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.
Since my “platoon” was smaller than one full-strength team, I spent most of the time at Bridgeport in the reconnaissance operations center (ROC), learning all the details of planning recon missions. By the end of the first week, I felt like a college student again. Late nights under fluorescent light, surviving on sludgy coffee, getting lots of theory but no practice.
I told my CO that I wanted to go on patrol with a team. His answer surprised me.
“Yeah, it’ll make us look good.”
Look good? I couldn’t care less. I wanted to see a mission from the team’s end of the radio. It was like flipping the map around. Generally, recon platoon commanders coordinated planning and logistics from the ROC while team leaders ran the patrols. I didn’t want to step on toes, but I needed a feel for a team’s abilities so I could better plan operations once my platoon was manned.
One of the battalion’s senior officers, later nicknamed “Major Benelli” by the Marines because he insisted on carrying a Benelli shotgun, disagreed. “That’s not your job, Lieutenant. Just stay in your lane.” Benelli couldn’t speak to someone of lower rank without smirking.
But Major Whitmer pulled me aside. “Go out with the team. You’ll learn a lot. There’ll be plenty of time to rot in the head shed when you’re a major.”
The mission’s scenario had the battalion operating clandestinely inside a hostile country. Army Airborne was planning an invasion the following week with a mass drop of soldiers and equipment. Recon’s job was to creep close to the drop zone and report back with details of its suitability for the mission. It was a classic, foot-mobile recon mission — get in, take a look, and get out without being seen.
It was midmorning when our helicopter settled toward the landing zone. I was shadowing a six-man team. The only man I knew was Rudy Reyes, the sergeant who had led workouts on the
“Contact! Back to the bird,” the team leader yelled. Another group of Marines was playing the opposition and shooting at us. The team deployed into a staggered line, with half the Marines firing while the other half moved. They struggled under the weight of eighty-pound packs, aiming from a knee and then turning to lumber toward the helicopter. The team leader and the pilots shot clipped sentences back and forth.
“Under fire. Gotta go.”
“Twenty more seconds. Don’t leave us.”
A door gunner leaned into his machine gun, blazing away at the shadows in the tree line. With the last team member still on the ramp, the helicopter rose from the compromised field. We flew to the team’s alternate insert point and made the drop-off. The team leader led his men off the zone and settled them into a tight circle, each man watching and listening as the helicopter clattered away. After the noise and motion of the insert, eyes and ears needed time to adjust to the more subtle rhythms of the woods. I watched pupils darting within bright whites, the Marines’ only recognizably human features. Even those would fade with a day’s fatigue, as bodies adjusted to dusky equilibrium with the forest around them. The team remained frozen for thirty minutes. Birds resumed their song, and squirrels again scurried through the fallen leaves. Only then did the Marines rise.
Three miles of mountainous terrain separated us from the drop zone. Landing any closer would have been too risky. The team planned to move into position around sunset to observe the objective and take photos to send back to the battalion. Then we would use the safety of darkness to recon the zone up close before moving to our extract landing zone, known as Sparrow, for pickup in the morning.
The patrol moved out with a corporal on point. He placed each heel on the ground, slowly rotating his foot to shift his weight silently to the ball. Behind him walked the team leader, followed by Rudy, moving sprightly even under the weight of the radios. Two junior Marines lugged the bulk of the team’s supplies — mainly water and batteries — and also the firepower of the team’s one light machine gun. The assistant team leader walked tail-end Charlie, watching for stragglers and ready to take over if something happened to the leader. I shadowed the assistant team leader at the rear of the patrol, watching the team move, charting our time and distance on the map, and trying my best to be invisible.
Just before sunset, the team stopped in the densest, most inhospitable thicket they could find — a perfect patrol base. Three men would remain there while three others went on a leader’s recon of the objective area. I opted to move with the leader’s recon.
We padded through a piny glen and reentered the sunlight to climb a shallow ridge of exposed rock. Enough shrubbery clung to veins of soil in the stones to conceal our movement, and we climbed quickly to a vantage point almost a thousand feet above the proposed drop zone. As two Marines scanned for threats, the team leader unpacked his equipment and went to work. He spun a telephoto lens the size of a wine bottle onto the camera body and began snapping a panoramic series across the length and breadth of the objective. He took five more shots with a different camera. After stowing the cameras, he unzipped a nylon bag and took out a sketchpad and a handful of colored pencils. In quick, confident strokes, he drew the outline of the drop zone, adding obstacles such as trees and ditches, penciling in estimated heights and dimensions. After cramming the page with data, he zipped the bag and stood. We clambered back down the ridge.
At the patrol base, the other Marines had set up the high-frequency radio while waiting for our group to return. They wanted to transmit their information back to the battalion so that even if the team got captured or
