One Bullet Away

by Nathaniel Fick

  “Weapons platoon, circle it up,” I said, standing in the hangar bay with my notebook and a photocopied map.

  The Marines stopped loading ammo and programming radios, pressing close to hear the word. I quickly outlined the mission to low whistles and nods of approval.

  “It’s important right now that we stick to our timeline. We have a lot to do. The rest of this evening is your time to prep individual and platoon gear. Get some rest tonight — tomorrow’s a busy day.” I tore a page from the notebook and taped it to the bulkhead above the platoon’s gear. “Here’s the schedule: 0600 breakfast; 0630 to 0800 draw weapons, issue ammo, and stage equipment; 0800 to 0900 helo drills; 0900 to 1000 formal platoon order issued; 1100 to 1200 final gear staging; 1200 to 1300 rules of engagement brief; 1300 to 1600 rehearsals; 1630 test fire; and 1700 call away and final load rehearsals. After 1730, Sword is airborne, and we’re on alert 10 — that’s ten minutes from notification to launch.”

  I looked around at the crowd of faces. “You’re it, fellas. A hundred million American men would like to be in your shoes right now. We have the honor of fighting back.”

  On Friday, I got my first look at the wartime military. While the platoons ran through the schedule, Patrick and I gathered equipment for the mission. I was used to signing for a roll of duct tape and accounting for each individual MRE we ate. But now gear seemed to materialize from nowhere — Javelin antitank missiles, iced coolers full of blood, atropine injectors for defense against chemical nerve agents, and two laser marking systems for guiding smart bombs in the dark.

  By 1700, our packs, ammunition, and medical equipment were staged in the helicopters, which sat, fueled and waiting, on the flight deck. The evening was balmy and clear, with dry air seeming to throw the ship’s features into high relief. I sent the platoon to its berthing area with orders to stay together — no trips to the gym or the late-night chow line. At last, I joined the company officers in TACLOG, where the Sword mission was unfolding over the radio speaker.

  We listened as the Rangers on the ground in Afghanistan vectored AC-130 Spectre gunships in on targets. Feeling helpless and wanting to be rested in case we got the call, I climbed five levels down from the Peleliu’s tower and then up into an empty bunk, turning off the light and drawing the privacy curtain around me. Fatigue won out over excitement, and I fell asleep.

  The battalion executive officer yanked back the curtain. “One of the Sword helicopters crashed. Get up and stand by.”

  I leaped from the rack and pulled on my boots, laces still flapping as I ran down the passageway to the battalion planning room. The clock read 3:45 A.M.

  The Sword mission was still under way, and information was incomplete and contradictory. The helo had been shot down in Afghanistan, or it had crashed in a cloud of dust while landing in Pakistan. No casualties, or everyone aboard had been killed. Rescue would launch immediately, or the Rangers would attempt to do their own recovery. Our default setting was to wait and let the situation develop. I picked up a phone to wake the Marines and then thought better of it. Each adrenaline rush is followed by a crash. Each time we prepped to launch but didn’t go would leave us a little more tired, jaded, and frustrated. It would be better, I thought, to protect them from as much of that as possible. With dawn an hour away, we didn’t have enough darkness to launch and reach the crash site before sunrise.

  The parachute jump into Rhino had been successful, and the Rangers had overcome limited resistance. The Sword mission to capture Mullah Omar failed because he hadn’t been there when the raid force had arrived. The Americans had narrowly avoided disaster when their helicopters came under fire while taking off. One Chinook had clipped a stone wall, knocking off one of its landing gear, but escaped safely.

  The crash had occurred at a staging base along the Pakistani border. Two Rangers had been killed when an MH-60 special operations Black Hawk rolled over after the pilots got disoriented in swirling dust. The dead men had been pulled out, and the survivors had been evacuated on other aircraft, but the helicopter was still where it had crashed.

  Despite the Pakistani government’s nominal alliance with the United States, it had only loose control over the border regions, where Taliban sympathies were strong. After one attempt to recover the helicopter was thwarted by heavy hostile fire, reaching the Black Hawk became a high priority. This was partly because of the sensitive nature of its avionics, and partly because of its propaganda value to our enemies. But mostly it was because the Marines weren’t going to let a few Pakistanis with rifles chase them away. Planning began for a beefed-up recovery force to go in, shooting if necessary, to bring back the Black Hawk. It would be built around Bravo Company.

  Again, we staged our gear, issued briefs, and coordinated the countless details of air support and communications. At 2030, word came to stand down. The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan was afraid we’d end up killing Pakistanis and damage the fragile American alliance with President Musharraf. Pakistani security forces would surround the airfield at Panjgur, where the Black Hawk sat, before we went in. The mission was on hold until the next night.

  The MEU commander, Colonel Thomas Waldhauser, scheduled the confirmation brief for four o’clock on the afternoon of the mission. Colonel Waldhauser had the tall, spare looks of a combat Marine. He had served as a young officer in the infantry and recon and had a reputation for letting his subordinates do their jobs.

  Patrick and I arrived fifteen minutes early to get a seat. Too late. Every table was full, and more people were crammed along the back wall. Only two platoons were going on this mission, but there must have been fifty officers in the room for the brief. I was exasperated but also reassured that so many people had a hand in it.

  The MEU operations officer began the presentation, speaking from the projected slides and talking mainly to the MEU commander and the Navy commodore in charge of the ARG, seated together at a table in the front row. They had sole veto power over any part of the plan. In succession, each key player, and many peripheral players, briefed his portion of the night’s mission. Air, intelligence, operations, communications, logistics, medical, weather, even the chaplain said a few words.

  Finally, Captain Whitmer stood up. He would be the leader on the ground in the dark. Looking rumpled and speaking softly, he had none of the perkiness of the earlier briefers, those who would stand on the ship and watch the helicopters fly away. He flashed a sympathetic smile at Patrick and me, as if acknowledging the necessity of this circus, and talked the commanders through our plan. Whitmer’s brief was thorough and confident, running through each of the mission’s decision points, from deciding whom to bring to deciding when to abort.

  Throughout the confirmation brief, Colonel Waldhauser had been pushing power down the chain of command, authorizing his subordinates to make the critical decisions at each point in the mission. When Captain Whitmer said he would be leaving his mortars behind due to space limitations on the helicopter, the colonel nodded. Abort criteria were no different. The colonel ordered only that we would abort the mission if we came under fire while approaching the landing zone. After landing, whether to abort would be a command decision by the men on the ground. When he was comfortable with the details, Colonel Waldhauser stood, faced the room, and said, “This mission is confirmed. Good luck, gentlemen.”

  After the brief broke up, Captain Whitmer, Patrick, and I had an appointment with Colonel Waldhauser in his cabin. Captain Whitmer rapped on the door, and the colonel himself opened it. He invited us to sit on two sofas and poured coffee for four before sitting in a chair opposite us.

  “Gentlemen, I invited you up for this private talk because I need you to understand the importance of this mission. General Musharraf has put himself way out on a political limb in order to support Operation Enduring Freedom.” The colonel leaned toward us for emphasis and went on. “What’s the most important thing you can do tonight?”

  Patrick and I looked at each other and said in unison, “Recover the Black Ha
wk.”

  “Wrong. The most important thing you can do tonight is not kill any Pakistanis. The Pakistani army has a security cordon around the airfield. Several hundred armed men will be out there in the dark. You might hear them, you might see them, but you must not shoot them. I don’t want a nervous young trigger-puller losing his cool and sparking an international incident. That, not recovering the helicopter, is the most important part of your mission tonight.

  “But,” he added with a smile, “I expect you’ll recover the Black Hawk, too.”

  I walked down through the Marines’ berthing area to check on my platoon and answer any final questions. Staff Sergeant Law was briefing his machine gunners, drilling the pyrotechnic signal plan and call signs for what must have been the hundredth time. “All right, warriors, once more. Red pyro means emergency extract. Green pyro is a squad pulling back — don’t shoot ’em. White is for illumination only, and smoke of any color is solely for concealment. Everybody got that?”

  Leaning against the wall, I listened as he ran through the call signs. “Mission commander is Proud Tiger, the forward air controller is Neck, and the escort Cobras are Swordplay.” When eyes began to glaze over, Law cut it short and turned to me.

  “Well, LT, we’re about as ready as we’ll ever be,” he said. “Let’s hope this mission actually goes tonight.” Law’s eyes were red behind his glasses. “Too much of this up-and-down crap and even my sharp edge gets dull.”

  “I think this time it’s a go,” I said. “Don’t forget to get some rest yourself.”

  I was pulling the metal hatch open at the base of the ladder well when Law called out, “Hey, sir. Don’t worry ’bout machine guns. We’re locked and cocked. These are good motherfuckers. They’re ready to go.”

  Suppressing a smile, I paused and nodded before climbing the ladder.

  11

  I SET MY ALARM for twelve-thirty A.M., but trying to sleep was futile. I tossed and turned in my bunk for three hours, finally giving up and reading a month-old Sports Illustrated while listening to Metallica’s Ride the Lightning. Unable to stand the waiting any longer, I grabbed my plastic coffee mug and walked through the dark passageways toward the wardroom.

  The ship was quiet. Most people were sleeping soundly, unaware of the drama unfolding in our lives. A light shone under the wardroom door, and I opened it to find Captain Whitmer and Patrick sitting at a table. They looked up at me with sympathetic smiles. Across the room, a group of pilots nursed steaming coffee and talked quietly over a map. I filled my mug and sat down at the table. A few minutes later, our three watch alarms went off simultaneously. At least I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep.

  We walked down to the hangar bay with a nonchalance I doubt any of us really felt. I know I didn’t. This was it. A real mission. A combat mission. I thought back to all my training and the instructors who had combat experience. They had seemed better than us, calmer, more assured, more capable. I didn’t feel that way now. I was just a boot lieutenant caught up in something beyond my control. The weight pressed down again, the burden of responsibility and the hope, above all else, that I wouldn’t do anything stupid and get people killed.

  I sat on my pack beneath the fluorescent lights and opened cardboard boxes of rifle ammunition. Live rounds. My hands were shaking as I loaded the magazines. Each bullet weighed about an ounce, a wide brass casing tapering to a lethal, copper-jacketed point. I had loaded thousands of live rounds in training but had never really examined them. They looked dangerous. I wondered whether any of mine would end up inside another human being before the night was over.

  We filed past the open elevator shaft to test fire our weapons out over the dark ocean. My rifle cracked and jumped in my hands. The purpose of a test fire isn’t to make sure the gun fires that first time, but to ensure that the next bullet is seated in the chamber, ready to go. The sound of shots reverberated off the metal walls, and acrid cordite hung in the air.

  The platoon lined up on the nonskid floor of the ramp leading to the flight deck. Each Marine sat in the order in which he would board the helicopter. That order, when reversed, was how we would hit the ground at Panjgur. Fire teams and machine gun squads sat together. I sat alone at the back, first man off the bird.

  Captain Whitmer, bulky in his body armor, called the lieutenants and sergeants over to where he stood in a corner. I expected a last-minute change to the plan or maybe a final reminder of our rules of engagement.

  “If any of you screw up and get a Marine killed tonight,” he said without preamble, “I will personally put a bullet in your head.”

  I caught Patrick’s eye and we mustered a quiet “Aye-aye, sir.” Captain Whitmer walked off. The hangar bay was too crowded to talk privately with Patrick, so I returned to my place in the line of Marines waiting on the ramp. Whitmer’s comment gnawed at me. Did he not trust us? Did he think we weren’t taking the mission seriously? If it had been an attempt to motivate us, it failed. I tried to put it out of my mind and focus on getting ready to go.

  I fitted a rubber life preserver around my neck and pulled on a pair of green Nomex shooting gloves. The life preserver had a carbon dioxide cartridge and a strobe light that would activate upon hitting the water. The gloves would keep my hands from being burned in a fire and allow me to grab weapons hot from shooting.

  After all the training, all the classes at Quantico and patrols at Camp Pendleton, I had a picture in my mind of how it would be. Momentous, significant, high drama. But grandiose phrases such as “in harm’s way” and “Godspeed” just didn’t fit. Around me sat a few dozen Marines waiting to launch. I saw ordinary guys doing a job. I didn’t think about the sweep of history, about the Afghan people or protecting America. My mind was on call signs and radio frequencies and the satellite pictures of the Black Hawk. Any fear or reservation disappeared in the task at hand. Sitting there in the dark with my rifle suddenly seemed to be the most natural thing in the world.

  Staff Sergeant Marine snapped me back to the hangar bay. “You’ll regret not bringing the mortars, sir, about the time the hajis are overrunning your perimeter.” He was walking along the line of troops, talking to the Marines waiting to leave.

  His tone was joking, but I knew he wished he was joining us. I did, too. Before I could answer, the intercom announced, “Call away, call away!” — our signal to board the helos.

  Marine clapped my shoulder. “Stay safe tonight.”

  We shuffled to the flight deck and turned our heads against the deafening roar of three Super Stallions, snorting jet exhaust and tossing us sideways with their rotor wash. The Marines around me shone dimly blue in the subdued lighting. I led a column to the lead helicopter, painted with the name “Creeping Death,” and counted thirty men aboard before taking the last seat near the tail ramp. Two other CH-53s roared farther down the flight deck. One would carry thirty more Marines, while the third would fly empty to lift the crashed Black Hawk and ferry it back to the Kitty Hawk.

  I donned a helmet attached to the helo’s internal radio and got a comm check with the pilots. The Marines squeezed onto webbed nylon seats around a pallet of spare ammunition and a pallet of medical supplies. Across from me, Staff Sergeant Law flashed a slight smile. My platoon and Patrick’s were mixed up, spread-loaded between the two CH-53s in case one of them crashed. Patrick’s first squad leader, Sergeant Tony Espera, sat next to Law. Espera had joined the Corps after working as a repo man in L.A. He looked unfazed and smiled when our eyes met.

  The engine noise increased, and we lurched sideways off the Peleliu’s deck. Climbing over the ocean, I listened to the pilots’ routine chatter — fuel, power, altitude, and navigation. The other two helicopters were dimly visible to our rear through my night vision goggles. The pilot called “Feet dry” over the intercom to let us know we’d crossed the Pakistani coast. I gave a hand signal that was relayed through the helicopter, and we took off our life preservers. The bird dropped to low altitude. Beyond the tail ramp, the ground flash
ed past almost within reach, but I saw no lights. Below us was Baluchistan, one of the least hospitable parts of the earth. With nothing to see and too much noise to talk, each man was alone with his thoughts.

  All through my training, I’d heard sports analogies. OCS was a game. Taking advantage of unrealistic details on field exercises at TBS was “gaming the game.” Winning. Losing. Code words like “touchdown” and “foul ball.” But sitting in that CH-53, racing north into Pakistan, it didn’t feel like a game. It felt like the most serious thing I’d ever done.

  The pilot passed the five-minute warning over the radio — five minutes to touchdown in the landing zone. I turned my backpack radio to high power and rechecked all my gear. Night vision goggles adjusted, seat belt unbuckled, last sip of water. The engine pitch changed as the pilots wrenched the big helicopter through a series of evasive turns approaching the landing zone. The landing gear thumped down, and the ramp dropped. I ran out, turning left to avoid the spinning tail rotor, and crouched at the edge of the runway to get a radio check as the helo thundered away in a cloud of dust. Staff Sergeant Law and his machine gunners disappeared to the north without a word. They would secure a perimeter around the crashed Black Hawk.

  I jogged across the runway to the spot we’d picked to set up a command post, passing the hulk of the helicopter. Over my headset radio, one of Patrick’s teams reported muzzle flashes in the distance. The lights of a Navy P-3 communications relay aircraft winked high overhead — too high even to hear.

  A group of Marines clustered in the darkness, and I ran toward them. Captain Whitmer stood with a Pakistani officer. They were laughing, standing lightly as if at a cocktail party. I felt rude approaching them with my rifle, crouched under a heavy pack.

  “Lieutenant Fick, this is Major Magid.”