One Bullet Away

by Nathaniel C. Fick

  The next ten months were a graduate seminar in infantry tactics, our last chance to learn before doing it for real. Captain Whitmer was the professor, and his style was unlike anything I'd seen at Quantico. Many of my buddies in 1/1's other companies complained that their commanders kept a thumb on them. They shunned boldness for fear of making an attention-grabbing mistake. The prevailing culture of 1/1, at least among the officers and senior NCOs, was careerist: laugh at the colonel's jokes, don't get anyone hurt, and stay under the radar.

  Not Captain Whitmer. The standard Marine Corps brief before live-fire training began with the words "Safety is paramount."

  "If safety were paramount," Whitmer declared, "we'd stay in the barracks and play pickup basketball. Good training is paramount." Whitmer's idea of good training reminded me of something I'd read about the Roman legions—their exercises were bloodless battles so that their battles were bloody exercises.

  He drove the point home one night on a windy ridge above the Pacific. The battalion's three rifle companies were moving independently toward a cinderblock town. Our mission was to link up near the town no later than 0100 and capture it for follow-on forces to use as a staging base. A reconnaissance team was observing the town, and the battalion's plan of attack kept changing as the team updated its reports on how the defenders were set up.

  Bravo Company had come ashore from a Navy ship a couple of hours before. We stumbled along a ridgeline in thick mist, still a mile away from where the battalion planned to link up. Wind blew the fog in whorls and eddies across the trail and down into the darkness that fell away to either side. Behind me, machine gunners and mortarmen carried their heavy weapons as quietly as they could, stifling the grunts and groans and clanking metal. Every few minutes, Captain Whitmer passed the battalion's updates over the radio to his platoon commanders. I cursed in the dark, trying simultaneously to navigate, keep track of the changing plan, and inform my section leaders of the updates as we pressed closer to the linkup point. Staff Sergeant Marine must have walked twice as far as the rest of us, moving back and forth through the column to pass word and keep tabs on the Marines. The platoon rolled with the changes. No complaints. No hesitation. We arrived at 0045, exhausted and disoriented, but on time for the attack. The other companies reported over the radio that they were still an hour away.

  Whitmer's lieutenants converged on him while we waited. He circled us close, soaked and shivering, and pointed out the night's lesson. "The other company commanders stopped moving each time a change came over the radio. They called their platoon commanders in and showed them the new plan on their map. Now look—they're fucking late." He paused, and I looked at Patrick, seeing the lesson crystallizing in his mind as it was in mine.

  "You guys were probably cursing me for briefing changes on the fly." We nodded in confession. "But I did it because you have to learn to operate that way. Any one of you," he whispered with emphasis, pointing at each of us, "is one bullet away from commanding this company. You need to learn it here, not in Iran or Somalia or wherever."

  I looked at my watch and saw that the other companies were still more than half an hour away. Captain Whitmer must have done the same, because he followed up with a question: "So what should we'do now?" He wasn't looking for advice; he wanted to critique our decision making.

  "We should attack, sir." I said it with a confidence I didn't feel. "We have a whole company here. Recon reports only about a dozen guys in the town. The battalion set its timeline for a reason."

  Captain Whitmer replied that we, as infantry officers, had been trained to be aggressive. Nods all around. "But there's a fine line between aggressive and foolish." Good commanders, he explained, could operate right at that line, without crossing it. We had to know the difference between a risk and a gamble. All commanders take risks. They are calculated decisions to make gains in a dangerous environment. Gambles are pure chance—closing your eyes and running the gauntlet. "Attacking that town right now, Lieutenant Fick," he said with renewed intensity, "would be a gamble. Don't ever be in a hurry to get your Marines killed."

  When the other companies arrived, the battalion attacked the town and secured it. I watched proudly as my platoon moved confidently through our sector of cinderblock buildings. They were having fun. With the overwhelming force of three companies, we suffered no casualties, and the slight delay to the battalion's timeline didn't matter. I felt chastened.

  We took a more direct route back to the boats, eager to be far from the beach before daylight. The moon was a fuzzy spot behind the clouds, and the wind had picked up, flecking spray through the air and blasting us with sand. Waves thundered onto the beach in sets of three. The company's coxswains had remained behind with the boats. They had them near the water's edge when we arrived, ready to launch.

  Staff Sergeant Marine and I knelt together in the sand, struggling into our wetsuits. I noticed that his was twice as thick as mine. "Why the polar bear suit, Staff Sergeant?"

  He looked smug and replied, "I been in boat company before, sir."

  I looked out at the wind-whipped ocean. "I'm gonna freeze my tits off tonight, aren't I?"

  "Just remember that there are two kinds of people in the world," Marine said sagely. "Those who piss in their wetsuits and those who lie about it."

  After we got dressed, Marine ran from boat to boat, counting the troops and making sure weapons were tied to the aluminum deck plates. He gave me a thumbs-up. The platoon was on its game.

  My six-man boat crew dragged its Zodiac into chest-deep water, holding the ropes that ran along the gunwale tubes. My breath caught in my throat. Each surging wave raised the water to my neck. I floated off my feet, struggling to keep the boat's bow pointed into the breakers. It would broach if it turned sideways, dumping our gear into the water and forcing us back to the beach to try again.

  The coxswain clambered aboard and started the engine, yelling, "All in!" We struggled up over the sides and fell into the bottom of the boat in a tangle of legs and rifles. "Get some weight in the bow," he shouted. Ahead, a line of white, five feet above eye level, raced from the darkness—the foaming crest of a wave. The coxswain opened the throttle, and we streaked toward the wave. We climbed its base and teetered at the top. I tried to will our center of gravity over onto the back side of the wall of water threatening to throw us up onto the sand.

  The engine shrieked as the propeller broke out of the water. Then our bow settled, and we were through. Surf passage complete. We steered for the bobbing shapes of the company's other boats, and I took my radio from its waterproof bag.

  "Pale Rider, Pale Rider, this is Oden. Touchdown. I say again, touchdown." "Touchdown" was our code word to the ship for "mission complete." Had something gone wrong, we would have said "foul ball."

  "Pale Rider copies touchdown. Be advised we're tossing pretty hard out here. May be unable to recover you aboard. Do you have fuel for alternate extract?"

  The waves had grown over the course of the night, and the ship's crew doubted that they could pick us up safely. Alternate extract meant a long, cold, punishing ride down the coast to the Del Mar Boat Basin at Camp Pendleton. My wool watch cap, soaked with salt water, kept slipping over my eyes. I pushed it back to look at Captain Whitmer.

  He squinted through the blowing spray. I imagined him hearing the siren song of warmth and rest for his troops on the ship and the satisfaction of running a mission as briefed. But this was training, and Captain Whitmer would do whatever challenged the company most, forcing it to improvise, adapt, and overcome.

  "Run the alternate," he ordered.

  The trip took two hours. Icy spray stung my exposed skin like needles as we crashed down the waves. In every trough, I thought we were about to be swamped by the next roller. Headlights crawled along I-5 to our left. I imagined the drivers on their early commutes, warm, listening to the radio, sipping coffee. In the bow of the boat, one Marine slipped into hypothermia. He stopped shivering, and his lips turned pale with bluish edges. We
wrapped around him to share body heat and shelter him from the frigid spray. Through it all, Captain Whitmer sat on the gunwale tube. He betrayed no discomfort, no concern, no rush to get back.

  When we pulled into Del Mar shortly after sunrise, I confronted Whitmer; his rationale was still unclear to me. "Sir, why didn't you at least try to get aboard the ship? Why make the Marines suffer? We'll never use these boats anyway."

  Captain Whitmer looked at me for a long moment, as if surprised I didn't get it. "Nate, it's not about the gear. Not even about the mission. It's about the people." He looked around at the Marines, now laughing and cleaning the boats in the morning sunlight. "When this company suffers, we're not wasting time or abusing anyone. The Marines are learning to hang together when things get bad, and that'll come back to us in spades. If there's ever a real mission for this battalion, Bravo will get the call, and we'll be ready."

  Shortly before we'deployed, I arrived at the office one morning to find Jim Beal, my friend from Quantico, sitting at my desk. We hadn't seen each other since TBS graduation. I dropped my duffel bag and grabbed his hand. Jim explained that he'd been sent to 1/1 as an artillery forward observer, or arty FO. This man works hand in hand with the weapons platoon commander in a MEU to run the company's fire support. I couldn't believe my good luck and asked Jim how he'd ended up in Bravo Company.

  "I asked which weapons platoon commander was the most fucked-up, and they sent me to you."

  "Whatever. They probably match the shitbird FO with the shit-hot platoon commander."

  My happiness was short-lived. A note on my desk announced that a senior gunnery sergeant would be joining the platoon later in the week. I knew what that meant. I would have to demote Staff Sergeant Marine from platoon sergeant to leader of the mortar section. I stormed into Captain Whitmer's office, but he could only shake his head. Out of his control. I tried the first sergeant, responsible for personnel changes in the company. Same reaction. The bureaucracy had deemed Bravo short one gunny and that was that. These more experienced Marines knew better than to waste too much time and emotion fighting the machine.

  It hurt. Why mess with a good platoon just before it deployed? Why did the platoon commander, and even the company commander, have no say in the matter? Marine and I had bonded. We worked well together. When I called him into the office to break the news, I was ready for a fight.

  But I should have known better. Staff Sergeant Marine ended up consoling me, saying that the new gunny was a good Marine and that he would enjoy working with mortars, even if they had a low CDI factor.

  I took the bait. "What's CDI?"

  "Chicks dig it, sir. Football team: high CDI. Chess club: low CDI. Platoon sergeant: high CDI. Mortar section: low CDI. Doesn't matter that mortars have all the firepower. Life's unfair. Didn't they teach you that in college?"

  8

  FEELING LIKE AN ACTOR on a movie set, I stood at the ship's rail in my khaki uniform. On the pier far below, throngs of people cheered and waved American flags as two tugboats pushed us away. A breeze rippled the water of San Diego Bay. At precisely ten A.M. on August 13,2001, the USS Dubuque slid beneath the graceful span of the San Diego–Coronado Bridge, turning west past Point Loma for the open Pacific. On the flight deck, Marines and sailors lined the rails, hands clasped behind their backs and eyes straight ahead. The only sound was the wind as each man soaked up his last view of the city skyline, the beaches, California.

  The Dubuque and two other ships, the USS Peleliu and the USS Comstock, made up an Amphibious Ready Group. The ARG's three ships carried the Fifteenth MEU (SOC). Two thousand Marines were in the MEU, including our infantry battalion, a helicopter squadron reinforced with four Harrier jets, and attachments such as a recon platoon, four tanks, and logistical support units. For the next six months, we would be America's "force in readiness" for half the globe.

  Staff Sergeant Marine joined me at the rail as I watched the coast turn misty and gray in the distance.

  "Congratulations, sir. This is your first step toward becoming an old campaigner like Lieutenant Hadsall."

  "I'll have to land on a few foreign shores before I feel like much of a campaigner," I replied, but I smiled at the thought that I might be catching up with the ideal in his head. "What're your predictions for this float?"

  Marine leaned on the rail with his hands out over the water, and the mischievous gleam faded for a moment. "Well, I heard a gunner in Fifth Marines say something real smart once. We had just come home from months of sitting in the desert after Saddam kicked out the U.N. inspectors back in '98. Lots of missed birthdays, anniversaries, births, and all that crap. Marines were a little discontent about not doing anything. This gunner said to us, 'Never regret not doing a real mission. Now you can have all golden memories and no ghosts.' I try to remember that when the war fever takes over."

  The Dubuque had been commissioned in 1967 and served off the coast of Vietnam. Five hundred sixty-nine feet long and displacing sixteen thousand tons, the ship carried its four hundred crew members and five hundred Marines at about fifteen knots. A five-story superstructure covered the forward third of the ship, and a flight deck stretched across the rear two thirds to the stern. Below it, the Dubuque's dominating feature was a well deck, a sort of garage for boats that could be flooded and then pumped dry again. At the stern, a huge clamshell door provided entrance to the well deck. In accordance with the Navy's hierarchy, enlisted Marines and sailors lived beneath the deck of the ship in catacombs of narrow passageways lined with steam pipes and electrical wiring. Officers, both Navy and Marine, lived in staterooms in the superstructure.

  Life aboard a warship at sea, especially one nearly forty years old, is like moving between a small closet, an apartment building boiler room, and a machine shop. The dominant features are movement and noise. The ship pitches and rolls constantly, throwing food from tables and men from bunks. As it moves, the steel creaks and groans. Engines throb, boilers hiss, and the ocean gurgles beneath the hull. Metal hatches must remain closed in case of flooding, so traffic, day and night, is marked by the rasps and clangs of closing and locking doors. Whistles, buzzers, and bells announce the events of the day—reveille, meals, drills, and taps. The ship's intercom and constantly buzzing telephones round out the cacophony. Newcomers quickly learn to carry earplugs.

  The Dubuque was configured to serve as a fleet flagship, which meant there was a second bridge for the admiral and extra officer berthing. Since the Peleliu was, in fact, the flagship of our small flotilla, the Dubuque carried far fewer officers than it was equipped to handle. So I had a four-man stateroom to myself. The price I paid for this luxury was that my living space doubled as a storage room for everyone else's things. A glance into my stateroom revealed the intentions of the Dubuque's Marines: three surfboards, four bags of golf clubs, four guitars, and a pile of Hawaiian shirts for liberty ports. Absent were maps of central Asia, down parkas, and Pashto and Dari translation guides. We still lived in a peaceful world.

  Every western Pacific cruise starts with a trial period—the five-day steam to Hawaii. It's a time to get used to the rhythm of life at sea before pulling into a safe harbor. I settled into a comfortable daily routine, waking up at five-thirty to run on the flight deck before the day grew hot. Then I took a tepid, vaguely salty shower and ate breakfast in the officer's mess, called the wardroom. I dedicated the morning to work—planning training, cleaning weapons, and slogging through administrative paperwork. My favorite pastime was teaching classes to the Marines. I used my IOC manuals to keep our tactics fresh and reached back to my college courses to teach about famous battles. Patrick did the same, but he had studied economics. The company's office in the superstructure often overflowed with Marines learning about efficient markets and elasticity.

  Training was limited by our tight confines, but we held races to assemble and disassemble machine guns while blindfolded, shot off the ship's stern at targets on the flight deck, and rappelled down elevator shafts into the well deck. L
unch was the day's high-water mark, followed by an afternoon slide of naps, reading, and lifting weights in the small triangular gym wedged into the bow. The old shipboard adage was "Sleep till you're hungry, then eat till you're tired, and repeat for six months."

  My favorite time of day was the early evening. After leaving the gym, I'd climb to the Dubuque's highest outside deck, just below the towering mast of radio antennas. There, on a rubber mat, Rudy Reyes led his trademark conditioning workouts—stretching, abs, breathing, and more stretching. Rudy was a sergeant in the MEU's recon platoon. Recon is the Corps's special operations force, trained to collect information behind enemy lines. But Rudy's demeanor in this gung-ho world was so decidedly nonmilitary that his platoon-mates called him "the Associate." Even the colonel stopped calling him Sergeant Reyes. He was Rudy. Afterward, I would lie on my back and watch the sky turn pink as the rocking ship made the clouds appear to swing overhead.

  ***

  The morning we pulled into Pearl Harbor, I woke early to watch our approach to Oahu. I wanted to see this fabled port from the deck of a Navy warship. As the sun began to light the sky, we rounded Diamond Head and glided west along Waikiki to the harbor entrance. The narrow channel cuts north past Hickam Air Force Base before turning hard to the right at Ford Island.

  A carpet of manicured lawns and stands of swaying palms flanked Hickam's lush waterfront. The green was startling after five days of empty sea. I stood at the rail, looking down at the ship's crew at work on the bridge below. It was fully light by the time the Dubuque made the turn at Ford Island. The previous evening, at the ship's nightly operations/intelligence brief, the navigator had said that this turn would be preceded by one long blast from the ship's whistle to ensure no traffic came barreling through from the other direction.