One Bullet Away

“So I’m driving along when Shawn says, ‘Hey, Rudy, turn around.’” He imitated Sergeant Patrick’s North Carolina drawl. “I start turning to the left, and ack ack ack ack, shooting everywhere. Humvee’s rocking. Tracers over, under, past my head. Madness, brother, just madness. Then I see Shawn jump in his seat and yell. Well, I’m busy turning around in this firefight, trying not to run into anything or get us stuck, and I hear him say, real calm, ‘I’m hit in the foot — I’m OK, though.’ Then that crazy mother ties a tourniquet around his leg, real cool, picks up his M4, and starts shooting again!” Rudy folded at the waist, slapping his knee, struggling to breathe. “Brother, that guy is awesome. Awesome.”

I was nursing the coffee Rudy had poured for me when Christeson’s voice crackled through the radio. “Sir, the CO needs you at his truck.” Looking toward company headquarters, I could see people packing up, getting ready to move.

“Roger, I’m on my way.”

I thanked the guys for the coffee, shouldered my rifle, and walked away.

31

HOW’S YOUR PLATOON, Nate?” The captain’s eyes were red. He asked the question with reservation, as if he already knew the answer.

“Licking its wounds, sir. Two Marines shot. Thirty holes in my trucks. And that’s just what I can see. The Marines are starting to wonder who’s calling the shots here. Hell, I’m starting to wonder who’s calling the shots.” Keeping a stoic face for the platoon sometimes meant unloading on my commander. “That attack was fucking kindergarten tactics. We all knew it, and no one said a goddamn thing about it. And how am I supposed to keep my Marines on their game when officers are pulling stunts like that photo op this morning?”

The captain cut me off. “All right. We’re all sorry about what happened to Sergeant Patrick. This is a war. Direct your frustration at the people who deserve it — the Iraqis.” With that phase of the discussion over, he moved on to the day’s plan while I seethed. Now I had to focus on getting from myself what I always expected from my troops: attention to the task at hand. What’s past is past, but the present and future will kill you.

The plan called for us to move south to Al Hayy, recross the bridge we had crossed two days before, and attack into Muwaffiqiya with the Third Battalion, First Marines. In training, the order for a multibattalion attack into an occupied town would have taken half a day. Here, it was a sentence.

Gunny Wynn, Colbert, Lovell, and Reyes stood around the Humvee hood. The team leaders were laughing, and tried to quiet down as I approached. I spread my map on the hood and began to lay out the day’s plan, but the guys couldn’t let go of the joke I’d interrupted. When Reyes and Lovell kept chuckling, I paused. Goddammit. Didn’t they know how serious this was? Didn’t they remember we’d lost Sergeant Patrick only a few hours earlier? Couldn’t they see that I carried their lives on my shoulders? I started to speak and stopped myself. I’d nearly repeated what Captain Whitmer had told us in the Peleliu hangar bay eighteen months before: “If any of you get a Marine killed today, I’ll shoot you myself.”

I finally understood why Whitmer had threatened us that night. Commanders always bear the heaviest responsibility. When you’re tired and under stress, your efforts to convey that gravitas can come out all wrong. The Marines must have seen my frustration, because they shut up and let me finish running through the plan. When I was done, they nodded and went off to brief their teams. They knew this wasn’t the time for questions or arguments, and I was grateful for that.

Our lives were in free fall, spinning so completely out of our control that all we could do was hang on and try to keep up. That was when mistakes happened. Without time to plan or process or recover, we were at the mercy of fate — or worse, of other people. As a commander, taking full responsibility for my own decisions was one thing; taking it for other people’s decisions was something else. The weight pressed down on me. I sat in my Humvee, studying the map, until Christeson fired up the engine.