A LITTLE COMIC RELIEF

From GENERATION KILL
by EVAN WRIGHT

PAGE 53
Person, like many other Marines in First Recon, has practiced driving a Humvee at night wth NVGs only a few times. Nor does he have a military operating license for a Humvee. There are right now some 75,000 soldiers and Marines in thousands of vehicles converging on a handful of breaches in the berms at the border. There is as much traffic rolling as there is on sections of the San Diego Freeway at rush hour; only it’s dark and everyone’s in tanks and heavily armored Humvees. It’s a wonder the whole invasion doesn’t end in a gigantic pileup by the border. Most of the drivers are amped-up nineteen- and twenty-year olds, wrestling with the same problems Person has – the limitations of NVGs, screwy comms and orders that change constantly.
All of this is happening beneath a sky that has turned pink, red and orange from the ferocious bombardment being unleashed on Iraqi border positions ten to twenty kilometers in fron of us. Rockets and artillery shells fly overhead, filling the air with a cacophony of strange sounds – whistling, rumbling; some rockets make a sizzling sound. The horizon flashes as they impact.
“The is the shit,” Person says as he takes in the destruction in his NVGs, which are exponentially intensifying every flash. “I wish I had some shrooms.”
“Yeah, it’s the shiznit,” Colbert says. “Now, watch the fucking vehicle in front of you.”