by Leadership;Brotherhood Joker One: A Marine Platoon's Story of Courage
However, no one knew our departure date or our final destination just yet. The colonel told us that we would definitely assume control of an important area, likely a town called Habbaniyah, and that we would probably leave sometime in the late spring or early fall of 2004. However, he took pains to emphasize that nothing was certain—higher headquarters was still hashing everything out. One thing, though, was quite clear: We could not go back at half strength, and the battalion was more likely to leave sooner rather than later. Prepare yourselves, Colonel Kennedy said. We’re going to get a whole host of new Marines, and from now until we leave, things are going to go very quickly.
A few days after the announcement, Golf Company received the first of the promised new arrivals: two new second lieutenants who would lead the second and third platoons. Eric Quist and Jonathan Hesener (“Hes”) both came straight from Infantry Officer Course, the Marine infantry officers’ finishing school. Hes was a U.S. Naval Academy grad and a leukemia survivor—he had contracted the disease during his first year of college, had a complete bone marrow transplant during his second year, and somehow managed to complete the rigorous program three years later. Standing five foot ten with sandy brown hair, light eyes, pale skin, and a long, thoughtful face, Hes struck me as smart but completely physically nondescript, at least until he raised his shirt to reveal the Lord’s Prayer tattooed in Aramaic across his ribcage. Quist came from a Marine family (his father was a colonel in the Corps) and he looked exactly how he acted: slightly pinched and nervous and extremely smart. With graying hair, steel-rimmed glasses, and wrinkles already starting to appear at the corners of his constantly squinted eyes, the six-foot-tall Quist had taken a roundabout way into the Corps: He had sold commercial off-the-shelf software for about five years before deciding to follow in his father’s footsteps.
Not long after their arrival, Golf got a fourth lieutenant, Craig Flowers, who rejoined the company after a six-week absence occasioned by a winter survival course in Alaska. After a few days, we found out that Flowers had graduated from West Point and then, improbably, had managed an inter-service transfer to the Marine Corps, something quite rare.
Happy as I was to have three compatriots, there was a problem with their arrival: The company still had only two understrength platoons, mine and the Ox’s weapons platoon, so the new lieutenants and Flowers were platoon commanders with nothing to command. Once Hes and Quist had finished checking in, though, the CO remedied the situation by splitting my platoon into three pieces. I kept Bowen and most of his twelve-man squad, along with Teague, Leza, and Carson. Quist got my second squad, which was now renamed second platoon, and Hes got my third, becoming, in turn, third platoon. Flowers took over Weapons, and the Ox moved to the position of executive officer (XO), a move that made him the CO’s right-hand man and put him one bullet away from controlling our lives. Thus, by mid-November, Golf Company had the standard four platoons, each manned by roughly one-third of its usual strength. When the rest of the promised Marines arrived, the men in these platoons, most of whom currently served as basic riflemen, would, ready or not, all become team and squad leaders.
The Corps has specific courses to help Marines make this transition from follower to leader, but we didn’t have the time to send anyone to them, because less than a week after its reorganization, Golf Company received its first wave of new-enlisted Marines, and that wave was huge. To fill the skeleton-like 2/4 to full fighting capacity, Marine finishing schools started shunting graduates to our battalion as quickly as possible. Instead of the normal batch of roughly a dozen new Marines that an infantry company gets at each school graduation, Golf received nearly fifty during the third week in November. It was a substantial administrative and logistical nightmare to swallow such a huge chunk of new joins all at once, and our difficulties were compounded by the fact that among this wave of new Marines, there was not a single one with any previous experience in the operating forces. They were all fresh out of infantry school, and my NCOs called them “boot drops.”
The term “boot” is one of the most derogatory in the Corps. In a Marine’s mind, if someone is a boot, then that someone is essentially raw, untrained, and unfit for whatever position they find themselves in. A huge amount of time and effort needs to be poured in as quickly as possible to ready the new one for even the most mundane tasks of the infantry, let alone for combat. By that definition, then, first platoon doubled in size, from thirteen to roughly twenty-five, with nothing but straight-up boots.
As I met our new arrivals, there were a couple of things that they all had in common aside from their lack of any worthwhile combat training. First, they were all short and skinny. In sharp contrast to most members of the existing group, not a single one of my new Marines stood over six feet tall or weighed over two hundred pounds. Second, they had baby faces, every single one of them, and if I had had to guess their ages individually, without knowing that they were Marines, I might have put each of them at around fifteen to seventeen (their actual ages were between eighteen and twenty-one). Third, they were all very nervous. The new Marines spent a lot of time stuttering, snapping to attention randomly and unnecessarily, and throwing frantic salutes while addressing everyone in sight as “Sir.”
As the boot drops poured in, we got to work straightaway, following the time-honored leadership principle that states that if our Marines fail, it won’t be because they were poor raw material, but because we were poor teachers. My first order of business was to assign all the new men to one of my three squads so that first platoon could begin drilling with the standard three subunits. Within a few days, we had done so, and Teague took over first squad, Leza, second, and Bowen, third. As the squad leaders took command of their brand-new, slightly understrength squads, we kept an eye out for a suitable radio operator (RO) among the new Marines, because in the infantry the only thing more important than having men who can shoot straight and walk fast is having at least one who can talk well.
Enter Private First Class (PFC) Yebra, a first-generation Colombian American who came to us fresh from his immigrant parents’ dairy farm in Wisconsin. He did not immediately impress me. Standing a wiry five seven, with black hair and nearly black eyes, Yebra spoke so softly that I had to strain to hear him the first time he snapped to attention. He was so gentle and un-Marine-like that I wondered how the little PFC had made it through basic training. However, a few days later, as Yebra proceeded to run three miles in under fifteen minutes, handily beating everyone in the platoon, I realized that this Marine would lead by example. I watched, stunned, as he cruised through the finish line running at a pace that would have been an all-out sprint for me. As it turned out, before joining the Corps, Yebra had been a high school cross-country star, even receiving a few college scholarship offers. In addition to being a physical prodigy, Yebra soon proved calm, cool, and deliberate (all necessary qualities for a Marine RO), so the squad leaders and I decided to reward Yebra’s physical ability and mental presence by making him carry thirty extra pounds—the radio and its spare batteries—every time we trained.
With our maneuver units set and our primary communicator identified, first platoon headed out to its maiden platoon training event, one planned by our new XO and training officer extraordinaire, the Ox. Even though his recent appointment had made him a staff officer with no platoons or squads to command, the Ox hated to let his status as Captain Bronzi’s subordinate stand in the way of his deserved supreme command authority. Thus he tried his utmost to control every aspect of the company’s training day, from when we worked out to how we patrolled to which sorts of classes the platoon commanders taught their men. Unsurprisingly, soon after Golf’s four new platoons had sorted themselves into maneuverable units, the Ox announced one afternoon in late November that he had generously reserved a specific fortified hillside for all of us to attack with our respective platoons the next day.
Hearing the news, Flowers shook his head and sighed. Less familiar with the Ox than he, the rest of us didn’t fu
lly understand the horror that this dictate implied, so we were cautiously enthusiastic about the exercise—after all, it would be our first real test drive with our new Marines, and the training seemed straightforward enough. Armed with weapons and firing blanks, one platoon would man the trenches cut into the side of the hill while another assaulted the position as it saw fit. Leading up to the hillside was a broad, flat plain covered with a fairly complex system of obstacles, the heart of which was three rows of double-stranded concertina wire, the military version of barbed wire in which the barbs are replaced with double-sided straight razors. It’s nasty stuff that rips up anyone who tries to move through it. Were the training a real-life assault, that wire meant that anyone conducting a frontal attack on the hillside without serious artillery/air support and a heavy smoke screen would have been cut to ribbons by the defenders. Of course, the wooded hills of California were nothing like the urban jungles of Iraq’s cities or the desolate moonscapes of Iraq’s deserts, so conformity to real life didn’t have a high priority in the Ox’s training scenario.
My platoon had gotten to the training area first, so we were allowed to conduct the first attack. I had no desire to shred my Marines in uselessly breaching row after row of wire, so, rather than assaulting frontally, we moved through the thick forest bordering the plain, breached a single strand of wire using an entrenching tool and some rope, and assaulted the trench line from its side, running quickly down its length while pretending to throw grenades and saying hello to our third-platoon friends who were playing the bad guys. When our “attack” finished, we took third platoon’s places in the trench line.
Up on the hill, I thought that the exercise had gone reasonably well, but down at its base, the Ox was livid. He had wanted all platoons to attack the way he would have done it, which would have been an all-out frontal assault through the wire. Furthermore, he wanted everyone to practice breaching concertina wire again and again, never mind the fact that none of us had breach kits, ladders, or even sheets of plywood to lay on top of the razors. Without those, the quickest way to cross the wire is to have one Marine who is geared up in his Kevlar vest and helmet take a running leap and launch himself on top of the razors in a technique known as “the Flying Squirrel.” The rest of his platoon would then run across his back, using the Marine as a bridge over the wire and lacerating his legs in the process. The delightful prospect of multiple Flying Squirrels greatly excited the Ox, and first platoon had disappointed him.
So an enraged Ox commanded Hes, Quist, and Flowers to assault the obstacles frontally. Being new, Hes and Quist complied, and my men and I watched in astonishment as Marine after Marine performed the Flying Squirrel and then limped painfully off the mock battlefield once the rest of their platoon had laid railroad tracks across their backs. The new Marines were wide-eyed; for all they knew this kind of absurdity was standard. Carrying the radio for me, Yebra leaned over and asked, even more softly than usual, “Sir, why are they doing that? We would have just shot them all in the first minute anyway, sir.”
“Yebra, I have no idea, but I’m sure there’s a reason that second and third are assaulting frontally. If nothing else, it’s good obstacle-breaching practice,” I replied somewhat lamely.
My RO didn’t say anything else after that.
Fortunately for his men, Flowers flatly refused a head-on assault, and the afternoon concluded much more pleasantly. The exercise highlighted the Ox’s greatest strength—his unthinking, unhesitating aggressiveness—and his greatest weakness—his unthinking, unhesitating aggressiveness. When the situation called for a frontal assault on a well-fortified enemy position, the Ox would attack fiercely. Similarly, when the situation called for diplomacy or the restrained use of force, he would attack fiercely. And when the situation called for patience or for a measured retreat, never fear, he would attack fiercely. Like Hes, Quist, and Flowers, I treated the Ox’s lack of tactical sense mostly as a joking matter; a few days after the training event, we first reversed the letters of his XO title, giving him the sobriquet by which he would be known from that day forward.
Even in those earliest days, though, platoon leadership wasn’t all tactics and training and “follow-me-let’s-get-’em”-type exercises in the hills and forests of Camp Pendleton. Good leadership, it seemed, entailed spending quite a bit of time on administrative details that I never dreamed would have been the responsibility of an infantry platoon commander. Teague, Bowen, Leza, and I spent countless hours determining the shoe and trouser sizes of each new man, taking counts of how many pairs of military-issue glasses we needed to order (it could take up to two months to get them from the procurement system), making certain that everyone’s pay was going to the proper bank accounts, scanning personnel files to see who had what relatives, and doing various and sundry other nontactical things to ensure that our new men were being taken care of off the battlefield as well as on it. Most of this work, though, was simple diligence and detail, and it wasn’t until a week after the hillside assault that our first major leadership head ache cropped up. One of my brand-new Marines, Lance Corporal Mahardy, was accused of underage drinking.
Any offense involving the use of alcohol is considered a deadly and often unforgivable sin in the American military—the peacetime, zero-defects leaders of the 1990s entirely eliminated the drinking culture that has been a proud part of military heritage worldwide since the days of Herodotus. Having grown up in the ‘90s military, Colonel Kennedy and Captain Bronzi were both determined to make examples out of alcohol offenders, and they planned on throwing the book at Mahardy. As he was ultimately my responsibility, I decided to call my Marine into the company office to hear his account firsthand before I took the official logbook’s word for it. So, late one afternoon, a relatively tall (six-foot), extremely skinny (160-pound), twenty-year-old Marine with pale skin, sandy-blond hair, and light freckles across his cheeks and arms stood at parade rest and explained his side of the story to me. He had been on his way to do his laundry and had stopped by another Marine’s room to say hello. He found a group of Marines passing around a case of beer, but he hadn’t actually drunk any of it. After hearing Mahardy’s explanation, and observing his demeanor as he gave it, I believed that my man was guilty of nothing more than wandering into the wrong room. I didn’t believe that he deserved harsh punishment, or any punishment at all, for that matter. But by the rules of the Corps, which prohibited his very presence in a barracks room containing alcohol, he was guilty as charged.
As I pondered what to do about Mahardy, I ran into another of the constant tensions faced by young officers: the tension between justice and mercy, and, to some extent, between respect and love. Respect from your Marines is founded on a number of different leadership traits, but foremost among them are competence and justice, and justice hinges on leadership applying an even, consistent system of punishments and rewards. A uniform set of standards across the Marine Corps outlines the criteria for both, and the Marines can always reference those standards if they have any questions surrounding what they can reasonably expect to result from their actions or the lack thereof. They anticipate, then, rewards for outstanding achievement, and they justifiably fear reprisals, often severe, for misdeeds or laziness.
To my surprise, I later found out that my Marines could accept even the harshest punishment with equanimity provided that 1) they understood the rules well in advance of the infringement, 2) they felt that the mandated sentence was appropriate for the misdeed, and 3) they were confident that you, as the punishment’s administrator, would have doled out the same penalty to anyone else in their situation. The Marines should absolutely fear what their lieutenant, company commander, or NCOs can do to them, but they should never, ever believe that those appointed over them either apply punishment out of a rush of emotion or occasionally suspend deserved sentences for reasons unknown. Failing to administer justice, or at least to push for justice to be done, is one of the absolute best ways of cutting your legs out from under yourself as a y
oung leader.
My first thought, then, was simply to let the CO determine the correct punishment. This would have been the easiest course of action, and nobody, including Mahardy, would have held it against me, but it didn’t sit well with me because I believed that Mahardy hadn’t been drinking. Furthermore, even in my inexperience, I had some intimation that in spite of the need for consistency, there are moments when simply following the letter of the law is a cop-out, and ultimately hinders your efforts to pull the best out of your men. In my opinion, the latter requires a love founded on humility, self-sacrifice, and, in some cases, mercy. Sometimes a punishment may be warranted because the letter of the law was violated, but you believe that the sentence should be suspended because of mitigating circumstances surrounding that violation. Or you might believe that the offender rates by law a specific punishment but that the offense was committed out of ignorance rather than malice. Maybe your Marine is a good kid who has potential that would be crushed by such treatment, or maybe they, in your best judgment, simply deserve a second chance.
I wasn’t sure exactly which of these situations applied to Mahardy’s case, but I believed that at least one or two of them did. If I abided solely by the letter of the law, I worried that I might come across as an automaton in my men’s eyes. But it was important not to signal a willingness to defer justice on a regular basis; though this might make the Marines like me more, I needed to be their leader, not their friend, and maintaining this boundary at all times is crucial. What, then, should a young officer do to navigate the delicate tension between justice and fear, between mercy and love?
I certainly don’t have all the answers to this age-old question, but I have found one way that a lieutenant can resolve this tension, and I applied it as best I could to Mahardy’s case. This thing can’t be done every time that you might like to, and even when you can do it, it is often extremely personally unpleasant. The way to satisfy both justice and mercy is, quite simply, to take the hit for your men, to divert whatever punishment they may rate onto your own head if you believe that mercy is warranted. This trade-off is just because as the lieutenant, you are held accountable for everything that your men achieve or fail to achieve, for everything that they do or that is done to them. While you may not be directly responsible for the deeds and misdeeds of your men, you are certainly qualified to interpose yourself between them and justice, should you so choose.
