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enduring the hostile conditions. One of the first guys I meet in the battalion brags, "We're like America's little pit bull. They beat it, starve it, mistreat it, and once in a while they let it out to attack somebody."
    In my first couple of days at the camp I'm placed in a tent with officers. I can't tell anybody apart; they all look the same in their desert camouflage fatigues. Most of the officers seem to be square-jawed, blue-eyed white guys in their mid- to late twenties. The initial reason I strike up an acquaintance with Lt. Fick, commander of the platoon I end up spending the war with, is he's easily recognizable. Though he's twenty-five, he has a loping, adolescent stride you can spot from a hundred meters away. He's one of fifty men who introduce themselves to me during my first twenty-four hours at the camp, but he's the only one I'm able to call by name on my way to the mess tent and ask if I can join him for dinner.
    Dinners are served on trays in a cafeteria line staffed by South Asian laborers. As we move through the line, Fick informs me that for a couple of weeks running, the only entree served has been mushy, gray chicken pieces. He speculates these might be remnants of the doomed camp chickens. Fick has one of those laughs involving a momentary loss of control that causes him to pitch forward like someone knocked him on the back of the head.
    He is six foot two with light-brown hair and the pleasant, clear-eyed looks of a former altar boy, which he is. The son of a successful Baltimore attorney father and a social-worker mother, Fick admits, "My family had a Leave It to Beaver quality." He entered Dartmouth intending to study pre-med, but in his sophomore year he was inspired to consider the military when he took a class conducted by a charismatic former Special Forces soldier who'd served in Vietnam. Fick ended up double-majoring in political science and classics, then attended the Marine Corps' Officer Candidates School. Two years after graduating in 1999, he found himself a Marine second lieutenant on a landing craft delivering humanitarian supplies to war-torn East Timor. "I had a boatload of food rations and boxes of brand-new ThighMasters," he says. "We were delivering exercise devices for the oppressed, starving people of East Timor." He throws his head forward, laughing.
    The absurdities of the military amuse Fick. A few weeks after 9/11, he led an infantry platoon on a clandestine helicopter mission into Pakistan to retrieve a Black Hawk downed by the Afghan border. After that, Fick and his men were among the first Marines to seize the ground in southern Afghanistan at Camp Rhino. When he returned home after weeks of living in frozen fighting holes, the Marines sent him a bill for five hundred dollars, charging him for the food rations he'd consumed during his combat deployment. He says, "We had a saying about the military in Afghanistan: 'The incompetent leading the unwilling to do the unnecessary.' "
    Despite his cavalier humor, Fick finished at the top of his class in Officer Candidates School and near the top of the Marine Corps' tough Basic Reconnaissance Course. He is also something of a closet idealist. His motivation for joining the Marines is a belief about which he is quietly passionate. "At Dartmouth, there was a sense that an ROTC program, which the school did not have, would militarize the campus," he explains. "They have it backward. ROTC programs at Ivy League campuses would liberalize the military. That can only be good for this country."
    During our first meal together, he explains the breakdown of First Recon. The 374 Marines in First Recon Battalion are spread among four companies—Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and an auxiliary Headquarters and Support company. Alpha, Bravo and Charlie are the frontline combat companies containing the battalion's 160 actual Recon Marines. The rest of the battalion's personnel fill support positions. Fick commands Bravo Company's Second Platoon. He's