One Bullet Away

The delusion persisted through our bus ride back to Camp Pendleton and the midnight reunion with our families on a basketball court behind the battalion’s offices. I locked my weapons in the armory but kept the holster on my thigh to hide a bloodstain from the boy at Qalat Sukkar. People waved signs and cheered, and we played the returning heroes. Sergeant Patrick stood quietly, apart from the crowd, dressed in starched cammies and wearing boots for the first time in two months. He wore them, despite the pain, because he thought it was right to greet the platoon while wearing his proper uniform. We all hugged him, along with our mothers and fathers and wives and girlfriends, because he was family.

I felt lonely that night in the hotel room — no radios hissing, no stars overhead, no Marines standing watch beside me. I slept in two-hour chunks. Before dawn, I woke up and took my second shower of the night, just because I could. A dark brown face stared back from the bathroom mirror. I saw lines on my forehead I hadn’t noticed before. The horseshoe still hung around my neck on its loop of parachute cord. I slipped it up and over my head for the first time since Christmas.

Delusions of normalcy continued as I settled back into my daily routine. I stopped for coffee on the way to work. I got stuck in traffic and went to the grocery store to refill my refrigerator. Life’s simple conveniences kept me so grateful that I hardly thought about the war. The return felt seamless. Sometimes I imagined that the four-month interlude had been a dream I could just forget.

But bit by bit, little things dragged me back. On a Saturday afternoon, a Marine friend who had not been in Iraq invited me to go skeet shooting with him at Camp Pendleton’s range. I accepted reflexively, thinking nothing of it. I noticed him looking at me as we drove up the freeway. Finally, he spoke.

“What the hell are you doing?”

I was swerving randomly under overpasses. In Iraq, that made it harder for people above to drop hand grenades into the Humvee.

“Sorry. I wasn’t paying attention.”

When we got to the range, I stood on the firing line with a shotgun and a bag of shells. Suddenly, I had no interest in shooting skeet. I had last fired a gun shortly before midnight on April 1, on the highway north of Al Hayy.

I sized people up on the street, looking head to toe for the telltale bulge of a pistol or a bomb. Not having a tourniquet and IV bag nearby made me vaguely uncomfortable. I ate up every scrap of news about the men still fighting but preferred not to talk about it. I cried sometimes for no reason at all. When a driver cut me off in a merge lane, I visualized, without emotion, pulling his head back and cutting his throat with my car key. On the Fourth of July, a firecracker sent me diving behind a car door, reaching for a pistol that wasn’t there. I felt older than my father. And I had the dream.

I thought I was losing my mind. The only way I knew I was still sane was that I thought I might be going crazy. Surely, that awareness meant I was sane. Crazy people think they’re sane. Only sane people can think they’re crazy. I was reduced to taking comfort in a tautology.

After three years as a platoon commander, I was promoted to captain and chosen to become the commanding officer of the Basic Reconnaissance Course. There are a limited number of operational jobs in the Marine Corps, so my two combat deployments guaranteed me a tour behind a desk instead of an immediate return to Afghanistan or Iraq. When I’d started OCS in 1998, I’d considered making the Marines my career. After Afghanistan, the possibility had remained, only slightly diminished. After Iraq, I knew I had to leave.

Most people in my life acted as if getting out was a natural choice for me. When I’d accepted my commission, friends and relatives had asked questions such as “Last time we talked, you were at Dartmouth. What happened?” or “Do Marines get paid?” An acquaintance felt the need to console my parents, saying, “You must be so disappointed.” These people now thought that I was correcting an earlier mistake, or perhaps that I’d satisfied my adolescent bravado. They thought that the job’s practical hardships had driven me out — long deployments, frequent moves, low pay, and danger. But they were wrong. For me, the intangible honor and pride of being a Marine officer outweighed all the adversity.

Some of my buddies in the Corps understood that the decision was more personal. They knew that I chafed under a hierarchy that sometimes valued polished boots more than tactical competence in its leaders. They figured that we had done in four years what a previous generation of Marines had done in twenty, or maybe never. Promotion, as an officer, means more paperwork and less time with the troops. They knew that I had joined the Marines to hold a sword, not a pencil. They were right, but the real reason was even deeper.