Joker One (12 page)

To make things even more realistic, one day the Ox managed to scavenge enough vehicles from the battalion to mount up all four Joker platoons. Our company drove around in three-block squares inside the Kuwaiti camp for hours, rehearsing different enemy contact scenarios late into the evening. For lap after dull lap, we practiced responses to small IED ambushes, to civilian traffic jams, to herds of goats crossing the road, and to friendly vehicle breakdowns.

After two hours of pretending, I felt that we had exhausted the repertoire of likely scenarios and useful responses. The platoons were making one final circuit, and I was mentally preparing myself to head to bed, when the Ox got on the hook and announced a typical Ox scenario:

“All Jokers, be advised, this is Joker Five. We have an enemy platoon dug in, in the defense two hundred meters off our right flank. We need to fucking
assault those bastards. Dismount the company and kick their asses. Over.”

I rolled my eyes. It was typical of the Ox to dream up the most hard-core scenario possible, regardless of whether his fantasy bore even a remote resemblance to anticipated reality. Unenthusiastically, Jokers One through Four ordered our men to dismount and execute the tedious assault. When the evening’s convoy operations were finally finished, each exhausted platoon commander took turns bashing the Ox. Flowers started off: “Did you hear what that dumb Ox was saying? What does he think we’re going to be fighting? The damn Red Hordes pouring into Eastern Europe?”

Quist, Hes, and I all chimed in with our own insults. Then, tired and filthy and muttering angrily to ourselves, we trudged back to our tent to try to get some sleep.

H
is affinity for sadistic training regimens aside, the Ox had learned a thing or two about infantry leadership from his nearly two years as a platoon commander. One event, in particular, made me realize that he was wiser than I thought. Because Camp Commando was full far beyond its capacity with troops ready to head into Iraq, time at its few phone banks and e-mail systems was difficult to come by. However, our company had two satellite cellphones that would allow us to call back home whenever we liked. The company officers and staff NCOs retained one of these phones for their own use, and the other was put in the hands of the platoon sergeants and rotated through each platoon. As there were only twelve officers and enlisted men on the company staff and just over 140 Marines in the company, the platoon commanders could call home much more frequently. And we did, often talking to our wives as much as once a day. The Ox, however, noticeably refrained from using the phone. Watching us so casually chat with our families, he cautioned all the platoon commanders to keep a close eye on how often our Marines were able to reach home before we burned up the airwaves ourselves. We ignored his advice and blithely continued our calling.

About three days before we headed into Iraq, Carson lumbered up to me.

“Sir, I’ve got, ahhh, something I need to say, sir,” he said, shuffling his feet and alternately looking down at the ground and at me.

I looked up at him. “Yeah, Carson, go ahead.”

“Sir, with all due respect, and it’s no huge deal, sir, but we kind of notice that you’re using the cellphone a lot to call home. Sir, none of us have really been able to use it, and the phone banks are always jammed, so we haven’t been able to call home like you, sir. Maybe you could, you know, like, give us the phone every now and again? It’s no big deal, though, sir.”

“Has Staff Sergeant not gotten you guys the phone yet?”

“No, sir. Third and fourth platoon have gotten to call home, though.”

Hearing that, I felt all of about three feet tall, and I found myself humbly apologizing to my team leader. I knew better than to take care of my needs before taking care of my men, but knowing and doing are unfortunately two different things. I had thought that the key to earning my men’s respect was to demonstrate excellent tactical judgment in combat, a strong set of individual skills (fitness, good shooting and navigating, and so on) and a general willingness to make large, spectacular sacrifices—in short, most things that I thought it took to be a war hero.

I could not have been more wrong. Being a good leader and being a hero, I was beginning to realize, were not at all the same thing. For the young lieutenant, much more difficult than thirty-second acts of courage, and ultimately much more telling, are the small, quiet, almost unnoticeable acts of service that he must perform day in and day out if he wants to appropriately ensure the welfare of his men. I was determined that I would never make the same mistake again. It would mean talking to Christy much less—rarely more than once a month—but it was necessary. Besides, the intensity of combat leadership was beginning to wholly consume me. As Iraq got closer and closer, home grew farther and farther away. Thoughts of my wife and an American reality that no longer existed for me got neatly com-partmented and tucked away.

The next day found the diminutive Yebra and I marching in endless squares around the various gravel roads running through the camp. To rehearse the battalion’s impending convoy north, every officer had been paired up with his radio operator and told to simulate a vehicle. Thirty of
these “vehicles” were now slowly trundling around Camp Commando under the blazing noonday sun. The night previously, the CO had designated me as the company’s navigator, so Yebra and I were the second vehicle in the long, snaking line of officers and radiomen (the first vehicle would be an armored Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun to guard us as we moved). I was the only one in the company who had actually led a convoy in Iraq before, so the assignment hadn’t come as a surprise. Still, staring back at all the men behind me, realizing that they were only a tenth of those whom I’d lead into Iraq, the enormity of the responsibility started to sink in. It was my job to get some thirty vehicles and 180 people safely to their destination, and if I screwed anything up, all of their lives would be put at risk unnecessarily.

Once the exercise finished, Yebra and I trudged over to the two seven-ton trucks that had been assigned to carry Joker One. The cab of each truck held only two people—myself and a driver from the truck company in the first and the platoon sergeant and another assigned driver in the second. The rest of Joker One had to sit in the truck beds. Unfortunately, the seven-tons were still configured for movements back in the United States, where carrying capacity took precedence over personnel protection or fighting capability. As a result, a thin canvas covering was the only thing between the Marines and the open road. Furthermore, the benches in the back sat along the sides of the truck, forcing the Marines either to sit with their backs to the road or to twist painfully around for hours at a time, trying to scan their surroundings as their backs screamed at the unceasing torque. It had taken only a few rehearsals to convince us that this setup was impossible to handle for even an hour, let alone for a three-days-straight convoy into the heart of Iraq.

To help improve our protection, we lined the truck beds with as many sandbags as each vehicle could safely carry. They wouldn’t cover people above their waists, but the bags were certainly better than nothing. The entire company scavenged Camp Commando for benches that we could put into two lines down the center of the seven-tons so that Marines could sit back-to-back, facing outward without having to twist themselves for hours. We had no luck, so the CO instructed each platoon to come up with two designs apiece for centerline benches using only what we could carry with us: boxes of MREs, crates of water, and our own duffel bags. The best design would be standardized and used throughout the entire company.

Hes, Quist, and Flowers—the engineer—had each come up with his own design, and they put their platoons to work constructing what they had planned. I hadn’t been able to think of anything particularly clever, or different, so I called Noriel, Leza, and Bowen together and explained what the CO wanted and why he wanted it. They all nodded as I went along. Many painful hours spent twisted in the back of the seven-tons had convinced my squad leaders of the absolute imperative for the centerline benches. Once finished, I turned them over to their squads. Noriel and Leza got to work on one truck, and Bowen and his men took another.

As much as I wanted to direct their efforts, to appear the in-charge leader who knew exactly how things should turn out, two minutes of observation convinced me that my men working together would create something far better than I would working on my own. Bowen had his guys huddled around him, and was explaining to them what I had explained to him, and design suggestions flew back and forth. Noriel and Leza were doing the same thing with the same results. After five minutes, the squads had broken up, and the seven-tons swarmed with Joker One Marines. Bowen took position at the head of the truck bed, standing atop two huge green duffel bags as he directed his men’s efforts, blouse off and tattoos straining as he lifted here, pointed there. Noriel did the same thing in his truck while Leza moved about on the ground, shunting men from one vehicle to another depending on the manpower needed for each.

Fully involved in the process, the Marines worked with a vengeance. The stocky, muscular Guzon shunted back and forth tirelessly, usually with at least two huge packs slung across his shoulders. Henderson, as it turned out, was a car wizard, and many of the best suggestions for load configuration came straight from him. Ideas were tested and discarded, gear was arranged and rearranged, and slowly but surely, two centerline benches began taking shape in each vehicle. Nearly every one of my men had a suggestion for how to do something better, and sometimes the smallest ideas—such as interweaving the handles of the duffel bags for greater stability—made the biggest difference. Standing on the side, carrying the occasional bag or case of water, I looked for opportunities to give direction, but they didn’t need it. Nearly an hour later, Noriel and Bowen pulled me up into their trucks to show off their handiwork. Both designs were good, but Bowen’s was best; it would become the company standard.

Two days later, Golf Company readied itself to head north. March 1, 2004, was our last night in Camp Commando, and I spent it checking and rechecking my crude map consisting solely of several eight-by-eleven printouts that I had taped together to form one continuous strip. I also had a GPS, and should that fail, I wore an electronic compass on my wrist and a magnetic compass on my flak jacket. Of course, inside a gigantic ferrous metal truck cab, these instruments can only be trusted to tell the most basic cardinal directions, but they were better than nothing. This redundancy may seem like overkill, but I was all too aware that if I missed a checkpoint or made a wrong turn somewhere, a thirty-vehicle convoy spread over two miles would somehow have to make a U-turn on a two-lane highway with no shoulder to speak of and treacherous, slippery sand on each side. Further complicating this difficult movement would be the fact that any road we were on would likely be jammed solidly with U.S. vehicles heading into and out of Iraq. Road signs were limited and printed mainly in Arabic, and we had no translators. Looming large over all these concerns, though, were the faceless insurgents who even in early 2004 had demonstrated the capability to attack a lost convoy made vulnerable during a missed turn or a complicated circling maneuver. The best way to ensure the safety of my company was to never make a navigation mistake. I was terribly worried that I would.

I spent the late evening hours of March 1 trying to sleep but failing miserably. I thought back to all the land navigation exercises I had done at my Basic School. I had failed the first one miserably and then spent every single Saturday morning working to improve in remedial sessions. I wondered if it had been enough, or if I would fail under the pressure. The weight of two hundred or so lives was heavier than I expected. So I prayed a simple prayer over and over:

“Dear God, please don’t let me screw up and get everybody killed.”

O
n the evening of March 3, I surveyed my Marines for the last time before crossing into Iraq. I had been leading the company’s convoy north through Kuwait for the past two days, and Golf was now staged just south of the Iraqi border inside yet another U.S. camp. Hundreds of other vehicles waited alongside our convoy, lined up in dozens of long canvas-and-steel rows in a huge gravel parking lot. Slowly, I walked down our row, checking to see what my Marines were doing before I tried for a few hours of sleep.