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Second Class Robert Timothy "Doc" Bryan, the twenty-nine-year-old medical corps-man. A tall redhead with narrow features, he approaches with a tight grin and shakes my hand. "So you came here for a war, huh? You like war?" He continues to squeeze my hand, then puts his face about eight inches from mine and stares with unblinking, electric-blue eyes. His smile begins to twitch. "I hope you have fun in this war, reporter."
    He releases my hand and smacks my shoulder. "I'm just fucking with you, that's all. No harm." He walks off, laughing.
    Several others break into laughter with him. Doc Bryan, I later find out, is always pissed off at something, if not the presence of a reporter, then incompetent military leaders or the barbarity of war. He's a self-made man, son of a steamfitter from a small town outside of Philadelphia, the first in his family to attend college. He attended Lock Haven University, then the University of Pennsylvania on a football scholarship while he earned a master's in education. In his younger days, Doc Bryan had a lot of ambient rage he used to burn off in weekend bar fights. "I'm always angry," he later tells me. "I was born that way. I'm an asshole."
    A diesel generator drones somewhere outside. The tent reeks of farts, sweat and the sickeningly sweet funk of fungal feet. Everyone walks around in skivvies, scratching their balls.
    Vigorous public ball scratching is common in the combat-arms side of the Marine Corps, even among high-level officers in the midst of briefings. The gesture is defiantly male, as is much of the vernacular of the Marine Corps itself. Not only do officers and enlisted men take pride in their profanity—the first time I meet First Recon's battalion commander, he tells me the other reporter who dropped out probably did so because he writes for a "fucking queer magazine"—the technical jargon of the Corps is rich with off-color lingo. The term "donkey dick," for example, is used to describe at least three different pieces of Marine equipment: a type of fuel spout, a radio antenna and a mortar-tube cleaning brush.
    Recon Marines will proudly tell you that if you look up their official Military Occupational Specialty in a Marine Corps manual, their job title is listed as "Reconnaissance Man." Theirs is one of the few remaining fields in the military closed to women. For many, becoming a Recon Marine represents one of the last all-male adventures left in America. Among them, few virtues are celebrated more than being hard—having stronger muscles, being a better fighter, being more able to withstand pain and privation. They refer to extra comforts—foam sleeping pads, sweaters, even cold medicine—as "snivel gear," and relentlessly mock those who bring it as pussies.
    Nor do the men have any CD or DVD players, Game Boys or any similar entertainment devices. They were forbidden to bring such distracting items to the Middle East. They are young Americans unplugged. Their only entertainment is talking, reading and playing cards or chess. There's a chessboard set up in the center of the tent, where a company tournament has been going on for six weeks now.
    At night they fight constantly. They judo-flip each other headfirst into the plywood floor of the tent. They strong-arm their buddies into head-locks and punch bruises into each other's ribs. They lie in wait for one another in the shadows and leap out swinging Ka-Bar knives, flecking their buddies' rib cages with little nicks from the knife tips, or dragging their blades lightly across a victim's throat, playfully simulating a clean kill. They do it to keep each other in shape; they do it for fun; they do it to establish dominance.
    The top dogs in the platoon are the team leaders. You can immediately pick out these guys just by the way they move among the men. They have a swagger, a magnetism that pulls the other guys to them like rock stars. In this tent the three most revered are Sergeants Kocher, Patrick and Colbert. The three