Joker One

by Donovan Campbell

  The tirade over, the Ox signed off. I sympathized with his feelings. Five minutes later, he was back on the PRR. The hospital had been contacted. An ambulance was on its way. I breathed out my relief, then continued moving around the perimeter, keeping a watchful eye on my Marines and the surroundings for any signs of trouble, but it was Corporal Walter who spotted trouble first and called over the PRR.

  “One-Actual! One-Actual! The people on that street three blocks west just started running.”

  “Roger that,” I shouted back. “Everyone, stand by, we're about to get hit.”

  Later, Walter informed me that right after his transmission and during mine, he had started raising his SAW to his shoulder to take aim down the street over his open Humvee door. Halfway through the motion, two men dressed in head-to-toe black suddenly popped around the corner, one standing, armed with an AK, and the other kneeling, armed with an RPG. Walter fumbled with the SAWs safety for a second, then pushed it through the weapon and loosed off a few rounds. Maybe he hit the men, maybe not. It didn't really matter. Our attackers had managed to get the RPG off.

  At the time, I was walking on the eastern side of the school, halfway down the long side of the rectangle. I heard the first boom and whipped my head north; then I heard the second. Gunfire rang out, and mixed with it came the horrifying cries of my first squad screaming, “Doc up! Doc up! Doc up!” My heart sank. I started running north, toward the sound of the explosion and the gunfire.

  As soon as they heard the cries for the corpsman, Docs Smith and Ca-macho rose from where they had been taking cover and ran pell-mell down the street toward the second explosion, heedless of the tracers that clearly zipped all around them. I watched as together they sped across my field of vision, and then I continued my run toward the action. Over the PRR came Noriel's frantic voice: “Sir, sir, sir. Bolding's been hit, sir. His legs, they're gone, sir. They're gone, sir.”

  I heard the transmission, and some part of me howled out briefly, but the rest was so overwhelmed with trying to sort out the tactical situation that it didn't feel anything at all. Adding to the confusion, at just that time, despite all the fire, an ambulance trundled up to the school from our north. The drivers belatedly realized what they had gotten themselves into, and they dived out of the van, disappearing into the rectangle's interior. Still running, I reached the northern tip of the school and took cover behind some junk. Then I called breathlessly over the PRR to Noriel.

  “One-One … Get ready to evac Bolding … You and the docs'll get him out of here … I'll be there in just a bit.”

  No reply came, and I started moving carefully toward Walter to get a visual on our enemies. As I ran across the street, it slowly dawned on me that the firing had ceased. By the time I made it over to Walter, all signs of combat had vanished. All signs save the screaming Bolding, of course.

  The human body has a lot of blood, more than most of us realize. Cut some of the major veins that carry that blood and it starts spilling out everywhere. Cut some of the major arteries and it starts spurting out everywhere. Major veins and arteries run up and down the legs, and Bolding didn't have any of those anymore below his knees, so blood absolutely poured out of the lower half of his body. First squad, Staff Sergeant, the Ox, and Docs Smith and Camacho worked frantically to stop it.

  As is often the case, Bolding was unaware of his missing appendages, perhaps because his nerve tissue had been badly burned. The RPG that took his legs had first hit a lightpost next to which he had been kneeling, as he faithfully stayed near his vehicle in case his services as driver were needed. The impact with the lightpost had caused the RPG's hot metal penetrator to detonate, and some combination of molten copper and sharp metal post fragments had gruesomely severed both of Bolding's legs at his knees. The Marines collected the separated pieces, and they gently placed them into an ice chest in the back of a Humvee. The legs were still wearing their boots.

  The medical term for this type of injury is “traumatic amputation,” and, like much of our shorthand, these two sterile words paper over a lot of gruesome reality, like, for example, the fact that Bolding was shouting, over and over, that his legs felt tangled. Would someone please untangle them, he asked. Or the fact that, for a second, the shouting stopped as Bolding gripped Walter, his best friend, by the collar and demanded to know if his nuts were still in place. I don't know whether Walter checked or not, but he did reassure Bolding that everything he needed was still intact. I'm told that Bolding was greatly relieved.

  I'm told because I never saw the injury at close range. Once I realized that the firing had stopped, I moved out of cover and started walking to the street corner where I could see the docs hunched over, working on Bolding. I made it to within about ten feet of them when the Ox did a wonderful and magnificent thing. Seeing me approaching, he straightened up from where he crouched near Bolding, walked up to me, and held up his outstretched hand. Blood dripped from it.

  “Hey, One. That's close enough. You don't need to see this, trust me. It'll just fuck you up. You need to fight the platoon with a clear head, and you're gonna have a hard time doing that if you see Bolding up close. We're doing everything we can. We'll get him out of here. Turn around. Fight your guys.”

  Over the Ox's shoulder I could see Bolding's torso jerking and twitching, and the docs working to hold him steady. I still felt nothing, and in my detached state I realized the truth of the Ox's words. I nodded and turned around to find a defiant Sergeant Noriel.

  “Hey, sir,” he said. “We're good here. We don't need to go. We need to stay and fight, sir. Get someone else to evac Bolding, sir. I want to fight.”

  Later, Noriel would tell me that at that exact moment he was furious and that he and the rest of his squad wanted only to fight and to kill, to exact some revenge in retaliation for what had just happened to their most beloved member. However, I sensed none of this bloodlust. As I stared at my angry squad leader, all I knew was that his squad was the casualty evacuation (casevac) squad that day—they were always the casevac squad—and that now they had to do their job. Whether they wanted to or not was, like everything else in our world, absolutely irrelevant. So I replied very simply to Noriel's demand: “One-One, you're the casualty squad. You know that, you've been that on every mission. It's because you've got the most drivers. You are evac'ing Bolding and you are doing it ASAP because he's bleeding out. Get going. Link up with us back at the Government Center when you're done.”

  I have no idea what happened to the children after our departure; the need to fight had yet again overtaken the need for compassion. I know that we saved a few of the kids, and I can only hope that some of the children survived who otherwise wouldn't have, because God knows we paid a terrible enough price for staying.

  As my two squads pushed west, everybody we encountered fled as soon as they set eyes on us. It could have been that news of the fight traveled quickly, but I believe it was more likely that the civilians knew immediately by our faces, by our body language, by the way we moved in short, vicious spurts that we were on edge and looking for any excuse to take up a fight. None offered itself, and none of my men were so far gone that they made up their own, so we made it back to the relative safety of the Government Center without firing a shot. I have no idea how long our movement lasted or what time we made it back there, only that we did and that I was completely exhausted when we finally took off our helmets in a room inside the center. First squad may have been there by the time we returned, but they may also have arrived a bit after us. Again, time in these situations is very fluid.

  As I sat there, vest on, forearms resting on my thighs, head hung down above my knees, weapon slung limply across my chest, I still felt nothing. My mind was fixed in tactical mode, trying to sort out which new problems were going to present themselves and how I should prioritize and respond to them. Slowly, it dawned on me that we weren't fighting anymore. I looked around at my Marines.

  Some of them sat as I did, stunned and silent. Others g
athered in huddled little knots, talking quietly to one another. Still others, like Teague, stood by themselves with hard eyes and stone faces, fingering their weapons. Over time, I watched as more of my Marines joined the latter category, and I knew what that group wanted. They wanted revenge on our faceless enemies and on the fearful civilians whose hesitance had prolonged our waiting and cost us one of our best men. They wanted revenge on the stupid, broken Iraqi public services whose ambulances had taken so long to respond to the wounded little children whom some of us had watched die. And they wanted revenge on the whole miserable city of Ramadi for forcing us to make horrible choices, day in and day out, until it seemed like no matter what path we took, we lost.

  I knew that the hard ones were thinking these thoughts because I was thinking them myself. The numbness had worn off, and in its stead rose a dull rage at more or less everything in my world except for my Marines. But the rage was irrelevant. I was a lieutenant, and a leader, and no matter what I felt, I had to take care of my men and accomplish our mission, and, unfortunately, revenge wasn't our mission.

  After some time sitting there, I sorted myself out enough to figure that my job hadn't ended just yet. My Marines still needed caring for. So I found the squad leaders and told them to gather our men. When they were ready, I spoke words to the platoon that I didn't feel but that needed to be spoken nonetheless because they were true and because they would help us.

  I started by telling Joker One that I wanted to kill very, very badly, and that a part of me didn't really care what it was that I killed as long as I got to do so. I fixed my eyes on Teague as I said this, and he nodded back. I told the Marines that a lot them probably wanted something similar. Teague nodded again. Then I told everyone that what we wanted didn't matter because we were United States Marines, and since our Corps had been founded, we had kept our honor clean and that Joker One was going to be no exception to this rule. We knew our mission and what we had come to do and it was still worthwhile, and we knew that as well. Something horrible had just happened, but it didn't change the mission and it didn't change how we got it done, and they knew this, I told them.

  Some of the Marines nodded, but most just stared blankly at me.

  So here's what we're gonna do, I continued. We're gonna go out there tomorrow and we're gonna try to make life a little bit better for the people we can. (Teague's face was immobile at this.) And if anyone attacks us while we're doing this, God help them because we're going to kill as many of them as best as we possibly can. And when we're finished fighting, we're going to get back to the business of rebuilding. (Teague's face was still blank.)

  At about this time, I noticed that the CO and the Gunny had somehow appeared at the back of our room and that they were watching me. I ignored them because I wasn't talking to them, and I continued the little speech to my Marines:

  Here's what we're not going to do. We're not going to kill everyone we feel like. We're not going to shoot indiscriminately at random civilians every time the fire breaks out. We've worked too hard to quit on the mission now. (At this, more Marines started nodding. Some were still silent, tears running down their young faces. Teague's dry eyes, though, bored back at me, his face still emotionless.) And you know what? I continued. Bolding wouldn't want us to start killing everyone randomly. You know Bolding, you know this is true. If he were here, you know that he would tell us to never mind him, to keep doing what we were doing because it's the right thing to do. You know this. You know this.

  Now almost every one of my Marines was nodding. Some were still crying and some were still dry-eyed, but they were nodding along with the words. I looked at Teague. He was nodding, too, and I knew that I had gotten through.

  As soon as I knew this, though, the mantle of leadership crumbled, and the full weight of what had happened finally overwhelmed the tactical numbness. The dull rage died, and in its place I felt only tremendous sadness and the crushing feeling of failure. Because of my decisions, one of my Marines had lost both of his legs. It may not have been my fault, but it was certainly my responsibility because everything that happened to my Marines was my responsibility. That's one of the first things you learn as an officer, and if you're a leader who's any good at all, then as you go on you know that you always err on the side of taking too much responsibility until the weight crushes you, and then your men pick you up, and then you take still more responsibility until they need to pick you up again.

  Staring at the Marines, I started getting crushed, and I started losing it. Tears welled up, and I choked them back and probably finished up the talk with a few inane, meaningless sentences. Then I literally turned on my heels and fled the room, helmet in hand, for the filthy, excrement-encrusted, piss-stained Iraqi bathroom down the hall and to the right. I arrived there blind from tears and banged open the door with my shoulder. Then I sank to the ground, curled up on myself, and cried and cried and cried.

  I didn't know it, but the Gunny had noticed my abrupt departure. Maybe ten seconds after I crashed through the door, he opened it very gently and looked in on me. I didn't see him then, and in fact I didn't notice the Gunny's presence at all until he sat down next to me and wrapped his arms around me. Instinctively, I hugged him back, buried my face into the rough Kevlar of his shoulder, and sobbed. He told me that it was all right, and then he didn't say anything at all.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Bolding made it as far as Germany, but once there he succumbed to acute respiratory distress syndrome (I'll never forget that sterile phrase) brought on by massive blood loss. We heard that his doctors had been amazed that he had even made it that far, given the nature and severity of his injuries. He must have been very strong, they said. He was.

  Bolding's death came as a severe shock—prior to it we had all assumed that his recovery was assured. I had been checking with our doctors and corpsmen every day to find out anything that they knew (they had a direct line over the radio to the other doctors throughout the theater), and together the Marines and I tracked Bolding's progress from Baghdad to Kuwait to Ramstein, Germany. When we heard that he had arrived there, all of our conversation suddenly shifted away from questions surrounding the probability of Bolding's survival and toward debates on the extent of his healing. In my hope, I told my men that today's prosthetics were excellent and that there was even a very slim chance that Bolding's own legs would be re-attached.

  On June 3, though, I assembled Joker One at the house, and, trying desperately to maintain my composure, told them that Bolding was dead. It was horrible, and I didn't want to do it. After leading my men to believe that Bolding would be just fine, I now had to reverse course completely and shatter the expectations I had helped to set. As much as I didn't want to face the men with the tragic news, I didn't have a choice. It was my responsibility to keep them informed. So I did, and I don't remember much else about it, just a hazy picture of the men kneeling and me trying not to cry as I told them what had happened. And, to be honest, I don't really want to remember much about that moment. I do know that once I finished, I fled the courtyard to be alone in my room.

  There I found that my hope, built so painstakingly over the past eight months, had been ruthlessly extinguished in one terrible moment in a nameless, dirty Iraqi street in a city that most people will never hear of. Having that hope crushed out was (and still is) a difficult, difficult thing, and, on the day I told my men that Bolding was dead, I fell into a deep depression. For a week, I didn't want to eat, and I didn't want to leave my bed, even though I found no respite in sleep. Instead of sleeping, I spent my time endlessly replaying the scene of Bolding's injury in my head, wondering where I had gone wrong, selfishly second-guessing myself with constant rounds of “What if I had …”

  So I was tired all of the time, physically and psychologically. Tired of making myself do pull-ups and push-ups when there was no guarantee that I would even come home with both arms attached. Tired of carefully planning each mission as well as we could in order to protect our Marines, o
nly to have the inevitable last-minute changes of combat throw off all our careful preparation. Tired of having to make life-and-death decisions every day, tired of having unexpected things go wrong no matter how hard we tried, tired of my Marines paying the price for my shortcomings, tired of my responsibility as a leader. And I was tired of trying to help the ungrateful Iraqis who seemed completely unappreciative of our efforts and our sacrifices on their behalf—we later found out that local residents blamed not the RPG-firing terrorists for the death of their children, but us for precipitating the attack.

  But the mission continued with no regard for one small lieutenant and his loss of hope. And why should it regard him? All over Iraq, that same loss of hope was repeated for other lieutenants every single day, and all over Iraq, the Iraqis themselves were dying in scores in terrorist or sectarian violence.

  The mission couldn't afford to pause and feel sorry for individual pain and grief, even if it wanted to; it was too important, and far bigger than any individual. No matter what, the mission needed to continue unabated.

  Fortunately, my Marines understood this basic truth much better than I did. The enemy and the missions left us no time for a respite after Bolding's death, so my men strapped on their gear daily and headed back out into the city, still trying to make life a little bit better for the people we were there to protect. They weren't bitter, they weren't angry, and, unlike me, they weren't trapped in a selfish spiral of recrimination and angst. On some level, my men still retained a beautiful, simple, powerful faith: There was a mission to help a brutalized people, that mission was worth doing, and if someone had to do it, then it might as well be them. And if anyone tried to stop my Marines in pursuit of that mission, then God help them, because my men would do their utmost to kill our enemies stone dead.