Donovan Campbell

by Leadership;Brotherhood Joker One: A Marine Platoon's Story of Courage

  As the platoon murmured the Twenty-third Psalm before our first mission on that mid-March evening, I believed that those prayers would be enough to keep us safe, to keep Henderson’s heart beating on the patrol, Guzon from shooting Staff Sergeant in the back, and Feldmeir from falling asleep during the middle of our walk. I hoped the prayers would keep me from getting my men lost on our first mission, from forgetting everything I knew about ambushes at night, from losing communication with one of my squads and abandoning my men to the mercies of Ramadi. In short, I hoped that prayer would allay my fears and cover for my shortcomings.

  The soft prayer ended, and together Joker One rose and walked from the hangar bay to the broad sandy area just inside the base’s main entrance. We assumed our patrol formation, with Noriel’s squad leading, Leza’s in the middle, and Bowen’s bringing up the rear. I stood just behind the base’s entry barrier as Yebra checked the radio one last time and the Marines behind me strung themselves out into two long, snaking lines. Suddenly the kneeling Yebra straightened, slung the radio across his back, and turned to me. Quietly he whispered, “Sir, COC [combat operations center] says we’re good to go.”

  I nodded, paused for a second, then looked up at Teague, the platoon’s point man. He stood a few meters away, looking back at me. In the dim wash of the streetlights lining Michigan, our eyes met. He didn’t look nervous—just hard, with narrowed eyes in an emotionless face. I nodded to Teague, lifted my arm above my head, and dropped it in front of my face. Move out. Teague nodded back, turned about, and calmly walked around the red-and-white-striped barrier and into the city. I crossed over five meters behind Teague, and behind me I heard Yebra mutter softly into the radio: “COC, be advised, Joker One is departing friendly lines.” Our first combat mission officially began.

  As soon as Teague took those first steps into Ramadi, my general fear and anxiety vanished. I was too concerned with minute-by-minute execution of the plan to worry about much more than the next half hour or so. In the scheme I had drawn up we would conduct an ambush at a cemetery at the south end of the city, a cemetery that had an excellent view of a train station where insurgents were rumored to be meeting at night. To catch them in the act, we planned to patrol down to the cemetery on foot, heading directly south from the Combat Outpost, across Michigan, and through a thick cluster of buildings lining the highway’s southern edge. Then we would cross a large open plain just to the east of the irrigation canal to keep ourselves away from the populated areas until the very last minute. With little electric light thrown off by the southern portion of Ramadi and low predicted natural ambient light, the darkness should cover our movement nicely. Bowen’s squad would peel off at the extreme southern end of the canal to keep watch over a major bridge while Noriel, Leza, and I would continue on, crossing under the bridge itself at the canal’s end and coming back into the city from the south.

  First and second squads would then occupy the little cemetery about five hundred meters due south of our target train station, the one demarcating Ramadi’s extreme southern end. We had heard reports that the insurgents used graves to hide their weapons, banking on the reluctance of Americans to search sites of such great sensitivity to the locals, so once we had observed the train station for long enough, we could give the cemetery a good once-over while the rest of the city slept.

  I had conceived this plan based on a prior train station visit with the Army and a detailed study of the photographic map I had managed to scrounge from one of the departing soldiers. Golf Company had obtained just a few maps of Ramadi prior to our arrival. Even with the Army supplying us their leftovers, there weren’t enough maps for each platoon commander, let alone each squad leader. As we walked out of the base’s gate, I held the worn photographic map in my left hand, and Leza, Bowen, and Noriel consulted crude hand-drawn graphics they had earlier created based on my lone map.

  My carefully thought-through plan held good for all of fifteen minutes. After moving quickly through the few buildings just south of Route Michigan, Joker One hit the open plain and our first set of complications. The aerial photos had shown this area as a smooth dirt field dotted with palm trees, but to our dismay we quickly discovered that the plain was scored with lines and lines of secondary irrigation ditches—most at least ten feet deep. The loose dirt sides of each of these furrows sloped down at about forty-five degrees, making it difficult for our heavily laden SAW gunners to struggle back up the slopes once they had climbed down. After twenty minutes of patrolling, first squad had managed to cross only three of these ditches, and third and second hadn’t even hit the plain yet.

  We pressed on for a little longer, but we were making horrible time. The Marines were starting to wear out climbing one crumbling ten-foot slope after another. Finally, after clambering on all fours out of our fourth or fifth irrigation ditch, I motioned Teague to move the head of the squad about two hundred meters west, right up against the main irrigation canal. It was a calculated risk—by moving so close to the canal and the lighted Farouq area just across the water, Joker One had a much greater chance of being spotted by locals sleeping on their rooftops. However, a nice, firm road ran alongside the canal, and the platoon could move much more quickly on it than in the open plain. If we crossed the area fast enough, perhaps no one would spot us.

  Once on the dirt road, our pace picked up considerably, and I called Leza and Bowen over our intersquad radios, the PRRs, to let them know about the changed scheme of maneuver. I reached Leza, second in the patrol’s column, but not Bowen; the PRRs, which had reached for close to a mile in training areas of Pendleton, apparently carried for only a few blocks in the urban canyons of Ramadi. Leza relayed the message, though, and the transition to the new route went smoothly. The platoon swiftly moved south until we hit the end of the canal. There, third squad and Staff Sergeant peeled off on their mission while first and second bumped over a set of railroad tracks, followed them underneath the bridge, and looped west, homing in on the cemetery.

  A few hundred meters from the bridge, we hit an open field with waist-high grass. With no other cover in sight save a few family compounds butting right up against the cemetery, I halted the patrol and had the men lie down in a rough circle. The bulk of the Marines would remain there, hidden by the grass, while Leza, Noriel, Teague, Yebra, and I headed to the ambush site for a quick look-over. The last thing that I wanted was the whole of Joker One to crowd into the cemetery and stumble noisily around trying to get into position all at once. Loading people into a night ambush is a tricky business. After about ten minutes of positioning themselves, first and second squads had assembled a rough defensive perimeter in the field. The small recce party and I headed out.

  After a hundred meters of moving, I glanced back at where the two squads lay. Even using my NVGs, the Marines were completely hidden in the tall grass, and I snapped a quick mental picture of their location so that our small reconnaissance patrol could find them on our way back. Then I turned my attention to the business of locating the little cemetery in the dark. I had driven there once before with the Army, but that had been during the daytime. Everything looks different at night and on foot. Despite the cool evening air, I started sweating. I thought that I knew where we were, but things were looking a little strange. As this was our first live mission, I was extremely worried about getting lost and inclined to second-guess myself. I briefly considered pulling out my GPS, but scrapped it as a last-resort idea. To get a reading, I would have had to illuminate the instrument. A random light in the middle of a grassy field on a clear night can be seen for miles. Nervously, I led us forward in what I hoped was the right direction.

  Five minutes later, Noriel and I hit the large dirt road that signaled the approach to the cemetery. But no sooner had I breathed a sigh of relief than headlights appeared around a road bend some one hundred meters away, moving rapidly toward us. With no time to spare, we flung ourselves facedown into a small depression on the side of the road. I held my breath as the vehicles rumbled
by. They turned out to be Army Humvees, but the soldiers either didn’t see us or didn’t deign to acknowledge us. When the coast was clear, we hopped back onto the dirt road and moved rapidly down it.

  After fifty more meters, Teague and I boosted Leza to the top of a high wall bordering the road to see if the cemetery was behind it. It wasn’t, and I cursed myself. Sweat was pouring off me in rivulets. We moved another fifty meters down the road and the entrance to the cemetery appeared: a dark break in the wall between compounds. I cursed my lack of patience. We darted inside and took cover in a small crypt. I settled down with Noriel and Leza, and together we planned out exactly how we would load the ambush, identifying squad positions, fields of fire and observation, and the various egress routes we would take if compromised. With everything sorted out, I left Yebra and Teague to watch over the cemetery while the two squad leaders and I headed back to get the squads. Teague had a PRR and could easily communicate with me over the short distance I needed to travel.

  As I had no desire to risk compromise again by heading down the dirt road, our reduced patrol climbed a broken wall at the rear of the cemetery and dropped into the compound abutting it to the south. Now that we had a good idea of the lay of the land, Noriel, Leza, and I would simply skirt the walls of these compounds, hiding in the shadows and avoiding use of the dirt road altogether. It was a solid plan, and it worked for about twenty meters. Then the feral dogs that slink around all the populated areas of Ramadi caught wind of us as we crept through someone’s backyard. What sounded like fifty hounds started howling loud enough to wake the nearby dead. At the time, though, Leza, Noriel, and I weren’t all that concerned about possible compromise. Instead, we were preoccupied trying to outrun the pack of snapping dogs that had suddenly materialized ten meters behind us. Abandoning all pretense at tactical movement, we ran full bore through people’s backyards. As we ran, we tore our way bodily through the things that people in Ramadi normally left in their backyards—laundry hanging up to dry, piles of crunchy trash, small clutches of sleeping chickens, and so on. After all of our efficient, professional, and silent patrolling in, I now felt like an amateur circus clown piling clumsily out of his clown car.

  With all our gear weighing us down, it didn’t take long for the dogs to close the distance, and I seriously considered shooting them. Just before I pivoted around to start killing dogs, though, Sergeant Leza performed a pivot of his own. Catching his movement out of the corner of my eye, I whipped around in time to see my blocky sergeant scoop up a rock, brandish it behind his head as if to throw it, and then charge full tilt at the baying dogs. The pack broke immediately under this feigned assault and peeled off into the darkness. I congratulated myself for having a quick-thinking, surprisingly nimble sergeant who had clearly been chased by dogs before.

  The rest of the mission proceeded without incident. Noriel, Leza, and I linked up with the two squads and led them back to the ambush site, where Teague and Yebra waited to guide them into position. With the cemetery loaded full of Marines, my reduced platoon waited, watching the train station to our north for several hours. After neither our NVGs nor our thermal scopes revealed any movement at our objective, we searched the cemetery for signs of recent activity. Finding none, we moved out to hit the train station itself. That, too, quickly proved a dry hole, and at 1 AM the platoon patrolled back to the Combat Outpost through the quiet Farouq area. By 2:30, Joker One was safely inside the Combat Outpost, a lot dirtier but a little more experienced, a little more confident that we could handle ourselves in the real world. Moreover, a number of my worries had proved unfounded. Guzon had done well—Staff Sergeant was still alive and kicking—and Henderson had exceeded my expectations. In fact, Henderson had proved himself so reliable and so tough in Kuwait that we had given him one of our precious SAWs. That whole evening, he had humped the light machine gun uncomplainingly up and down drainage ditches, even stopping to help out other Marines who had trouble struggling up the steep slopes. Even Feldmeir did okay—he fell asleep a few times in the cemetery, and Teague had to smack him on the back of his helmet to keep him awake, but he stayed alert and ready through both the patrol in and the egress out. My men were everything that I had hoped for.

  As I headed back to my room, helmet swinging in my left hand and weapon still slung across my gear-laden chest, I smiled a bit to myself. The first mission hadn’t exactly been a textbook ambush, but it hadn’t been a failure. The newly formed Joker One had performed well in its first time out of the gates. I had even managed to get us where we needed to go with only a few minor setbacks, so now both I and the rest of platoon knew that the lieutenant, whatever his other failings, could at least steer himself in the dark of the city. This most basic of accomplishments gave me some badly needed confidence.

  Most important, though, everyone returned from this mission. At the time, that accomplishment was the ultimate definition of success in my mind.

  THIRTEEN

  Over the course of the next week, Golf Company settled into a loose routine that would form the basis for our combat rhythms and that would give some vague shape to our new life in Ramadi. The CO created a rotation schedule guaranteeing that at least one out of every eight days was spent guarding the Outpost, which meant that, except for periodic squad-sized local security patrols, the majority of the day was spent either on or behind the compound walls. Another of the eight days was scheduled to be “off.” In theory, this meant a day free of all mission responsibilities for the Marines. (The platoon commanders and platoon sergeants stood duty as watch officers—even in theory, we never had a dedicated day off.) The other six days were spent running missions, either as the platoon tasked to take the twelve to fourteen hours during sunup, the platoon tasked to take the remainder during sundown, or the platoon tasked to stand ready for twenty-four straight hours as the backup for both (the QRF platoon). Golf Company’s final eight-day schedule, then, went as follows:

  DAY ONE: Day Ops

  DAY TWO: Night Ops/Tertiary QRF

  DAY THREE: QRF

  DAY FOUR: Security

  DAY FIVE: Day Ops

  DAY SIX: Night Ops/Tertiary QRF

  DAY SEVEN: QRF

  DAY EIGHT: “Off”/Secondary QRF/Gunny Duty

  A few days after our first mission, on our first “off” day, I walked into the platoon’s courtyard to check on the men and found eight gray Marines shuffling confusedly around. I almost fell over. In the dim light of the early evening, the strange figures looked like statues come to life, but on closer inspection these animated wonders turned out to be merely Mahardy, Yebra, Henderson, Guzon, Bolding, and three others. Shirtless, they ground to a halt when I walked into the courtyard. From stony faces eight eyeballs rolled whitely in my direction, the only proof that these now-still creatures actually lived. Even Bolding’s dark black skin had succumbed to a fine gray powder that covered every square inch of him, but his hundred-megawatt-smile still shone through the dust and obvious exhaustion. As he was the first Marine I recognized, I made a beeline for Bolding to ask what had happened to turn my platoon into living statues. Before I got there, though, I was intercepted by an agitated Noriel.

  “Sir, sir, sir! I finally found you. I’ve been looking all over for you, sir. The XO made the Marines move concrete powder bags for the past three hours. Each of the bags, he weights about fifty pounds, sir. We had to put them in one building, and we did it, sir, but as soon as we finished, the XO decided that we had to move them to another one. So we had to redo it, sir! Now the Marines is filthy, but Gunny’s told the companies we can’t use bottled waters to take showers. I asked Staff Sergeant if we could use him just this once, but he said no. Sir, how can the Marines sleep like this?” Noriel waved his arms at the statues.

  How indeed? We had no running water, and all of the baby wipes we had brought with us from the States wouldn’t even clean one of my men. At the courtyard’s entrance, I peered around the corner. None of the company staff were in view. I ducked back to Noriel and
told him to sneak into the mess hall and take whatever water he needed. If anyone asked my sergeant what he was doing, he was to tell them I had ordered him to retrieve some water. If they had a problem with it, they could deal with me directly.

  Hearing this, Noriel grinned and was off like a shot to the mess hell. Five minutes later he returned, arms and cargo pockets full of bottles of water.

  Establishing any sort of routine in Ramadi was nearly impossible. We soon learned that our missions were completely unpredictable and would arise, or change themselves, at any time, day or night. Being technically “off” was no guarantee of rest.

  There was one notable exception to this patternless pattern: the morning route sweep. Because Michigan was such an important transportation artery for all coalition forces in the area, keeping it free and clear of IEDs became a high priority for our company, so almost every morning started off with a platoon patrol straight down the highway from the Outpost on the eastern edge of Ramadi to the Government Center on the city’s western boundary. The mission seems sound and practicable in theory; even the term, “route sweep,” sounds professional, efficient, antiseptic. The reality is anything but—a route sweep is a nasty mission that can only be accomplished by ugly, primitive, and fairly risky methods.

  The Army had performed its sweeps by driving down the highway in fully armored Humvees at forty miles per hour, minimum, looking for whatever suspicious objects they could spot at such high speeds while holding their breaths, just waiting to get exploded. By contrast, we performed our route sweeps by walking down Michigan wearing body armor. Like the Army, we also held our breaths, waiting to get exploded. Walking at five miles an hour rather than driving at forty, we stood a much better chance of spotting unusual objects among the trash and other clutter littering the road. Wearing only body armor, though, we also stood a much worse chance of surviving a blast. Even at the slow speed, Marines still rarely spotted well-camouflaged IEDs until we were about thirty to fifty feet away, well within the kill zone. Each morning route sweep was an extremely nerve-racking forty minutes, to say the least. I envied the Army and their armored vehicles.