The Fighters

by C. J. Chivers

  Petty Officer Dustin “Doc” Kirby had his first taste of the Chicago 500 in the summer of 2006. His battalion pulled into Camp Fallujah in late July, just as American war plans were changing again. Neither military campaigns nor political transition had calmed Iraq’s violence. The Marines returned to Fallujah in late 2004 and drove many militants out. The area’s population had not crossed over to the new government’s side. The province had resoundingly rejected Iraq’s constitution in a referendum in 2005; 97 percent of the votes cast were against ratifying the new document. And the Pentagon’s practice of concentrating its ground combat power on large bases had given insurgents and terrorists freedom to move, helping create an environment in which armed groups had grown confident and strong. The groups near Fallujah included Al Qaeda in Iraq, the franchise that once swore loyalty to Osama bin Laden, but under Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi had broken the leash and led a multipronged campaign against Iraq’s Shiite population, its government, and foreign troops and aid organizations, including the UN. American forces had killed Zarqawi in June 2006, just before Kirby arrived. Sunni militants no longer had an unchallenged enclave in Fallujah’s streets. But his followers fought on. Many of them had survived the fighting in Fallujah, escaped from the city, and clustered around Karma, keeping the Chicago 500 what it was: a punishing ribbon of asphalt.

  The battalion arrived as the Pentagon was moving to check the groups’ growth and begin rolling them back. American troops had been ordered off super-bases and into small outposts, from where they were instructed to follow a set of ideas the military called COIN, its acronym for a hastily assembled counterinsurgency doctrine that generals hoped would stop the country’s bloody slide. Iraq had descended into civil war. Its new security forces were unreliable and weak. Kirby and the rest of his unit were told that their mission now was to protect the Iraqi population from militants, build relationships with Iraqis, and help the country’s government reestablish some of the order the invasion had destroyed.

  That was the plan. Many of the young Marines did not pretend to understand it. It sounded like so much officer school theory, which it was. Even if the doctrine was sound, which much of the rank and file doubted, the Marines patrolling Karma felt shorthanded. The battalion’s turf, Operations Area Redwolf, was roughly three hundred square miles of farmland crisscrossed with canals, dotted with villages, and bordered by desert. The battalion had only a thousand Marines, many of whom were occupied with outpost defense or quick-reaction-force duties, or busy in operations centers and the logistics depots on Camp Fallujah. This left few Marines for work on the roads or in villages. It limited where the Marines even tried to go. “Economy of force,” the corps called it—a euphemism for counterinsurgency with a skeleton crew.

  The shortage of Marines was especially pressing in and around Karma, where Weapons Company worked, which was among Redwolf’s most dangerous ground. Before leaving the States, the company, which traditionally had been organized into mortar, heavy machine-gun, and antitank missile platoons, was rearranged in full. It became a motorized infantry force of five mobile assault platoons, each consisting of about a half dozen trucks with machine guns on turrets, thirty Marines, and a corpsman or two to handle ailment treatment and trauma care. Kirby was assigned to Mobile Assault Platoon 2. The Marines also set aside their usual camouflage utility uniforms and donned tan flight suits like those worn by aviation crews. The suits were fire retardant—safer than normal utilities, which in a burning vehicle were prone to bursting into flame. The officers spoke of COIN, of interacting with villagers and seeking partners in a new Iraq. The uniform swap, like the referendum vote tallies showing 3 percent support for the political project in Baghdad, said something else: You’re not going to find many friends in Karma.

  Kirby picked up other ominous signs all around. After the battalion flew from the States to Kuwait and drove to the big Marine base outside Fallujah, the platoon met its counterparts in the battalion it was replacing. For a few days the fresh Marines accompanied the departing unit on its last missions, part of a handoff of duties called “left-seat, right-seat” patrols. The idea was straightforward: Incoming Marines were to get a crash course on Redwolf’s lethal geography, learning areas where ambushes had occurred and bombs had often been laid. As his platoon’s sole trauma care specialist, Kirby wanted to know what to expect, so he sought out one of the departing battalion’s docs. He was jolted by the man’s bluntness and brevity. “Stock up on tourniquets and bleeder kits, bro, and get ready to do your job,” the man said.

  At first Kirby was angry. That’s it? he thought. That’s all you have for me? Then he heard the corpsman had worked on a fatally wounded Marine shortly before. Having a Marine die under a corpsman’s care was his community’s nightmare. Kirby’s anger subsided. He filed away the other corpsman’s words, and dour mood, as lessons. He’s not in the proper place to give me a turnover. But he is in the right place to let me know that I’m in a bad place. Weapons Company was headed into a lethal puzzle with a feel-good doctrine and a small crew.

  Karma, the line went, is Bad Karma. Kirby had no illusions. The foreboding feelings fit.

  Within days the company relocated to Karma’s small center, turning north onto Chicago from the highway linking Abu Ghraib and Fallujah and passing through a small industrial zone before crossing a bridge over a winding waterworks. Previous Marines had given this ditch a name: Shit Creek. From here Chicago was about six miles long as a bird might fly. As far as Marines were concerned, it was all bad.

  When Weapons Company rolled into Karma, there was not enough infrastructure for its Marines. The police station was too small for the full American force, and Outpost Omar, farther north up the road, was only partially built and not ready to be occupied. The company set up its office at the police station, a grubby concrete building ringed by blast walls. Inside its lobby was a mural of a silhouetted Marine in mourning, the work of a previous unit. Out back were free weights and Porta-Potties that were cleaned by transferring their contents into barrels and burning the sludge with diesel fuel. Several times a day the air filled with Arabic as loudspeakers on mosques broadcast prayers and anti-occupant screeds. Sometimes the company’s interpreters said the voices urged Karma’s residents to fight. Just up the road a circular concrete sign bore Arabic script. One Marine asked a translator what it said, and was told it was a greeting welcoming people to Karma. It was not. It was the beginning of Al Imran 103, a Koranic verse urging Islamic solidarity—an implicit call for resistance scrawled in front of the American post.I The Marines called the sign the Lollipop.

  For the first few weeks, with few bunks to sleep in, the Marines of Mobile Assault Platoon 2 drove the Chicago 500 almost constantly. Sometimes, when the need for sleep grew too great, they would pull onto farmers’ fields and form the trucks into a circle so everyone could rotate through brief rests. The platoons called these hasty patrol bases a “coil.” There were living quarters in the police station, and a few times the platoon parked behind the blast walls to try to find cots before another group of exhausted Marines would get a turn. But the space was small and the chance of finding a spot slim. Musical bunks, Kirby thought. Other times the platoon assumed duties in the bunkers protecting the police stations—posts made of lumber and sandbags, ringed by mesh to stop rocket-propelled grenades.

  Kirby came to accept that he did not quite grasp the overall mission. The intelligence was unclear, the enemy rarely visible, and the doctrine longer on theory than a coherent vision for the troops’ day-to-day. The company had been told it was trying something that had not been tried in Iraq before: a security mission with a focus on protecting the population. But what if the population did not want this protection? Kirby heard contradictions at every turn. One day, he thought, senior Marines would say it was going to be easy. The next they’d say everyone was going to be knee-deep in blood and shit. Some instructions felt habitual, as rote as a weekend safety brief: Don’t go anywhere alone, don’t leave the wire without
permission, keep your equipment close.

  Kirby stuck to what he knew: being ready to treat Marines. He also gave himself a personal mission: to be his platoon’s motivator, the man in the ranks who kept everyone else upbeat. He was well suited for this. Kirby was a believer in the Marine Corps, and driven to do well. He thrived in the military’s culture and was in peak physical shape. He’d developed a swagger and gregarious personality. His loud Southern accent, his near-perpetual state of motion, his enthusiasm and ability to weather bullshit, his in-your-space approach to his Marine peers—these combined to make him a palpable part of Weapons Company’s personality. Everyone in the battalion, it seemed, knew Doc Kirby.

  His assumption of a larger role had other roots. Mobile Assault Platoon Two was led by a gunnery sergeant, Shawn Dempsey, whom Kirby respected and liked. But the company’s leadership was an uneven lot. The first lieutenant who commanded Weapons Company was tall and imposing, a quiet presence who spoke few words and rarely smiled. He had spent most of his career as an enlisted Marine, and was commissioned as an officer in his thirties. Marines considered him competent and legit, though many kept their distance, finding him stern and unapproachable. They called him the Shark, a reference to his blank-faced alertness and habit of quietly making rounds to look over each post himself, a process they called “The shark on patrol.” When he roamed the positions at night, they whispered between themselves, “The shark’s in the water.” The commander’s senior enlisted partner, the company’s first sergeant, exuded a different type of presence altogether. He was noisy and brash. He had come from the Marine Corps drill fields, where the habits of power and harsh indoctrination were given license, and had not previously served in the infantry. When he was out of earshot, Marines said he seemed uncomfortable on the occasions when he patrolled with them. Sometimes, they said, he overcompensated and gave unsound instructions, like telling Marines to keep a symmetrically equal dispersion between them when they walked, as if they were part of an introductory tactical demonstration on the grass at Parris Island, and not on the ever-varying ground of a real war, where grunts move between pieces of terrain and cover. His tendency to revert to a loud and all-powerful drill instructor persona on the outposts sat wrong in a combat zone. No one liked a random haze. In an abruptly reorganized company, with a confusing mission for which they were understaffed, Marines defaulted to the battlefield’s baseline mentality: They looked after themselves, platoon by platoon, squad by squad, truck crew by truck crew, each Marine having the other’s back, and staying wide of the higher-ups. Kirby’s role, the sailor who wandered the ranks, checking on every man, gave him influence beyond his rank.

  * * *

  For Kirby, Karma was a new Iraq. In 2005, the year after his cousin, Doc Worley, was wounded and lost his leg, Kirby’s battalion had been sent overseas, but not for ground combat. The Marine Corps was still busy with its routine of packing battalions aboard ships for rotations in floating task forces. Kirby embarked aboard the USS Kearsarge, an amphibious assault ship, and headed across the Atlantic. Shipboard life was tedious but the months were not entirely boring. The Pentagon’s wartime posture meant the battalion did more than training visits with allies. In the summer of that year, Kirby was part of a detachment sent into southern Iraq to work beside British forces around Basra. And on August 19, 2005, while tied to a pier in Jordan next to another ship, the Kearsarge was attacked by ground-to-ground rockets fired from a warehouse in the city. The rockets missed the ships, though one killed a Jordanian soldier, and the Kearsarge departed with such speed that Kirby, who was on a working party on the pier, was left behind. The attack gave his family a taste of the Pentagon’s habit of speaking in partial truths: His mother and father received an email assuring them that all the sailors and Marines on the ship were accounted for, even though, as far as Kirby was concerned, the Navy had steamed away without him. It was six days before a ferry ran Kirby and the other abandoned sailors and Marines out to sea to climb back aboard the Kearsarge.

  The deployment to Karma augured more action. And then it seemed not to deliver. Nothing spectacular happened in the first weeks of the company’s patrols. Some of the Marines began wondering if the threats they had been warned of had been overstated. They found IEDs, and had occasional incoming mortar rounds or bursts of small-arms fire. But these attacks were largely ineffective. Some days passed quietly. A few admitted to themselves that they felt complacent. It was August in Iraq, under a searing sun, and the viciousness they had been warned awaited them did not materialize. Mostly, Kirby thought, it’s just stupid hot.

  After a few weeks Weapons Company moved its headquarters to Outpost Omar, a small walled compound north of the city in open fields laced with canals. A few other buildings were within range of a rifle shot. The outpost’s history was subject to debate. Some Marines heard that its main building had been a poultry-processing house. Others, trading an apocryphal story, said the place had formerly been a funeral home. In grunt-speak, the tales allowed for a pitch-perfect one-liner: We live in a morgue. The outpost’s opening brought rounds of new labor. When Weapons Company settled in, engineers had already installed a generator and wiring and built exterior walls. But the company had to choose and establish its own defenses—and then build the group of small bunkers in which the Marines would stand post—to be ready to repel any attack. Between patrols and time on watch, the Marines built Omar into a lone fortress in Anbar Province, wedged between two asphalt lanes and a field. Kirby was kept busy by the tasks he shared with Marines, and by tending to minor medical problems—cuts and colds, sprains and intestinal infections—that are among the low-grade and persistent hassles of infantry life.

  And then it began.

  On August 23, Mobile Assault Platoon Five set out to meet with a gas station owner who they heard wanted to discuss problems with extortion and black-market fuel. The meeting was a short drive up Chicago to the T-intersection with Route Lincoln, which ran parallel to a large canal. The canal marked the edge of the irrigated zone. To the north extended a landscape of sand and stone—an area with almost no Marine presence that the battalion suspected insurgents used for training and weapons storage.

  The T-intersection was a busy hub, a rest stop with a gas station and food kiosks.

  The platoon positioned the trucks around the gas station so the staff sergeant could go inside to talk with the man. Other Marines stepped out, making a show of presence.

  Lance Corporal Donterry Woods was standing with Lance Corporal J. D. Hirlston, who was taking pictures. The two men were talking about photography, bantering in the small talk of Marines on perimeter duty.

  The platoon heard a single loud crack.

  Hirlston stiffened, remained momentarily upright, and fell.

  Woods jumped to help. A bullet had passed through Hirlston’s mouth and exited out the back of his neck, near the base of his skull.

  Woods was a big Marine, upward of 200 pounds, muscular and lean. He began to drag his friend. He saw the wounds and knew Hirlston was dead. Gun trucks pulled around them, cutting off a follow-on shot.

  “Get him the fuck in here!” Woods heard.

  Another Marine, Lance Corporal Daniel Strauser, leapt down from a turret and helped lift Hirlston into the truck. One of the platoon’s trucks opened fire to the north, from where the shot had come. Its machine gun roared.

  Hirlston was inside, motionless on the seat. The platoon collapsed the cordon and sped away, heading south down Chicago, past Omar, through a sweeping bend they called the S-curve, headlong into Karma, passing the police station and racing on.

  They were headed for Fallujah Surgical and the doctor there.

  They drove with fury, the fine points of the rules for interactions with civilians on the roads forgotten.

  After Karma, the trucks turned west on the highway and sped in the gates of Camp Fallujah, lurching to a stop at the surgical center, where several Marines carried Hirlston inside.

  All at once there was n
othing left to do.

  Woods and Strauser and the rest of Mobile Assault Platoon Five waited, looking around, splattered and soaked by blood.

  Someone suggested they clean up and change clothes. They headed to the supply section for clean flight suits. Woods felt dizzy. He suspected that the platoon had been lured to a meeting, with a sniper waiting, across the canal. They had been set up.

  * * *

  Kirby was seething. He arrived on Camp Fallujah just before the corpsmen were to transfer Hirlston’s body to mortuary affairs, where he would be processed for the flights to Dover Air Force Base and onward to his home in Tennessee. He all but stormed in. Weapons Company had not yet suffered a loss, and he was furious that Hirlston had not received lifesaving care. It was a corpsman’s job to save wounded Marines. His anger masked complicated feelings. He and Hirlston had quarreled before leaving the States, and for stupid reasons. Back in the barracks at Camp Lejeune, where the Marines were safe and relaxed, Kirby had eaten a few of Hirlston’s Oreos. Hirlston had retaliated by eating Kirby’s stash of ramen noodles. The two locked in a standoff for weeks.