One Bullet Away

The platoon lived in a carport a hundred feet long and twenty feet wide. Concrete pillars supported a concrete roof above the concrete floor. There were no walls. The concrete absorbed so much heat during the day that it was too hot to sleep near at night. It radiated like an oven until dawn, when it began recharging for the next night. I wanted to sleep under the sky, but disease-ridden sand fleas infested every patch of ground, so I settled for wrapping up in a waterproof sleeping bag liner and sweating through the night. Sleep was intermittent anyway. Living in a field of human waste spread dysentery through the platoon. The closest I came to willing my own death in Iraq was while curled up in the dust outside a plywood latrine, too weak to swat the jellybean-size flies clustered on my head.

Rumors swirled of surveillance missions along the Saudi border or patrols into Ad Diwaniyah. Eighteen thousand Marines slowly assembled at Paige, enough for almost any mission imaginable. The Marines kept active — studying maps, prowling for intelligence around the division’s headquarters, and working out with an improvised weight set of discarded Iraqi tank parts. But after three weeks, we received the order to turn over all our ammunition to other units driving north. On the division’s status board, a little green card next to First Recon’s name was changed to red. We were done.

Combat missions had galvanized the battalion. Without them, the pettiness of peacetime military life returned. One morning, the captain assembled our company for PT: a run around Paige followed by calisthenics. We stood in rows in the dust, wearing green shorts and tan combat boots, resigned to working out without a shower. The Marines were sullen; they resented taking orders from a leader they no longer respected.

The captain chose pushups as our first exercise. While he counted the repetitions, the whole company was supposed to echo him loudly. Instead, fifty Marines grunted silently through a set of twenty-five, mumbling numbers at the dirt. Crunches were next. The captain asked for a volunteer to lead the counting, and Gunny Wynn trotted to the front of the formation. He dropped on his back and began counting out loud. The company roared in unison, “One… two… three… four!” The Marines around us stopped to watch as they realized that a small mutiny was taking place. I smiled, staring at the sky as I curled my crossed arms to my thighs and tried to out-shout them all.

The captain summoned me that afternoon to his makeshift office in an old barracks building. I found him sitting behind a desk, wearing his full uniform instead of the trousers and T-shirt we usually wore in the heat. When he didn’t invite me to sit on one of the MRE boxes strewn across the floor, I knew I was in trouble.

“Lieutenant Fick, I’m relieving Gunny Wynn for insubordination.”

I started to reply, but he cut me off. “In Ar Rifa, he challenged my orders in front of the Marines,” he said. I tried again to speak, but he looked down at his paperwork and said, “Dismissed.”

My gut impulse was to throw my metal lieutenant’s bars on the captain’s desk and tell him I quit. But of course I couldn’t do that. Wynn and I were a team. We felt we had a duty to protect the platoon from the caprice of the larger corps. The Marines’ loyalty to Wynn was fierce, something like love. Relieving him would be a blow to their morale and to their trust in the battalion. I decided we had to put our pride aside and figure out a way to keep our jobs.

When I got back to the carport, Wynn was supervising the cleaning of the platoon’s sniper rifles. He looked up when I walked over.

“Let’s take a walk, Gunny.”

We left the camp and started down the road that ran for a mile along Paige. I felt light without my body armor, carrying a pistol instead of my rifle. Around us, Marines scrubbed weapons, counted ammunition into piles, and repaired their vehicles for the long drive back to Kuwait.

“The CO plans to relieve you for disobeying his orders,” I said.

Wynn took the news quietly and kept walking. Finally, he replied, “Bullshit. I only disobeyed his orders when they would have gotten people killed for no reason. I’ll go to the colonel.”

“No.” The word sounded harsher than I’d intended. “You need to let me deal with this.”

“Sir,” he protested, “these guys are attacking me when they’re the ones who screwed up. I’m going to the colonel.”

“Mike, this isn’t about you,” I said, trying to appeal to his sense of duty. “It’s about the platoon. You’re the only thing between these guys and our Marines. Listen to me: I will deal with it. I know it’s crazy, but I have more firepower right now.”