One Bullet Away

by Nathaniel Fick

  I walked among the platoon, from vehicle to vehicle, visiting each team to listen to stories, take requests, and answer questions. Work continued while we talked, and everyone seemed to take renewed interest in the simple pleasures of eating a bag of pretzels or slipping out of his MOPP jacket to feel the warmth of the sun on his shoulders. Evan Wright was sprawled in the grass next to Colbert’s Humvee, laughing with the Marines who stood around him scrubbing their M4s.

  “I’m surprised you’re still with us,” I said.

  “Because I should have left or could have been shot?”

  I laughed. “Both.”

  Beneath the banter, the mood was morose. After earlier firefights, I had seen a quiet confidence in the younger Marines, the realization that they had faced the beast and won. That was gone now. The beast had fought back, and although no one was dead, we had paid a blood price. The more experienced Marines were vocal.

  “Sir, what the fuck were the commanders thinking, sending us in there with no armor to clear a fucking town? We could have all been killed, and for what? We’re sitting in the same goddamn field we were in last night, as if nothing had happened, except we got the shit shot out of us and lost a great team leader.”

  I walked a fine line. As an officer, I couldn’t badmouth decisions the way a lance corporal could. Even as a lowly first lieutenant, I simply had too much rank, too much authority and influence. It would be disloyal and insubordinate, a transgression both moral and legal. At the same time, though, to smile in the face of stupidity and say something about liberating the Iraqi people or living up to the example of Iwo Jima and Hue City would neuter me in the eyes of my men. Men shrink in combat to little circles of trust: us versus them. A platoon that puts its commander in the “them” category is a dangerous place to be. Every young officer quickly learns the difference between legal authority and moral authority. Legal authority is worn on the collar — the gold and silver rank insignia that garner salutes and the title “sir.” It doesn’t win firefights. Moral authority is the legitimacy granted to a leader who knows his job and cares about his men. In combat, I learned to rely on moral authority much more than on legal authority.

  So I conceded part of the Marine’s statement. “That was bullshit, bad tactics. After all the artillery prep and with the air escort, no one expected that ambush to happen. We were all wrong. I can’t speak for the battalion, but I can tell you that will never happen again in this platoon.” I paused and locked eyes with the Marine to be sure he knew I wasn’t just talking. “I’m sorry about Pappy. I don’t know if we’ll be fighting for another three days, three weeks, or three months, but I can tell you one thing. We have to learn from what we do right and what we do wrong, then move on. There were twenty-three of us, back to back. Now there are twenty-two. We have to get each other home in one piece.”

  The Marine nodded, accepting this line of reasoning. Strong combat leadership is never by committee. Platoon commanders must command, and command in battle isn’t based on consensus. It’s based on consent. Any leader wields only as much authority and influence as is conferred by the consent of those he leads. The Marines allowed me to be their commander, and they could revoke their permission at any time.

  I stopped at Sergeant Reyes’s vehicle, where half the team was replacing a tire shredded by machine gun fire while the other half brewed coffee and relived the night’s adventure. Behind them, their Humvee’s windshield displayed a hole exactly 7.62 millimeters wide where an AK-47 round had passed within inches of Sergeant Reyes’s head. Now Rudy himself was serving as barista, carefully bringing water to a boil through coffee grounds, then pouring it with a delicate flourish that topped each cup with white crema. He spoke as he worked.

  “So I’m driving along when Shawn says, ‘Hey, Rudy, turn around.’” He imitated Sergeant Patrick’s North Carolina drawl. “I start turning to the left, and ack ack ack ack, shooting everywhere. Humvee’s rocking. Tracers over, under, past my head. Madness, brother, just madness. Then I see Shawn jump in his seat and yell. Well, I’m busy turning around in this firefight, trying not to run into anything or get us stuck, and I hear him say, real calm, ‘I’m hit in the foot — I’m OK, though.’ Then that crazy mother ties a tourniquet around his leg, real cool, picks up his M4, and starts shooting again!” Rudy folded at the waist, slapping his knee, struggling to breathe. “Brother, that guy is awesome. Awesome.”

  I was nursing the coffee Rudy had poured for me when Christeson’s voice crackled through the radio. “Sir, the CO needs you at his truck.” Looking toward company headquarters, I could see people packing up, getting ready to move.

  “Roger, I’m on my way.”

  I thanked the guys for the coffee, shouldered my rifle, and walked away.

  31

  “ HOW’S YOUR PLATOON, Nate?” The captain’s eyes were red. He asked the question with reservation, as if he already knew the answer.

  “Licking its wounds, sir. Two Marines shot. Thirty holes in my trucks. And that’s just what I can see. The Marines are starting to wonder who’s calling the shots here. Hell, I’m starting to wonder who’s calling the shots.” Keeping a stoic face for the platoon sometimes meant unloading on my commander. “That attack was fucking kindergarten tactics. We all knew it, and no one said a goddamn thing about it. And how am I supposed to keep my Marines on their game when officers are pulling stunts like that photo op this morning?”

  The captain cut me off. “All right. We’re all sorry about what happened to Sergeant Patrick. This is a war. Direct your frustration at the people who deserve it — the Iraqis.” With that phase of the discussion over, he moved on to the day’s plan while I seethed. Now I had to focus on getting from myself what I always expected from my troops: attention to the task at hand. What’s past is past, but the present and future will kill you.

  The plan called for us to move south to Al Hayy, recross the bridge we had crossed two days before, and attack into Muwaffiqiya with the Third Battalion, First Marines. In training, the order for a multibattalion attack into an occupied town would have taken half a day. Here, it was a sentence.

  Gunny Wynn, Colbert, Lovell, and Reyes stood around the Humvee hood. The team leaders were laughing, and tried to quiet down as I approached. I spread my map on the hood and began to lay out the day’s plan, but the guys couldn’t let go of the joke I’d interrupted. When Reyes and Lovell kept chuckling, I paused. Goddammit. Didn’t they know how serious this was? Didn’t they remember we’d lost Sergeant Patrick only a few hours earlier? Couldn’t they see that I carried their lives on my shoulders? I started to speak and stopped myself. I’d nearly repeated what Captain Whitmer had told us in the Peleliu hangar bay eighteen months before: “If any of you get a Marine killed today, I’ll shoot you myself.”

  I finally understood why Whitmer had threatened us that night. Commanders always bear the heaviest responsibility. When you’re tired and under stress, your efforts to convey that gravitas can come out all wrong. The Marines must have seen my frustration, because they shut up and let me finish running through the plan. When I was done, they nodded and went off to brief their teams. They knew this wasn’t the time for questions or arguments, and I was grateful for that.

  Our lives were in free fall, spinning so completely out of our control that all we could do was hang on and try to keep up. That was when mistakes happened. Without time to plan or process or recover, we were at the mercy of fate — or worse, of other people. As a commander, taking full responsibility for my own decisions was one thing; taking it for other people’s decisions was something else. The weight pressed down on me. I sat in my Humvee, studying the map, until Christeson fired up the engine.

  We swung south to Al Hayy and into a world transformed. Of course, the weather had changed. Gloomy, dusty skies gave way to brilliant blue. All along the road, people waved and cheered. Girls in purple and yellow dresses smiled shyly while their brothers sprinted along the road’s edge, slapping high-fives and giving the thumbs-up.
Shutters and gates, once closed, were thrown open, and laundry fluttered in the breeze on lines above the streets. Traffic darted back and forth through the city, but despite our best attempts at watchfulness, we could see none of it as a threat. The desolate lot we’d raced through two days before was half soccer field, half open-air market. All foreboding had vanished. The only thing missing as we crawled through crowds of cheering Iraqis were streams of ticker tape from above. For the first time, we saw the meaning of liberation and felt the release of pure joy from ordinary lives. It was the best fifteen minutes of our week.

  After crossing the bridge, we turned north and followed the river on the road we’d been watching two nights before. Craters pocked the roadside, and telephone poles were canted at odd angles, their wires severed and snaking along the ground — results of the artillery we’d dropped on escaping fedayeen. We stopped just south of Muwaffiqiya. Third Battalion, First Marines was halted ahead of us, waiting while its psychological operations teams blared surrender messages from loudspeakers into the town. I punched two-man observation teams out to our flanks and had the snipers begin scanning through their scopes. This area had been nothing but trouble for us.

  As the teams rotated through security, maintenance, and rest, Gunny Wynn and I walked around to check the platoon’s pulse. I wanted to see how Team Two was doing without Sergeant Patrick. Every man in the team had stepped up a level — Reyes to team leader and the other guys to a greater share of the collective responsibility now that they were down a man. Reyes knelt on his hands and knees next to his Humvee, scrubbing, while Jacks stood post behind the Mark-19.

  “What are you doing, Rudy?”

  “Hey, sir. I’m scrubbing Pappy’s blood off our vehicle. Bad for our chi.”

  “Your what?”

  “Chi — spiritual energy. It’s the life force that influences everything we do. The old man bled a lot before we got him out of the truck, and I’m just trying to clean up a bit while we have the time.”

  I knelt next to Rudy and ran my finger across the jagged hole where the AK-47 bullet had pierced the Humvee’s frame. The bullet had been traveling upward when it hit. I remembered those machine gun rounds sparking as they ricocheted off the road. It was reassuring to know that my snap judgment at the bridge had been right. “Did you find the bullet?”

  Rudy smiled and reached into a pouch in his vest. “I’m saving it for Pappy.” He held up a shiny 7.62 mm rifle bullet. It was hardly deformed at all. Thankfully. Had it tumbled or mushroomed after hitting the Humvee, it would have torn a ragged chunk from Sergeant Patrick rather than passing cleanly through. I took it in my hand — it was heavy — then gave it back.

  “The sacred geometry of chance, sir.”

  “I like that.”

  “Espera and I talked about it earlier. We can do a lot to influence the outcome, but sometimes it’s out of our hands,” Rudy said, then mimed firing a rifle. “A running man shoots a burst into a moving Humvee. Why do some miss? Why do some hit? Why a flesh wound and not a femoral artery? Aim and skill have nothing to do with it. The difference between life and death out here is seconds and millimeters — the sacred geometry of chance.” He looked down at the AK bullet in his hand. “Pappy’s time came. He was in Somalia and Afghanistan before this. You can only dodge for so long.”

  “How are you and the team, Rudy? Let Gunny Wynn and I know what you need, and we’ll shuffle things around to support you.”

  “We’ll be fine, sir. They’re all good guys, and Pappy trained ’em right — they can go on without him. I just can’t believe he’s not here. I miss him already.”

  “Me too.” I stood to leave, then stuck out my hand. Rudy took it. “You’re the team leader now, Sergeant Reyes. I know you’re up to it.”

  The infantry battalion pushed through Muwaffiqiya without resistance. Any foreign fighters and fedayeen in the town had simply melted away. We followed behind the grunts, crawling along a road paralleling the river. Ornate masonry walls surrounded waterfront parks, and wide sidewalks swept along the roadside. Shuttered storefronts lined the stone buildings, clearly a holdover from some earlier, more prosperous era in that part of Iraq. A dedicated afternoon of trash collecting and whitewashing could have vaulted the place into respectability, but that afternoon had never happened.

  “Jesus, Gunny, look over there,” I said. To our right, across the river, stood a clump of trees by the side of a small bridge — the site of our ambush the night before. The trees, buildings, and bridge were just as I remembered them. We could even see the pile of debris dragged into the road by the Syrians. It was eerie, seeing the scene from the enemy’s perspective.

  “That machine gun must have been set up right here.” I looked around for a telltale pile of brass shell casings but saw nothing. The buildings along the river had been on the receiving end of our heaviest fire — artillery, Cobras, and tanks. Rubble spilled into the street. Whole city blocks had been replaced with piles of shattered bricks. Explosions had cleaved some rooms in half, leaving their intact remnants visible where walls once stood. Furniture still filled the rooms, and pictures hung on the walls. I caught fleeting glimpses of people peeking at us from the ruins. Sympathy was tempered by the knowledge that a handful of foreign fighters could not have remained there to ambush us without the approval, or at least the indifference, of the villagers. And yet children surely lived there, and we had blown their homes to pieces.

  “Cars are driving next to us a few blocks that way.” Wynn pointed to our left, deeper into Muwaffiqiya. “Creeping along like they’re casing us.”

  I looked and saw a blue sedan, its passengers staring at me as I was at them. A block later, it passed another cross street, still keeping pace with us.

  “Hitman Two, halt in place while Alpha moves forward to investigate an arms cache.” The CO interrupted our observation with the order to stop, while Alpha Company pushed ahead.

  Except for the drivers and turret gunners, we all moved away from the Humvees — juicy targets in the close confines of a city street. I took my rifle and radio and knelt in the alcove doorway of a store, scanning the rooftops and windows across the street. Up and down the road, the platoon melted into shadows. Teams alternated sides of the street, so each could see the windows and roofs above the other. Watching Marines crouched in the rubble reminded me of pictures of the battle for Hue City during the Tet offensive. If Vietnam still grips the nation’s consciousness, its memory is doubly strong in the Marine Corps. When officers and staff NCOs in Iraq turned their backs, Marines were apt to slip an ace of spades into their helmet bands or write slogans on their flak jackets. “Born to Kill.” “George Bush’s Hired Gun.” I heard Iraqis referred to as “gooks” or “Charlie,” only half jokingly. Vietnam Marines are still the archetypal Marines.

  “Hitman Two, be advised that radio intercepts indicate fedayeen regrouping in the city and preparing to launch suicide car bomb attacks against us. No further information.”

  This announcement from company headquarters was big news. We had never received a warning about a specific threat in a specific place from the signals intelligence team riding with the battalion. Their Arabic linguists scanned local Iraqi radio traffic, so I took the threat seriously and passed it on to the teams. The Marines calmly acknowledged the news, but their hands tightened on pistol grips, and their eyes darted more quickly up alleys and roads. I thought back to the car that had seemed to be shadowing us. Instantly, the sunny afternoon turned tense. I felt a charge in the air like that before a thunderstorm. Even my memory of those moments is in black and white, the very recollection thrown into shadowy high relief.

  Moving forward, we drove slowly, looking for the rear of Alpha Company. Near the northern edge of Muwaffiqiya, we linked up. Their lead vehicles turned left at a grassy park and drove away from the river. It seemed odd that we’d be driving deeper into the town instead of continuing north into the open fields I could barely see through thinning buildings. As my platoon reached the t
urn, Major Whitmer jumped from his Humvee, which was parked at the side of the road.

  “Nate, keep going straight. Alpha made a wrong turn. You’re on battalion point now. Pull forward a few hundred meters and halt so we can get this unfucked.”

  Colbert and Espera pulled their vehicles abreast and set up a rolling roadblock to keep any oncoming traffic from running into the battalion as it untwisted itself. We snaked around the park and began to roll slowly past a row of low-slung industrial buildings.

  “Vehicle from the front. Blue sedan. Three or four passengers.” Colbert’s report was terse, spoken in the clipped tones of a guy juggling rifle, binoculars, and a radio handset while reporting to his commander, giving orders to his subordinates, and planning his next move. If anyone could manage this balancing act, it was Brad Colbert. He’d been named the battalion’s Team Leader of the Year, and I had boundless confidence in him.

  “Roger. Escalation of force. Don’t let him pass,” I said. But I thought, Blue sedan? Fuck, I knew it. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Just as we move to the front of the battalion, too. All right, Brad, you were Team Leader of the Year. Do the right thing, my man.