Joker One (46 page)

They loved one another and their mission—the people of Ramadi —in a way that I didn’t fully appreciate until just a few days before we left the city,
during the second week of September. I’d run into Mahardy, smoking outside the hangar bay as usual, and I’d asked him the standard throwaway question: Was he excited to go home? The response shocked me.

On the one hand, Mahardy said, he was excited to see his family, but on the other, he was sad to leave before the job in Ramadi was finished. We’d worked hard, and we’d come a long way, and Mahardy was worried that our replacements would just screw things up, would treat the people harshly and erase whatever small gains we had made in winning them over. Furthermore, going home meant that his new family, Joker One, wouldn’t be around all the time like they were now. Mahardy loved the guys, he said, and he wasn’t sure what he’d do without them there.

As I asked more of my Marines the same question I’d asked Mahardy, more of them gave me the same answer he had. The consistency of the responses shocked me. I couldn’t in any way relate to wanting to stay in Ramadi. A good portion of the city’s residents hated us just for being American, and a smaller but still sizable chunk of them actively tried to kill us every day. Why would anyone want to risk his life to help these people? How could anyone love them? What does it really mean to love?

I
t has taken time and distance from it all for me to understand fully what my Marines had been telling me then, but now I think that I get it. Now I think that I understand a bit more about what it means to truly love, because for my men, love was something much more than emotion. For them, love was expressed in the only currency that mattered in combat: action—a consistent pattern running throughout the large and the small, a pattern of sacrifice that reinforced the idea that we all cared more for the other than we did for ourselves. For them, love was about deeds, not words, and as I reflected that day on the love of my men, a thousand small acts came to mind.

Love was why Waters gave Mahardy his last cigarette.

It was why Mahardy said, “Fuck you, I’m not taking your last one,” and gave it back.

It was why Docs Smith and Camacho chose to live in Joker One’s compound when they could have had much nicer rooms with the other corps-men in the hangar bay: why they forced the Marines to take off their boots every day so that they could inspect their disgusting feet.

Love was why Bowen taught classes on patrol overlays instead of sleeping: why Noriel cursed unintelligibly at his men when they practiced patrolling without their heavy body armor; why Teague walked point every day so that if something bad happened, it would happen first to him.

And love was why Brooks walked backward every day, guarding our vulnerable rear as we moved.

As time went by, these small acts—so many of which I either failed to notice or simply took for granted—created something in Joker One that was more than just the sum of all of us. In fact, these acts gave Joker One a life of its own, a life that wove all of us inextricably into itself, until the pain and the joy felt by one were the pain and the joy felt by all. And that life grew so vibrant, and so powerful, that my men practiced the ultimate extension of love—laying down their lives for one another—nearly every single day.

So Joker One was why Raymond and his team formed a wall in front of me when I was caught in that tangle of concertina wire. Joker One was why Yebra ran into the middle of a citywide firefight despite his horribly weakened condition; why he fixed a radio until his brain boiled and he passed out, convulsing.

Joker One was why Williams patrolled with a limp.

Joker One was why Kepler climbed into a helicopter gun run while everyone else took cover; why Doc Camacho ran into the middle of a fire-swept street, waving his arms, asking the enemy to please shoot at him.

Joker One was why Niles guarded a compound entrance until everyone else had made it safely inside.

For me, then, loving Joker One—something I so desperately hoped that I did—meant much more than simply feeling that I cared. It meant patience when explaining something for the fifth time to a nineteen-year-old who just didn’t get it. It meant kindness when dealing with a Marine who had made an honest mistake while trying his hardest; mercy when deciding the appropriate punishment. It meant dispensing justice and then forgetting that it had been dispensed, punishing wrong and then wiping the slate clean.

Love was joy at the growth of my men, even when it diminished my own authority. It was giving the credit for our successes to the team while assuming all the responsibility for our failures on myself. It was constantly teaching my men, sharing everything with them until I had nothing left to give,
with the expectation and the hope that they would become greater than me. It was making myself less so that they might become more.

Love accepted the Marines for exactly who they were and never believed that it was all they ever would be. Love demanded more, demanded their best, every single day; it cut through all rationalizations and excuses. It constantly celebrated the good in my men and refused to condone the natural selfishness that dwelt within us all.

Love told the honest truth when lying would have been much easier or would have made me look much better; it admitted to the men that sometimes I had no answers. It confessed my mistakes and asked for forgiveness when I had wronged, and it moved past those mistakes when forgiveness had been granted.

Love hoped that things would be better someday, maybe in this life or maybe in the next, but it didn’t deny the reality of the pain and suffering that surrounded us day in and day out; it didn’t dishonestly rationalize them or explain them away. Love didn’t try to make sense of the senseless; it simply offered a light to run to.

But, like now, that light grew dim sometimes. So, sometimes, love meant just getting out of bed in the morning when everything inside screamed to rest, just for one day. Sometimes it meant simply putting one foot in front of the other on patrol. And sometimes it meant continuing the mission when you didn’t see any progress, meant protecting the defenseless, refraining from pulling the trigger, putting yourself at greater risk, doing what you knew to be right even though you didn’t really want to.

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o that was how we loved those who hated us; blessed those who persecuted us; daily laid down our lives for our neighbors. No matter what we felt, we tried to demonstrate love through our daily actions. Now I understand more about what it means to truly love, and what it means to love your neighbor—how you can do it even when your neighbor literally tries to kill you.

And now I understand the true magnitude of what Bolding did. At the time of the attack that took his life, I thought that Bolding had died for us. Now I know that, as much as he laid down his life for his brothers, Bolding also laid down his life for a group of small, badly wounded Iraqi
children, trading his legs, his blood, and his future so that they might have a chance for a future of their own. More than any of us, Bolding had lived out the greater-love principle to its fullest possible extent.

On September 9, 2004, Joker One loaded up into trucks and prepared to head out of the Outpost for Junction City en route to the United States and home. We were leaving with fewer than we came, and the knowledge sat heavy on me as I hopped into the cab of my vehicle. However, we had done our very best, and we loved one another with everything we had. In the platoon, we had created something much greater than any of us, something that I hoped we would take with us for the rest of our lives. In Ramadi, we had made mistakes and paid the price, but to the fullest extent possible we had cared for those whom war always traps between bad and worse.

Looking back through the window at my men, seeing them smiling and pushing one another and slapping magazines into their weapons for the last time, I understood how much we had accomplished and how hard we had tried. After Aldrich, faith and hope had left me, and I despaired, but now I realized that love somehow remained. Slowly, it began to restore the other two.

A
fter two weeks of waiting for a plane to become available, Joker One finally flew to Kuwait and from there back to the States. On September 125, 2004, we formed up with the rest of the company at the armory in Camp Pendleton, California. It was late there, around ten o’clock, but that hadn’t stopped our loved ones from gathering to greet us. We could hear their cheers, just a few hundred yards away, up on top of a hill where they couldn’t quite see us down at the armory. Once the company had assembled in a rough column of four squares, we set off up the hill, the CO marching at our head, Joker One and I following just behind him.

When the CO and the flag bearer preceding him crested the hill, the crowd erupted. The company marched toward them, eyes straight forward, hands swinging stiffly by our sides, heads held high. I don’t know what the rest of the men were thinking then, but I, for one, felt proud. Ramadi hadn’t become a bastion of security and stability on our watch, but it hadn’t completely fallen to the insurgents, either. To prevent that, we had fought every day, street by street and house by house, bringing only what we could carry on our backs. We had fought hard, and we had persevered, and maybe the city was a little bit better for having had us there.

However, we had taken a tremendous beating in the process. The battalion had suffered thirty-four killed and over ten times that number wounded in seven and a half months. Across 2/4, those numbers worked out to be a little less than one out of every three men. In Golf Company, the ratio was even higher: Roughly one out of every two of us had been wounded. However, our sister company, Echo, had suffered the worst: They had suffered twenty-two killed, about one out of every eight men. They had quite literally been decimated. Later, we were told that when we returned to the States, we had taken more casualties than any battalion—Marine or Army—since Vietnam.

These thoughts flitted briefly through my mind as the company stopped its march directly in front of the gathered crowd. As one man, the battalion turned left and faced our shouting loved ones, and, staring at them as I saluted our CO and our flag, I was reminded of the tremendous price we had paid to march back with our heads held high. There in front of me, waving his right arm only, was Carson. His left was bound up in a sling. Leza and Niles stood next to him, both on crutches, and Boren was there with his wife and his cane. When the CO dismissed us, and the Marines of Joker One flooded out of the ranks to run into the arms of their crying wives, to hug their mothers and fathers, to have their little ones jump into their arms, I couldn’t help but think that our joy was incomplete. One of our families was missing. One of us hadn’t made it back, and his wife and parents had no reason to come to California to greet us. Even as I kissed Christy, and even as I watched my men tearfully reunite with those who loved them, I thought about the one family to whom I hadn’t been able to keep my promise.

Four days later, the entire battalion went on a month of leave. It was wonderful to be back in America—and what better place to be than Southern California—but everywhere I went, I felt a little naked. I was used to being armed to the teeth, used to having an entire squad around me everywhere I traveled. Without the knowledge that twelve men were watching over one another and me, I felt nervous around crowds, and I avoided them. Loud noises scared me, and I jumped every time a door slammed or a car backfired. I still had trouble sleeping.

Still, each day was a little bit better than its predecessor, and, slowly, I eased my way back into America. By the time sleeping in my own bed felt
more or less normal, everyone had returned from their leave and their respective homes. It was wonderful to be around the men again. One month later, though, I found out that I was being replaced as Joker One’s platoon commander. It wasn’t a surprise—with only five months of active duty left for me, I had to turn my men over to a new leader sometime. However, it was one of the hardest things I have ever done, giving the men who had been the center of my world over to someone else who didn’t know them as I did. I let them go all the same. Keeping the Marines any longer would have been selfish—they needed time and training with their new leader, and the longer I kept them, the less well they would all work together.

Shortly before I left, Joker One threw a platoon beach party, and at it the men gave me a surprise. Just as we were preparing to leave, Noriel gathered the men and walked them and me over to a pickup truck that had been backed up to the beach. I hadn’t noticed it before. As we assembled around the tailgate, Noriel announced to me that the platoon had gotten together to give their departing leader a little something. Then he dropped the tailgate and revealed my present.

Stood on its side so I could look clearly into its glass front was a custom-made hardwood case lined with red velvet. Inside it were mounted an officer’s sword and sheath. To my surprise, the sword fit me exactly. I looked up at Noriel on discovering this, and he was grinning from ear to ear.