One Bullet Away

General Mattis arrived a few minutes later, clearing the atmosphere like a thunderstorm on a humid afternoon. Mattis is kinetic. The troops who knew him from Afghanistan loved him, and everyone else loved him by reputation. Stars on a collar can throw a barrier between leader and led, but Mattis’s rank only contributed to his hero status. Here was an officer, a general, who understood the Marines, who, in fact, was one of them. I caught Wynn’s eye and leaned toward him to whisper a question: “You know what Mattis’s call sign is?” He shook his head. “Chaos. How fucking cool is that?” Wynn nodded admiringly as General Mattis began to speak.

“Good afternoon, Marines. Thank you for your attention so late on a Friday. I know the women of Southern California are waiting for you, so I won’t waste your time.”

General Mattis didn’t talk battle plans and tactics — those would be disseminated through the chain of command beneath him. Instead, he focused on seven general principles. He ordered us to reflect on them, internalize them, and make them real. The division’s success in battle, he said, would depend on them.

“Be able to deploy without chaos on eight days’ notice.” I thought we could probably get out in eight days, but not without chaos. All our routine maintenance and repairs had to be completed. Gear had to be organized and packed for shipping. Desert uniforms issued. Manifests prepared. Anthrax and smallpox vaccinations given. I thought, too, of my personal life. A house to pack up, a car to store, bills to pay, family and friends to see. Deploying for war would be a mess, no matter what.

“Fight at every level as a combined-arms team.” Combined arms was another Marine Corps mantra. The idea was to put the enemy in a dilemma in which hiding from one weapon exposed him to another. A lone rifleman and a grenadier could be a combined-arms team, and so could the division and its air wing. We were good at this. Recon teams had more experience with air and artillery than anyone except perhaps former weapons platoon commanders.

“Aggressive NCO leadership is the key to victory.” Never a problem in recon. The team leaders, mostly sergeants, were the battalion’s backbone. They were well trained, motivated, and experienced. I suspected my challenge would be tempering their aggression, not stoking it.

“Mistakes are forgivable, but a lack of self-discipline will be met with zero tolerance.” Light discipline, noise discipline, and fire discipline would be demanded at all times. Mattis knew that victory hung on the details. Sloppiness in the little things led to sloppiness in the big things. He would quash it at the lowest level he could. Thinking back to the silence of the patrol at Bridgeport, I was confident of recon’s discipline.

“Build confidence in your NBC equipment.” NBC stood for nuclear, biological, and chemical. The general paused and looked deliberately around the room. “Expect to be slimed with chemicals.” This, frankly, terrified me. Marines spent at least one day per year in the gas chamber learning to use and trust their gas masks. But that was with tear gas. I had seen pictures of Saddam’s gas attacks on the Kurdish village of Halabja. Green corpses, choked to death by sarin or VX. Gunny Wynn summed it up: “If we get hit with chem, we’re fucked.”

“Train to survive the first five days in combat.” They were the most dangerous. This sounded good, but I wasn’t sure how training for the first five days differed from training for the next five days, or the last five days. Besides, drawing on memories of the last war against Iraq, many Marines didn’t think the war would last five days.

“Finally, get your family ready to be without you.” Mattis never explained whether he meant for the duration of the deployment or forever. Probably both, I concluded. My life insurance policy was current, and I had a will, but I decided to write letters to the important people in my life, just in case.

General Mattis closed with a divisionwide directive: no Marine in the First Marine Division would deploy with more personal gear than was allowed to an infantry lance corporal. No cots, no coffeepots, no Game Boys, CD players, or satellite telephones. No double standards. Every man would sleep on the ground, and every man would shoulder an equal portion of the daily hardship. It was a Spartan concept, quintessentially Mattis, and I liked it.