One Bullet Away

by Nathaniel Fick

  While I worked, I listened to a CD sent to me by a cousin in New York. It was a benefit concert held only a month earlier at Madison Square Garden, an outpouring of sorrow, rage, and resilience in response to 9/11. A New York firefighter named Mike Moran started the recording.

  “All I can say, on behalf of my brother John and the twelve members of Ladder Three that we’ve lost, the twenty members of the New York City Fire Department football team that we’ve lost, and all the people from my neighborhood, my hometown, Rockaway Beach, Queens, New York, our friends, our neighbors, our relatives, they are not gone because they are not forgotten. And I want to say one more thing, in the spirit of the Irish people: Osama bin Laden, you can kiss my royal Irish ass.”

  A feeling of profound gratitude that I was in a position to get revenge for 9/11 surged through me. Its intensity was startling. It wasn’t just a professional interest in finally doing what I’d trained so long to do. It was personal. I wanted to find the people who had planned the attack on America and put their heads on stakes.

  Lifting my rucksack, I stepped on the scale and watched the needle spin to 365 pounds. Subtracting my body weight of 190, I was lugging 175 pounds on my back. I remembered a study I’d read at IOC warning that Marines couldn’t carry more than 50 pounds and remain effective. Fifty pounds allowed me to carry ammo, or water, or radios, but not all three. It was just another case of theory dying in the face of practice.

  After packing, I went down the passageway to TACLOG to listen as Charlie Company seized the desert airstrip in southern Afghanistan which would become known around the world as Camp Rhino. Rhino had been the code name for the field in October when Task Force Sword had parachuted in, and the name had stuck. I banged on the locked door, and a Marine let me in and updated me on the mission.

  “They departed the Peleliu on time and are airborne right now. Scheduled to hit the deck there at 1700Z,” he said.

  1700Z was 2100 local, about thirty minutes away. VJ was out there, and I tried to imagine what was going through his mind. He was probably sitting in the back of a CH-53, watching the dark landscape flash past as they flew “nap-of-the-earth,” following the contours of the ground to stay below radar coverage. I felt relieved but a little unworthy in the warm, bright room, drinking a mug of coffee. When we heard that the assault waves were safely on the ground, I went to bed. There was, after all, nothing I could do for VJ or anyone with him. They were on their own, as we would be soon.

  I lay on my bunk, unable to sleep, thinking about the latest news. Intelligence had reported that the Taliban were negotiating surrender in Kunduz, under pressure from the Afghan Northern Alliance and American Special Forces. Unfortunately, nothing so promising was being said about Kandahar. Kandahar was the spiritual home of the Taliban movement and seemed to be shaping up as their Alamo. Our mission was to force the collapse of the Taliban there. A camp of four hundred hardened fighters was reported to the east of Rhino, and a Navy jet had a SAM launched at it near Lashkar Gah, north of Rhino. At the same time, the Taliban consul general had announced that “the fireworks would begin” in the United States during the last week of Ramadan in mid-December and that Americans would “die like flies.” Eventually, I drifted off into an uneasy sleep.

  The next afternoon, the company rode ashore on a hovercraft. I watched through a narrow window as we backed out of the well deck, past the edge of the Dubuque’s stern, and thought that this adventure would be over by the next time I saw that lip of metal. We dozed to the drone of the engines on the thirty-minute ride to the beach. It was dark when the doors opened, revealing a quiet cove. Three lines of small breakers lapped at the base of gentle dunes. Overhead, a nearly full moon cast shadows on the sand.

  We boarded trucks for the eight-mile drive to the Pasni airfield. I sat on my pack with a group of Marines and talked as we rumbled up off the beach across a flat expanse of scrubby trees.

  “So, sir, this is a pretty big deal, right? A battalion of Marines going into Afghanistan. People at home will read about this, won’t they?” a Marine asked.

  I assured him that they would. This was the deepest amphibious strike ever conducted by the Marine Corps — more than 440 miles from the ships to Kandahar. It was like staging from Boston and attacking Baltimore.

  Every kilometer or so, we passed dirt intersections where roads branched off from ours and disappeared into the darkness. Two Pakistani sentries stood guard at each junction, looking like World War I doughboys with laced-up leggings and bolt-action rifles. I pulled farther inside my flak jacket, trying to keep warm. Even on the coast, the desert heat dissipated quickly after sunset, leaving only an empty, bone-chilling cold. After half an hour of stop-and-go bumping, we saw the lights of a runway and heard two C-130s on the ground. A small grove of trees resolved itself into light-armored vehicles (LAVs) and Humvees covered in camouflage netting. We had arrived at the Pasni airfield, the last stop before Afghanistan.

  Life at Pasni had a peculiar rhythm. Gear and Marines piled up there to be flown to Rhino. Fear of surface-to-air missiles in Afghanistan limited flights to the hours of darkness. In Pakistan, we kept up the illusion that American troops weren’t running offensive operations. That meant hiding in the stone hangars during the day, bored and sweltering. Once the sun set, the base burst into a frenzy of continuous movement. C-130s landed, loaded without even shutting off their engines, and disappeared back down the runway. Helicopters shuttled back and forth to the ships. Mountains of equipment moved from pile to aircraft to gone.

  The night we arrived, the hangars were already full, so the platoon staked out a spot in a clearing next to one. I couldn’t sleep and took a walk to explore. Strands of white lights decorated baked brick buildings, giving the place a strangely festive air. I expected to see tables set with red-and-white-checked tablecloths and people drinking wine beneath the trees. Instead, I saw only forklifts carrying pallets of ammo and sentries standing along the edges of the field, facing outward toward the darkness beyond.

  Before sunrise, we woke up and moved inside. We sat in the hangar all day. I repacked my gear for the fifth time. Marines around me played cards, slept, and congregated near the doors to breathe fresh air and talk.

  “So the Cobra pumps a rocket into the building, right there in downtown Tirana,” one Marine was saying. “Civilians sitting around drinking coffee, reading the newspaper. Big fucking explosion, fucking concrete falling into the streets. And we’re in uniform. ‘U.S. Marines’ right there on my chest. ‘Marines’ on the side of the helicopter. Can’t just be like, ‘Sorry, guys, I don’t know what fucksticks are in that helicopter.’”

  Another guy ratcheted up the intensity. “Mogadishu, brother. You ain’t seen shit if you ain’t been to the Mog. Skinny little fuckers running all over the place. Stoned outta their fucking heads on that leaf they chew. Khat, they call it. Makes them get crazy and shoot a lot. Stay away from the walls. Bullets travel along the walls.”

  From a different cluster of Marines came comic relief. “I’m riding down the main street in Pattaya Beach, two beers in my hands, two whores behind me, and we’re on the back of an elephant painted pink. What? Yeah, I knew they were women. I grab-checked them. This wasn’t my first fucking deployment.”

  As I eavesdropped, I realized that although they traveled a lot, they rarely saw the places they visited. Marines aren’t travelers in the traditional sense. They view foreign countries either from behind a gun sight or through the haze of a night on liberty. Perspective skews to one dimension, as if the Marines are the players and everything else is a prop. The same would hold true in Afghanistan, I suspected.

  We knew strikingly little about where we were going. No one had foreseen operating in this part of the world. We had packed for training in Thailand, Australia, and Kenya, liberty in the Seychelles, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and long-shot contingencies like a final solution to the Saddam problem. Afghanistan was literally not on our map.

  We had been given hastily made Pas
hto and Dari “pointie-talkie” cards, which listed English phrases appropriate to our situation, such as “Drop the weapon, or I will shoot,” and then gave both their written and phonetic translations. We had only rudimentary maps. Most American maps of Afghanistan dated from the Soviet occupation. Ours were large-scale with little detail and were plotted according to different data. Rhino was situated right at the intersection of four map sheets, which were rendered in three different scales and data. Finding your position on one map sheet was a simple task of plotting your GPS coordinates. Move a bit west onto another map sheet, though, and you had to move 141 meters north and 182 meters east to match the GPS coordinates with the point on the map. Farther north, and the correction was 130 meters south and 217 meters west. I lay in the hangar in Pasni, half-listening to the Marines’ stories, committing all this to memory and hoping I wouldn’t have to recall it under pressure.

  Shortly after dark, Patrick came over and said, “Here’s your ticket.” He handed me a manifest sheet with the names and blood types of the Marines who would be on the plane. “We’re on the nine-thirty shuttle to Kandahar.”

  13

  THREE HOURS LATER, in the dim red light of the C-130’s cargo bay, I sprawled on top of a huge rubber fuel bladder as we barreled north. Sitting on five hundred gallons of kerosene stoked my already overactive imagination. I tried to remember the maximum altitude of a shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile and wished I knew how high we were flying. Thinking of 1/1’s peacetime slogan — “Safety is paramount” — I realized that priorities were changing. The Marines all played it cool. Some pretended to sleep; others read. But there was enough eye contact made and quickly broken to know it was a front.

  We knew we were almost there when the airplane plunged and we floated a few inches off the floor. The landing gear slammed down with a thud, and the fuselage rocked back and forth as we slowed. Dust choked the cabin when the pilots dropped the ramp. My platoon suffered its first casualty when a private caught his leg in a piece of cargo webbing and broke his ankle before even touching Afghan soil.

  We lugged our gear off into a frigid, barren landscape. The full moon washed the sand in silver all the way to the horizon. It looked like fresh snow. The crystalline air reminded me of the mountains, and I remembered that Rhino was 3,285 feet above sea level. After the C-130 spun around and roared off for Pasni, the runway lanterns blinked out, and we walked in darkness to a walled compound at the southwest corner of the field. One of the great topics of speculation among the Marines in Afghanistan was the origin of this camp. Ninety miles from Kandahar, more desolate than any place I’d ever been, Rhino was a short dirt runway and a complex of buildings enclosed within a white block wall. Guard towers studded the four corners. Inside the wall stood a high-ceilinged warehouse, a water tower, half a dozen smaller buildings, and a mosque. All were impressively constructed, with marble floors, granite countertops, new lighting fixtures, and white plaster walls. Paved roads flanked by brick drainage ditches connected the buildings. Some people swore that the CIA had financed it early in the campaign to capture bin Laden. Others claimed that it was the private falconing camp of an Arab prince.

  The whole place had been shot up during the Sword mission a month before. Each guard tower had a single cannon hole in its roof — direct hits from the AC-130 Spectre gunship we had listened to from the Peleliu’s TACLOG. Heavy machine gun fire had raked most of the walls, and small arms casings littered the ground. Many of them were from AK-47s, indicating that whoever had been there had fought back.

  We slept on the floor of the warehouse that night, waiting until daylight to move out and take our positions on the perimeter. Bravo Company manned the southeastern corner, with Charlie tied in on our left flank and Alpha on our right. My machine guns and assault section were attached to the rifle platoons to put more firepower out on the line, and Staff Sergeant Marine dug in his mortars behind the center of the company’s position. Jim and I went in search of a spot with good visibility. Flat desert stretched almost unbroken to the horizon in every direction, but there was one lone hill next to the runway. We decided to climb it and check out the view.

  Afghanistan is one of the most heavily mined countries on earth, so we kept one eye to the ground as we walked, even though a land mine inside the compound was almost unimaginable. While looking down at the ground, I spotted a piece of paper plastered against the dried husk of a bush by the incessant desert wind. I peeled it off. It was notepaper, the size of a thank-you card, bearing a photocopy of the famous picture of three firefighters raising the American flag over the rubble of the World Trade Center. Above them, in block letters, were the words FREEDOM ENDURES. The flip side of the paper had the same photo, and the Pashto translation of the motto. It looked like a calling card left by Task Force Sword. I pocketed it.

  The hill was too far from Bravo’s lines to be useful to Jim and me, so we settled for setting up in the guard tower at the southeastern corner of the compound. It stood about thirty feet high, intact except for the shell holes in its peaked roof. From the top, we looked across Bravo Company’s entire front — a perfect place to control mortars in a fight. It would also be a perfect place for the enemy to shoot at, but lacking any alternative, we put that out of our minds.

  We stood watch in the tower for almost a week. American aircraft continued pounding Taliban positions, and we often saw them high overhead, tiny fighters hanging on to larger tankers. Besides us, the only Americans on the ground were a few Special Forces teams farther north. They were all fighting in and near population centers — Kabul, Mazar-e Sharif, Kunduz. No one lived around Rhino. Our patrols went out every night and saw nothing. We watched from the tower all day and saw nothing. To be of value, we had to go where the bad guys were.

  One afternoon in early December, Jim stood watch while I lay on the floor of the tower to write letters to my two younger sisters. A sentence into the first one, I fell asleep. Thudding footsteps on the spiral steel staircase woke me an hour later. Three women and a man, all Navy doctors, poked their heads above the floor. They were anesthesiologists and trauma surgeons, sent to Afghanistan from San Diego’s Naval Medical Center with thirty hours’ notice. They wore their pistols self-consciously.

  “What do you guys do up here?” The woman’s glance took in our binoculars, maps, and arsenal of weapons piled in the corner.

  “Give you all three or four minutes’ early warning before the human wave assault,” Jim answered blithely.

  She blinked but didn’t smile.

  “So why all the doctors?” I tried to deflect more questions by asking one of my own.

  A man with the carefully gloved hands of a surgeon explained that the nearest trauma facility was in Oman, about four hours away by C-130. With a growing American presence in Afghanistan and correspondingly more casualties, higher command had decided to set up a tented operating room in Rhino’s courtyard.

  “We can perform three simultaneous lifesaving surgeries,” he said.

  Jim and I nodded gravely, unsure whether this was meant as reassurance or merely information.

  The doctors took a last look from the tower and retreated down the stairs. The surgeon, looking over his shoulder, said, “We hear you’re leaving soon. Good luck up north. We’ll be here if you need us.”

  That one was definitely meant as reassurance.

  * * *

  Heading north was news to Jim and me, so we called Staff Sergeant Marine to take our place in the tower and went to visit Captain Whitmer at company headquarters. As we walked across the sand toward the olive-drab tent hidden in the dunes, a figure approached us with an unusual collar insignia glinting in the sun. It didn’t look like a bar or an oak leaf.

  It was a star. General Mattis had arrived to take command of Task Force 58.

  “Good afternoon, sir.” Our greeting tried to make up in vigor what it lacked in salutes, since Marines in the field never salute officers for fear of attracting enemy sniper fire. That seemed unlikely here
, but it was policy nonetheless. I certainly didn’t want to be reamed out by the general for a life-threatening show of respect.

  “Good afternoon, young warriors.” General Mattis stopped to speak with us. Of slender build and wearing glasses, he carried his pistol in a leather shoulder holster. Without preamble or small talk, he praised our mission in Afghanistan. “You need to know how much you’ve already accomplished by being here. You prove that the United States has the balls to put troops on the ground in Afghanistan. You’ve emboldened the Northern Alliance to renew its pressure on the Taliban and al Qaeda in Kandahar. You’ve reassured Americans at a time when they sorely need it.”

  He shook our hands in the way that generals do, grasping us each behind the elbow for emphasis. Part of me wanted to be unimpressed, but Jim and I both walked a little taller toward the headquarters tent.

  The next afternoon, we climbed the stairs to the task force COC and pushed through the plastic sheet doorway into the warmth and light of the crowded room. The effect was all cheer and goodwill after the cold emptiness of the desert outside. The doctors were right: we were heading north the next day. The plan was mostly set, and platoon commanders were brought in only for the final confirmation brief.

  Computer stations filled the back corner, and track lighting overhead bathed laminated maps taped together across the longest wall. Rifles were stacked by the door like umbrellas. Forty infantry officers, helicopter pilots, SEALs, Australian Special Air Service operators, and CIA liaisons crowded around in a whatever-keeps-you-warm assortment of fleece jackets and skullcaps. Most sat on piles of carpets, which outnumbered chairs by two or three to one.