Joker One (47 page)
Authors: Donovan Campbell
“Now you know why I asked your inseams, sir.” He paused and looked at me expectantly. Still dumbfounded, I looked back. Noriel spoke up again. “Damn, sir, you’re dry-eyed still. I was hoping you’d cry when you saw this.” Then he walked over and handed me something small and jangling. I looked down. It was a whole host of dog tags, all strung together one after the other along the standard beaded metal chain. They were bent and dented. Some were still covered in sand.
Noriel spoke again, serious now. “Sir, those are all of us, sir. So you can remember us when you’re gone.” He paused, then. “Sir, we even got Bolding’s dog tag for you.”
Hearing that, I nearly did cry.
I left the platoon the next week, and I thought that it would be the last time I would see them together, but I was wrong. Three weeks later, we held a memorial service for the battalion’s dead, and the CO called me to make sure that I would come. Up until the day of the service, I couldn’t decide
whether I wanted to be there—Bolding’s family was coming, the CO had told me, and I didn’t know how I could face them. But when the afternoon finally arrived, I pushed my fear aside and walked down to the event. Standing at the back, in the very last row of a crowd of Marines, I had a difficult time maintaining my composure as the chaplain honored our dead for the last time. At the front of the crowd, I could see Joker One, assembled together with their new leader at their head. Some time passed, more words were spoken by the company commanders, and eventually the service ended. My Marines broke up and formed a long line—they were paying their respects to Bolding’s mother and sisters.
Supremely nervous, I walked over to the line and waited my turn. I don’t know how long the waiting lasted—it seemed forever but too short—and the entire time I practiced the words that I wanted to say to Bolding’s mother about her son. Her son was a hero, I wanted to tell her, and he died defending others, children who couldn’t defend themselves. He was one of the best of all of us, and he never quit on his team. He lifted us all with his smile and his cheerful nature. We missed him.
Then, suddenly, I was there, in front of her, and I couldn’t say anything at all. For a time, I looked at her, and she at me, and then I broke down sobbing. It was the first time I had cried about Bolding since we lost him, since the Gunny had held me in that miserable bathroom in Iraq. I couldn’t speak coherently, and the only thing I said, over and over again through my sobs, was this:
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Then, though I couldn’t see, so I can’t describe exactly what happened, Bolding’s mom was hugging me. Just like the Gunny had, she pulled me down into her chest, and I wrapped my arms around her and cried and cried until I couldn’t cry anymore.
I don’t remember if she said anything to me, but when the moment passed, I felt some measure of absolution. Life continued, and so would I. Some things I will never understand, but I accept that now, and I no longer demand full comprehension as the price of the pursuit of excellence. So I’ll keep putting one foot in front of the other as best as I possibly can until my mission on earth ends and God takes me home.
I didn’t write
Joker One
thinking that it would ever become a book, much less a bestseller. In fact, I never thought that anyone other than my men and their families would ever read our story, a story I wrote because I felt that it was the final thing I had to do as the leader of Joker One. You see, while I was a combat platoon commander, I failed to write enough awards for my men. I didn’t realize that what we were doing in Ramadi was unique. I thought that everyone in Iraq was fighting as hard as we were, that everyone was suffering one-half to one-third wounded as they battled for months without ceasing. But they weren’t. What we did was special, even for the bloody summer of 2004. Because I thought it was normal, though, I demanded nearly superhuman feats from my men before I wrote them up for awards. For what they did and what they endured, nearly all of my Marines deserved medals. I didn’t do enough to ensure that they got them.
Also, as a young lieutenant, I didn’t realize the supreme importance of martial decorations. It wasn’t until I left the military (the first time) and saw how people were rewarded in the civilian world that I finally got it. In the military, the only thing that we can do to show our appreciation for above-and-beyond performance, performance that often demands a limb or a life as its toll, is to take a little bit of ribbon, and wrap it around a little bit of metal, and pin it on a man’s camouflage fatigues. If he’s dead, then we present the decoration to his widow, or his mother. Junior officers can’t hand out extra vacation, or a cash bonus, or a desirable duty location, or a promotion. All of those rewards are out of our hands. All that we can do is take the time to tell the Marine Corps the story of our men in a format it understands and hope that the awards boards agree with us. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t, but it doesn’t matter; we can’t control the boards. All we can do is make the effort, and I didn’t do enough of that. My Marines don’t have all of the medals they deserve.
I thought about my oversight as I progressed through my first year of business school nearly a year after returning from Iraq. Throughout my studies, I kept in touch with some of my men. To a man, they told me the same thing: “Sir, we don’t really tell anyone else what happened overseas. Not even our families. They just don’t get it. It’s like trying to explain red to a blind man: no matter how hard you try, they’ll never fully understand, so you just stop trying eventually, you know?”
I did know, but the fact that the parents and the wives of my men had no real idea of what their sons and their husbands had endured didn’t sit well with me. My Marines had performed magnificently in an environment that demanded more than they should have been able to give. Undermanned and underequipped, these nineteen- and twenty- year- olds had never given up, had never succumbed to the pressure, the heat, or their own worst natures. They had fought hard, kept the faith, and finished their mission with honor. And their parents knew none of it.
So, knowing that I had stories left to tell and knowing that my men hadn’t told them, I determined that I would write down what we had done. That way, my men could give the finished product to their families and say, “Here’s what I did. Now you can read about it. I don’t have to tell it.” From there, one thing led to another, and now the stories are a book, and many people know what my Marines did. It doesn’t make up for the lack of medals, I know, but it was the last unfinished thing I had to do. Having done it, I felt a sense of completion that I lacked earlier.
Now I’m writing this afterword nearly five years after the events of that fateful 2004 deployment. Since then, I’ve completed business school, had two daughters, and been recalled for yet another tour in Afghanistan. In fact, I finished
Joker One
while in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital. I’m willing to bet that it was the first time my editor and friend, Tim Bartlett, had worked with an author in a war zone—perhaps there should have been a clause in our contract that specified exactly what happened in the event that the author was exploded by a suicide car bomb.
At any rate, it feels somewhat strange now to be finally writing in the comfort of my own home. The first chapter of the book feels even more true today than when I penned it back at school: the events in Ramadi seem like they happened to someone else, somewhere else, in a different life maybe. Now I have my own house in a city where all the streetlights work, and the trash gets picked up, and the roads don’t explode when you drive on them. I see my wife every day, and my daughters don’t age in stop-motion photography. I can drive down the streets without scanning the rooftops. I can go to sleep at night without having to keep my boots on. I don’t have to worry about someone trying their best tomorrow to kill everyone I love.
But everything in Ramadi really did happen, even though it seems like it didn’t now. For me, it hits hard, and sometimes all at once. I’ll see a half-finished parking garage, and it’ll remind me of one of our observation posts in Iraq, and I’ll think of the time that Philips fell off of a wall while trying to climb into the garage, and how we had to medevac him and how funny it was later but how amateurish it felt at the time. Then I’ll think of other medevacs, like Niles or Leza, and nothing will be funny for a while. But our good friend the catfish always makes me smile, and I always seem to remember the good times with the bad.
From everything that I’ve heard from my men since the book came out, good mixed with bad seems to be a pervasive theme. The good was people sacrificing for each other: Teague walking point, Doc Camacho running through fire to treat our wounded, random taxis stopping during firefights to pick up hurt civilians. The bad was all of the evil that we saw: the children who exploded in front of us, the trash that never got picked up, Leza—screaming—on that damn green canvas stretcher. I remember them both, but for some reason it’s the good that mainly sticks with me.
That’s been the case for most, but not all, of the Marines I’ve talked with since the book came out. Noriel has gone back to college, gotten his bachelor’s degree, and is now applying to nursing school. He wants to work at the VA. Going there was like coming home, he told me. Teague joined a reserve unit and spent time teaching other Marines to get ready to head to Iraq. Walter just rejoined the Corps after a stint as a civilian. Mahardy is back with his family in New York State, attending college. Leza is a policeman in El Paso. Waters is one somewhere else. Brown is a firefighter. Bowen, as far as I know, is still in the Corps. He was voted Marine of the Year for the entire 1st Marine Division in 2004, and he has a bright future ahead of him as one of the USMC’s finest.
Others have struggled a bit more. One of them thanked me for telling our story, because it reminded him of all the good we did in Iraq and all of the good times we had over there. Prior to the book, it seemed that all he remembered was the bad. Feldmeir deserted shortly after returning from Iraq. He rejoined the platoon sometime later, but he didn’t last much longer before he was discharged. Carson achieved his goal in the Corps—he made it through sniper school to earn the coveted sniper specialty—but he eventually had to be medically discharged because his shoulder never fully healed.
To a man, though, every one of my men who has contacted me has been thrilled that their story has been told. They say that they appreciate the honesty and the reality, although I never set out be particularly good at either. Indeed, some have told me that they remember their roles in some incidents a bit differently than I do, and their points are fair. It’s a nearly impossible thing, to put together a single firefight completely and accurately. It’s even harder to string together a whole series of them; I have no doubt that I left out some notable deeds that should have been included, and that I included some things that should have been left out. When it comes to the overall story, though, everyone who’s talked to me is in agreement:
Joker One
faithfully represents what happened to us during our bloody 2004 deployment, for better and for worse.
As for me, well, I like to think that I’ve come out of war a better young man than I was when I went into it. There are some things I’ll struggle with for a long time, like why Bolding died, and why a lot of my men got hurt, and why I came through unscathed. But I’ve got life in front of me when so many don’t, and it’s my responsibility to live as best as I can for all of those who cannot. Every time I’m tempted to quit something worth doing because it’s hard, or every time that I begin to feel sorry for myself and my circumstances, I think of all of my friends who are dead and how they’d love to have my problems. I think of everyone I know who’s come out so wounded that just getting out of bed is a supreme obstacle, and I get instant perspective on my own problems.
Every time my daughter asks the same question for the fourteenth time, I remind myself of how painful life was separated from her, how I would have given anything for her to drive me batty with repeated “Why?” questions. Every time work goes poorly, I remind myself that no one died today. I’m more patient with my wife because I no longer take her for granted (as much), and I’m more patient with the small inconveniences of life in America because I no longer take her for granted, either.
So, one day at a time, I shoulder my load and do my small part to fight to keep our country great. I’m no longer in the service, but that doesn’t mean I can’t serve. I owe it to Bolding, to Wroblowski, to Winchester, and to everyone else who never came home to do my best every day. In so doing, I hope that I can bring honor to my God, my country, and my Corps. Life is good, and I now know that I don’t live it for myself. And I finally understand why the “always” is so important in our motto.
Semper Fidelis
.
First, I would like to thank my wife, undoubtedly my better half (as everyone who has ever met both of us says), for her courage, strength, and unfailing support throughout three combat deployments, one involuntary recall, and six years of marriage. I could never have written a short story, let alone this book, without her. Throughout the entire process, she served as my editor, cheerleader, confidante, and counselor. I am a blessed man.
I must also thank Professor Nitin Nohria and Scott Snook of Harvard Business School for 1) their friendship, 2) their insight, and 3) making my dream a reality. They took the time out of their busy schedules to sponsor a veteran’s writing project as a full-credit business school class. This book is the result of them pushing me to turn my chapters in on time. I also owe a great deal of thanks to my Harvard classmates, all of whom gave very generously of their time and advice in order to help a rough-around-the-edges infantryman adapt to the business world. I could not have asked for better friends and better people to help ease the reintegration into civilian life.
My agent, first editor, and dear friend Eve Bridburg also deserves more than I can give her. She took a bet on a complete unknown and then worked amazingly hard to turn a loose collection of war stories into a coherent narrative
fit to give to publishing-house editors. Though she’s been wonderful as an agent, it’s her friendship that I value most of all. And speaking of friends, Craig Perry, one of my closest friends on this earth, took his very limited time to read all of my earliest work and give invaluable insight and advice.
Nate Fick—writer, friend, and Marine officer extraordinaire—helped make this book possible. Not only did he give excellent advice along the way, but he also read the entire finished product and gave indispensable critical insight. After I was recalled (and before this book caught the attention of any editors), Phil Kapusta, my boss at Special Operations Command, Central, did the same thing Nate did, only Phil did it from an active-duty SEAL’s perspective. He didn’t have the time, but somehow he made it because he is a terrific leader.
Of course, my editor at Random House, Tim Bartlett, warrants great thanks for all the hard work he put into making this book as good as it could possibly be. Any shortcomings in the work have everything to do with me and nothing to do with him. Lindsey Schwoeri, Tim’s assistant, has been wonderful as well.
PepsiCo as an organization also gets special mention. Without its unflinching support for my family and me, my third combat deployment would have been much more difficult than it was. I am very lucky to work for such a terrific company staffed by such terrific people.
My amazing parents, Polly and Donovan Jr., are responsible for all of my success and none of my shortcomings. They have sacrificed quite a bit and done a wonderful job raising my four brothers and me. My greatest hope is that I can make them proud all of the days of their lives.
Others who deserve special mention are Brendan O’Donohoe, David Perpich, Arthur Golden, Ayan Mandal, Michael Stern, and Luke Eddinger, for all their help, wisdom, and friendship.
I thank all the men of Joker One. You taught me more than I can put into words. Hopefully, by the time you get to this part of the book, you know how much you mean to me.
Finally, I thank God, from whom all blessings flow.