Best American Magazine Writing 2013

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  “She no-shit saved my life,” Tom says. “I was in a downward spiral.” He compares his life before Nina to that of firefighter Tommy Gavin, of the television show Rescue Me: destructive and alcohol-fueled. Gently, she dialed him back, and she found her own release from the persistent suspicion that a man would be careless with her heart. “We have a good understanding of how life can be,” Tom says. “We leaned on each other at the same time.” They were soft with each other, playful. Early on, she locked the car doors while they were at a gas station and made Tom dance before she’d let him back in, and that became part of them. He’s danced in the rain and in front of his Marines.

  Nina had two young boys from a first marriage—Lee, four years old, and Andrew, not yet a year—and from the beginning Tom regarded them as his own. “He’s very protective, of me and the kids and his Marines,” she says. “He reminds me of a dog. If he could pee on stuff to own it, he would.”

  They married in October 2007, near her family’s home in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Tom left the Marines a few months later and became a full-time firefighter. But that put a financial pinch on the family, and by the next year he was back in the Corps. A year after that he was in Afghanistan, thirty miles south of northern Marjah in the Garmsir District.

  That deployment stretched from May to November 2009, but he best remembers seven endless days in July that summed up the terror, frustration, and dark comedy of being a grunt in Afghanistan.

  A convoy of thickly armored trucks called a Route Clearance Patrol had been crawling down Redskins, a road near Tom’s patrol base that the Taliban sowed with bombs as fast as the Marines could find them. The first truck used heavy rollers attached to its front end to detonate pressure-activated bombs. Trucks farther back had enormous mechanical arms for digging into suspicious-looking dirt patches and sophisticated electronics to jam radio-controlled detonators. Marines inside peered from three-inch-thick windows searching for signs: an exposed bit of wire running from the embankment into a field, or a plastic baggie that might hide a radio transmitter. This was nervous, slow-motion work, and while the patrol found many bombs, many bombs found them first, announced with booms like little earthquakes.

  From his patrol base more than half a mile away, Tom felt the shock wave roll through him as a plume of dirt and smoke bloomed on the horizon.

  The blast had heaved a fourteen-ton armored truck into a canal along the road. While maneuvering another vehicle to pull out the damaged truck, the patrol hit another bomb. Tom’s squad headed up Redskins, escorting a wrecker truck. Halfway there, the first vehicle, with Jesse in the back, rolled over a bomb. From the second vehicle, Tom watched the truck lift several feet off the ground and slam down. He ran up the road, popped his head in a blown-open door, and found Jesse and the others rattled but uninjured.

  The wrecker continued to the first blast site, which left Tom with nine guys and one working truck. Sit tight, his bosses told him. They sent another wrecker the next morning, and a bomb destroyed it. Sit tight, they told him again, we’ll get you tomorrow. By day three, he and his men had drank most of their water and eaten all the rations stored in the truck, single-serving MREs. They ate watermelon from a farmer’s field and drank water from an irrigation ditch. Every day the Marines sent more patrols to get them, and the patrols hit more bombs. At night Tom listened to the Taliban attack other stranded patrols. On day five, a bridge collapsed, stalling another rescue. On day six, a wrecker finally reached them, but they found another IED on the drive home. Staff Sergeant David Spicer, a bomb disposal tech, crept up the road to rig it with explosives. Sergeant Michael Heede, a combat engineer who had been stranded with Tom, was walking up the road to help Spicer when the bomb detonated. Tom watched both men disappear. He and his men spent the seventh day picking up the pieces.

  A month later, two men from Tom’s platoon, Lance Corporals Bruce Ferrell and Patrick Schimmell, died in a bomb blast while on a foot patrol. Again, Tom and his men searched for what remained.

  Yet his squad was lucky, these thirteen men who had survived so many firefights and explosions without a single wound. Like the afternoon walking home along a field’s edge, in the quiet moments after another gunfight. A Talib had triggered a bomb under one of Tom’s light machine gunners, and an enormous concussion punched through the patrol. The bomb, big enough to kill but buried too deep for maximum effect, tossed the Marine into the air. He tumbled to the dirt, popped onto his feet, and fired into the tree line, where the triggerman likely hid. “You missed, motherfuckers!” he screamed. “You can’t kill me!”

  When Tom came home, Nina greeted him with an eight-foot banner, using the nickname his company commander had given the squad: WELCOME HOME SGT. WHORL AND HIS IMMORTALS!

  During the second deployment, she often thought about that nickname.

  “He thought he was bulletproof,” she says.

  Tom, Jesse, and Ryan stood over Ian’s cot and stared at everything that represented his life over the past two months. Cans of tuna and sardines his mother had sent. Headphones. A pair of flip-flops. The sleeping bag he had woken up in that morning.

  “Start packing his gear,” Tom said.

  He hadn’t yet read Nina’s e-mail, and hadn’t received official word about Ian. Maybe there was a chance. But even if Ian somehow lived, Tom knew he wouldn’t be coming back to Dakota, and the longer the Marines saw their friend’s gear and an empty cot, the more distracted they’d be on patrol.

  This was quiet work that needed few words. They separated his Marine-issue equipment—night-vision goggles, hand grenades, GPS—which needed to be accounted for on property books. Tom had Ian’s bent rifle, shattered radios, shredded gear, and bloodied clothes in a pile next to his cot in the COC, which left the most personal possessions: his journal and his cell phone, letters from his family, his uniforms, and a crocheted cross from a family friend.

  While Ian’s friends finished separating and packing his belongings, the Fox Company first sergeant, James Breland, sent Tom a message over the secure instant-messaging system. Tom read it and pounded his fist on the plywood desk, then called together the rest of the squad.

  “Corporal Muller is dead,” he told them.

  Some of the men cried.

  “Tomorrow we’re going out,” Tom said. “The next day we’re going out. And we’re going to keep going out until our relief is here and we go home.”

  Late that night, Tom walked into the darkness just outside Dakota, where no one could see or hear him, and he wept. He had trained Ian to replace him as squad leader, so sure was he that he’d be the one to die, that his time had come. He did not expect to return from the deployment, and he could accept that. But losing Ian broke his heart.

  As Tom stood alone in the blackness of southern Afghanistan, a late-afternoon sun pushed long shadows across the streets of North Danville, Vermont, where Susanne Muller had been running errands. Groceries. Auto parts store. Library. The last stop was the post office, to mail a package to Ian. She’d sent more than a dozen already in the short time he’d been in Afghanistan, along with thirty pounds of cheddar cheese donated by Cabot and several boxes of jerky and smoked meat from Vermont Smoke and Cure. But this package could wait. Her phone battery had just died, and she couldn’t bear being out of contact, should her husband, Clif, or any of her other six kids need to reach her, but mostly if Ian called.

  She’d last spoken to him on Sunday, five days earlier. “It’s so good to hear your voice,” she had said. “I was worried about you.” She’d never told him that before. Of course she felt it; worry consumed her, and she barely slept. But she didn’t want to add to his stress, and she wanted him to feel he could share anything with her. Two days earlier, when Ian told them he’d gotten his first kill, during the March 3 firefight, she had tried to sound supportive, even let out a little cheer.

  “They take our sweet boys from our arms and they train them to kill,” she says, not meant as a criticism of the Marine Corps but as a pragmatic assess
ment. She wanted to prepare for what war would do to him. She read about the fight in Afghanistan, learned the Marines’ lingo, and watched YouTube videos of firefights to better understand what he was experiencing. She even got her passport before Ian deployed. If he was grievously injured, he would be evacuated first to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center at Ramstein Air Base, in Germany, where he might stay for several days if his condition was unstable. The Pentagon arranges travel to Germany for the families of service members injured so badly they may not make it home, but Susanne didn’t want to waste time.

  Ian figured that time could be fast approaching. Talking to his dad after the March 3 firefight, he said the platoon had a big mission coming up, and that he was uneasy. In the past he’d felt he had a shield wrapped around him in battle. Now that confidence had faded. “My luck is running out,” he said.

  By late afternoon on March 11, Susanne was home, sitting on the living room couch reading a biography of Osama bin Laden. The Mullers were a Christian family, and around Vermont, more people opposed armed conflict than supported it. “I wanted to be able to intelligently support my son at war,” she says.

  “Mom, there’s a cop car outside,” said her youngest son, Reuben, walking down the stairs. “And there’s a gray car out there, too.”

  That set her heart to racing. She rose and walked to the door and saw four men step from the car, all in uniform: a Navy chaplain and three Marines. For months to come, that scene would replay in slow motion, often as she cried herself to sleep.

  Clif was beside her now as they stepped onto the front deck. She fell to her knees. “No. No. No,” she wailed. “My sweet Ian. My sweet Ian.”

  “Come up and tell us what you have to tell us,” Clif told the men, trying to be strong enough for both of them. But it was more than an hour before Susanne’s hysteria had faded and she had stopped crying long enough for the Marines to deliver their official message: that Corporal Ian Muller had been killed by an improvised explosive device while on a foot patrol in Afghanistan.

  “Did anyone else die?” Susanne asked. “Did anyone else get hurt?”

  The Marines told her they weren’t authorized to release that information.

  When the men left that night, Clif kicked the coffee table so hard a leg snapped, and then they cried together for hours, until every muscle in Susanne’s face ached.

  At four a.m., Susanne looked at the casualty report the Marines had brought, which Clif had folded up and shoved in a pocket. Along with detailing Ian’s injuries—massive head wound, fractured left leg and right arm—it said he’d been identified by Staff Sergeant James Malachowski and the corpsman, Jesse Deller, so Susanne knew they hadn’t been killed. Through an online parents’ support forum, she’d become friends with Alison Malachowski and Wendy Deller, and only learned later that they were the mothers of the platoon sergeant and medic at Patrol Base Dakota. Alison and Wendy wouldn’t have heard about Ian yet, because of the communications blackouts initiated after any casualty to ensure that next of kin hear through the official notification process and not from another Marine e-mailing or calling home. So Susanne made two calls, long before dawn, when a ringing phone is often the harbinger of terrible news. She could say just a few words before she started sobbing: “Ian stepped on an IED, and he’s dead.”

  The next morning at Dakota, the Marines made a battle cross memorial in the courtyard, the traditional farewell to a fallen comrade: a rifle stuck in the ground, bayonet first, between a pair of boots, with a helmet on the rifle buttstock. Ryan hung a pair of his own dog tags from the handgrip, because they didn’t have Ian’s. The men approached on their own, knelt by the display, shared a few words with their friend, then gathered for a group picture. Tom wore the same pants from the day before, smeared with Ian’s blood.

  A convoy of armored vehicles rolled up to Dakota and delivered Lieutenant Colonel John Harrill, the battalion commander; Sergeant Major Richard Mathern, the battalion’s highest-ranking noncommissioned officer; and Captain Adam Sacchetti, Fox Company’s commander. They wanted to see the blast site, so Tom and his men would take them. And because Ian was dead and Matt was still rattled and puking from the explosion, Tom needed someone to lead the patrol.

  “Fazenbaker,” he said, “you’re on point.”

  Corporal Craig Fazenbaker nodded.

  Tom could see the distress on his men’s faces. He felt it himself. They were shaken and scared, and rage knotted their guts. “You have to keep pushing,” he had told them. “You have to. There’s no option. Because if you don’t, then we’ve done nothing, we’ve accomplished nothing.”

  So they left Dakota and walked north up through the fields and onto the road where Ian had been blown up. Not far from the first blast site they found a second IED along the road, and as they waited for the bomb techs from Explosive Ordnance Disposal to come blow it up, the Taliban opened fire from a cluster of buildings to the west. The higher-ups and most of the Marines with them jumped into a canal for cover. Maybe Tom was numbed by Ian’s death or had just become accustomed to being shot at, but he stood in the road, then walked into the field, rifle held casually at his side, to where Lance Corporal William Saunders and Moore lay on their bellies. Bullets kicked up bursts of dirt as the gunmen walked the rounds closer to the Marines. Saunders fired in the general direction of the incoming fire. Tom poked him with the toe of his boot. “Hey, you’re wasting ammunition,” he said. “You need to aim when you’re shooting.”

  After the patrol, Tom took the satellite phone outside, sat on an ammunition can, and flipped through the notebook in which he’d written his men’s next-of-kin details. He tried to prepare himself for the conversation, but he didn’t know how. As he’d told Ian and his other men as they trained up for Afghanistan at Camp Lejeune, he could only give the broad strokes of what to expect and how to respond. “War is something I can’t teach you or explain to you,” he told them. “You can’t really fathom it until you go through it.” Facedown in a ditch as bullets skip off the ground around you. Or the sledgehammer force of a bomb blast. Or picking up pieces of a friend. Or calling his parents.

  “Mr. Muller,” he said, “this is Tom Whorl, Ian’s squad leader.”

  Susanne ran downstairs and picked up the other phone, and Tom told them what a strong leader Ian was, that he was Tom’s right-hand man. He did not tell them he’d been grooming Ian to assume his job, convinced that he’d die during this deployment. But he did tell them that their son had been unconscious the whole time and felt no pain.

  Tom passed the phone to the others—Ryan, Matt, Jesse—who told her that her son was loud and funny and selfless, that he encouraged other Marines to work out at Dakota’s gym by poking fun of them, and that he carried so much gear and walked point so that others wouldn’t have to.

  In Dakota’s Combat Operations Center, Jimmy sat on his cot with a notebook propped on his leg.

  Mr. and Mrs. Muller,

  I know how little my words mean when it comes to losing a son such as Ian. He is one of the finest Marines I have served beside, but more than that he was my friend. Ian was the type of guy that everyone could not help but like. He could lift everyone’s spirits just by coming into a room. Ian and I shared a lot of things in common. We would talk about dirt bikes and tubing down the Potomac river. Then one day I found out he had been to Westminster, MD, to visit his brother, with all of the same interests we share I was surprised we had never met before. Ian would hit the gym every day out here, and all the Marines would also do so hoping they could be in the same shape as him. He could not wait to go to the beach when he got back.

  Ian would talk about his family all the time, he was very proud of his brothers, and would joke how they got all of the height in the family. One day I was listening to classical music when Ian told me all about how he played the viola his entire life, and how all of his brothers played classical instruments. He went on for a long time about how one of his brothers made second chair in the Vermont symphony orchest
ra. He was very proud of that.

  Ian was the leader all Marines want to become and the friend everyone wants to have. Of the Marines I have fought beside, Ian is one I would choose to do so with again and again. I can remember one instance where the two of us were pinned down in a canal, with rounds impacting around him he was still directing his Marines to cover while he engaged the enemy.

  On March 11th, Ian, Sgt. Tom Whorl and I were on a roof overlooking a small village. The three of us sat up there for three hours and joked and laughed about everything while we watched the village. Two pictures are enclosed of us on that roof top, taken by his friend, Doc Deller.

  Your family is in the prayers of everyone at PB Dakota and we thank you for Ian. He is truly the type of man who will remain in our thoughts forever.

  Staff Sergeant James Malachowski

  3rd Plt., Plt. Sgt.

  The letter wouldn’t reach the Mullers for two weeks, until the morning after they had returned from another funeral for a Dakota Marine.

  3. “Building Clear”

  A week after Ian died, the Marines pushed northwest again, back toward the villages of Five Points and Cocheran. But this time they took a dozen local militiamen, known as ISCI—Interim Security for Critical Infrastructure. They were mostly untrained in military tactics, wore civilian clothes, and looked more like Taliban fighters than soldiers, but they were reshaping the battlefield in ways the Marines couldn’t. The few Afghan National Army soldiers stationed at Dakota were from northern Afghanistan and could barely communicate with locals, since most of them spoke Dari rather than Pashto, the language of the south. They could sometimes read a situation better than the Marines, but they were still outsiders. The ISCI were locals. Most had lived in the area since birth and could pick up on everything the Marines couldn’t: out-of-town fighters, strange accents, and locals who were helping the Taliban.