One Bullet Away

The door opened, and Captain Novack led an anonymous man to the podium. “Good morning, gents,” Novack said. “You’ve heard me run my mouth about speed, surprise, and violence of action. Violence of action doesn’t start with weapons and tactics. It starts in your head.” Novack turned to the man by his side. “This is Dr. Clete DiGiovanni. Dr. DiGiovanni — we call him Dr. Death around here — is a psychiatrist. Before he started shrinking heads, he was an officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and the Special Operations Group in Vietnam. He speaks your language.”

Novack started to turn the podium over to Dr. DiGiovanni but leaned back toward the microphone.

“One more thing. Lieutenant Fick, the doctor is a Dartmouth grad, too. You can trade squash tips after class.”

“Good morning, Marines.” Dr. DiGiovanni spoke with solemn control. “My nickname is unfortunate, because my job is to help keep you and your troops alive.”

He defined “killology” as the study of healthy people’s reactions to killing. Its corollaries are the factors that enable killing and the maintenance of psychiatric health during prolonged exposure to mortal danger. DiGiovanni explained that an infantryman’s effectiveness is more fundamental than his ability to shoot a rifle or carry a heavy pack. All else is predicated on psychiatric health. He identified five things an infantry leader can do to help maintain the psychiatric effectiveness of his men in combat: minimize fatigue by sleeping whenever possible, build confidence as a team, encourage communication, use spare time to practice emergency medical training, and do after-action critiques to address the shock of combat and killing.

“And trust me, gentlemen, it will be a shock,” he said.

A slide projector whirred to life, casting a square of blank light on the screen at the front of the room. DiGiovanni explained that the first step toward understanding the topic was exposure to violent death.

“The pictures you are about to see are very graphic. Young infantry officers, like yourselves, in Vietnam.”

The photos were indeed of young men like us, but after suffering horrific trauma to their heads and torsos. I had to squint and tilt my head to separate the victims’ eyes from mouths from cheekbones. High-velocity rifle bullets tear through bone and flesh, destroying all vestiges of animate humanity. I could not help but contextualize the pictures. Platoon commanders, recent graduates of this same school, who shipped off to take their first commands. They woke up one morning, pulled on their boots, ate breakfast, and never guessed that nightfall would find them as exhibit A in the killology curriculum of other lieutenants.

Like most Marine training, hands-on experience followed DiGiovanni’s class. The closest battlefield to Quantico was the Anacostia neighborhood of southeastern Washington, D.C. On Friday night, two other lieutenants and I stood discreetly against the wall in D.C. General Hospital’s emergency room, waiting for the casualties to pour in.

The doctors and nurses welcomed Marine observers on nights filled with drug and gang violence that sometimes spilled into the hospital itself. For us, the program was a chance to see gunshots and stabbings in a sterile place, without the additional stresses of combat, command, and dying friends.

A young surgical resident escorted us. We must have looked bored, hugging the wall and watching a steady stream of sore throats and twisted ankles.

“Don’t worry, guys,” she said. “It’s a hot summer night. After ten or eleven o’clock, the ambulances will be backed up outside. You’ll see plenty.”

She was right. The first trauma patient of the evening was a teenage girl with a dozen knife wounds in her back. Her lungs had been punctured, and she blew little pink bubbles with each faint breath. Next came a guy our age whose legs had been broken by an attacker with a hammer. Bones sticking out of his skin reminded me more of a roast chicken than a human being. Sometime after midnight, we noticed the doctors scrambling to meet a gurney at the door. They hadn’t done this before. We asked what was coming.

“Gunshot to the head.”

The man on the stretcher looked as if he was made of wax. Powder burns surrounded the entry wound — a point-blank shot. It was small caliber, maybe a .22, and there was no exit wound. The bullet had just bounced around inside his skull, turning brain to mush. This was the first dead man I had ever seen, and it was, as Dr. Death had promised, a shock.

We left the following Monday on a major field exercise. I was sitting on my pack at the edge of the landing zone, waiting for a helicopter, when Captain Novack appeared, calling my name and three others. We scrambled over to him, and he led us into the trees, out of sight and hearing of the rest of the class.

“Gents, when you get back over there, tell the class I had to counsel you for failing the last written test.”

I must have looked surprised.