One Bullet Away

“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains
And the women come out to cut up what remains
Jest roll to your rifle an’ blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.”

“If I’m wounded, Staff Sergeant, and you fuckers leave me on Afghanistan’s plains, I’ll put my last bullet between your shoulder blades before I put it in my own head,” I replied.

Marine laughed and shot another stream of brown saliva into the sand. “I expect you will, sir.” He paused and added, “Even Hadsall might’ve done that.”

I continued down the line to see the rest of the platoon. A white halo surrounded the moon, looking like an iris around a pupil. The moonlight cast my shadow across glowing sand, again reminding me of new snow. Normally, I chafed under the twenty-pound weight of my flak jacket, but now it was the only thing keeping the icy wind off my skin. I imagined the chill air pouring off glaciers high in the Hindu Kush and racing across miles of desert without a tree to slow it down.

One of my machine gun teams was dug in with Patrick’s platoon, anchoring the far flank of the company’s lines. They were in the middle of Sergeant Espera’s squad, the former repo man with whom I’d flown into Pakistan on the Sword mission. For a few hours each night, Espera turned one of his holes into the company’s social center, brewing coffee and debating the issues of the day with all comers. I slid into the hole, and Espera caught me up on the night’s discussion.

“Sir, we’re talking about Lindh. These guys” — he nodded at the other Marines in the hole — “think he’s a freedom fighter.”

John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, had been captured the week before at Qala-i-Jangi prison in northern Afghanistan. Now he was imprisoned in a metal container a few hundred yards from Espera’s hole.

“And what do you think?” I asked Espera.

“Traitor. And the most vicious kind. He turned his back on the society that raised him, that gave him the freedom and idealism to follow his beliefs.”

“But what was his crime?” I goaded Espera, happy to play devil’s advocate. “Other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

“Joining the Taliban. Claiming to be a member of al Qaeda. Shit, sir, if that ain’t enough for you, his buddies killed a Marine!” Mike Spann, a CIA officer and former Marine captain, had been killed shortly after interrogating Lindh. “If my grandma killed a Marine, she’d be on my shitlist.”

Espera turned serious again. “We’re young Americans out here doing what our nation’s democratically elected leaders told us to do. And he’s fighting against us. Why’s that so hard to figure out? And already the press is bitching about how he’s being treated. He’s warm. He’s protected. He eats three meals each day and sleeps all night. Do I have that? Do my men have that?”

“Their freedom to voice stupid opinions is part of what we’re fighting for,” I said. It was well after midnight, and I still had more positions to check on, so I climbed out of the hole as Espera and the other guys resumed their debate.

Farther down the line, in the middle of a gravelly flat near the runway’s end, I approached another fighting hole, careful to come from the rear and listen for the verbal challenge. It was an assault rocket team, and there should have been two Marines awake. In the moonlight, I saw three heads silhouetted against the sky. I slid down into the hole with a rustle of cascading dirt. General Mattis leaned against a wall of sandbags, talking with a sergeant and a lance corporal.

This was real leadership. No one would have questioned Mattis if he’d slept eight hours each night in a private room, to be woken each morning by an aide who ironed his uniforms and heated his MREs. But there he was, in the middle of a freezing night, out on the lines with his Marines.

General Mattis asked the assault men if they had any complaints.

“Just one, sir. We haven’t been north to kill anything yet.”

Mattis patted him on the shoulder. I had heard that he was old school, that he valued raw aggression more than any other quality in his troops.

“You will, young man. You will. The first time these bastards run into United States Marines, I want it to be the most traumatic experience of their miserable lives.”

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