William Christie 03 - The Blood We Shed

by William Christie

  And to answer Milburn's question, we weren't fucked. Because we sailed right past our Spanish exercise area at Sierra de Retin and proceeded deeper into the Mediterranean.

  And then it got serious, because the word went around that we were headed straight for the Suez Canal. Which may or may not have had something to do with what happened next.

  It was around 2100. We were watching the nightly movie in the room when there came a knock on the door.

  "Come in," O'Brien yelled.

  The door opened part way and Corporal Asuego's head appeared.

  "Come in," I said, swinging out of my rack. "What's up?"

  "Sorry to bother you, sir, but Lance Corporal Thomas is down in the ship's library, acting really crazy."

  I was already pulling my boots on. "Grab a chair and start at the beginning."

  "Thomas's been acting kind of funny for a while, sir. Then tonight he's down in the library, just walking back and forth, back and forth. I think he's lost it, sir."

  I was going to have to see this for myself. "Okay, I'll handle this. You can go back to the berthing area."

  "You sure you won't need any help, sir?"

  "With Thomas?"

  "Okay, sir."

  "Be careful out there," O'Brien said as I went out the door. Everyone else started chuckling.

  After the heat exhaustion and other annoying little misadventures, I knew Thomas wasn't one of my brightest lights but I didn't think he was crazy. And as long as he wasn't armed I knew he wasn't dangerous.

  Just as Corporal Asuego had reported, Thomas was in the library, pacing back and forth and muttering. And everyone else in there was doing their best to ignore him.

  I walked up to him and said conversationally, "What's going on, Thomas?"

  He started as if he hadn't seen me. His eyes were wide and wild. Then it came flowing out in a stream of consciousness. "I didn't do it sir they say I did but I didn't I know what I did but I didn't do that...."

  "Didn't do what?" I asked.

  But he switched to another track. "I could have been on TV instead of here I was better than everyone that got picked for Moesha they all lied to me Brandy would have liked me...."

  I knew Thomas was from LA, but had no idea he'd chosen the Corps over an acting career. Which brought us to the heart of the matter. I'd seen a few Academy Award-winning performances in my time as a platoon commander. Now, a lot of officers got really hyper about Marines putting on an act. The only thing they hated more than being played was someone getting over on them.

  I looked at it a little differently. If I couldn't tell whether Thomas was yellow or crazy, then good luck and Godspeed. At least he was out of my hair. And if it was real then he needed to see a mental health professional.

  I said, "You'd better come with me, Thomas."

  He did, Boot Camp discipline proving stronger than mental disturbance.

  I sat him down in the sickbay, and out of earshot explained the situation to the duty corpsman, a First Class Petty Officer—the equivalent of a Marine Staff Sergeant.

  "We'll check him out, sir," he said.

  "Make sure you keep a close eye on him," I said.

  "We know what we're doing, sir." Said in the self-important know-it-all way of certain corpsmen who'd picked up an attitude treating Navy doctors like their golfing buddies.

  "Whatever, Doc. He's all yours." I headed back down the passageway, and who should appear at the other end but Major Thom, the battalion XO. The man was amazing. Whenever anything went down in the battalion, he turned up.

  Just as I was about to open my mouth to brief him, from back in the sickbay I heard the First Class's startled voice exclaim, "Hey, come back here!"

  And there was Thomas rounding the corner at a dead run, bent on escape. Which made me believe for the first time that he really was crazy. As he closed on us Major Thom exclaimed, equally startled, "Stop him!"

  When the universe arranges itself in your favor you have to take advantage of it. I swung my right arm and caught Thomas with a forearm shiver to the head.

  Contrary to the stories that went around, I did not hit him hard. But he landed on the deck like a sack of cement. As I bent down to put him in a wrist lock, from behind me I heard Major Thom's voice, filled with accusation. "What did you do?"

  "Just following your orders, sir," I replied. He couldn't blame me for carrying them out.

  I walked Thomas into the sickbay and kept his wrist in the come-along until they strapped him down in a bed. Of course I had to turn to the First Class and say, "You know what you're doing now, Doc?"

  But Major Thom got his revenge. As we sailed past Sicily a CH-53 flew to the Naval Base at Sigonella to pick up mail and parts. I think we can all guess who went on that flight, with Thomas in a strait-jacket sitting between two corpsmen, to deliver him to the Naval Hospital.

  Nothing like a long helicopter flight over the open ocean to put you in a good mood. At the Naval Hospital the attending physician took one look at poor, scrawny, mournful Thomas and snapped, "Get that strait-jacket off him."

  "Right after you sign for him, sir," I said. "Then you can chase him around the hospital all day if you like."

  Back at the ship, and back in the room, Milburn said, "Thanks for the mail, Mike. Nice trip?"

  "Don't we all love helicopters?"

  "You ought to be ashamed of yourself," said O'Brien. "So the kid's a little confused. And you dough-pop him, slap him in a strait-jacket, and send him to the loony bin."

  "No, you 're a little confused," I said. "He's as crazy as a shithouse rat."

  I remember thinking, as weird as these first two weeks had been, what was it going to be like after six months?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  As we sailed deeper into the eastern Mediterranean we became quite the item of interest. Ships, helicopters, and planes of all nations showed up to take a look at us. And, in the self-perpetuating process of intelligence, we did the same thing. The IMC would order, "Away the Snoopy Detail," and the secret squirrels would dash topside with their cameras.

  If the flight deck was open everyone would go up to see what the show was. On such an occasion I ran into Corporal Asuego. I had questions I wanted answered, and had already done my own intelligence gathering.

  "Any idea what set Thomas off that night?" I asked.

  "Not really, sir."

  "Uh, huh. What happened in the woods back at Lejeune? I know there was drinking going on." Probably only lieutenant colonels and above believed that because Marines were underage, and it was against orders, they wouldn't drink.

  Corporal Asuego was now in the awkward position of not knowing exactly what I knew, except that I knew too much. Which made withholding information problematic. "Some of the troops were out in the woods drinking, sir. Thomas was there. He passed out."

  He stopped then, so I said, "And?"

  More hesitation. "They pulled down his trou, sir, and took his picture."

  Somehow I knew the high road hadn't been taken. "What happened after that?"

  "Nothing, sir. But Thomas was being an asshole down in the berthing area, and someone told him they had a picture of him from that night sucking someone's dick when he was drunk. And Thomas went off."

  "You mean he didn't say: fuck you, show me the picture?"

  "No, sir, he just went nuts."

  It was rough stuff, and I had some rough boys. But sometimes the pack separated out the weak on their own. I couldn't stop all of it unless I chained myself to everyone 24 hours a day. Just as Boot Camp didn't turn Marines into psychotics, Marines generally didn't have nervous breakdowns after being teased too hard.

  We transited the Suez Canal with heavy machine-guns mounted on the catwalk around the flight deck and Egyptian military patrols on the shore.

  One morning in the Red Sea our phone rang right after reveille. And right after breakfast we reported to the company office with our mission planning materials. Then all the Echo company officers walked down the passa
geway to a conference room with a guard outside.

  An interesting group showed up. The Maritime Special Purpose Force commander, along with the Force Recon platoon commander and his Gunny. The two SEAL platoon officers. The helo squadron commander with his operations officer and the senior Cobra and '53 pilots. Colonel Sweatman, Major Woodman the new S-3, and Captain Farrow, the intelligence officer. And the MEU commander and his planning staff.

  This had us all looking at each other. Something was up. Something different. Something big.

  It was big. The briefing was long, but I'll provide the background because the S-2 gave us next to nothing. Before Osama Bin Laden found a home among the Taliban in Afghanistan he'd spread his wings in Sudan and Yemen.

  Yemen was important. Although he'd grown up a Saudi, Bin Laden's family was of Yemenite origin. And the particular circumstances of the country made it very inviting for him.

  Yemen had previously been two countries, the relatively Islamic military-run Yemen Arab Republic, or North Yemen, and the radical Marxist People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, or South Yemen. From the sixties onward South Yemen hosted terrorist training camps for the Palestinians, IRA, European Red Brigades, and Japanese Red Army. The two countries united in 1990 when the Soviet Union's collapse made being a People's Republic no longer profitable. A two month civil war in 1994 sealed the unification and sent the Marxists into retirement.

  The radical Islamic fundamentalists gave the government a lot of help in making that happen, and their reward was an open door into the political, military, and educational establishments. And Bin Laden and his money came along on that ride. The weak central government's traditional lack of control over the remote tribal regions made it even easier.

  Bin Laden also took a lot of his ideology from Yemen. The militant, puritanical, anti-Western Islam of the Yemeni Salafists made the Saudi Wahabis look like New England Episcopalians. They believed the world needed to be forcibly returned to exactly as it was at the time of the Prophet Muhammad 1,400 years ago—making exceptions for a few useful items like AK-47's, plastic explosives, and jet airliners.

  Yemen was like the farm leagues of Islamic terrorism. The prospects from all over the world were screened in the religious schools, which usually offered electives in automatic weapons. The most radical, dedicated, and violent were sent off to the major leagues in Afghanistan. The Yemeni-trained Salafists were among the most feared fighters in Afghanistan, Algeria, Chechnya, and Kashmir.

  Which brings us back to the briefing. Intelligence whose source we were not allowed to know had determined that around ten of the top Al Qaeda in Yemen, and maybe a couple who had escaped from Afghanistan, were meeting and hiding out in a remote village high up in the mountains near the Saudi border.

  And we were given the mission of raiding the village and either capturing or killing them. We were moving on super short notice; these guys didn't hang around in one place very long. We launched right into our rapid planning process.

  "Holy shit," O'Brien exclaimed when we finally took a break. "Delta Force and the Rangers must be totally committed to Afghanistan, otherwise they never would have picked us over the glory boys."

  "It has to be because we're in the right place at the right time," I said. "Only one day to plan before we execute."

  "We're supposed to be able to do that," said Nichols.

  "We all know that," said Milburn. "But this isn't like the Rangers parachuting onto a deserted airfield. It had to come from the Secretary of Defense."

  I'll translate that. Their success in the military zero-defects system meant that our generals were almost temperamentally incapable of any kind of major risk taking. Which was why they'd had to be dragged kicking and screaming into Panama, Desert Storm, Haiti, and Kosovo by civilian politicians. It was also why the war on terrorism had so far emphasized low risk over mission effectiveness.

  "We'd better pull this one off," said Captain Z. "Or we'll never be doing it again."

  "Great intel," Nichols grumbled. "Situation, enemy: your guess is as good as ours. No wonder we got Pearl Harbored after spending 30 billion dollars a year."

  "That one's easy," I said. "Everyone in town."

  "What do you mean?" Milburn asked.

  "In December the Yemeni military tried to pull a helo raid just like this to bag some Al Qaeda. Except they did it in daylight and got the shit shot out of them. Out in the boonies where we're going there's no law but tribal justice, tribal self defense. Everyone packs either an AK-47 or a rocket launcher. They kidnap tourists to get government services. The government keeps them quiet by holding the Sheiks' sons hostage. When you're a guest of the tribe, or paying them for protection, everyone in town is going to start shooting at anyone who flies in."

  "Why didn't the S-2 mention that December raid?" said Nichols.

  "You're kidding, right?" Milburn said to him.

  "If we told the Yemeni government about this," I said, "we'd better plan on the terrorists either being long gone or locked and cocked and waiting for us to come off the birds."

  "We will," said Captain Z.

  We didn't really bother ourselves with whether the mission was a good idea or not. Pulling it off and bringing everyone home alive were all we had time for. And everyone knew the risks. I despise military memoirists who write as if the fact that people get killed, crippled, and maimed in war had somehow been kept a secret from them.

  We had some advantages. The special operations guys tended to rely on surprise and their high-speed ninja skills to pull off a mission. Which worked great when everything went according to plan, less great when it didn't. Though not nearly as high-speed, we had an enormous amount of organic firepower available if the situation turned against us.

  "How did you know about that December raid?" Milburn asked me.

  "There are these things called newspapers and magazines, that tell you what's going on the world," I explained carefully.

  "Funny," he said.

  I hoped the intelligence the President, Secretary of Defense, and Joint Chiefs used to make their decision was good, because all we had was a stack of satellite photos of the village, the location of the three houses the terrorists were supposedly sleeping in—based on God only knew what kind of intel, rumor, or hunch—and some passport photos and descriptions that could have fit three quarters of the 20-30 year-olds in the Middle East.

  The S-2 section immediately built a 3-D terrain model of the village. It was something they did for nearly every operation, and they were really good at it.

  The village was out of range of CH-46's. We'd have to use '53's. Fortunately, based on early Afghan lessons we'd deployed with six instead of the usual four. The escorting Cobras, also six vice four, wouldn't be able to make it with any realistic weapon load or time on station, so an isolated location would be found to set up a FARP, or Forward Area Refueling and re-arming Point. More complication was never good when planning a raid, but we practiced doing FARPs quite often. We'd also have a KC-130 tanker available to refuel the '53's in flight. The MEU commander burned up the airwaves demanding another backup KC-130. Planes broke. You never took only one of anything you needed.

  As is usually the case, life threw a monkey wrench into the planning process. O'Brien received a Red Cross message telling him he had a son. Fantastic news, except there were complications. The father's presence was requested at home.

  Jack and Captain Z talked privately. The Captain gave him the option, but O'Brien said he was going on the mission.

  Rumor control went crazy when the ship shut down the e-mail and satellite phone systems. Americans had zero security consciousness. A sailor who went out on the flight deck catwalk to see if he could get a cell phone connection from a land station ended up in the brig, squawking that he just wanted to call his wife.

  We only stopped for meals, and they were quick ones. Once the MEU commander signed off on the plan we issued the operation order to the troops, using the satellite photos and terrain model.
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  Their reaction? The usual 10% went—oh shit. Sixty percent were grimly satisfied to be doing what they'd signed up for. And about 30% couldn't wait to finally shoot someone. The squad leaders began conducting room clearing drills.

  We were all so busy there wasn't time to dwell on any anxieties, not that they would have been discussed anyway. If you thought anyone was going to want to talk about their feelings before going into battle, then I haven't done a good job of describing the culture.

  I was more worried than scared. About all the things we hadn't done. Not enough training time, not enough ammunition, not enough realistic live fire. And what hadn't I done? What hadn't I taught?

  The hard core the platoon, the leaders and senior lance corporals, had trained together from day one. They were tight. The younger Marines had arrived in packets from the School of Infantry. Some at the four month mark in our training cycle, some at three, some at two. We'd given them as much extra work as we could. The MCCRES and Special Operations Exercises, being all-encompassing, had helped bring them up to speed. Some were there; some not quite. At least all Marines knew how to follow their leaders. Hopefully that would be enough.

  But I had two brand new PFC's who'd arrived from the School of Infantry less than a month before we shipped out. They hadn't done a day's training with us. They were crushed when I told them they were staying on the ship, but I remembered PFC Francois's first time on the grenade range. It would have been criminal negligence to bring them along on the raid.

  Everyone's gear had to be inspected. Nothing could be left behind, either forgotten or because the troops thought they knew best, like the Rangers in Somalia leaving the back plates out of their body armor. No personal effects but a military ID card. Fresh batteries in all the electronics. Inoperative night vision goggles hurriedly temp loaned from units that weren't going. More paperwork.

  It was a madhouse. All the staff officers wanted to put their chop on our plan, so they could say later, "I was intimately involved in the planning process." Intimate was right: they were really fucking with us. As Captain Z said, "Now I know why, even though we train to do it right, everything always falls to shit when we go to war for real. All the staff pukes start running around like rats on acid. Okay, y'all do the pre-mission prep by the book, and I'll try to keep all the little helpers away."