A few choice excerpts from Evan Wright's Generation Kill, his record of the battles of a platoon of Reconnaissance Marines as they moved north into Iraq as the front line soldiers of the March 2003 invasion:

• "Who's the fucking retard who sent us into that town?" Person asks, spitting a thick stream of tobacco juice, which catches in the wind and mists across the faces of several of his buddies standing nearby. "That sure tops my list of stupid shit we've done." Trombley is beside himself. "I was just thinking one thing when we drove into that ambush," he enthuses. "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I felt like I was living it when I seen the flames coming out of windows, the blown-up car in the street, guys crawling around shooting at us. It was fucking cool."
• The Hispanics in the platoon refer to the white guys as "cracker-ass fucks," the whites refer to them as "muds" and to Spanish as "dirty spic talk," and they are the best of friends.
• "Hey, it's ten in the morning!" says Person, yelling at two farmers dressed in robes in the distance. "Don't you think you ought to change out of your pajamas?"
• Before First Recon's campaign is over, Captain America will lose control of his platoon when he is temporarily relieved of command. Already, some of his men are beginning to fantasize about his death. "All it takes is one dumb guy in charge to ruin everything," says one of them. "Every time he steps out of the vehicle, I pray he gets shot."
• A teenage boy and girl walk ahead on the trail, holding hands. "Kind of cute," Colbert observes. "Don't shoot them, Garza," he adds. As they roll past the hand-holding teens, Colbert and Person wave at them and start singing the South Park version of "Loving You," with the lyrics "Loving you is easy 'cause you're bare-chested."
• "It should be a little acid," Person says, offering his own medical opinion. "And burn a little when it comes out." "Maybe on your little bitch asshole from all the cock that's been stuffed up it," Colbert snaps. Hearing this exchange, another Marine in the platoon says, "Man, the Marines are so homoerotic. That's all we talk about. Have you guys ever realized how homoerotic this whole thing is?" Just before sundown, Marine artillery batteries, dug in a few kilometers ahead, begin to pound the city. As darkness falls, Colbert's team excavates Ranger graves by the Humvee. The ground trembles as a column of massive M1A1 tanks rolls past, a few feet from where the Marines are resting. Out of the darkness, someone shouts, "Hey, if you lay down with your cock on the ground, it feels good."
• "They shot one of my Marines in the stomach out there." He gestures toward the field. "We fired back. Blew a donkey's head off. We didn't see nothing else."
• The only action they saw occurred on the night their perimeter was overrun by camels. Espera and his men opened up on them with machine guns. "After three weeks out there, no sleep, living in those holes, I was fucking hallucinating," he explains. "We thought those camels were fucking Hajjis coming over the wire. When we lit those motherfuckers up, it was fucking raining camel meat. It was a mess, dog. Motherfuckers even did a story on it in the L.A. Times."
• "Yeah," Person says, a note of belligerence in his voice. "When I get back I'm gonna start a gay club. I'll call it the Men's Room. There will be, like, a big urinal with a two-way mirror everyone pisses against. It will be, like, facing the bar, so when everyone's drinking there will be, like, these big cocks pissing at them."
• "Oh, my God!" Person laughs. "He's got his bayonet out." Captain America runs across the field ahead of his Humvee, bayonet fixed on his M-16, ready to savage enemy forces. He turns every few paces and dramatically waves his men forward, like an action hero. "He thinks he's Rambo," Person guffaws. "That retard is in charge of people?"
• Traveling the world as a Marine has opened his eyes to stark differences between the way Americans and those in less fortunate parts of the planet live. "All these countries around the world, nobody's fat," he says. "Back home, fat motherfuckers are everywhere. Seventy-five percent of all Americans are fat. Do you know how hard it is to put on thirty pounds? A motherfucker has to sit on the couch and do nothing but eat all day. In America, white trash and poor Mexicans are all fat as motherfuckers. The white man created a system with so much excess, even the poor motherfuckers are fat."