by Leadership;Brotherhood Joker One: A Marine Platoon's Story of Courage
Lance Corporal Niles. Gunshot wound to left leg. Bleeding badly, no arteries cut. Priority medevac. Over.
That one got battalion’s attention. Within two minutes, an entire headquarters convoy arrived on the scene and somehow crammed itself into a small two-hundred-meter front just outside the mosque’s entrance. Within another two minutes, an Army convoy sporting two Bradley fighting vehicles and two armored ambulances rolled up to our position. The street became a wall-to-wall parking lot.
I was disgusted by the lack of dispersion, but I had better things to do than supervise the tactical array of units over which I had no control. Four stretcher bearers from the Army ambulances came running toward us, and, together with Doc, I helped them load Niles onto the ubiquitous green canvas. As they moved carefully with their burden back to the ambulance, I moved with them. Niles had held his hand up to me as they lifted the stretcher, and I had taken it. Now we moved, hand in hand, to the ambulance’s yawning entrance.
Throughout the short trip, Niles didn’t say anything. He just looked at me. He was still shaking, and he was growing continually paler from the blood loss. I knew that I should say something, but I didn’t know what. We continued to move. He continued to stare. Finally, I spoke.
“Niles, you’re gonna be fine. I promise. We’ll get you out of here. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. I’m here. Don’t worry. I’ll make them take good care of you. I promise. Don’t worry.”
Niles never said anything back, but his hand stayed firmly clenched in mine until the stretcher bearers carried him up the ramp to the ambulance. I held on for as high as my arm could reach, but eventually I had to let go. I had a different destination. For a brief second, though, I wanted to leave it all, to go with them, to hold Niles’s hand the whole way to Junction City, to tell him that he’d be okay until the doctors could get to him, to tell him that I was there for him and that he didn’t need to worry anymore. I wanted to leave that dirty street, the scene of yet another of my failures, and the whole mixed-up situation behind, but I couldn’t.
So I watched Niles until the slowly rising back hatch of the ambulance shut him off from me for good. Then I forced myself to forget him altogether, and I turned my attention back to my primary responsibility—sorting out the tactical situation at hand.
It was even messier than when I had detached from it. Vehicle after vehicle had piled into the street directly in front of the mosque, until that short segment of pavement became an unending sea of steel. It gave the enemy a nice, fat target to hit. Behind me, second platoon had stormed their way past the Shawanies, through the mosque courtyard, and into the building itself. Part of the squad fanned out to search the building while the rest headed up to the roof. Now I could see Marines running along the mosque’s roof to covered fighting positions, watching over the close-packed vehicles below them and getting ready to get hit again.
It didn’t take long for the new battle to materialize. This time, two RPGs slammed into the brand-new vehicle depot in front of the mosque. The enemy probably didn’t even aim—they didn’t have to—but the explosion killed two Army soldiers immediately and wounded another three. A short but intense firefight broke out. In the midst of all the gunshots, I glanced to my south and saw one of the younger Shawanies standing on the sidewalk with his machine gun held at his hip, its barrel pointing into the air at a sixty-degree angle. Wide-eyed, the man frantically swiveled his head back and forth and then decided to get into the action by ripping off burst after burst of completely unaimed machine gun fire.
The enemy quickly melted away into the surrounding neighborhoods, and as soon as the fight died down, second platoon moved out of the mosque itself and searched the buildings immediately adjacent, buildings that the locals considered to be part of the mosque complex. There they found two huge weapons caches including, among other things, antipersonnel mines and suicide vests. The search lasted for thirty minutes. The vehicle cluster in front of the mosque thinned out a bit as the drivers finally grasped the meaning of dispersion, but it didn’t matter. The enemy hit us again, this time from the south. Running across a street to warn third squad of the potential attack, Teague was blown off his feet by an RPG. Both of his eardrums ruptured, and the blast drove small bits of dirt and shrapnel into his forearms. He got back up and continued running.
Shortly thereafter, battalion decided to move out, and two hours later, Golf Company and the three Shawanies were back at the Outpost. We never worked with them again. Our search had netted two huge weapons caches, both of which would likely be replenished within the next several weeks out of the billions of tons of high explosive still unaccounted for in Iraq. Joker One had lost one of our best Marines. If we were to stay another six months, and if we got lucky with our combat replacements, perhaps we could train up a new platoon member to Niles’s level.
As night fell, I realized that Ott was the only member left from his fire team. I disbanded the team and gave Ott to Teague.
What a miserable day.
THIRTY-FOUR
The high casualty rate that Joker One had sustained over the past two weeks was par for the course for everyone in the battalion during the late summer of 2004. Throughout August, while most people in America took vacations, injured Marines poured into the Combat Outpost at least thrice weekly. Every time four stretcher bearers and their wounded cargo ran out to the medevac helicopter that touched down at the north end of our base, I wondered whether the young man staining the canvas dark with his blood would ever fully recover, whether his dreams had died in the middle of fire and smoke. I wondered when it would again be one of my men who took his place. And I wondered how many of us would eventually make it back whole to the States.
No longer did I think that just being good at our jobs would be enough to protect us, or that my own decisions under fire could in some way prevent harm from befalling my men. After Bolding’s death, I had accepted the fact that I might not make it back. Now, every time we left the base I simply assumed that someone would come back wounded. It was a grim place to be, but it was freeing in some ways, for I wasn’t carrying the weight of every injured man on my shoulders anymore. Not everything was my fault—sometimes it was fair to blame the enemy, or ill fortune, or stupid missions for our wounded.
Though this mind-set shift made it easier to lead outside the base, it didn’t make it any easier to see the wounded lying in their litters inside it. Some casualties hit us particularly hard, like the time Sergeant Longoria, leader of the sniper squad attached to Golf, had his left hand nearly severed by an IED. The litter bearers carried him semiconscious into the aid station. Little streams of blood dangled off the sides of the litter’s poles. A few hours later, Doctor Crickard, the Navy physician at the Outpost, walked out of the aid station and told us that Longoria would almost certainly never regain full use of his hand again. Everyone looked downcast; all he’d ever wanted to be was a Marine scout-sniper. Another dream, dead.
Some casualties were particularly bad, like the one Duke Wells, the Weapons Platoon executive officer, brought in a few days after Longoria’s injury. His convoy had just been hit by an IED, and when a few of the corps-men threw open the tailgate of his casualty vehicle, a river of blood sluiced out and splattered all over our hangar bay floor. It created a dark, wide pool on the slick concrete. The corpsmen unloaded casualties and carried them to the aid station, and where they walked they left thick swaths of blood behind.
All of the injured looked terrible, but one was worse than most. Where his eyes used to be were two dark red gauze pads, held to his head by an elastic bandage. I had never seen an eyeless casualty before.
An hour later, the wounded had been carried out to the medevac helicopter, but the blood pool and the blood trails all over the hangar bay remained. Staff Sergeant and one other Marine wordlessly started mopping them up. The wet stuff came out, but the dark stains stayed. Staring at them later, I couldn’t think of much worse than losing my vision. I hoped that if or when I got wounded, I�
��d keep my eyes. And my genitals, for that matter. I hoped the same for my men, and that night, I couldn’t stop thinking about the young man whose eyes had been replaced by dark wells of blood.
Apparently, neither could Doc Crickard, because sometime toward the end of August he left the Outpost and was replaced by a new doctor whom we had never seen before. I bumped into the large soft-looking man and asked him casually what had happened to Doc Crickard. The new guy sort of shuffled his feet, and an embarrassed reply came back. “Oh, Doc Crickard was rotated back to Hurricane Point. He was, uh, pretty burnt out from taking care of all the casualties.”
I bit back my sarcastic reply and walked off. I was furious. The doctors got rotated, but the infantrymen were the ones fighting and dying out in the city, and there was no such thing as a day off the lines for us. The wounded and the dead continued to wear at my heart and mind, and it seemed that no matter where I turned, I couldn’t escape the sight of them. Strangely enough, being outside the base had in some ways become easier than being inside it. At least out in the city you were focused, constantly busy evaluating the situation, making decisions, and keeping track of your men. When the casualties happened, they happened, and there wasn’t much to be done about it.
Inside the base, though, there was nothing to do but brood on who’d be hurt next. Every time the booms rang out, or someone slammed a door, you jumped and the adrenaline started and you wondered who’d be brought inside in a litter, or if you’d have to go outside with litters of your own. You thought of all the things that had happened that you couldn’t change, and you watched the bleeding young men brought in one at a time and wondered if they’d ever fully recover. Worst of all, you never, ever forgot, even for an instant, the inescapable truth that man is indeed mortal.
By late August, even the Gunny’s hands had started ceaselessly shaking. The casualties got to everyone; there was little hope of rising above them. So, each night that I wasn’t out in the city, I debated the probability of being called out on a mission before dawn. If I came down on the side of improbable, then I took two or three sleeping pills. If I came down on the side of probable, then I lay awake and consoled myself by telling myself that at least things couldn’t get much worse for us than they were at the end of August.
THIRTY-FIVE
Of course, like nearly every other time I’ve challenged worse, I was wrong.
August 23, 3:30 AM found me in the COC, going over routine last-minute preparations with Hes, the current watch officer. We had a straightforward mission to protect the Government Center. Just outside, my Marines were assembling for the normal pre-mission inspection, and I could hear the quiet but insistent voices of my three squad leaders chivying them along. Together, Staff Sergeant and I quickly reviewed the position of all friendly units outside the Outpost. A squad from fourth platoon had just left the base on foot, en route to relieve the snipers at the Hotel OP. Their little pin put them a short two hundred meters outside the gates, and their patrol overlay indicated that they would continue straight down Michigan—the fastest way to the OP—until they hit the Hotel. Yesterday, an IED had exploded along Michigan, so it wasn’t the route I would have chosen, but it was early enough in the morning to justify the decision. Other than that, no other units were out. Everything seemed normal. Hes gave me permission to leave, and Staff Sergeant and I hurried outside for the quick final inspection.
I was in a bit of a rush—we were running about twenty minutes behind schedule—so the inspection was somewhat perfunctory. Once it finished, the platoon mounted up, and sometime between 4:30 and 5:00, we roared out of the Outpost gates. Behind me, I heard Mahardy call it in.
“COC, be advised, Joker One has just left the Outpost en route to the Government Center in five Humvees.”
Just as planned, the vehicles cut across all four lanes of Michigan at the median break in front of the Outpost. In the lead Humvee, I turned around as soon as we straightened out on the southern side of the road. Behind me, the other four vehicles carefully negotiated the median break. As soon I saw that they had all made it through, we would gun the engines and accelerate from a dangerously slow ten miles per hour to a much greater IED-defying speed. We were going against traffic, because there wasn’t too much at that time of night, and anyway, I was more afraid of IEDs than collisions. In the driver’s seat, Lance Corporal Waters suddenly fidgeted with something. The movement was unusual, and I turned to look at him. He had taken off his night vision goggles and placed them in his lap. For a driver, that move was a strict no-no. My night vision gear, a monocular device, remained tightly clamped to my left eye.
“Waters,” I said, “what the hell are you doing? Why did you just put your goggles in your lap?”
“Look, sir. Streetlights’re working up ahead. Goggles’ll white out there and I won’t be able to see. Plus, sir, you see those lights on the horizon? It looks like one of those trucker convoys that the hajjis run sometimes at night is heading our way. If the streetlights don’t do it, those headlights’ll white out my goggles for sure. I’ve only got the Seven-Bravos [an older generation of goggles that cover both eyes instead of just one]. I can’t afford to be whited out. I’ll put ‘em back on once we’re in the backstreets and there’s no light and I don’t need to worry about it anymore.”
It made sense to me, and, anyway, Bowen had just called from the last vehicle to let me know that his Humvees were through the median and ready to roll. I gave the order.
“Waters, punch it. Let’s do this.”
“Roger that, sir.” He accelerated rapidly, and within a few seconds all five vehicles were speeding the wrong way down Michigan. We traveled for a few blocks and began approaching a bend, one that started at the exact site of the IED attack the day before. I clenched up. As Waters slowed a bit to negotiate the curve, bright pink halogen lights suddenly flared in our eyes. The oncoming trucker convoy was a scant hundred meters away and approaching fast.
Waters shouted at me. “Which side of the road do you want me on, sir?” It was a critical question—when playing chicken with a tractor-trailer, we had learned through earlier experience that the best way of getting them to swerve was to pick a lane early, stay in it tenaciously, and force the oncoming traffic to adjust to us. Through a few near misses, we had learned that if you failed to clearly telegraph your intent, then you wound up with the same problem that people on foot have when approaching someone in a crowd: You move to your right, they move to their left, which puts you on collision course again and you almost hit each other, so you both move back to your original courses and almost hit each other again—the little age-old dance that you do in crowds all the time. Now we were doing it at fifty miles an hour with a convoy of semis.
I shouted back—they were almost on us, and the roar was deafening. “Stick close to the median. Don’t pull up on the sidewalk—fourth’s got a squad somewhere around here.”
“Roger that!” Waters pulled our Humvee as far north as he could, almost scraping against the concrete lane divider. Then the trucks were on us. My night vision goggles whited out. My uncovered right eye went blind. I couldn’t hear anything, just the roar of the passing convoy.
However, I could feel, and sometime during the passage of the last few trucks I felt a gut-wrenching double thump.
Thump-thump.
Just like that, with a mere split second’s pause between the two. The Humvee jigged, then scraped up against the median. Waters slammed on the brakes.
I was irate. “Waters, what the hell? Did you just run over the median?”
I‘ll never forget a single word of the reply. Wide-eyed, Waters turned to look at me as our vehicle literally screeched to a halt. I could only barely see him out of my right eye—the goggles over my left weren’t working.
“No, sir!” he screamed at me. “I think we just hit a fucking Marine!”
My anger evaporated. Time slowed down. The vehicle behind, carrying the rest of first squad, slammed into our rear as Waters brought us to
a complete stop, but I didn’t even notice. Somehow, I was out of the Humvee before it fully stopped, running back along the slowing convoy to where I had heard that horrible thump. I was so confused—I had no idea whom we had hit or even who could possibly be out in the middle of the highway at 5 AM. It didn’t dawn on me that fourth platoon might have been walking down the middle of Michigan rather than on the sidewalks, but it didn’t take me long to locate the sprawled body of a Marine lying on the north side of Michigan. Our impact had flung him across the median.
I hurdled the little wall at a sprint and ran up to the still form. He had no helmet and his head was swelling. I don’t want to describe it, so I won’t. Suffice to say, the injury looked bad, and the Marine wasn’t conscious. I immediately screamed into the PRR for my docs. Then I turned to Mahardy, faithfully behind me as always. I still wish that he hadn’t had to share that sight with me. I called in the medevac.
“COC, this is One-Actual. Be advised, we have just run over a Marine west of the Michigan-Racetrack traffic circle. Break.” Through the swelling, I could recognize the Marine, and what had happened suddenly struck me. “It’s Lance Corporal Aldrich. He has a severe head injury. Medevac is urgent surgical. He will need a helo to Baghdad ASAP.” As I spoke, Docs Smith and Camacho ran up. They were carrying a stretcher. “I’ve got the vehicles right here, so I’ll stabilize Aldrich and get him back to the Outpost ASAP. Over.”
Hes’s voice came back. “Roger, One, I copy all. I’ll arrange the medevac. Three out.” Unlike the Ox, Hes knew better than to ask clarifying questions in the middle of a crisis.
I put down the radio handset and turned to Staff Sergeant. He had overheard the whole thing, and as my eyes met his, he nodded and went into action, screaming at the Marines to turn the vehicles around immediately. Noriel got into the action shortly thereafter, and all five of my Humvees backed up, performing quick three-point turns in the middle of the highway.
