Best American Magazine Writing 2013

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  This was a chess match: attack and counter.

  The late-winter rains saturated the patrol base and the surrounding fields, turning everything to calf-deep peanut butter that could suck the boots off a Marine’s feet. Moving through the fields exhausted the men and kept them exposed to rifle fire from distant tree lines, but they felt somewhat safe there, away from roads and trails, which were more likely laced with bombs. Until a farmer told the Marines that the Taliban had planted bombs in his field. The development rattled Tom. “The placement of IEDs in open fields is horrible,” he wrote in his journal. “The worst feeling is not knowing when your last step will be. That’s what takes a toll on your brain.”

  Over at Patrol Base Beatley, Sergeant Dan Clift had stepped on a land mine that raked his legs with shrapnel, but the wounds were light and he was expected back in a few days. Tom had to call in his own medevac helicopter that day, for an Afghan National Army soldier assigned to Dakota who had passed out during a foot patrol. “I hope I never have to call another medevac,” he wrote in his journal that night. “So many people don’t understand what it’s like to be responsible for the lives of the Marines and Navy corpsman under me. Every day is so stressful and I lose so much sleep worrying about the next day, planning and going over so much in my head, every move and decision calculated.”

  The bullet smacked the dirt between Tom and Ian, inches from their feet, as they stepped out of the compound they’d just finished searching. A second later they heard the shot, fired from a string of houses along Route Animal, three hundred yards to the northwest.

  “Let’s go,” Tom said.

  As the patrol fanned out and jogged into the field, moving toward the buildings, more gunmen opened fire, from several spots along Route Animal and in Cocheran Village, farther north. Muzzle flashes twinkled from alleyways and darkened windows. The Marines at Dakota were terrified of buried bombs—the utter lack of control—but they loved firefights. Here they could influence the outcome. Many of them had joined the Corps with fantasies of moments like this—sprinting across open ground as bullets kick up dirt around them and snap overhead, then diving onto the ground and laying down cover fire as their comrades bound forward, leapfrogging toward the enemy. These were bread-and-butter infantry skills.

  With Ian’s four-man team in the lead, Tom pushed the patrol forward, an exhausting movement through muddy fields crisscrossed by irrigation canals. Ian spotted a gunman firing at them beside a pump house near a mosque along Route Animal. He had been trained at the Marine Corps’s sniper school and carried an MK12 Special Purpose Rifle, a tricked-out version of the M-4 and M-16 rifles most Marines carry, fitted with a powerful scope. He could drop a man at a half-mile. He centered the crosshairs of his scope on the man’s head and fired as Tom, Lance Corporal Ryan Moore, and Navy Hospitalman Jesse Deller, the platoon’s medic, lobbed 40-millimeter grenades from launchers attached to their rifles.

  They found the gunman later in an empty house with grenade shrapnel stitched across his back and a hole in his head, stuffed with gauze. Tom called in a medevac helicopter for the man, who would die soon, and the Marines kept searching. The other fighters had fled, but they found blood trails and a cache of three remote controls and six receivers, a little win for the day—fewer buried bombs and at least one less insurgent to fire a rifle or trigger a bomb.

  But Cocheran Village had been an ongoing problem for the Marines, and killing a single Taliban fighter wouldn’t fix that. Fox Company would move into the area in force, search the buildings for weapons and bomb-making supplies, and kill or capture anyone who opposed them.

  “The weather is getting warmer, and more fighters are coming in every day,” Tom wrote in his journal a few days later, on March 10. “Tomorrow we are doing a company clearing operation to the north, where the worst fighting has been recently.”

  Jimmy’s and Tom’s men got the easy job: overwatch. Marines from First Platoon would sweep through and search the village while the Dakota Marines watched from a distance, to keep enemy fighters from moving into the village, and intercept or kill any insurgents trying to flee the area. Squirters, they called them.

  In the compound where Tom and Ian had nearly been shot a few days earlier, Tom sent Ian onto the rooftop, where he’d have a clear view of the village, four hundred yards to the north, and the surrounding fields and roads. Jimmy climbed onto the roof with him to plot target reference points on his map, should he need to call in mortar fire. Though Jimmy outranked Tom, he didn’t micromanage on patrols, and he let Tom maneuver the men. A platoon sergeant mostly stays in the background, running logistics, making sure the platoon has food, water, and ammunition, the resources to fight. On patrol, he would call in air support during firefights, or medevac helicopters, should someone get hurt; otherwise Jimmy acted like a rifleman, ready to charge an enemy position.

  Tom checked the perimeter security around the compound and then joined Ian and Jimmy on the roof. This was tedious work, hours of watching, waiting. But Ian was a talker, and as they lay on the roof watching the village, he told Tom and Jimmy about growing up with five brothers and a sister in a huge old farmhouse in rural Vermont, where their mother had home-schooled all of them and where he learned to play the viola. Every child played at least one instrument, and Ian’s brother Dylan made the viola and several of his siblings’ violins. Ian was the most adventurous and athletic, and he had mountain-biked, rock-climbed, and snowboarded in the nearby White Mountains. Now twenty-two, he’d been in the Marines for four years and wasn’t sure whether he would stay. Dylan worked for a Houston company called Canrig as a mud tester monitoring oil wells. Maybe he’d try that. Or he might go back to college, where he’d spent a year studying graphic design. A deployment offered plenty of time to plan a future.

  First Platoon finished the search, and the Dakota Marines covered their withdrawal. Before Ian, Jimmy, and Tom climbed off the rooftop, Jesse, the medic, snapped a picture of the three peering down at him, then they filed out of the compound and started home, down a tree-lined dirt road, with Ian walking point, the most dangerous position.

  Tom had conceded that argument weeks earlier. He had told Ian that walking point wasn’t a team leader’s job, that his place was farther back, directing movement. But Ian was determined: he didn’t want his men put at extra risk, men who had wives and kids. Before the deployment he’d even broken up with his girlfriend of more than a year because he didn’t want her saddled with the burden of constant worry, or caring for him should he come home crippled.

  Matt Westbrook, the dog handler, and Ian had argued about walking point as well. Yes, Matt had a wife, but he also had a bomb-sniffing dog, and he couldn’t let Ian assume the added danger on his behalf. Ian agreed to sometimes let Westbrook run point, and earlier that day Matt had said he’d lead the patrol back to Dakota. But by midafternoon Holly was tired, and a tired bomb dog is useless.

  “I’ll take us back,” Ian said.

  Matt nodded and fell in behind him on the road, with Holly between them, zigzagging down the road, sniffing.

  “Sergeant Whorl,” Ian called back, “do you want me to stay on the road or go through the field?”

  Moving on foot through Afghanistan offered nothing but bad options. Of course the roads were dangerous. But now the fields were, too. The men were tired from being out all day, and a quick shot back to Dakota would limit their time exposed in the open.

  “Stay on the road,” Tom said. Ian turned south, sweeping the mine detector before him, an olive-drab metronome. Tick tock.

  With the mine detector, his rifle, ammunition, grenades, body armor and helmet, two radios, the bomb jammer, water, and medical supplies, Ian carried close to ninety pounds, more than any other Marine in the patrol. He could handle the load: at five foot seven, he had weighed 150 pounds when he entered the Marines in 2007, but he had since bulked up to 205. He figured carrying extra weight would increase the patrol’s overall effectiveness—a weaker and overloaded Marine falling
behind put everyone at risk. Besides, that way other Marines couldn’t complain about their lighter loads, or not being able jump across canals with the awkward weight.

  Ian turned south, onto a tree-lined road that split two muddy fields. In a month the fields would be thick with waist-high poppy plants.

  Tick tock.

  Fifty yards up, the road crossed a canal just in front of a large, high-walled compound to the left.

  “Muller,” Tom said, “slow it up a bit.” The patrol had stretched out after the Afghan soldiers, farther back, stopped to question a farmer. Tom and Matt picked up their pace and closed the distance with Ian, who worked the mine detector back and forth.

  Tick tock.

  Holly sniffed the air, five feet behind Ian, as he stepped onto the dirt bridge that spanned the canal.

  Tick tock.

  Tick.

  Matt still can’t figure out how Holly wasn’t killed.

  2. Repercussions

  With a patrol outside the wire, Dakota ran on a skeleton crew: a Marine in each guard post and a team leader manning the Combat Operations Center—that little desk in Tom and Jimmy’s room—to relay messages between the patrol and higher-ups. Today the job fell to Ryan Moore, at nineteen the youngest of Tom’s three team leaders.

  He’d grown up in Navarre, a town of maybe fifteen hundred in eastern Ohio, moved out at sixteen, and spent his high school years lifting weights, repairing cars, and smoking weed. In the Marine Corps he found his groove. He listened and he worked harder than others, and when he arrived at Camp Lejeune after boot camp and infantry training, Tom noticed and soon put him in charge of three other Marines. Ryan would rather have been outside the wire leading his men and trying to kill Taliban, but he knew the importance of his role back at Dakota, should the patrol find trouble.

  Before the Marines walked out of the patrol base that morning, Ryan had hugged Ian. They’d had enough close calls and heard enough terrible stories to know that life out here was utterly unpredictable. Many of the Marines made a point of telling their friends how much they cared about them.

  “I love you,” Ryan said.

  “I love you, too,” Ian told him.

  From Ian’s first weekend at Camp Lejeune, five months before the deployment, Ryan drew him into his group of friends, and they spent much of their free time together, watching movies in the barracks or hitting the Jacksonville bars. Five-cent Pabst Blue Ribbon at Gus’ on Wednesdays. The mechanical bull on Fridays. All of which suited Ian. As he was always telling his friends, “Live each day like it’s your last.”

  Where Ryan could be reserved, Ian was class-clown loud, all smile and uncontained energy, like at Sergeant Clift’s platoon party before they left for Afghanistan, when he ran around the house in an orange wig, slugging Jägermeister. After he’d passed out in a recliner, Ryan and the other guys posed with him for pictures.

  Though Ian had been trained as an infantryman, he’d spent his first three years in the Corps with the Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team, a sort of Marine SWAT team. When he arrived at Lejeune, he was new to the role of infantry team leader, like Ryan. They traded knowledge and learned together, then taught classes for the rest of the squad on everything from the use and maintenance of machine guns to calling for medevac helicopters over the radio. They peppered Tom with questions about his job as squad leader so they’d know exactly what to do if they had to step up. They regarded their roles as young leaders with something close to sacred respect. Ryan tried to set an example for his men and could often be seen picking up trash around Dakota or fixing a broken piece of equipment—not because Tom had told him to, but because it was the right thing to do. “If I know what needs to be done every day, I’m not even going to make him waste his breath by coming over to tell me,” he says. “I’m going to make sure me and my guys already have it done.” Likewise, when one of Ian’s men had been caught sitting in his sleeping bag during a cold night on guard, Tom left it to Ian to decide the punishment. They filled a hundred sandbags for perimeter defenses—as a team, Ian included, because they were responsible for one another, and an individual lapse in judgment could affect them all.

  At Dakota, Ryan and Ian still spent much of their free time together, watching movies or lifting weights. They worked out every day at Dakota’s outdoor gym, an elaborate collection of homemade equipment built from plywood and two-by-fours, with sandbags, metal stakes, and spools of concertina wire as weights. Ryan figured they might get in a good late-afternoon workout when Ian returned from the overwatch mission.

  The patrol had been out for several hours, and he knew they’d be back soon. He tried to call for their current location over the radio, but transmissions could be spotty inside the building, so he climbed atop the generator in the courtyard. From there he could see over Dakota’s wall and send an unbroken line-of-sight radio message. As he raised the radio to his mouth, a bomb exploded near a string of trees a couple hundred yards north, just where he figured the Marines would be. Ryan saw an eruption of dirt, like a mini-volcano, that threw debris fifty feet into the field along the road, and a second later the sound reached him, a deep crunch and rumble.

  He radioed for a situation report, and after a long moment Staff Sergeant Malachowski’s voice responded, calm and deliberate, with a medevac request.

  “Muller’s hit,” Jimmy said. “Heavy lacerations, arterial bleeding, left leg and left arm.”

  And then Ryan understood. That wasn’t debris arcing over the trees and into the field. That was Ian.

  The blast had thrown Matt to the ground and slammed into Tom as if he’d been whacked with a giant mallet. A wave of dirt and rock washed over him, and shrapnel tore holes in his helmet cover. He staggered and caught himself and watched Ian fly through the air, over a twenty-foot tree. He heard him land in the field, a heavy thud, and he leaped across the canal and ran toward him. Even at a distance, he saw red on Ian’s body, everywhere. Matt, knocked unconscious for a few seconds, sat up in the road. Holly was unscathed by the bomb. She sat beside him, waiting for direction.

  The medic, Jesse, was several men back in the patrol, and running forward before Ian hit the ground. A blast that big, someone up there would be hurt. Tom was already crouched over Ian when Jesse arrived. He threw down his aid bag, a backpack stuffed with thirty pounds of bandages, splints, IV bags, painkillers, and airway tubes.

  Ian didn’t move. But he was alive, and struggling to breathe, choking on blood pooling in his throat from deep cuts across his face and internal bleeding. Tom and Jesse dragged him another thirty feet from the blast site—farther from any secondary bombs, a common insurgent tactic to compound casualties by hitting Marines giving aid to their injured. Jesse ran his finger down Ian’s neck and found the notch at his Adam’s apple, then sliced a half-inch slit in the cartilage and inserted a plastic breathing tube. He and Tom looped two tourniquets over Ian’s left arm and left leg, broken and gashed by the blast. A huge knot had already formed on his forehead, likely a sign that his skull had fractured and his brain was swelling.

  On the road, Matt stood on weak legs. His tongue and face had gone numb, and his body tingled. He hadn’t yet started puking from the concussion, but he would soon. He needed to sweep the area for secondary bombs, but he couldn’t think clearly. He ordered Holly out to search, but she stayed beside him. Tom saw Matt standing in the road, unfocused and dazed.

  “Westbrook, stop,” he said. “You need to sit down.”

  The tourniquets had stanched the bleeding on Ian’s arms, and Jesse bandaged his torn face. He and Tom talked to Ian as they worked on him, but he didn’t respond. He lay motionless and pulled ragged breaths through the hole in his throat.

  Several Marines pushed into the field to secure a landing zone for the medevac, which now raced toward them from the north, low over the fields, and Jimmy tossed out a green smoke grenade to mark their position. The massive twin-rotor Chinook helicopter, flown by a British crew, landed fast and hard, less than a hundred feet
from Tom and Jesse, and they bent over Ian to shield him from the wave of dirt thrown up by the rotor wash. Together with the flight medics, they carried their friend onto the helicopter and watched him rise up and disappear beyond the trees.

  Twenty-seven minutes after the explosion, trauma doctors received Ian in the hospital on Camp Bastion, a remarkable feat of battlefield medicine. Not that it mattered.

  Nina Whorl knew before her husband that Ian was dead.

  She was deployed, too, just thirty miles away on Camp Bastion, where she worked administration and logistics for a Marine aviation unit. From her office, she heard over the radio that medevac was delivering an “angel” from Tom’s battalion, the aircrews’ term for deceased service members. Fearing it was her husband, she made a phone call and learned that it was Ian, then she sent a simple e-mail, which waited for Tom back at Dakota: I already heard. Are you okay?

  They had met on Parris Island, where, as a primary marksmanship instructor, he taught new recruits how to shoot and volunteered with the Burton Fire District in his downtime. She was a sergeant, like him, and had been in the Marine Corps since 2001. They had met briefly through a mutual friend, but when she stopped by to see him at a high school football game where he was on call with the ambulance in case of injuries, he was hooked: on the blond hair, the Tennessee accent, and the sass. “I’m not a touchy-feely guy at all,” he says. “People call me emotionless, but I looked at her and I knew.” It was surprising for Tom to be swayed by such whimsy, and for Nina, too. They had both had marriages end badly and leave them hardened. They had forgotten that two people can be good to each other, and good for each other.