Joker One (34 page)

I’ll never know for certain what the Ox said during that one frantic moment, but I do know that ever thereafter, my Marines despised him with everything they had. For his part, the Ox began to treat me and my platoon with a bit more deference. Maybe it was because he knew that I knew that the first thing he had thought of after the shooting was absolving himself of any responsibility, a cardinal sin in our world. Or maybe it was because he really had issued the order to fire. Or maybe it was because he felt as bad as I did that Joker One had shot someone who almost certainly didn’t deserve the death penalty for whatever crime he had committed. And at the end of the day, no matter who said what and no matter what orders were or were
not given, it was my platoon that had shot, and thus my responsibility for the outcome. As a former platoon commander himself, the Ox understood this basic truth, and though I can’t say for certain, I believe that a part of him knew that, like it or not, I had assumed responsibility for his decision.

I took two sedatives that evening, but sleep still came only fitfully.

A subsequent investigation cleared both my platoon and the Ox of any willful wrongdoing. My men testified truthfully as to the order they thought they had heard, and the Ox and his radio operator testified truthfully as to the order they thought he had given. In the end, the investigators concluded that no one had failed due to negligence, laziness, or malice. The Devil Siphon incident was just another of the tragedies that inevitably occur during the fog and the chaos of war, tragedies that affect anonymous individuals on all sides of the conflict.

Their stories are usually crushed out by the larger narrative of nations, and history doesn’t even record their names. Their children still cry, though.

O
n May 27, I woke up to a horrible feeling of dread. I can’t really properly put that heavy sense of impending doom into words, but the feeling meant that, for the first time, I was so scared about what the day held that I didn’t want to leave my sleeping bag. I had been scared before other missions, of course, but never before had I felt such a deep certainty that something bad would happen to my men if they left the Outpost that day. I didn’t want us to leave, but what I wanted was irrelevant. We had a mission, and, with or without me, my Marines were going to go out into the city and get it done. I forced myself out of bed and headed downstairs.

Our task that day was deterrence. General Jim Mattis, in charge of all USMC ground forces in Iraq, was hosting the second day of talks with dozens of tribal leaders and local officials at the Government Center. Such a concentrated host of important people from both sides made the center a very attractive insurgent target, so one Joker platoon was tasked to guard the building itself while another patrolled the environs to prevent mortar attacks. The day prior, Joker One had stood post on the Government Center’s walls. Now it was our turn to leave them to patrol the city.

We planned to use five Humvees to zip unpredictably about the city,
moving quickly from one foot patrol site to another as we investigated areas favorable for mortar launches. However, at the last minute, very typically, the CO threw an unexpected change at us. In consonance with his contracting duties, the Ox needed to inspect an elementary school that Golf Company had paid a local builder to repair. As long as Joker One was patrolling the area, the CO reasoned, the company could kill two birds with one stone by taking the Ox to the schoolhouse and guarding it while he performed the inspection. I protested mightily. After our last experience with Joker Five and his decision-making process, I didn’t want the man coming within one mile of my Marines and a mission. Furthermore, inspections take time, and from numerous previous patrols I knew that the area around the school offered only minimal cover for vehicles. A lengthy wait in the middle of a densely populated area with our vehicles completely in the open was a recipe for disaster. I said as much to the CO.

However, he overruled me, and my sense of unease deepened. To limit the damage from this undesirable assignment, I made two demands of the Ox: 1) that he give no orders to my men and 2) that he take no more than five to ten minutes inside the schoolhouse. Ten minutes, I told him, was pushing it; any longer than that and we were almost certain to get attacked. The Ox, still humbled by the Devil Siphon debacle, agreed. Done with the COC, I finished readying myself, and sometime before 10
AM,
Joker One left the Outpost in five Humvees to carry out our assigned mission. As usual, Bolding was right behind me, driving our second vehicle.

We started our foot patrols with a few open areas in the middle of the city, then we moved in the vehicles to the wide fields at Ramadi’s southwestern tip. There we spent at least half an hour patrolling the lush rural area next to the Euphrates offshoot, hoping to focus the enemy’s attention on that place before we mounted up and headed back into the city for the school inspection. Sometime shortly before noon, we abandoned the open fields for the densely packed butchers’ district and the little nameless school it contained. Ten minutes later, we arrived.

The school was constructed somewhat strangely in that it was not the usual thickly walled compound with a squat building complex inside. Instead, four thin, one-story, wall-less buildings joined together to form a hollowed-out rectangle, with a small break on the northern side creating an entrance to the rectangle’s center and the open courtyard it contained. To
its north, west, and south, the school was surrounded by twenty to thirty meters of soft dirt field, and beyond them the dense housing complexes sprouted thickly again all around. To the east, though, there was no field, just the usual long line of housing compounds separated from the school itself by a small, trash-lined north-south street. It was on this street that we pulled up sometime around noon.

Immediately upon arrival, the Ox hopped out of his vehicle and headed into the school with the translator, a radio operator, and one of my teams. Just before he stepped through the rectangle’s northern break, I called the Ox on the PRR.

“Hey, Five, remember, no more than ten minutes. I don’t like this area.”

“Yeah, One-Actual, I got it. I’ll be out shortly.”

“Roger that. I’d better see you soon.”

The rest of us dismounted and knelt next to our vehicles, taking what cover we could. The drivers, Waters, Bolding, Fyfe, Henderson, and Lance Corporal Moore, stayed close to the driver’s side doors in case they were immediately needed. They were a bit more exposed, but it was a necessary trade-off. The Humvees ran in a long, evenly spaced line down the street, from the tip of the very northernmost school building to the end of the open field to the rectangle’s south. If the stay extended any longer than ten minutes, we would reposition the vehicles to form a rough 360-degree perimeter around the school, but establishing that formation would take precious time, as would getting out of it. As long as the inspection finished quickly, we would stay well aligned, ready to mount up and head out in ten seconds or less.

Three blocks to our south we could see the busy east-west street, called Baseline Road by us, that marked the southern boundary of the butchers’ district. I eyed the compounds lining it with hard suspicion, but nothing seemed amiss. Civilian foot and vehicle traffic was normal for the time of day. The weird little rhythms of commerce that marked the area seemed in sync, and all three squad leaders called in periodically. Nothing unusual to report, sir.

After five minutes, I started getting nervous, and I called the Ox to get a situation report. He was just finishing up, he said. He’d be right there. Five more minutes passed with no sign of the Ox. I called back, more forcefully this time, informing Joker Five that he either needed to leave the building
immediately or let me know how much longer he was going to stay so that we could modify our defensive posture accordingly. Even with the heavy .50-cals mounted and manned on our first and last vehicles, sitting in a line along the road was only appropriate for a very short stop, I reminded him. His stay was starting to put us in danger. He’d be right out, the Ox replied.

Maybe three minutes later, the Ox and his entourage finally reappeared, trailing the usual crowd of twenty to thirty small children behind them. Designated Marines rapidly handed out the soccer balls and other small gifts that we had brought, and, vastly relieved, I gave the order to mount up. The drivers hopped back in first, and the rest of Joker One began loading the vehicles smoothly and quickly, just as we had done hundreds of times before.

I waited with my door open until the last of the Marines started mounting. The little kids stood in a tight knot on the sidewalk right next to our third vehicle, waving at us as we hopped in the Humvees, pleading for us to hand out more gifts. I smiled a bit—it was nice to be appreciated—and threw my left leg through the door as Noriel, Bowen, and Leza called out almost in unison that all squads were mounted and ready to head out.

Then a few things happened simultaneously, or maybe there was a timeline, but everything sort of runs together in my head as I try to remember it. A boom tore open the silence and an RPG hissed by, maybe a few feet over the top of my closing door. Small-arms fire rang out from our south, and from the .50-cal turret right above me, Brown started firing back with his heavy gun. My platoon sergeant flung himself out of the way of the rocket, twisting in the air, wrenching his back. Another explosion rang out, and the crowd of small children disintegrated into flame and smoke. From somewhere behind me, Marines started screaming out the worst words a platoon commander can hear: “Doc up! Doc up! Someone get a corpsman! Doc up!”

I jumped out of the Humvee and looked around. I can’t give specifics of the scene—I was too busy scanning the whole area and sorting out the enemy threat in my head—only a general impression, and it was of a macabre tableau from hell. The rocket had missed us. Instead it had impacted squarely in the middle of the crowd of small children. Dead and wounded little ones were draped limply all over the sidewalk, severed body
parts mixing in with whole bodies, or in some cases flung even farther, into the street. Blood, always the blood, streamed onto the sidewalk and into the dirt, where it settled darkly in pools or rivulets. Across the whole scene drifted smoke and dust. The Marines jumped out of the vehicles and ran helter-skelter among the children, collecting the wounded and their body parts, applying first aid where they could. The docs were working frantically. I noticed, strangely enough, that they hadn’t bothered to put on their latex gloves.

Throughout it all, Brown continued hammering at the enemy firing position he had spotted in the housing compounds across Baseline Road. At some point in time, the AKs ceased chattering, and one of my Marines, Fyfe, shouted at me that he had seen the RPG gunners, that they had taken off to the east, that he could guide us there. All three squad leaders called in to report that none of our Marines had been wounded and that the only fire we appeared to be taking was coming from due south.

That information was what I needed to hear, so I started giving orders over the PRR:

“One-Three, you are the casualty squad. Stay here with the docs and set up a collection point for the kids inside the school. One-One, One-Two, mount up. We’re heading south.”

Three terse “Rogers” came back, and first and second squads flung themselves into the first three Humvees with abandon. When they were mounted, the first two vehicles screeched south in pursuit of the terrorists. My driver took a hard turn, skidding the Humvee sideways, and headed east. Behind us, Bolding took the turn more carefully, and his vehicle dropped back. Twisting around and not seeing his vehicle, I called back to Fyfe, sitting in the seat kitty-corner from me.

“Where’d they go, Fyfe? Where’d they go? Tell me!”

He was suddenly no longer sure, and I can’t blame him for that, for as soon as we had made the eastern turn onto Baseline, the Humvee had been enveloped by the normal butchers’ area crowd. Completely impervious to our private tragedy just three blocks away, the locals were carrying out business as usual. Foot traffic thronged the area, merchants hawked their wares, and more blood, animal this time, ran through the streets. Fyfe settled on a likely house, and my driver bounced the compound gate open with the Humvee. Five of us hit the house, but it was a dry hole. I came back out to
find that our vehicle was still alone. We had left too quickly, and the other three Humvees were zipping about somewhere nearby. I tried raising them on the PRR, but had no success. With crowds everywhere and no sign of our attackers, I decided to head back to the schoolhouse and the misery and to regroup there. On the way, we caught Joker Five calling over the PRR, and I instructed him to rally the rest of the convoy with us at the school. Less than ten minutes after we had left hell, we were back.

While squads one and two had been hunting, Bowen and his men had been doctoring, emptying their first aid kits until they had no bandages left, then using whatever else came to hand—bandannas, T-shirts, anything to help the kids. At some point during the process, Brooks found a little huddled pink-and-red mass, blown almost ten feet from the site of the explosion. Leaving his weapon dangling across his chest (and himself completely defenseless), Brooks picked up the bundle with both of his arms to find a pale, badly wounded little girl, bleeding profusely from her neck and breathing shallowly. Later, Brooks told me that as he ran with her to the docs, all he could think of was his own daughter. She was the same age as the shredded thing that he now held so tenderly.