the battalion doctor, who took one look and drove me to a hospital. I had been bitten not by a sand flea but by a recluse spider and now had a severe staph infection.
They operated twice in the next two days to save my hand. I was then evacuated to Hawaii. Two years of training for this?
For two weeks I couldn’t feel or move my fingers. The doctors recommended a gradual course of physical therapy over six months. I went enough times to understand the principle: exercise the fingers until sufficient pain kicked in to stop the treatment until the next day. I decided to replace the in-clinic daily visit with my own twice-a- day schedule. At first, I could only pull the fingers open like a pair of rusty pliers, with each creak bringing on a wave of fresh pain. So I started drinking Kentucky bourbon. I had nothing to do but drink and bend my fingers. I was knocking back a bottle to a bottle and a half a day, twelve thousand miles away from my platoon in Iraq and six thousand miles from where the bourbon came.
The doctors told me to go home for a week in October. I called Justin Hardin, who had played tight end on our high school team and was my solid, down-to-earth buddy—the calm one in our duo—and told him I was coming. He said we’d be sure to go to a football game or two and hit up a few parties. I was excited. Maybe a girl or two would remember me—maybe even Nikki. The doctors were right: just thinking about getting out of the barracks, hanging out where I knew everyone, made me smile.
That didn’t work out. Justin was killed in a car crash about three hours after we made our plans over the phone. His car slipped off a rain-slick road and hit a tree.
I was looking forward to going home for Christmas, hoping for some fun, but while home another old friend, Mary Kate Moore, smashed her car and she was gone, too, just after I had seen her pass on the road. I was hoping it wasn’t me that was such a good luck charm for my friends. When I was in high school, I had signed up for the track team, doing some sprinting and pole-vaulting, just to jog around the track with Mary Kate. She was a little bitty, peppy thing, and I had a real crush on her back then. Unbelievable. I never liked Christmas much anyway.
In the early winter of 2008, my battalion had returned from Iraq and I was back with them. My platoon sergeant, Gunnery Sgt. Hector Soto-Rodriguez, watched me for a few weeks and then laid down the law:
“Knock off the drinking, Meyer,” he said. “You’re a sniper, not a screw-off. It’s time for you to step up and be a leader.”
He put me in charge of a team and challenged me to build us into a top-notch fighting unit. I had a job to do that mercifully took up all my time.
Gunny Soto-Rodriguez sent me to the marksmanship coach course. After shooting hundreds of rounds, I could hit practically anything with a pistol or rifle. From there, I was sent to the mountain warfare center in Bridgeport, California, for the high-altitude sniper course. The center is located atop the Sierra Nevada range, 150 miles east of San Francisco. The spring scenery was stunning and the instructors were veritable mountain men. During the winter, the Marines up there survive in snow caves. In the summer, they scale rock faces at ten thousand feet.
On one exercise, five of us were sent into the wilds with a map and blanks in our rifles to stalk and simulate killing a guerrilla leader. The instructors gave us a can of mace in case we crossed a bear. To avoid enemy patrols, we dug hide sites to sleep in during the day and moved at night through snow-capped passes. The second day, we came across some bear scat.
During the third night, we were walking silently on pine needles through a moonlit forest—it’s beautiful up there—when the point man thrust up his right hand. We froze and looked every which way. There in the soft earth next to us were enormous paw prints. Not one of us breathed for the next five minutes. It was so quiet you could hear the moon moving overhead. Suddenly our point man leapt up and ran back to us, his hand clenched like a claw.
We froze, looking at the shaggy, crouched monster about to tear us apart. I glanced around and concluded I’d never have time to climb the nearest tree, plus bears climb trees as well and are a lot better than I am at it. We waited like mice for the bear to choose its first victim. After about fifteen seconds, we realized we were looking at a moss-covered stump.
The next day, we found the guerrilla camp and took one shot—a bull’s-eye.
When I rejoined my battalion in Hawaii in mid-2008, I was put in charge of my own six-man sniper team. We were tight. When others were around, my team called me Corporal and came to parade rest to report. When we were alone, I told them not to do any of that stuff. We were like the Army Special Forces. We knew our jobs and were relaxed with each other, using first names.
While my battalion was set to go back to Iraq, I figured they would be in a backbench situation. By late 2008, the American battalions in Iraq had pulled back to remote bases. They were no longer conducting combat patrols.
When headquarters asked for volunteers to serve as advisors in Afghanistan, I signed up. I knew that would mean action.
“The Afghans won’t have your back, Corporal,” my platoon commander warned me. Sergeants who had served in both countries told me the Afghan soldiers were worse than the Iraqis. They called the Afghans pogues, a slang term meaning unreliable and undisciplined.
Just the same, I was looking forward to the adventure. As a sniper with mountain training behind me, I was confident I could handle whatever came my way.
I flew to Okinawa, where I joined an advisor team. In Marine language, that’s Embedded Training Team 2-8. Four of the other nineteen team members on ETT 2-8 were infantrymen, and I was the only sniper. Because the infantry battalions were committed to Iraq, most advisors were non-infantry Marines stationed on Okinawa. Since World War II, the Marines had maintained a base on the Japanese island, a thousand miles south of Tokyo.
I flew to Okinawa, where our ETT spent a month concentrating on the basics of fire and maneuver. We didn’t know each other and I wasn’t impressed with our makeshift workup. We would soon be advising a veteran Afghan battalion fighting in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, but we didn’t follow a serious program of instruction for going to war.
From Okinawa, we flew to the mountain warfare camp in California’s High Sierras to acclimate. Since I knew the terrain from my previous deployment at the sniper course, I was usually placed at point on the patrols. During the day the instructors would harass us, shooting blanks from a distant hillside or a thickly wooded draw, and then withdrawing before we could engage them. That was solid training, exactly what was needed to simulate what we would encounter in the mountains of Afghanistan.
In the evening, though, we bedded down without security, as if every combat patrol ended at sundown. We set up lean-tos, spread out pine branches as mattresses, took off our boots, boiled our favorite noodles over bright campfires, and went comfortably asleep under the stars. All we lacked were marshmallows.
I couldn’t restrain myself from bitching. My previous sergeants would have kicked my ass down the mountain for camping out Boy Scout style.
Second Lt. Ademola Fabayo, a New Yorker whose parents immigrated from Nigeria, was the operations officer on our ETT, although he did not have infantry training. My focus upon tactics exasperated him.
“We’re not going there to fight, Meyer,” he said. “Our job is to train the Afghans. They do the fighting, not us.”
Back then, and even today, I didn’t understand how we could train Afghans in a combat zone while avoiding the fight. There was a huge problem with that theory. In our field exercises, the enemy were American role players with fake bullets; in Afghanistan, the enemy were genuine Taliban fighters. Things came to a head on the last patrol. Everyone was tired as we came down the hill, heading toward warm showers and decent food. The patrol leader left four stragglers on the hillside to wander in by themselves. As we were putting away our weapons, I complained about the haphazard ending. For three years in the infantry, it had been pounded into me to be precise and disciplined. No slack, no shortcuts.
First Sgt. Christopher Garza, the team’s senior enlisted man, was a strict but fair man. In retrospect, things might have turned out differently if I had used diplomacy, appealed to his human side, recited my Tinker Bell speech, and got him to smile. Instead, I charged straight ahead and blurted out what I believed.
“We need a debrief to correct our errors, First Sergeant,” I said.
“Damn it, Meyer,” Garza yelled back. “I’m tired of your negative attitude.”
