Joker One

by Donovan Campbell

  The next day, Mitchell, Bronzi, and I visited another police chief, this one suspected of being on the take. It was our mission to warn him to change his ways or risk joining the inmates he currently oversaw. While at the station house, deep in the Farouq area, Mitchell pointed out the spot where an enemy had fired an RPG at his patrol two weeks previously. Since then, he told us, nothing major had happened in Ramadi. The story confirmed what we all suspected and hoped: Combat in the city probably wouldn't be very fierce, and the action that did occur would likely confine itself to occasional IED blasts and mortar attacks. From that day forward, all of the officers from the CO on down regularly debated whether we would ever be authorized to wear the coveted Combat Action Ribbon, since the criteria for this award demanded that fire be both taken and returned.

  Another measure of our naïveté came a few days later, when, during a brief foot patrol with the Army through the packed souk, the CO and I heard automatic weapons fire from what sounded like a block or two away. Even though we hadn't heard the distinctive cracking that indicated the fire was actually close enough to do damage, for the rest of the day we twittered to each other about the incident like excited schoolboys. What we didn't realize then was that the default way to express nearly any emotion in Ramadi was to walk outside and peel off a few rounds from the family AK-47. Wedding parties wildly fired their weapons into the air to celebrate the joy of marriage; funeral parties wildly fired their weapons into the air to mourn the sadness of passing; families at circumcisions wildly fired their weapons into the air to commemorate the separation of a boy from a part of his penis.

  ELEVEN

  While Noriel, Leza, Bowen, and I were busy taking in the sights and sounds of the city, the Gunny was busy housing the Joker platoons. I hadn't involved myself in the process, which was fortunate because at the time I had no idea of how important geography was to unit cohesion. Fortunately, the Gunny understood this concept all too well, and he gave my platoon its own building. The “house,” as we called it, was shaped like an L, with all of the new Marines billeted in the long arm and all of my NCOs housed in the short one. Docs Smith and Camacho got their own bunks in the NCO rooms—unlike the other platoons’ corpsmen, most of whom opted to live in the main hangar bay building with the Navy doctors and their fellow corpsmen, ours docs chose to live with us. Unsurprisingly, Doc Smith fit right in with second squad. Very surprisingly, Doc Camacho fit right in with first. Maybe the hot climate agreed with him, or maybe there was more to the young man than simply the neonatal ward tender. Time would certainly tell.

  Two eight-foot-high walls connected the arms of the L, forming a small courtyard where my Marines relaxed when they weren't running missions. I can't say for certain, but I believe that the combination of our own living space with our own relaxing space contributed as much as anything else to the tight cohesion that developed among the Marines of Joker One. Most other platoons had to share houses with one another, and none had their own courtyard in which to hang out. We were the only ones with this amenity. Once again, the Gunny was taking care of me in spite of myself.

  While the Gunny was helping sort out the Marines, the Ox was busy screwing up the base improvement project. Shortly after arrival, the CO had placed his right-hand man in charge of all of the company's contracting, both within our walls and without. With little knowledge of the process and few other readily available options, the Ox had chosen to stick with a contractor whom he had inherited from the Army. This man—whom we'll call Achmed since it eventually became apparent that he had never given anyone his real name—told the Ox that because the Ox was such a clever, strong officer, he, Achmed, would perform a whole host of free work for us. Delighted with his shrewd negotiating prowess, the Ox immediately told all the lieutenants to ensure that neither we nor our Marines hassled Achmed, since he, the Ox, had cleverly convinced the Iraqi to “hook us up with a ton of free shit.” Alarm bells immediately went off in Flowers's engineer head after hearing of this “clever deal,” but his offer to help the Ox with the contracting process was rebuffed in short order.

  The “ton of free shit” that Achmed had so graciously “hooked us up with” turned out to be, among other things, a faulty electrical wiring system installed by drunken vagrants and a shower complex that drained itself into the middle of our base, eventually creating a disgusting malarial swamp that sometimes prevented showering even when we had water, which was rare. Worse, the creative wiring schematic caused our breaker box, located in the medical room, to catch on fire about two months after its completion. Wounded Marines had to be quickly transported out of the burning room while doctors and corpsmen battled the fire with whatever they could find. Eventually all the wiring had to be redone by a former electrician who spent days on the task. During these failures, “Achmed” was nowhere to be found. Sources later hinted that he had taken our money and simply relocated his operation to Baghdad after finishing his work on our base.

  Fortunately, not all the responsibility for internal improvements had been assigned to the Ox. The CO had put Flowers and the Gunny in charge of shoring up the base's defenses, and they got to work with a vengeance.

  While Hes, Quist, and I rode around the city with the Army, the Gunny and Flowers remained largely inside our complex, trying to harden its outer walls and interior buildings against mortars, rockets, and suicide VBIEDs (vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, otherwise known as car bombs). They created two new machine-gun positions along our perimeter to cover the crumbled portion of our north wall. Once that was done, the Gunny set the Marines to work putting sandbags over everything that mattered, from the electrical transmission lines that ran out of our generator to the portable chemical toilets that the Army had left us. Flowers, meanwhile, got division engineers to bring in tons and tons of dirt with which to fill huge ten-foot-tall canvas boxes that were placed around each platoon's living areas. Called HESCO barriers, these massive mounds of dirt would do for large objects what the sandbags did for small ones—prevent mortars and rockets from shredding them.

  There was no time to waste. From our first day in our new home, the Army had told us about the local mortar happy hour, which apparently lasted from 6 PM to about 9 PM every day. During this time, the chances of the enemy firing mortars at our base were significantly elevated, and just a few days after our arrival, a couple of medium-sized 82mm mortar rounds landed outside the base walls with huge ground-and-wall-shaking thuds. Everyone walking outside the base's buildings fell flat on their faces while everyone inside instinctively flinched and looked for something to throw themselves behind. From then on, the CO mandated that all Marines wear flak jackets and helmets during those hours. In practice, this order meant wearing Kevlar vests and helmets when heading over to the bathroom area to shave or take bottled-water showers.

  The sight of young, skinny infantrymen tromping around awkwardly in short shorts, flip-flops, towels, and body armor was a source of never-ending laughter for us in those early days. No mortars had landed inside our walls, no rockets had struck the base, no one had fired at us on patrols, and none of our Marines had been killed or wounded. It was still a merry adventure for the Jokers, and we were all just happy to finally be doing our jobs in real life.

  By the way, our army predecessors had named our little base “Combat Outpost,” and we stuck with it. It proved to be a prescient decision.

  TWELVE

  The Lord is my shepherd.

  I shall not want.

  He makes me to lie down in green pastures.

  He leads me beside still waters.

  He restores my soul …

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

  I will fear no evil,

  For thou art with me.

  Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.

  Thou hast prepared a table before me in the presence of my enemies.

  Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over.

  Surely goodness and mercy will
follow me all the days of my life,

  And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever …

  Blessed be the Lord my Rock

  Who trains my hands for battle

  And my fingers for war.

  My strong tower, and my deliverer.

  My shield, and the one in whom I trust,

  Who subdues my people under me. Amen.

  The prayer echoed softly through the front of the hangar bay as thirty or so kneeling Marines murmured it in unison while the rest of our platoon stood silently behind them with their heads bowed. The platoon formed a rough semicircle, and at its front I knelt, praying quietly and fervently. The sun had just winked out, the swift desert night had fallen, and all around us the city wailed as the muezzins’ calls to prayer rang out in jarring ululation. The microphone-amplified chants formed a weird background to our own quiet prayers, and for a brief second the strange juxtaposition of faiths struck me with sudden clarity.

  The moment passed as quickly as it had come—I was far too nervous for reflection. Three days earlier, Golf had suffered its first casualty when, on one of our last turnover rides with the Army, one of Flowers's men, Corporal McPherson, had had his face blown off from the upper lip down by an IED. Mac had lived, but our merry foreign adventure had ended in flame and smoke and a young man's jaw scattered across a city block. Now we had some sense of what it meant to “take casualties,” and for the first time I wondered what I'd do if any of my men were wounded. I couldn't rely on the Army's help for a medevac; Golf Company had finally assumed full control of the Ramadi AO just one day earlier.

  With these and other concerns weighing heavily on me, I'd given my gear an unusually thorough pre-mission inspection half an hour before the prayer started. All of us had plenty of equipment—the average Marine carried between fifty and sixty pounds on every mission—and if time allowed we inspected it before every single mission. That night, I'd started with the Interceptor flak jacket, the basic unit from which everything else hung. Each of these Kevlar vests covered us from the throats down to our waists, with a small add-on flap hanging over our groins. This triangular piece of Kevlar certainly wouldn't stop AK bullets and probably wouldn't stop any serious shrapnel, but just having it hanging there made me feel a bit better. Inside each Interceptor were our SAPI (small-arms protective insert) plates, rectangles made of sandwiched ceramic layers that could stop 7.62mm AK-47 rounds. Each plate added roughly four pounds to the vest itself, and the total combination came out to about seventeen pounds.

  Next, I had checked the magazines strapped to the lower left side of the Interceptor to make certain that 1) all six were filled with twenty-eight rounds apiece, and 2) the springs inside were in good working order. Often, when an M-16 jams it's due to a worn-out spring in the magazine, not a malfunction with the weapon itself. Next to the magazine pouches I had laced a grenade pouch, but in those first few weeks it was usually filled with something else, something random. We still didn't have enough grenades to give one to each man in the mission platoons, so we carefully rationed the little we did have, with twenty or so going to select Marines in the ops platoon and the other ten or so going to the QRF (quick reaction force) platoon.

  A brand-new bayonet hanging handle down and a first aid kit rounded out the gear on the bottom left half of the vest. On the bottom right half, I had stuck my map/binocular pouch containing those items plus my night vision goggles (NVGs) and many, many spare AA batteries. My canteen also hung there as a complement to my CamelBak hydration pack. To the right side of my chest, I fastened my Garmin GPS and its backup, my military-issue magnetic compass, and around my waist I'd strapped my butt pack, which carried assorted survival equipment and two sets of field rations. In the desert, electrolytes are nearly as precious as water, and copious drinking without eating is a good way to wash them all out of your body and suffer a serious case of hyponatremia, which can kill just as surely as dehydration. On my back hung the CamelBak, one that I had purchased myself because it carried 50 percent more water than the standard-issue gear. Of course, this extra water came with extra weight, and, including my M-16A4 rifle and the M-9 pistol strapped to my right leg, all of my gear added up to a little bit more than fifty pounds. I couldn't complain, though. My SAW gunners carried close to thirty pounds of weapons and ammo alone, as did Yebra and Mahardy with the radio and its spare batteries.

  Now, as I knelt in the hangar bay on that early March evening, praying quietly with all of that gear tugging heavily on my shoulders and back, I was glad that the platoon had spent countless hours adjusting to the load back in Camp Pendleton. Joker One was about to execute its first live mission in Ramadi, a night ambush, and the last thing we needed was fatigue from carrying unfamiliar equipment. That night would be my first time leading the entire platoon on a true infantry mission, and it was the first time we had prayed together as a unit. These simultaneous firsts were no coincidence. Over the past few weeks, I had thought long and hard over the decision to institute a platoon prayer before each live mission, and thirty minutes before our first time out of the Outpost's gates, I had decided in favor of prayer for a few reasons.

  First off, I believed that if we had a pre-battle ritual, something unique to first platoon that only we performed every time we left the base's confines, then we would more quickly gain a sense of corporate over individual identity. Ideally, I wanted each of my Marines to think of himself first as a member of Joker One and only thereafter as an individual with needs and desires different from that of the team as a whole, for I believed that selfishness was the best way to destroy a unit and to get Marines killed in combat. In my mind, the best way to purge this destructive quality from my men was to replace a focus on the self—and its concomitant concern with individual happiness—with a focus on the group and an overriding concern with the service and welfare of others. A pre-battle ritual may seem a strange way to try to effect such a profound transformation, but I had already learned the hard way that sometimes the smallest things have an unexpectedly large impact. Those who felt uncomfortable praying weren't required to say the words, but they were required to stand or kneel shoulder to shoulder with those who did. Thus, Joker One stood together before the mission, and together we steeled ourselves to walk outside the wire for the first time and do our jobs come what may.

  I had a responsibility to my men to provide for all their needs, and those included their spiritual as well as their material ones. Some may say that the spiritual is the province of the chaplain or the priest and that the lieutenant should stick to tactics, to fire and maneuver. My only reply is that the chaplain doesn't throw grenades alongside his men. It's not the priest who holds the hand of the Marine who's just been shot and swears to him that no matter what happens, he will make it back alive somehow, someway. Marines will only really listen to those who have suffered alongside them, and if you want any credibility as a leader, you not only have to bear the same burdens as they, but you also have to try, to your utmost ability and every single day, to transfer those burdens from their shoulders onto yours.

  After Corporal Mac's face had been blown off by the IED, many of my men had serious questions. “Why did this have to happen to Mac?” and “What if it happens to me?” I didn't have a good answer for the first, and I didn't want to confront the reality of the second just yet, so I prayed and asked the Marines to pray with me for a third, more selfish reason: Deep in my heart, I believed that prayer would work without fail, that if together Joker One prayed long and hard enough, God would spare all of us from Mac's fate. What I know now, and which didn't occur to me then, was that by praying as I prayed, and hoping what I hoped, and believing what I believed, I was effectively reducing God to a result-dispensing genie who, if just fed the proper incantations, would give the sincere petitioner (me) the exact outcome desired.

  As the platoon murmured the Twenty-third Psalm before our first mission on that mid-March evening, I believed that those prayers would be enough to keep us safe, to keep Hende
rson's heart beating on the patrol, Guzon from shooting Staff Sergeant in the back, and Feldmeir from falling asleep during the middle of our walk. I hoped the prayers would keep me from getting my men lost on our first mission, from forgetting everything I knew about ambushes at night, from losing communication with one of my squads and abandoning my men to the mercies of Ramadi. In short, I hoped that prayer would allay my fears and cover for my shortcomings.

  The soft prayer ended, and together Joker One rose and walked from the hangar bay to the broad sandy area just inside the base's main entrance. We assumed our patrol formation, with Noriel's squad leading, Leza's in the middle, and Bowen's bringing up the rear. I stood just behind the base's entry barrier as Yebra checked the radio one last time and the Marines behind me strung themselves out into two long, snaking lines. Suddenly the kneeling Yebra straightened, slung the radio across his back, and turned to me. Quietly he whispered, “Sir, COC [combat operations center] says we're good to go.”

  I nodded, paused for a second, then looked up at Teague, the platoon's point man. He stood a few meters away, looking back at me. In the dim wash of the streetlights lining Michigan, our eyes met. He didn't look nervous—just hard, with narrowed eyes in an emotionless face. I nodded to Teague, lifted my arm above my head, and dropped it in front of my face. Move out. Teague nodded back, turned about, and calmly walked around the red-and-white-striped barrier and into the city. I crossed over five meters behind Teague, and behind me I heard Yebra mutter softly into the radio: “COC, be advised, Joker One is departing friendly lines.” Our first combat mission officially began.