The Fighters

by C. J. Chivers

  Then came Karma, where there was less room for bullshit. Hirlston told Doc he was sorry and that it had been a ridiculous fight. Kirby was moved. “Motherfucker, I was going to apologize first,” he replied. The feud ended. The two men were good.

  Hirlston was gone?

  Kirby was incensed.

  He stepped into the room. Hirlston’s body was on the table. Kirby’s anger evaporated as he examined the wound. He felt a flash of acceptance, even calm. Hirlston had been killed instantly. The only way a corpsman could have saved him, Kirby thought, would have been to be there two seconds before it happened and push him out of the way. The corpsman in Mobile Assault Platoon Five never had a pulse to work with, or a life to save.

  There wasn’t shit he could have done.

  Kirby strode back to his own platoon, changed. He had sworn oaths to himself that none of his Marines would die. But there were things a corpsman could not do.

  * * *

  The killing of Hirlston marked a shift in the company’s tour. It was as if the insurgents had studied the Marines’ tactics and routines, sketched the layout and defenses of the Karma police station and OP Omar, and were now ready to fight. Two days later there was an attack on the Iraqi police station, where many Marines lived. In late August an RPG was fired at one of the mobile patrols. The next day a sniper fired on an explosive ordnance disposal unit as it was trying to clear an IED on Chicago. Three Marines were wounded when an IED damaged their Humvee. By mid-September Omar was receiving mortar fire and the police station was occasionally targeted by rifle grenades, lobbed into the compound. Violence was spiking. The Marines were finding more IEDs—including a truck bomb they discovered ahead of an attack—and were frequently coming under fire when outside their bases and out of their trucks. Al Qaeda in Iraq had lost its leader. Its fighters were still active, and close.

  On September 17, the company commander had to fill in on short notice for the battalion commander at a meeting with a council of the city’s residents. This was part of the effort to have Karma accept the Americans and to work with the police to restore government to the city. He asked Kirby’s platoon commander, Gunnery Sergeant Shawn Dempsey, to set a cordon of security around the building where the meeting would be held.

  Dempsey rounded up the platoon but left Kirby and his truck behind. Inside Karma he positioned the trucks at each intersection near the building, blocking alleys from which attackers or a car bomb might approach. The company commander and first sergeant stepped inside, leaving the platoon to watch the streets. The Marines put out traffic cones and stood behind the trucks, expecting people would keep back, as they usually did.

  After a short while a boy, perhaps seven years old, calmly walked past the cones and the first truck, into the area where only Marines were standing. It was odd. This child was either clueless or bold. Dempsey held up a hand.

  “Hey, stop, little dude,” he said. The boy looked up.

  Dempsey motioned to the boy to follow him, led him to the edge of the cordon, and pointed him up an alley. They were side by side. Dempsey stepped up onto a curb and turned to direct the child down the sidewalk and out of the way.

  He heard the shot.

  It sounded like a rush of air—a hiss and whack. The bullet hit him.

  Dempsey fell to the ground and scrambled behind the truck.

  A turret gunner shouted from above: “Gunny got shot!”

  Dempsey could feel where the bullet had struck squarely in his back. But he was breathing, and alert. He stood. The patrol burst into action. Engines started. Marines rushed to seats. The commander and first sergeant ran from the meeting to organize the medevac. The interpreter panicked and bolted ahead to the company commander’s truck, climbed in, and shut the doors. There was no time to argue. The commander pushed his way into Dempsey’s truck. The patrol accelerated away, leaving its orange cones behind.

  Dempsey was on the radio, calling in the casualty. The Marine receiving the report asked for a kill number, the code assigned to each Marine.

  Dempsey gave his own.

  The radio went quiet.

  “Say again kill number,” the call came back.

  A gunny calling in his own medevac did not make sense.

  Dempsey repeated it.

  The trucks rushed into the police station, where Kirby removed his equipment to find that the bullet had been stopped by the ceramic plate that hung behind his shoulders. A large welt was forming across Dempsey’s back, as if he had been hit with a baseball bat. He had been spared.

  Kirby looked him over. With the medical equipment in Karma, he said, he had no way to be sure Dempsey was not bleeding internally. He recommended Dempsey be evacuated for a more thorough exam.II

  Word spread as the platoon settled down: That kid set Dempsey up, just like the guy who set up Hirlston. Weapons Company’s mood was darkening. Its younger Marines had joined the Corps after the terrorist attacks in 2001. Many of them wanted to be hunters, to find and bring Osama bin Laden to justice. In Karma it seemed the war worked the other way round. They were in a town rippling with hostility, under rules and theories that ordered them to be nice, and in regular contact with some of Iraq’s most savvy and violent militants. Instead of doing the hunting, it was as if they were the hunted. They did not see many signs of help from the Iraqis they were told would be allies.

  Bad signs were not confined to the people of Karma. The Iraqi police unit, already thinly staffed, was shrinking due to desertions and abductions. The remaining police were afraid. They spent most of their time inside, effectively under Marine guard. The Marines suspected some of them were informants for the insurgents; one man in particular slipped off into the police station parking lot, out of earshot, and made a phone call whenever a team from the battalion sniper platoon showed up. The Marines thought he was warning the insurgents to stay away until the precision shooters left. And even if the police wanted to fight, they possessed almost no material ability to participate. There were fewer police officers than police trucks, which were damaged when an incoming grenade exploded within the walls, riddling their pickups with shrapnel, perforating their tires, and further idling the fleet. As the police received more equipment—pistols, machine guns, bulletproof vests—it tended to disappear. Even success was followed by betrayal. Intelligence reports that included photographs of militants often showed them in orange prison attire. These men had been taken prisoner before and had either escaped from Iraq’s jails or been released to continue their war.

  In this dysfunctional system, the job of exerting influence over the area fell almost entirely to the Marines, who faced militant tactics that taught residents to keep their distance from the Americans. On one patrol, Kirby’s platoon rode out at about 3:00 A.M. to Omar’s north, past the intersection where Hirlston had been killed. At sunrise they began the return drive.

  In the back of the convoy, Kirby heard a radio call. Up ahead the bodies of three young Iraqi men were lying in the intersection, set down in a row.

  The platoon stopped. Kirby jogged out to examine the remains.

  The three men had been shot, once each in the forehead. Papers covered their faces. Their bodies were warm. Kirby figured they had been alive minutes before. He looked closely, trying to glean more of the crime. Thin fibers of blue cloth lined the entrance wound in one of the men’s skulls. He had been blindfolded, then shot through the cloth, and his killers had removed the blindfold before displaying the bodies for the Marines. The papers on their faces declared the reason for the executions: These men, the Arabic script said, had spoken with the occupiers. Kneeling over the bodies, at the center of the grisly display, Kirby understood. Whoever had done this had watched the Marines pass by and acted quickly, putting the corpses in the road between the time the patrol had passed the intersection and the time it returned. They were probably watching Kirby right now.

  The insurgents grew bolder. On October 19 they attacked OP Omar in force. Their assault began with mortars, followed by a
dump truck laden with explosives. A platoon had several trucks outside the base as the attack escalated. Marines near the outpost’s entry point opened fire, filling the driver with bullets.

  The truck exploded—a blast and ball of flame, but short of its target.

  The mortar and rifle fire continued. Omar’s posts ran low on ammunition. Kirby ran from post to post, shuttling ammunition and water to Marines. An American fighter jet came low for a fast pass, roaring over the fight in a show of force. The militants withdrew. The fields around OP Omar fell quiet. Traffic on Chicago slowly resumed, picking its way around the husk and scraps of the ruined truck.

  Weapons Company had repelled the attack without injury.

  Its luck did not hold.

  Not long after the attack, the battalion passed intelligence to the company about a house the militants were using as a base. The officers had to decide between raiding the place by night or by day. By 2006 Karma’s insurgents were survivors of three years of fighting. Many had moved to the farmland after being forced by other Marines from their urban hideouts in Fallujah. They knew that Americans often raided by darkness, trying to kill or capture militants beside their beds when night-vision equipment gave conventional forces an advantage. Many of them did not stay in homes at night. The officers opted for Weapons Company to sweep the house by day, hoping to catch their suspects when they least expected it.

  The raid force departed the morning of October 30. The first phases of the raid proceeded as planned. With drivers and turret gunners watching from the dirt road, and a pair of helicopters overhead, Marines from inside each truck leapt out and ran to the house for the search.

  It was a tan-brick building beside a canal. A cinder-block wall defined part of a yard, which gave way to muddy fields with a few scattered palm trees. No one was home when the Marines burst inside. But the signs indicated that their battalion’s intelligence had been correct: This was a small insurgent base. Marines found folding-stock Kalashnikovs and a PK machine gun hidden in the home and under a pile of livestock feed outside, a chest rig for carrying rifle magazines, and an ammunition can. They also found spools of electrical wire and base stations for Sanyo cordless telephones—common components in local IEDs. A sedan outside had been stripped of interior seats. This, they presumed, was a car bomb in the making.

  Marines on the outer cordon could see Iraqi men milling about, watching. The Marines raised their rifles and watched through scopes. The men drifted out of sight.

  Kirby gathered the captured weapons, and he and Dempsey stowed them in the back of a Humvee. The company commander ordered the Marines to wrap up. The helicopters departed. The job seemed done.

  Kirby had taken a seat in his truck when he heard the shot.

  It was audible inside the vehicle even over the diesel-engine growl. Outside, Dempsey dove behind a tree, then popped up, looking for the shooter, expecting a fight.

  Kirby tensed. This is where shit gets interesting, he thought.

  Throughout Mobile Assault Platoon Two, radios crackled with reports letting Dempsey know that his crews were okay.

  “Truck Six good.”

  “Truck Five good.”

  “Truck Four good.”

  “Truck Three good.”

  Weapons Company waited for the pause. Dempsey did not have time to ask. A shout told him a Marine needed help: “Corpsman up!”

  Marines passed it along, shouting from turrets, speaking into radio handsets. “Corpsman up!”

  Kirby leapt out the door, running through shouts from Marines in the column. They were guiding him, demanding his presence, pleading for him to hurry to a downed man.

  “Corpsman up!”

  “Truck One!”

  “Get up there!”

  Kirby ran, a mad sprint, passing unhurt Marines, heading to the truck where someone had been shot.

  “Truck One!”

  “Get the fuck up there!”

  It was a fifty-meter dash to the first truck. Someone opened a door for Kirby as he arrived. He heard a voice.

  “It’s Smith,” it said. “Smith got shot in the head.”

  Lance Corporal Colin Smith had been in the turret. He was lying across the gunner’s stand in the back of the truck. For an ephemeral moment, Kirby had a vision: Sitting beside Smith, an arm’s length away and intruding on the Marines, was a strange young man in a black hood with a taut face and brilliant blue eyes. The man’s arm reached out. Kirby met the man’s gaze. He was young and looked annoyed, as if the corpsman had interfered. Kirby had never seen him before, but knew him at once: the Grim Reaper. You can’t have him, he thought.

  The man disappeared, as if he had not been there at all.

  Kirby climbed in. Smith had been his roommate in the barracks at Camp Lejeune. A Marine was cradling Smith’s head like a baby’s. He looked at Kirby with desperate, reddened eyes.

  “What do I do?” he said. His hands were coated in blood. Fear was contagious. Panic bred mistakes. Calm allowed people to think, and to work. Kirby knew he had to project calm.

  “You did good, man,” he said. “You did good.”

  He pulled Smith close and looked down. Smith’s eyes were closed. A thin stream of blood trailed from the right side of his head down his face. The exit wound on the opposite side of his skull was about the size of a fifty-cent piece, aligned with Smith’s frontal lobe.

  He is my friend, Kirby thought.

  He rested Smith’s head on his groin protector and forced himself to focus. To do this right he had to suppress unnecessary thoughts and resist the paralyzing emotional shock rising within. He is my friend.

  He swept that away.

  Smith was a patient. The patient needed care.

  He pulled back Smith’s eyelids. Both pupils were dilated. He shined a flashlight down. Both eyes constricted as light hit them. It was the sign Kirby hoped for. Kirby felt for Smith’s pulse. It was strong. Smith’s jaw was clenched. But he was breathing, audibly and hard.

  Kirby reached into his medical kit, removed a pressure dressing, and gently wrapped it around Smith’s head to cover the entrance and exit wounds. He had two ambitions, one medical and the other social. He had to keep impurities out. He also wanted to protect the platoon from seeing what he had just seen.

  Smith stopped breathing. Kirby was in a zone. He leaned over, pressed his lips over Smith’s mouth and gave him two rescue breaths, and pulled back.

  Smith gasped. Kirby repositioned his head, lowering it, creating a straight neck, and ensuring the airway was as open as it could be. The labored breathing settled into a quieter rhythm.

  Kirby looked up. Dempsey’s face was there. He was peering into the vehicle, watching Smith and the corpsman and the spreading blood, getting his bearings on what to do next. He asked for an assessment.

  “His pupils are responsive,” Kirby said. “He has brain activity.”

  Dempsey nodded. With good news came an urgency not afforded the dead. If Smith was alive and could survive, then any evacuation must happen promptly.

  They needed a helicopter.

  Now.

  Smith peed himself, soaking his flight suit in a spreading stain.

  Kirby wondered if this signaled the end. Was his friend voiding himself as he died? He kept a straight face. His mind screamed. God fucking damn it! God fucking damn it!

  Smith’s breathing labored on.

  The company had radioed for a medevac. The two helicopters that had been watching over the Marines during the raid heard the call. They turned around and were back.

  Dempsey jumped onto the hood of the truck and told the driver to move to the field beside the house they had just searched. Kirby held Smith tightly as they bounced over the dirt. Dempsey tossed a red smoke grenade. Its plume climbed in the air. The helicopter, a Huey, touched down.

  The Marines loaded Smith onto a poleless litter, lifted him, and rushed to the aircraft. It was a Huey gunship, not a medevac bird. Smith was still breathing when they laid him inside. Kirby’s
job was done. He had to hand over his friend. Over the roar of the engine, he shouted lifesaving steps to the door gunner, tapped Smith on the leg, and ran clear. The blades swept up dust and grass and blew the red smoke away, scattering it in pink wisps. The helicopter moved low over the field, gaining elevation, cleared a date palm grove, and was gone.

  Suddenly there was nothing for Kirby to do. He ran back to his truck and plopped onto the right front seat. The company began moving. Someone said a car had sped away after the shot, heading to a house that Weapons Company would now search.

  Kirby sat in the front seat, his hands and arms and legs wet with his friend’s blood. It was clotting, sticky and still warm. He held Smith’s helmet. He turned it over to look at where the bullet passed through. The bullet rolled inside. It was an armor-piercing 7.62x54R round. It had zipped through the front of the helmet and then the top of Smith’s head. Kirby lifted it out and inspected it, rolling it in his hand. It had kept its shape. He put it in his pocket.

  Nausea came in waves.

  Outside, Weapons Company’s Marines were rushing into the house where they had heard the sniper might have hidden. They detained two men. Kirby had not been ordered out. He stayed in his seat, listening to the radio reports, waiting to be called, trembling with an energy that he could neither channel nor contain. Tears streamed down his face. He stared at his bloody hands, and at the stains on his legs and lap, where he had cradled Smith’s head.