Joker One

by Donovan Campbell

  “Check it out, I just got hit in the head! Man, that hurts.” Grinning and shaking his head, the giant Carson put his helmet back on. Standing next to him, half a head shorter apiece, Niles and Ott stared up at their team leader with wide eyes and open mouths. Jarred out of my reverie, I walked outside the compound to find out if Joker One needed to press south into the fight.

  As soon as I made it past the gates, a disturbing sight greeted my eyes. We had raided consecutive housing compounds all along a raised dirt road; now all the wives and daughters of the men we had just taken had assembled on that road, heedless of the gunfire to the south. At first they simply stood there, holding one another's hands and staring numbly at us. Then a large seven-ton truck pulled up, and headquarters Marines started loading the bound and blindfolded prisoners into the back like so many boxes.

  Seeing this, the small circles of women erupted with one of the most piercing displays of despair I have ever witnessed. Ululating wails rent the air, and, as the fervor built, the adult women started bending down to pick up the dust of the road and rub it through their hair, on their faces, in their eyes. They slapped themselves across their cheeks, or beat themselves about their heads and necks with their fists. They ripped off pieces of their clothes and stomped on them. The little girls clung to their mothers’ robes, either sobbing or simply standing with their heads buried amid the voluminous folds.

  I was unnerved, and so were my Marines. Yebra and Leza darted quick glances at each other; Niles and Ott stopped watching their prisoners and honed in on the mourners, completely mesmerized. Carson chivied them back to their tasks, but even he had trouble keeping his eyes off the screaming women and the crying girls. Soon the seven-ton trundled off, and the mourners, watching it leave, finally started to calm a bit.

  The truck had barely gone a hundred yards when it hit a ditch and flipped over on its side, spilling Marines and prisoners alike out of its bed, and rolling over a few of them. I ran to the accident site, as did Docs Smith and Camacho, and they immediately got to work triaging and treating both injured prisoners and Marines. The docs made no distinction—the most seriously injured, regardless of nationality, were treated first. Of our forces, a squad leader from fourth platoon had a badly broken arm, and a few other Marines had other major and minor cuts and bruises. One of my men had literally jumped out of the turret as the truck rolled over, and thus he had avoided being crushed to death.

  Our bound prisoners, however, had no such recourse. Several of them had been crushed underneath the vehicle as it rolled, and both of my docs were working on a couple of the worst ones. I managed to catch Camacho's eye, and he glanced down at his patient, then looked up and shook his head at me. I turned away, saddened.

  Behind us, the wailing redoubled. I looked over at the mourners; a few of the women were now lying motionless on the ground. Prior to the truck rollover, and in spite of my post–April 6 resolve, I had wanted to run up to them and explain that it was all right, that we weren't Saddam, that their husbands would probably be taken in for questioning and then returned unharmed. Abu Ghraib notwithstanding, no one in our company or battalion deliberately mistreated prisoners. I didn't really know whether our detainees were bad or good—for all I knew, they could have been notorious insurgent leaders—but none of our hearts were so hardened as to be totally untouched by the deep, very real grief standing there on that miserable, dusty road.

  Now, with our vehicle lying pitifully on its side and some of our detainees bleeding in a filthy drainage ditch in the middle of nowhere, I wanted so badly to tell the weeping women that I was sorry, that we didn't mean to hurt any of our prisoners, that we made mistakes just like everybody else but that unlike everybody else, our mistakes were life and death—sometimes life for us and death for others, and sometimes death for us and life for others. Today an eighteen-year-old truck driver—a random young Marine from the battalion's truck detachment—had simply misjudged the steepness of the road when he made his turn, and death and wounding, on both sides, had been the result.

  I wanted to bend down and tell the little girls that our people had also been badly hurt, that none of us really wanted to separate them from their dads, that somehow every decision that we made in this crazy country always seemed a difficult choice between bad and worse and that nothing ever turned out quite the way we hoped. I couldn't do anything to help them, though. I couldn't even speak to them in their language.

  So I turned my back on the crowd and did the only thing I felt I could: I started talking to my nearby Marines. They felt as bad as, if not worse than, I did, and I tried to answer all of their questions as honestly as possible—“What just happened, sir?” “Are the prisoners gonna be okay?” “What do we do for their families?” More often than not, though, I found myself saying something along the lines of “I just don't know. I wish I did, but I don't, and I won't tell you that I do. All that I do know is that all we can do is our best. Keep your head up. I'm very proud of you.”

  Some eight hours later, we returned to the base. Although the projected fighting hadn't materialized for us, Echo and Weapons Company had seen heavy combat. Eventually, a fierce counterattack killed or dissipated the last remaining insurgent holdouts, but ten more of our comrades lost their lives in the firestorm of the initial ambushes. Yet again, more of our friends didn't return home from the mission.

  That evening, I lay awake all night long. Insomnia had hit before, but usually it allowed at least a few hours of sleep before dawn.

  TWENTY-THREE

  After the intense combat of early April, the insurgent presence in Ramadi declined dramatically, partly because our enemies lost so many fighters during the fierce, toe-to-toe battles and partly because many of the most committed terrorists had relocated to Fallujah after the Marine offensive there was halted on April 9. That embattled, cordoned-off city had become the front line in the war against America, so a good deal of the most dedicated insurgents left Ramadi for her smaller sister thirty miles east. During the last two weeks of April, the attacks on Golf Company nearly ceased. Ramadi was eerily quiet.

  I enjoyed the calm, but I suspected that it wouldn't last. We still had five months left in our deployment—five more months of constant fighting and five more months away from our wives and children. And all of the Joker platoon commanders had five more months of the lonely, ever-present burden of combat leadership, of the constant knowledge that forty lives rested on our every decision, of the wound-tight tension of never being able to really share our responsibilities with anyone, and of the sleepless nights that came with all these things.

  So, during those few quiet weeks of late April, I visited the platoon's house as often as my duties and officer-enlisted propriety permitted. Judging how much time to spend around the men, especially in the place where they live, is always a tricky business for a young officer. Spend too much time with them and you risk descending into micromanagement, learning things that you just don't need to know, or convincing the men that you are their friend. Spend too much time away from them and you risk losing touch with their day-to-day concerns, becoming aloof and disconnected, and convincing the men that you don't really care because you don't sacrifice you own personal time. So I walked the thin line between too much and too little and checked on the men every time I could. Every time, I found something different, for, other than knowing that some would be watching movies and some would be writing letters, there was absolutely no way to predict what my Marines would be doing in their downtime. Nearly always, I loved the surprises.

  One morning, I walked into the platoon's courtyard and found, to my immense surprise, that the entire 300-square-foot space was taken up by a plastic children's wading pool filled with water. Inside it were the extraordinarily pale and skinny Niles and Mahardy—with the exception of their sunburned faces and hands, they looked a lot like long, lean grubworms. Sitting around the pool, sunning themselves as if they were on the beach, were the stocky, tan or black Guzon, Bolding, and Raymond.
Bared to the waist, Noriel was just walking out of his room when he spotted me and the obvious shock on my face. Of course, he started grinning from ear to ear.

  I was speechless. We hadn't showered for at least a week, and somehow my Marines had scavenged not only a pool but also the precious water with which to fill it. As it turned out, George the translator had bought the pool at their request during his last foray into town, and Teague had simply pulled over the Iraqi water-delivery truck on its way out of our base and asked it to pump its remaining cargo into our courtyard. (By now, the Ox had engaged an Iraqi company to fill up the two plastic fifty-gallon water reservoirs installed by Achmed the contractor. Thus Golf Company could all take showers roughly once every week.) The scheme had succeeded brilliantly, and now I had multiple Marines crammed into a child's pool, brown faces and pale bodies pointed up at the sun.

  For a minute I didn't know what to say. Having a wading pool in the courtyard was not only a gigantic waste of water but also a recipe for injury—the more time the Marines spent without a solid roof over their heads, the higher the probability that they would be hit by one of the mortars that in mid-April had begun falling in and around the Outpost nearly every day. I looked at the men. Mahardy was trying to dunk another Marine, Lance Corporal Kepler. Niles was splashing Raymond, who was lying on his sleeping mat in the sun, trying to get a tan. I sighed. Maybe I should have made my Marines dump the water and ditch the pool, but I didn't have the heart. There were so few things that they could truly enjoy over here, and if the pool was one of them, then I figured I'd let them have their fun for at least a few hours. Once the water became intolerably unsanitary, we'd dump it.

  The following day, I walked into the courtyard unexpectedly and found Corporal Walter parading around it wearing only a pair of pantyhose and the little green hot pants, which he had somehow turned into a thong. I immediately about-faced, walked back out, and hoped that no one had seen me. I had no idea how Walter had managed to get his hands on a pair of panty hose, and I had no plans to find out. I didn't need to know everything that the Marines were doing in their spare time.

  Two days later, I warily peered around the courtyard's entrance. Inside, I saw nine Marines trooping back and forth, all shirtless and covered in blood. I nearly fainted. I rushed through the entrance with my head on a swivel, frantically trying to get a handle on the situation. Noticing my sudden arrival, Bowen ran over, grinning like the Cheshire cat, and I accosted him with nervous questions. Why was everyone bleeding so badly? Why were empty IV bags everywhere? Why did the Marines all look so happy? Why, damn it? Answer me!

  As I wound anxiously down, Bowen simply widened his grin and explained that all of the blood, all of the ghastly mess inside our courtyard, was just a part of some IV training he had set up with the docs. It was getting hotter, he said, and everyone needed to be prepared to rehydrate everyone else in the quickest and most effective manner possible: electrolytes straight to the bloodstream. Hearing this explanation, I stared wordlessly at Bowen and at the rest of the Marines, and I marveled. They had spent the last two hours alternately insulting one another and then jabbing one another with needles until everyone bled from at least four different places, all so that they would be better prepared to keep one another alive during combat.

  By the day's end, all of my men were covered in blood and smiling.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  As it turned out, my absolute best day in Iraq happened during that fleeting late April calm. The events took place mainly in and around Joker lOne's house, although the day did begin somewhat inauspiciously outside the Combat Outpost. In fact, the day began with Joker One being blown up on a mission. It was April 28, and we had just completed the morning's route sweep and were heading back to the Outpost in five unarmored Humvees (after early April, ammunition, including much-needed grenades, equipment, and vehicles had been showered on us from above). About halfway through the Farouq district, the second one, Bolding's Humvee, disappeared in fire and smoke as an IED exploded directly underneath it.

  When I glanced back, shocked at the explosion, I once again believed that I had just lost five men, but soon enough the wounded vehicle crawled forward out of the all-enveloping dust cloud. Despite being unable to feel his left arm, Bolding had managed to drive the vehicle out of the kill zone, and, half an hour later, the entire convoy made it back to the Outpost. As soon as we parked the vehicles, Bolding excused himself to go to the medical station. It was only then that I found out that the blast concussion had knocked out the feeling over much of the left half of his body. Later, in the doctor's room, I offered Bolding the rest of the day, or even the week off, but he tactfully refused. Smiling broadly, he informed me that he just wanted to get back to the squad—according to him, that would be all the healing he needed.

  Shaking my head, I wandered out of the medical office, once again amazed by my Marines. Were I in Bolding's shoes, I probably would have taken the day off, and you could be damn sure that I wouldn't be smiling if I was still having trouble moving my arm.

  A few hours later, I spotted Noriel walking by the hangar bay's entrance carrying two shovels and a pick. Very unusual. By now, I had learned the hard way that nearly all of the unusuals, no matter how small, needed to be at least cursorily checked lest weirdness run too rampant among Marines with too much downtime between missions. I called out to him.

  “Hey, Noriel, what are you doing with those things?”

  “Oh, hey, sir. Staff Sergeant says every Marines has got to fill twenty sandbags apiece. The ground, he is hard, sir, so I got the platoon some picks and shovels. It's hard to dig with our little e-tools.”

  “Every Marine in the platoon has to fill twenty bags?”

  “Oh yes, sir.”

  “Okay, very well, make sure that you have twenty empty bags for me. I'll be over shortly to fill them.”

  Noriel smiled. “Roger that, sir,” he said. Then he trooped back to the house with his armful of gear.

  I hadn't really thought through the decision to dig with my men when I made it. In my mind, it was simple: The whole platoon had a dirty, menial task to perform, which meant that I had a dirty, menial task to perform with them. Maybe I should have considered the choice a bit more, though. Maybe the digging somehow diminished my status as an officer; maybe I should have had better things to do with my time than hack cursingly away at the rock-hard earth under the scorching desert sun. Maybe I violated an earlier admonition from the Gunny to be a lieutenant doing a lieutenant's work, not a lieutenant doing a lance corporal's work. There are a lot of maybes, things that might have happened had I decided to allocate my time somewhat differently on that day, but one thing remains certain: The decision to spend the afternoon sweating mindlessly with my Marines—getting blisters on my palms from the stupid shovel handle and a piercing dehydration headache from the stupid desert sun—gave me my best day in Iraq.

  About twenty minutes after my conversation with Noriel, I walked over to the platoon's house and found my Marines already digging. Just five feet away from our courtyard, a large mound of soft, loose dirt had been piled high by some sort of construction vehicle. To my surprise, the Marines were completely ignoring this ready-made source of sandbag-filling material, instead laboriously chipping their own dirt out of the hard desert ground. Puzzled, I queried my platoon sergeant, who, when I arrived, had been smoking a cigarette and “supervising” the Marines’ efforts.

  “Hey, Staff Sergeant,” I said. “Why are we bothering to scrape our own dirt out of the ground? Why not just scoop it out of this nice pile here and fill up as many sandbags as we can until it runs out? Then, if we need to, we can fill up the rest with the dirt we dig up ourselves.”

  “Oh no, sir,” came the prompt reply. “That's the Gunny's dirt. We can't use it.”

  I stared blankly at Staff Sergeant for a few seconds. The connection between the Gunny and a pile of dirt escaped me, so he clarified.

  “Sir, the Gunny told me a couple of days ago that tha
t dirt is his and that he may use it for something in the future. We can't take it from him, sir. We just can't.” Staff Sergeant looked horrified at the very thought of touching the Gunny's precious dirt.

  By now, most of the Marines had either stopped digging altogether or were just going through the motions, looking at us out of the corners of their eyes and waiting to see how the conversation between Staff Sergeant and I played out. I thought briefly about the Gunny and his dirt, then decided to assume that he must certainly have been saving that dirt for us to use for sandbag filling. If I was wrong, the Gunny might correct me, respectfully, of course, but if he really didn't care that much (and I suspected that he didn't), then we could save maybe an hour or two of scraping away at the unyielding desert floor. Normally, I didn't like to go against Staff Sergeant in front of the Marines, but this time I didn't see any graceful way to change course.

  I glanced around—the Gunny was nowhere in sight—so I turned back and smiled wryly at my platoon sergeant. “Well, Staff Sergeant, I didn't know that the Gunny was into real estate speculation in Iraq, so why don't we assume that he's been saving this dirt for us. If the Gunny asks you any questions, just tell him that I ordered the Marines to use it and send him my way.”

  Having made my little statement, I propped my M-16 up against the courtyard wall, pulled off my cammie blouse, and, dressed ridiculously in boots, pants, undershirt, and a floppy camouflage sombrero, I took a big scoop out of that beautiful, soft dirt mound. The Marines started cheering, really, and poor Staff Sergeant stared helplessly at me as everyone else attacked the dirt with gusto. Just a bit later, someone rustled up a pair of tinny little speakers and a CD player, and Niles assumed DJ duties and started blasting horrible punk music as loud as the pathetic speakers would allow. A digging party had begun.