Spare Parts

With the war to begin soon, the lack of training and gear have become a major concern for Williams and the other Marines. Without their LAVs, they can’t train properly. Williams is still worried, among other things, that he is actually a “spare part,” and not a real Marine, because he doesn’t have the training he needs.

Racism again appears after Williams’s unit lands in Saudi Arabia. The Arabic culture is different than American culture, and the Saudi government has asked that certain cultural norms be adhered to. The Marines in Williams’s unit ignore the order. They fly the American flag. They play loud music. When their Arab bus driver asks them to take down the flag, Gunny Brandt refuses, until Captain Cruz forces him to. But when Nagel and Draper play the Black Sabbath song “War Pigs,” and the Arab driver pulls the bus over, Gunny Brandt brandishes a pistol and places it to the driver’s temple. The message is clear to the driver: our culture, our concerns, are more important than yours. Gunny Brandt is telling the Arab driver, as Williams thinks later, that since the Marines are in the Middle East to fight for Kuwait’s freedom, all Arabs should respect American culture, and not the other way around. Williams feels, at times, hatred for the Arabs: “I had never felt as loyal to the American flag as I did when I saw it hanging there. But I had never felt as protective of it as I did when the Arab stormed off the bus and tried to pull it down” (175). Williams and the other Marines believe they are protecting all Arabs from Saddam Hussein, but they know so little about the conflict they don’t understand the different ethnicities and cultures that the Middle East is comprised of.

Also introduced in the chapter is the uncomfortableness of war. It takes three hours for Williams to eat chow, with an hour walk each way. The latrines are disgusting. They must cover their ears, necks, and faces with bandannas and wraps to keep the sand out—it even gets into their pants and rubs their skin raw. They are also confronted with the fear of a chemical attack. They have not yet faced the horrors of war, but they are becoming familiar with the small annoyances that strip them of their strength.

In Chapter 8, Williams relates all the mistakes the Marines make, from killing fellow Marines with friendly fire, to sleeping on the job. Williams’s earlier fears have come to fruition: their lack of training has made them vulnerable. They are inexperienced, unused to both night vision and driving in sand, and their lack of training takes its toll. Williams also relates his first feelings of guilt. He hears of the friendly-fire incident and feels bad for his fellow Marines. He feels even worse when he realizes he knew the only survivor, who was injured.

Instead of coming closer and working with Nagel, the two continue to fight. Nagel’s inexperience and attitude are a direct contributor to Williams flipping the LAV, and without the LAV, Williams realizes how vulnerable they are.

Williams, along with other Marines, also hates the Iraqi soldiers:

I wanted to fire. I wanted to make them pay. So I looked through the sight, and held on to the gun control, and prayed for the order to fire. After all, it was their fault I was there. It was their fault I stared through the sights with a cold heart. It was their fault that Gina sat at home with a heavy heart […] and that Doc trembled in the hull with a chicken heart […] and that Hunter lay in a hospital bed with a purple heart […] and that eleven mothers cried at caskets with broken hearts (217).

This hatred and racism may have contributed to one of the worst mistakes Williams makes, when he says he sees muzzle flashes coming from an Iraqi truck, which the Marines then blow up, killing the two passengers. After an investigation, Williams realizes what he saw were bullets hitting the truck, not coming from the truck, and he wonders if he and the other Marines only saw what they wanted to see—if their exhaustion, inexperience, and anger caused them to kill.