One Bullet Away

The generator powered a row of overhead lights illuminating maps spread across two walls. Little flags marked the last updated position of each of the battalion’s patrols. A third wall held a status board, showing the composition, call sign, location, and activity of each team or platoon on patrol. Three Marines manned a bank of radios, whose wires snaked across the floor and out an open window to a small forest of antennas on the roof. Amid the squawks and static, they kept open the vital lifeline linking patrols in the field to aircraft, artillery, and all other forms of salvation. I always entered the ROC with some trepidation. Seeing competent Marines doing their jobs well made me feel more confident when I was the one on the other end of the radio. But I always had a nagging fear that I’d find the radio operators asleep, the map positions hours out of date, and the staff playing cards while a platoon was chewed apart. I knew that the fear was irrational, but I felt it every time.

That night, the ROC thrummed like the generators outside. Marines spoke on the radio in clipped tones, shuttled back and forth with messages from the platoons in the field, and constantly updated the status board and the maps. Major Whitmer sat in the corner, reading reports. He wasn’t in my chain of command, but we’d known each other for almost four years, and I trusted him.

“Good evening, sir. May I join you for a minute?”

“Please, Nate. Pull up a chair.”

“Sir, you’re looking pretty tired. I thought field-grades got eight hours each night.”

He laughed, indulging my jab. “You look pretty rough, too.”

“Yeah, well, I better get over it. I’m taking the platoon out in the morning for forty-eight hours. We’re supposed to patrol south of here along the Tigris. Wanted to see if you could add any insight or special advice.” I laid out the patrol plan for him on the map behind us.

“Remember, Nate, we were still fighting less than a week ago. That means three things. People’s lives are a wreck, and they’ll expect a lot from you — don’t overcommit us. Also expect to see some revenge killing — don’t get sucked into a fight not of your choosing. Third, the bad guys melted away last week instead of dying in the fight — they may or may not still be bad, but they’re out there, so be careful.”

35

GODFATHER, THIS IS HITMAN TWO, requesting permission to depart friendly lines with five Humvees, one Marine officer, twenty Marine enlisted, one Navy enlisted, and two civilians. Patrol route is as briefed; ETR forty-eight hours from now.”

With this call, the power plant gate swung open, and the platoon, with Mish and Evan Wright riding along, rumbled down the dirt road toward Baghdad. Fedayeen had been operating in the area, and intelligence indicated they were working from an amusement park near the Tigris. Our mission was to spread goodwill to the local populace while also collecting information on the fedayeen and inflicting whatever damage we could on them. For the next two days, my platoon would be the only American presence in a sixty-square-kilometer swath north of Baghdad. On the map, it was a mix of palm groves, farms, villages, and some of the city’s northern sprawl. We were about to find out how the map stacked up against reality.

The platoon hummed. We were on our own, free to make decisions, to run missions the way we saw fit. For the next two days, the buck stopped with me and Gunny Wynn. Everyone was rested after sleeping in the relative comfort of the power plant, and mail had arrived the night before. We’d gorged ourselves on homemade cookies, beef jerky, trail mix, and all the other delicacies we had lived without for a month. Three days without missions had left us all with a sense of withdrawal. I craved action. We believed that we could bring order to our little slice of Iraq, that we could be examples of freedom and tolerance and generosity. And if anyone opposed us, at least a firefight was more exciting than lying around on a warehouse floor. I needed a fix.

Our first stop looked like a nice American subdevelopment. According to the map, its name was Qalat Abd al Jasadi. It was a small neighborhood, only three blocks square. Large, well-kept houses peeked from behind walls of manicured shrubbery. Children played ball in the street while adults did lawn work and tinkered with cars. The orderly homes had caught my attention from the highway. I reasoned that only Ba’ath Party members or supporters would have lived in such comfort under the Hussein regime. If our mission was to stabilize the city and root out unsavory elements, a Ba’ath stronghold seemed as good a place as any to start. And so I made the natural choice for a Marine platoon commander desensitized by three weeks of war and invigorated by three days of rest: I decided to provoke them.