One Bullet Away

by Nathaniel C. Fick

  The next day and night passed in a blur of beatings and interrogations. I was stripped to my underwear and shoved alone into a cinder-block cell, shorter than I was tall and narrower than I was wide. My legs cramped, and I shifted onto my feet. Then my back cramped, and I repeated the cycle for hours on end. Isolation is brutal, even for a short time. There was nothing to look at, no one to talk to, no way to keep track of time. We were made to feel completely powerless so that we would understand that our fates were in the hands of our captors.

  After dark, a scratchy recording echoed through the camp. I recognized it as Rudyard Kipling's "Boots," in a droning British monotone. Over and over, it played a continuous loop: "There's no discharge in the war!"

  When dealing with stress, we crave human contact, a connection with others who can empathize with our pain and provide the simple hope of shared hardship. I was cautiously excited when, hours after sunset, the guards dragged me from my cell and led me at gunpoint down a long underground corridor. Even hearing them talk and seeing them move took my focus off myself.

  I entered a carpeted room, warm and bright. A man behind a desk greeted me with a gracious smile and, in accented English, asked me to sit. He pushed a candy bar and a steaming mug of coffee across his desk, inviting me to enjoy them. Mind-fucking me. I refused, but not without a long glance at the rising steam. He introduced himself as a representative of the Jamaican embassy. I nodded. He asked about my treatment. I replied that Article 25 of the Geneva Convention required that I be housed in decent accommodations, while Article 26 guaranteed me basic daily food rations. I had received neither. He smiled and said he would see what he could do to help. He put on a concerned look and asked about my physical condition. At his prompting, I moved my head up and down, and back and forth. I bent my arms and legs.

  Going through the charade, I knew this was a "soft sell" interrogation. Torture is generally a weapon of the weak. Americans are social creatures and especially susceptible to those who will eviscerate us with a gentle smile and a kind word. By obeying politely but accepting no favors, I had defeated the conniving Jamaican. I was returned to my cell.

  After shivering for a few hours, I was again led out, this time blindfolded and bound at the wrists. Inside another room, I was forced into a wooden box. It measured perhaps five feet by two feet and was no more than two feet deep. A lid slammed over me, and I heard a latch slide into place. It was like being buried alive. I struggled to stay calm, to breathe easily, and not to thrash around and let them know they'd gotten to me.

  When I was finally let out, the guards pushed me up a flight of stairs and made me kneel on a wooden floor. They tightened the blindfold so I could see nothing. My hands remained tied behind my back. A voice began to fire questions at me—name, rank, service, reason for being in the country, number of Americans on my plane. The floorboards creaked as he walked around me. I didn't know where the blows would come from.

  I struggled to use the resistance techniques I had been taught, crafting a story that was believable, logical, flexible, and consistent. Alternately, I slipped into vagueness and ran down irrelevant tangents. I filled my speech with military acronyms and claimed a faulty memory. Whenever I sensed a fist winding up in the dark, I gave him a piece of information. I verbally bobbed and weaved until my knees were sore. Finally, a rifle barrel prodded me to my feet and planted itself in my rib cage as I limped back to my cell.

  Coping strategies. I stared at the cell wall, shivering. I had no idea how many hours remained before sunrise or how many days I'd be in the camp. Then I remembered the tap code. One of the classes in Coronado had been in a Morse code–like tapping of letters to spell words through cell walls. I tapped "hi" on the wall in front of me. H-I-H-I H-I.

  It surprised me when someone tapped back. I missed his first few taps and scratched at the wall, the signal to start over.

  S-F S-F S-F.

  Semper fi. Always faithful. I smiled in the tight confines of the cell and sat back to wait for my next mind-fuck.

  When SERE ended, the staff carefully debriefed each student on his performance. A Navy petty officer sat with me in an empty Coronado classroom.

  "So, sir," he said with a smile, "how long do you think you were locked in the box?"

  "An hour, maybe two," I replied.

  "Eight minutes."

  The two times I was led from my cell had, as I guessed, been my soft and hard interrogations. The hard sell had been a total success—I had given up almost no information and had used the resistance techniques so effectively that the interrogator had never resorted to torture. The soft sell had been a different matter. As I sat in silence the petty officer played a videotape. There I sat in the warm room, looking pale and thin. Apparently, there had been a hidden camera I never saw. A voice-over asked questions that were never actually posed to me, and my reactions had been spliced in.

  "Do you care that you bomb and kill the little children of our country?"

  I shook my head no.

  "Do you think America is evil for the war crimes it commits here against our peace-loving people?"

  I nodded an emphatic yes.

  My neck stretches in response to the Jamaican's health questions had been used against me. Despite the best intentions, I had fallen victim to the soft sell. The petty officer was sympathetic. "Don't worry, sir. Getting mind-fucked once is the best way to make sure it won't happen again."

  18

  THE FOLLOWING Monday morning, I put on my green dress uniform for the second time. It had been nearly two years since I'd checked into 1/1, and I wasn't a boot anymore. I wore a few ribbons from Afghanistan on my chest and all the confidence that went with them.

  Recon's headquarters was called Camp Margarita, a collection of single-story offices near Pendleton's airfield. A sign at the entrance bore the insignia I remembered from Colonel Leftwich's statue at TBS: a skull and crossbones surrounded by the words "Swift, Silent, Deadly." The battalion had been formed in 1937, and had fought with distinction in almost every Marine campaign since.

  The clerk collected my orders and sent me to the battalion commander's office, saying the commander liked to shake hands with each of his new officers when they checked in. Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Ferrando, trim and fine-featured, was on the telephone when I knocked on his door. He motioned me to a seat. A bout with throat cancer had left him with a raspy voice, and I understood why the battalion, under his command, used the call sign Godfather. After hanging up, Colonel Ferrando didn't waste time on pleasantries.

  "Your job is to be the hardest motherfucker in your platoon," he said while pointing at me across the desk. "Do that, and everything else will fall into place."

  He added that I was assigned to Bravo Company, call sign Hitman, and wished me luck.

  I stood at attention, about-faced, and stepped straight into Major Whitmer. He had been promoted after our return from Afghanistan and was recon's new operations officer. Just back from ten weeks at combatant diver school in Panama City, he looked tan and fit. I was happy to see him.

  "Congratulations on getting through the pipeline, Nate."

  "Congratulations on your promotion, sir. I hope you didn't get the field-grade lobotomy that goes with it." It was a running joke among lieutenants and captains that field-grade officers traded their common sense for the rank.

  "Careful, Lieutenant. You're about to feel the wrath of a field-grade officer." Whitmer smiled, and I laughed, remembering the warning from 1/1's operations officer in Afghanistan.

  A genial captain commanded Bravo Company. He was a former all-American football player, an intelligence officer by trade, with virtually no infantry field experience. But unlike the infantry, recon operated at the team and platoon levels. Since the company existed only for administrative reasons, the CO's background didn't bother me. He welcomed me aboard and asked which news I wanted first, bad or worse. I chose bad.

  "You have second platoon—Hitman Two—and there are three Marines in it." Dill's f
ull-strength recon platoon had had twenty-three Marines. After returning from Afghanistan, some had left the Corps or moved to different units; others were away at school but would return later, in the summer and fall.

  "And worse?"

  "We're leaving next week for a month at Bridgeport. I hope you weren't planning to go on vacation after all those schools."

  The Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center is in the High Sierra, near Bridgeport, California. It opened in 1951 to train Marines to fight on Korea's snowy peaks. Afghanistan's terrain is similar, and in the summer of 2002, a return to Afghanistan seemed likely. The battalion would spend three and a half weeks rock climbing and running recon patrols through the mountains. Had we known then what we knew a few months later, we would have gone instead to the desert training ranges at Twentynine Palms.

  Since my "platoon" was smaller than one full-strength team, I spent most of the time at Bridgeport in the reconnaissance operations center (ROC), learning all the details of planning recon missions. By the end of the first week, I felt like a college student again. Late nights under fluorescent light, surviving on sludgy coffee, getting lots of theory but no practice.

  I told my CO that I wanted to go on patrol with a team. His answer surprised me.

  "Yeah, it'll make us look good."

  Look good? I couldn't care less. I wanted to see a mission from the team's end of the radio. It was like flipping the map around. Generally, recon platoon commanders coordinated planning and logistics from the ROC while team leaders ran the patrols. I didn't want to step on toes, but I needed a feel for a team's abilities so I could better plan operations once my platoon was manned.

  One of the battalion's senior officers, later nicknamed "Major Benelli" by the Marines because he insisted on carrying a Benelli shotgun, disagreed. "That's not your job, Lieutenant. Just stay in your lane." Benelli couldn't speak to someone of lower rank without smirking.

  But Major Whitmer pulled me aside. "Go out with the team. You'll learn a lot. There'll be plenty of time to rot in the head shed when you're a major."

  The mission's scenario had the battalion operating clandestinely inside a hostile country. Army Airborne was planning an invasion the following week with a mass drop of soldiers and equipment. Recon's job was to creep close to the drop zone and report back with details of its suitability for the mission. It was a classic, foot-mobile recon mission—get in, take a look, and get out without being seen.

  It was midmorning when our helicopter settled toward the landing zone. I was shadowing a six-man team. The only man I knew was Rudy Reyes, the sergeant who had led workouts on the Dubuque and then manned the observation post atop the hangar in Jacobabad. He was serving as the team's radio operator. The team leader was in command; I would just bird-dog them. Through the window, I saw an impossibly small patch of yellow grass bordered by a wire fence. But the pilots were reserve lieutenant colonels, willing to put their bird into any zone an inch wider than the diameter of the rotor blades. The wheels thumped down, and the team filed toward a skirmisher line of scraggly pines. Flashes winked from the shadows. All I heard was the roar of the rotors turning a few feet behind me.

  "Contact! Back to the bird," the team leader yelled. Another group of Marines was playing the opposition and shooting at us. The team deployed into a staggered line, with half the Marines firing while the other half moved. They struggled under the weight of eighty-pound packs, aiming from a knee and then turning to lumber toward the helicopter. The team leader and the pilots shot clipped sentences back and forth.

  "Under fire. Gotta go."

  "Twenty more seconds. Don't leave us."

  A door gunner leaned into his machine gun, blazing away at the shadows in the tree line. With the last team member still on the ramp, the helicopter rose from the compromised field. We flew to the team's alternate insert point and made the drop-off. The team leader led his men off the zone and settled them into a tight circle, each man watching and listening as the helicopter clattered away. After the noise and motion of the insert, eyes and ears needed time to adjust to the more subtle rhythms of the woods. I watched pupils darting within bright whites, the Marines' only recognizably human features. Even those would fade with a day's fatigue, as bodies adjusted to dusky equilibrium with the forest around them. The team remained frozen for thirty minutes. Birds resumed their song, and squirrels again scurried through the fallen leaves. Only then did the Marines rise.

  Three miles of mountainous terrain separated us from the drop zone. Landing any closer would have been too risky. The team planned to move into position around sunset to observe the objective and take photos to send back to the battalion. Then we would use the safety of darkness to recon the zone up close before moving to our extract landing zone, known as Sparrow, for pickup in the morning.

  The patrol moved out with a corporal on point. He placed each heel on the ground, slowly rotating his foot to shift his weight silently to the ball. Behind him walked the team leader, followed by Rudy, moving sprightly even under the weight of the radios. Two junior Marines lugged the bulk of the team's supplies—mainly water and batteries—and also the firepower of the team's one light machine gun. The assistant team leader walked tail-end Charlie, watching for stragglers and ready to take over if something happened to the leader. I shadowed the assistant team leader at the rear of the patrol, watching the team move, charting our time and distance on the map, and trying my best to be invisible.

  Just before sunset, the team stopped in the densest, most inhospitable thicket they could find—a perfect patrol base. Three men would remain there while three others went on a leader's recon of the objective area. I opted to move with the leader's recon.

  We padded through a piny glen and reentered the sunlight to climb a shallow ridge of exposed rock. Enough shrubbery clung to veins of soil in the stones to conceal our movement, and we climbed quickly to a vantage point almost a thousand feet above the proposed drop zone. As two Marines scanned for threats, the team leader unpacked his equipment and went to work. He spun a telephoto lens the size of a wine bottle onto the camera body and began snapping a panoramic series across the length and breadth of the objective. He took five more shots with a different camera. After stowing the cameras, he unzipped a nylon bag and took out a sketchpad and a handful of colored pencils. In quick, confident strokes, he drew the outline of the drop zone, adding obstacles such as trees and ditches, penciling in estimated heights and dimensions. After cramming the page with data, he zipped the bag and stood. We clambered back down the ridge.

  At the patrol base, the other Marines had set up the high-frequency radio while waiting for our group to return. They wanted to transmit their information back to the battalion so that even if the team got captured or killed, the mission would not have been in vain. The team leader furiously typed a report on his tiny laptop while Rudy tried to contact the ROC.

  "Godfather, this is Hitman Two." They were using my call sign, the second platoon of Bravo Company, to call the battalion.

  Static.

  "Godfather, Godfather. Hitman Two. Come in. Over."

  Static.

  The mountains interfered with a conventional whip antenna, so Rudy shinnied up a nearby tree and wrapped a spool of thin wire around its branches, effectively turning it into a huge, field-expedient antenna.

  "Godfather, this is Hitman Two."

  "Hitman Two, Godfather. Send your traffic."

  The team sent its pictures and text report back to the battalion as an encrypted digital burst transmission. I knew the Marines in the ROC would be clustered around the receiving computer, anxious to see near-real-time imagery sent by a team miles away. Even in training, this was impressive technology. After sending the report, the team packed its gear and waited for dark before moving to the drop zone.

  I was learning lessons that would help me make better use of my platoon in the future. Recon teams never have enough time, enough batteries, or enough information. They always have too many q
uestions to answer, too many mandatory radio checks to make with headquarters, and too many mouths to feed.

  The point man drifted down the slope like a wisp of blown fog. I dropped night vision goggles in front of my eyes to track the team in the dark. Without them, I had not even crunching footsteps to follow. I was amazed at how good they were.

  We split into two groups at the southern edge of the drop zone and zigzagged along the edges of the field, with a kilometer of grass between the team's two halves. A rising moon illuminated each condensed exhalation from my mouth. I labored silently under an eighty-pound pack filled with warm clothes and batteries. No grunting. No cursing. No carelessly snapping a twig underfoot. We threaded single file along the shadow paths cast by pines. Moving in the open under this moon was too conspicuous. Far overhead, airliners slid through the dark, winking red and white. I imagined coffee cups being collected and tray tables placed upright in preparation for landing in San Francisco. Twenty minutes for them; twenty light-years for us.

  The teams linked up expertly north of the drop zone. Radio calls, flashes of infrared light, a cautious approach, a whispered password, a hurried reply. Pastry. Tiger. The team leader steered the team halfway to the extract landing zone before settling into a tight circle. There we repeated the earlier drill of composing and sending information to the battalion. The drop zone had been free of obstructions. Let the airborne invasion commence. With dawn an hour away, there wasn't time for sleep or food. Rudy compensated for both by sprinkling instant coffee crystals on his tongue, grinning with all the satisfaction of a content connoisseur.

  The eastern sky was still dark when we began the final sprint to Sparrow, balancing stealth with the new need to meet the helicopter. The point man still placed each heel down with care, but his steps fell in quicker succession than before. I looked at the map—just under two kilometers to the zone. A rule of thumb in terrain like this is one kilometer per hour. We had twenty minutes to do nearly twice that. I imagined the pilots flying toward Sparrow, trusting us to be there. Just as we approached the zone, rotor blades echoed through the valley. The team leader contacted the bird.