Joker One (36 page)

Some of them sat as I did, stunned and silent. Others gathered in huddled little knots, talking quietly to one another. Still others, like Teague, stood by themselves with hard eyes and stone faces, fingering their weapons. Over time, I watched as more of my Marines joined the latter category, and I knew what that group wanted. They wanted revenge on our faceless enemies and on the fearful civilians whose hesitance had prolonged our waiting and cost us one of our best men. They wanted revenge on the stupid, broken Iraqi public services whose ambulances had taken so long to respond to the wounded little children whom some of us had watched die. And they wanted revenge on the whole miserable city of Ramadi for forcing us to make horrible choices, day in and day out, until it seemed like no matter what path we took, we lost.

I knew that the hard ones were thinking these thoughts because I was thinking them myself. The numbness had worn off, and in its stead rose a dull rage at more or less everything in my world except for my Marines. But the rage was irrelevant. I was a lieutenant, and a leader, and no matter what I felt, I had to take care of my men and accomplish our mission, and, unfortunately, revenge wasn’t our mission.

After some time sitting there, I sorted myself out enough to figure that my job hadn’t ended just yet. My Marines still needed caring for. So I found
the squad leaders and told them to gather our men. When they were ready, I spoke words to the platoon that I didn’t feel but that needed to be spoken nonetheless because they were true and because they would help us.

I started by telling Joker One that I wanted to kill very, very badly, and that a part of me didn’t really care what it was that I killed as long as I got to do so. I fixed my eyes on Teague as I said this, and he nodded back. I told the Marines that a lot them probably wanted something similar. Teague nodded again. Then I told everyone that what we wanted didn’t matter because we were United States Marines, and since our Corps had been founded, we had kept our honor clean and that Joker One was going to be no exception to this rule. We knew our mission and what we had come to do and it was still worthwhile, and we knew that as well. Something horrible had just happened, but it didn’t change the mission and it didn’t change how we got it done, and they knew this, I told them.

Some of the Marines nodded, but most just stared blankly at me.

So here’s what we’re gonna do, I continued. We’re gonna go out there tomorrow and we’re gonna try to make life a little bit better for the people we can. (Teague’s face was immobile at this.) And if anyone attacks us while we’re doing this, God help them because we’re going to kill as many of them as best as we possibly can. And when we’re finished fighting, we’re going to get back to the business of rebuilding. (Teague’s face was still blank.)

At about this time, I noticed that the CO and the Gunny had somehow appeared at the back of our room and that they were watching me. I ignored them because I wasn’t talking to them, and I continued the little speech to my Marines:

Here’s what we’re not going to do. We’re not going to kill everyone we feel like. We’re not going to shoot indiscriminately at random civilians every time the fire breaks out. We’ve worked too hard to quit on the mission now. (At this, more Marines started nodding. Some were still silent, tears running down their young faces. Teague’s dry eyes, though, bored back at me, his face still emotionless.) And you know what? I continued. Bolding wouldn’t want us to start killing everyone randomly. You know Bolding, you know this is true. If he were here, you know that he would tell us to never mind him, to keep doing what we were doing because it’s the right thing to do. You know this. You know this.

Now almost every one of my Marines was nodding. Some were still crying
and some were still dry-eyed, but they were nodding along with the words. I looked at Teague. He was nodding, too, and I knew that I had gotten through.

As soon as I knew this, though, the mantle of leadership crumbled, and the full weight of what had happened finally overwhelmed the tactical numbness. The dull rage died, and in its place I felt only tremendous sadness and the crushing feeling of failure. Because of my decisions, one of my Marines had lost both of his legs. It may not have been my fault, but it was certainly my responsibility because everything that happened to my Marines was my responsibility. That’s one of the first things you learn as an officer, and if you’re a leader who’s any good at all, then as you go on you know that you always err on the side of taking too much responsibility until the weight crushes you, and then your men pick you up, and then you take still more responsibility until they need to pick you up again.

Staring at the Marines, I started getting crushed, and I started losing it. Tears welled up, and I choked them back and probably finished up the talk with a few inane, meaningless sentences. Then I literally turned on my heels and fled the room, helmet in hand, for the filthy, excrement-encrusted, piss-stained Iraqi bathroom down the hall and to the right. I arrived there blind from tears and banged open the door with my shoulder. Then I sank to the ground, curled up on myself, and cried and cried and cried.

I didn’t know it, but the Gunny had noticed my abrupt departure. Maybe ten seconds after I crashed through the door, he opened it very gently and looked in on me. I didn’t see him then, and in fact I didn’t notice the Gunny’s presence at all until he sat down next to me and wrapped his arms around me. Instinctively, I hugged him back, buried my face into the rough Kevlar of his shoulder, and sobbed. He told me that it was all right, and then he didn’t say anything at all.

B
olding made it as far as Germany, but once there he succumbed to acute respiratory distress syndrome (I’ll never forget that sterile phrase) brought on by massive blood loss. We heard that his doctors had been amazed that he had even made it that far, given the nature and severity of his injuries. He must have been very strong, they said. He was.

Bolding’s death came as a severe shock—prior to it we had all assumed that his recovery was assured. I had been checking with our doctors and corpsmen every day to find out anything that they knew (they had a direct line over the radio to the other doctors throughout the theater), and together the Marines and I tracked Bolding’s progress from Baghdad to Kuwait to Ramstein, Germany. When we heard that he had arrived there, all of our conversation suddenly shifted away from questions surrounding the probability of Bolding’s survival and toward debates on the extent of his healing. In my hope, I told my men that today’s prosthetics were excellent and that there was even a very slim chance that Bolding’s own legs would be re-attached.

On June 3, though, I assembled Joker One at the house, and, trying desperately to maintain my composure, told them that Bolding was dead. It was
horrible, and I didn’t want to do it. After leading my men to believe that Bolding would be just fine, I now had to reverse course completely and shatter the expectations I had helped to set. As much as I didn’t want to face the men with the tragic news, I didn’t have a choice. It was my responsibility to keep them informed. So I did, and I don’t remember much else about it, just a hazy picture of the men kneeling and me trying not to cry as I told them what had happened. And, to be honest, I don’t really want to remember much about that moment. I do know that once I finished, I fled the courtyard to be alone in my room.

There I found that my hope, built so painstakingly over the past eight months, had been ruthlessly extinguished in one terrible moment in a nameless, dirty Iraqi street in a city that most people will never hear of. Having that hope crushed out was (and still is) a difficult, difficult thing, and, on the day I told my men that Bolding was dead, I fell into a deep depression. For a week, I didn’t want to eat, and I didn’t want to leave my bed, even though I found no respite in sleep. Instead of sleeping, I spent my time endlessly replaying the scene of Bolding’s injury in my head, wondering where I had gone wrong, selfishly second-guessing myself with constant rounds of “What if I had …”

So I was tired all of the time, physically and psychologically. Tired of making myself do pull-ups and push-ups when there was no guarantee that I would even come home with both arms attached. Tired of carefully planning each mission as well as we could in order to protect our Marines, only to have the inevitable last-minute changes of combat throw off all our careful preparation. Tired of having to make life-and-death decisions every day, tired of having unexpected things go wrong no matter how hard we tried, tired of my Marines paying the price for my shortcomings, tired of my responsibility as a leader. And I was tired of trying to help the ungrateful Iraqis who seemed completely unappreciative of our efforts and our sacrifices on their behalf—we later found out that local residents blamed not the RPG-firing terrorists for the death of their children, but us for precipitating the attack.

But the mission continued with no regard for one small lieutenant and his loss of hope. And why should it regard him? All over Iraq, that same loss of hope was repeated for other lieutenants every single day, and all over Iraq, the Iraqis themselves were dying in scores in terrorist or sectarian violence.

The mission couldn’t afford to pause and feel sorry for individual pain and grief, even if it wanted to; it was too important, and far bigger than any individual. No matter what, the mission needed to continue unabated.

Fortunately, my Marines understood this basic truth much better than I did. The enemy and the missions left us no time for a respite after Bolding’s death, so my men strapped on their gear daily and headed back out into the city, still trying to make life a little bit better for the people we were there to protect. They weren’t bitter, they weren’t angry, and, unlike me, they weren’t trapped in a selfish spiral of recrimination and angst. On some level, my men still retained a beautiful, simple, powerful faith: There was a mission to help a brutalized people, that mission was worth doing, and if someone had to do it, then it might as well be them. And if anyone tried to stop my Marines in pursuit of that mission, then God help them, because my men would do their utmost to kill our enemies stone dead.

My Marines were magnificent, and they saved me that time. Fortunately, I wasn’t so far gone in my self-destructive spiral that I couldn’t go out on Joker One’s missions. I hadn’t laid down my responsibility altogether—I wasn’t worth very much as a decision maker for a week, but at least I was physically present with my men, sharing the hardship and the danger. As I shared, I watched them, and I noticed, perhaps more intently than ever before (probably because I needed my men more than ever before), all the small, wonderful things that made my Marines the best. I noticed their perseverance and their ability to pick themselves up and move on with some joy in their hearts. I noticed their tenderness toward one another, their selfless service even as the barbed teasings and the practical jokes continued unabated.

I noticed Noriel, Leza, and Bowen all pick up the leadership ball that I had dropped, talking to one another, planning their missions in absence of guidance from me, walking the lines, talking to the men, touching each on his shoulders. I listened to Mahardy and Waters fight like cat and dog one minute, only to have one offer the other the last of his water on a long, hot patrol the next. I listened to Niles relentlessly goad Ott, and Ott stolidly respond. I watched Guzon volunteer to carry the SAW, adding another twenty pounds to his combat load even as the temperature soared well above 120 degrees. I watched Docs Smith and Camacho bending over my Marines’
horrific feet, lancing boils and dispensing medical advice like nervous mothers. I noticed Bowen patiently teaching his men during nearly every spare minute of downtime, making himself less so that his squad might become greater.

All these things and more that I can’t put into words I noticed, but noticing prepared me to finally receive some sort of absolution in the form of the skinny, filthy, wonderful Private First Class Gabriel Henderson. For whatever reason, Henderson’s tender heart kept a close watch on me, and one day, roughly two weeks after Bolding’s death, he walked up to me and said out of the blue:

“Hey, sir, you know that none of the platoon blames you for what happened to Bolding. It’s okay, sir.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

Henderson broke into a big smile. “Bolding’s in heaven now, sir, and I know that he’s smiling down at us right now, just like he always smiled at us when he was here. He’s okay, sir. Don’t worry, sir. He’s okay. And someday you will get to see him again, sir.”

I had to turn away to keep from crying.

I think that Henderson’s profound, simple faith was what finally allowed me to pick myself back up, and, in some very real sense, regain my own faith. Despite the anguish, and the self-doubt, and all the questions, I wasn’t ready to give up on God just yet. I didn’t understand the tragedy of Bolding’s death, and I still don’t and I won’t pretend to, but seeing the simple faith of my Marines made me realize that, as a leader, I had a very basic choice to make: 1) I could throw in the towel on God—in other words, rationalize away my inability to understand and comprehend the infinite by stating that He didn’t exist; or 2) I could accept the fact that this life is painful, and tragic, and messy, and that God’s designs often don’t coincide with my plans and that many times I won’t, and will never, understand why they don’t, but that none of this means that God doesn’t exist or that He isn’t ultimately good. The first choice, as I saw it, offered me no hope. Without God, then Bolding’s life and death were meaningless—he served no ultimate purpose, he worked for no greater good, and now that he was gone he had no hope for the future. With God, though, Bolding’s life and death were in service of the infinite, of a personal deity who cared and who intended the best for His
people, even if they didn’t see it or didn’t want it. The second choice offered me hope, and I reached for it and strapped myself back into the responsibility of leadership.