Joker One (7 page)

In talking with Feldmeir about the situation, I learned that there might have been some explanation outside of genetics for his condition: Feldmeir had been raised in a series of foster homes and adoptive households ever since he had stopped living with his mom at the age of ten. The narcolepsy was one of his ways of dealing with the resulting trauma. A few days after the problem was brought to our attention, the squad leaders and I decided that Feldmeir would need huge amounts of special attention, so we assigned him to Corporal Teague, who had continued to distinguish himself as one of the best and fittest of our squad leaders. We would have preferred to reassign him to another unit, but we couldn’t afford to. We were going to combat very soon and, understrength as we were, we could ill afford to lose another man.

Fortunately, Feldmeir proved the exception rather than the rule, and as November ticked by in a blurry haze of paperwork, patrolling, and endless lines of shots and gear draw, I continued to learn the ins and outs of my new men. Many, like my radio operator, Yebra, had either disenrolled from college or turned down college scholarships after 9/11 to serve in the armed forces. Others wanted to carry on a family’s military tradition, or sought adventure and camaraderie. Though the individual reasons for joining varied, nearly all of my men were with us because they very much wanted to be with us. Indeed, when I asked each of my Marines why they had joined the Corps, during the one-on-one interviews that I scheduled with all of them, nearly to a man they gave me a variation of the same answer:
Sir, I love this
country and I wanted to serve and I wanted to be the best, so I joined the Marine infantry, sir.

In fact, several of my men were so motivated to be Marine riflemen that they had surmounted serious physical difficulties to make it through boot camp. PFC Henderson was one of these. Not long after he joined, we sent him for a medical screening because he mentioned in passing that he was having fairly intense chest pains following each run (additionally, Henderson looked roughly fifteen years old—he had an amazing baby face—so it couldn’t hurt to get a doctor’s second opinion regarding our man’s true age, or so Leza told me with a wink). A series of tests indicated some cardiovascular abnormality, but the doctors couldn’t identify the condition and they couldn’t determine whether the unknown was serious. Predictably, they erred on the side of caution and forbade Henderson from any and all strenuous training, so we stuck him in the company office and gave him a desk job. He hated it, but he worked hard anyway.

I was disappointed—Henderson was a genuinely sweet kid who had tried hard to help everywhere he was placed, and staffed as we were at just over 50 percent of our standard fighting capacity, first platoon could not afford to lose one man so soon after gaining him. However, less than a week later my spirits perked up, because Golf received a much-needed addition: a company gunnery sergeant. Alongside every officer chain of command is an enlisted one, and the company gunnery sergeant (“gunny” for short) is the enlisted counterpart to the company XO. Together they are responsible for all the administrative and logistical groundwork that keeps a company fed, equipped, trained, and fighting. Without a gunny, the day-to-day operations of the infantry would likely grind to a halt. As our old gunny was about to retire—he had one foot out the door already—things were bound to improve. And indeed, while I didn’t know it at the time, that day in late November when the new gunny joined Golf Company was one of the best days of my life.

The man’s full name and title were Gunnery Sergeant Winston C. Jaugan, but I will always remember him as simply the Gunny because, as far as I’m concerned, there’s only one gunny that matters—Golf Company’s Gunny, the best in the Corps. The Gunny was born in the Philippines and retained the distinctive dialect of the Tagalog people, the Philippines’ second-largest
ethnic group, making for bizarre English syntax in general and exceptionally amusing swearing when the Gunny got worked up. He had come to us straight from an assignment as a drill sergeant, so, aside from the weathered, cragged face that had clearly seen its share of lessons learned the hard way, the Gunny looked as if he had just stepped out of a shrink-wrapped box. His wide shoulders and thick chest tapered down to a narrow waist, and the forearms that protruded from his perfectly rolled sleeves were cabled with muscle.

And the Gunny didn’t walk; he stalked. Everywhere he went, his head and shoulders were thrust aggressively forward as he swiveled his eyes this way and that, searching for the lost in need of instruction. Within a day of his arrival, Golf Company started functioning with noticeably more efficiency. Even better, the Gunny took all of the young lieutenants under his wing because he was a true professional, and he realized we needed it. The best senior enlisted NCOs usually take it upon themselves to teach and mentor the younger officers, and the task requires a deft hand, because every officer, no matter how young or inexperienced, outranks every enlisted man. Within a week of his arrival, the Gunny was already teaching me, helping me to better understand both my men and myself. When he found me deeply engrossed filling sandbags with a few of my men, for example, the Gunny waited until I was alone and then gently suggested that since I was a lieutenant and my time was limited, I might want to focus on planning and coordination and let the men deal with the details.

I was grateful for the help, and soon enough I began to rely on the Gunny for more than just straightforward leadership advice and general company efficiency. You see, not long after the Gunny’s arrival, I received my own enlisted counterpart—my platoon sergeant. If the gunnery sergeant is the enlisted equivalent of the company executive officer, the platoon sergeant is the enlisted equivalent of the platoon commander. In theory, an infantry platoon sergeant should be a lieutenant’s right-hand man, seeing to logistical and administrative tasks so the commander can focus his attention solely on tactics, on finding and defeating the enemy and accomplishing the mission. With at least ten years in the Corps under his belt, a platoon sergeant should also serve as the enlisted leader of the Marines, a trusted voice of experience who anticipates their needs because, as a young Marine, he once had those very same needs. He should be a careful mentor to the
young lieutenant, protecting the inexperienced officer from himself, and with time a platoon sergeant should become the lieutenant’s best and closest confidant. In theory, the two should function as two halves of a whole unit dedicated wholeheartedly to taking care of the men in their charge.

Unfortunately, with my platoon sergeant, whom we’ll call simply Staff Sergeant, reality diverged wildly from theory. Even though he had served in the Corps for a little more than eleven years by the time he got to us, Staff Sergeant had spent at least half that time in nonleadership roles, and he hadn’t been in the infantry for the past six years. The time off showed in his physique—tall, skinny, and flabby all at the same time. Staff Sergeant stood nearly six feet, three inches, with long, gangly arms and legs that connected to a hunched torso and a slightly concave chest. With his cammies on, Staff Sergeant looked almost skinny, but when his top came off it became apparent that most of the weight he carried wasn’t muscle. And though he was only twenty-nine years old, Staff Sergeant’s pitted, lined face made me initially put him at closer to forty than thirty.

Most recently, my platoon sergeant had toured with the Marine Corps Rifle Team, a select group of the Corps’s best shooters, who tour the country and represent the Marines at various shooting competitions. He had considered the job his own personal heaven. Within a week of his arrival, Staff Sergeant began to share this view with my Marines by complaining vocally about his pitiful new lot in life in the infantry, and I had to pull the man aside and tactfully remind him that, as a leader, he no longer had the luxury of complaining down.

His response did not fill me with hope.

“Sir, I have no idea how to be a platoon sergeant.”

I was at a complete loss as to how to respond. Fortunately, the Gunny saw my dilemma, and when he wasn’t mentoring officers or smoothly running the company, Gunny Jaugan took it upon himself to “supervise” my platoon’s latest addition. After two weeks of the Gunny’s tender care, Staff Sergeant literally cowered at the sight of the fiery Filipino. Consummate professional that he was, the Gunny never let me see his sessions with my platoon sergeant. All I knew was that occasionally the Gunny would roar “Staff Sergeant” and my platoon sergeant would drop whatever he was doing and start running.

In truth, I was somewhat ambivalent about having an effective staff sergeant
anyway. Over the past two months I had become quite jealous of my status as the sole authority for my men, and I feared and distrusted anyone who threatened to diminish it. I, in my inexperience, was unwilling to admit that when it came to leading a platoon, there was more than enough responsibility for two.

So, by December 2003, an inexperienced platoon sergeant and a jealous lieutenant had been paired together to lead a whole clutch of boot Marines into a combat deployment. Fortunately, I had three excellent squad leaders in Teague, Leza, and Bowen, terrific younger Marines like Carson and Yebra, and solid compatriots in Hes, Quist, and Flowers. As for Staff Sergeant, Henderson, Mahardy, and Feldmeir, only time would tell how they would work out, but we had time enough before we deployed, I believed.

I
t turned out I was wrong. In mid-December, word came down that we wouldn’t be leaving in April, May, or June as we had planned. It would
I
be more like early February. We’d be heading to a still-undetermined location somewhere in the heart of the volatile Anbar province. To make matters worse, our standard two weeks off at Christmas would count as our predeployment leave (the two-to three-week vacation that every Marine unit gets immediately before it heads overseas), and all of our gear would have to be packed and in boxes by the first week of February.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, we had just received our second huge wave of boot drops, roughly fifteen new Marines, every bit as green as the last bunch, who filled us to nearly 100 percent fighting capacity. The standard period for a new Marine before deployment is six months; we’d been hoping for at least half of that. The new timetable handed to us allowed Golf a little less than two months to get the first wave of new joins ready for combat, and the second would have only four weeks to integrate, train, and settle all of their domestic affairs before shipping off.

As the new Marines poured in, we tried our utmost to process them as quickly as possible. NCOs stormed about all through the barracks, measuring
pants, assigning men to squads, and shepherding their new Marines to dozens of different administrative appointments. Every morning, long lines formed outside the medical offices as hundreds of boot drops waited for their anthrax and smallpox inoculations, and our Navy dental officers had their hands full trying to clean and repair hundreds and hundreds of teeth. Every afternoon, Marines queued up outside the armory or the supply shack, waiting to draw the equipment and weaponry they’d be using in training and in combat. Meanwhile, the platoon leaders, Hes, Quist, Flowers, and I, spent hours assigning and reassigning weapons, night vision equipment, and all the other specialized gear specific to each Marine. We debated responses to different types of enemy attacks in an attempt to come up with a platoonwide set of standard operating procedures, and we studied, as best we could, the reports coming out of Habbaniyah so that we would have some idea of what to expect when we got there.

By the time Christmas break rolled around in late December, Golf Company had completed almost all the administrative groundwork necessary to enable us to focus entirely on training when all our Marines returned from the two weeks off. Personally, I was looking forward to the break, because my hectic schedule and Christy’s work as a night shift nurse in a pediatric hospital had allowed us very little time together over the past two months. Indeed, we had, on occasion, passed each other going opposite ways on Interstate 5—she headed to work, and I returning from it. Even when I wasn’t in the field overnight, it was fairly common for my wife and I to go for four days without seeing each other. We communicated via notes left on the kitchen counter and hurried phone calls snatched during quick breaks. It wasn’t ideal, but it was all we had, and I was eager for more time to pour into our barely year-old marriage.

However, only a few days into the Christmas break, I realized it was impossible to try to treat this as just another relaxing vacation. All I thought about was how I’d be leaving again in under two months and that my newly formed platoon had, at best, six or seven weeks to prepare ourselves for combat. It didn’t help that Christy was working twelve-hour night shifts, meaning that during those two weeks our time together was sporadic and disjointed at best. Indeed, my wife had to work on Christmas and New Year’s Eve, so I volunteered as the battalion’s officer of the day on both those days. As the rest of California opened presents and counted the seconds until
2004, Christy put IVs into dangerously sick children, and I walked the empty barracks and continued to diagram responses to enemy IED ambushes.