The war I had known was one filled with open combat, one characterized by endless columns of armored vehicles, cannon fire and artillery, and punishing air strikes. With his experiences in Ramadi the previous year, Lieutenant Grubb’s recollection of Iraq mirrored my own, as did the memories of my fire support advisor, 1st Lt. Matt Bates. A chiseled, shaved-headed Naval Academy graduate from Oklahoma, Bates had served his first Iraq deployment the previous year in Al Qa’im. Quick-witted and intense, he took his job as an artilleryman seriously. But he also expressed his lighter side by routinely repeating random bits of movie dialogue and scenes from South Park. His tour in Al Qa’im had been one punctuated by both fire support missions and provisional infantry operations. Like Grubb and me, Bates was used to the kinetic environment that had been common during the force surge the previous year. It took significant effort on the part of Captain Flynn, my operations advisor, who himself had served on a MiTT team the previous year, to convince us that our role as advisors was not to wage war with the Iraqi army, but to instruct them on how to wage war. The surest way for us to lose our jobs, Flynn informed us on several occasions, was for the MiTT team to be kicking in doors. It was our job to make the Iraqis do it, to teach them how to do it.
Yet as the course progressed we heard more and more war stories from the instructors. Our training in close-combat marksmanship did little to alter our perception of the dangerous situation we envisioned ourselves walking into, nor did the training we received in subjects such as machine-gun employment and combat first aid. For three days the team was instructed in battlefield trauma management by a former Navy chief—a veteran of multiple tours with Force Reconnaissance units—and his curvy, buxom wife. We learned the graphic art of applying tourniquets and pressure dressings, and we practiced inserting nasal pharyngeal tubes—“nose hoses”—deep into each others’ nasal passages and throats. We rehearsed procedures for treating sucking chest wounds, and we practiced the application of needle thoracentesis by inserting heavy-gauged needles into filled sandbags that simulated the chest cavity of a casualty suffering a tension pneumothorax—a sucking chest wound. Exercises included work with fake blood and “moulage” kits that realistically simulated horrible wounds. It was grim instruction and practical application, but at the same time it developed a confidence among the team members that told us we would be prepared to treat each other properly if the shit hit the fan. The training far exceeded that which my Marines and I had conducted prior to the invasion five years earlier. And as the team rehearsed the procedures again and again I found myself wondering if my single Marine casualty during the war’s beginning might have been saved had my company undergone such rigorous, realistic preparation.
The gravity of the training aside, our first-aid course was not without humor. On one occasion, as the team stood in a semicircle practicing with the composite graphite and Velcro tourniquets we had been issued, SSgt. Shaun Leek was having difficulty getting the device’s strap to fit around his massive quadriceps muscle. Leek, the team’s gravel-voiced operations and fire support chief, was an avid bodybuilder with a forceful personality. With a previous tour on the drill field under his belt, he quickly found his niche as the “hammer” on the team. He was an SNCO capable of unleashing drill instructor hell on the Marines, yet instantly being able to transition to the role of mentor. Beneath his hulking, hard-assed exterior lay a warmhearted father and leader. But on this occasion, as another Marine struggled to fit the tourniquet around Leek’s leg, frustration set in. I summed up the situation.
“It’s easy, Staff Sergeant,” I said. “Your leg’s too fucking big.”
He looked at me, perplexed.
“But sir,” he replied. “You told us with all the extra gear they would be issuing us that we needed to hit the gym hard to be able to carry it all.”
“Well, maybe not that hard,” I suggested, laughing.
And Leek was correct: the extra equipment was causing difficulties for all of us. The Marine Corps had begun issuing its new generation of body armor, and even in training the weight was killing us. Named the Modular Tactical Vest (MTV), the new armor was a bulky monstrosity that attempted to crush us beneath its suffocating weight each time we donned it. It wasn’t long before we began aching for the days of our old flak vests. The issuing of the MTV, which was advertised to provide the ultimate degree of protection against bullets and shrapnel, as well as the multitudes of other specialized equipment handed to us, only enhanced our perception that we were going to Iraq to fight it out again in the streets. We were wrong, and it wasn’t until the team deployed to the Marine desert base at Twentynine Palms, California, for our final training exercise that we began to gain a greater appreciation for what lay ahead of us as advisors in Iraq.
Mojave Viper was the capstone exercise for all Marine battalions deploying to Iraq. For four weeks the force would train in counterinsurgency tactics, and the evolution culminated in a three-day final exercise. In the preceding years the training and exercise evaluation staff aboard Twentynine Palms had filled the high-desert passes with artificial Iraqi towns and populated them with Arabic-speaking Iraqi-American role players. It was as close to being in Iraq as you could get, and once immersed in the “Iraqi” village of Wadi al Sahara it was easy to forget that it was merely a training exercise.
As part of this, our team was attached to an infantry battalion for the final exercise in December 2007. We embedded with a “battalion” of the Iraqi army, and for three days we forged working relationships with the role players acting the parts of the battalion staff and the soldiers. It was an eye-opening experience, and we quickly learned that our role as an advisor team would focus more on the development of an Iraqi battalion staff than it would on conducting routine operations such as patrolling. Over the course of three nights I quickly developed a relationship with the “Iraqi colonel,” Abu Fayehdi, himself a genuine Iraqi in real life who had left his home country before Saddam Hussein’s rise to power. His advice was simple: Build a relationship with your counterpart; the Iraqi army will do nothing with you or for you until they really know you. Mistakes will be made, but learn from them and continue forward.
Mojave Viper was an important evolution for the team in another regard. For two weeks we froze our asses off as we lived and worked out of an unheated aluminum Quonset hut aboard Twentynine Palms’ Camp Wilson. It was among the coldest training exercises most of us had ever endured, and I waited for everyone’s true character to be revealed. I was pleasantly surprised. The Marines worked together in the harsh, high-desert environment with a sense of purpose, and in their misery they still found time for humor. Shivering together in the icebox of our hut, huddled around coffee pots and space heaters, they traded jokes, played cards, and passed around tins of tobacco and packs of cigarettes. During the final exercise, when our Iraqi army compound came under frequent enemy fire, the team would don their heavy gear, hurry to their battle stations, and rush outside the wire to chase down the attacking insurgents.
In the preceding months, despite the hours and days of mindless classroom instruction and field events, the Marines had molded themselves into a real team, and I found absent in myself the misgivings and concerns that had hounded me as a young, uncertain company commander prior to my deployment to Iraq in 2003. A new dawn had risen for me as a leader, and as we gathered in the Officers’ Club after the exercise, drank beers together, and congratulated ourselves on our crushing defeat of the enemy in Wadi al Sahara, I genuinely looked forward to deploying to combat with this group of men.
Chapter 4
Gear
The convoy roster lists my name, and even though it is just another admin run to Camp Al Qa’im I prepare to don the same gear as if going into a full-scale urban assault. Death seeks everyone here, not discriminating between logistical convoys and combat patrols.
I begin by pulling on the tan, fire-retardant Nomex flight suit. The suit has a peculiar quality—during the winter its thin material lets the col
d in, and during the summer it somehow manages to keep heat trapped against the body. It is the same kind of suit my father wore when he flew during Vietnam and the Cold War. And in its bagginess and pocket-lined sleeves and legs I imagine myself in his shoes, flying patrol after patrol, each time not knowing if my men and I will come back.
My boots are next. Hundreds of years of modern warfare, entire textbooks cataloging countless revolutions in military affairs, and one maxim continues to stand firm: Your boots are your best friend. I know from hard experience that if your feet are miserable, you are miserable. And I refuse to go through that hell again. So I change my socks every day and shower my feet with Gold Bond’s medicated foot powder. I worry each time the warm advance of a blister rises to the surface, and I redouble my efforts to keep my feet clean and dry. But I am fighting a losing battle, because the weight of my gear keeps constant pressure on my feet, causing them to sweat and grind against the insoles of my boots. And I resign myself to the fact that my feet will never be the same.
Hanging on a wooden cross in the corner of my hut, my body armor waits for me to once again shoulder its crushing load. As I contort myself into unnatural positions to pull it over my head and secure it firmly against my torso, I immediately feel the rigidity across my chest, the pulling on my shoulders, and the worrisome tingling in my lower back. I begin to sweat, and I haven’t even ventured outside into the stifling desert heat yet. The flight suit and the armor trap everything in like the chemical suit I once wore, and beads of sweat run down the length of my body and rest in pools in my boots.
My body armor barely resembles the vest I wore during the war’s beginning. I remember how the old vest was little more than a Kevlar blanket, not much different in concept or degree of protection from the even older flak jacket I wore when I first joined the Marine Corps. I remember my complaints about its weight and the heat, and I remember that back in 2003 at the war’s beginning almost no one had the ballistic plate inserts designed for the vest. At the time I wondered how anyone would be able to move around with the added weight of the plates on the chest and back.
But, again, the war has evolved, and with it so has my body armor. Everyone has the ballistic plates now; that was guaranteed after it became an issue during the presidential campaign of 2004. Only now the body armor has additional plates hanging along my ribs, and more than ever movement is constricted. The side plates force my arms out from my sides; this is made even worse by the bulky first-aid kit fastened under one arm and the utility pouch under the other. I walk around with limbs outstretched like a gorilla. Magazines of rifle and pistol ammunition are strapped to my chest because that is the only way I can get to them, and my handheld radio hangs next to them for easy access too. My pistol rests in a drop holster on my thigh, and extra gear I have deemed essential lines both the holster’s mount and the padded utility belt I wear around my chafed hips. I constantly adjust and readjust my gear, seeking the perfect solution that maximizes comfort and equipment accessibility. But each time I come up short. I make a mental note of what’s wrong, where my gear pinches, what I cannot access, and I promise myself to correct it the next time I make adjustments.
My Kevlar helmet waits for me to don it, and like the rest of my gear it is not the same model I wore five years ago. I am thankful, because the old helmet was heavier and too uncomfortable. I remember hardly ever wearing it because it gave me headaches. The new Kevlar is lighter and padded on the inside like a football player’s helmet. It fits on my head with the snug comfort of a weighty baseball cap. And even though it retains heat, makes my head sweat, and still causes headaches, I don’t remove it at the first opportunity like I did before, because there were no IEDs in 2003, and there were no snipers.
My Nomex flight gloves and ballistic glasses go on last, because I don’t want my hands to burn or lose my eyesight if an IED detonates next to me. I also wear pads to protect my knees inside my Humvee, because I can’t take the bumps as easily as I used to. And because I know what it feels like when an armored, two-hundred-pound Humvee door closes on my leg.
Loaded up with all of my gear, I grab my rifle and night-vision goggles from the armory and waddle to my vehicle. My thoughts turn to a study I once read. I think about the underlying theme of the study, that as the fighting load and protective equipment escalates, your chances of getting hit and dying actually increase rather than decrease. I also remember one of the first books I ever read as a lieutenant—S. L. A. Marshall’s The Soldier’s Load and the Mobility of a Nation—and how it talked about the ridiculous weights that men under arms are forced to carry. That book was written in the 1950s. I think about the lip service that has been paid to it over the decades, and yet the fighting load has gotten heavier, hotter, and bulkier.
Squeezing myself into the cubbyhole of my Humvee, I feel the pressure of the body armor shift from my shoulders down to my lumbar spine, and I know I’ll be lucky if I don’t have back problems for the rest of my life. As the convoy leaves the wire I hope I will not have to dismount the Humvee until I reach my destination, because walking even the shortest distance is exhausting. I wonder if I could run wearing all this gear, and the thought makes me laugh, because as it is I can barely walk. My gait is more like a waddle, and I think about that study once again.
I realize that, at age thirty-six, I am getting too old for this crap. My knees, shoulders, and back are worn out from years of this—from humping body armor and Kevlar helmets, from lifting weights and bouncing around in armored vehicles. I understand why so many old, retired infantry Marines walk gingerly and slightly hunched over, because I know the kinds of grinding abuse their bodies have endured. I wonder if that will eventually be me, and I am sure of one thing: if my body armor and fighting load gets any heavier, I am guaranteed to spend my twilight years just as they do, nursing sore joints, tired bones, and sleepless memories.
Chapter 5
Transit
As February drew to a close an Army CH-47 Chinook helicopter dropped me and my team off at the bustling hub of Camp Fallujah, a sprawling American camp that was home not only to Multi-National Force-West (MNF-W; the I MEF headquarters for all Coalition units in Al Anbar province), but also Regimental Combat Team 1 (RCT-1) and numerous other military units. Five years earlier my company and I had been in Kuwait, uncertain of our future as we prepared to march north into Iraq. Now I found myself back in the same country I had invaded, only this time I had come as an advisor, not as a liberator or an occupier. Pausing to catch my breath, I reflected on the previous two weeks since the team and I had departed the United States. Our transit from Camp Pendleton to Iraq had been fraught with aggravation, with long flights and even longer periods of frustration. I was relieved to have the brief respite.
On the morning of 13 February my wife and three-year-old daughter drove me and my mountain of equipment to the armory that overlooked the ATG and the Del Mar boat basin. In the previous weeks the team had been victims of the same cruel yo-yo game of shifting departure dates I had encountered in 2003, and as before the unknown had played havoc with me and Ashley. For months we both had attempted to prepare Emery for my approaching extended absence, and in doing so my wife and I had expended so much energy that we had found little time for ourselves. Our youngest daughter, Kinsey, had been born a scant three weeks before my departure, and the requirements of a newborn only lessened the time Ashley and I were able to spend together.
As it always did with the approach of a pending deployment, time slipped away from me, and before we knew it my departure date was upon us. Leaving Kinsey in the care of my sister-in-law, the three of us piled into our car and made what was for me an agonizing fifteen-minute drive to Camp Pendleton. As I had done before my previous deployments I walked Ashley around to see the team members one last time, and then I steered my two girls toward the car. Ashley knew it was coming and didn’t protest; she had become a pro at it by that point. But this time my exit was infinitely more significant. In the past I had only A
shley to worry about, and she had only me to do the same.
Now I was the father of two children, one too young to even know who I was and the other at an age where she knew I was going away but couldn’t understand why. The only way Ashley and I could explain it was to tell Emery that there were some soldiers in another country who needed help, and Daddy was going there to try to help them. I couldn’t simplify it much more than that, and I silently thanked my fortune that I didn’t have to say what so many other Marines and soldiers had had to say to their children in the preceding years—that Daddy had to go away to fight the bad men.
As I kissed Ashley and Emery good-bye one last time, I leaned in to buckle my daughter’s car seat. Smiling, she looked at me and spoke, her words catching me off guard.
“Don’t go out there . . . and get in trouble with the boys, Daddy.”
“What the . . .” I said, turning to Ashley, my voice catching in my throat. “Did you hear that?”
Ashley put her hands to her mouth, her eyes beginning to glisten with tears.
“I don’t know where that came from,” she said.
I was flabbergasted, speechless that a child so young and so innocent seemed to suddenly understand everything. Her words crushed me, and I realized my life had just reached a new milestone: I was leaving my children for the first time. It shouldn’t have affected me. After all, I had endured numerous deployments by my father; they had shaped my childhood, had been the keys to my eventual entry into the Marine Corps as an adult. But now, knowing that my wife faced seven months of taking care of two small children, knowing that my daughters faced what to them would be an eternity without a father, I understood the burden my parents had shouldered in the years my father had served in the Navy. In the moment that my wife and child pulled away from me and drove out of sight I empathized with my father, and admired my mother’s strength even more. For the thousandth time I hated myself for what I was putting my family through, and then I turned and headed toward my team and our waiting buses. My moment of sorrow and grief had expired, and I locked my emotions in the dark recesses of my subconscious, preparing myself for the daunting task ahead of me. My compartmentalization had begun.
In the Gray Area Page 3
