One Bullet Away

We sailed the next afternoon for the two-week steam to Darwin, on Australia’s north coast. Life fell once again into the easy shipboard routine of training, working out, and reading. I spent the evenings after Rudy’s workouts in a chair at the ship’s rail, watching our bow wave push toward the setting sun and reading Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places,” Hemingway wrote. “But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure that it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

Steaming southwest at fifteen knots, we were in no special hurry either.

At six o’clock on a Friday evening, two weeks and six thousand miles from Camp Pendleton, we sailed south of Guadalcanal. I had learned a few days before that we would be passing by the island and worked to prepare a presentation about the Marines’ first great battle of the Second World War. When I gathered the platoon on the upper deck, a reddening sun cast streaks above our heads. Guadalcanal’s green mountains climbed from the sea and disappeared in a ring of clouds.

In the late summer and fall of 1942, the entire First Marine Division, including 1/1, had battled the Japanese army for control of Guadalcanal. I saw the Marines looking at the island while I spoke, probably imagining, as I was, the lines of landing craft, geysers of water where Japanese shells fell, machine guns raking the beach. Infamously, the Navy had abandoned the Marines ashore after four of its ships were sunk. With limited supplies, the Marines had pried the island from Japanese control at a cost of more than a thousand dead and four times that many wounded. They had killed twenty-five thousand Japanese.

History is the Marine Corps’s religion. I’d seen it throughout my training and felt it at the Marine Corps War Memorial, as I read the list of battles outside 1/1’s headquarters at Camp Pendleton, and even when I saw the name of the lone lieutenant killed aboard the Arizona. Past deeds are a young Marine’s source of pride, inspiration to face danger, and reassurance that death in battle isn’t consignment to oblivion. His buddies and all future Marines will keep the faith. Some people in my life would call that naiveté, but I was coming to know it as esprit de corps. My platoon lingered at the rail that evening, talking softly and watching Guadalcanal fade in the gathering darkness.

A week later, we pulled into Darwin for two days of training in the outback. Half the platoon joined the company for live-firing exercises, while the mortar section and Jim and I rode a bus three hours inland to a desolate training area, where we planned to drop mortars, artillery, and bombs. We arrived after dark and found the battalion combat operations center (COC) fully outfitted with lights, running water, tents, and showers. They were courteous enough to direct us several miles down a dirt road to our bivouac site in a burned-out field full of termite mounds the size of telephone booths.

We settled in uncomfortably, remembering the battalion surgeon’s warning that Australia is home to nine of the world’s ten deadliest snakes, including the death adder and taipan, which can render a man, in his words, “completely fucked.” We were briefed that even the cute mini-kangaroos called wallabies can grab a person with their little hands and try to kick off the person’s head with their powerful hind legs. The Marines around us snored as Jim and I opted to stand by the Humvee and talk rather than take our chances on the ground.

After two days of shooting, we returned to Darwin for a day off before our departure. Jim, Patrick, and I drove to the Adelaide River and spent the afternoon feeding crocodiles from a riverboat and swimming in waterfalls. That evening, we found a bar for dinner and drinks. Our ships were scheduled to leave at nine o’clock the next morning.

I sipped a Victoria Bitter and looked at my watch, trying to calculate the time on the East Coast of the United States. Ten-fifteen P.M. in Darwin made it eight-fifteen A.M. the same day in Maryland. I couldn’t remember the date, but it was Tuesday, so maybe I could catch my dad at his desk.

I walked across the street to the pay phones in a hotel lobby. My dad and I talked for ten minutes, he asking about our trip and I asking about news from home. Neither of us had anything interesting to tell. I said I’d send him an e-mail soon from the ship and hung up. As I walked out, I saw Patrick talking on a phone farther down the wall.

“What’s the word, bro?” Jim pushed a fresh beer my way and asked what was happening in the States.

“Nada. Pretty morning in Baltimore. Nothing to interest you guys.” I had barely settled back onto my stool when Patrick burst through the door.

“Fucking terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.”