by Leadership;Brotherhood Joker One: A Marine Platoon's Story of Courage
Love told the honest truth when lying would have been much easier or would have made me look much better; it admitted to the men that sometimes I had no answers. It confessed my mistakes and asked for forgiveness when I had wronged, and it moved past those mistakes when forgiveness had been granted.
Love hoped that things would be better someday, maybe in this life or maybe in the next, but it didn’t deny the reality of the pain and suffering that surrounded us day in and day out; it didn’t dishonestly rationalize them or explain them away. Love didn’t try to make sense of the senseless; it simply offered a light to run to.
But, like now, that light grew dim sometimes. So, sometimes, love meant just getting out of bed in the morning when everything inside screamed to rest, just for one day. Sometimes it meant simply putting one foot in front of the other on patrol. And sometimes it meant continuing the mission when you didn’t see any progress, meant protecting the defenseless, refraining from pulling the trigger, putting yourself at greater risk, doing what you knew to be right even though you didn’t really want to.
So that was how we loved those who hated us; blessed those who persecuted us; daily laid down our lives for our neighbors. No matter what we felt, we tried to demonstrate love through our daily actions. Now I understand more about what it means to truly love, and what it means to love your neighbor—how you can do it even when your neighbor literally tries to kill you.
And now I understand the true magnitude of what Bolding did. At the time of the attack that took his life, I thought that Bolding had died for us. Now I know that, as much as he laid down his life for his brothers, Bolding also laid down his life for a group of small, badly wounded Iraqi children, trading his legs, his blood, and his future so that they might have a chance for a future of their own. More than any of us, Bolding had lived out the greater-love principle to its fullest possible extent.
On September 9, 2004, Joker One loaded up into trucks and prepared to head out of the Outpost for Junction City en route to the United States and home. We were leaving with fewer than we came, and the knowledge sat heavy on me as I hopped into the cab of my vehicle. However, we had done our very best, and we loved one another with everything we had. In the platoon, we had created something much greater than any of us, something that I hoped we would take with us for the rest of our lives. In Ramadi, we had made mistakes and paid the price, but to the fullest extent possible we had cared for those whom war always traps between bad and worse.
Looking back through the window at my men, seeing them smiling and pushing one another and slapping magazines into their weapons for the last time, I understood how much we had accomplished and how hard we had tried. After Aldrich, faith and hope had left me, and I despaired, but now I realized that love somehow remained. Slowly, it began to restore the other two.
THIRTY-EIGHT
After two weeks of waiting for a plane to become available, Joker One finally flew to Kuwait and from there back to the States. On September 25, 2004, we formed up with the rest of the company at the armory in Camp Pendleton, California. It was late there, around ten o’clock, but that hadn’t stopped our loved ones from gathering to greet us. We could hear their cheers, just a few hundred yards away, up on top of a hill where they couldn’t quite see us down at the armory. Once the company had assembled in a rough column of four squares, we set off up the hill, the CO marching at our head, Joker One and I following just behind him.
When the CO and the flag bearer preceding him crested the hill, the crowd erupted. The company marched toward them, eyes straight forward, hands swinging stiffly by our sides, heads held high. I don’t know what the rest of the men were thinking then, but I, for one, felt proud. Ramadi hadn’t become a bastion of security and stability on our watch, but it hadn’t completely fallen to the insurgents, either. To prevent that, we had fought every day, street by street and house by house, bringing only what we could carry on our backs. We had fought hard, and we had persevered, and maybe the city was a little bit better for having had us there.
However, we had taken a tremendous beating in the process. The battalion had suffered thirty-four killed and over ten times that number wounded in seven and a half months. Across 2/4, those numbers worked out to be a little less than one out of every three men. In Golf Company, the ratio was even higher: Roughly one out of every two of us had been wounded. However, our sister company, Echo, had suffered the worst: They had suffered twenty-two killed, about one out of every eight men. They had quite literally been decimated. Later, we were told that when we returned to the States, we had taken more casualties than any battalion—Marine or Army—since Vietnam.
These thoughts flitted briefly through my mind as the company stopped its march directly in front of the gathered crowd. As one man, the battalion turned left and faced our shouting loved ones, and, staring at them as I saluted our CO and our flag, I was reminded of the tremendous price we had paid to march back with our heads held high. There in front of me, waving his right arm only, was Carson. His left was bound up in a sling. Leza and Niles stood next to him, both on crutches, and Boren was there with his wife and his cane. When the CO dismissed us, and the Marines of Joker One flooded out of the ranks to run into the arms of their crying wives, to hug their mothers and fathers, to have their little ones jump into their arms, I couldn’t help but think that our joy was incomplete. One of our families was missing. One of us hadn’t made it back, and his wife and parents had no reason to come to California to greet us. Even as I kissed Christy, and even as I watched my men tearfully reunite with those who loved them, I thought about the one family to whom I hadn’t been able to keep my promise.
Four days later, the entire battalion went on a month of leave. It was wonderful to be back in America—and what better place to be than Southern California—but everywhere I went, I felt a little naked. I was used to being armed to the teeth, used to having an entire squad around me everywhere I traveled. Without the knowledge that twelve men were watching over one another and me, I felt nervous around crowds, and I avoided them. Loud noises scared me, and I jumped every time a door slammed or a car backfired. I still had trouble sleeping.
Still, each day was a little bit better than its predecessor, and, slowly, I eased my way back into America. By the time sleeping in my own bed felt more or less normal, everyone had returned from their leave and their respective homes. It was wonderful to be around the men again. One month later, though, I found out that I was being replaced as Joker One’s platoon commander. It wasn’t a surprise—with only five months of active duty left for me, I had to turn my men over to a new leader sometime. However, it was one of the hardest things I have ever done, giving the men who had been the center of my world over to someone else who didn’t know them as I did. I let them go all the same. Keeping the Marines any longer would have been selfish—they needed time and training with their new leader, and the longer I kept them, the less well they would all work together.
Shortly before I left, Joker One threw a platoon beach party, and at it the men gave me a surprise. Just as we were preparing to leave, Noriel gathered the men and walked them and me over to a pickup truck that had been backed up to the beach. I hadn’t noticed it before. As we assembled around the tailgate, Noriel announced to me that the platoon had gotten together to give their departing leader a little something. Then he dropped the tailgate and revealed my present.
Stood on its side so I could look clearly into its glass front was a custom-made hardwood case lined with red velvet. Inside it were mounted an officer’s sword and sheath. To my surprise, the sword fit me exactly. I looked up at Noriel on discovering this, and he was grinning from ear to ear.
“Now you know why I asked your inseams, sir.” He paused and looked at me expectantly. Still dumbfounded, I looked back. Noriel spoke up again. “Damn, sir, you’re dry-eyed still. I was hoping you’d cry when you saw this.” Then he walked over and handed me something small and jangling. I looked down. It was a whole host of do
g tags, all strung together one after the other along the standard beaded metal chain. They were bent and dented. Some were still covered in sand.
Noriel spoke again, serious now. “Sir, those are all of us, sir. So you can remember us when you’re gone.” He paused, then. “Sir, we even got Bolding’s dog tag for you.”
Hearing that, I nearly did cry.
I left the platoon the next week, and I thought that it would be the last time I would see them together, but I was wrong. Three weeks later, we held a memorial service for the battalion’s dead, and the CO called me to make sure that I would come. Up until the day of the service, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to be there—Bolding’s family was coming, the CO had told me, and I didn’t know how I could face them. But when the afternoon finally arrived, I pushed my fear aside and walked down to the event. Standing at the back, in the very last row of a crowd of Marines, I had a difficult time maintaining my composure as the chaplain honored our dead for the last time. At the front of the crowd, I could see Joker One, assembled together with their new leader at their head. Some time passed, more words were spoken by the company commanders, and eventually the service ended. My Marines broke up and formed a long line—they were paying their respects to Bolding’s mother and sisters.
Supremely nervous, I walked over to the line and waited my turn. I don’t know how long the waiting lasted—it seemed forever but too short—and the entire time I practiced the words that I wanted to say to Bolding’s mother about her son. Her son was a hero, I wanted to tell her, and he died defending others, children who couldn’t defend themselves. He was one of the best of all of us, and he never quit on his team. He lifted us all with his smile and his cheerful nature. We missed him.
Then, suddenly, I was there, in front of her, and I couldn’t say anything at all. For a time, I looked at her, and she at me, and then I broke down sobbing. It was the first time I had cried about Bolding since we lost him, since the Gunny had held me in that miserable bathroom in Iraq. I couldn’t speak coherently, and the only thing I said, over and over again through my sobs, was this:
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Then, though I couldn’t see, so I can’t describe exactly what happened, Bolding’s mom was hugging me. Just like the Gunny had, she pulled me down into her chest, and I wrapped my arms around her and cried and cried until I couldn’t cry anymore.
I don’t remember if she said anything to me, but when the moment passed, I felt some measure of absolution. Life continued, and so would I. Some things I will never understand, but I accept that now, and I no longer demand full comprehension as the price of the pursuit of excellence. So I’ll keep putting one foot in front of the other as best as I possibly can until my mission on earth ends and God takes me home.
I didn’t write Joker One thinking that it would ever become a book, much less a bestseller. In fact, I never thought that anyone other than my men and their families would ever read our story, a story I wrote because I felt that it was the final thing I had to do as the leader of Joker One. You see, while I was a combat platoon commander, I failed to write enough awards for my men. I didn’t realize that what we were doing in Ramadi was unique. I thought that everyone in Iraq was fighting as hard as we were, that everyone was suffering one-half to one-third wounded as they battled for months without ceasing. But they weren’t. What we did was special, even for the bloody summer of 2004. Because I thought it was normal, though, I demanded nearly superhuman feats from my men before I wrote them up for awards. For what they did and what they endured, nearly all of my Marines deserved medals. I didn’t do enough to ensure that they got them.
Also, as a young lieutenant, I didn’t realize the supreme importance of martial decorations. It wasn’t until I left the military (the first time) and saw how people were rewarded in the civilian world that I finally got it. In the military, the only thing that we can do to show our appreciation for above-and-beyond performance, performance that often demands a limb or a life as its toll, is to take a little bit of ribbon, and wrap it around a little bit of metal, and pin it on a man’s camouflage fatigues. If he’s dead, then we present the decoration to his widow, or his mother. Junior officers can’t hand out extra vacation, or a cash bonus, or a desirable duty location, or a promotion. All of those rewards are out of our hands. All that we can do is take the time to tell the Marine Corps the story of our men in a format it understands and hope that the awards boards agree with us. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t, but it doesn’t matter; we can’t control the boards. All we can do is make the effort, and I didn’t do enough of that. My Marines don’t have all of the medals they deserve.
I thought about my oversight as I progressed through my first year of business school nearly a year after returning from Iraq. Throughout my studies, I kept in touch with some of my men. To a man, they told me the same thing: “Sir, we don’t really tell anyone else what happened overseas. Not even our families. They just don’t get it. It’s like trying to explain red to a blind man: no matter how hard you try, they’ll never fully understand, so you just stop trying eventually, you know?”
I did know, but the fact that the parents and the wives of my men had no real idea of what their sons and their husbands had endured didn’t sit well with me. My Marines had performed magnificently in an environment that demanded more than they should have been able to give. Undermanned and underequipped, these nineteen- and twenty- year- olds had never given up, had never succumbed to the pressure, the heat, or their own worst natures. They had fought hard, kept the faith, and finished their mission with honor. And their parents knew none of it.
So, knowing that I had stories left to tell and knowing that my men hadn’t told them, I determined that I would write down what we had done. That way, my men could give the finished product to their families and say, “Here’s what I did. Now you can read about it. I don’t have to tell it.” From there, one thing led to another, and now the stories are a book, and many people know what my Marines did. It doesn’t make up for the lack of medals, I know, but it was the last unfinished thing I had to do. Having done it, I felt a sense of completion that I lacked earlier.
Now I’m writing this afterword nearly five years after the events of that fateful 2004 deployment. Since then, I’ve completed business school, had two daughters, and been recalled for yet another tour in Afghanistan. In fact, I finished Joker One while in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital. I’m willing to bet that it was the first time my editor and friend, Tim Bartlett, had worked with an author in a war zone—perhaps there should have been a clause in our contract that specified exactly what happened in the event that the author was exploded by a suicide car bomb.
At any rate, it feels somewhat strange now to be finally writing in the comfort of my own home. The first chapter of the book feels even more true today than when I penned it back at school: the events in Ramadi seem like they happened to someone else, somewhere else, in a different life maybe. Now I have my own house in a city where all the streetlights work, and the trash gets picked up, and the roads don’t explode when you drive on them. I see my wife every day, and my daughters don’t age in stop-motion photography. I can drive down the streets without scanning the rooftops. I can go to sleep at night without having to keep my boots on. I don’t have to worry about someone trying their best tomorrow to kill everyone I love.
But everything in Ramadi really did happen, even though it seems like it didn’t now. For me, it hits hard, and sometimes all at once. I’ll see a half-finished parking garage, and it’ll remind me of one of our observation posts in Iraq, and I’ll think of the time that Philips fell off of a wall while trying to climb into the garage, and how we had to medevac him and how funny it was later but how amateurish it felt at the time. Then I’ll think of other medevacs, like Niles or Leza, and nothing will be funny for a while. But our good friend the catfish always makes me smile, and I always seem to remember the good times with the bad.
From everyth
ing that I’ve heard from my men since the book came out, good mixed with bad seems to be a pervasive theme. The good was people sacrificing for each other: Teague walking point, Doc Camacho running through fire to treat our wounded, random taxis stopping during firefights to pick up hurt civilians. The bad was all of the evil that we saw: the children who exploded in front of us, the trash that never got picked up, Leza—screaming—on that damn green canvas stretcher. I remember them both, but for some reason it’s the good that mainly sticks with me.
That’s been the case for most, but not all, of the Marines I’ve talked with since the book came out. Noriel has gone back to college, gotten his bachelor’s degree, and is now applying to nursing school. He wants to work at the VA. Going there was like coming home, he told me. Teague joined a reserve unit and spent time teaching other Marines to get ready to head to Iraq. Walter just rejoined the Corps after a stint as a civilian. Mahardy is back with his family in New York State, attending college. Leza is a policeman in El Paso. Waters is one somewhere else. Brown is a firefighter. Bowen, as far as I know, is still in the Corps. He was voted Marine of the Year for the entire 1st Marine Division in 2004, and he has a bright future ahead of him as one of the USMC’s finest.
Others have struggled a bit more. One of them thanked me for telling our story, because it reminded him of all the good we did in Iraq and all of the good times we had over there. Prior to the book, it seemed that all he remembered was the bad. Feldmeir deserted shortly after returning from Iraq. He rejoined the platoon sometime later, but he didn’t last much longer before he was discharged. Carson achieved his goal in the Corps—he made it through sniper school to earn the coveted sniper specialty—but he eventually had to be medically discharged because his shoulder never fully healed.