He shook uncontrollably. He rocked back and forth in the seat.
Never before had he saved a life. He had thought it would be cool. Instead he felt guilty. He had seen the entrance and exit wounds and the torn brain matter, and had a sense of what was missing. Some of it was inside the helmet on his lap. Kirby could visualize the path of the steel bullet through his friend’s skull. If Smith survived the trip to the first hospital—if he made it through stabilization and surgery and the transfer to Germany—what kind of life could he expect?
Kirby had acted in the moment, holding emotions in check so he could do his job. Now his emotions broke free. He had a chance to think past the second-by-second sequence and tasks of lifesaving steps. He was not sure what saving a life meant.
Did I do that for me? Kirby wondered. Or for him? He did not know whether Smith was even still alive. There was no medic on the Huey. He might die on the way.
Kirby had done what he had most wanted to do, and was trying not to vomit.
* * *
The hours passed quickly. The company drove its two prisoners to the police station. A warrant officer took the bullet from Kirby and bagged it for evidence. The platoon drove back to Omar, where Kirby showered, threw away his bloody flight suit, and was issued a replacement.
The company commander met with the Marines to tell them that he had received information: Smith survived the flight to the doctors and was stable and in surgery. The Shark seemed warmer than usual. Inside the command post, one of the platoon’s drivers, Lance Corporal Daniel Nicholson, opened a pocket-sized Bible and led the Marines in prayer, verses from Psalm 91, a counterpoint to Al Imran 103.
“Thou shall not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day,” he said. “. . . For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.”
Kirby found his bunk. Now was his chance to rest, to sleep.
He could not. Contradictory feelings plagued him. Marines snored. Kirby waited for news, half expecting someone to step into the bunk room and say that Smith had died. Sunrise found him drained, an insomniac rising for another day. He felt locked inside his own head. He was excoriating himself, reliving the sight of his friend’s wound, replaying his own actions, feeling anxiety, dread, and doubt. He wondered about the vision of the man in the black hood beside Smith. He assumed he had hallucinated; the vision was the product of an overwhelmed mind. He could still see those blue eyes. Kirby was in a daze, a state of physical exhaustion and moral turmoil. That night he volunteered for guard duty, knowing he would not sleep. What had Smith’s life been saved for?
For more than a week Kirby felt mechanical, moving from duty to duty, patrol to patrol, event to event, outwardly present, inwardly withdrawn, always sleep-deprived. He thought saving a life would be validating and satisfying, a test that, if he passed it, would infuse him with wisdom and meaning. It was none of these things. He was stalked by a mix of self-loathing and worry about what Smith’s life now held.
Most men who had been shot like Smith had died in prior wars. Through luck—the bullet had been just high enough, the lifesaving steps had been just quick enough, the helicopter had been just close enough—Smith had survived. But for what? Each day Kirby waited for the news that Smith was dead. Outwardly, he kept up appearances; he had to be the corpsman who could be counted on. Internally, he was numb.
A week later he was in a motorized patrol heading to the police station, in the back right seat, still dazed.
The trucks were in a column moving south down Chicago, nearing a road juncture Dempsey called the Evil Intersection. Several auto garages were just off the road’s west shoulder. Traversing the intersection was a gamble. If Marines left the trucks to search on foot—a predictable behavior—they risked being shot by a sniper. If they drove straight through, they risked being hit by a bomb. It was only steps from the police station—the Chicago 500 distilled.
Dempsey decided to drive it. He gave the word.
The police station was 300 yards away. The column of trucks sped up. Kirby was in a vehicle near the end of the column, ready to react. The lead truck passed safely. The second followed not far behind. Kirby saw the auto garages drawing near. The structures offered cover to anyone who might remotely detonate an IED. The other trucks made it.
His truck came even with first of the garages. They were a ramshackle mess, littered with garbage, grimy barrels, and idled cars.
A bomb exploded to Kirby’s right. Two 130-millimeter artillery shells, wired together, had been detonated by someone watching the Marines.
A pressure wave slammed against the passenger-side doors. Kirby was near the explosion. He felt the vehicle absorb the blast, almost as if it might flip, and heard shrapnel splatter against armor. When the truck glided to a stop, he looked himself over. He was intact. He felt alert.
He spun to check the others.
The vehicle commander, Corporal Drew Upton, was unconscious. In the driver’s seat, Lance Corporal Nicholson, the Marine who had read the Psalm after Smith was shot, was screaming and touching his face. The turret gunner, Lance Corporal William Thorpe, was thrashing. Kirby felt both woozy from the blast and fired by adrenaline and purpose. The Marines’ needs snatched him from his funk. He opened his door and swung himself out and onto his feet, carrying a medical bag. Thorpe was waking up. Kirby looked at him. He was whole. Kirby saw no blood. Thorpe spoke.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m fine.”
Triage, Kirby thought.
He ran to the opposite side of the truck and pulled open the driver’s door.
Nicholson looked up.
Kirby’s mind formed its own thought. Fuck.
Much of Nicholson’s face had been sheared away. Shrapnel had hit a seam above the right-side doors, where the armor was weaker, and skipped inside, striking his head. From the ear to an eye and then over to his upper lip, his face was a partially connected mask, hanging like a flap. Kirby glanced down at Nicholson’s equipment harness. Teeth had fallen onto it.
“Hey, man, I got you,” he said.
He opened a pressure dressing, pressed it against the wound, and asked Nicholson to help. “I need you to hold this right here while I do some stuff,” he said. Nicholson took the dressing and pushed up against his face.
He was over the surprise of being hit and was registering what he knew. He had calmed himself. “Doc, I think I am missing some teeth,” he said.
Kirby added the words to his inventory. Nicholson was coherent, talking, making sense. Amazing signs, Kirby thought.
“You are going to be fine, bro,” he said. “You are going to be fine.”
The truck’s entire crew was moving now. Upton had come more fully to; he reached across the vehicle to pull gauze for Kirby out of Nicholson’s first-aid kit. Thorpe, the turret gunner, climbed onto the hood, jumped down to the road, and fell over. He rolled into a prone position with his rifle aimed out, ready to defend the truck. Blood stained the back of his trousers.
Iraqis watched the wounded Americans from up and down the street. The broken truck of Mobile Assault Platoon Two was the latest bloody spectacle on the Chicago 500, another scramble of bloodied men beside a smoking hole and a damaged ride.
The rest of the platoon swarmed them.
The crowd kept away as they charged in.
Dempsey appeared in Kirby’s field of view. He had run from another truck.
“Gunny, we’re going to need an urgent surgical,” Kirby said.
“Got it,” Dempsey answered.
They loaded Nicholson into another truck and sped the last few hundred yards, into the station, and led Nicholson out back to wait for the medevac. Kirby stayed with him until a helicopter came and lifted the Marines away. Kirby was ordered to Camp Fallujah, where an exam determined that he had suffered a concussion. The military was beginning to force soldiers to slow down and rest, and undergo evaluations, after concussions from bomb blasts. He was told he would need to spend a week o
n the base on light duty, under close watch.
Light duty required Kirby to be idle. Without the distractions of patrols and platoon life, his mind resumed its tour of guilt. He played the sequence after Smith had been shot over and over in his head. He had faced the Reaper and done all he could to save his friend. He had lived up to everything a corpsman assigned to Marines was supposed to do. Marines were looking up to him, thanking him, expressing admiration, respect, even love. And yet Kirby was depressed. He berated himself. People told him he had acted selflessly. He felt the opposite. He had acted selfishly. By keeping his friend alive, Kirby had established his own worth and cemented his place as a corpsman before his Marines. What did Smith get out of it, with a brain trauma like that?
He was given a bunk at Camp Fallujah and told to convalesce. He had recurring headache and ringing ears. Time dragged. He wanted to go back to Outpost Omar, where there was work to be done. While waiting to be declared fit to return, another corpsman came to him with word: There was a call for Kirby at the aid station. The aid station had an international telephone line. The doctor used it for his casework—to gather information with which to brief the battalion’s officers on the conditions and prognoses of wounded Marines, and to pass information to doctors in the States. It was not a line that Kirby ever used. He asked what was going on.
Someone wanted to talk with him, the corpsman said.
In the office, Kirby was told Lance Corporal Smith’s father, Bob Smith, was on the line. Kirby took the handset, wondering what to say, heart pounding. “Yes, sir, this is Petty Officer Kirby,” he said.
He heard a man’s voice, clear and strong. “I want to thank you for saving my son’s life,” he said.
Lance Corporal Smith had arrived at the Naval Hospital at Bethesda, his father said, and he was with him now. He told Kirby that when he looked into Colin’s eyes, he could see him in there.
Kirby could hear it. The voice on the other end was breaking. Bob Smith was talking through tears. He pushed on. “My son would not be alive if not for you,” Smith said. “And as long as I am breathing, you will have a father in Ohio.”
Kirby’s guilt began to lift.
* * *
A few days later Kirby passed the concussion protocols and returned to Outpost Omar and the Karma police station. His life on the Chicago 500 resumed: standing post, patrolling, tending to the company’s Marines, marking days off a combat tour. In early December, Mobile Assault Platoon Two came off patrols for a rotation at the police station. There were no other Marines there beside the guard force, which meant the platoon might have the bunk room to itself and get proper sleep. One of the Marines had a DVD of a season of Family Guy. Kirby and several Marines clustered around a screen watching episodes, laughing, carried away from Karma a session at a time.
During one of the episodes, the ground shook. It was like the tremor of an earthquake, detectable through the feet.
The sound of the explosion followed behind, a heavy crack, then a rolling rumble.
The Marines were up before the shouting began. “Get your shit on! We gotta go.”
The blast had been to their north. They heard clods of dirt landing. When they ran to their trucks, they saw a tower of smoke climbing in the sky.
Someone had been hit by a massive IED on Route Chicago.
Regret washed over Kirby again. He felt like he had let Marines down. When the bomb detonated, they had been enjoying Family Guy, tuning out the war, which continued right outside the police station’s blast walls.
Somebody just died, he thought. We were laughing right then.
The platoon sped to the blast site, turret gunners ready, and came upon a pair of Abrams tanks. They were stopped. They seemed to be intact.
The militants often went quiet when Marine tank patrols moved through. Abrams were immune to most light weapons, and were imposing in a way Humvees never would be. On this day the tanks had been moving north on the road, past the police station, and crossed without incident through the juncture where Nicholson had been wounded. They continued toward Omar. At the S-curve the bomb exploded under the trailing tank. By local standards it was huge. Its explosive charge, perhaps 250 pounds in all, had been stuffed into a drainage culvert—a job that must have taken those who had hidden it there considerable time. A fine copper wire ran from the crater to the west toward a watching triggerman who had initiated the blast.
The crater was roughly twenty feet long, fifteen feet wide, and five feet deep.
The rear tank was damaged but its crew was not seriously wounded. The platoon guarded the site until a recovery vehicle retrieved the tank and an explosive ordnance disposal team investigated the site. The bombers had chosen their target poorly. Attacking a tank was tempting, but the Abrams withstood the blast and would be repaired. Had the same bomb detonated under one of Weapons Company’s Humvees, the vehicle would have been blown into chunks. All the Marines inside might have been killed.III
The bombs kept coming. A truck in another platoon was hit by an IED in the northern stretch of Chicago near where Hirlston had been killed. The truck was badly damaged, and the platoon sergeant, who had been riding shotgun inside, appeared stunned when he returned to Omar. Kirby examined him. The sergeant looked tense and ashen. Kirby had no formal say in another platoon’s affairs, but he told the sergeant to go to Camp Fallujah, as Kirby had, for rest and observation.
The sergeant refused. “Go fuck yourself,” he said.
Kirby backed away. In mid-December the same sergeant lost his M4 rifle on patrol—a violation of the Marine culture so egregious that it was beyond an embarrassment. It was an all but instant end of a career. Whispers traveled among the company’s Marines about how it had happened. Some said the sergeant had leaned it against his truck during a stop at a police post in Karma and forgotten it when the patrol drove away. Others said the sergeant had set it on a bumper to urinate and stepped back into his seat without it. Whichever story a Marine believed, the effect was the same. The sergeant was immediately relieved of duties and sent to Camp Fallujah in shame. The Marines then heard that the battalion was asking whether he had suffered a brain injury that had undermined his memory and caused his inattentiveness, and been a factor in the rifle’s loss.
The sergeant’s lapse ushered in fresh hassles for everyone else. Weapons Company, stinging at the loss, entered a period when it repeatedly counted its equipment. Marines were required to prove they had all of their issued items. Constant inspections fueled anger and distrust. And some Marines worried about grimmer effects. In the bunk rooms and in trucks, where Marines were close and spoke with candor, they asked: What might the missing rifle’s next chapter be? It was equipped with an infrared laser target pointer and 4-power optical sight. Would one of Weapons Company’s own weapons be turned against them?
* * *
In the cold hours before sunrise on Christmas morning, Petty Officer Kirby made a mistake. He woke inside a trailer in Camp Fallujah, stood half-dressed beside his rack, and groggily urinated into an empty water bottle. Working hard days in Iraq’s dry climate, Marines and corpsmen drank large quantities of water. This was seen as a duty, necessary for heading off dehydration and avoiding collapse. Heavy intakes created hassles, including frequent urination. The portable toilets were outside and often foul. Waking at night and walking into blackness to use them disrupted sleep—which, for Weapons Company’s Marines, was already in short supply. The workaround was simple: Many Marines kept empty water bottles by their bunks and at night would reach to them for relief. The practice was both common and forbidden, considered an affront to discipline and close-quarters hygiene. On Christmas morning Kirby was caught.
A sergeant discovered Kirby’s water bottle filled with pee. The two men argued. A few hours later, the sergeant asked for Marines to stand post. Another member of the platoon volunteered. The sergeant who was angry at Kirby had a different idea. He told the corpsman he would stand the extra duty—a shift in a two-man bunker on the roof.
“You’re going up there, and you fucking know why,” he said.
The particular post was a sparely built box of framing lumber ringed by a low sandbag wall. Salvaged bulletproof windows from vehicles offered a measure of protection, but the place had an otherwise partially made feel. It lacked camouflaged netting to break up the Marines’ outlines or a heavy metal screen to catch an incoming rocket-propelled grenade. For weeks Marines had groused about it. They thought it was unsafe and should not be occupied. Lance Corporal Anthony Santos, who was assigned to the post with Kirby, loathed the place, which he thought resembled a cheap closet with no door.
Kirby took his turn behind the tinted bulletproof glass late in the morning, the punitive replacement on a shift that had been scheduled for his driver. The day was quiet. It felt like a holiday lull. He passed a few hours chatting with Santos. The two men talked about movies, and joked, and griped about Doc’s misfortune, of being punished on Christmas Day. In the afternoon, his time up, Kirby stepped from behind the barrier and into the open, ready to dash the few steps to the stairs leading to the ground.
A bright light flashed in his eyes. He felt a jolt to his head. There had been no warning.
“What the fuck happened?” he said.
He did not recognize his voice. Its Southern twang had been replaced by mumble.
He looked back. Santos was staring out of the bunker, directly at him.
“Shit, you’re bleeding!” he said. He was wide-eyed. “What do I do?”
“I’m bleeding?” Kirby said. Again his words did not form. What the fuck’s going on? He leaned forward and held his left hand under his mouth. A single drop of blood landed on his palm. A flood followed. In a hot gush, Kirby’s hand was covered.
He heard someone yell.
“Doc Kirby got shot in the face!”
Kirby tried to guide his mind away from panic. Hunched over, staring at his soaked left hand, he needed information. How bad is it?
The Fighters Page 17