Evan Wright About Ray Person, "Generation Kill "

Evan Wright about Ray Person, "Generation Kill "

The fact that the enemy in this town has succeeded in shutting up the driver of this vehicle, Corporal Josh Ray Person, is no mean feat. A twenty-two-year-old from Missouri with a faintly hick accent and a shock of white-blond hair covering his wide, squarish head—his blue eyes are so far apart Marines call him “Hammerhead” or “Goldfish”—Person plans to be a rock star when he gets out of the Corps. The first night of the invasion, he had crossed the Iraqi border, simultaneously entertaining and annoying his fellow Marines by screeching out mocking versions of Avril Lavigne songs.

Tweaking on a mix of chewing tobacco, instant coffee crystals, which he consumes dry by the mouthful, and over-the-counter stimulants like ephedra-based Ripped Fuel, Person never stops jabbering. Already he’s reached a profound conclusion about this campaign: that the battlefield that is Iraq is filled with “fucking retards.” There’s the retard commander in the battalion, who took a wrong turn near the border, delaying the invasion by at least an hour. There’s another officer, a classic retard, who has spent much of the campaign chasing through the desert to pick up souvenirs—helmets, Republican Guard caps and rifles—thrown down by fleeing Iraqi soldiers. There are the hopeless retards in the battalion-support sections who screwed up the radios and didn’t bring enough batteries to operate the Marines’ thermal-imaging devices. But in Person’s eyes, one retard reigns supreme: Saddam Hussein. “We already kicked his ass once,” he says. “Then we let him go, and he spends the next twelve years pissing us off even more. We don’t want to be in this shithole country. We don’t want to invade it. What a fucking retard.” (p.3)

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