One Bullet Away

by Nathaniel C. Fick

  "Moonlight, this is Hitman Two. We're oscar mike to the zone." (He used the abbreviation for "on the move.")

  "Roger, Hitman Two. Give us a buzz saw and a NATO-Y."

  The pilot had requested the most favored method for guiding a helicopter into a landing zone in the dark. The NATO-Y, standard throughout the Western militaries, is four chem lights tied to premeasured lengths of parachute cord. When laid on the ground and pulled taut, they form a Y. One of the Marines pulled it out, already tied, and cracked the four chem lights. He laid them across the landing zone, with the base pointing into the wind and the two legs marking touchdown points for the helicopter's main landing gear.

  The buzz saw is a single infrared chem light tied to a two-foot strip of parachute cord. The Marine cracked it and began swinging the cord like a lariat. Through night vision goggles, the spinning chem light stood out as a circle of shimmering light, a beacon to guide the aircrew into the little patch of grass where the team squatted in the tree line.

  I turned my head as the rotor wash blasted dust and twigs against our bodies. Dull green light spilled from the cargo bay as the ramp dropped. The team leader counted his team aboard, placing his hands on each man. Then he reached into the grass beneath the ramp and yanked the NATO-Y up into the helicopter. Leave no trace. The pilots added power, and we headed toward breakfast. I'd heard recon Marines call themselves "the quiet professionals," and now I understood why. Except for radio calls to the ROC, the team had spoken fewer than ten words in twenty-four hours.

  By September 2002, the platoon had filled to full strength: twenty-three Marines divided into three teams of six and a five-man headquarters section. The whole battalion gathered on a Friday afternoon in the adobe mission-style chapel at the base. The topic was Iraq. It was an incongruous setting for a war briefing but the only building that could seat everyone comfortably. I walked in with Gunnery Sergeant Mike Wynn and Sergeant Brad Colbert.

  Gunny Wynn was from Texas, wise and wiry. He had served in combat as a sniper in Mogadishu in the early 1990s, and then again while working at the U.S. embassy in El Salvador. When I'd learned he was going to be my platoon sergeant, I had called Eric Dill at his new post in Hawaii. "Get on your knees and thank God," he said. "You got one of the best." Like Staff Sergeant Marine, Wynn wasn't a yeller. He earned the respect of his men by being honest and fair. As a more seasoned lieutenant, I didn't require the same coaching I'd needed two years before, so Wynn and I were partners from the start.

  Sergeant Colbert would lead Team One. He was a blond, cerebral San Diegan, known as "the Iceman" for his cool performance as a recon team leader on our raids near Kandahar a year before. We all slid into a wooden pew together and chatted before the start of the brief.

  President Bush had recently told the United Nations that its failure to enforce resolutions against Iraq would leave the United States no choice but to act on its own. The senior Marines in the battalion had seen all this before, and the general consensus was still that diplomatic blustering would result in some kind of negotiated solution. No American tank would ever roll into Baghdad. The room grew quiet as the division chief of staff, a colonel, took his place on the altar.

  "Worshiping the god of war," Colbert muttered.

  The colonel introduced representatives from the division staff, each of whom would brief his own area of expertise. A pimply lance corporal, described by the colonel as "the most knowledgeable person in the division about the Iraqi army, its weapons, and its tactics," climbed the altar to give an intelligence brief. Gunny Wynn leaned toward me. "If that's true, then we're in a world of shit."

  I heard only pens scratching on paper as representatives from the division's logistics shop ran through plans to use funnels to conserve water and explained how to test captured fuel for contamination. Suddenly, the colonel interrupted the brief.

  "I don't hear any motivation, Recon Battalion. Give me a 'Kill.'"

  He wanted us to shout "Kill!" to prove we were motivated by the brief. Looking at Wynn, I asked, "Who is this clown? Does he think he's talking to recruits at Parris Island?"

  The battalion chuckled and shifted uncomfortably, offering only a tepid response to the colonel's order.

  "Get up, go outside, and come back in here with a little more fire."

  I thought he was joking, but he pointed at the door without smiling. We shuffled out to the parking lot, about-faced, and reentered to sit down again. Gone were the professionalism and concentration. I saw and felt surliness and disappointment. We had come for a brief about the war. The colonel had treated us like children and lost us. I hoped our lives would never depend on him.

  General Mattis arrived a few minutes later, clearing the atmosphere like a thunderstorm on a humid afternoon. Mattis is kinetic. The troops who knew him from Afghanistan loved him, and everyone else loved him by reputation. Stars on a collar can throw a barrier between leader and led, but Mattis's rank only contributed to his hero status. Here was an officer, a general, who understood the Marines, who, in fact, was one of them. I caught Wynn's eye and leaned toward him to whisper a question: "You know what Mattis's call sign is?" He shook his head. "Chaos. How fucking cool is that?" Wynn nodded admiringly as General Mattis began to speak.

  "Good afternoon, Marines. Thank you for your attention so late on a Friday. I know the women of Southern California are waiting for you, so I won't waste your time."

  General Mattis didn't talk battle plans and tactics—those would be disseminated through the chain of command beneath him. Instead, he focused on seven general principles. He ordered us to reflect on them, internalize them, and make them real. The division's success in battle, he said, would depend on them.

  "Be able to deploy without chaos on eight days' notice." I thought we could probably get out in eight days, but not without chaos. All our routine maintenance and repairs had to be completed. Gear had to be organized and packed for shipping. Desert uniforms issued. Manifests prepared. Anthrax and smallpox vaccinations given. I thought, too, of my personal life. A house to pack up, a car to store, bills to pay, family and friends to see. Deploying for war would be a mess, no matter what.

  "Fight at every level as a combined-arms team." Combined arms was another Marine Corps mantra. The idea was to put the enemy in a dilemma in which hiding from one weapon exposed him to another. A lone rifleman and a grenadier could be a combined-arms team, and so could the division and its air wing. We were good at this. Recon teams had more experience with air and artillery than anyone except perhaps former weapons platoon commanders.

  "Aggressive NCO leadership is the key to victory." Never a problem in recon. The team leaders, mostly sergeants, were the battalion's backbone. They were well trained, motivated, and experienced. I suspected my challenge would be tempering their aggression, not stoking it.

  "Mistakes are forgivable, but a lack of self-discipline will be met with zero tolerance." Light discipline, noise discipline, and fire discipline would be demanded at all times. Mattis knew that victory hung on the details. Sloppiness in the little things led to sloppiness in the big things.He would quash it at the lowest level he could. Thinking back to the silence of the patrol at Bridgeport, I was confident of recon's discipline.

  "Build confidence in your NBC equipment." NBC stood for nuclear, biological, and chemical. The general paused and looked deliberately around the room. "Expect to be slimed with chemicals." This, frankly, terrified me. Marines spent at least one day per year in the gas chamber learning to use and trust their gas masks. But that was with tear gas. I had seen pictures of Saddam's gas attacks on the Kurdish village of Halabja. Green corpses, choked to death by sarin or VX. Gunny Wynn summed it up: "If we get hit with chem, we're fucked."

  "Train to survive the first five days in combat." They were the most dangerous. This sounded good, but I wasn't sure how training for the first five days differed from training for the next five days, or the last five days. Besides, drawing on memories of the last war against Iraq, many Marines d
idn't think the war would last five days.

  "Finally, get your family ready to be without you." Mattis never explained whether he meant for the duration of the deployment or forever. Probably both, I concluded. My life insurance policy was current, and I had a will, but I decided to write letters to the important people in my life, just in case.

  General Mattis closed with a divisionwide directive: no Marine in the First Marine Division would deploy with more personal gear than was allowed to an infantry lance corporal. No cots, no coffeepots, no Game Boys, CD players, or satellite telephones. No double standards. Every man would sleep on the ground, and every man would shoulder an equal portion of the daily hardship. It was a Spartan concept, quintessentially Mattis, and I liked it.

  Throughout the fall, tensions with Iraq grew. In October, Congress authorized a U.S. attack if Iraq failed to give up its weapons of mass destruction. In November, the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 1441, stating that Iraqi noncompliance with its demands to disarm would be met with "serious consequences." Even so, my daily life remained mostly unchanged. I still lived near the beach with VJ, and we ran together almost every evening, talking about the growing crisis as the sun sank into the Pacific. We still believed it would come to nothing. In mid-November, Patrick English and I and our girlfriends went to the division's Marine Corps birthday ball in Nevada. Officers in their dress blues swirled dates across the dance floor or clustered at the bar telling stories. I felt the eerie sense of looking at a photograph from 1939. It was the division's last quiet month.

  Warning signs began to appear at the battalion. We were told that none of the possible military options in Iraq had a role for foot-mobile reconnaissance. The war would move too fast. Instead, we would be equipped with Humvees and heavy machine guns. Such a drastic change in our doctrine was almost inconceivable. I decided to wait and see if the promised equipment actually showed up. By Thanksgiving, it had. Still, I remembered the mission to Tora Bora. All the equipment had shown up for that, but the operation had been scrubbed. By early December, there was no more denying it; we began full-time preparation for a war with Iraq.

  The battalion gave each platoon five Humvees, two Mark-19 40 mm automatic grenade launchers, and two .50-caliber heavy machine guns. Most of the modifications needed to make them battle ready were up to us. Much of the gear was old, but the Marines weren't fazed. They just wanted permission to make the changes they needed.

  Gunny Wynn and I suspected that the company would deny any unconventional requests to modify the Humvees. "Wouldn't make us look good," I said, mocking my CO's oft-repeated criterion for whether or not we should do something.

  So we opted to beg forgiveness rather than ask permission. I knew from Afghanistan that the rules would change when the first shot was fired. By then it would be too late. Using their Afghan experience, Colbert and Sergeant Larry Shawn Patrick opened Second Platoon's chop shop. Patrick, known as "Pappy" because of his grandfatherly thirty years, led Team Two. He was an unflappable North Carolinian, tall and thin, who had started his recon career in Somalia ten years before.

  The platoon labored for weeks in the motor pool, often working late into the night. We strung lights so that we could see in the dark, and everyone contributed money, tools, and supplies. Colbert's Humvee had light armor, but the other four were open, like dune buggies. We mottled the beige-colored exteriors with brown and gray to break up the vehicles' outlines and reduce their visibility at dawn and dusk. Camouflage netting, rolled and hung from the roofs, was rigged to release quickly with the pull of a single strap. Each Humvee, when stationary, could be made to look like a bush within seconds.

  The heavy machine guns would be mounted atop three-foot-high metal posts in the Humvee beds. Gunners would stand behind them, with the firing handles at chest level. Sergeant Steve Lovell bolted racks over each wheel well to hold extra cans of ammunition near the gunners who would need it. Lovell, leader of Team Three, was new to recon. He had grown up on a Pennsylvania dairy farm and served in the infantry as a sniper.

  "One thing I learned as a sniper," he told me while riveting an ammo rack to a Humvee, "is that nothing in the world's as useless as ammo just out of reach."

  Corporal Josh Person, another Afghanistan vet now serving as the driver in Colbert's team, mounted civilian CB antennas to the rearview mirrors, running cables inside to the radios. After some trial-and-error tuning, their static-free transmissions became the envy of the other platoons. Colbert bought Garmin GPS antennas at RadioShack, allowing the teams to mount their GPS receivers against the windshield rather than holding them outside open windows to pick up satellites.

  By the time we had finished outfitting the Humvees for combat, we had invested hundreds of man-hours and thousands of dollars from our own pockets. The vehicles were concrete examples of the lessons learned on patrols in Afghanistan. The day the teams declared them ready to go, the battalion sergeant major, its senior enlisted Marine, came down to the motor pool to take a look. Sergeant major is a position of great influence when held by the right man. Our sergeant major, though, was distrusted by the Marines because of his fixation, on the eve of war, with trivialities such as proper haircuts and polished boots.

  Looking at the Humvees, he sneered, "Y'all are nothing but a bunch of cowboys who don't trust the Marine Corps to provide you with everything you need to win."

  Except for the cowboy part, he was right.

  19

  MY ATTITUDE IN DECEMBER was proof of the human ability to rationalize away pain. Congress had voted for war. The president had stated publicly that he would fight alone if necessary. Recon battalion had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in specialized equipment for a desert fight in Iraq. Troops were being sent to the region. But still I doubted that the war would happen. The very idea of American tanks in Baghdad, of U.S. troops in an Arab capital, was too far removed from any point of reference in my life. That I would be among those troops was simply unthinkable. I could intellectualize my way through how the war would unfold, but I couldn't feel it. It wasn't real.

  I spent the holidays at home in Baltimore. Four days before Christmas, the president announced the deployment of troops to the Middle East in response to Saddam Hussein's noncompliance with U.N. resolutions. Recon would surely be among the first to go.

  At our traditional Christmas dinner, my grandmother took me aside and said, "Nathaniel, I want you to have this. Now seems like a good time." She handed me a small box.

  Opening it, I found an aluminum horseshoe less than two inches wide. I read the inscription. "Sakashima—Kamikaze—June 7,1945." I remembered seeing it years before.

  "Your grandfather had it made from the shrapnel that hit him. He always considered himself lucky. Maybe some of it will rub off on you."

  The next morning, I made a necklace out of the horseshoe by stringing parachute cord through it. I put it around my neck and pledged not to take it off until I returned home again.

  ***

  On the last day of January, I left the office early and drove home to enjoy what I expected would be my final weekend in San Diego. We had been told to be ready to deploy within a week. After changing, I jogged down the street and headed west for the beach. The tide was low, the air was warm, and the setting sun reddened as it sank toward the ocean. I ran south through Carlsbad to the rock jetty that marked my normal turnaround point. But the evening was so beautiful that I kept going south and stretched the run into a ninety-minute workout. Racing home in the fading light, I felt content and invigorated.

  The blinking red light on my answering machine shattered the illusion. Four messages. Without even dialing, I knew what it meant. My commanding officer and Gunny Wynn both had the same news: be at the battalion by ten P.M. Our summons had come.

  VJ and I went to dinner at Jay's, our favorite Italian restaurant. He was already assigned to an upcoming MEU, so he'd be sitting this war out. Waiting for our food to arrive, the realization slowly formed in my mind: I was being se
nt to war. It was different from Afghanistan. Then, we were already gone. Now, I was leaving this quiet seaside town, with its pasta, Barbaresco, and palm trees, and going to war. To war. There was nothing I could do about it except go to prison if I refused.

  I looked around at the other tables. There were people my age on dates, whispering and smiling. Older couples, comfortable and relaxed. Waitresses brushed against tables, steam rose from entrées, and I was going to war. These people looked forward to Saturday, and Sunday, and the coming months and years of their lives. Mine felt as if it had ended. I didn't have a future. Trying to conjure up a mental image of myself after Iraq, I found that I couldn't. Iraq loomed like a black hole into which all the thoughts and acts and hopes and dreams of twenty-five years were being sucked. I couldn't imagine what might come out the other side. We walked out of Jay's, where I had eaten dinner on my first night in California, and I wondered whether I would ever be back.

  The battalion was in total disarray. Under floodlights, Marines staged and restaged packs on the parade deck. First by company, then by platoon, then by company again. Wives and kids stood by, watching the circus, surely wondering how they could trust this organization to bring their loved ones back safely. It was cold for California, which seemed somehow fitting. Wynn and I counted heads and sat down on our packs to wait for the buses. Orion shone directly overhead. In the coming months, I would often think back to that moment as I gazed up at the constellation on very different nights in very different places.