Then the gunny unexpectedly stopped our forward movement.
“Company, halt!” I glanced up to see that we were at an intersection waiting for the traffic signal to change from red to green. It was bad enough that we had to stop, but we stalled right in front of the active-duty hecklers. Their taunts were louder than ever without the sounds of our boots or the gunny’s cadence. But one voice was recognizably louder than the rest. I had heard it before, but at first I could not place it with a face or a name.
At least, not until I heard the jeer, “Hey, everybody, the Green Machine must be broken. . . . Here come the spare parts!”
I recognized that voice, but couldn’t believe it.
I looked up toward the balcony on my right and sure enough, there he was—Morrison. I would have recognized him anywhere.
The Marines in our company grew progressively agitated as the deluge of insults poured from the balcony and the crowd. Finally enough was enough. Poole was the first from our company to break ranks.
He walked right out of formation toward the crowd of Marines.
“Step up, mu-fuckas! Say it to my face!”
One of the active-duty Marines accepted the challenge. Poole charged him like a nose guard, tackling him to the ground. Then some other parts of our formation broke off to join the fight, scouts 150
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and crewmen alike. I thought we were headed toward a full-blown riot.
Capt. Bounds stood between the potential melee and us and ordered our restraint.
“Stand fast! Stand fast!”
I stood fast.
Once our officers intervened, the fists and boots stopped flying.
Fighting among enlisted Marines was one thing, but assaulting an officer was grounds for court-martial. The fight stopped as quickly as it had started.
Poole wasn’t pleased with the officers’ interference. He continued to scream insults at the active-duty Marines. Then he directed his anger toward the Marines who escorted him back into formation.
“We’re getting ready to go to war, and you pussies are afraid to fight!”
Sgt. Krause jumped in Poole’s face.
“Save it for the Iraqis!”
Gunny Brandt watched the whole episode with his arms folded and an I-told-you-so look on his face.
That was the last time we marched to the mess hall.
In the final analysis the fight served us well. It was the catalyst that started the bonding process within our platoon, especially between the scouts and the crewmen. It gave us a lot to talk about in the chow hall that morning. We put our differences aside and reveled in the bravado of Poole and the others who had joined him.
Dark-green Marines sat with light-green Marines. Second-years shared tables with first-years. And scouts broke bread with crewmen. The integration was long overdue.
I sat with Dougherty and talked of my inauspicious reunion with Morrison. Dougherty pointed out that it was not quite a reunion, because he never saw me. During breakfast I bored Dougherty with all of the details about the rivalry between Morrison and me in boot camp. I carried on about his antireserve mentality, and our last meeting with Drill Instructor Sgt. Talley.
Dougherty was not nearly as taken aback by the encounter. All he could say about it was “It just shows you how small the Corps is.”
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Dougherty would be right about that. Fate wasn’t finished with Morrison and me yet.
29 NOVEMBER 1990
We started our first training day crowded together elbow-to-elbow, in the bleachers that encircled the outdoor training area.
A strange captain took his place at the center of the circle and waited for our attention. “I am Captain Ricks, the officer in charge of your battalion-level training and preparation for Operation Desert Shield in Southwest Asia.”
Some of us paid attention to him. Some Marines heard the standard welcome statement and quickly tuned him out. Capt. Ricks, however, was no standard instructor and this was no standard class.
He introduced the lesson with the generic statement “This is lesson one . . .” while he held a small metal canister, the size of a de-odorant spray can, over his head. Then he pulled a tab and threw the canister on the ground in the center of the circle. We sat, stared, and waited for something to happen. There was no sound. There was no smoke. When I finally looked up at Capt. Ricks, he already had his mask on and was touching his shoulders with his hands, the universal signal for a gas attack. Capt. Ricks’s assistants threw other canisters under our bleachers as their muffled voices shouted through the filters of their masks, “Gas! Gas! Gas!” By the time I figured out what was happening, it was too late.
The stinging sensation started inside my nostrils and under the lids of my eyes. I looked down through the blur of tears at the canvas bag strapped to my leg, and felt around to find the button that secured its flap. Inside was my gas mask . . . at least I hoped it was.
It had not seen the light of day since it was issued to me. None of us had paid much attention to our gas masks. For that matter none of us had paid much attention to any of our nuclear-biological-chemical gear. Prior to the Gulf War we had perceived the threat of chemical or biological warfare to be negligible. The gear entered our 152
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consciousness only occasionally as an accessory to an exercise, but even then it was viewed by most as an obstacle that impeded the really important training. We joked that the initials, NBC, represented
“No-Body-Cares,” which reflected our indifference to its value.
Capt. Ricks’s class was about to change that mindset for all of us, forever.
I had the wherewithal to keep my mouth shut but instinctively drew air in through my nose. The first whiff burned and I blew hard to get the air back out. Then, without thinking, I opened my mouth and inhaled.
It felt as if someone forced a flaming torch down my throat and singed my lungs. In an attempt to recover, I closed my eyes tightly and held my breath. I heard shouts and whoops as the Marines around me, too, wrestled with the bags on their hips. We poked and prodded each other with elbows and knees as we bumbled within the tight confines of the bleacher seats. Finally, with very little air left to support the effort, I managed to pull my gas mask from its carrier.
My fingers felt blindly along the unfamiliar shape of the mask.
There was no metal cylinder like the ones we used in LAV school, only smooth rubber, hard plastic, and a tangle of elastic straps. I tried in vain to orient it, but couldn’t tell the top from the bottom, or the inside from the outside. My eyes cracked open for a second, but the gas penetrated like acid and forced them back shut. I tugged, pulled, and stretched the straps like a madman, but still couldn’t pull them over my head. It was difficult enough to fit the mask to my face under classroom conditions. It was impossible under the circumstances. I had no sight, no air, no time . . . and no chance. So, on the verge of blacking out, I threw the Hail Mary.
I frantically smashed the rubber to my face, straps and all, and sucked air in deeply. This time the torch in my throat was a flamethrower. Tears spurted from my eyes, while snot flowed un-controllably from my nose, like water from a spigot. The slimy mixture covered the mask, my face, and my hands. Then the unavoidable happened—I dropped the mask.
I felt around feverishly at my feet until a muffled voice screamed over the mayhem into my ear, “It’s too late . . . you’re dead.”
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One of the instructors pulled me aside where the air was clear and I could begin to breathe again. I joined dozens of Marines, like me, who had failed to don their masks in time. When the gas cleared the training area, Capt. Ricks removed his mask and gave us the all-clear signal.
I retrieved my mask from under the bleachers and returned to my seat with my tail between my legs.
This time everyone paid attention when Capt. Ricks spoke.
“Do I have your attention, Marines?”
Marines wheezed, coughed, and gagged their affirmation. Capt.
Ricks delivered the news gravely.
“Marines, I just returned from a base camp in Saudi Arabia. The NBC alarm sounds every day there. Sometimes it’s practice—sometimes it’s a False Alarm.”
Capt. Ricks shook his head at Capt. Cruz. “You should be glad this wasn’t the real deal, or you would have lost a quarter of your company.”
Capt. Cruz acknowledged the grim evaluation with a nod.
“The good news here, Marines, is most of you reservists are smart . . . college types. You should pick things up quickly, and you’ll need to. The bad news is that we do not have a lot of time to train. . . . Division gave your company twenty-eight days, to be exact. I call the training package: Twenty-Eight Days from Campus to Combat.”
Capt. Ricks had our full attention after his demonstration and his speech. His warning was simple and clear. “You will likely be exposed to biological and chemical agents in the desert. If you pay attention and apply yourselves, I guarantee you’ll survive. If you don’t . . . based on the cluster-fuck I just saw, I guarantee you won’t.”
He and his staff worked with us all day providing immersion-style nuclear, biological, and chemical training. The experience gave me a newfound respect for my NBC gear, especially my gas mask. I no longer considered it a burden on my hip. It was a life raft on the Titanic.
Capt. Ricks hypnotized us with fear. We hung on to his every word, took copious notes, and participated actively in every exercise.
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We repeatedly practiced inspecting, fitting, and donning our gas masks. We learned how to install and properly use the chemical protective hoods. And we helped each other into and out of our chemical protection suits.
His team explained all about the biological agents that we were likely to encounter, such as anthrax. They even showed us samples of the Cipro pills that we would be issued in Saudi to protect us against the deadly virus. It was like watching a science fiction movie—invisible germs . . . antidote pills . . . protective suits. But that wasn’t even the worst of it. Capt. Cruz explained how another type of weapon made anthrax seem like the flu—nerve agents. The threat of anthrax concerned us, but the threat of nerve agents frightened us beyond words.
The instructors described several nerve agents used by the Iraqis, and shocked us with the graphic descriptions of how the slightest exposure, even a single drop, could shut down our central nervous systems and destroy us from within. They talked of bleeding from the inside out, melting organs, and complete incapacita-tion. Capt. Ricks tried to build our confidence by showing us the nerve-agent-protection pills that we would be issued in Saudi. He explained how the NAP pills helped us build resistance to the effects of some nerve agents.
Gunny Koffman asked the question in all of our minds. “And if the pills don’t work?”
Capt. Ricks sighed for emphasis. “The last resort is atropine.”
Capt. Ricks explained that atropine would slow the effects of nerve agent and extend our life for a few hours until we could receive medical treatment. But even then, he warned, our chances of survival would be minimal. He emphasized that atropine should only be given if we, or another Marine, were having a reaction to nerve agent—uncontrolled bleeding, convulsions, seizures, or paraly-sis. Then he showed us the tube that carried the atropine.
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syringe deeply into his muscle to deliver the atropine. I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to thrust that injector into my leg.
Capt. Ricks finished our training by teaching us about an inconspicuous piece of gear called an NBC canteen cap. NBC caps looked like regular canteen caps, but had special valves that plugged into the gas-mask drinking tube. The tube allowed us to drink without removing our gas masks. Capt. Ricks had warned that we would need these to survive in the desert.
“You never want to have to choose between drinking and breathing,” he said.
I examined my canteens after class. There were no NBC caps.
Then I panicked. Other Marines panicked as well. Capt. Ricks’s class had scared the hell out of all of us.
Sgt. Krause waved his arms to quell our rising anxiety, “At ease!
At ease! We are scheduled to go to supply in the next few days and everyone will get his issue.”
Capt. Ricks and his team of instructors were outstanding. I had hoped to get instructors with their level of expertise for all aspects of our training at Camp Lejeune, but that would only be wishful thinking. None of us knew that our first training day would be an anomaly. We expected twenty-seven more days of the same kick-ass instructors, hands-on experience, and real-life application. What we got was far less.
Company-level training in garrison was unbearably monotonous. In fact, it should have been called “company-level waiting.”
After we finished in one line we were hurried along to wait in another . . . then another . . . and another. We hurried and waited from breakfast through dinner.
What I recall most vividly about this period of our preparation was the number of shots we received. It seemed whenever there was a lull in our training schedule we were sent to the clinic to receive more shots. We received shots in the shoulders, in the arms, in the thigh, and the ass. Some were just under the skin and some were deep into the muscle. Some were to be massaged and some to be left alone. I felt like a human pincushion. One corpsman remarked as 156
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we walked through a gauntlet of injections, “After all these inocula-tions you’ll be able to swim in a cesspool and not catch a thing!”
On Sunday we experienced our first platoon-level training day.
Unlike company-level training, which included all six platoons of our company, platoon-level training only included the four squads within our platoon. At first I was relieved that Sgt. Krause would be responsible for our platoon-level training schedule. I figured he had the most infantry experience, which in my mind made him the most qualified. Unfortunately, though, he spent a considerable amount of time in meetings with the senior leadership of the company. His absence put the squad leaders, by default, in charge of our training.
Our squad leaders included Lance Cpl. Nagel, Cpl. Shane, Sgt.
Lopez, and Sgt. Moss.
Sgt. Moss and Lance Cpl. Nagel were school-trained crewmen.
They assumed responsibility for crewmen training. Sgt. Lopez and Cpl. Shane were school-trained scout team leaders. They followed Sgt. Krause’s lead and segregated the scouts from the crewmen for their training. The arrangement benefited the scouts more than it did us. Sgt. Lopez and Cpl. Shane were highly skilled and respected among the scout troops. Moreover, they did not need vehicles for their training. The crewmen did.
Neither Sgt. Moss nor Lance Cpl. Nagel was qualified to lead crewmen training. Sgt. Moss lacked the confidence. Nagel lacked the patience. To make matters worse Sgt. Krause was not a school-trained LAV crewmen, so he lacked the depth and breadth of experience to guide our ill-equipped leaders. The only resources to support crewmen training were our guidebooks from LAV school.
The result was pathetic. We spent our fourth training day pretend-ing our bodies were LAVs while we walked around the athletic field and practiced movement formations. It would have been barely tolerable during a peacetime drill weekend. With only twenty-four days left in our preparation for combat it was a criminal waste of training time. I was disgusted.
Training day five, however, began with promise. During the morning brief Sgt. Krause informed us that we were scheduled for three rifle training days. That meant more battalion-level training—
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> useful training! I looked forward to getting back to the field, away from the stagnation of garrison. Moreover, I was excited by the prospect that Capt. Ricks might be in charge. My optimism was short lived. Capt. Ricks wasn’t our instructor, and the rifle “training” days were anything but.
We spent the first rifle-training day in the armory. There was only one battalion armorer available to issue rifles, as all of the others were deployed. He was not thrilled to spend his day in the armory, and he let all of us know it with his wiseass attitude. I added the armory to the running tab of bad experiences with our active-duty counterparts, and to the tab of days spent waiting in line.
We started the next day with a ten-mile conditioning hump around Camp Lejeune that ended on the rifle range. For those of us who were only four months removed from the school of infantry, the hump was like a Sunday stroll. For many others it was a grueling marathon. The smokers wheezed, the alcoholics got dehydrated, and the couch potatoes fell out. We accommodated them with a snaillike pace and frequent rest breaks. Unlike the insuperable mountainous humps in California I had no trouble keeping up. The route was flat and I was in the best physical condition of my life.
More importantly, I now knew how to adjust my clothing and equipment to protect my skin from the grind of the gear.
We arrived at the rifle range pumped for the type of training that Capt. Ricks provided, but when he was nowhere in sight it didn’t take us long to deflate. The rifle training we received paled in comparison to the NBC training. Each of us was issued a scant forty-five rounds of ammunition. The first thirty rounds were fired hastily into stationary targets before the sun set. Then, after sunset, we fired the remaining fifteen rounds at the same targets under the light from illumination ordnance. It was another colossal waste of time as far as I was concerned. We barely fired enough to verify our rifle’s accuracy. It was nowhere near enough to prepare us for the dynamic engagements we were likely to experience in the desert.
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