Joker One

by Donovan Campbell

  About three days before we headed into Iraq, Carson lumbered up to me.

  “Sir, I've got, ahhh, something I need to say, sir,” he said, shuffling his feet and alternately looking down at the ground and at me.

  I looked up at him. “Yeah, Carson, go ahead.”

  “Sir, with all due respect, and it's no huge deal, sir, but we kind of notice that you're using the cellphone a lot to call home. Sir, none of us have really been able to use it, and the phone banks are always jammed, so we haven't been able to call home like you, sir. Maybe you could, you know, like, give us the phone every now and again? It's no big deal, though, sir.”

  “Has Staff Sergeant not gotten you guys the phone yet?”

  “No, sir. Third and fourth platoon have gotten to call home, though.”

  Hearing that, I felt all of about three feet tall, and I found myself humbly apologizing to my team leader. I knew better than to take care of my needs before taking care of my men, but knowing and doing are unfortunately two different things. I had thought that the key to earning my men's respect was to demonstrate excellent tactical judgment in combat, a strong set of individual skills (fitness, good shooting and navigating, and so on) and a general willingness to make large, spectacular sacrifices—in short, most things that I thought it took to be a war hero.

  I could not have been more wrong. Being a good leader and being a hero, I was beginning to realize, were not at all the same thing. For the young lieutenant, much more difficult than thirty-second acts of courage, and ultimately much more telling, are the small, quiet, almost unnoticeable acts of service that he must perform day in and day out if he wants to appropriately ensure the welfare of his men. I was determined that I would never make the same mistake again. It would mean talking to Christy much less—rarely more than once a month—but it was necessary. Besides, the intensity of combat leadership was beginning to wholly consume me. As Iraq got closer and closer, home grew farther and farther away. Thoughts of my wife and an American reality that no longer existed for me got neatly com-partmented and tucked away.

  The next day found the diminutive Yebra and I marching in endless squares around the various gravel roads running through the camp. To rehearse the battalion's impending convoy north, every officer had been paired up with his radio operator and told to simulate a vehicle. Thirty of these “vehicles” were now slowly trundling around Camp Commando under the blazing noonday sun. The night previously, the CO had designated me as the company's navigator, so Yebra and I were the second vehicle in the long, snaking line of officers and radiomen (the first vehicle would be an armored Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun to guard us as we moved). I was the only one in the company who had actually led a convoy in Iraq before, so the assignment hadn't come as a surprise. Still, staring back at all the men behind me, realizing that they were only a tenth of those whom I'd lead into Iraq, the enormity of the responsibility started to sink in. It was my job to get some thirty vehicles and 180 people safely to their destination, and if I screwed anything up, all of their lives would be put at risk unnecessarily.

  Once the exercise finished, Yebra and I trudged over to the two seven-ton trucks that had been assigned to carry Joker One. The cab of each truck held only two people—myself and a driver from the truck company in the first and the platoon sergeant and another assigned driver in the second. The rest of Joker One had to sit in the truck beds. Unfortunately, the seven-tons were still configured for movements back in the United States, where carrying capacity took precedence over personnel protection or fighting capability. As a result, a thin canvas covering was the only thing between the Marines and the open road. Furthermore, the benches in the back sat along the sides of the truck, forcing the Marines either to sit with their backs to the road or to twist painfully around for hours at a time, trying to scan their surroundings as their backs screamed at the unceasing torque. It had taken only a few rehearsals to convince us that this setup was impossible to handle for even an hour, let alone for a three-days-straight convoy into the heart of Iraq.

  To help improve our protection, we lined the truck beds with as many sandbags as each vehicle could safely carry. They wouldn't cover people above their waists, but the bags were certainly better than nothing. The entire company scavenged Camp Commando for benches that we could put into two lines down the center of the seven-tons so that Marines could sit back-to-back, facing outward without having to twist themselves for hours. We had no luck, so the CO instructed each platoon to come up with two designs apiece for centerline benches using only what we could carry with us: boxes of MREs, crates of water, and our own duffel bags. The best design would be standardized and used throughout the entire company.

  Hes, Quist, and Flowers—the engineer—had each come up with his own design, and they put their platoons to work constructing what they had planned. I hadn't been able to think of anything particularly clever, or different, so I called Noriel, Leza, and Bowen together and explained what the CO wanted and why he wanted it. They all nodded as I went along. Many painful hours spent twisted in the back of the seven-tons had convinced my squad leaders of the absolute imperative for the centerline benches. Once finished, I turned them over to their squads. Noriel and Leza got to work on one truck, and Bowen and his men took another.

  As much as I wanted to direct their efforts, to appear the in-charge leader who knew exactly how things should turn out, two minutes of observation convinced me that my men working together would create something far better than I would working on my own. Bowen had his guys huddled around him, and was explaining to them what I had explained to him, and design suggestions flew back and forth. Noriel and Leza were doing the same thing with the same results. After five minutes, the squads had broken up, and the seven-tons swarmed with Joker One Marines. Bowen took position at the head of the truck bed, standing atop two huge green duffel bags as he directed his men's efforts, blouse off and tattoos straining as he lifted here, pointed there. Noriel did the same thing in his truck while Leza moved about on the ground, shunting men from one vehicle to another depending on the manpower needed for each.

  Fully involved in the process, the Marines worked with a vengeance. The stocky, muscular Guzon shunted back and forth tirelessly, usually with at least two huge packs slung across his shoulders. Henderson, as it turned out, was a car wizard, and many of the best suggestions for load configuration came straight from him. Ideas were tested and discarded, gear was arranged and rearranged, and slowly but surely, two centerline benches began taking shape in each vehicle. Nearly every one of my men had a suggestion for how to do something better, and sometimes the smallest ideas—such as interweaving the handles of the duffel bags for greater stability—made the biggest difference. Standing on the side, carrying the occasional bag or case of water, I looked for opportunities to give direction, but they didn't need it. Nearly an hour later, Noriel and Bowen pulled me up into their trucks to show off their handiwork. Both designs were good, but Bowen's was best; it would become the company standard.

  Two days later, Golf Company readied itself to head north. March 1, 2004, was our last night in Camp Commando, and I spent it checking and rechecking my crude map consisting solely of several eight-by-eleven printouts that I had taped together to form one continuous strip. I also had a GPS, and should that fail, I wore an electronic compass on my wrist and a magnetic compass on my flak jacket. Of course, inside a gigantic ferrous metal truck cab, these instruments can only be trusted to tell the most basic cardinal directions, but they were better than nothing. This redundancy may seem like overkill, but I was all too aware that if I missed a checkpoint or made a wrong turn somewhere, a thirty-vehicle convoy spread over two miles would somehow have to make a U-turn on a two-lane highway with no shoulder to speak of and treacherous, slippery sand on each side. Further complicating this difficult movement would be the fact that any road we were on would likely be jammed solidly with U.S. vehicles heading into and out of Iraq. Road signs were limited and printed mainl
y in Arabic, and we had no translators. Looming large over all these concerns, though, were the faceless insurgents who even in early 2004 had demonstrated the capability to attack a lost convoy made vulnerable during a missed turn or a complicated circling maneuver. The best way to ensure the safety of my company was to never make a navigation mistake. I was terribly worried that I would.

  I spent the late evening hours of March 1 trying to sleep but failing miserably. I thought back to all the land navigation exercises I had done at my Basic School. I had failed the first one miserably and then spent every single Saturday morning working to improve in remedial sessions. I wondered if it had been enough, or if I would fail under the pressure. The weight of two hundred or so lives was heavier than I expected. So I prayed a simple prayer over and over:

  “Dear God, please don't let me screw up and get everybody killed.”

  NINE

  On the evening of March 3, I surveyed my Marines for the last time before crossing into Iraq. I had been leading the company's convoy north through Kuwait for the past two days, and Golf was now staged just south of the Iraqi border inside yet another U.S. camp. Hundreds of other vehicles waited alongside our convoy, lined up in dozens of long canvas-and-steel rows in a huge gravel parking lot. Slowly, I walked down our row, checking to see what my Marines were doing before I tried for a few hours of sleep.

  Noriel, Leza, and Bowen were doing much the same thing: giving their men one last look-over, walking around the vehicles, checking on the gear. They appeared busy and focused. Teague, Carson, and the other team leaders were hanging out with their men. Most were laughing with one another, or reading. Some wrote letters in the day's last light while others did what Marines do best—they slept, bedded down in sleeping bags next to the trucks. None looked too nervous. Walking back to my truck, it suddenly hit me: These kids laughing and writing and sleeping and talking, they were mine. They made up Joker One, and I was their leader, about to take them into a country designated a combat zone. I felt nervous and proud and slightly unready all at the same time. But, ready or not, the next morning was coming and Iraq was coming with it. I pulled out my sleeping mat and bedded down in the gravel, trying to grab a couple of hours of shut-eye before a very early morning.

  At 2 AM on March 4, Joker One woke up, packed up, and boarded our two trucks. I climbed up into the cab of mine and began checking the radio, talking to the other platoon commanders as my Marines settled into the bed behind me. The canvas sides that covered the top half of the truck beds had been rolled up, so I could see the silhouettes of my men clambering about underneath the stars. After determining that my radio worked, I put down my handset and used a small flashlight to review my crude map. I wasn't tired in the least. My body had pumped what felt like a quart of adrenaline into my bloodstream, and, for the moment, my heart was pounding rapidly. I felt hyperalert. The tiredness, I knew from experience, would set in later, so I had collected five or so packets of instant coffee to help keep me sharp when the adrenaline wore off.

  For two hours, Golf Company waited, vehicles running, for units ahead of us to clear the border checkpoint. Hundreds of convoys were traveling into and out of Iraq during the rotation from Operation Iraqi Freedom I to II, and traffic marshals had been set up along the border to help control their movements. We couldn't proceed north until the marshals told us to. During the delay, each platoon commander periodically talked with his counterparts to make certain that everyone's communication gear was still working. Inch by inch, our lightless convoy slowly crept forward until we nearly bumped up against the base gates, lit up like day under the sterile white glare of two giant arc lights.

  Finally, at 4 AM, we received permission from the checkpoint controller to leave Kuwait. The giant traffic light set up on the left-hand side of the gates turned from red to green, and Captain Bronzi ordered the convoy forward. As the huge steel gate rolled slowly to one side, I gave my first combat order over the PRR, the small intraplatoon radio whose headset was fastened firmly to my right ear and throat.

  “Squad leaders, have your men make Condition One.”

  Behind me, thirty-seven snick-snacks rang out almost in unison as my men pulled their M-16 bolts to the rear and then let them slam forward, chambering a round. There's nothing else on earth that makes that sound.

  Joker One was locked and loaded. I racked my own bolt back and felt somewhat satisfied as it slammed home. Then I ordered my vehicle forward, and the Jokers rolled out, weapons ready, adrenaline blasting, minds amped for any and every possible scenario. We were finally doing it for real.

  My seven-ton made it all of two hundred meters into Iraq before grinding to a halt. The road ahead of our convoy was packed with military vehicles stacked end to end, all waiting to go around a single-lane cloverleaf that would dump us onto a highway heading north. As there are only a few of these northbound highways in Iraq, huge numbers of coalition vehicles intermixed with the normal local traffic clogged each one. Our thirty-vehicle convoy was just a small part of an unbroken line stretching for as far as my eyes could see. At nearly the exact same time that our convoy halted, my radio went dead, and I lost all communication with the rest of the convoy. Still, the Jokers weren't going anywhere anytime soon, so I took my attention off the road and pulled out the radio to sort out what had happened.

  Thirty seconds later, a rapid, frantic banging on my truck door jolted me out of my technical inspection. I pulled up on the latch and leaned out to find an agitated, wide-eyed Captain Bronzi hopping from foot to foot and shouting rapid-fire sentences at me.

  “Joker One, my radio's gone completely out, I can't talk to anyone, the convoy's stopped moving. We are sitting ducks out here, man. And I can't talk to anyone. We are sitting ducks out here! We've got to do something. We've got to get these vehicles moving. We are sitting ducks out here!”

  I restrained the impulse to point out that we were a mere two hundred meters north of the Kuwaiti border and that about two-thirds of the convoy was still safely inside the base. I also decided not to mention that the likelihood of an attack this close to the heavily armed border watchtowers seemed fairly remote. I did, however, point out that if we were indeed sitting ducks, then at least we were in good company—those several hundred other military vehicles stacked along the highway to our north. Looking for the first time at the massive logjam in front of us, the CO regained his composure and headed off to try to fix the communication problem.

  Two minutes later, the radios began working again, and the traffic ahead of us began to move and we entered the highway. But as our vehicles stretched, I started losing Flowers, the platoon commander responsible for keeping track of the convoy's rear third. Our capricious long-range radios would work only sporadically for the remainder of the trip, so I relied heavily on my little intrasquad PRR to communicate with Quist, the platoon commander closest to me. I would pass him a message, he would pass it back to the next vehicle equipped with a PRR, they would pass that backward, and so on in a long game of high-speed telephone. Messages traveling from the convoy's back to its front reached me the same way. Compounding our difficulties, vehicles at random points along the convoy broke down every so often. We could ill afford to be separated from them. With thousands of same-color, same-model military vehicles on the same road at the same time, it would have been easy for a few of our separated members to latch on to the wrong convoy and end up hundreds of miles from our final destination.

  Fortunately, our rehearsals in Kuwait paid off. The Ox and a repair truck constantly moved up and down the convoy's line, fixing broken Humvees if possible and hooking them up via tow straps to other Humvees if not. At the front of the convoy, I tried desperately to keep track of all the goings-on miles behind me in spite of the patchy radio so that I could slow us down when work was being done and speed us up when it wasn't. I started swallowing my coffee grounds about an hour after our entrance into Iraq.

  I also drank water furiously. It was ninety degrees outside in the Iraqi dese
rt and I was wearing sixty pounds of gear on a Kevlar vest that didn't breathe. Soon, the high caffeine/high water combination proved more than my renal system could handle, and I found myself performing in real time the one thing that I had forgotten to practice earlier: urinating into an empty water bottle while moving at forty-two miles per hour and checking our direction with my wrist compass. Thankfully, these unpleasant exercises were the most eventful things to happen to me during the entire convoy. At 4 P.M. on the same day, the Jokers pulled into the city that would be our home for the next seven months.

  Ramadi. The capital city of the Sunni-dominated Anbar province, it contained roughly 350,000 people, a sweltering mass of humanity packed into less than nine square miles—one of the highest population densities on earth. As we pulled into the city from the north, its alien nature struck me almost like a physical blow. No amount of training at abandoned U.S. bases could have prepared us for the rows and rows of close-packed, high-walled compounds that made up the city blocks, or the mounds of trash that lined every street, or the throngs of people who stared at us as our convoy crawled through their midst on the way to our first stop.

  We pulled into Ramadi from the city's west side and made our way into a base located at the tip of a peninsula formed by the Y intersection of the Euphrates River and one of its tributaries. Called Hurricane Point, the place was one of three main U.S. bases located on the western border of the city. We were relatively pleased with what we saw. The main base headquarters was inside an elaborately constructed former palace of Saddam Hussein's. Air-conditioning units protruded from nearly all the boarded-up windows, and the outside walls were covered in sandbags stacked five feet high. Palm trees lined a nicely paved road that ran throughout the base. Hurricane Point also featured running water in its shower areas, nearly twenty-four-hour electricity, multiple phone banks, an Internet café, and a mess hall. Though we knew we wouldn't be staying here—we had simply pulled in to drop off a few vehicles and personnel who belonged to another of 2/4's companies—we hoped it would be representative of what we'd find at our own, as yet unnamed base.