by Craig Grossi
Jim, the corpsman, had been watching, too. You got the feeling Jim had been an Eagle Scout as a kid. He was super bright and always had any tools he needed close by. He got up from his spot in the shade and came over, taking a closer look at the bugs on Fred’s neck. He pulled out a set of tweezers from his fanny pack and, pointing to the bugs, said, “Why don’t you hold him steady, and we’ll see if I can get some of these bloodsuckers off?”
The two of us crouched down in the dirt. I sat cross-legged and pulled Fred toward me, holding him by the shoulders. The bugs, like flying ticks, were digging into Fred’s fur and attaching to his hide. Getting them out meant Jim was going to have to pull them from his skin.
“Careful, dude,” I said, as Jim narrowed in on one, closing down on it with the tweezers. I didn’t know how Fred was going to react. In one quick motion, Jim yanked hard and, between the prongs of the tweezers, pulled away the first bug, along with a clump of Fred’s fur. I braced myself for a yowl or nip from Fred, but he just sat there, unbothered. Jim and I exchanged looks. Carefully, he kept going, pulling out one bug at a time. Patiently, Fred just sat there, letting us do our work.
When we finished, a tiny bug graveyard had piled up in the dirt beside us. Jim gave Fred a pat on the top of the head and stood up. “Wow,” he said. “I can’t believe he let us do that.”
Fred, in his newfound freedom, shook again, then walked to my sleeping mat. He stepped over the edge of the bug net—a single-person cocoon-like shelter we each slept inside—and climbed in, pawing at the material to arrange it how he wanted. It was as if he’d done it a hundred times before. Content with the arrangement, he lay down, let out a sigh, and blinked his eyes closed. I was caked in dirt, too, and I didn’t mind at all if the dusty pup wanted a spot on my bed. Jim and I laughed.
“Little guy is making himself right at home!” he said.
I leaned over and zipped up the bug net for our new friend. I was some six thousand miles from home, in a combat zone, in one of the harshest places in the world. And here was this dog. Unlike me, Fred was home. Sangin was all he knew. And even though he’d probably never had a drink of clean water before or a scratch behind the ear, he was gentle and sweet. Looking down at him, I stopped worrying about the no-dog policy or when the next RPG would pierce the sky. For that moment, I felt like I was home, too.
CHAPTER 3
School’s Out
Back in the truck, Josh and I wound our way through the mountains, edging closer to our first destination: Chattanooga, Tennessee. In the backseat, Fred snored peacefully.
Josh and I had first met a year earlier, in my very first class at Georgetown. “Modern Borders,” it was called, a political science course about how countries were shaped throughout history. I’d walked into the room just before class started and spotted a tall guy in the back with a beard like mine and a prosthetic leg. His backpack lay on the floor next to him and a dirty Nalgene bottle sat on his desk. I went straight for him.
Plopping myself down in the desk next to Josh, I said, “Hey, man. Isn’t it a little cold out for shorts?”
“I like feeling the cool air on my leg,” he quipped. I knew we’d be friends.
Later, Josh told me he knew I was a marine by the way I carried myself. I told him I knew he was army from the patches on his backpack. Army guys love their patches.
Before enrolling at Georgetown, I never really pictured myself as a college student. And after spending eight years in the marines, going back to school wasn’t at the top of my priority list. As a kid, I’d never been much of a student. I knew I was smart, and I loved school, but it was hard for me to learn in a classroom. My attention span was short and my energy was high. I never understood why we were supposed to sit still for so long. In elementary school, I was diagnosed with ADD. I started medication, but it made me miserable and gave me insomnia.
I was normally upbeat and boisterous, so my friends didn’t know what was wrong with me when I started showing up at school every day with a blank look on my face, tired and deflated. When my mom gave me the pill every morning, I started hiding it under my tongue, then spitting it out on the walk to the bus stop.
One day during my sophomore year of high school, recruiters from all five military branches came to our school. A representative from the navy stood up, clicking through a PowerPoint presentation on a projector behind him, explaining to the full auditorium what it meant to join the navy and all the benefits of doing so. A guy from the air force did the same thing, and the army. When the Marine Corps rep took the stage, the screen behind him went blank. He didn’t have a slide show or a presentation. He stared out into the faces of the kids in front of him, gripping the podium as if he were about to lift it overhead. Then he said one thing: “Maybe three or four of you have what it takes to be a marine. If you think you’re one of them, come talk to me.” With that, he stepped down. I didn’t have the nerve to talk to him that day, but it left an impression on me.
Growing up outside Washington, D.C., it wasn’t unusual to know people who had served in the military. Our neighborhood might as well have been base housing for the Pentagon. My dad had been in the air force during the Vietnam era and served as an investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board after getting his degree on the G.I. Bill. By my senior year of high school, I started thinking seriously about joining the marines. My friends were all applying to go to college, but I couldn’t imagine facing another four years of school.
Then my parents split. It was one of those things that, as a kid, just kind of sneaks up on you. After my big sister, Sarah, went away to college, it was just me and my parents in the house. My mom and dad both traveled a lot for work, so I was used to that. I was also used to my parents sleeping in separate rooms. I thought they just preferred it that way; maybe my dad snored. I didn’t think too much about it, maybe because I didn’t want to, or didn’t know how. I was busy, too; it was my senior year, and I had a lot going on between my travel hockey team and an active social calendar.
I came home from an out-of-town ice hockey tournament, though, and Mom wasn’t home. She was on a work trip, I figured, but then I found a note in my room. She’d written it to me, explaining that she and my father were splitting up. It probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise—she’d even said something to me about moving to South Carolina—but she hadn’t been direct, and I didn’t realize she was trying to say good-bye. My dad hadn’t said anything. I guess the two of them didn’t know how to explain their problems to me, and I was too busy being a seventeen-year-old to have picked up on the signs. I didn’t know how to handle it, so I ignored it. I had enough to distract me.
My mom had been the one to take Sarah to visit college campuses her senior year. Now it was just my dad and me at home, and my grades weren’t good. I’d brought up the Marine Corps to him, but he didn’t want to hear it. He urged me to try community college.
As my high school graduation approached, I was at risk of failing two required classes. Still, no one said anything. Instead, I was nominated by my peers to be the speaker at our senior ceremony. When I failed the classes and showed up on graduation day, I waited for the other shoe to drop. It didn’t. I had heard stories about the administration letting students walk at graduation, then, instead of a diploma, those students would get a letter ordering them to summer school. But after I made my speech and was handed a big manila envelope, I was stunned to find a diploma inside.
I acted happy about it, but it didn’t feel right to me. Now more than ever, I wanted to be challenged and held accountable, and it seemed like no one was going to do that for me. I daydreamed about how, if I joined the marines, I’d be held to a higher standard. I’d get my ass kicked. To me, it was an organization that recognized hard work and nothing less. I craved that. It was what I loved about playing ice hockey. If you didn’t do the work, you didn’t get to play. Only the strongest and fastest made the cut—no excuses.
Ultimately, though, I enrolled in community colle
ge, promising my dad I’d give it a try.
Then 9/11 happened. Like many future enlistees, I was filled with an overwhelming sense of duty. I wanted a purpose and a mission. This was a clearer sign than any. When my semester was finished at community college, I enlisted. When I came home with my paperwork from the processing center, my dad didn’t mince words. “The marines?” he said. “You’re gonna be cannon fodder.” I knew he was proud I’d joined but also troubled I’d chosen the branch of the military notorious for being at the front lines of war.
Because I’d enlisted in a delayed entry program and because of the high volume of enlistees after the September 11 attacks, it wasn’t until March 2003 that I was finally able to report to boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina. I promptly began receiving the ass-kicking I’d been waiting for. We were shouted at from morning till night, drilled at length on everything from putting on a sock to hitting a target at five hundred yards. There were no comforts. The bathrooms, for instance, had no stalls. You shit in the open, and it’s not unusual for a drill instructor to come in and dump water on you—and the toilet paper—while you’re at it. It felt like we were nothing more than livestock, and I guess that was the point. By the end of the first phase, I learned how to operate coolly and efficiently under the merciless reign of the drill instructors. I was determined to accomplish every task in spite of their efforts to distract and disrupt. I was becoming a marine.
Toward the end of training, my fellow recruits and I shuffled into a large warehouse where we were issued our dress uniforms. Our measurements were taken by a laser-scanning machine that spit out our sizes onto paper receipts. As I waited in line to receive my issue of starchy green pants and paper-thin khaki shirts, I noticed my receipt read “PFC Grossi,” for private first class. That had to be a mistake. I was a private, the lowest enlisted rank, and I hadn’t received a promotion to PFC. The only way that could happen in boot camp was if the senior drill instructor meritoriously selected you, but as far as I knew, that hadn’t occurred.
I tried in vain to explain to the young supply marine that there was a mistake on my receipt, but I was pretty much told to go fuck myself. The next morning, I put on my “pickle suit,” the green dress coat and matching pants, complete with a khaki tie and shirt underneath. My one ribbon was pinned to my chest and the fresh PFC chevrons were burning a hole in my shoulder. Alone in a sea of itchy fabric, I was just waiting for a drill instructor to rip those chevrons right off. Still, no one reacted.
A few days later came the company commander’s inspection. We’d be drilled by a high-ranking marine on everything we’d learned over the past three months. We were expected to be able to answer in a moment any question shot our way, from the maximum effective range of an M203 grenade launcher to the sixth general order of a sentry. I had been selected as a squad leader, so I spent most of the morning making sure each of my squad members had a properly tied tie and a good shave. I’d been told by my recruiter and by other marines to avoid becoming a leader while at boot camp. “Just keep your head down and don’t volunteer for anything. If you’re a squad leader, it just means extra work,” they said, but the philosophy never sat right with me. I’d joined the marines because I was tired of flying under the radar.
On inspection day, my platoon was first. I remember the perfectly polished silver oak leaf pinned to the collar of the company commander inspecting us. That meant he was a lieutenant colonel. My squad and I needed to have our shit tight.
The lieutenant colonel stepped up in front of me, giving me and my rifle a slow once-over from top to bottom.
“What did you do to receive your promotion, PFC Grossi?” he said.
I froze. I still had no idea.
“Sir, this recruit does not know why he was promoted, sir,” I said, unable to come up with anything better to say. The lieutenant colonel looked back at my drill instructors over his right shoulder. Two of them shot me a gaze that made me want to shit my pants. The senior drill instructor grinned and shook his head, then the lieutenant colonel looked at me and said, “Well, I think you’re gonna find out.”
My senior drill instructor walked over to me. He was a big guy with dark skin. I could see the veins in his arms curl like little blue pipes around his tattoos. He had been a father figure to me and my fellow recruits—firm but fair.
“I never told you why I promoted you, Grossi?” he said.
“No, sir,” I replied.
“I’ve been watching you. I see what you do for your platoon when nobody is watching. That’s what’s most important: doing the right thing with no anticipation of reward,” he said.
All the discipline in the world couldn’t hold back the tears that rolled down my cheeks. In that moment, I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be. It wasn’t about the promotion; it was the fact that I finally felt seen. I was good at something, and my hard work was recognized.
My pride was promptly checked. The other two drill instructors reminded me that I had botched my answer to the lieutenant colonel and that I was crying like a bitch in my uniform. I paid for it in the sand pit that night, but I did so with pleasure. I had found my place. All the push-ups and mountain climbers in the world couldn’t extinguish the fire inside me.
Despite my promising start in the Marine Corps, the years that followed boot camp were a massive letdown. I had joined to be a military police (MP) officer, because I had always been interested in law enforcement and I thought doing it in the marines would be a great way to serve my country. Later, it could potentially lead to a career as a cop. I’d also heard that MPs could be selected to attend K-9 training. I loved dogs and really loved the idea of being able to work with one every day.
However, I learned a hard lesson about the marines after boot camp: it didn’t matter what you wanted to do; it all boiled down to the needs of the corps. I ended up working in corrections, a field I had little interest in, and was assigned as a guard in Camp Delta (Guantanamo Bay) and then a naval brig in Charleston, South Carolina, that contained U.S. servicemen confined for everything from being late to work to murder, rape, and drug trafficking. I made the most of my time but never really felt that I was properly challenged. While my fellow marines were invading Fallujah and Ramadi, I was scooping chow for detainees in Gitmo, who occasionally liked to throw their bodily fluids in my face. It was not the duty I had signed up for.
In 2007, I completed my four years of active service, never leaving the corrections field. My command refused to let me retrain into another, more deployable field. Feeling frustrated and emasculated, I returned home to northern Virginia. For nine months, I drifted aimlessly from job to job with no real purpose. I knew I could be recalled at any time, and if that happened, I’d likely get put back in corrections. I didn’t want to end up at another brig, and I didn’t want to sit around at home, either. I decided to reenlist.
I remember how annoyed my recruiter was when I said I didn’t want to go back to corrections and told him I didn’t want to try a regular military police unit, either, which he kept advocating.
“All right, hotshot. What do you want to do, then?” he asked.
The truth was, I wanted to be in special operations. I was still seeking what I had been from the beginning: I wanted to be pushed and challenged. I wanted to work hard for a team that demanded the best of me. So, I told him I wanted to be a RECON marine. The recruiter scoffed. Being in special ops is what everyone thinks they want, so when you say RECON, they automatically think you’re just another wannabe tough guy.
“Listen,” he said. “I can’t help you with RECON, but you should talk to the guys downstairs. You might be interested in what they do—they have a lot of medals on their chests. They do their own recruiting, so I can’t make any promises, but I can put your name in.”
That was my introduction to the Marine Corps intelligence field. I knew it was the right fit on my first appointment.
I showed up in a suit. I wasn’t on active duty and wasn’t sure if it
was okay to wear my uniform. The building was on a naval installation near Virginia Beach. It wasn’t anything special—just a two-story cinder-block office building with a flagpole out front. When I knocked on the door, a short, muscled staff sergeant opened it a crack and looked at me.
“Put these on,” he said, abruptly extending a pair of handcuffs.
I looked down at the shiny metal restraints. Before accepting them, without thinking, I said, “Why?”
With that, he yanked the door open. Two larger marines stood on the other side of the frame. They reached through the doorway, grabbed me by the collar, and pulled me inside.
Asking that question—Why?—was what literally got me through the door. It was a test. As a marine, you learn to do what you’re told, with a “Yes, sir.” But intelligence needed marines who could also think for themselves. I found out later that anyone who put on the handcuffs without hesitation got the door slammed in their face.
When we were growing up, my friends told me more than once that I was a good listener. It never crossed my mind that that quality would translate into a job skill until I ended up in intelligence. In training, I learned how to question, screen, collect evidence, and interrogate. I practiced meeting with a source whose role was to act scared and reticent, and I’d carefully extract information from them through conversation. I realized being a good intelligence collector meant being able to listen and to form relationships with people in all kinds of situations. I was a natural.
Only after six months of on-the-job training would the intel team decide whether it was worth sending me through another four months of classroom training. Seats in class had to be earned. They wanted to make sure you had a decent shot at making it through the rigorous course before they gave you one. The six months flew by, and when I found out I’d been selected to continue training, I was thrilled. Over the following four months, I was challenged in ways I never could have predicted. There were intense, immersive, scenario-based training sessions combined with rigorous academic courses in everything from human behavior to report writing. We had an exam at the end of every week, and any score less than 80 percent was considered a failure. There were many moments when I thought I’d be dropped from the course. While I’d grown up thinking I wasn’t “book smart,” I realized I could succeed in a classroom environment when I enjoyed the material and found it relevant and interesting. I’d found a challenge worth attempting. I slowly overcame my fear of the academic setting and my confidence began to grow. The class started with thirty candidates; by the end, there were fifteen of us. I’d made it.
