by Leadership;Brotherhood Joker One: A Marine Platoon's Story of Courage
Throughout all the fighting, I led a forty-man infantry platoon—one-quarter of our company—under the CO’s command. Day after unrelenting day bound our platoon tightly together, eventually creating a whole much greater than the sum of its parts, and we grew to love one another fiercely. I knew these men better than my best friends; better, in some ways, than my wife. For what they did and what they suffered, my men deserve to have their story told.
But it’s so hard to tell the truth, because the telling means dragging up painful memories, opening doors that you thought you had closed, and revisiting a past you hoped you had put behind you. However, I think that someone needs to do it, and I was the leader, so the responsibility falls to me.
I was neither born into the military nor bred for it—aside from a two-year stint my grandfather did as an Air Force doctor, no one in my family had ever served in the armed forces. Indeed, the thought of joining the service never really occurred to me until my junior year at college, when I decided that the Marine Corps Officer Candidate School (OCS), the ten-week selection process that qualifies university students for an officer’s commission, would look good on my résumé.
With this less-than-altruistic motivation to spur me on, I headed down to Quantico, Virginia, to take in the ten weeks of uninterrupted screaming that constitutes OCS. Unsurprisingly, I hated the experience, and on the day I completed the course, I swore internally never, ever to join the Marine Corps. I hadn’t done ROTC, and I hadn’t accepted a dime from any of the services to help pay for college, so I didn’t owe the military a thing. I intended for it to stay that way.
Over the course of my senior year, though, something shifted. Somehow, the Fortune 500 recruiters and the postgraduation salaries lost their luster, and, somewhat to my surprise, I soon found myself casting about for a pursuit that would force me to assume responsibility for something greater than myself, something that would force me to give back, to serve others. Try as I might to avoid them, I kept coming back to the United States Marines. I knew from OCS that if I could make it to the Marine infantry, then I could be a platoon commander and have forty men whose lives would be entirely my responsibility. I also knew that in the infantry I’d be in a place where I could no longer hide behind potential, a place where past academic achievements and family connections were irrelevant, a place where people demanded daily excellence in action because lives hung in the balance. As my final semester of school wound down, I thought of the words one of my sergeant instructors had screamed at me over the summer: “Candidate, the currency in which we trade is human lives. Do you think you can handle that responsibility?”
I didn’t know if I could, but I did know that I wanted to try, and I knew that I wanted to learn to lead, which, I soon discovered, simply meant serving others to an increasingly great degree. Surprising everyone in my family (my mother called me crazy), I joined the Corps after graduation, and I foundered at first in the training, but eventually I righted and eventually I got my wish—I made it to an infantry platoon.
So, that’s me: an ordinary young man who once made the choice to serve. I wish I could present someone greater to the reader, someone whose exploits and whose fame could automatically make people sit up and pay attention to the story of my men, but I can’t, because I’m not that someone. However, to this day I love my Marines with all that I’m capable of, and in spite of my shortcomings I want to do my utmost to help tell their tale. Though I can’t offer myself to the reader, I can offer my men, and I can tell a true story with love and heartfelt emotion from the inside out. And I hope and I pray that whoever reads this story will know my men as I do, and that knowing them, they too might come to love them.
TWO
After joining the Corps, the road to my platoon was anything other than smooth and short. In fact, it took a year and a half of intense training, one combat deployment, and some significant complaining on my part before I could get there. The complaining occurred mainly because I was promised one thing and given another. After toiling away on staff intelligence work in Iraq throughout the summer and fall of 2003, which essentially involved reading human source reports, writing the 1st Marine Division’s daily intelligence summary, and briefing the division commander, General Jim Mattis, I returned to the United States with a promise that I would be given command of a scout-sniper platoon with the 2d Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment (spelled 2/4 and pronounced “Two-Four”). And I wanted that sniper platoon, in part because my training had sent me through a cut-down version of Marine sniper school and in part because I wanted to tell people that I commanded snipers. However, when I reported for duty to the battalion’s executive officer (“XO”) at Camp Pendleton, California, he cheerfully informed me that although 2/4 already had a sniper platoon commander, it just so happened to be in desperate need of an experienced intelligence officer.
The XO thought that I would fill the bill nicely. Aside from the brand-new battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Kennedy, I was, at the time, the only Marine in 2/4 who had actually been to Iraq—the battalion had spent the entire 2003 invasion, and the whole last year, deployed to Okinawa. Furthermore, my time overseas had given me extensive real-world intelligence experience but zero real-world infantry experience, making me very valuable as a staff officer but possibly even worse than worthless as a line platoon commander.
This news came as a crushing disappointment, and it even managed to sap some of the joy out of my reunion with my wife, Christy. I had left Camp Pendleton for my first deployment to Iraq three days before our one-year wedding anniversary, and the four months of deployment that followed had given me a vivid reminder of how much I needed and depended on my wife. It’s strange how so often we don’t truly appreciate our blessings until they’re taken from us. It’s equally strange how quickly we adapt back to a new normal and lapse into our old assumptions and our old foibles. Throughout the second week following my return (I took only four days off after my arrival in the States, so eager was I to get down to an actual infantry battalion), I stewed about my new assignment, focusing on the disappointment of unmet expectations to the exclusion of the reunion with my better half.
I hadn’t joined the Marines to make PowerPoint presentations and to debrief those who had just come back to the base from patrols. I had joined the Corps to lead those patrols, to take care of my men, to test and stretch myself in every way possible. Even though four months spent working fourteen-hour, seven-days-a-week shifts, hot, sweaty, dirty in the desert had sucked most of the glamour out of war and all of the exotic appeal out of Iraq, I still wanted to at least put myself in a position to lead Marines on the ground. The prospects of a USMC return to Iraq seemed fairly remote in October 2003—after all, major combat operations had been declared over, and the insurgency was still simmering out of sight—but, if by some miracle it did occur, then I wanted to be on the front lines with my men, not in an air-conditioned headquarters building safely removed from the action.
So I did one of the only things that an officer can do when given a set of orders that he or she doesn’t want to execute: I complained (some might say whined) mightily and incessantly to my superiors. After about two weeks of moaning, and at about the same time that a higher-ranking, more experienced intelligence officer joined 2/4, Colonel Kennedy took pity on me and assigned me to infantry company G, known simply as Golf Company. I wouldn’t get the promised sniper platoon, he told me. In his opinion, I would get something far better—a basic, straight-leg infantry platoon. “If it’s leadership you want,” Colonel Kennedy told me, “then there’s nothing better than taking a bolt-plate, nineteen-year-old lance corporal straight out of school and making him the best young man, and the best Marine, he can possibly be.” At the time I was a bit disappointed; “infantry” didn’t sound as sexy and elite as did “scout-sniper.” In retrospect, though, Colonel Kennedy was absolutely right, and not getting my first choice of platoons was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
On October 15,
I checked into the Golf Company office, a tiny room on one end of the red-roofed, whitewashed cinder-block building that was the battalion’s headquarters. In typical military fashion, four desks were crammed inside the office. Only two were occupied. Sitting at one was the company clerk, a young enlisted Marine named Corporal Mangio, who signed my check-in sheet and then turned back to his computer. Not really knowing what else to do, I took a seat at one of the unoccupied desks and thought about what I should do during my first day on the job.
I didn’t have any grandiose ambitions, nor did I really expect to accomplish all that much. During my training, my infantry instructors had gone to great lengths to tell me all kinds of things that eager, insecure lieutenants had tried to do on day one with their new platoons to establish power and authority, from assembling all their Marines and then running them until they puked to telling recent returnees from the Persian Gulf War, “It’s not like you just got back from the fucking island-hopping campaign. You’ve still got a lot of fucking training to do. Now let’s get to it.” Some lieutenants, chomping at the bit to make their mark, had even changed all of their platoon’s way of doing things simply because the new leader hadn’t thought of these things himself.
None of those hard entrances had worked out well for the young and the eager, so I decided that the first thing I would do was meet my noncommissioned officers (NCOs)—the sergeants and corporals with between three and six years of infantry experience apiece and whom, in spite of my relative lack of experience, I would lead. I didn’t expect to make grand speeches and I had no plans to immediately reinvent the wheel, but I did want to meet those who would form the backbone of my platoon, so I asked Mangio where I could find my platoon’s squad and team leaders. Each infantry platoon comprises three thirteen-man squads usually led by a sergeant, and each squad comprises three four-man teams usually led by a corporal. Together these squad and team leaders form the leadership backbone of every infantry platoon, and I wanted to get to know mine right away. However, they weren’t available because, according to the twenty-year-old Golf Company clerk teaching the new lieutenant the ropes, they were out doing their jobs somewhere on the base. I couldn’t come up with anything else to do, so I found myself fidgeting nervously in the office for about half an hour, trying to look like I was doing something useful as I mulled over what I was going to say when I introduced myself to my team.
Sitting at my metal desk in that cramped company office, I was painfully aware of the fact that I had no idea what to do and no idea how to go about figuring it out. Suddenly I became aware that someone was staring at me. My evident cluelessness had caught the eye of someone I would come to know as the Ox, who at the time was sitting at the desk directly across from me, and he decided then and there to take me under his wing whether I liked it or not. As I sat staring at the ground, muttering to myself, the Ox rose, lumbered over, and proceeded to greet me in standard Marine fashion by shaking my hand as hard as he possibly could, and then asking if I wanted to go work out with him. As my digits were slowly crushed in the Ox’s death grip, I took stock of the sturdy twenty-something lieutenant planted in front of me. He stood about five foot ten and must have weighed just over two hundred pounds, and given the way his chest and shoulders strained his camouflage blouse and the painful screaming in my knuckles, most of that bulk was muscle. A close-cropped sandy blond flattop sat spiked into crispy gel-laden perfection on the top of the Ox’s round head, and a pair of sharp blue eyes bore into mine, insistently demanding an immediate answer to the crucial workout question. Slightly intimidated and growing desperate to extricate my now-nerveless fingers, I quickly agreed to the Ox’s proposal.
Initially I was happy to have a comrade. For reasons unclear to me then, the Ox was the only other lieutenant present in Golf Company, which was strange, as there are normally five lieutenants in each infantry company. As the Ox clapped plate after plate onto the weight bar and then, later, cranked up the treadmill to six-minute miles, I realized that my initial assessment of his bulk had been correct—he was very fit, very strong, and very fast. Over the course of the morning, I found out why: The Ox had been a star football player at his small college, and for a few years before joining the Corps he had actually played semipro football in various leagues across America. After joining, he had spent nearly two years leading an infantry platoon for 2/4, and Captain Bronzi, the brand-new Golf Company CO, had just moved him out of that role and made him the company’s weapons platoon commander.
Every Marine battalion is comprised of five companies: three infantry companies, also called “line” companies, one weapons company, which contains the battalion’s heavy weapons—82mm mortars, .50-caliber machine guns, Mark 19 automatic grenade launchers—and one headquarters and service company, which contains the mechanics, the truck drivers, and the administrative and logistical personnel necessary to keep the battalion running smoothly. Occasionally the sniper platoon falls under weapons company, but more often it is its own stand-alone entity, and it reports directly to the battalion commander.
Each infantry company, in turn, comprises four platoons, usually three infantry platoons and one weapons platoon. The infantry platoons, around forty men apiece, are the company commander’s units to maneuver against the enemy, and in order to remain foot-mobile, the Marines in them carry fairly light weapons—M-16 rifles, some with attached M-203 grenade launchers, M-249 squad automatic weapon (SAW) light machine guns, and, sometimes, little green baseball-shaped hand grenades. The weapons platoon contains the company’s heavier (but still man-portable) weaponry—medium machine guns, 60mm mortars, and the shoulder-launched multipurpose assualt weapon (SMAW) rocket launchers—and the crews trained to use them. Usually, the most experienced lieutenant in an infantry company commands the weapons platoon, so, even though he hadn’t deployed to a combat zone yet, I figured that the Ox would have a lot of good platoon commander advice to give me. I was glad he had taken me under his wing.
As the day drew to a close, though, I started reconsidering that feeling. After our workout, the Ox and I spent the rest of the afternoon together, and during that time, he had somehow managed to tell me his entire life story from about twelve years old on—how he had grown up working in his father’s steel company, how he had met and married his wife, and, most recently, how miserable his year with 2/4 Okinawa had been. Apparently, while he was there all the other platoon commanders had stopped inviting the Ox to their social functions because, according to the Ox, his impeccably upright and virtuous behavior had put a damper on his fellow officers’ well-thought-out plans for riotous fornication. The Ox further claimed that, fortunately for him, the enlisted Marines were his good friends, so he had spent his free time hanging out with them instead of with his fellow officers. But since there were only twenty-four enlisted men in his platoon (not the standard forty-two—the Ox informed me that his Marines had kept inexplicably getting hurt shortly before their deployment), and because they had been stuck on an island together, even the Marines had gotten pretty old for him. I was brand-new to the whole platoon commander thing, but something about the Ox’s description of his deployment didn’t ring true. As the day started winding down, and the Ox continued to talk at full speed, with no signs of slowing, I began to appreciate what it must have been like to be stuck on an island with this man.
Just as I was beginning to wonder whether I would ever have the chance to meet my NCOs, a young Marine strode into the office. Physically nondescript, he seemed an average, five-foot-ten, one-hundred-and-sixty pound, early-twenties kid. The new arrival looked around the small room until his eyes settled on the camouflage name tape over my right breast pocket. Locking on, he marched over, squared himself off in front of me, struck the position of attention, and announced crisply:
“Corporal Bowen reporting as ordered, sir.”
Somewhat startled, I gave the Marine a more careful once-over and immediately upgraded my impression. Even in his cammies, Bowen suddenly looked like he could
have stepped out of a recruiting poster. With neat creases in his pants and blouse, black hair shaved up high on the sides of his head, a ramrod-straight body, and a fixed, unwavering stare, this young man was the picture of a squared-away NCO. Perhaps equally important, Bowen’s forceful entry had managed to get the Ox to stop talking, which even then I recognized as a moderately heroic feat. Whether he meant to or not, Bowen had just started what would soon become a regular practice—recognizing when his lieutenant was in a jam and then taking whatever action was necessary to extricate him.
In fact, I was so impressed and grateful that I just sort of stared at Bowen for about a minute or so, wondering why he wasn’t speaking to me. Then I realized that I had completely forgotten to release him from the position of attention (Marines generally don’t talk when locked rigidly into this position). The Ox cleared his throat.
“At ease, Corporal. What can I do for you?” I said.
When put at ease, most people relax into a natural standing posture. The hands unclench and move away from the sides. The feet spread or start shuffling around. The spine slackens. Not so with Bowen. His only concessions to “at ease” were moving his hands to take notes, moving his mouth to speak, and maybe moving his feet two to three inches apart from each other. Aside from that, nothing changed.
“Sir, I hear that you’re my new platoon commander. Since the platoon sergeant’s out right now, I just wanted to introduce myself. I’m your third-squad leader. Now, I also wanted to let you know what the platoon did today and what the schedule is for tomorrow. We need your input on a few things, sir.”
