by Leadership;Brotherhood Joker One: A Marine Platoon's Story of Courage
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, only 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.
My Marines were magnificent, and they saved me that time. Fortunately, I wasn’t so far gone in my self-destructive spiral that I couldn’t go out on Joker One’s missions. I hadn’t laid down my responsibility altogether—I wasn’t worth very much as a decision maker for a week, but at least I was physically present with my men, sharing the hardship and the danger. As I shared, I watched them, and I noticed, perhaps more intently than ever before (probably because I needed my men more than ever before), all the small, wonderful things that made my Marines the best. I noticed their perseverance and their ability to pick themselves up and move on with some joy in their hearts. I noticed their tenderness toward one another, their selfless service even as the barbed teasings and the practical jokes continued unabated.
I noticed Noriel, Leza, and Bowen all pick up the leadership ball that I had dropped, talking to one another, planning their missions in absence of guidance from me, walking the lines, talking to the men, touching each on his shoulders. I listened to Mahardy and Waters fight like cat and dog one minute, only to have one offer the other the last of his water on a long, hot patrol the next. I listened to Niles relentlessly goad Ott, and Ott stolidly respond. I watched Guzon volunteer to carry the SAW, adding another twenty pounds to his combat load even as the temperature soared well above 120 degrees. I watched Docs Smith and Camacho bending over my Marines’ horrific feet, lancing boils and dispensing medical advice like nervous mothers. I noticed Bowen patiently teaching his men during nearly every spare minute of downtime, making himself less so that his squad might become greater.
All these things and more that I can’t put into words I noticed, but noticing prepared me to finally receive some sort of absolution in the form of the skinny, filthy, wonderful Private First Class Gabriel Henderson. For whatever reason, Henderson’s tender heart kept a close watch on me, and one day, roughly two weeks after Bolding’s death, he walked up to me and said out of the blue:
“Hey, sir, you know that none of the platoon blames you for what happened to Bolding. It’s okay, sir.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
Henderson broke into a big smile. “Bolding’s in heaven now, sir, and I know that he’s smiling down at us right now, just like he always smiled at us when he was here. He’s okay, sir. Don’t worry, sir. He’s okay. And someday you will get to see him again, sir.”
I had to turn away to keep from crying.
I think that Henderson’s profound, simple faith was what finally allowed me to pick myself back up, and, in some very real sense, regain my own faith. Despite the anguish, and the self-doubt, and all the questions, I wasn’t ready to give up on God just yet. I didn’t understand the tragedy of Bolding’s death, and I still don’t and I won’t pretend to, but seeing the simple faith of my Marines made me realize that, as a leader, I had a very basic choice to make: 1) I could throw in the towel on God—in other words, rationalize away my inability to understand and comprehend the infinite by stating that He didn’t exist; or 2) I could accept the fact that this life is painful, and tragic, and messy, and that God’s designs often don’t coincide with my plans and that many times I won’t, and will never, understand why they don’t, but that none of this means that God doesn’t exist or that He isn’t ultimately good. The first choice, as I saw it, offered me no hope. Without God, then Bolding’s life and death were meaningless—he served no ultimate purpose, he worked for no greater good, and now that he was gone he had no hope for the future. With God, though, Bolding’s life and death were in service of the infinite, of a personal deity who cared and who intended the best for His people, even if they didn’t see it or didn’t want it. The second choice offered me hope, and I reached for it and strapped myself back into the responsibility of leadership.
But even as one hope kindled, another died. Prior to Bolding’s death, I had assumed that I would survive Iraq. In the aftermath, I wished fervently that I had died in Bolding’s stead, but since I hadn’t, for a time I clung to the belief that God somehow owed it to me to bring me home alive. With acceptance of the second choice and of God’s unqualified sovereignty, though, I finally realized that, no matter how hard I prayed, God didn’t owe me anything, not even life. With that realization came an acceptance of death and even more than that. Finally, I had gotten to where I needed to be as an infantry lieutenant. Finally, I considered myself already dead, with each day a precious gift that I didn’t deserve.
The mind-set shift didn’t make life easier going forward, and it didn’t remove the responsibility of combat leadership in any way, but it did help me to make decisions with less consideration of my personal welfare. And for a time, it helped me to take joy in the day we had been given with no expectation for more, with no expectation that God would grant me another tomorrow.
TWENTY-EIGHT
As June moved slowly along, the daily temperature climbed rapidly, making us long for the breezy hundred-degree days of May, and to amuse myself I would occasionally hang my Suunto digital wrist-top compass/watch/thermometer off my flak jacket and watch the degrees Fahrenheit skyrocket throughout the day. A few times, during the heat of the early afternoon, the Suunto reached 135 degrees, but mostly the temps hovered between 115 and 125. Of course, these were only numbers, and the full impact of the h
eat didn’t hit me until I walked into the house’s courtyard one midafternoon and saw a whole line of our aluminum canteen cups arrayed along one wall. When I asked Carson why the strange arrangement, he told me simply that it was quicker to use the desert sun to heat ramen noodles than it was to use our portable stoves.
No matter what adjustments we made, walking in these temperatures was grueling. Luckily, the local Iraqi government was supposed to take control of Ramadi sometime in late June, and their national guard and policemen were expected to start performing a large share of the day-in, day-out patrolling. I, for one, was happy for a chance to step back and let the local security forces do their jobs, as they were the only ones who could truly identify the terrorists in their midst.
This Ramadi changeover was planned as part of a larger, countrywide Turnover of Authority (TOA) from the CPA to an appointed interim Iraqi government. On June 30, it was announced, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer would hand over control of Iraq to an Iraqi prime minister and disband the CPA forever (not a minute too soon, as far as I was concerned). The Iraqis would have their country back—their future would be in their hands, at least theoretically—and U.S. forces all across the country would take a less active role in day-to-day operations as the Iraqi army and police began to step up to a leading role in their own security. For our part, 2/4 planned to curtail its patrols and searches deep inside the city in the hope that a reduced presence would prove less onerous to the locals. The Army even set up an official liaison office in Junction City, its huge base just across the river from Ramadi, to help the infantry companies coordinate joint action with their Iraqi counterparts. If we ever needed anything, just call, they said.
So I hoped that our unrelenting mission pace would calm down during the weeks leading up to June 30, but, as with so many other things I hoped for, I was soon disappointed. Halfway through June, a new, more time-consuming mission took the place of our scaled-back patrolling schedule. Because of the increasing number of IED attacks along the main highway through Ramadi, the battalion tasked Golf Company with a new twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week mission: Keep Route Michigan clear of bombs. The only way to accomplish this was for us to man our own observation positions (OPs) in the heart of Ramadi —in essence setting up little squad-and platoon-sized firmbases well outside the Combat Outpost.
The CO anticipated that this round-the-clock responsibility on top of all our other round-the-clock responsibilities (securing the Government Center, raids, and so on) might very well break his men. So he negotiated hard with his superiors for a reprieve, and he got one: We were only to secure Michigan for the eastern half of the city, and going forward, Fox Company, one of 2/4’s other infantry companies, based on the west side of Ramadi, would split the Government Center protection responsibilities with us. The second piece meant a welcome break from short patrols through the teeming, cramped alleyways of the market area, but the first piece was even better. If we could just find the right building with the right view of the highway, then we might need to set up only one mini-firmbase inside Ramadi.
After a few trial-and-error experiments, we found our candidate: a tall building just west of the al-Haq mosque, on the southern side of Route Michigan with an excellent view of both the highway to the north and the Farouq district to the south. We called the building “the Ag Center,” short for “the Agricultural Center,” in the mistaken belief that it housed an agricultural training facility. As it turned out, that facility was actually two hundred meters east of the Ag Center. The building that we selected for full-time occupation was, in reality, an Islamic library and a religious training center. Unable to read the Arabic titles of the books that lined the building’s two cavernous front rooms, it took us roughly three weeks to discover our mistake, but by then it was too late. All the students and teachers left after week two of our occupation in spite of our attempts to set them at ease and avoid disturbing their lectures. We had the building all to ourselves, and, even though we had tried to avoid that situation, the isolation probably made our immediate situation a little safer. Of course, arbitrarily confiscating a center of Islamic learning did little for the long-term counterinsurgency mission of winning hearts and minds.
At least the Ag Center was nearly perfect from a security standpoint. The facility itself was a wide four-story building with a flat roof big enough to accommodate at least two Marine squads. A small, three-foot-high parapet ran the entire length of the roof, giving whoever was up there decent cover from incoming small-arms fire. The main walls of the building itself provided even better cover, as they were composed of thick cinder blocks reinforced with iron rebar. Most Iraqi machine guns never penetrated them, and even the RPGs could only tear small holes through the solid concrete.
The first floor of the Ag Center was by far the biggest, and it was separated into two halves. The front, Michigan-facing half contained two identical rooms, each with volumes and volumes of religious literature stacked high on tall wooden bookcases. The rear, Farouq-facing half comprised one gigantic room with a blackboard on one end and ten or so rows of desks and chairs facing the blackboard. There was one main entrance to the building in between the two book rooms, and another, smaller side entrance opened up at the rear corner of the schoolroom.
The other three floors of the building rose out of the first one like a thin rectangle placed on top of a squat square base. Floors two and three were each bisected by a corridor running east and west that separated the front and rear halves. Ten-foot-tall windows, each with a good view of Michigan and the buildings along it, lined the northern wall. On the southern side were five small rooms, each with a narrow view of the Farouq area, which sprung up just fifty feet to the Ag Center’s south. Though these rooms each had toilets and sinks, the building itself had no running water or electricity, so early attempts to use the facilities (both the toilets and the sinks) to relieve ourselves quickly turned each room into a stinking, fetid mess that just got worse with every passing day. When we could, we relieved ourselves into water bottles or in the corners of the building’s courtyard. The fourth “floor” consisted solely of one tiny, north-facing room built into a small box nestled on the wide roof. Finally, an open courtyard surrounded the entire Ag Center, and around the courtyard ran the center’s thick outer compound walls. The walls had front and rear gated entrances, but only the former was large enough to admit a determined suicide car bomber, something that hadn’t yet become common, but which we all thoroughly feared. Someone who’s determined to trade their life for yours is very hard to stop, and is usually the smartest weapon on the battlefield.
Though the Ag Center’s thick inner and outer walls provided a good bit of security on their own merits, we quickly took steps to improve our home away from home. We built sandbagged machine gun bunkers at the building’s southeastern and southwestern corners, and in front of the main gate we strung a long line of metal barriers and triple-stranded concertina wire. No suicide bomber would be driving his vehicle through that opening if we could help it. Furthermore, after a bit of experimentation, we placed a medium machine gun and several thousand rounds of ammunition on the roof. In the event of a decent-sized attack, a predesignated Marine would move out of the room on the fourth floor, grab that prestaged machine gun, and quickly move it around the roof to where it could best be employed to stem the enemy’s assault. For that same reason, we also placed on the roof our one shoulder-fired rocket launcher armed with the standard high-explosive rounds and the newest rocket in the Marine Corps arsenal: the thermobaric NE (“Novel Explosive”) round. No one in the company had ever fired one of these before, but the effects were supposedly devastating.
Each NE round contained four pounds of PBXN-113, an explosive that creates huge shock waves when detonated inside a building, sucking all the air out of it and more often than not collapsing the entire thing. We were curious about our new toy in the way that men often are about any kind of new and cutting-edge gadget, so we wanted to see the NE round in acti
on.
Even as we hardened and armed our mini-firmbase, the OP missions began in earnest. Starting the first week of June, Golf Company manned the Ag Center around the clock. A typical day would start at about six in the morning, with the Day Ops platoon sending one squad out of the Outpost on a foot patrol through either the industrial or the Farouq area en route to the OP. If the patrol wasn’t attacked, then the squad usually made it to the center in under half an hour. If it was, then the squad sometimes took a bit longer depending on the intensity of the enemy fire and/or the casualties sustained during the engagement.
During the night, the Ag Center was manned by the Night Ops platoon, so once the day patrol made it safely inside the building, the Day Ops squad leader or platoon commander would conduct a turnover with his Night Ops counterpart while individual squad members peeled off to relieve the Night Ops Marines at each fighting position. After all the necessary information—How was the patrol in? Anything weird happen last night? What’s the shop activity like this morning? Are the kids going to school?—had been passed back and forth between individuals, the Night Ops squad would patrol out of the Ag Center, heading back to the Outpost via a different route than the one just used.
