Charlie Mike

by Joe Klein

  He was, for the first time, under fire now—nothing very sustained, an occasional rocket-propelled grenade or bap-bap-bap potshots at the American convoys passing through. He began to notice something very odd: from time to time, Iraqi men—much older men, sometimes—would come out from under cover, stand tall, and start shooting at the convoys. It seemed suicidal. Why on earth were they doing that? Eric figured that the public display of courage was essential. These were people whose homes had been violated by the Americans. They were defending the honor of their families.

  There was a Marine battalion operating in Fallujah, but Eric found that the most effective units were the ten- to fifteen-member Marine MiTT teams (Military Transition Teams) that were serving as trainers for Iraq army and police units. He especially liked patrolling with a young Lieutenant named Travis Manion, who seemed—both Greitens and Joel Poudrier believed—a poster boy for everything an American military officer should be: smart, fit, principled, and creative. Manion was an Annapolis graduate and had served in Fallujah before as part of a Marine Force Recon unit. Poudrier gave him the toughest part of the city—an area called the Pizza Slice—to secure.

  The regular Marines were skeptical about MiTT teams. They wanted no part of patrolling with the Iraqis. Who could trust them? But a strong bond had developed between Manion’s team and its Iraqi army unit. The Iraqis went to war, courageously, in unarmored pickup trucks and with half the body armor that the Americans had. Manion’s team and the Iraqis patrolled together at night, using the intel that Eric’s targeting cell provided, and Eric often went along. The Iraqis would knock on the door and explain the situation to the head of household. “Where’s your cousin Abu Mohammed? We were here two weeks ago and you said he was with your cousin Ahmed. You gave us an address. He wasn’t there. We’ve heard that he’s back here. So here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to look through the rest of your house. We’d like you to come with us and show us around.”

  The Iraqis spoke quietly to the head of household. They didn’t force him to his knees or embarrass him in front of his family. They made it seem as if he were giving his guests a tour of his home. This seemed far less intrusive than the tactics that Eric had seen the U.S. forces use in Ramadi.

  One day, Eric and Major Poudrier brought a photo of a suspected sniper to an Iraqi unit. “We’re looking for this guy,” Poudrier said.

  “That guy?” The Iraqi Lieutenant said. “He’s down at the barbershop.”

  “Now?” Poudrier asked.

  “Now,” the Iraqi replied. And sure enough, he was. They arrested him there.

  The Iraqis were not perfect allies; they didn’t have much discipline. They were careless with their weapons and the way they organized their patrols. Their Army was mostly composed of Shiites who had no love for Fallujah’s Sunnis.

  One afternoon in late March, Eric was out on patrol with Manion’s MiTT team—another team was riding in a convoy along a parallel route—when he heard an IED and several grenades go off. The other team had been hit.

  A Marine Humvee had been jolted by a rocket-propelled grenade, but the Iraqis had been hit far worse: one of their pickup trucks had been blown up by an IED; several of their men had been killed. They brought three suspects who had been loitering in the area back to their command outpost.

  When Eric returned to base, he heard a major commotion in the common room. He ran down the hallway, along with Manion and Poudrier, and found Iraqi soldiers pummeling the suspects they’d brought in after the explosion. Both the prisoners and the Iraqi soldiers were screaming and crying. One of the suspects was on the ground, getting kicked by the Iraqis; another was still standing, getting punched and throttled by his captors, then knocked to the ground. The Americans tried to separate the combatants, but the screaming and stomping seemed only to intensify with their efforts to stanch it. The Iraqi soldiers were furious about the deaths of their comrades, terrified by how close they all had come to getting killed.

  Eric had never seen wild rage like this before. He was wearing his sidearm; indeed, everyone in the room was armed—and someone could start shooting at any minute, a possibility that became more immediate when Colonel Ali, the commander of the Iraqi troops, stormed into the room screaming as loudly as his men and brandishing an AK-47.

  Poudrier considered Ali to be a very good soldier—certainly far better than Ali’s predecessor, who had been pocketing his soldiers’ pay—and the Colonel proved it now. He went after the loudest, most passionate of his men, who was still trying to get at one of the prisoners, jammed the AK-47 in his sternum, and, in a drill sergeant’s bellow, told him to shut up. That calmed things down very quickly. In the evening, the Americans ate together with the Iraqis and then watched the James Bond movie Casino Royale; somehow the incident had drawn them closer. They were fighting the same enemy, the same war, and experiencing the same rage when their comrades were hurt.

  This, Eric realized, was what the individual experience of war was all about. It wasn’t about some great cause: it was about the protection of your friends, your family, your tribe—and the gut hatred of those who would do them harm. It didn’t matter if the war was misguided, as Eric believed this one to be. It was all about the love and muscular bonding that comes with brotherhood under fire. For the overwhelming majority of the men and women at war in Iraq—Americans and Iraqis alike—these relationships would be the most intense of their lives.

  The next day began with a mortar attack, which was not unusual. “Here’s our morning wake-up call,” said Poudrier, who could find the humor in just about anything. “Damn. I was hoping to sleep in.”

  But Eric sensed that there was something purposeful about these mortars. The explosions seemed to be marching in an orderly fashion toward the barracks. Usually a mortar attack was a hit-and-run affair, the perpetrators dashing off before they could be located and obliterated.

  He and Joel had bunks next to each other, and they stood and began to get dressed.

  Then Eric was down.

  He may have lost consciousness for a moment, or perhaps not—the explosion so loud that no one could hear—and he found himself on the floor, tucked into the SEAL incoming artillery position with his hands over his ears and his mouth open.

  A truck had somehow gotten past—or been allowed past—the checkpoints, through the switchback entrance between blast walls and Hesco barriers into FOB Fallujah. It had sidled up next to the old administrative building that served as the Marine barracks, and then it had detonated. The front of the building had been blown away. Inside, it was dark, the electricity blown, and the air was filled with choking dust—and another chemical smell: chlorine. The bomb had been laced with chlorine. Eric picked himself up, too stunned to ache. The Marines began to call out to one another: “Hey Maurice, you all right?” “Joel? Francis?” People were saying, “Yeah, I’m okay,” but Eric’s ears were ringing, and it was hard to keep track. A Marine Lieutenant Colonel found his way to them in the tangled darkness. He had a flashlight, and Eric could see the clogging dust in the air. He was having trouble breathing and his eyes were burning, but he grabbed hold of Staff Sergeant Francis and they followed the flashlight, stumbling out of there.

  They made it out to the rear of the barracks, where Eric fell to his hands and knees, coughing furiously. His body wanted to retch—people around him were vomiting—but he could only spit. He stood up and tried to figure out who had gotten out and who hadn’t. Joel Poudrier hadn’t. Eric could swear that Joel had said, “Yeah, I’m fine,” but he hadn’t come out. The Lieutenant Colonel and some of the men went back in and found Poudrier, who was bleeding severely from the back of his head.

  Eric realized that there was a pretty fierce firefight going on, and he and Staff Sergeant Francis ran up five stories to the roof of the building to reconnoiter. When he emerged on the roof, there was a rip of small-arms fire, and he dived to the ground and low-crawled to the front of the building. He took the northwest corner, and Francis took th
e southwest. In Eric’s corner, an Iraqi soldier was firing his rifle out toward the attackers. But Eric couldn’t see any attackers below, just people running around. He got out his scope and took a closer look—there were Iraqi police running about in the distance. There didn’t seem to be any attackers left. The Iraqi soldier was laying friendly fire on the Iraqi police. Eric had him stop.

  Travis Manion and some other Marines arrived on the roof a few minutes later with a medic who asked if Eric was okay. “I’m fine,” he said. “Good to go.”

  But he was bleeding and stunned, and they insisted that he go to Fallujah medical. A convoy of Humvees rolled up below; by the time Eric got down from the roof, they were all full. There was one open-bed truck, and Eric got in with a young Marine and they rolled through Fallujah on their backs, staring up at the blasted buildings as the sun rose in the sky and the day became impossibly hot.

  Eric was diagnosed with a mild concussion. He had taken some shrapnel in his head—twenty splinters, fragments from the building. He told the medics he was fine, but his head was still ringing, and he couldn’t hear or breathe very well. He asked about Poudrier, who’d already been medevaced to the hospital in Balad, which meant his wound was probably pretty serious.

  Eric called Kaj as soon as he could. “You’re going to hear about this truck bomb in Fallujah,” he said. “I’m fine, but I need you to call my parents and tell them not to worry.”

  It took Eric nearly a month to recover from the blast. He would wake at night, coughing, and it was hard to do his usual workouts—his lungs had obviously been damaged by the chlorine. But he kept pushing himself, and his lungs regained capacity, and within weeks after he got home, he was running as strong as he ever had. His vision came back to normal after several weeks of tremendous irritation and constant blinking. His hearing took longer, but eventually that returned as well.

  His deployment ended on April 5, 2007, a week after the blast. His return home was almost like an experiment in dive physics, experiencing the bends—not physically, but psychologically. One moment he was in Fallujah, preparing his last target list alongside his successor, and then he was choppered to Balad, and then he was flying home, and then he was in Dam Neck, Virginia, retrieving his white Ford Ranger pickup truck in the parking lot and driving through the gates . . .

  There was a Wendy’s just outside the base, and there was a line of people waiting at the drive-through, and suddenly Eric was infuriated. He wanted to stop his truck, storm the drive-through line, and shout at them, “You have no idea! You don’t know anything!”

  They were just sitting there in the cars, annoyed, perhaps, by the length of the line, while young men like Travis Manion were off on the other side of the world, doing a night raid in a Humvee that might be blown to bits by an IED, or being targeted by a sniper in that vulnerable moment when they contorted themselves out of the Humvee and surveyed the street, or shot in the face while entering a house. And these burger-and-fries people were just sitting there, in extraordinary comfort, not even getting out of their cars to get a fast-food meal, cocooned in their cars, listening to their music, living their lives, ordering Frostys.

  Eric realized he was being irrational. He was in Dam Neck, Virginia. The people on that line were Navy families, as likely as not. That was probably a chief petty officer ordering that Frosty. But his anger—so unlike him—reinforced by a sense of loss, and a sudden loss of purpose, continued in intermittent fashion for the next several months. He would see something or hear some civilian complaining about the stupidest thing, and he’d want to wring someone’s neck.

  The other thing was, he wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do now, what he wanted to do with his life. He wanted to do something useful. He still wanted to lead; he still wanted to help refugees . . . Or maybe, he proposed to Kaj, they could train to become astronauts, or maybe climb Mount Everest. “Eric,” Kaj reminded him, “it’s cold up there. We’re water people, warm weather people.”

  This was part of the bends, too: for the moment, there just wasn’t anything he had to do. In Iraq, his life had been a rigor of necessary tasks—an all-day, all-night proposition. Even chow was crucial: he had to keep his energy up. But now, life spooled out in a leisurely fashion. He could actually sit and talk and savor a meal. He had a girlfriend, a woman he’d met during his White House fellowship, who was also in the service, and they went on vacation together. Summer was coming. He had just turned thirty-three years old. His war was over.

  Chapter 5

  CAN YOU GET ME A BEER?

  Jake Wood’s platoon was given a day off after Nathan Windsor was killed at the intersection of Angels and Pirates, just outside Fallujah, in February 2007. The next day was to be a light one, too—one of the squads would go out on a routine patrol. A coin was flipped. Clay Hunt’s squad lost; Jeff Muir and Jake Wood got to spend another day hanging around FOB Viking. Jeff, Jake, and Clay were watching a season of 24, the Kiefer Sutherland spy series, and Jeff told Clay, “Don’t worry, bro, we’ll hold the next episode until you get back.”

  An hour or so later, Jeff went to take a shower. He had just finished brushing his teeth and was walking back to his hooch when a Marine he barely knew came walking in the opposite direction and said, “Hey, Muir, you know anyone named Hunt?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “He got shot.”

  Muir grabbed the guy. “How bad?” He didn’t know. Jeff ran back toward his hooch and saw that everyone was getting their stuff together, mounting up, going out to Route Lincoln where the attack had taken place. He ran to his bunk and was gathering his gear when Jake came in and said, “Hey, Clay got shot.”

  “How bad?” Jeff asked, knowing from the tone of Jake’s voice that it wasn’t terrible.

  “He got shot in the wrist . . . He’s out there, over by the CP. He wants to see you.”

  Jeff dropped everything and ran to the command post, where Clay was sitting on the front of his Humvee, all bandaged up and high as a kite on morphine. “Hey, man,” he said when Muir approached. “Can you get me a beer?”

  There was no beer downrange, no drugs or alcoholic beverages permitted. Muir began to laugh.

  “C’mon, bro, get me a beer. I love you, man.”

  Ahhh, the morphine, Jeff thought: everybody loves everybody on morphine.

  “You’ll be drinking beer before I will,” Jeff said. “You’re out of here. What happened?”

  “I was prone, on the SAW,” he said. “Fucker shot me through the wrist. He missed me by six inches.”

  “You okay?”

  Clay shrugged. And then they took him to the hospital in Fallujah. Within a week, he was back in California.

  “Mom, I should have been dead,” Clay said, when his parents visited him at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego. “Two seconds earlier, I would have been dead. I was prone, with the machine gun, but I lifted up. I used my left arm to lift up, so my left wrist was down where my head had just been.”

  There had been an AQI sniper in their area of operations, a magic sniper, very talented. The theory was that he had nailed Windsor in the neck, which was a great shot. He’d also nailed another Marine they didn’t know, from a moving car, and that guy had been walking—it was nearly impossible to make that shot. Clay believed the magic sniper had shot him, too. (Back in Iraq, Jake and Jeff came to the same conclusion.) Clay had certainly been lucky: the round had gone straight through, with minimal damage. Still, his wrist would never be quite the same. He would no longer be able to push open a door with his flat palm—he could only use his fist. He would have to do push-ups with his left fist and right palm on the ground in perpetuity. It wasn’t so bad.

  “Well, that’s over now,” Clay’s dad said. “You’ve got a million-dollar wound. You don’t have to go back.”

  “I’m going back,” Clay said.

  “They might not let you.”

  “I need to go back,” Clay said. “They need me.”

  Stacy Hunt knew better than t
o argue with his son. When Clay got an idea in his head, that was pretty much it. The boy ran at two speeds, obsessed or scattered. There had been an official diagnosis for this: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

  Clay had been born early, tiny. He had always been . . . a challenge, different, a bundle of real talents and vexing deficits. Stacy didn’t always handle this as well as he could have—certainly not as well as Clay’s mother, Susan, who had more patience and more time for her son and could express her love for him far more easily than Stacy could. Susan seemed focused on Clay’s strengths; Stacy worried about his weaknesses.

  The Hunts had met at the University of Texas and done very well for themselves. Stacy was in a boom market in Houston, a city that exploded in the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century. They weren’t exactly wealthy, but they were certainly comfortable, living in the western suburbs in a development called Rustling Pines. Their older child, a daughter, was a straight-ahead success in high school. She was a cheerleader with very good grades, a real go-getter. Clay had the makings to be all that, too—a normal kid, a better than normal kid. He was very smart, ticketed for the Advanced Placement track in school and—to Stacy’s delight—a fine athlete, even though he was small; in football, he made up for his size with toughness. He was a very good kid, too, in his way: he loved going on church service projects, thought hard about the deep things—like God—and never was mischievous in an evil way. But he sometimes would drift into trouble—a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Stacy believed. Or he was just oblivious, off in his own world.

  When Clay was four years old, Stacy took him to the country club and began to teach him golf, which, along with football, was an iconic Texas sport. Much to his delight, the kid wasn’t bad. He bought Clay a mini-set of golf clubs, and Clay was knocking the ball around—hitting it very well for his size—by age five. Stacy knew that Clay didn’t have the patience for more than four or five holes, but he expected that limit would expand over time. No doubt they’d be playing full rounds before long—but the opposite happened. The golf course featured several water hazards, and on sunny days turtles would bask on the banks. Clay was far more interested in the turtles than he was in golf. He would abandon his clubs mid-hole, run down to the water, and try to capture the turtles. Stacy couldn’t pull him away. There were times Clay would arrive home in tears. He desperately wanted to please his father, but the turtles . . . He couldn’t stay away from them.