The Fighters

by C. J. Chivers

Crowder was not sure what she was talking about.

  “No,” he said. “We were just in Iraq.”

  Her demeanor stiffened. “Oh, you were in the war,” she said.

  Crowder sensed disapproval.

  The two wounded soldiers took their boarding passes, made their way to the gate, and lay down on the floor, waiting to board. Other soldiers heading home helped them onto the plane. Once in the air, the flight attendants invited them to sleep in the back of the aircraft, on the galley floor. They took sedatives that the medic had given them, and dozed much of the way across the Atlantic.

  * * *

  The next day Kryszewski stepped from a car in front of his house. He had a ritual with his oldest son, Travis, who was five. Over the course of the boy’s life, Kryszewski had been away more than he had been home. When he returned, Travis would run to him and jump into his arms. They would hold each other in a long, primal embrace.

  Through the fog of his painkillers, Kryszewski saw the child.

  He was running to him.

  Kryszewski was wobbly and bandaged, with shrapnel still under his skin. He could not roughhouse. He held up his hand, signaling to Travis to stop. The boy slowed, happiness draining from his face. Kryszewski was home.

  * * *

  I. Pronounced “skiff” in intelligence community slang.

  II. An ACOG, or Advance Combat Optical Gunsight, an accessory to his rifle. Kryszewski had slung his rifle across his back, barrel down.

  By late 2004, the American forces in Iraq were mired in a spiraling war with well-established dangers. Fresh troops arrived without equipment matched to the threats, or the doctrine or cultural knowledge for common situations they would face. Roadside bombs and ambushes had become common. Vehicles lacked armor. Uniforms were flammable. The military did not have the logistics capability to keep itself supplied, and relied on private contractors to maintain its forces and bases. Objectionable actions by both sides—the mutilation and display of American contractors by militants in Fallujah, the abuse of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib—filled the news. Roughly 130,000 troops were in Iraq, where new militant groups were multiplying. About 20,000 were in Afghanistan. Neither war was near an end. The American services labored to enlist and train recruits, rushing to fill their ranks for rotations to come.

  FOUR

  * * *

  * * *

  “IN THE NAVY HE’LL BE SAFE”

  Hospital Corpsman Dustin E. Kirby and a Family at War

  “Joe Dan was fucking Superman.”

  SEPTEMBER 17, 2004

  On the Drive Between Jacksonville and Powder Springs

  Dustin Kirby was feeling lucky. It was Friday morning at Headquarters & Service Company, Second Battalion, Eighth Marines, the infantry unit at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, to which he was assigned. Word had circulated that the company’s Marines and sailors would be released from their duties before lunch. This weekend’s liberty, as Marines call their off-duty time, would include Friday afternoon—a welcome bonus for young men heading to war. It meant that Kirby could leave early for his drive home.

  Camp Lejeune was on the Atlantic coast and the Kirby family lived in Powder Springs, Georgia—a town of thirteen thousand that fell just inside the five-hundred-mile limit the battalion ordered its members to remain within during weekends. Freed from work, Kirby climbed into his black 1995 GMC step-side pickup truck, which his grandfather had given him. He traveled with more than his off-duty clothes. He had packed field uniforms and combat equipment, too. Second Battalion, Eighth Marines, was on twenty-four-hour fly-away notice, in the event the United States needed to send Marines to a crisis. If the call came, Kirby could turn his truck around and drive straight for the battalion armory to collect his M16.

  Kirby disliked this drive. But his military life had not yet eclipsed home. He was twenty years old and had been in the Navy a year, most of it in indoctrination and training. He joined his first operational unit only a few months before, as a field corpsman, a trauma medic who would be expected to treat wounds in an infantry platoon during a combat deployment the following year. It was a revered position among the grunts, and his East Coast assignment had been a good draw for a young man from Georgia. His cousin, Joe Dan Worley, had also joined the Navy as a corpsman but been sent to the First Marine Regiment in Southern California, far from home. Then Worley’s battalion left for Iraq not long after he found out his wife was pregnant. He was still there, busy with the fighting in and around Fallujah. His first child was three months old. Worley had yet to see her. Kirby’s duties, he knew, would take him to similar places. But for now his work at Camp Lejeune kept him close enough to home that each weekend he could make the trip.

  Sometimes it felt as if he had never left. On the trip westward, Kirby would call his mother, Gail, or his brother, Daniel, or a friend. Then he’d put the phone on speaker and talk for twenty minutes or a half hour, making plans. When one call ended, he’d make another. Call by call, the highways passed beneath him until he covered the eight hours behind the wheel and was pulling into his parents’ driveway.

  He called his home number to let everyone know the good news. His company had let him leave early. He would be home in time for dinner.

  No answer.

  He called his siblings.

  No one answered those lines either.

  He hit SEEK on his radio, looking for whatever distraction music might bring.

  Kirby’s route to a Marine infantry battalion had been circuitous and yet managed to feel ordained. His family was unflinchingly patriotic and unshakably Christian, a tone set by his grandfather, William E. Kirby, who as a young soldier had been wounded in the Battle of the Bulge near the end of World War Two. William Kirby returned to the woods outside Atlanta and became a preacher in a Pentecostal church. His faith in Jesus Christ and the scriptures, along with his own admonishments about clean living, were cornerstones of the Kirby worldview. “Once you get the water on you, you’re good,” he taught. “But you’ve got to live right.”

  Dustin Kirby was raised in awe of his grandfather’s battlefield service. From an early age he dreamed of being a paratrooper and trying out for the Special Forces. In high school he signed up for Junior ROTC, seeing it as a pipeline to that life. He was a Marvel Comics fan—Captain America, Thor, and the Silver Surfer were his favorites—and wanted to be a hero. When al Qaeda attacked New York and Washington, he had just started his senior year in high school and had already enlisted in the Army, having signed up for the delayed entry plan as a junior when he was seventeen. He wanted to be assigned to the infantry. His relationship with the Army was short-lived. After the attacks, he had misgivings about his recruiters, who he felt were pushing him for a military police or communications job. A war was starting. Kirby wanted to fight. When he graduated in 2002, he told the Army he would not show up for boot camp. He took a job as an usher at a local movie theater, biding his time. He considered college but found the prospect of four years of study unappealing. In college, he thought, he’d be bored. College was no path for a hero.

  His plans crystallized after his cousin enlisted. Worley was three years older than he was, and had lettered in football and wrestling in high school. Dustin saw him as a Superman: handsome, kind, and physically imposing, but in possession of a polite and respectful demeanor. Worley had married young and started work at a metal fabrication shop that manufactured parts for Boeing. It was a good job, but repetitious, and he felt stuck in a paycheck-to-paycheck cycle. He and his wife, Angel Worley, decided the military offered a chance to reset their lives. He opted for the Navy because he and Angel thought it might be safer. In 2002, he enlisted and selected a job as a corpsman—a medical job. This seemed safer still. He was unaware that it meant he could be assigned to the Marine Corps. America’s momentum toward the invasion of Iraq had begun. Worley paid it little attention. He was headed to the Navy and had a family to feed. Ground war was not on his mind. In early 2003 he shipped to boot c
amp at Naval Station Great Lakes, near Chicago. He was in recruit training when his instructors announced that the United States had begun its attack on Iraq. The country was now fighting two wars. Worley figured he’d pass his years working in a naval hospital or on a ship.

  Back in Georgia, as Worley paid Iraq little mind, the Pentagon’s march toward Baghdad cemented Kirby’s choices. He would follow his grandfather’s path and serve his country in war. Soon he was back at the recruiting offices, talking with the Navy about joining the SEALs. During the entrance physical in Atlanta, the staff told him his eyesight was too poor for the SEALs but he was medically qualified as a corpsman. He signed his enlistment contract in May 2003 and was told to report to Great Lakes in September. His mother, Gail Kirby, was relieved by the news. He wouldn’t be with the Army or the SEALs. He’d be away from the violence, just like Worley, maybe even afloat. The Navy’s not that bad, she thought. In the Navy he’ll be safe. He’ll be on a ship and not in the middle of a war. He’ll be out on the ocean. Nothing happens out on the ocean.

  Kirby’s family threw a pizza party for him the night before he left. He was supposed to be at an airport hotel that evening, ahead of his morning flight. But the house swelled with visitors and the party dragged on so late that his recruiter extended his check-in time. Late that night, after leaving him at the hotel lobby, Gail and his father, Jacko, were driving back to Powder Springs. Jacko abruptly pulled to a stop on the highway shoulder. His eyes were filled with tears. He was consumed with sorrow, and something he had not expected: fear.

  “Our little town was never going to be big enough for Dusty,” he said.

  Gail had not seen her husband cry before, not even when his mother had died.

  She felt a pervasive sense of dread.

  * * *

  Dustin Kirby excelled at boot camp. He exuded intensity, seemed to enjoy the indoctrination, and frequently professed his love of the United States. He thrived in what other sailors saw as the military’s “stupid shit” and pined for a hard assignment and a chance to distinguish himself in battle. By then his cousin, Worley, had been selected for Field Medical Service School, the last step before being assigned to the Marines, and an almost sure diversion from duty in a hospital or on a ship. Kirby heard what his cousin was doing. He wanted the same kind of assignment. He ached for a place in an infantry platoon.

  At the swim test, one of his instructors asked him what his job would be in the Navy.

  “I’m going to be a corpsman in the Fleet Marine Forces,” he said loudly, his head just above the surface. The instructor laughed derisively.

  “Good luck,” he said. “You need perfect vision to go with the Marines.”

  Kirby was crushed. That night in the barracks he made his way back to an open bay, a place where the platoon hung its mops and recruits huddled to commiserate while their instructors were away. Kirby gathered his friends and started crying, telling them he expected to be disqualified. He was nearly despondent. One of them watched Kirby’s eagerness with foreboding, as if he were seeing a man willfully “heading into a meat grinder.” When the platoon graduated in December of 2003, Kirby learned the swim instructor had been wrong. The Navy shipped him to Camp Lejeune for Field Medical Service School and an eventual assignment to the Marines.

  Field Medical Service School is where the Marine Corps takes custody of its sailors, preparing them for life among grunts. The transition “from blue side to green side,” as the Corps calls it, can be jarring, in part because the curriculum is an eye-opening tour of the brutality and trauma of modern warfare. This was the realm of sucking-chest wounds, femoral bleeding, full-body burns, blast amputations, and psychologically disoriented victims in the first moments of devastating injuries. And Kirby’s training moved past treating one patient at a time in the safety of well-lit aid stations. It emphasized death-delaying steps on the ground under simulated fire and then escalated to mass-casualty drills—the aftermath of a rocket strike, a helicopter crash, or a bomb blast—when a corpsman could be thrust into danger to sort and treat a dozen or more anguished victims at once.

  Where others saw gore, Kirby sensed responsibility. He felt charged by the opportunity to snatch others’ lives from death while risking his own, and of earning his place on the “green side,” the harsh Marine Corps milieu that many sailors tried to avoid. None of the training seemed notional. He understood and accepted that he was on an institutional conveyor belt carrying him from stateside drills to the body-wrecking firefights and roadside bombs of Iraq. The Marine Corps had not seen full-scale war since Vietnam. But Iraq, he knew, was boiling under American occupation, and around on Camp Lejeune battalions were preparing for combat tours in areas where militants were rising up. Kirby knew he would be put in a platoon and sent to clash with them. He expected to save those who fell.

  By the time Kirby graduated from Field Medical Service School, Worley had already left. He arrived in late 2003 at Camp Pendleton, in California, and was put on a fast track to Iraq with Second Battalion, First Marines. The battalion had fought in the invasion of Iraq and worked in Shiite areas of the country’s south before heading home for rest and refitting. Worley returned with the battalion’s Fox Company to Iraq in March 2004.

  They arrived to a changed war. This time the battalion was assigned to Anbar Province, an area inhabited by Sunnis displaced from power by the fall of Saddam Hussein. An initially uneasy but mostly nonviolent relationship between Fallujah’s residents and American forces had broken into open fighting during 2003, and the insurgency had gathered ferocity with the passage of a year. This was not a war against a conventional Baathist military, in which American firepower could be concentrated against a visible foe. It was a campaign against shadowy enemies who engaged in guerrilla warfare and were developing a proficiency with improvised bombs. The country’s stockpiles of conventional munitions, left unguarded by the evaporation of Hussein’s military in 2003, gifted the militants with a seemingly boundless supply of explosives. The fuel for long-term violence was in place.

  Kirby had been in touch with Worley since he shipped out, and knew something of the war his cousin was fighting. Fox Company landed in Kuwait in March 2004 and set out on the long drive to Forward Operating Base Volturno, which they renamed BahariaI, a former Iraqi resort near Fallujah, to relieve a unit from the 82nd Airborne Division. The turnover was tense. The departing soldiers, Worley thought, were spooked and unsure of their tactics. They spoke of no-go areas—places they had ceded to militants and no longer patrolled. Worley’s platoon commander, First Lieutenant Wade Zirkle, was disappointed. The Army had taken a posture he did not like, and allowed the militants to grow bold. He had a word for it: “standoffish.”

  The initial guidance to Fox Company’s Marines was to step up the pace and ambition of patrols and thereby learn the turf and its people. It was an old formula for an uncertain occupation, mixing intelligence gathering and a show of presence with an intention of finding allies and nudging Fallujah toward order. In meetings it sounded possible. On the ground it promised confusion. The Marines were trained to fight, but there was no opposing army to fight against. And outreach and intelligence gathering were hindered by the fact that almost none of the Marines knew Arabic, beyond a few phrases on printed cards the Corps handed out. They could not talk with Iraqis without the help of interpreters, who were few.

  The first large mission came on March 26, when the battalion entered Fallujah in what its senior officers said would serve as a signal to its residents that a new unit and mentality had arrived.

  Worley’s platoon, known by its call sign, Pale Rider Three, was given a sector to patrol. It approached the city from the north. Most of the Marines were on foot, walking widely spaced apart. Two Humvees moved with them, each with a .50-caliber machine gun. Worley liked the platoon commander, Lieutenant Zirkle, who had fought during the invasion. He joined the platoon weeks before the deployment, replacing an officer who had been relieved.

  The first ho
urs passed quietly. The militants risked only one shot: a rocket-propelled grenade fired from a rooftop, which sailed over the Marines’ heads and exploded in a courtyard. As the day dragged on, Lieutenant Zirkle grew uneasy. He was having trouble contacting the company commander on the radio, and thought the captain was preoccupied with missions given to other platoons, including a search of several buildings. He did not want his Marines, most of whom had never been in combat before, wandering the streets. They were targets with no missions. He ordered the squads to move to a partially built building near a field and patrol from there. At dusk the platoon was ordered to walk south back into the city, meet the company at the main east–west corridor, and return to their base, Baharia.

  Soon after stepping off, the platoon was attacked.

  For fifteen or twenty seconds militants fired with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades from a third-story rooftop. The Marines returned fire for about a minute, when commands to cease fire were yelled from Marine to Marine.

  One of the young Marines in a Humvee, Private First Class Leroy Sandoval Jr., had been struck.

  Marines shouted for a corpsman.

  Worley ran to the truck and found Sandoval slumped inside. He dragged him out, pulled him behind the vehicle for cover, and examined him. Sandoval was his first wounded Marine and his first encounter with what modern weapons can do. He had at least one gunshot wound in his upper body and one behind his helmet’s lower edge, on his brow. The bullet had pierced the bottom of his Kevlar. The Marines moved him into a courtyard patio and guarded him while the corpsman worked. Worley found a heartbeat and started CPR.

  The heartbeat faded.

  There was no saving a man wounded this badly.

  The platoon loaded Sandoval into the back of the Humvee.