Joker One

by Donovan Campbell

  “We're all out, sir. No more left,” he shouted back.

  “Roger that. Let's hit this house.”

  We charged the compound, kicked down the door, and streamed through, weapons raised to fire. Nothing was inside save a large hole in the dirt, some dark streaks on the wall, and some dark dribbles on the ground. They had probably only been wounded. We cleared the courtyard and then turned around and headed back the way we had come.

  We headed west again, still trying to locate the beleaguered third platoon. Coming around another corner, I saw Corporal Hayes—a third-platoon team leader—and one other Marine crouched down on our street's sidewalk, just one block to our north. Finally we had linked up with at least part of the missing unit. I ran over, and, as I got closer, I noticed that Hayes was white-faced and shaking slightly. He was bleeding from one of his hands.

  “Hayes, where are the rest of your guys? Are any more wounded? Who do we need to get?”

  He stared blankly at me for a bit, then, despite his pain, pointed out a spot one block to our north. “Sir, last I saw them, they were somewhere around there. We got separated early on. Now all of us're wounded.” He stopped talking after that, exhausted and in pain.

  The Marine to his right was also injured, and he was crying and rocking to himself. As I walked off, Noriel walked up.

  “Hey. It's gonna be okay,” he told them, and knelt down and put his arms around the crying Marine. “Now give me your magazines,” he said, more softly. “I'm low on bullets, and you won't need them anymore.”

  Doc Camacho moved up and immediately got to work on the wounded Hayes, so I moved off, trying to locate the rest of Hayes's team, including the one dead Marine that I knew about. Ten feet in front of me, another wounded third-squad member suddenly staggered around a corner toward us. It was third's Lance Corporal Gentile, and he was weaponless. Both hands were pressed against his face and neck; they were covered in blood, and blood was seeping through his closed fingers. Gentile had taken a round through the back of his neck, and it had blown off part of his nose and most of his right cheek when it exited his body through his face. I motioned Gentile back toward Doc and then moved up to the street from which he had emerged. Glancing down it, I saw the dead body of Moises Langhorst sprawled out, arms akimbo, in the middle of the street, maybe thirty feet away from me. Even from that distance, I could tell that Langhorst had been stripped of his weapon and all gear, leaving a strangely naked-looking body clad only in cammies and boots.

  Noriel came up alongside me and, glancing over at Langhorst, asked, “Sir, do you want to go get him?”

  I pondered the question briefly, and, right at that moment, two Army ambulances appeared out of nowhere and started rolling down our street. They stopped right at Doc Camacho, and an unknown Army colonel jumped out of the vehicles, ran up to the CO, and offered to evacuate our wounded for us. Seeing this, I turned back to Noriel.

  “No. My concern right now is for the living. Let's keep moving north. Let's find the rest of third.”

  We were still missing half of Hayes's squad and two other full squads from third, and I knew they had at least one other seriously wounded Marine in their ranks. We couldn't do anything for Langhorst now, and, even though the firing around us had ceased, our first priority was still breaking through to the besieged and helping the people we could. Noriel and I moved off north, to the end of the block, and I called the CO over the PRR to see if he knew where to go from here. He was still the only one with a long-range radio, and still the only one who had even some idea of where the rest of third was located.

  When the CO didn't reply, I glanced back, only to discover that he and the Army colonel were busy conferring at the entrance to the street containing Langhorst's body. They suddenly straightened, and the CO and one other Marine, probably Mahardy, took off down the street to retrieve Langhorst. Behind them, the Army colonel started firing down the same street with a shotgun. I had no idea what he was shooting at, since the enemy guns around us had halted altogether, and I hadn't seen any worthwhile targets on that street thirty seconds ago. Maybe it was random covering fire.

  No help was going to come from this quarter for the time being, so I turned my PRR to third platoon's channel and started calling out to them. After the third try, I heard Sergeant Holt, Corporal Hayes's squad leader, bark back at me.

  “Goddamn, sir, it's good to hear you guys. How close are you?” he said.

  “Holt, I don't know. I don't know where you are, but you've gotta be within a few blocks if I can hear you on this.”

  “Well, sir, can you fire something in the air? Maybe we'll see it.”

  “Wait one.”

  Sergeant Noriel had heard the whole exchange, and before I could turn to him, he slapped a red star cluster—a small aluminum canister that fires a red flare one hundred feet into the air—into my hand. “You can shoot this, sir.” Then he started tugging at my cammies, but I was too engrossed with finding the rest of third platoon to pay attention to him. I fired the pyrotechnic up into the air, and Holt informed me that we were only a block and a half away, just to his south.

  I set off again, Noriel following me, still tugging at my cammies—later he told me that he felt like a little kid, tagging along after a distracted parent. Finally it dawned on me that he had something to say.

  “What do you want, Noriel?”

  “Just wanted to say, sir, that you're a pretty tall guy. Maybe you should think about kneeling or taking cover occasionally. You keep this up, you'll get shots soon.”

  Shortly after we arrived on the scene, the firing at Sergeant Holt's squad

  slackened enough to allow them to leave the housing compound where they had taken refuge. The seven remaining able-bodied men moved just behind my first squad, and shortly after all of them had left their building, yet another third-platoon squad emerged from a nearby housing compound. They, too, inserted themselves among us, and I told Noriel to head off again, farther into the city. I started walking again before being stopped dead in my tracks by one of Sergeant Noriel's team leaders, Corporal Brown, calling over the PRR.

  “Sir,” he said, “I'm standing next to a dead Marine here. What do you want me to do?”

  Dead bodies are classified as routine medevacs, but there's never anything routine about zippering up the lifeless husk of one of your comrades and loading him like so much cordwood into the nearest vehicle. For three minutes, that's exactly what we did. Then we headed west again to find the still-living—the priority and the urgent medevacs.

  By midafternoon I had managed to hook up with my full platoon as well as most of third, and all 1,200 of 2/4's Marines had deployed in force into Ramadi to crush the fighters. We had now been fighting for almost five straight hours, and I felt tired and frantically busy. Fire would erupt fiercely and die down again just as quickly as small pockets of resistance all around us sprang into life, then disbanded. During one of those quick firefights, I was moving with Leza when the bullets started snapping all around.

  “Get the guys into a house. Strong-point and return fire,” I yelled, meaning they should guard the doors and windows.

  “Roger, sir,” came the reply. “Carson, get us inside the gate.”

  I looked behind me, and, sure enough, Lance Corporal Carson had just rammed his entire body against the sturdy metal gate of a compound wall. He rebounded, then shook his head just like a bull in a bullfight and charged again. This time the gate exploded inward, and second squad streamed inside to relative safety. Leza started running inside, then paused, turned around, and grinned at me despite the heavy fire.

  “Hey, sir. That's Carson for you, huh?”

  For the first time, I found myself grinning during a firefight. “Yeah, it sure is. Let's get the hell inside, huh?”

  We poured into the building and climbed up to the roof, ignoring the people inside, if there even were any. Rows and rows of nearly identical housing compounds surrounded us, and, looking at them, I realized we were on the very
western edge of the Farouq district, almost at the edge of the gigantic aboveground cemetery that marked the city center. Hes and the final squad from third platoon had taken cover among its tombstones.

  Half an hour later, Hes and the rest of his men were found at the very western edge of the cemetery. It was early evening, and by now the fire inside the city had ceased altogether. The CO worked out a grid containing most of the butchers’ district and all of the Farouq district, and he put fourth platoon, mine, and the remnants of third into action searching every house along the east-west streets of the grid. The streets of the city were devoid of traffic, but the occasional pedestrian walked the sidewalks, sometimes even passing us, and from every third or fourth compound we passed residents stared at us from their rooftops or their open doors. Seeing them silhouetted against the evening sun made me slightly nervous, but I was still numb to most emotions outside my extreme focus. Once citizens had been identified as nonthreats, I lost all interest and moved on to the next task and/or suspicious person.

  I walked by an open compound gate and glanced briefly inside. I saw a kid, about fifteen years old, with curly black hair and the very beginnings of a mustache tracing his upper lip, dressed in a black Adidas jacket and black nylon pants. Both hands were in his pockets. If he had been standing upright, he would have been leaning almost jauntily against a wall, with one leg crooked at the knee to rest on the other. He wasn't standing, though. He was lying down, and his legs were twitching spastically. He had a neat red hole between his eyes. I walked on.

  After an hour we finished searching the grid and patrolled back into the

  base on foot. I was trudging back inside the base's walls, right next to Hes, carrying my helmet in my left hand with my right dangling limply at my side. My M-16 hung neatly across the front of my chest, suspended by its three-point sling, and all of my gear was still on. It had been a long day of fighting, roughly eight hours, and we were exhausted and filthy, covered with dirt, sweat, and gunpowder residue. Hes had blood all over his cammies, but he wasn't visibly wounded, so it likely wasn't his. We walked in silence for a bit, then he spoke up.

  “I've got a hell of a headache, One.”

  “Dehydration, huh?”

  “Yeah, well, that and the fact that I got knocked out by a bullet.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, we were fighting on a roof near the cemetery when an AK round must have caught my Kevlar at an angle. Look here, you can see the divot it made in the thing. Anyway, I fell over—must've been knocked out. I woke up and found my Marines dragging me off the roof, screaming that I had been killed. Man, were they surprised when I jumped up and told them I was okay. You should've seen the looks on their faces.”

  “Hell, man, you gonna see the docs?”

  “Nah, they'll just treat me and put me in for a Purple Heart. I lost two guys today, One, and a bunch of others have got bullets all through ‘em. Those guys rate Purple Hearts. Not me … Not me.” Hes shook his head and put a lit cigarette up to his lips and took a deep drag. (Hes was as good as his word: He never told the docs, and he never received the Purple Heart he rated.)

  I could only stare at Hes in reply. I tried to think of something witty to make light of the situation, but my mind was moving too slowly for humor.

  By now, most of the adrenaline had worn off, and I hadn't slept or shaved in thirty-six hours. I felt dirty, grizzled, and exhausted, and I narrowed my burning eyes to slits after I took off my sweat-blurred sunglasses. Still, I had made it back with my entire platoon, and I felt proud. And about one hundred years older than when I had left that morning.

  Each of us, I guess, had something to be thankful for. Hes, that that round hadn't hit him straight on. Me, that none of my men had been wounded. As far as I knew, Joker One was the only platoon that had fought all day long without a single casualty, major or minor. I couldn't believe it when all my squad leaders had reported none wounded upon our return to the base, so I had made them check the Marines again. Unsurprisingly, the report came back the same: None wounded, sir. Still, everyone was exhausted, so I postponed the usual debrief. Besides, I wanted to check with the CO and the other platoon commanders to straighten out the day's big-picture events before I got back to my men.

  I was pretty shaken up, but I was relieved that we had made it through unscathed and happy that we had killed a substantial number of our attackers. I had no idea how the Marines felt, though, until Mahardy asked me a question sometime later that night. He was in the hangar bay, smoking, and he pulled me aside as I passed him en route to the COC.

  “Sir,” he said, “do you think we fought well today, sir? I mean, that was our first big fight. Would the Marines who fought at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, you know, be proud of us?”

  On hearing this, I almost broke down crying. I had to turn away, choke back tears, and steady my voice before I answered.

  “Yeah, Mahardy. We fought well. The Corps is proud of us. We did fine.”

  And we had done fine indeed. Despite being ambushed by well-prepared, highly motivated fighters all across the city, and despite being substantially outnumbered and outgunned for a good chunk of the day's fighting, Golf Company had hit back hard, ultimately recovering our own and repelling our attackers in some of the fiercest street battles since Hue City in Vietnam. And we had managed to kill, by most accounts, several hundred of our enemies. It would be nearly two months before the insurgency was again able to amass that kind of combat power in Ramadi. And the locals no longer thought of us as easily crumbled awat.

  Back in the States, though, our families had no idea of what we had just been through. When Christy turned on the television early on April 7 after returning home from a twelve-hour, all-night shift at the Children's Hospital of Orange County, the first thing she saw was the headlines screaming that twelve Marines had been killed and well over three times that number wounded in fierce fighting in a strange city called Ramadi. There was nothing else—no official calls or e-mails, no contact from the other company wives, nothing from me and nothing from my men. Just the news banner endlessly scrolling across the bottom of the TV screen, announcing the deaths of the nameless over and over. Christy collapsed and spent the next few hours on the floor, unmoving.

  It would be two days before she knew that I was alive.

  TWENTY

  Despite their heavy losses, the enemy fighters weren't finished; they launched another round of fierce attacks early the next day. April 7 went much the same as its predecessor, only this time it was second platoon, not third, that was pinned down inside the city, and the enemy seemed less widespread but more focused, more deliberate. There were fewer local volunteer fighters, but the professionals had worked straight through the hours of darkness to set up more fortified ambush positions. Fortunately, most of us had been able to rest during the night of April 6, so we went into the day's fighting at least somewhat refreshed, even if we were somewhat casualty-debilitated by the previous day's battles. By the time April 7 was over, Golf Company had returned back inside the gates of the Outpost sometime in the early evening, but two more Marines had lost their lives, among them one of Quist's men.

  To take the initiative away from our enemies and preempt yet another round of casualties and citywide battles, 2/4's commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Kennedy, decided to launch a massive battalion-wide surge through the Farouq area on April 8. Titled “Operation County Fair” after a similar mission in Vietnam, the operation called for all three of the battalion's infantry companies to search house to house in predesignated sectors of Farouq while Weapons Company, along with bits and pieces of an Army brigade, provided a mobile cordon to prevent fleeing insurgents from escaping the hunt. The battalion expected the fighting to last for twenty-four to thirty-six hours, so everyone was told to take extra food and water.

  Joker One and I had spent most of April 7 guarding the Combat Outpost and skirmishing in its immediate environs, so we were the best-rested and least casualty-debilitated unit in Gol
f Company. After all, we hadn't had any wounded, and we had slept for three or four hours on the evening of April 6. Therefore, Captain Bronzi tasked us to infiltrate the city a few hours before the rest of the company left the Outpost. Under cover of darkness, we were to move quietly through the alleyways and backstreets until we reached a series of tall houses on the western edge of Farouq. There we would set up rooftop positions, acting as a backstop for the rest of our company as it swept through the area from the east to the west. With any luck, we would be able to spot enemy ambushers as they set up their attack positions and put them between a rock and a hard place as they fled the platoons sweeping in our direction.

  Thus, 4 AM on April 8, 2004, found Joker One praying, accompanied by a few attachments: a sniper team called Headhunter Two, which had been sent to us to assist in our efforts to shoot our enemies from a distance. I was happy to have them. The sniper platoon worked for 2/4, and my friend Nate Scott commanded it, so I knew all of the Marines, and I knew that they were extremely tough, competent, and professional. Additionally, Headhunter Two came complete with one long-range M-40A3 sniper rifle and, equally important, one long-range, PRC 119 radio. Once our prayer was over, I reminded my Marines and the newcomers to push water and to eat something every now and again to keep their electrolytes up for the lengthy fighting ahead of us. Final advice dispensed, the three squads dispersed and headed out of the firmbase on foot, moving as silently as possible through the sleeping city, each squad taking a different, predetermined route to its final objective. I walked with Leza and second.