Joker One

by Donovan Campbell

  Personally, I felt my own sense of mission shift, from stabilizing and transforming Ramadi to simply returning home with all of my men alive. Even though many of my Marines had grasped the possibility of their own deaths, I really hadn't at that point in time. There was no real reason underlying my avoidance of reality, no reason other than that death hadn't yet happened to me, to my platoon, to Joker One. There wasn't any particular skill or fortitude to this—we had simply been lucky. But I didn't know this at the time. Instead, I reasoned that if we had made it through the fierce fighting of April unscathed, then we could, and probably would, make it through anything and everything that the rest of the deployment would throw at us. After all, how could the fighting get worse than what we saw on April 6? After the battles of the Seventh and the Eighth, my platoon was, I believe, the only one in the battalion that had yet to suffer a single wound, and I took that respite as a clear sign that the prayers were working and that God would certainly bring all of us home safely.

  I communicated these sentiments to Christy—we eventually got a satellite set up on the roof of the hangar bay and three laptop computers rigged for shaky Internet access—and she responded with cautious optimism. She was glad that no one was hurt, she said, but she reminded me that God wasn't a cosmic slot machine that came up sevens every time for the pious believer. He doesn't guarantee us health and prosperity, or even safety for your men in this life, she told me. All He guarantees you is your relationship with Him in the next. They were hard words of truth, to be sure, but ones spoken in love.

  And I completely ignored them. They weren't what I wanted to hear. I didn't recognize yet that my steadfast dismissal of the idea of casualties in my platoon stemmed not so much from a belief about God's grace but from a refusal to consider the very real possibility that someday I might be responsible for the death and wounding of the men I loved so much. I still thought that I could have my cake and eat it, too, that I could accomplish the mission and bring everyone home unscathed. I thought that if I was just good enough, that if we just prayed hard enough, then my responsibility to make one of the worst choices in war—the mission or my men—just might be avoided.

  However, there was something that I was right about, something that I understood well, and that something was that Christy didn't need to know about a change that took place in me after April 6. I didn't share it with her then, but ever after that day, some part of me took a grim satisfaction every time Joker One killed cleanly in the heat of battle. After a month of walking around Ramadi feeling as if we were more or less unsuspecting targets, it felt good to hit back strongly, to regain some of the initiative, to kill our enemies in large numbers. It felt good to know that someone else was doing the dying, too, and that if we were suffering, then maybe we could make our enemies suffer even more.

  This realization hit me fully on April 9, when we were patrolling down Michigan during the normal morning route sweep. As I walked down the median in the middle of the road, I noticed huge pyramids of white bags stacked in front of the Saddam and al-Haq mosques. I had never seen anything like them before, so I looked closer. Each pyramid was roughly twenty bags long, five bags deep, and at least three stories high. I had no idea what they were, so I called Leza over the PRR.

  “Hey, One-Two, what the hell are those stacked white things? Are they rice shipments for the mujahideen brethren in Fallujah or what?”

  “No, sir, those stacks, they're body bags, sir. They're all body bags.”

  I pulled out my binos to check closer. Sure enough, some of the white bags were mottled with huge, rust-colored stains. There must have been hundreds of dead bodies in front of the mosques, I realized.

  As the rest of the patrol wound its way past al-Haq, I found myself smiling.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Despite the quiet of April 8 and 9, our enemies weren't altogether finished with large-scale operations. After the battalion's sweep through Ramadi, 2/4 received reports that although the hard-core insurgents had largely been driven out of the city proper by the fierce battles of the Sixth and the Seventh, sizable forces had re-formed in the rural areas just to its east. We would go and find them.

  On April 10, then, I found myself rushing around among a long line of vehicles staged in our hangar bay. All three of my squads were staged near different trucks in preparation for an impending sweep of the area east of the city, and early in the morning, in the predawn dark, I was hurriedly giving my men one last check before we set off out of the base's gates. Halfway through the inspection, it dawned on me that words were ringing out in unison near each of the trucks. I stopped all that I was doing and stepped backward, away from the vehicles, until I could see my entire platoon. In three tight little groups, all of my Marines save one were kneeling with their heads bowed over weapons that hung down across their chests; the one standing Marine was praying the Twenty-third Psalm strongly, leading as everyone else muttered softly along with him. It was our platoon prayer, the one that I had instituted as soon as we arrived in Iraq, the one that I had forgotten to pray with my men before they saddled up for the movement out. Now they were doing it themselves, and, at that exact moment, I knew for the first time that my individual Marines had become entirely Joker One. There are very few profoundly beautiful moments in war, and that morning was one of them.

  I certainly needed it, because the rest of the day would be difficult. Like the last battalion-sized operation, we had been told to prepare for a twenty-four-to thirty-six-hour firefight, and this time we'd be starting the broad-brush sweeping mission with targeted raids on two to three houses per platoon. We had specific intelligence linking these places to insurgents, so all males inside the houses were to be detained and brought to a common company collection area, where a small guard detachment could watch over them while the rest of the platoons moved on with a general search of all compounds within our assigned sector. Every resource we had was to be expended on the operation; back at the Outpost, the cooks and mechanics would stand guard atop the walls of the base to free up more infantrymen.

  Bronzi had decided to move our company to the target houses, some three miles away, on foot, so we woke early, at around 2 AM, and by 3:30 the company was preparing to set out on the patrol. For the first time, Joker One would carry a 60mm mortar, a weapon capable of leveling a small house, into combat. The battalion commander wanted each platoon to initiate its raids by firing several illumination rounds into the air from a launch site within one hundred meters of the target compounds. It was certainly an intimidating way to begin. The illum rounds would light up the predawn sky and make terrific noises, but, practically speaking, the battalion CO's wishes meant that one of my Marines had to carry a twenty-pound mortar tube (in addition to his other fifty pounds of gear) on his back for roughly two and a half miles.

  Bolding had volunteered for the job. As it turned out, he was my platoon's senior mortarman, and ever since arriving in Kuwait, he had dropped all vestiges of his stateside immaturity. Now his easygoing manner, his constant self-sacrifice (he continued to help our brand-new Marines on their onerous working parties), and his trademark smile had made him one of the most well-liked Marines, if not the most, of Joker One. I still called Bolding “Lance Corporal,” but, as he was the only African American in the platoon, the rest of the men, with typical affectionate irreverence, called him “Black Man.” In the infantry, the measure of a man's respect among his peers is often directly proportional to the frequency with which an affectionate nickname is used (“The Ox,” by the way, is an example of a nonaffectionate nickname). Using that as a rule of thumb, then, Bolding and “Gooch” Guzon were running neck-and-neck for the title of most-loved member of the platoon.

  Furthermore, ever since we deployed, Bolding had proved himself so responsible that we had given him leadership over the other mortarmen—Henderson and Guzon. He was to command them when we needed mortars fired and to teach and mentor them at all times as a sort of secondary team leader. It was the sort of responsibil
ity that we had taken away from Bolding earlier but that he now needed and deserved. Unsurprisingly, when the squad leaders had explained the mortar mission to their men, Bolding immediately asked to carry the heavy tube. He was the team leader, he said, so humping the pig was his job, plain and simple.

  Shortly before the platoon stepped off on the mission, I paid him a short visit. “Hey, Bolding, how are you feeling?” I asked. Bolding was a stocky five-ten or so, solidly muscled with almost no fat on him, but carrying a mortar tube was no joke for anyone, regardless of how fit they were. When added to the rest of the gear we carried, the total load must have been roughly half of Bolding's 160 pounds.

  He smiled widely back me.

  “Hey, sir! I'm doin’ fine. This mortar tube ain't shit, sir. Don't worry. Gooch, Henderson, and I'll get this thing taken care of. Just tell us when, sir, we'll fire those mortars.”

  He was still smiling, and his cheerful fortitude reminded me that whenever my men were asked to carry more, or to patrol one more time, or to fight unexpectedly yet again, they simply shrugged, complained, laughed, and then got it done come what may. A broad smile crept across my face, and I clapped Bolding on the shoulder and then walked up to the head of the patrol to wait for the order to head out. Joker One was at the head of the company patrol, and we were tasked to lead the way to the point where each platoon would peel off and hit its individual targets.

  Roughly fifteen minutes later, an angry CO called me over the radio, demanding to know why we hadn't left. I was briefly nonplussed. We had been about to set off earlier, but I had been stopped by the Ox and told that the CO's radio was having trouble, that we needed to wait for him, and that the CO would call me when he was ready. I hadn't heard from either of them since.

  Suddenly the radio squawked. It was Captain Bronzi, furious that we hadn't started moving yet. “What the hell is wrong with you, One? Every other company is already moving.”

  I bit back the urge to lash out in kind, acknowledged the command, and thirty seconds later the platoon was moving. We exited the firmbase via its little-used northwest exit and patrolled smoothly through the housing compounds that lay just to the Outpost's west. We made it all of one hundred meters before being stopped dead in our tracks by a thick, extensive barbed-wire fence that hadn't appeared on the photographic map. The entire company halted as we probed it for an opening, and, sure enough, one minute later the CO was back on the radio.

  “One, Six. What the hell are you doing? Over.”

  I told him that we'd hit a fence, but it didn't seem to matter. He was still angry.

  “Hey, One, we don't have any fucking time to waste. The rest of the companies are almost at their objectives. We're going to be the last ones to make it to ours. Hurry it up.”

  “Well, Six, that's because all of the other companies are driving, and we happen to be walking,” I wanted to say, but once again I kept my mouth shut. Sure enough, less than a minute later, we found an opening through the wire and moved through quickly. The company stretched out from the firmbase, snaking rapidly in a twisting, half-mile-long column through the waist-high grass covering the open fields to the Outpost's north. Two-thirds of the way to our target houses, we hit another obstacle—a wide drainage ditch filled with waist-deep water. The ditch's slopes were steep and long, extending down for about ten feet before the water began. It would take forever for 140 Marines to wade the obstacle, but this time I had planned for our encounter. There were two main bridges over the water, and I had plotted Joker One's patrol route to arrive at the ditch about fifty meters south of the first bridge. Checking my GPS quickly, I knew we were somewhere very near the crossing point, so I halted the patrol, called the CO to let him know the situation, and then set out with Mahardy to find the bridge. Yet again, within thirty seconds, the CO was back on the radio.

  “One, Six. Why aren't we moving yet? Over.”

  I was getting exasperated. “Six, One, be advised that the bridge isn't exactly where we thought it was, but we should be close. I'm looking for it now. Break. We should be moving again within five minutes. Over.”

  “You have one minute, One. After that, you are going fucking swimming through that ditch. We have got to move. Every other company is at its objective already. Out.”

  Hearing that, I had to restrain myself from losing my temper altogether and demanding that the CO come up and swim through the ditch himself to see how well that tactic would work out for us. Ultimately, though, his impatience didn't matter because shortly after his call Mahardy found the bridge, and Joker One moved out again, the rest of the company in tow.

  Once everyone had made it across, the CO ordered all platoons to run the final half mile or so to our objectives, so the whole company finished the movement in a tripping, cursing half-run, half-fall over rough, broken ground in the dead of night. At least one Marine in Joker Two twisted his ankle so badly that he was rendered useless for the remainder of the operation. In fact, he had to be medevaced. However, the rest of us made it to our targets reasonably quickly, and, somehow, Bolding and his mortar tube managed to keep up with the rest of us. The illumination launches went off without a hitch and reasonably on time, and with them we began to hit our target houses.

  By then, most raids had become fairly standard, fairly routine affairs, with none of the excitement and flair of that very first one, in large part because our targets from then on out had all been more or less the same. Never again did we seek out very specific, very unusual Sudanese terrorists. Instead, our target descriptions mostly revolved around the ubiquitous, generic Arab male: “dark hair, dark skin, mustache or beard, medium height, medium build; age between twenty and fifty; may be named Mohammed or Muhamed; single-source intelligence ties him/his cousins to local insurgent groups.” Perhaps one time out of every ten, we got grainy, photocopied pictures of the suspected targets. The pictures’ usefulness was questionable at best and misleading at worst.

  This morning was no different than usual, and Noriel and Leza were ploddingly rounding up suspects from two different houses when Bowen, leader of our cordon force, called me excitedly over the PRR. A fugitive had just slipped out of his cordon by jumping from one house roof to another. Startled, I looked up the street just in time to see a man emerge from an alleyway three blocks away and take off down the road at a dead run. Teague and I darted after him, but, weighed down by our gear as we were, the suspect quickly widened his lead on us. We were losing him. Teague called me, panting, on his PRR.

  “Sir … Do you want … me to shoot him?”

  “Negative … Let him go.” I wasn't prepared to shoot a fleeing, unarmed man in the back when all that we had to go on were single-source suspicions that someone in the house from which he had emerged was, perhaps, connected with insurgents. If, back in America, some unknown force had come for me in the dead of night, I too would probably have fled. And in America, the police didn't have a long and storied history of torturing or disappearing those whom they snatched. Many Iraqis still didn't understand that American detentions weren't like those of Saddam, and most of them reasoned that if someone disappeared in the middle of the night, then it was a fair bet they'd never be seen again in this life.

  Five seconds later, the man took a quick right down another dark alleyway, and we lost him. Winded, Teague and I returned to the compounds to find that Leza and Noriel had consolidated all of our military-age male detainees in a single room, zip-tied their hands, and checked them against our photographs. As always, the women and children remained free, but a few Marines kept a watchful eye on them nonetheless. No weapons, explosives, or insurgent propaganda had been found—the houses were clean, and no one could tell from the grainy pictures we had been given whether the men inside were definite matches with our targets. They did fit the written descriptions, but, then again, so did 70 percent of all Iraqi males. Also like 70 percent of all Iraqi males, none of our targets had proper hawilah, identification papers. I called the CO, explained the situation, and received a
n order to bring all detainees to the company consolidation point, a housing compound at the end of the block. Before I took all of the men away, I wanted to explain to the frightened women and children that their husbands and fathers would probably only be taken for a little while, but without a translator, it was useless. So I didn't say anything. I just moved out.

  We moved quickly, and half an hour later, all detainees were sitting, blindfolded and with their hands bound behind them, in a circle in the middle of a large, fenced yard, the company collection point. No sooner had we settled the detainees than fierce gunfire broke out to our south. Porcupine and Weapons had hit a few insurgent ambushes, and they were slugging their way through them tenaciously. Half a mile north, though, Golf Company remained untouched. With the palm trees waving idly above our heads and the Euphrates burbling placidly fifty feet away, our sister companies’ fighting seemed distant and unreal. Half a mile was a world away until Carson suddenly bellowed.

  “Holy shit! That hurts like a sonofabitch.” Every Marine inside the compound turned to look at him as he took off his helmet and turned it over, examining it closely. Then, proudly, Carson brandished it aloft, displaying a long, shallow furrow running along the length of the top right side. Somehow, someway, a stray round from the distant firefight had penetrated our world and smacked Carson's helmet.