Joker One

by Donovan Campbell

  “Joker Six, this is One-Actual. Be advised, we have found nothing here. The attackers escaped. Over.”

  “Roger, One-Actual. I'm going to take the QRF out and look around the area. Over.”

  I was so surprised that I forgot all tactical dialogue. “Why? You're not going to find anything.”

  Captain Bronzi's voice came back, tight with anger. “One-Actual, we're going out because I fucking think it's necessary. Last time I checked, I was still CO. Over.”

  I shook my head. I thought he was putting people at risk unnecessarily, but it was his call.

  “Roger that, Six. Anything else? Over.”

  “Negative, One. Come back to the Outpost. Six out.”

  “One out.”

  We patrolled the half mile back to the Outpost as quickly as our heavy

  gear loads would let us. Once inside its gates, we pulled off our helmets, unloaded our weapons, and started the quick inspections to make certain that we had all of our sensitive items—spare barrels for the SAWs, for example. Everyone was drenched with sweat and still breathing hard. Brooks's team was covered in the dirt and dust from the explosion that had stuck to the exposed, sweat-laden skin of their necks and faces.

  Inspections completed, we headed back to the platoon's house for a debrief session. When we got to the platoon's courtyard, we found first and second squads already assembled, silently waiting as we trooped in. Their men had already stripped out of their gear, so as the sun set behind us, a mixed crowed of hard-looking, armored warriors and pale, skinny high school kids gathered in a tight half circle around me for the after-action question-and-answer session.

  Strangely, I still didn't feel anything—no relief at our lack of casualties, no anger at first squad and the mix-up with the COC, nothing. I was still in that strange emotionless combat mode, totally focused on the event and on understanding fully what had happened so that we could better forestall being ambushed again. I didn't know why COC hadn't registered first squad's arrival or why first squad hadn't been able to find us at the police station. I didn't know how our enemies had hit us from two directions at once or exactly how far away from Brooks that RPG had exploded. My sole concern was answering as many of these outstanding questions as I could, and that concern took all of my attention.

  So, M-16 and gear still slung across my sweat-soaked chest, I began the debrief with my assembled platoon. First I summarized the events as best I understood them—after all, as the commander I had the best overall picture of the fight because my primary job was to build that picture. Next I asked what the rest of third squad had seen that I hadn't. I was amazed at how many of the young Marines spoke up, and as the entire picture of the day's short firefight emerged, we learned a couple of things. First, RPGs travel slowly enough that you can see them in flight, and they'll skip off the pavement like Frisbees if they don't hit it at a steep enough angle. We learned this fact because Brooks had seen the RPG warhead zipping at him as he crossed the road, and he had somehow managed to jump as the rocket passed beneath him, skipping off the pavement just a few feet in front of him and continuing on to impact the traffic circle just five meters away.

  This is how we learned the second thing, which is that the rocket warhead can tear concrete to pieces. An RPG warhead looks much like an American football with a finned cylinder about eighteen inches long sticking out of one end. That football can carry a lot of explosive, all of which detonates as soon as it hits something. The RPG that Brooks had hopped had dug a huge divot out of the foot-wide concrete traffic circle, much as a golfer does to the fairway on a bad drive.

  Third, any proper RPG makes two explosions—one when it fires, and one when it detonates. If you hear only one boom, then no need to worry. The warhead hasn't been armed, or it's a dud. Though we had already learned a decent amount about RPGs in training, such as how many millimeters of rolled homogenous armor they can penetrate and how their shaped charge mechanism spews molten copper in a thin stream upon detonation, these smaller, equally relevant details were news to us.

  We also learned something else, something far more important and far more disturbing. During the fighting, I had thought that no one had gotten more than a quick glimpse of our attackers, but I was wrong. Bowen informed me that he thought Dotson and Cabrera—the point men—had both had a chance to observe the gunmen for at least twenty seconds. Puzzled, I asked them about it, and they told me that yes, they had indeed seen two of our attackers. I immediately asked them if they had fired. Nervously, Dotson and Cabrera looked at each other; then Cabrera replied simply, “Uh, no, sir. We didn't fire our weapons, sir.”

  I was furious. “What the hell is wrong with you? We're Marines—we kill people who attack us. Why on earth would you not shoot?”

  Dotson and Cabrera glanced at each other again, then Dotson replied, quietly. “Uh, sir, we didn't fire back because the guys were surrounded by a crowd of little kids, sir. Maybe twenty, they were all around. The guys, they were just holding up their AKs in the middle of the kids and firing them wildly our way. Without a scope, sir, I was worried that if I fired, I would hit the little kids.” He looked down at his feet, shuffled them, and then looked back up at me and said softly, “I thought that was what you wanted, sir.”

  My heart swelled with pride in my Marines at exactly the same time that I kicked myself for yelling at them before I had all the facts. Dotson and Cabrera had done exactly what we had trained them to do—stop, think, and put themselves at greater risk if they believed that there was any danger to innocent civilians from their reactions. Immediately, I publicly back -pedaled.

  “Guys, I didn't know that. You did exactly the right thing. I'm proud of you. Everyone else, if you find yourself in that situation, do exactly what Cabrera and Dotson did.”

  Hearing this, all of the Marines nodded, and I ended the debrief and let them disperse. We had learned something more valuable and disturbing than the flight characteristics of an RPG. The insurgents would use kids for cover. We knew that the militias in Somalia had used this tactic to great effect during their street battles with Rangers in Mogadishu, but we hadn't heard many reports of it happening in Iraq. The idea that someone would use small children—both girls and boys—as nothing more than disposable body armor is so foreign, so beyond the pale of basic morality and decency, that you have trouble believing it until it happens to you. It's kind of like a car crash: Until you're in one, you can know that they happen and perhaps even sympathize with the victims, but you can't fully internalize it, or accept it as entirely real with painful, ongoing consequences, until you're sitting in a wrecked vehicle and staring at your broken leg.

  As the Marines walked away, I did something that I now regret. I pulled Bowen aside and asked him how I had done during the fighting. How had I seemed under fire? Did I not do something that he had needed me to? Could he help me be a better lieutenant, please?

  What was Bowen supposed to say? I had put him on the spot, but, professional that he was, Bowen managed to smoothly answer at least some of these questions. Halfway through our conversation, the Gunny suddenly appeared off to my right, about ten feet way, smoking a cigarette and leaning against the hangar bay wall. When Bowen and I finished up, the Gunny stubbed out the smoke and walked over. He stood silently next to me for a while, watching my third-squad leader walk away. Then he spoke up.

  “Your first firefights, right, sir?”

  I nodded.

  “You brought all the Marines back this times, though, right, sir?”

  I nodded again. “But I think mostly it was because the enemy sucks at shooting. Plus, we didn't even shoot back. I don't think that's a really good performance, Gunny. I probably should have done something differently.” Again, I was seeking validation.

  “Hey, sir, you kept your heads, you brought the Marines back, no civilians was killed. Hard to argue with that, sir.” He clapped me on the back. “Hard to argue with that. They'll be time enough to shoot back, sir. Don't worry.” The Gunny gave me
a little crooked, squint-eyed smile, then wandered off on another of his never-ending projects.

  As I reflected on his words, the implications of the day's events began to sink in. No longer did I wonder whether we'd ever earn the coveted Combat Action Ribbon. I suspected that we might be in for more fighting than originally anticipated. Exactly how much fighting I didn't know, but I still hoped that it would be the exception rather than the rule. My men had performed well, but, going forward, I didn't know how we could fight an enemy that clothed itself with children, particularly while trying to win the favor of the local residents. I took some solace in the fact that the other side couldn't shoot straight, but even incompetent enemies sometimes get lucky. At some point, we'd be forced to use our weapons. Until then, though, we'd have to muster some of the most difficult strength of all—the strength not to fight back.

  SIXTEEN

  The second time we came under attack, a mere two days later, we took several RPGs all at once. We were walking along Michigan to the Government Center when the engineers at the head of our patrol located an IED in the middle of the road. It was a dull olive artillery shell, and it looked much like a gigantic, two-foot-long bullet. As we moved quickly to cordon it off, I heard several explosions in rapid succession—several RPGs, all launched at us. One of them drilled a neat hole through the thin armor of the passenger door on our lead Humvee and continued onward to drill another neat hole through the two off-white blocks of C-4 that our engineers had placed on the vehicle's center console. Fortunately, neither block exploded. Two of our engineers took shrapnel from the blast: One had minor cuts on his hands while the other, a six-foot, three-inch giant named Canouck had a sizable chunk embedded in his right leg. When I arrived at our damaged Humvee, Docs Smith and Camacho had cut off Canouck's pant leg, bandaged his wound, and tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent him from standing and shouting obscenities at our vanished attackers. Shortly thereafter, a medevac vehicle from the Outpost and an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team from Hurricane Point arrived. We sent Canouck back, blew up the IED, and continued on to Ramadi's Government Center. An inauspicious way to start the day, but we had handled it with no serious casualties or loss of life.

  If the point of our mission was to bring stability to Ramadi, the city's Government Center was often the focal point of that mission. Inside a double layer of ten-foot-tall concrete barriers, roughly eight buildings housed all the administrative and logistical machinery necessary for the governance of the entire Anbar province. We were primarily concerned with one building, a large, four-story, L-shaped monstrosity where the governor, the mayor, and various other high officials met daily, but we couldn't completely ignore the rest of the compound. With its front butting up against the teeming souk and its rear extending halfway to the butchers’ district in the southwest quadrant of the city, the entire complex was, to say the least, a security nightmare.

  We had left the Outpost early, at 7 AM, and after the RPG attack we made our way on foot to the Center, walking straight down Route Michigan until we reached its huge concrete barriers, nestled securely in the heart of Ramadi's downtown market area. The crowds were fairly light as we passed through, but by 10 AM they had become so thick that the one-squad security patrols we ran out of the Government Center every two hours could barely thread their way through the clogged sidewalks. Snarling traffic jams replete with the ubiquitous orange-and-white taxis packed the previously empty Route Michigan—the highway ran directly in front of the Center's double concrete walls.

  As the day wound on, hundreds of people necessary to keep Anbar province functioning would pass into and out of the front of the building we were protecting, and searching every one of them was clearly unworkable and likely counterproductive. We decided to concentrate our efforts on repelling any direct attacks on the building, positioning ourselves at stationary posts around the L of the building's roof, watching the crowds of people and cars just dozens of meters away, wondering whether one of them might explode, marveling at how everyone went about their mundane daily business in such an uncertain environment. These crowds, and our anxiety level, remained high until well after sundown.

  The private security contractors operating in Iraq have occasionally come under criticism for their excesses, but on that day—and most others following—we felt incredibly fortunate to have help from the men of Triple Canopy, the company that had received the contract from the U.S. government to protect key American personnel and infrastructure facilities in Ramadi. For the Center, this mandate meant setting up a series of guarded checkpoints (using Iraqi forces) along the two approaches to the building's entrances and periodically sweeping its halls with bomb-sniffing dogs. It also meant occasionally training and equipping the fledgling Iraqi police and national guardsmen who operated out of the provincial police headquarters just west of our L-shaped government building.

  Mostly ex–special forces types, the Triple Canopy guys probably had regular names like Joe or Frank, but we knew them simply by their colorful call signs, among them Highway, Pigpen, and Pipebomb. The Triple Canopy guys seemed equally happy to have our help, and they had quickly equipped us with their own long-range Motorola radios so that we could communicate with them at all times. The first time I used them, I was ecstatic—the Motorolas beat our U.S.-issued PRRs hands down, and there were enough of them to equip each squad leader with one. We were finally able to send our squads more than two blocks away and still keep in contact with them (we still didn't have enough long-range radios to give any more than one to each platoon).

  So, shortly after arriving at the Center on that early March morning, I rendezvoused with Highway, collected the radios, and trudged tiredly up to the roof with Noriel and third squad to man our fighting positions in the hundred-degree heat. It had already been a long day. As Noriel and I popped out into the blazing sun and clomped across the sticky tar slathered around on the building's roof, I was less than enthusiastic about what lay ahead. Security duty on the Government Center roof involved cramming yourself and another man into a four-foot-by-three-foot sandbagged plywood box and then sweating for two hours underneath the 120-degree desert sun while having to maintain constant vigilance. But I soon found that being up there meant I could sweat side by side with my Marines, mostly free of the pressures of navigation and constant communication that defined our patrols. Sometimes we talked about Ramadi, sometimes about life in general, and sometimes we just sat there, watching the streets together in companionable silence.

  During those early days I learned a great deal about my men on that roof. Feldmeir told me of his troubled past, of the series of foster homes he'd grown up in, of his constant fear each time he was moved. Mahardy told me about growing up in upstate New York with a tight-knit Irish family of seven and how he and his siblings were still best friends.

  It was on the roof that I learned that Noriel had enlisted in the Marines at age twenty because he saw no future in busing tables as a green-card immigrant in Lake Tahoe. Shortly after his enlistment, my fiery squad leader had been charged with assault with a deadly weapon. Sometime during his infantry finishing school, Noriel had been pulling guard duty, carrying an M-16 and a full magazine of ammunition (as all guards do) when one of his fellow privates began “screwing” with him. Noriel being Noriel, he had immediately pulled back the bolt on his weapon, locked and loaded a round, and proceeded to threaten the offender with grievous bodily harm if he continued. The next day, Noriel found himself arraigned on some very serious charges and assigned to a disciplinary platoon whose sole purpose was to beat down its members by making them perform such Sisyphean tasks as carrying a boulder on a five-mile round trip, painting and unpainting rocks, and, the all-time classic, digging a trench only to immediately fill it in again. For a year, my future first-squad leader endured the treatment, refusing to quit because he knew he had nothing to go home to. Then one day all charges were inexplicably dropped, and Noriel was sent right back to the school to finish his infantry training.


  Less remarkable but slightly more amusing were PFCs Niles and Ott, the two team members led by the giant Carson. In their shared bunker up on the roof, they interacted in the unique way that only the pressure and close confines of extended combat can produce. The two Marines were as opposite as the day was long, and stuffed together into the little pillboxes up on the Government Center roof, they played off each other like a two-man comedy act. Nineteen-year-old Niles was one of the smartest, quickest, and lankiest Marines in the platoon, and he probably had the most expansive vocabulary of any of its members. He was also possessed of endless reserves of twitchy, nervous energy. By contrast, the short, solid Ott was one of our slowest, most laid-back men—by his own admission, he had smoked a lot of weed before joining the Corps, and I suspect that the drug combined with his own God-given personality to make him Niles's polar opposite. Typically, Niles would take Ott around and around, tying him in verbal and intellectual conundrums until Ott finally broke out with “Ah, shit, you're making fun of me again, aren't you, Niles?” It was their own game, and they played it endlessly to help ease the strangely tense monotony of watching a particular patch of city for hours on end.

  Whenever I made my rounds on the roof, walking from sandbagged bunker to sandbagged bunker as I checked on each team, the two often as not broke off their practiced dialogue, and I found myself fielding Niles's incisive questions, questions that ranged from the feasibility of representative democracy in Iraq to why the blatant disconnect between the CPA in Baghdad and those of us on the ground tasked with executing its apparently half-baked policies. My answer to the latter question, by the way, was that if Joker One also lived in a mini-America (Baghdad's Green Zone) with discos featuring half-naked women, bars, movie rental parlors, swimming pools, and the like, and that if we only rarely ventured outside its four walls, then maybe we, too, would lose all contact with reality and concoct fantasyland plans of stock market exchanges before bothering to turn on the water. Maybe we, too, would prefer the comfort and the safety of something that mimicked America, and maybe we, too, would prefer to leave the dangerous, dirty work of policy implementation to nineteen-year-old lance corporals.