Walk in My Combat Boots

by James Patterson

  Names and identifying details of some of the people portrayed in this book have been changed.

  Copyright © 2021 by James Patterson

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  First edition: February 2021

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  ISBN 978-0-316-42910-8 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941488

  E3-21210114-DANF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PART ONE: A CALL TO DUTY MIKE LEVASSEUR

  JASON DRODDY

  JODI MICHELLE PRITCHARD

  DON STEVENS

  MARIO COSTAGLIOLA

  JILLIAN O’HARA

  PART TWO: IN TRAINING LISA MARIE BODENBURG

  RYAN LEAHY

  NICK BLACK

  GREG STUBE

  JENA STEWART

  MIKE HANSEN

  MIGUEL FERRER

  ALEX

  JEFF MILLER

  JIM TAFT

  RON SILVERMAN

  PART THREE: IN COUNTRY STEVEN DOMOKOS

  MIKE EVANS

  JASON BURKE

  LYNNE O’DONNELL

  TORIE

  DAVE KINSLER

  JUSTIN BROG

  JEDDAH DELORIA

  LIZA VICTORIA

  ANDY BRASOSKY

  CRISTIN MICHAEL MCKENZIE

  JOHN KNITTEL

  RED

  NATE HARLAN

  SHERRY HEMBY

  JOHN WALL

  PART FOUR: ON THE HOME FRONT TOM

  KEVIN DRODDY

  ROBERT LIVELY

  PATRICK KERN

  LARRY GOMEZ

  JON EYTON

  ANDY WEINS

  KAREN ZAKRZEWICZ

  BRENNAN AVANTS

  NICOLE KRUSE

  MIKE ERGO

  CODA: MEMORIAL DAY SHIVAN SIVALINGAM

  GINNY LUTHER

  RORY PATRICK HAMILL

  Discover More

  About the Authors

  Also By James Patterson

  To Rory Patrick Hamill

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  PART ONE:

  A CALL TO DUTY

  MIKE LEVASSEUR

  Mike Levasseur grew up outside Hartford, Connecticut. When he graduated from high school in 1997, he joined the US Army National Guard. He served as a civilian firefighter and paramedic for twenty years alongside his military service. He was deployed eight times, three of which were combat missions. After sustaining multiple injuries, Mike retired at age thirty-eight and went on to earn a master’s degree in emergency management from Georgetown University.

  We’re not going to make it.”

  This from Jackson, the squad leader of my platoon. He’s referring to the forty-plus Humvees on the base in Kuwait, which in 2004 is nothing but a big mess of tents in the middle of the desert. The vehicles are all soft-shell. Not a single one has armor on it.

  It’s 2:00 a.m. I just stepped off a plane.

  Jackson opens his duffel and removes two Gatorade bottles—the big thirty-two-ounce ones. He hands them to me, then looks back down at the bag, thinking.

  “Better make it three,” he says, and grabs another one. “Follow me.”

  Twenty-four hours ago, I was at Fort Drum, in upstate New York, training with the US Army National Guard and freezing my ass off in forty-five-below-zero weather.

  I haven’t slept since I was pulled from the field. No soldier does when told you’re going to war.

  Jackson finds an engineer. “We’re heading to Baghdad,” Jackson tells him, “and I’d like to make it there in one piece.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Plate armor. Enough to weld the doors and cover the underside in case we drive over an IED on Military Supply Route Tampa. I also want to line the inside floor of the Humvee with sandbags.”

  Jackson holds up a Gatorade bottle. “Brought you one of each. Vodka, gin, and bourbon—the good stuff, not the cheap stuff. We have a deal?”

  Five hours later, we’re driving a jerry-rigged Humvee in a convoy heading north on this main highway that goes from Kuwait all the way up to Mosul. The road is flat and blackened from explosives. Smoke from a burning hulk of what looks like a car billows into the hard blue desert sky, taking me back to my time in Bosnia. I was there, working an ER shift at the base hospital, when 9/11 happened. We watched it live on a TV in the hospital’s waiting room. When we saw the second plane crash into the building, right then we all knew we were going to war.

  Jackson comes to a stop. We’ve driven less than a quarter of a mile.

  “Possible IED ahead,” he says. “Got to wait until the engineers clear it.”

  We dismount. Everything is flat and dry and unbearably hot. In the distance I can make out the sound of small arms fire. My adrenaline is pumping, my mouth dry. I keep looking around me.

  I worked in Bosnia as a medic. I was also loaned out—pimped out, as we call it—to units that needed a medic for their combat patrols. The biggest worry I had was stepping on a land mine. No one ever shot at me.

  It takes well over an hour to clear the IED. I get back into the Humvee. The drive to Camp Anaconda, northwest of Baghdad, is over six hours.

  It takes us two days.

  The first battle in Fallujah happens three months later, in April. Some Blackwater guys riding in an up-armored Chevy Suburban stop on a road by the bridge at the entrance to the gates of Fallujah when they’re approached by a group of kids selling gum, candy, soda, and fake Rolexes. A guy rolls down the window to buy some candy, and a kid drops a frag grenade into the Suburban.

  The burned, charred bodies of four Americans are dragged from the wreckage and strung up by the bridge. The insurgents declare an all-out war against the Americans in Iraq.

  They start slicing people’s heads off on TV.

  Camp Anaconda, where I’m stationed, is a sprawling military supply base that houses close to thirty thousand civilians, soldiers, Marines, and airmen. Every branch of the service. Even the Navy is there.

  Camp Mortarville, as it will become known for the around-the-clock attacks, turns into the most dangerous place in Iraq. Pilots dropping off supplies keep their engines running. Each night when I go to bed in my small A-frame tent, with electricity that works maybe 40 percent of the time and no running water, I wonder, like everyone else, if I’ll be alive come morning.

  The hospital, one of the largest in Iraq, o
verflows with casualties, mostly young Marines. The latest casualty is a kid who jumped on a grenade to save his buddies and was KIA. His name was Raphael Peralta, an immigrant from Mexico who came to the US and joined the Marine Corps.

  I’m working in the ER on another young kid, his hand hanging on by the skin, when I’m told I’ve been pimped out for medevac. The kid keeps screaming to hurry up and cut his hand off and patch him up so he can go back to his guys.

  Flying in the back of the Black Hawk helicopter, my adrenaline pumping, I’m told we’re heading to Samarra. A homemade bomb exploded near an Army guard post. As the Black Hawk lands, I remind myself to be ready for anything.

  The bird’s door opens to screaming and smoke and blowing sand and I’m off and running. Someone is depending on me to save his life.

  Dealing with trauma on the battlefield, seeing limbs blown off by an IED, the amount of carnage and blood…it’s more surreal than anything from a movie. Two Army soldiers have been torn apart by the blast. One is dead. Later, I’ll learn his name: Specialist Anthony J. Dixon, of Lindenwold, New Jersey. He was twenty years old.

  The other is still alive. He’s on his back, blinking up at the harsh Iraqi sun. I drop to my knees and begin to apply a tourniquet around the stump of his missing leg.

  His name, he tells me, is Armando Hernandez. “I need you to level with me, Doc.” He licks his lips, his eyes sliding to mine. “Is my junk still there?”

  Gallows humor. It’s the only thing that keeps us sane.

  “Still there,” I tell him.

  Hernandez tells me he’s from a farming town in the desert of California. Volunteered to serve his country. He’s twenty-two and has kids of his own. I’ve got him stabilized. As we fly back, I keep looking at his uniform—he’s Army, like me. I’ve been on that road at his guard post at least one hundred times. This could have easily been me lying here.

  Hernandez is alive when we land, and he’s alive when we bring him into the ER.

  I’m on my way to clean up when a grave-faced combat surgeon finds me.

  “No,” I tell him, shaking my head. “Don’t tell me—”

  “There was no way he was going to survive, not with those wounds. I was amazed he was still alive when you brought him into the ER.” He sees I’m not buying it and adds, “Trust me when I tell you that you did everything you could.”

  I believe him, and yet some part of me refuses to believe him.

  The surgeon sees that the indecision is eating me and says, “Mike, if this had happened on the front steps of Walter Reed, he wouldn’t have survived.”

  I try to take some solace in that as I head to the showers. It’s Marine Corps–style, cold water only. You get wet, wash, turn the water back on, then get out. Nothing refreshing or relaxing about it. As I scrub down, washing away the blood of a brother, I have no idea what this war will end up costing me.

  In my upcoming year here in Iraq, I will spend half of my time outside the wire. Years from now, I’ll end up with a pretty nasty case of PTSD. I’ll suffer permanent brain injury from having gotten blown up several times. I won’t be able to run, and there will be days when I can barely stand. I’ll have memory and sleeping issues, and my future wife will catch me every now and then clearing the house in my sleep, even kicking in my own closet door. It’s one of the reasons why I won’t keep guns in my house.

  But I will never have a single regret. I will think of Armando Hernandez and Anthony Dixon and Raphael Peralta and the young Marine screaming to cut his hand off so he can go back out and fight with his brothers and sisters. I will think of them and all the brave soldiers who served with me in Iraq, and my heart will swell with pride and sadness, and it will haunt me that I’ll never be able to accurately describe their sacrifices to others.

  JASON DRODDY

  Jason Droddy and his twin brother, Kevin, entered the Army on March 18, 2009. They served six years with 3rd Ranger Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment; deployed six times; and executed more than 150 missions each. Jason got out as a sergeant. His real estate company, the Droddy Group, helps veterans buy and sell their homes.

  I’m okay with dying. You have to be okay with it, consciously or subconsciously, to be good at this job. If I’m not okay with it, I’ll hesitate, and I will get killed. There are no second chances.

  My Ranger missions involve looking for and capturing certain high-value Iraqi targets. We go out mainly at night. It’s a lot of kicking in doors and rushing into rooms, not knowing who—or what—we’ll encounter. Each time it’s a mystery. I get into a lot of firefights, some of which are pretty intense.

  My twin brother, Kevin, who is also a Ranger, is in a different part of the country, doing the exact same thing I’m doing. This is the first time we’ve ever spent any extended time apart.

  When I’m having a weak moment, tired, anything like that, I think of Kevin. Back at basic training and during Ranger school, we never showed weakness because we wanted to be strong for each other, always. I have to be strong and focused so I can return home to my family.

  And there’s no question in my mind that Kevin and I are coming home together.

  One night I’m given a mission brief about a high-value target hiding inside a compound. Our guys have been watching this compound all day long, and certain individuals who appear to be guarding the compound walk back and forth from the perimeter to a wood line that is basically facing the compound. From comm chatter, we find out there’s a heavy World War II–era Russian machine gun sitting somewhere in the wood line.

  “Protect the machine gun,” we hear these guys say. “Don’t let it get wet. Make sure someone is watching it at all times.”

  That night we do a landing within three hundred meters of the compound. I run off the back of the helicopter. The rotor wash is intense, and the brownout is bad; I can’t see anything, and it’s loud, chaotic.

  The bad guys don’t know we’re here. They’re staying low in the poppy field as we creep toward them. I see one guy hustling away from the compound to the wood line, and because of all the radio chatter I know he’s going for the big machine gun. I can’t let him get to it. I need to protect the force at all cost. Now.

  I fire with my squad automatic weapon (SAW), a machine gun that fires long six-to-nine-round bursts, and end up trading shots with the bad guys. It’s the first time I initiate combat.

  The guys I’m with—we’re tough, trying to be manly men and acting like we’re not scared or worried, but they know how close I am with my brother. Anytime the leadership finds out Kevin is in contact with the enemy, they always invite me up to the Joint Operations Center (JOC) to watch the intelligence surveillance reconnaissance (ISR) feed from the drones so I can keep an eye on what’s going on, watch what’s happening. It’s tough to watch Kevin in a fight but there’s also a relief in being able to see him and know he’s okay.

  We start doing some remain over day (ROD) missions, where we infiltrate one night and then move to the target compound and set up shop right before sunrise. We remain over day in a compound and then fight, pick fights, or just wait for a fight. The next night we move on to another target, or move through some trench lines and into some really bad areas.

  I’m with a private, the two of us walking point on a trench line running from one fighting position to another fighting position. We’re walking along the interior edge when he says to me, “Hey, keep your eyes open. We saw some movement here during the day.”

  I work my way down the trench system. Then it makes a little shape, like an S. I look down the trench, but I can’t see all that much. I move, trying to stay as quiet as possible.

  I hear talking. I’m thinking it’s one of my guys just being loud, like telling everyone to back off, try to spread out more. Then I listen a little closer and hear the voices speaking Pashto, the Iranian language of Pashtuns—and they’re close, really close. I have an adrenaline dump and stop dead in my tracks.

  I jump on the radio. “I’ve got voices around this c
orner.”

  A first sergeant responds. “Get over the wall. Keep it between you guys and see if you can spot where these guys are at.”

  I back off a little bit. My squad jumps the wall and then I continue toward the S turn. As soon as I get around it, I hear machine-gun fire open and pepper the wall the squad is ducking behind.

  We basically get up on this wall, throw the machine gun up over the top, and press fire. We shoot two of the guys who are trying to flee. I know there’s a third one somewhere. Every time I peek over the wall, I see a muzzle flash from below, where this third guy is shooting up at us.

  My SAW jams. I take every grenade I have and throw them over the wall so I can buy myself enough time to fix the jam.

  The bad guy stops firing. I wait.

  It’s quiet.

  “Push over the wall,” the first sergeant says. “Make sure you have support.”

  We set up support. The guys in 3rd Squad push over the wall and begin to clear the trenches.

  We jump over the wall. Right in front of us is a dirt walkway that drops down into a six-foot trench. We stand topside, looking down into it. As I walk, I find a little mud bridge that crosses the trench. Down to my right, my squad leader sits down on the edge of the trench, looks underneath the bridge to make sure the third guy that was shooting at us isn’t there.

  I cross the bridge. On the other side I find a stockpile of guns the enemy tried to cover up. We’re in a bad area for IEDs, so I leave the stockpile alone, come back across the bridge, and start working my way down toward my squad leader. He drops into the trench, and I see gunfire coming from underneath the bridge.

  I immediately turn and go to jump the wall to get cover. Then I hear my squad leader scream, and, knowing he got hit, I turn and run back to the trench line, where I see my private pulling my squad leader out of the trench. I jump down and give them suppressive fire, focusing on the area underneath the bridge. I can’t really see where the shooter is, so I just shoot everything to give them time to pull out my squad leader.