Joker One
Authors: Donovan Campbell
This book is dedicated to the men of Joker One and
to the parents, spouses, and fiancées of the fighters
overseas. Those who wait at home have the hardest
job in the military.
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said: “Who is this who darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Now brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”
—JOB 38:1-4
And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
—1 CORINTHIANS 13:13
Sergeant Mariano Noriel—
Joker One’s first-squad leader, a twenty-five-year-old Filipino immigrant with a feisty personality and can-do attitude. The unofficial second-in-command of the platoon.
Sergeant Danny Leza
—Joker One’s second-squad leader, a twenty-three-year-old Latino fluent in both English and Spanish. A quiet intellectual and one of Joker One’s ablest tacticians.
Corporal Chris Bowen
—Joker One’s third-squad leader, a twenty-year-old New Hampshire native and one of the best all-around Marines in the platoon. Three years younger than his squad leader peers because of numerous merit-based promotions.
Corporal Brian Teague
—Joker One’s first fire team leader, first squad, a twenty-one-year-old native of the backwoods of Tennessee. The platoon’s best shot and one of its most skilled Marines.
Lance Corporal William Feldmeir
—Member, first fire team, first squad, a twenty-year-old refugee from a series of foster homes. A narcoleptic whom Teague constantly supervised.
Lance Corporal Todd Bolding
—Member, second fire team, first squad. The twenty-three-year-old leader of Joker One’s mortar team, and the only African American in the platoon. Nicknamed “Black Man.”
Lance Corporal Joe Mahardy
—Radio operator, first squad. Twenty-year-old Mahardy had achieved academic honors at Syracuse University. Intelligent, tough, and talkative in equal measures.
Private First Class Gabriel Henderson
—Member, second fire team, first squad. Nineteen-year-old Henderson persevered through unexplained chest pains early on to become one of the most cheerful, well-loved members of the platoon. Nicknamed “Hendersizzle.”
Lance Corporal Nick Carson—
Third fire team leader, second squad. The biggest Marine in the platoon at six foot three and well over two hundred pounds. Twenty years old, he was strong, unselfish, and inhumanly tough.
Private Josh Guzon
—Member, second fire team, second squad. The shortest, stockiest Marine in the platoon at five foot four and one hundred and sixty pounds. Nicknamed “Gooch.”
Private First Class Ramses Yebra
—Radio operator, second squad. Twenty years old and the fastest Marine in the platoon, running three miles in under sixteen minutes. Tough, calm, and quiet, he was saddled with the radio shortly after joining Joker One.
Gunnery Sergeant Winston Jaugan
—Company gunnery sergeant, Golf Company. Known simply as “The Gunny” and responsible for the 180-man company’s logistics and training. A forty-something Filipino immigrant, the Gunny was the heart and soul of Golf Company.
Captain Chris Bronzi
—Commanding officer, Golf Company. Called “the CO” for short, the thirty-something Bronzi was responsible for everything Golf Company did or failed to do. The 2004 deployment to Ramadi was his first combat deployment.
The Ox
—Executive officer, Golf Company. The CO’s right-hand man. Worked with the Gunny on Golf Company’s training and logistics issues. With twenty-two months commanding an infantry platoon, the twenty-five-year-old Ox was the most experienced lieutenant in the company.
Staff Sergeant
—Platoon sergeant, first platoon, Golf Company. Joker One’s formal second-in-command, the twenty-nine-year-old Staff Sergeant theoretically worked hand in hand with the platoon commander to take care of the Joker One Marines.
This list of characters features some of the main personalities from my platoon’s time in Ramadi, Iraq, throughout the spring and summer of 2004. Written from my limited perspective as a Marine lieutenant and a platoon commander, this book can pay only small tribute to so many, named and unnamed, who acted heroically overseas. During the writing, I consulted my patrol logs, my men, and my memory to help tell our story as accurately as possible. Any mistakes that have been made are unintentional and the inevitable by-products of the all-pervasive fog of war.
ONE
I
found myself fascinated by the interesting geometric designs of the twisted iron rebar in front of me. For a time, my eyes traced each of the dark, thumb-thick strands where they spewed out of the cinder-block walls like the frozen tentacles of some monster from the myths of antiquity. I have no idea how long I spent engrossed in contemplation, because time in and around firefights is somewhat fluid, but eventually I tore myself away from profound admiration of the destruction in front of my eyes. It was difficult, this return to a reality that sometimes seemed more like a myth—or maybe a nightmare—but it was necessary, because the problem immediately at hand was all too real. If I ignored it for too long, I might get everyone around me killed.
So I stepped back from the abandoned building’s wall and surveyed the floor around me. Somewhere in the various piles of newly created rubble scattered about the floor were pieces of the rockets that had just ripped through two feet of cinder block to explode inside my observation post (OP). I needed to find at least one of these pieces, preferably the base of the warhead, because this was the first time that my unit had been hit by rockets
capable of doing this much damage. If I could find a piece, then we could figure out what kind of rockets these were, estimate what it would take to launch them, and predict how they would be used in the future. We could then effectively plan to thwart them and potentially save several lives, which was important to me because my job description was twofold: 1) save lives and 2) take lives. Not necessarily in that order.
With these considerations in mind, I sifted diligently through the rubble until I found what I was looking for: a smooth black object, just a little larger than a hockey puck, with a half dozen or so holes drilled through it. Though the little puck looked fairly innocuous, I knew from hard-won experience that it was actually a thing of great pain; it was the base of one of the rockets that had just struck us. Without stopping to think, I grabbed the thick circular object as firmly as I could, shrieked manfully, and then dropped it as quickly as I could. Even ten minutes after its firing, this part of the explosive warhead was still hot enough to sear my palm. Important safety lesson: When picking up a newly fired enemy rocket warhead base, allow proper time for cooling
or
handle it with gloves. I filed that one away with other lessons learned the hard way, right after “RPGs (rocket propelled grenades) that you need to worry about always make two booms” and “No one here is your friend.” We now lived in a bizarre world where explosions were so commonplace that we had ways of distinguishing the more from the less harmful and where little tips and tricks about proper expended rocket handling made perfect sense to collate, absorb, and pass on. The absurd had become our baseline.