Joker One (23 page)

I have no idea how long I was trapped in the wire. It was probably only a few seconds, but that was one of those moments when the flow of time froze solid and the whole world was reduced to a single moment, to a life-and-death struggle between me and the inanimate razors. Intently, I focused in on my own private battle until a sudden movement to my left caught my eye. It was Raymond. I turned my head, and it seemed like I watched in slow motion as somehow he catapulted himself over both strands of concertina wire, putting his body between me and the machine gun. Then the world opened up, and I watched as the rest of his team followed his lead, vaulting the solid concertina wire one after the other. A solid wall of four of my
Marines interposed themselves between their lieutenant and his attackers, and my Marines stared firing back.

All of a sudden, time started up again and I ripped my leg out of the razors, shredding both my trouser legs and my lower right thigh in the process. Raymond and his men had silenced the gun, and Teague’s insistent voice in my right ear finally registered through the confusion around me. Hearing it, I responded.

“Send it, Teague,” I yelled over the PRR as I hustled to the cover of a building’s entrance.

“Sir, I missed a guy on a roof as he ran away, but I know what building they’re attacking from. Can you see the building with the orange soap sign on it?”

I looked at all the buildings within my line of sight. “No, Teague, I can’t.”

“Well, just keep moving east and I’ll guide you on.”

“Roger that. Moving.”

I motioned to Raymond to move his team off the sidewalk and into the cluster of buildings next to us, and I glanced back at Leza to see if he had followed the conversation. He had, and he gave me another silent thumbs-up. Second and third squads moved deeper into the buildings, hunting for the one with the orange soap sign.

Within about five minutes, we found it, and I ordered Bowen to cordon off the building’s rear while Leza and I hit it with his squad. Swiftly, second squad ran to the building’s entrance as third snaked around its rear, and, arriving at the building’s sheet steel door, Raymond battered it with his body until the locking mechanism broke. We poured inside, only to discover that the orange soap sign building was a student dormitory. After a thorough search, we had found nothing other than frightened male college students hiding behind locked doors. Frustrated, I made my way out to the building’s balcony to call across the city to the Golf Company COC. That morning, I had been given a smaller version of our long-range radios, a version that we had never seen before, and I just happened to be carrying it on my vest as we hit the building. Time to test it out, I thought.

“Joker COC, this is Joker One-Actual. Be advised, we have the situation at the center well in hand. Break …”

“One-Actual, this is Six-Actual,” came Captain Bronzi’s near-shouted reply. “If you ever put that moron on the radio again, I will fucking kill you. I repeat, I will fucking kill you. I have no idea what’s going on over there. I’ve had to listen to a driveling idiot for the past ten minutes. I have no idea how many enemy you are facing, how many casualties you have, or what the hell is going on in general. You had better start talking right fucking now and fucking fast, Joker One!”

“That moron” referred to Feldmeir. Unbeknownst to me, during our entire brief firefight he had been manning the radio, for in an earlier moment of lunacy I had agreed to Noriel’s request to let our narcoleptic take the platoon’s sole 119. It was a last-ditch effort to find some continuous activity that would keep our somnolent Marine awake, but I clearly hadn’t thought through the implications of making Private First Class Feldmeir the critical lifeline to our higher headquarters. Nearly the entire time we had been under fire, the PFC had been screaming frantically into the radio: “They’re attacking us, they’re attacking us! The fire’s all around! Everywhere!! Aaaah-hhhh!!” The CO had been frustrated, and rightfully so. He hadn’t hesitated to let me know.

Once the tirade ended, I responded with a detailed situation report. It calmed the CO down a bit to hear that no one had been hurt and that the enemy had been chased off, but he was understandably less than pleased with my choice of radio operators. He reiterated his threat to physically kill me if I ever let Feldmeir on the radio again. After the day’s performance, I couldn’t dispute the judgment, and I signed off, somewhat chastened.

Heading back down from the balcony, I rejoined my platoon. Somewhat pleased with ourselves for finally firing back, we returned to the Government Center, and second and third squads settled back into their rooms while I trudged up to the roof to try to sort out what had actually happened during the fighting. On the way up, I ran into Highway, the leader of the Triple Canopy group. It was the second time in as many days that Joker One had responded to an attack on the compound, and the former Force Recon Marine pulled me aside.

“Hey, lieutenant, your guys are really solid. You move quick and you’re not afraid to attack, which is more than I can say for some of the other folks who have been here. You fight well. I’m glad the Corps is here.”

I took Highway’s kind words as high praise, and was again proud of my
men. Then I moved up to the roof, hunted down Noriel, and, sighing, told him that never again was Feldmeir to touch the radio. If he did, I might die.

My first squad leader agreed readily, and together with Teague we began to reconstruct the afternoon’s attack. After comparing notes, we determined that the insurgents had struck from the roofs of three different buildings just across the street, and that they had covered this head-on assault with supporting fire from a machine gun position somewhere to our north. Before the main force fled, Teague had gotten four shots off at one of the rooftop attackers, but his bullets had gone wild. We had just learned the hard way that our three newly issued short-range scopes (called “ACOGs”) did not retain their accuracy when we took them off our weapons, even though we had been told that they were supposed to. Never mind that, Teague told me. He now knew the adjustment he had to make—he’d be good shooting from here on out.

After spending some more time on the roof with each Marine, I tromped back down to our makeshift headquarters rooms. We were scheduled to spend the night at the Government Center, pulling security and posting a squad-sized observation position to our east to prevent IEDs from being planted along the highway. I drew up the specific rotations for the evening’s mission and then spent the rest of the afternoon shuttling between the roof and the squad rooms. Near 5
PM,
the CO and fourth platoon dropped off George the translator on their way over to a meeting at Hurricane Point. After that, though, the early evening passed uneventfully. George smoked and talked with the Iraqi police.

When twilight finally came around, I moved myself to the roof for the rest of the mission. It was the best place for me to command and control my various forces, and, now that the sun had gone down, I could endure the heat for more than two straight hours. The temperatures hovered just above one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and after the day’s events, our cammies were soaked, our boots squelched with sweat, and our heads ached from dehydration and exposure.

Once the darkness had enveloped the city completely, Noriel and first squad left the Government Center and headed to their Route Michigan observation site: an abandoned multistory parking garage four blocks to our east. There the squad planned to remain until we picked them up on the next morning’s route sweep home. For an hour after their departure, the
night proceeded uneventfully. The streets cleared of the evening shopping rush, the tea tables across from us slowly emptied, and, one by one, the lights in the storefronts to our north winked off. With the cessation of civilian activity in front of us, I had just relaxed a bit when I heard one AK shot followed immediately by three quick shots from an M-16. I braced for more fire, but none came. A few seconds later, Noriel called me on his Motorola. Teague had shot an Iraqi, he said, but other than that the situation report was somewhat cryptic and guarded. He requested my presence on the scene immediately, so I ran down from the roof as quickly as my tired legs and the unevenly spaced steps would allow.

Five minutes later, second squad, George, and I met a subdued Noriel on the street with his men in tow. I walked over, and my first-squad leader silently handed me a black plastic grocery bag. I took it. It was heavy.

“Noriel, what is this?” I asked.

“Look inside him, sir. Just look inside.”

I opened up the bag, and found, winking back at me, four sticks of PE-4 (a powerful military-grade explosive), two blocks of dynamite, and at least fifteen different blasting caps. Everything needed to make several IEDs, or to level a small house.

I looked back up, stunned. “Where did you find this, Noriel?”

“Sir, he was in the car of the guy Tig killed.”

“How did you know what car was his?”

“The locals pointed it out, sir.”

“Okay, where is the dead guy?”

“Don’t know, sir. Before we could get to him, some peoples loaded him into a taxi, and he took off. But we need to search that house across the street, sir—the guy Tig killed was running out of it when Tig shot him. Maybe more bombs in there, sir.”

Puzzled, I turned to look at the building directly across the street from us, and, after a moment’s consideration, I ordered second squad to enter and search it. The structure in question turned out to be a gym, and it was filled with nothing more menacing than pictures of Saddam on the walls and used hypodermic needles on the floors. When we finally finished turning the place upside down, I rejoined Noriel’s squad and demanded a full explanation of what had just happened. They quickly explained in hushed tones.

T
en minutes earlier, shortly before the shooting, Corporal Brown, Noriel’s second-team leader, had noticed a soft scuffling sound at the stairwell leading up to the squad’s position on the garage’s third floor. As he leaned in for a closer look, the scuffling picked up, and Brown began to suspect that someone was trying to creep up the stairs to fling a grenade or a homemade bomb into the scattered squad. Using his PRR, the team leader softly called Noriel over to the gaping stairwell entrance. Quietly, the first-squad leader picked up his gear and crept across the floor.

As soon as he had made his way to Brown’s position, Noriel, who was carrying the heavy long-range radio as he crawled, located the nearest Marine to hand it off to. Unfortunately, that nearest Marine happened to be Feldmeir, and even in the dark Noriel noticed his head bobbing. As quietly as he could, the sergeant smacked Feldmeir on the back of the helmet to wake him up.

“Feldmeir,” he hissed. “Take this radio. I have to check on something. No matter what happens, Feldmeir, don’t fucking say anything on the radio. I will fucking kill you if you do.” Wide-eyed, Feldmeir nodded his mute agreement.

Not fully satisfied but with time for a decision ticking away, Noriel reluctantly handed off the radio and crept the few feet over to where Brown knelt. On arrival, the squad leader heard the same scuffling sounds, and he quickly pulled out his single grenade, removed the thumb clip, and pulled the pin. Now the only thing keeping the device from detonating was Noriel’s thumb pressed firmly up against the grenade’s spoon, the long rectangular flange that extends downward off the top of a grenade, curving over the device’s circular body. Holding the grenade away from his body, Noriel leaned out over the gaping hole and peered into the darkness with his NVGs. He didn’t see anything, but the scuffling only continued, and at the first sign of an attacker Noriel determined that he’d simply drop the grenade down the stairs and then take cover.

As Noriel and Brown knelt tensely over the entrance to their floor, waiting for the split second in which an attack would materialize, Teague noticed a commotion in the building immediately opposite him. Perking up, he focused his attention on the building’s entrance just in time to see an Iraqi run out of the building followed by a giant wielding an AK-47. The
huge Arab seemed irate, and without warning he suddenly raised his rifle and fired a shot into the back of the fleeing man. The Iraqi fell and began twitching spasmodically on the ground. His assailant strode over and raised the rifle to his shoulder, clearly intending to apply a brutal coup de grâce and finish what he had started.

Teague was shocked, and he called Noriel over the PRR. “Ser’ent. Ser’ent! A hajji just shot another hajji in the back. He’s gonna shoot him again, Ser’ent.”

(“Hajji,” by the way, was our generic term for the Iraqis. Its formal use is as an honorific bestowed on someone who has completed the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. I’m afraid our use was more in the grand tradition of soldiers faced with a populace with whom we couldn’t communicate and who often seemed difficult to understand, to say the least. In most instances the term wasn’t meant to denigrate the Iraqis—we simply used the two-syllable “hajji” because it was easier than the three-syllable “Iraqi.”)

His concentration broken, Noriel was briefly nonplussed by the sudden commotion. The live grenade still hung out over the stairwell entrance. After about a second’s consideration, Joker One’s first-squad leader radioed Teague back.

“Well! Fuck! What are you waiting for? Shoot back, Tig!”

Teague took action. Correcting for his errant ACOG sights, he aimed at a point three feet above and to the right of the Iraqi’s head and loosed a three-round burst. All three caught the man in the throat, and he fell to the ground like a marionette whose strings had been severed. There he lay, boneless and unmoving.

Through it all, Noriel knelt by the stairs, still waiting with his grenade at the ready. As the gunfire faded, he realized that the scuffling had ceased, and, as Noriel’s attention diffused, he noticed something horrifying: Feldmeir was talking on the radio, again babbling uncontrollably to the COC a vague account of Iraqis shooting Iraqis and us shooting Iraqis and something about a grenade. Furious, Noriel rose and whirled to confront Feldmeir, the live grenade in his right hand completely forgotten. Brown, however, hadn’t taken his eyes off the explosive, and his face went white as his squad leader stormed over to Feldmeir with his arms swinging furiously. Before Noriel could snatch the radio away from the self-appointed radio operator,
though, he was intercepted by a slightly wide-eyed, slightly agitated Teague.