Joker One (38 page)

Second, as the day heated up so did the building, transforming itself into a giant concrete oven as the hours wore on. Swaddled in our thick layers of nonbreathing Kevlar, we slowly cooked inside. Even without moving, even hidden from the brutal desert sun, the heat wore us down, making us more and more sluggish in responding to enemy attacks even as it made us less and less likely to see them coming.

And come they did—an immobile outpost in the middle of the city made a very attractive target, and within a week the enemy was hitting the Ag Center nearly every day. For a brief period, the insurgents contented themselves with hit-and-run, spray-and-pray small-arms attacks directed in the general area of the building, but when those proved ineffective, the enemy became creative. RPG soon followed RPG in quick volleys, and on at least one occasion the insurgents staged a diversionary small-arms attack that allowed them to get off a shot with a heavy antitank rocket. Chunks of concrete blown out from the wall shattered dozens of desks and chairs, and the school’s chalkboard cracked all the way down one side. The following morning, the last Iraqi holdout—the building’s caretaker—took one look at the devastation inside and immediately turned on his heel and walked away. We never saw another local inside the Ag Center again, but we probably wouldn’t have let them in even if we had. If we could have found the owners of the building, we would have compensated them for its loss, but we couldn’t, so we didn’t.

Throughout June, the small-unit attacks on the Ag Center continued apace. With the third week of the month came a new tactic: stand and fight. On at least three separate occasions, groups of ten to twenty men moved in from the north and staged just out of sight in the industrial area across the street. When they had screwed up their courage enough, they would launch suddenly out of their hidden redoubt with sustained bursts of rocket and small-arms fire. The attacks always came from the same place, a little taxi stand just across the road, and the short battles always shaped up the same way. A heavily armed, well-fortified U.S. force squared off against tenacious but lightly armed, poorly protected insurgents who eschewed their normal hit-and-run tactics. During each fight, delighted Marines enthusiastically
fired every weapon in the arsenal, to include all of the thermobaric SMAW rounds. The results were devastating. In one case, the taxi stand was completely destroyed; in another, a nearby garage had its doors, its windows, and its rolling steel front blown out. In all cases, the enemy died in place almost to a man and Golf Company emerged unscathed. We relieved fourth platoon shortly after one of these battles, and one of their Marines, Corporal Stephanovich, ran up to me, pumped his fist wildly, and related the attack to me in animatedly excited tones.

As crazy as it seems in retrospect, at the time seeing Steph’s unbounded joy made me wish that the enemy had attacked my platoon. Every time the insurgents decided to stand and fight instead of hit and run, the normal roles switched: We became the hunters, and our enemies became the hunted. Despite all the attacks lately, it had become a rare thing to be able to bite back cleanly and fiercely, and I was jealous. Why was fourth always the lucky ones? Couldn’t the enemy have waited just one hour? Then we’d have been the ones firing the thermobaric SMAW rounds.

T
he regular assaults on the Ag Center were just a piece, albeit a large one, of a pattern of widespread hit-and-run attacks that developed slowly throughout Ramadi during the month of June. After the powers that be brought the first Marine invasion of Fallujah to a screeching halt, that city became a regionwide magnet for willing
jihadin.
In fact, it even began to export its own battle-hardened insurgents. A mere half hour to the west, Ramadi became a favorite destination for the newly mobile fighters, and through these and other methods our enemies slowly rebuilt the combat power they had lost in the widespread fighting of April. By the end of June, 2/4 was averaging three or more enemy contacts a day—whether small arms, RPGs, IEDs, or whatever—making it one of the most heavily engaged units in all of Iraq.

The Combat Outpost, our home away from home, would become one of their favorite targets. Although our walls and watchtowers prevented all-out assaults on the base, the enemy began using distance weapons—rockets and mortars—with greater effectiveness and frequency throughout the month, and the thin illusion of safety that we clung to inside the base’s walls
slowly eroded in the face of the explosions that constantly shook the buildings. Our lives inside the Outpost became increasingly difficult.

During the first week of June, a 120mm mortar round, the largest made by the former Soviets, landed in the middle of the courtyard of the platoon’s house. It destroyed half the outer wall, tossing the heavy cinder blocks about like so many matchsticks, and it gouged a four-foot-wide crater out of the solid brick floor. Back in the COC, the massive explosions rocked the entire hangar bay, and I ran to my platoon’s house, nearly frantic with worry at the reports of casualties in Joker One. But, amazingly, only two of my Marines were wounded—small bits of shrapnel in their hands and faces. Had the mortar round landed literally one minute earlier, it would have been a very different story, because the courtyard would have been packed full of my Marines. For a variety of different reasons, everyone had decided to go back inside their rooms just seconds before the mortars launched; thus, the courtyard was empty when the 120mm rounds devastated it. If any of my men had been in it, I would have had at least one fire team, and maybe an entire squad, KIA.

A few days later, we had another scare. Sergeant Noriel and I were walking back to the COC after a long patrol in from the Ag Center when a loud explosion rang out and a rocket zipped across our field of vision. It tore into the side of the hangar bay. We sprinted the rest of the way to the building, and there we found a white-faced and shaken second squad clustered outside the entrance to the QRF room. The rocket warhead, as it turned out, had ripped its way into their room. There, it had hit the ground in the very middle of my second squad, where the explosive device began spinning slowly. After a stunned pause, Leza, Carson, and the others had piled out of the room as quickly as possible, with some diving out the door in their haste to escape an imminent explosion. However, it never came—the deformed warhead simply sat there on the concrete, slowly spinning to a stop in an empty room. Standing outside, I marveled at our good fortune and thanked God for small mercies like a defective fuse in an antitank rocket.

However, the law of averages was working against us, and we couldn’t stay lucky forever. On June 13, after yet another mortar attack, PFC Boren walked into the hangar bay, bleeding from his thigh and hand, shaking his head and grinning. He had been using the restroom when a mortar attack
began, and one of the rounds had landed four feet away from the end of a long row of portable toilets. Fortunately, Boren was on the other end, and only a few fragments penetrated to where he sat, doing his business with renewed urgency. Prior to that day, I never would have guessed that survival might hinge on choosing the right toilet. But the news wasn’t all good: Boren was evacuated to the States—shrapnel had lodged right next to the bones of his hip and hand, making it impossible for the doctors to remove. To this day, he hasn’t fully recovered.

With all of the exploding going on inside the Outpost, Joker One and I spent less and less time in the open air and more and more time with at least two feet of cinder block between us and the shrapnel. Still, there were exceptions, like the time I climbed onto the huge hundred-gallon plastic water tank that normally held our shower and laundry water and spent about five minutes staring down into it. I had left the sanctuary of the hangar bay for the trip to the tank shortly after noon, when one of my men, PFC Williams, had run into the COC and planted himself in front of me. That was unusual, so I looked up from my map to see Williams quaking with excitement, hopping happily from one foot to the other.

“Hi, Williams. What is it?” I said.

He broke into a gigantic, full-out smile. “Sir, sir, sir,” he said breathlessly. “There’s a
catfish
in our water tank! Come see, sir, come see!”

A catfish in the tank that supplied our supposedly purified shower and laundry water—this was indeed worth seeing, and besides, I was bored stiff. Nothing was exploding at just that minute. We headed off to the shower area, taking care to avoid the swamp along the way.

Williams led the way to our red plastic reservoir, where a good chunk of my platoon stood chatting animatedly. As soon as I arrived, Williams and another Marine helped boost me to the lip of the giant plastic tank. I grabbed the opening and stifled a shout—it was scorching hot. More carefully this time, I leaned over the top and glanced inside. Sure enough, at the very bottom of the tank, a catfish swam lazily in a small circle. First I laughed, then I sighed, and then I asked the Marines to please put me back down.

Up until now, our water service had been sporadic at best, but we had assumed that what little water we had gotten had at least been pure. Apparently,
that was not the case. A subsequent investigation established that the contractors had been driving their trucks to the nearby Euphrates, filling their gigantic tanks with water straight from the river, and driving directly over to the Outpost to supply us. We had been given several lectures back in the States on the life-threatening parasites that dwelt in the rivers, and the doctors had told us to avoid submersing ourselves in its waters at any cost. Unwittingly, we had now been bathing in the Euphrates for at least two months.

For the next hour, the Marines took turns boosting one another to the top of the tank. Their joy was contagious, and for the rest of the day, I smiled every time I thought of our new friend, the catfish. He even took front and center in that night’s e-mail to Christy.

Shortly thereafter, I tempted fate again by spending nearly an entire hour in the platoon courtyard smoking cigars with my squad leaders. The moment came about because a few days after June 15, Sergeant Leza ran up to me with a satellite cellphone in his hand and a huge smile spread across his round face. “Sir, sir! The baby came, sir! Martha’s had a boy and they’re both doing just fine, sir! We’re gonna call him Royce, sir! I’m a dad again!” He was beaming, and I threw my arm around his shoulders.

“Congratulations, Leza. Get the other squad leaders. I’ll be back in ten minutes. We’re gonna celebrate.”

“Roger that, sir.” He disappeared inside the squad leader’s room, and I left the platoon’s courtyard and headed back to the COC. Someone had just sent Hes a package of cigars, and he had promised me four of them when Leza had his baby. Now I went to collect.

Ten minutes later, I was back, and the squad leaders were waiting in the courtyard with four plastic chairs that they had dug up from parts unknown. Staff Sergeant wasn’t there, as he had been evacuated to Baghdad one week earlier due to a noncombat knee injury that only he could have inflicted on himself. It had happened during a cordon-and-search mission when my platoon sergeant had been trying to help pry a lock off a suspicious auto repair shop. The crowbar had slipped, and Staff Sergeant had pirouetted wildly, arms akimbo and gear flying all across his body. The wild balance dance had ended with Staff Sergeant falling ass-first through the open hood of a car with no engine. There he had sat, folded neatly in half like a kid stuffed
into a trash can by a lunchroom bully, until the Marines had recovered from their astonishment and unwedged him. Calling in the medevac, I hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry.

So, on the day of the birth of Leza’s second son, Joker One’s leadership consisted of only the three squad leaders and I, which was exactly the way I preferred it. I passed out the cigars, and we used our bayonets to cut off the ends. Then Bowen lit up each of us in turn, and we sat in a small circle, quietly smoking, completely oblivious to the world around us. For a brief time, rank disappeared. There were no titles and no sirs; we were simply the four combat leaders of Joker One sharing a companionable moment together. It was wonderful.