Joker One (29 page)

“Kill him,” I said into the radio handset.

N
o reply came, but less than a minute later I heard the long, low boom of

the sniper rifle followed by three high, quick pops from an M-16. Then the report came back.

“One-Actual, this is One-Three. Be advised, Headhunters say that target is dead. I say again, target is dead. Break. He was hit low, through the liver, so we had to finish him with the 16. Break. Some civilians are loading the body into a car now. Over.”

“Roger, One-Three. Tell the Headhunters good work. Out.”

“Roger. Out.”

Nothing else happened that day. The predicted attacks never materialized, and the battalion found a few minor weapons caches but nothing other than that—no insurgents, no terror cells, and no key civilian organizers. The only violence on April 8 was that which we had inflicted on the anonymous AK-wielding Iraqi, and I spent much of the rest of the day’s downtime on the roof wondering if I had ordered the death of a potential attacker or an off-duty police officer.

A few months later, the battalion intelligence officer, Captain Towle, stopped by our base for a meeting with the CO. Afterward, he spotted me and came over to chat, and we talked for a bit, one intel officer to another, about recent events in Ramadi and elsewhere. The conversation was winding down when, out of nowhere, Towle said, “Oh, by the way, you remember that guy you had the snipers take out?”

“Yes,” I replied hesitantly. It wasn’t something that I thought about all that often, probably because I didn’t particularly like to think about it.

“Well, we later figured out who he was. Turns out, he was the bodyguard of a notorious thug sheik with suspected ties to organized crime and terrorism. After you guys killed the bodyguard, the sheik got scared and left Ramadi. We haven’t heard from him since.” He nodded his approval as the words trailed off.

I nodded back but didn’t bother to reply. It’s one thing to shoot an insurgent who’s trying to annihilate your men with a machine gun or a rocket, but it’s something else altogether to order an unsuspecting man’s death from two hundred yards away and then to follow the results dealt out in real time. Right then I didn’t know how to tell the captain that the decision to kill that Iraqi didn’t feel either right or wrong when I made it. It just felt hard either way, and the understanding now that the man was a known bad character still didn’t really change my choice, its weight, or my feelings about it. It seemed a waste of time to try to explain that sometimes, on the front lines, there are no great options, just bad ones and worse ones, so you do what you can in the knowledge that you’re dealing life and death no matter which way the decision swings. Then you live with the results and shut up about the whole thing.

“W
hat do you think happens when I die, sir? I think now that I might.” The question came from Lance Corporal Williams, one of my youngest Marines. Joker One was now a million years away from early March of 2004, when we used to debate whether we’d ever be awarded the coveted Combat Action Ribbon. As we lived through our bloody April, Joker One and I had no idea of the larger picture in Iraq. We didn’t know that a combined Marine/Army force was slugging it out with Shiite militias among the tombstones of the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf, or that our fellow Marines just down the road were bitterly disappointed after having their rolling invasion of Fallujah halted in midstride by civilian politicians. We didn’t know that 134 coalition soldiers would be killed that month in Iraq. And we didn’t know that many people were beginning to realize that the insurgency might be more than just a few isolated hotspots of violence. All we knew was that one morning we had woken up to find that our city had exploded around us, and that when the dust finally settled a few days later, many of our friends had simply ceased to be. Their deaths hadn’t been easy; we knew because we’d recovered some of the bodies ourselves—Langhorst had been shot through the head, and Hallal, the Marine whose body had
been found by Corporal Brown, had had his throat slit and his gear stripped. For the first time we understood that Golf Company wouldn’t be returning home whole.

Friendly deaths weren’t the only ones that affected us deeply, though. From the boy I had seen kicking in the courtyard to the woman carrying groceries that Hes had seen wither under machine gun fire, the citizens of Ramadi also paid a steep price in blood each time violence broke out. Civilians always suffer—it’s an inescapable fact of war, it always has been—and you may very well have an intellectual understanding that these things happen. But until you see a boy with a red third eye, it’s hard to fully understand what “collateral damage” really means. Now we knew. For us, then, April proved a turning point of a different type, a psychological one, and it profoundly changed the way we thought of ourselves, our situation, and the Iraqi citizens surrounding us.

For many members of Joker One, death took on a very real persona on April 6, and thereafter many of my Marines’ questions mirrored Williams’s: “Sir, what do you think happens when I die?”

There’s an old saying that in war there are no atheists in the foxholes. It’s not true. There are indeed atheists on the front lines—there were a few in my platoon—and even after the events of April some of them clung to their faith as steadfastly as did those of us who believed in God. A more accurate saying, then, would be something along the lines of “In war, no front-line soldier can ignore the inevitability of his own death.” Most nineteen-year-olds have the luxury of avoiding such thoughts altogether, or at least of distracting themselves if the idea does arise, but, having watched some of their closest friends killed and maimed traumatically, my Marines no longer did. They couldn’t reflect on tragedy for a time and then push it aside as a life of relative comfort in America slowly anesthetized them; there was no comfort, no America, no familiarity to take the edge off life. We still had six more months to go in our deployment, and now we feared that whenever we ventured outside the base, death would stalk us relentlessly.

In this psychologically wearing climate our pre-mission prayers took on an even more serious tenor, and became, I think, increasingly important to the men. I believe that, in some small way, the prayer helped my Marines focus their attention on the job at hand and on protecting one another, rather than on worries for their own death. The brief moment of togetherness
gave all of us purpose in the face of chaos and random violence. To those who sought it, the prayer also provided some comfort that God was in control, that their lives had worth and meaning stemming from an absolute source.

And we needed meaning, because after April 6 we lost all faith in our tactics as emissaries of kindness and in the willingness of the people of Ramadi to help us. It would have been one thing, we thought, if, during the fighting, the citizens had simply cowered fearfully in their homes. Having been brutalized by Saddam Hussein for the past three decades, most had learned that survival meant never seeing evil, never volunteering for anything, keeping your mouth shut and your head down when neighbors mysteriously disappeared. So we would have understood if they had decided to stay at home and sit this one out, but they didn’t.

Instead, despite our daily kindness, despite the relief projects, the money, the aid that we had already poured into the hospitals, despite the fact that we routinely altered our missions to make ourselves less safe in order to avoid offending them, the citizens of Ramadi had come out of their houses and actively tried to kill us. Multiple intelligence sources later told us that hundreds, if not thousands, of males ranging from teenagers to fifty-year-olds had grabbed their family’s assault rifles, and, using the chaos caused by the hard-core insurgents as cover, they had taken potshots at U.S. forces as we passed by. Maybe it was one of these bullets that tumbled through Gentile’s face and neck or through the back of Langhorst’s head, we thought. And when these local Minutemen returned home, we were told, many of them had bragged of their exploits to their friends. For the younger ones, shooting at the Americans had apparently become a sort of coming-of-age ritual; for the older ones, it was probably a way to express anger and frustration with the misery of life in Iraq, a misery that, for better or worse, U.S. forces kicked off with the 2003 invasion. It also occurred to us that some, if not most, of them may have also felt humiliated by an occupying Western power carrying guns with impunity on their streets, or that others may have thought we were there as neoimperialists, come to steal their oil. Occasionally, I wondered what I would have done if the situation were reversed, and the Iraqi army had invaded Texas. I probably wouldn’t have sat idly on the sidelines.

Making matters worse, the institutions that had formally agreed to assist
us in our efforts, such as the local police or Ramadi’s national guard battalion, not only abandoned their posts but also refused even to pass along the message that an attack was pending. It didn’t take a trained official to figure out the signs of the assault; anyone could have done it—after all, on April 5, the insurgents had posted flyers in the marketplace and elsewhere, flyers that warned businesses not to open and residents to stay at home on the following day as attacks on U.S. forces were planned. It would have taken only two or three people out of 350,000 to warn us, but no one, to my knowledge, did. Again, there were some reasons for this—the insurgents would kill them if they found out, and we wouldn’t—but we didn’t know in early 2004 that for most Iraqis the decision to help coalition forces often meant death. All we knew was that no one seemed to be on our side.

So on April 6, 2004, the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment flipped the switch of its default settings and settled firmly on kill. The insurgents, along with large swaths of the civilian population, had wanted a jihad, and a jihad we had given them. We had poured the full weight of our battalion’s combat power into the city, and if the enemy decided to stand and fight again, then we would do the exact same thing, only more quickly. And if the citizens who refused to help us, or even to warn us, suffered during the fighting that ensued, then so be it. We never believed that we could win without their support, but if they wanted to help the enemy put bullets through our stomachs, then they had to be prepared to live with the consequences. Maybe they needed to fear us a little bit before they’d help us. Maybe kindness wasn’t enough.

But though we stopped believing in open kindness as a sufficient condition for mission success, we never eschewed basic morality. No matter how much we despised our opponents for killing the weak and terrorizing the defenseless, and no matter how well their methods seemed to work, we could not, and would not, emulate them. We wouldn’t fire artillery indiscriminately into the city (indeed, during our entire time in Ramadi, we never used this most devastating of weapons), or use our tanks and jets to level buildings hiding suspected insurgents and civilians alike. Even if it meant more risk, we’d go in and get them ourselves, using only whatever we could carry. We wouldn’t beat or torture our prisoners, or routinely threaten uncooperative local families. We wouldn’t descend to the level of Abu Ghraib.

There was undoubtedly quite a bit of altruism in our stance, but I believe
that we were equally driven by hard practicality. From my first deployment, I knew that whatever we did during the day we had to live with at night, and whatever acts we committed in Iraq we had to carry home with us to America. I repeated this idea over and over to the men, reminding them that we had joined to protect those who couldn’t protect themselves. If we interposed ourselves between an unarmed child and a thug with a machine gun and got wounded or killed in the process, so be it. That was our job, and we had all volunteered for it. If we opened fire randomly, or out of hatred and a desire to kill those who had refused to help us, then, quite frankly, we did not deserve the title of United States Marines, and we did not deserve to be able to meet our own eyes in the mirror.

We replaced open kindness, then, not with terror of our own but with fierce readiness. No longer would we smile and wave on patrol; no longer would we appear soft and weak. From that day forward, smiles vanished, wide eyes turned to slits, and both hands remained firmly on our weapons at all times—waving ceased altogether. If someone wanted to attack us, then they needed to see in our visages that we would attack right back, fiercely, unhesitatingly, and mercilessly. No more soft cake.

We also replaced our faith in the people of Ramadi with faith only in one another, with the idea that, no matter what happened and no matter what the circumstances, we would look after our comrades before looking after ourselves. Sometimes we talked about this concept, but most of the time it went unsaid; we just knew what we’d do for one another. If a man went down, another would be there to drag him away or to cover his body with his own; if someone started veering out of control, into the dangerous area of hatred and vengeance, the rest of us would come alongside to bring him back. And we replaced our belief in the idea that Ramadi would be made a stable bastion of democracy with the hope that we could somehow, someway, make life better for at least some of its residents.