Joker One (17 page)

With all our gear weighing us down, it didn’t take long for the dogs to close the distance, and I seriously considered shooting them. Just before I pivoted around to start killing dogs, though, Sergeant Leza performed a pivot of his own. Catching his movement out of the corner of my eye, I whipped around in time to see my blocky sergeant scoop up a rock, brandish it behind his head as if to throw it, and then charge full tilt at the baying dogs. The pack broke immediately under this feigned assault and peeled off into the darkness. I congratulated myself for having a quick-thinking, surprisingly nimble sergeant who had clearly been chased by dogs before.

The rest of the mission proceeded without incident. Noriel, Leza, and I linked up with the two squads and led them back to the ambush site, where Teague and Yebra waited to guide them into position. With the cemetery
loaded full of Marines, my reduced platoon waited, watching the train station to our north for several hours. After neither our NVGs nor our thermal scopes revealed any movement at our objective, we searched the cemetery for signs of recent activity. Finding none, we moved out to hit the train station itself. That, too, quickly proved a dry hole, and at 1
AM
the platoon patrolled back to the Combat Outpost through the quiet Farouq area. By 2:30, Joker One was safely inside the Combat Outpost, a lot dirtier but a little more experienced, a little more confident that we could handle ourselves in the real world. Moreover, a number of my worries had proved unfounded. Guzon had done well—Staff Sergeant was still alive and kicking—and Henderson had exceeded my expectations. In fact, Henderson had proved himself so reliable and so tough in Kuwait that we had given him one of our precious SAWs. That whole evening, he had humped the light machine gun uncomplainingly up and down drainage ditches, even stopping to help out other Marines who had trouble struggling up the steep slopes. Even Feldmeir did okay—he fell asleep a few times in the cemetery, and Teague had to smack him on the back of his helmet to keep him awake, but he stayed alert and ready through both the patrol in and the egress out. My men were everything that I had hoped for.

As I headed back to my room, helmet swinging in my left hand and weapon still slung across my gear-laden chest, I smiled a bit to myself. The first mission hadn’t exactly been a textbook ambush, but it hadn’t been a failure. The newly formed Joker One had performed well in its first time out of the gates. I had even managed to get us where we needed to go with only a few minor setbacks, so now both I and the rest of platoon knew that the lieutenant, whatever his other failings, could at least steer himself in the dark of the city. This most basic of accomplishments gave me some badly needed confidence.

Most important, though, everyone returned from this mission. At the time, that accomplishment was the ultimate definition of success in my mind.

O
ver the course of the next week, Golf Company settled into a loose routine that would form the basis for our combat rhythms and that would give some vague shape to our new life in Ramadi. The CO created a rotation schedule guaranteeing that at least one out of every eight days was spent guarding the Outpost, which meant that, except for periodic squad-sized local security patrols, the majority of the day was spent either on or behind the compound walls. Another of the eight days was scheduled to be “off.” In theory, this meant a day free of all mission responsibilities for the Marines. (The platoon commanders and platoon sergeants stood duty as watch officers—even in theory, we never had a dedicated day off.) The other six days were spent running missions, either as the platoon tasked to take the twelve to fourteen hours during sunup, the platoon tasked to take the remainder during sundown, or the platoon tasked to stand ready for twenty-four straight hours as the backup for both (the QRF platoon). Golf Company’s final eight-day schedule, then, went as follows:

A few days after our first mission, on our first “off” day, I walked into the platoon’s courtyard to check on the men and found eight gray Marines shuffling confusedly around. I almost fell over. In the dim light of the early evening, the strange figures looked like statues come to life, but on closer inspection these animated wonders turned out to be merely Mahardy, Yebra, Henderson, Guzon, Bolding, and three others. Shirtless, they ground to a halt when I walked into the courtyard. From stony faces eight eyeballs rolled whitely in my direction, the only proof that these now-still creatures actually lived. Even Bolding’s dark black skin had succumbed to a fine gray powder that covered every square inch of him, but his hundred-megawatt-smile still shone through the dust and obvious exhaustion. As he was the first Marine I recognized, I made a beeline for Bolding to ask what had happened to turn my platoon into living statues. Before I got there, though, I was intercepted by an agitated Noriel.

“Sir, sir, sir! I finally found you. I’ve been looking all over for you, sir. The XO made the Marines move concrete powder bags for the past three hours. Each of the bags, he weights about fifty pounds, sir. We had to put them in one building, and we did it, sir, but as soon as we finished, the XO decided that we had to move them to another one. So we had to redo it, sir! Now the Marines is filthy, but Gunny’s told the companies we can’t use bottled waters to take showers. I asked Staff Sergeant if we could use him just this once, but he said no. Sir, how can the Marines sleep like this?” Noriel waved his arms at the statues.

How indeed? We had no running water, and all of the baby wipes we had brought with us from the States wouldn’t even clean one of my men. At the courtyard’s entrance, I peered around the corner. None of the company staff were in view. I ducked back to Noriel and told him to sneak into the mess hall and take whatever water he needed. If anyone asked my sergeant
what he was doing, he was to tell them I had ordered him to retrieve some water. If they had a problem with it, they could deal with me directly.

Hearing this, Noriel grinned and was off like a shot to the mess hell. Five minutes later he returned, arms and cargo pockets full of bottles of water.

Establishing any sort of routine in Ramadi was nearly impossible. We soon learned that our missions were completely unpredictable and would arise, or change themselves, at any time, day or night. Being technically “off” was no guarantee of rest.

There was one notable exception to this patternless pattern: the morning route sweep. Because Michigan was such an important transportation artery for all coalition forces in the area, keeping it free and clear of IEDs became a high priority for our company, so almost every morning started off with a platoon patrol straight down the highway from the Outpost on the eastern edge of Ramadi to the Government Center on the city’s western boundary. The mission seems sound and practicable in theory; even the term, “route sweep,” sounds professional, efficient, antiseptic. The reality is anything but—a route sweep is a nasty mission that can only be accomplished by ugly, primitive, and fairly risky methods.

The Army had performed its sweeps by driving down the highway in fully armored Humvees at forty miles per hour, minimum, looking for whatever suspicious objects they could spot at such high speeds while holding their breaths, just waiting to get exploded. By contrast, we performed our route sweeps by walking down Michigan wearing body armor. Like the Army, we also held our breaths, waiting to get exploded. Walking at five miles an hour rather than driving at forty, we stood a much better chance of spotting unusual objects among the trash and other clutter littering the road. Wearing only body armor, though, we also stood a much worse chance of surviving a blast. Even at the slow speed, Marines still rarely spotted well-camouflaged IEDs until we were about thirty to fifty feet away, well within the kill zone. Each morning route sweep was an extremely nerve-racking forty minutes, to say the least. I envied the Army and their armored vehicles.

Every platoon commander had his own preferred time of morning to do the sweep, giving the recurring mission some inherent unpredictability. Exhibiting regular mission patterns is a great way to get your men killed. Quist liked to wait until midmorning, when he could be sure that the streets
would be crowded with people. If they weren’t, or if certain spots seemed to be widely avoided, then he could be relatively certain that an IED was in place. By understanding the ebb and flow of daily life, he used the city’s inhabitants as early warning devices.

As compelling as it was, I had heard of too many times when tens or hundreds of unsuspecting civilians were blown up to trust too fully to this logic. Instead, I preferred doing my sweeps early in the morning, just after first light. The terrorists are
Homo sapiens,
and, like the rest of the species, they are subject to the very human desire not to wake up at 4
AM.
Furthermore, without crowds, the insurgents were deprived of their most valuable asset: normal civilians to provide cover and concealment for their operations. Since we couldn’t use civilians in the same callous manner—as mere pieces of terrain at best and as human shields at worst—I liked to level the playing field whenever I could by depriving the enemy of their inherent advantage. They could still detonate us, of course, but now they would have to do so from a nearby building instead of a nearby crowd, and a distant triggerman would be deprived of a hidden, anonymous observer. The downside to such early morning operations, though, was that the light wasn’t as good as it was later, so it was a bit easier to miss well-hidden IEDs.

At 5
AM
on March 14, Joker One set out on its maiden route sweep. An engineer squad had been attached to our company, and I had earlier grabbed two of these explosives experts and asked them to walk point during the mission. They moved on the sidewalks on the north and south sides of Michigan, and Teague’s team followed closely behind. Walking on the median, straight down the center of the road, were Noriel, Mahardy, and I. Someone had to investigate the area, but walking in the middle of a four-lane highway with no cover for thirty meters on any side was a dicey business. I wanted the smallest number of Marines possible exposed like that, so on that day the leaders walked the medians while everyone else stayed on the sidewalks, closer to the buildings and cover. Later, Noriel and I traded off center responsibilities to give the enemy a less concentrated target, but on this first unpleasant mission we wanted to send a signal to the Marines about what they could expect from their leadership going forward.

By the time we made it to the road’s center, Bowen and Leza had already peeled off to our south and north, respectively—in addition to being a juicy bomb magnet, first squad also presented a tempting target to potential ambushers
holed up in the multistory buildings bordering the highway. By patrolling one to two blocks off Michigan, second and third squads protected our flanks and provided some early warning in the event of an enemy staging to attack. For forty-five minutes, Joker One walked the city this way. I alternated between using the PRR to monitor all of our squads’ positions, scanning the median for bombs, and trying not to hyperventilate.

Finally we hit the Government Center, and I relaxed a bit. The sweep part of the mission was over, and I leaned my head back to tell Mahardy to call in the checkpoint. He was already on it. He was more than on it: Not only was Mahardy telling the COC our current location, but he was telling them where we were headed next and that he would let them know when we hit our follow-on checkpoint. This kid was a keeper, I thought. The more I could rely on my RO to communicate with the COC in my stead, the more I could focus on controlling my platoon.

At the Government Center, Joker One wheeled south, deep into the butchers’ area. Incredulous Iraqis stopped everything to stare. In the past, U.S. forces had rarely, if ever, ventured down here, and they certainly had not done so on foot. We walked past butchers who halted in mid-chop, schoolchildren who stopped walking to school, shopkeepers who completely ignored their customers, customers who completely ignored their shopping. Smiling and waving when we could, we pressed on, moving quickly through the area. I wanted to say something, to talk to the locals, to reach out to them, but without any translators in our platoon it was impossible. Bowen tried his rudimentary Arabic a few times, but the Iraqis couldn’t understand him. He had apparently learned a different dialect.

When we hit the Farouq district, the stares intensified, and some took a harder edge. We still smiled and waved, and after about ten minutes a crowd of children formed around us, all shouting at once in broken English:
Mister mister, give me, give me. Give me Pepsi. Give me soccer ball. Give me Frisbee, pencil.
We handed out all the candy and writing utensils we had on us. I started thinking that no matter where you went, little kids still acted like little kids. It was reassuring that in this crazy city, at least something translated across cultural lines. I broke out in a wide smile. Then Carson called me over the PRR: