Given the age and battered condition of the vehicles when they arrived, it's a little like the Marines who will be leading the invasion in them are entering a Formula One race in demolition derby cars.
    Colbert's place in the Humvee is the front passenger seat directly in front of me. His personal weapon is an M-4 rifle, the shortened version of the M-16. His M-4 also has an auxiliary tube below the barrel, called a 203, which is a single-shot grenade launcher. He keeps this between his knees. "Let's go, Person," he says. "We're on the move."
    The Humvee lurches forward, banging and creaking. Garza, who earlier in the day helped me wrestle free from my MOPP suit, stands on a raised metal platform in the center of the vehicle between the seats. His boots, legs and ass are constantly in everyone's face as he swivels around in the turret, manning the MK-19 automatic grenade launcher on the roof.
    Each Humvee is equipped with either a .50-caliber machine gun or an MK-19 (usually referred to as a "Mark-19"). The .50-cal, as the machine gun is called, is a heavy weapon, with a barrel about a meter long, that fires steel-penetrating rounds that will rip apart cars or trucks a kilometer away but won't do much against a tank. The Mark-19, which resembles one of those machines that fire tennis balls on a practice court, launches grenades at a rate of about one per second. These grenade rounds also have an effective range of about a kilometer. The heavy weapons can devastate infantry on the ground, destroy bunkers and wreck mud-brick or cement structures in Iraqi towns, but they're not really meant to stop tanks or take on large mechanized forces.
    Despite the imposing size Humvees appear to have when you see civilian versions on the streets, there's barely any room inside Colbert's. Everyone is bulked up with their helmets, vests, MOPP suits and rubber boots. The vehicle is crammed with boxes of military food rations, several five-gallon cans of water, extra diesel fuel, more than 300 grenades, a few thousand rounds of rifle and machine-gun ammunition, special smoke and thermite incendiary grenades, several pounds of C-4 plastic explosive, claymore mines, a bale of concertina wire, cammie nets, a spare tire, extra parts, fluids and filters for the engine, a tool set, bolt cutters, map books, bags of ropes, a fire extinguisher, five rucksacks of personal gear, chemlites, several hundred extra batteries for the portable radios, shovels, a pickax, a sledgehammer