One Bullet Away

When SERE ended, the staff carefully debriefed each student on his performance. A Navy petty officer sat with me in an empty Coronado classroom.

“So, sir,” he said with a smile, “how long do you think you were locked in the box?”

“An hour, maybe two,” I replied.

“Eight minutes.”

The two times I was led from my cell had, as I guessed, been my soft and hard interrogations. The hard sell had been a total success — I had given up almost no information and had used the resistance techniques so effectively that the interrogator had never resorted to torture. The soft sell had been a different matter. As I sat in silence the petty officer played a videotape. There I sat in the warm room, looking pale and thin. Apparently, there had been a hidden camera I never saw. A voice-over asked questions that were never actually posed to me, and my reactions had been spliced in.

“Do you care that you bomb and kill the little children of our country?”

I shook my head no.

“Do you think America is evil for the war crimes it commits here against our peace-loving people?”

I nodded an emphatic yes.

My neck stretches in response to the Jamaican’s health questions had been used against me. Despite the best intentions, I had fallen victim to the soft sell. The petty officer was sympathetic. “Don’t worry, sir. Getting mind-fucked once is the best way to make sure it won’t happen again.”

18

THE FOLLOWING Monday morning, I put on my green dress uniform for the second time. It had been nearly two years since I’d checked into 1/1, and I wasn’t a boot anymore. I wore a few ribbons from Afghanistan on my chest and all the confidence that went with them.

Recon’s headquarters was called Camp Margarita, a collection of single-story offices near Pendleton’s airfield. A sign at the entrance bore the insignia I remembered from Colonel Leftwich’s statue at TBS: a skull and crossbones surrounded by the words “Swift, Silent, Deadly.” The battalion had been formed in 1937, and had fought with distinction in almost every Marine campaign since.

The clerk collected my orders and sent me to the battalion commander’s office, saying the commander liked to shake hands with each of his new officers when they checked in. Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Ferrando, trim and fine-featured, was on the telephone when I knocked on his door. He motioned me to a seat. A bout with throat cancer had left him with a raspy voice, and I understood why the battalion, under his command, used the call sign Godfather. After hanging up, Colonel Ferrando didn’t waste time on pleasantries.

“Your job is to be the hardest motherfucker in your platoon,” he said while pointing at me across the desk. “Do that, and everything else will fall into place.”

He added that I was assigned to Bravo Company, call sign Hitman, and wished me luck.

I stood at attention, about-faced, and stepped straight into Major Whitmer. He had been promoted after our return from Afghanistan and was recon’s new operations officer. Just back from ten weeks at combatant diver school in Panama City, he looked tan and fit. I was happy to see him.

“Congratulations on getting through the pipeline, Nate.”

“Congratulations on your promotion, sir. I hope you didn’t get the field-grade lobotomy that goes with it.” It was a running joke among lieutenants and captains that field-grade officers traded their common sense for the rank.

“Careful, Lieutenant. You’re about to feel the wrath of a field-grade officer.” Whitmer smiled, and I laughed, remembering the warning from 1/1’s operations officer in Afghanistan.

A genial captain commanded Bravo Company. He was a former all-American football player, an intelligence officer by trade, with virtually no infantry field experience. But unlike the infantry, recon operated at the team and platoon levels. Since the company existed only for administrative reasons, the CO’s background didn’t bother me. He welcomed me aboard and asked which news I wanted first, bad or worse. I chose bad.

“You have second platoon — Hitman Two — and there are three Marines in it.” Dill’s full-strength recon platoon had had twenty-three Marines. After returning from Afghanistan, some had left the Corps or moved to different units; others were away at school but would return later, in the summer and fall.

“And worse?”

“We’re leaving next week for a month at Bridgeport. I hope you weren’t planning to go on vacation after all those schools.”

The Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center is in the High Sierra, near Bridgeport, California. It opened in 1951 to train Marines to fight on Korea’s snowy peaks. Afghanistan’s terrain is similar, and in the summer of 2002, a return to Afghanistan seemed likely. The battalion would spend three and a half weeks rock climbing and running recon patrols through the mountains. Had we known then what we knew a few months later, we would have gone instead to the desert training ranges at Twentynine Palms.