Joker One (31 page)

By then, most raids had become fairly standard, fairly routine affairs, with none of the excitement and flair of that very first one, in large part because our targets from then on out had all been more or less the same. Never again did we seek out very specific, very unusual Sudanese terrorists. Instead, our target descriptions mostly revolved around the ubiquitous, generic Arab male: “dark hair, dark skin, mustache or beard, medium height, medium build; age between twenty and fifty; may be named Mohammed or Muhamed; single-source intelligence ties him/his cousins to local insurgent groups.” Perhaps one time out of every ten, we got grainy, photocopied pictures of the suspected targets. The pictures’ usefulness was questionable at best and misleading at worst.

This morning was no different than usual, and Noriel and Leza were ploddingly rounding up suspects from two different houses when Bowen, leader of our cordon force, called me excitedly over the PRR. A fugitive had just slipped out of his cordon by jumping from one house roof to another. Startled, I looked up the street just in time to see a man emerge from an alleyway three blocks away and take off down the road at a dead run. Teague and I darted after him, but, weighed down by our gear as we were, the suspect quickly widened his lead on us. We were losing him. Teague called me, panting, on his PRR.

“Sir … Do you want … me to shoot him?”

“Negative … Let him go.” I wasn’t prepared to shoot a fleeing, unarmed man in the back when all that we had to go on were single-source suspicions that someone in the house from which he had emerged was, perhaps, connected with insurgents. If, back in America, some unknown force had come for me in the dead of night, I too would probably have fled. And in America, the police didn’t have a long and storied history of torturing or disappearing those whom they snatched. Many Iraqis still didn’t understand that American detentions weren’t like those of Saddam, and most of them reasoned that if someone disappeared in the middle of the night, then it was a fair bet they’d never be seen again in this life.

Five seconds later, the man took a quick right down another dark alleyway, and we lost him. Winded, Teague and I returned to the compounds to find that Leza and Noriel had consolidated all of our military-age male detainees in a single room, zip-tied their hands, and checked them against our photographs. As always, the women and children remained free, but a few Marines kept a watchful eye on them nonetheless. No weapons, explosives, or insurgent propaganda had been found—the houses were clean, and no one could tell from the grainy pictures we had been given whether the men inside were definite matches with our targets. They did fit the written descriptions, but, then again, so did 70 percent of all Iraqi males. Also like 70 percent of all Iraqi males, none of our targets had proper
hawilah,
identification papers. I called the CO, explained the situation, and received an order to bring all detainees to the company consolidation point, a housing compound at the end of the block. Before I took all of the men away, I wanted to explain to the frightened women and children that their husbands
and fathers would probably only be taken for a little while, but without a translator, it was useless. So I didn’t say anything. I just moved out.

We moved quickly, and half an hour later, all detainees were sitting, blindfolded and with their hands bound behind them, in a circle in the middle of a large, fenced yard, the company collection point. No sooner had we settled the detainees than fierce gunfire broke out to our south. Porcupine and Weapons had hit a few insurgent ambushes, and they were slugging their way through them tenaciously. Half a mile north, though, Golf Company remained untouched. With the palm trees waving idly above our heads and the Euphrates burbling placidly fifty feet away, our sister companies’ fighting seemed distant and unreal. Half a mile was a world away until Carson suddenly bellowed.

“Holy shit! That hurts like a sonofabitch.” Every Marine inside the compound turned to look at him as he took off his helmet and turned it over, examining it closely. Then, proudly, Carson brandished it aloft, displaying a long, shallow furrow running along the length of the top right side. Somehow, someway, a stray round from the distant firefight had penetrated our world and smacked Carson’s helmet.

“Check it out, I just got hit in the head! Man, that hurts.” Grinning and shaking his head, the giant Carson put his helmet back on. Standing next to him, half a head shorter apiece, Niles and Ott stared up at their team leader with wide eyes and open mouths. Jarred out of my reverie, I walked outside the compound to find out if Joker One needed to press south into the fight.

As soon as I made it past the gates, a disturbing sight greeted my eyes. We had raided consecutive housing compounds all along a raised dirt road; now all the wives and daughters of the men we had just taken had assembled on that road, heedless of the gunfire to the south. At first they simply stood there, holding one another’s hands and staring numbly at us. Then a large seven-ton truck pulled up, and headquarters Marines started loading the bound and blindfolded prisoners into the back like so many boxes.

Seeing this, the small circles of women erupted with one of the most piercing displays of despair I have ever witnessed. Ululating wails rent the air, and, as the fervor built, the adult women started bending down to pick up the dust of the road and rub it through their hair, on their faces, in their eyes. They slapped themselves across their cheeks, or beat themselves about
their heads and necks with their fists. They ripped off pieces of their clothes and stomped on them. The little girls clung to their mothers’ robes, either sobbing or simply standing with their heads buried amid the voluminous folds.

I was unnerved, and so were my Marines. Yebra and Leza darted quick glances at each other; Niles and Ott stopped watching their prisoners and honed in on the mourners, completely mesmerized. Carson chivied them back to their tasks, but even he had trouble keeping his eyes off the screaming women and the crying girls. Soon the seven-ton trundled off, and the mourners, watching it leave, finally started to calm a bit.

The truck had barely gone a hundred yards when it hit a ditch and flipped over on its side, spilling Marines and prisoners alike out of its bed, and rolling over a few of them. I ran to the accident site, as did Docs Smith and Camacho, and they immediately got to work triaging and treating both injured prisoners and Marines. The docs made no distinction—the most seriously injured, regardless of nationality, were treated first. Of our forces, a squad leader from fourth platoon had a badly broken arm, and a few other Marines had other major and minor cuts and bruises. One of my men had literally jumped out of the turret as the truck rolled over, and thus he had avoided being crushed to death.

Our bound prisoners, however, had no such recourse. Several of them had been crushed underneath the vehicle as it rolled, and both of my docs were working on a couple of the worst ones. I managed to catch Camacho’s eye, and he glanced down at his patient, then looked up and shook his head at me. I turned away, saddened.

Behind us, the wailing redoubled. I looked over at the mourners; a few of the women were now lying motionless on the ground. Prior to the truck rollover, and in spite of my post–April 6 resolve, I had wanted to run up to them and explain that it was all right, that we weren’t Saddam, that their husbands would probably be taken in for questioning and then returned unharmed. Abu Ghraib notwithstanding, no one in our company or battalion deliberately mistreated prisoners. I didn’t really know whether our detainees were bad or good—for all I knew, they could have been notorious insurgent leaders—but none of our hearts were so hardened as to be totally untouched by the deep, very real grief standing there on that miserable, dusty road.

Now, with our vehicle lying pitifully on its side and some of our detainees bleeding in a filthy drainage ditch in the middle of nowhere, I wanted so badly to tell the weeping women that I was sorry, that we didn’t mean to hurt any of our prisoners, that we made mistakes just like everybody else but that unlike everybody else, our mistakes were life and death—sometimes life for us and death for others, and sometimes death for us and life for others. Today an eighteen-year-old truck driver—a random young Marine from the battalion’s truck detachment—had simply misjudged the steepness of the road when he made his turn, and death and wounding, on both sides, had been the result.

I wanted to bend down and tell the little girls that our people had also been badly hurt, that none of us really wanted to separate them from their dads, that somehow every decision that we made in this crazy country always seemed a difficult choice between bad and worse and that nothing ever turned out quite the way we hoped. I couldn’t do anything to help them, though. I couldn’t even speak to them in their language.

So I turned my back on the crowd and did the only thing I felt I could: I started talking to my nearby Marines. They felt as bad as, if not worse than, I did, and I tried to answer all of their questions as honestly as possible—“What just happened, sir?” “Are the prisoners gonna be okay?” “What do we do for their families?” More often than not, though, I found myself saying something along the lines of “I just don’t know. I wish I did, but I don’t, and I won’t tell you that I do. All that I do know is that all we can do is our best. Keep your head up. I’m very proud of you.”

Some eight hours later, we returned to the base. Although the projected fighting hadn’t materialized for us, Echo and Weapons Company had seen heavy combat. Eventually, a fierce counterattack killed or dissipated the last remaining insurgent holdouts, but ten more of our comrades lost their lives in the firestorm of the initial ambushes. Yet again, more of our friends didn’t return home from the mission.

That evening, I lay awake all night long. Insomnia had hit before, but usually it allowed at least a few hours of sleep before dawn.

A
fter the intense combat of early April, the insurgent presence in Ramadi declined dramatically, partly because our enemies lost so many fighters during the fierce, toe-to-toe battles and partly because many of the most committed terrorists had relocated to Fallujah after the Marine offensive there was halted on April 9. That embattled, cordoned-off city had become the front line in the war against America, so a good deal of the most dedicated insurgents left Ramadi for her smaller sister thirty miles east. During the last two weeks of April, the attacks on Golf Company nearly ceased. Ramadi was eerily quiet.

I enjoyed the calm, but I suspected that it wouldn’t last. We still had five months left in our deployment—five more months of constant fighting and five more months away from our wives and children. And all of the Joker platoon commanders had five more months of the lonely, ever-present burden of combat leadership, of the constant knowledge that forty lives rested on our every decision, of the wound-tight tension of never being able to really share our responsibilities with anyone, and of the sleepless nights that came with all these things.

So, during those few quiet weeks of late April, I visited the platoon’s
house as often as my duties and officer-enlisted propriety permitted. Judging how much time to spend around the men, especially in the place where they live, is always a tricky business for a young officer. Spend too much time with them and you risk descending into micromanagement, learning things that you just don’t need to know, or convincing the men that you are their friend. Spend too much time away from them and you risk losing touch with their day-to-day concerns, becoming aloof and disconnected, and convincing the men that you don’t really care because you don’t sacrifice you own personal time. So I walked the thin line between too much and too little and checked on the men every time I could. Every time, I found something different, for, other than knowing that some would be watching movies and some would be writing letters, there was absolutely no way to predict what my Marines would be doing in their downtime. Nearly always, I loved the surprises.

One morning, I walked into the platoon’s courtyard and found, to my immense surprise, that the entire 300-square-foot space was taken up by a plastic children’s wading pool filled with water. Inside it were the extraordinarily pale and skinny Niles and Mahardy—with the exception of their sunburned faces and hands, they looked a lot like long, lean grubworms. Sitting around the pool, sunning themselves as if they were on the beach, were the stocky, tan or black Guzon, Bolding, and Raymond. Bared to the waist, Noriel was just walking out of his room when he spotted me and the obvious shock on my face. Of course, he started grinning from ear to ear.

I was speechless. We hadn’t showered for at least a week, and somehow my Marines had scavenged not only a pool but also the precious water with which to fill it. As it turned out, George the translator had bought the pool at their request during his last foray into town, and Teague had simply pulled over the Iraqi water-delivery truck on its way out of our base and asked it to pump its remaining cargo into our courtyard. (By now, the Ox had engaged an Iraqi company to fill up the two plastic fifty-gallon water reservoirs installed by Achmed the contractor. Thus Golf Company could all take showers roughly once every week.) The scheme had succeeded brilliantly, and now I had multiple Marines crammed into a child’s pool, brown faces and pale bodies pointed up at the sun.