By Evan Wright. Christopher Bodley, chaplain for the First Reconnaissance Battalion, is trying to minister to fighting Marines, now resting for the first time since the invasion of Iraq began more than a week ago. After their initiation into urban-guerrilla warfare in An Nasiriyah to the south, followed by three days of continual fighting against an enemy they seldom actually saw, the Marines of the elite battalion have been given forty-eight hours of downtime to recuperate.
Their camp is spread across two kilometers of what looks like a fantasy Martian landscape of dried-out, reddish mud flats and empty canals. Each four- to six-man team lives in holes dug beneath camouflage nets placed around its Humvee. Through-out the day, Bodley walks around the camp and attempts to minister to his flock of heavily armed young men. Although the Marines in First Recon have already killed dozens, accidentally wounded civilians and taken one casualty of their own a driver shot in the arm , the chaplain encounters few troubled by war itself.
The Killer Elite Part One. Bodley is new to First Recon, and he confesses that he finds these Marines tough to counsel. People here think Jesus is a doormat. Over by Sgt. Gunnery Sgt. A Marine will fuck anything. It took these Marines nearly a week to reach this airfield, and they are less than halfway to their destination: the city of Al Kut, sixty miles to the north and head-quarters of a Republican Guard division. The Marines are also fighting their way into uncharted moral terrain, hunting an enemy that has remained hidden β dressed in civilian clothes, shooting at them from within populated areas.
At times, the slaughter of unarmed civilians will almost seem to exceed that of actual combatants. Steve Ferrando. They blame Ferrando for staffing the officer corps with men they feel are incompetent, such as the platoon commander the Marines have derisively nicknamed Captain America β who will shortly come under suspicion for mistreating enemy prisoners of war.
They blame Ferrando for leading them into the ambush two days ago at Al Gharraf, where one Marine was wounded and many others narrowly, even miraculously, escaped death.
