One Bullet Away

by Nathaniel C. Fick

Ancient Babylon spread across the plains beneath the palace. The city had been excavated by Germans a century earlier and its treasures carted off to Berlin. Most of what remained was, like the palace, a fantasy. Saddam had reconstructed Babylon not according to any archaeological evidence, but to tickle his own fancy. Crenellated walls and soaring towers crowned the bricks of the original ruins. Once each year, the regime had held a ceremony in Babylon to celebrate Iraq's glory. Saddam himself had played the role of King Nebuchadnezzar.

  We parked next to the famed Ishtar Gate, a blue portal covered with reliefs of lions, stags, and mythical creatures. I remembered only the highlights of Babylon's history—Hammurabi, the Hanging Gardens, the death of Alexander the Great—and was relieved when a distinguished older gentleman approached us. His first sentence made me laugh: "Call me Ishmael." Wearing a fedora and dark sunglasses, Ish-mael had been an archaeologist at Babylon before the Ba'ath Party came to power in 1968. He carried a thick binder filled with maps and photographs and offered to take us on a tour of the site.

  Ishmael shepherded us through Babylon's cobbled streets. He spoke lilting English, weaving a story of mighty kings and fallen empires. Behind him, like so many schoolkids on a field trip, trailed the platoon, covered with guns and knives, straining to hear every word. We walked down the fabled Street of Processions, past the basalt Lion of Babylon, and across the stage on which Alexander is rumored to have died. Colbert slid next to me and marveled that, in only two years, we had followed two of Alexander's most fabled campaigns—across Afghanistan and Iraq.

  "Somehow I doubt I'll be remembered as 'Brad the Great,'" he said.

  Ishmael mixed his history lesson with modern parallels: new beginnings, imperial hubris, the death of an old regime. He kept up a running commentary on Saddam's abuses. Six of his family members, including his only son, had been executed in the 1990s. Inside the mysteriously cool natural icehouses deep beneath the floors, he quietly expressed his hope that the Americans would kill Saddam and end his terror definitively. The fear still gripped him.

  Back outside, Espera stood against a wall, with the sunlight casting sharp shadows across a stone courtyard. "Look around. This great empire rose and fell. Everything rises and falls, nations and individuals, too," he said. Lacking a cigar to point with, he leaned back on his hands. "Sometimes I think these decisions are already made; the script is already written, and we're the last to read it. Maybe the universe is like a big watch: If you can crack the formula to the universal principles, then you can figure it all out."

  Colbert cut in. "Is this your goddamn lottery theory again?"

  Espera ignored the exasperation and bent toward me. "Think about the lottery for a second," he continued. "You buy some tickets at 7-Eleven, and you turn on the TV that night to watch some dude read numbers off Ping-Pong balls. Well, there's nothing random about which numbers pop up." Espera said this as if it were all self-evident. Then he narrowed his eyes and got to the point. "If you could calculate the weight of the balls, the temperature and humidity of the room, the force of the little air jets, and a thousand other variables, then you could correctly predict what numbers win." He looked around with satisfaction. "Same thing here. Babylon fell. Iraq fell. The United States will someday fall. It's already written. That bullet that hit Pappy had his name on it since it was iron ore in the ground. We just couldn't see and calculate all the variables in time to save him. I'm not sure if that makes me feel better or worse."

  A small crowd had gathered. Ishmael looked uncertainly at his competition. Reyes clapped Espera on the back and said, "Don't know if I agree with you, brother, but well said. Amen."

  Colbert wandered off, saying, "Tony, you need to go home and get laid."

  "Tell me something I don't know, white boy." Espera fell back into his own brooding, and we followed Ishmael toward the Ishtar Gate.

  He carefully gathered his maps, tucking them back into the binder. Ishmael shook each of our hands, saying he hoped that Western tourists would soon flock to Babylon and help his people recapture their lost prosperity. Removing his fedora, Ishmael insisted that we'didn't have to pay him but allowed that any money "would buy many things of need" for his family. Gunny Wynn was a step ahead. He had collected a few dollars from each of us and tipped Ishmael a year's wages.

  We looped around a circular drive leading up the hill and parked near the palace's front door. The view was even more spectacular than I had expected. We gazed across the entire sweep of Babylon, over the palms, and past the Euphrates. The next day, another recon platoon stood in the same place and watched in horror as a Marine helicopter crashed into the river and sank, killing its four-man crew and one Marine who had jumped in to save them. But our afternoon was peaceful, and I could almost understand Saddam's delusion, from that perch, of keeping the whole country under his thumb. We crossed the threshold through wooden doors two stories high.

  The entry hall seemed modeled on a cathedral, but the power conveyed to visitors was not of God, but of Saddam. We tromped across an inlaid marble floor, marveling at a chandelier nearly the size of a Humvee. Carved panels of dark wood stood inside deep alcoves in the walls, like statues of saints. Doors led to long hallways promising riches. A grand staircase rose to balconies overlooking the ground-floor rooms. Everything was marble, crystal, or mahogany. One ceiling displayed a mural showing the sweep of Iraqi history, from the Ishtar Gate to Saddam Hussein. The whole place was garish, superficially impressive like a Las Vegas hotel rather than awe-inspiring like a medieval cathedral. It represented no grand idea or human triumph. Men from the First Marine Expeditionary Force headquarters camped in the upstairs rooms, and filthy cammies floated in a marble tub where, perhaps only weeks before, Saddam had enjoyed one of his final soaks.

  ***

  A week later, we packed up for the five-hundred-kilometer drive to Kuwait. Leaving at six P.M. to avoid the midday heat, we passed through As Samawah, where convoys had been mobbed and shot at on previous evenings. The town slept through our passage, and we saw only dogs barking under streetlights. We paralleled the Euphrates River toward Nasiriyah, and despite the warm air, I shivered when I saw its lights on the horizon. Memories of our first visit, exactly two months earlier, came surging back. As we refueled on the highway, scorpions scuttled across the pavement, casting shadows in the headlights which made them look a foot tall. I drove a long leg through the dead hours of early morning, passing near the Ar Ratawi railroad bridge and the oil fields of Rumaila. After Gunny Wynn took over, I fell asleep in the passenger seat and woke up in the sunlight of the empty Kuwaiti desert.

  Part III

  Aftermath

  Anyone who looks with anguish on evils so great must acknowledge the tragedy of it all; and if anyone experiences them without anguish, his condition is even more tragic, since he remains serene by losing his humanity.

  —AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO

  39

  I STROLL IN THE SUMMER SUNLIGHT at a lakeside family reunion. Young cousins splash in the water, while adults laugh over drinks. In the distance, a band plays. I approach people to join the conversations, but no one can see or hear me. I am invisible to them. Looking down at myself in confusion, I see that I wear desert camouflage and carry a rifle slung across my chest. Blood soaks my clothes.

  For months after coming home, this dream woke me. Not every night, only a dozen times in all, but often enough to make sleep an act of will. Sometimes I got up and took a walk. Sometimes I did pushups on my bedroom floor until I collapsed in exhaustion. Mostly, though, I stared at the ceiling and tried to think of something, anything, else.

  The homecoming story is a cliché. From the moment we arrived in Kuwait, I felt that I knew what would happen next. One Marine in a different battalion cracked almost immediately and shot another Marine in the chest during a touch football game. We took off from Kuwait City aboard a commercial airliner. The passengers cheered as the wheels left the ground. My seat was clean, the food delicious, and the stewardesses pretty. Some
people talked, most slept, and I stared out the window. The pyramids at Giza slid past in the morning light. In Frankfurt, I stood at the terminal door for twenty minutes, just marveling at the green grass. We entered American airspace north of Syracuse, New York, on Tuesday, June 3, 2003, at two P.M. The pilot said, "Welcome home," and we cheered again.

  When we landed at the Air Force base in Riverside, California, I walked down the stairs to the tarmac. There were the grills where the Red Cross had cooked hamburgers for us, the hangar where we'd slept on the floor, and the television still blaring at the rows of empty chairs where we'd watched the space shuttle burn up. Outside, headlights moved on the freeway. A Tuesday evening commute. Nothing had changed.

  The delusion persisted through our bus ride back to Camp Pendle-ton and the midnight reunion with our families on a basketball court behind the battalion's offices. I locked my weapons in the armory but kept the holster on my thigh to hide a bloodstain from the boy at Qalat Sukkar. People waved signs and cheered, and we played the returning heroes. Sergeant Patrick stood quietly, apart from the crowd, dressed in starched cammies and wearing boots for the first time in two months. He wore them, despite the pain, because he thought it was right to greet the platoon while wearing his proper uniform. We all hugged him, along with our mothers and fathers and wives and girlfriends, because he was family.

  I felt lonely that night in the hotel room—no radios hissing, no stars overhead, no Marines standing watch beside me. I slept in two-hour chunks. Before dawn, I woke up and took my second shower of the night, just because I could. A dark brown face stared back from the bathroom mirror. I saw lines on my forehead I hadn't noticed before. The horseshoe still hung around my neck on its loop of parachute cord. I slipped it up and over my head for the first time since Christmas.

  Delusions of normalcy continued as I settled back into my daily routine. I stopped for coffee on the way to work. I got stuck in traffic and went to the grocery store to refill my refrigerator. Life's simple conveniences kept me so grateful that I hardly thought about the war. The return felt seamless. Sometimes I imagined that the four-month interlude had been a dream I could just forget.

  But bit by bit, little things dragged me back. On a Saturday afternoon, a Marine friend who had not been in Iraq invited me to go skeet shooting with him at Camp Pendleton's range. I accepted reflexively, thinking nothing of it. I noticed him looking at me as we'drove up the freeway. Finally, he spoke.

  "What the hell are you doing?"

  I was swerving randomly under overpasses. In Iraq, that made it harder for people above to drop hand grenades into the Humvee.

  "Sorry. I wasn't paying attention."

  When we got to the range, I stood on the firing line with a shotgun and a bag of shells. Suddenly, I had no interest in shooting skeet. I had last fired a gun shortly before midnight on April 1, on the highway north of Al Hayy.

  I sized people up on the street, looking head to toe for the telltale bulge of a pistol or a bomb. Not having a tourniquet and IV bag nearby made me vaguely uncomfortable. I ate up every scrap of news about the men still fighting but preferred not to talk about it. I cried sometimes for no reason at all. When a driver cut me off in a merge lane, I visualized, without emotion, pulling his head back and cutting his throat with my car key. On the Fourth of July, a firecracker sent me diving behind a car door, reaching for a pistol that wasn't there. I felt older than my father. And I had the dream.

  I thought I was losing my mind. The only way I knew I was still sane was that I thought I might be going crazy. Surely, that awareness meant I was sane. Crazy people think they're sane. Only sane people can think they're crazy. I was reduced to taking comfort in a tautology.

  After three years as a platoon commander, I was promoted to captain and chosen to become the commanding officer of the Basic Reconnaissance Course. There are a limited number of operational jobs in the Marine Corps, so my two combat deployments guaranteed me a tour behind a desk instead of an immediate return to Afghanistan or Iraq. When I'd started OCS in 1998, I'd considered making the Marines my career. After Afghanistan, the possibility had remained, only slightly diminished. After Iraq, I knew I had to leave.

  Most people in my life acted as if getting out was a natural choice for me. When I'd accepted my commission, friends and relatives had asked questions such as "Last time we talked, you were at Dartmouth. What happened?" or "Do Marines get paid?" An acquaintance felt the need to console my parents, saying, "You must be so disappointed." These people now thought that I was correcting an earlier mistake, or perhaps that I'd satisfied my adolescent bravado. They thought that the job's practical hardships had driven me out—long deployments, frequent moves, low pay, and danger. But they were wrong. For me, the intangible honor and pride of being a Marine officer outweighed all the adversity.

  Some of my buddies in the Corps understood that the decision was more personal. They knew that I chafed under a hierarchy that sometimes valued polished boots more than tactical competence in its leaders. They figured that we had done in four years what a previous generation of Marines had done in twenty, or maybe never. Promotion, as an officer, means more paperwork and less time with the troops. They knew that I had joined the Marines to hold a sword, not a pencil. They were right, but the real reason was even deeper.

  I left the Corps because I had become a reluctant warrior. Many Marines reminded me of gladiators. They had that mysterious quality that allows some men to strap on greaves and a breastplate and wade into the gore. I respected, admired, and emulated them, but I could never be like them. I could kill when killing was called for, and I got hooked on the rush of combat as much as any man did. But I couldn't make the conscious choice to put myself in that position again and again throughout my professional life. Great Marine commanders, like all great warriors, are able to kill that which they love most—their men. It's a fundamental law of warfare. Twice I had cheated it. I couldn't tempt fate again.

  The battalion traditionally held a sendoff ceremony called a "Hail & Farewell" for its departing officers. Major Benelli scheduled mine for a Friday afternoon when he knew I wouldn't be in town. It was a snub, but not one that stung, since my allegiance wasn't to the battalion; it was to the platoon.

  Recon platoons are steeped in tradition, and one of the finest is the paddle party. Mine was held at Mike Wynn's house on a Friday night in August. The whole platoon was there. They put me in a chair in the center of the room and gathered around. The ceremony's roots stretch back to Viking warships. According to tradition, when a warrior left the crew to settle down and start a family, his comrades presented him with his oar as a symbol of the contribution he had made and of their own collective weakening after his departure.

  The youngest Marine, Lance Corporal Christeson, held the paddle first. Gunny Wynn and I had recommended him for combat meritorious promotion from private first class to lance corporal, one of the first since the Vietnam War. The paddle passed from his hands through the whole platoon, moving in order of seniority, with each man telling a story as he held it. "Lower, Christeson. You're shooting too high." Rushing to the landing zone at Bridgeport. Task Force Sword. Ambush Alley. Espera and the ever-present cigar. Lasers in Muwaffiqiya. Horsehead.

  Sydney. Boat raids. "Take the shot." The paddle passed from Gunny Wynn, the senior Marine in the platoon, to Sergeant Patrick, the man who had made it. Patrick turned the paddle around, showing it to me for the first time.

  He had carved it from a four-foot block of cherry. Green, tan, and black parachute cord wrapped the handle. My captain's bars, jump wings, and ribbons adorned the blade. On the back, Rudy had inked First Recon's insignia and attached a photo of the platoon in the Kuwaiti desert on the eve of the war.

  I reached out to touch it and sensed another crease in history. When my hand closed around the parachute cord, my command of the platoon ended. In their words, I was promoted from captain to mister. In mine, the most meaningful year of my life was over.

  A few mo
rnings later, I drove to work for my last day. It was a foggy, cool Southern California morning. In the parking lot, I saw my replacement, a red-haired captain named Brent Morel. We had gone to lunch together the day before and sat for two hours as I tried to put the platoon into words—Colbert's cool demeanor, Rudy's enthusiasm, Jacks's mastery of the Mark-19, Patrick's southern aphorisms. The war in Iraq hadn't ended, and I wanted Morel to know the men when he took them back for their second tour.

  "Mornin', Brent."

  He looked up from the waterproof bag he was sealing. "Hi, Nate. We're heading down to the beach for a fin."

  "Everybody?"

  "Whole platoon. Wanna come?" It was a gracious offer, but I couldn't accept it.

  "They're yours now, man. Have a good one."

  In the office, I collected all my gear, cleaning each piece and stuffing it into my rucksack to return to the supply warehouse. I held my rifle, thinking of Al Gharraf and the dead fedayeen. Putting my hand around the grip of my pistol, I was back at the bridge in Muwaffiqiya with tracers slicing through the dark. Brown bloodstains still mottled my flight gloves, but I shoved them into the ruck. I tried for a moment to beat Iraq's dust from its canvas but gave up. This pack would probably be retired anyway. A piece of shrapnel had torn through its outer pockets and ripped away all the snaps.

  At the warehouse, I waited in a line of Marines turning in their gear.Some were heading to new assignments, others getting out. All were quiet. Near the opposite doorway stood a group of second lieutenants, new guys with fresh haircuts. They joked and laughed, pretending not to see us. I wanted to gather them up and tell them what my father had told me as a new Marine: "Stand tall, but come home physically and psychologically intact." I knew they would clasp their hands behind them, listen respectfully, and then laugh behind the back of the crazy captain who'd forgotten that Marine lieutenants are invincible. So I walked to my car and drove home instead. They would figure it out for themselves.