31
“HOW’S YOUR PLATOON, Nate?” The captain’s eyes were red. He asked the question with reservation, as if he already knew the answer.
“Licking its wounds, sir. Two Marines shot. Thirty holes in my trucks. And that’s just what I can see. The Marines are starting to wonder who’s calling the shots here. Hell, I’m starting to wonder who’s calling the shots.” Keeping a stoic face for the platoon sometimes meant unloading on my commander. “That attack was fucking kindergarten tactics. We all knew it, and no one said a goddamn thing about it. And how am I supposed to keep my Marines on their game when officers are pulling stunts like that photo op this morning?”
The captain cut me off. “All right. We’re all sorry about what happened to Sergeant Patrick. This is a war. Direct your frustration at the people who deserve it — the Iraqis.” With that phase of the discussion over, he moved on to the day’s plan while I seethed. Now I had to focus on getting from myself what I always expected from my troops: attention to the task at hand. What’s past is past, but the present and future will kill you.
The plan called for us to move south to Al Hayy, recross the bridge we had crossed two days before, and attack into Muwaffiqiya with the Third Battalion, First Marines. In training, the order for a multibattalion attack into an occupied town would have taken half a day. Here, it was a sentence.
Gunny Wynn, Colbert, Lovell, and Reyes stood around the Humvee hood. The team leaders were laughing, and tried to quiet down as I approached. I spread my map on the hood and began to lay out the day’s plan, but the guys couldn’t let go of the joke I’d interrupted. When Reyes and Lovell kept chuckling, I paused. Goddammit. Didn’t they know how serious this was? Didn’t they remember we’d lost Sergeant Patrick only a few hours earlier? Couldn’t they see that I carried their lives on my shoulders? I started to speak and stopped myself. I’d nearly repeated what Captain Whitmer had told us in the
I finally understood why Whitmer had threatened us that night. Commanders always bear the heaviest responsibility. When you’re tired and under stress, your efforts to convey that gravitas can come out all wrong. The Marines must have seen my frustration, because they shut up and let me finish running through the plan. When I was done, they nodded and went off to brief their teams. They knew this wasn’t the time for questions or arguments, and I was grateful for that.
Our lives were in free fall, spinning so completely out of our control that all we could do was hang on and try to keep up. That was when mistakes happened. Without time to plan or process or recover, we were at the mercy of fate — or worse, of other people. As a commander, taking full responsibility for my own decisions was one thing; taking it for other people’s decisions was something else. The weight pressed down on me. I sat in my Humvee, studying the map, until Christeson fired up the engine.
We swung south to Al Hayy and into a world transformed. Of course, the weather had changed. Gloomy, dusty skies gave way to brilliant blue. All along the road, people waved and cheered. Girls in purple and yellow dresses smiled shyly while their brothers sprinted along the road’s edge, slapping high-fives and giving the thumbs-up. Shutters and gates, once closed, were thrown open, and laundry fluttered in the breeze on lines above the streets. Traffic darted back and forth through the city, but despite our best attempts at watchfulness, we could see none of it as a threat. The desolate lot we’d raced through two days before was half soccer field, half open-air market. All foreboding had vanished. The only thing missing as we crawled through crowds of cheering Iraqis were streams of ticker tape from above. For the first time, we saw the meaning of liberation and felt the release of pure joy from ordinary lives. It was the best fifteen minutes of our week.
After crossing the bridge, we turned north and followed the river on the road we’d been watching two nights before. Craters pocked the roadside, and telephone poles were canted at odd angles, their wires severed and snaking along the ground — results of the artillery we’d dropped on escaping fedayeen. We stopped just south of Muwaffiqiya. Third Battalion, First Marines was halted ahead of us, waiting while its psychological operations teams blared surrender messages from loudspeakers into the town. I punched two-man observation teams out to our flanks and had the snipers begin scanning through their scopes. This area had been nothing but trouble for us.
As the teams rotated through security, maintenance, and rest, Gunny Wynn and I walked around to check the platoon’s pulse. I wanted to see how Team Two was doing without Sergeant Patrick. Every man in the team had stepped up a level — Reyes to team leader and the other guys to a greater share of the collective responsibility now that they were down a man. Reyes knelt on his hands and knees next to his Humvee, scrubbing, while Jacks stood post behind the Mark-19.
“What are you doing, Rudy?”
“Hey, sir. I’m scrubbing Pappy’s blood off our vehicle. Bad for our chi.”
“Your what?”
“Chi — spiritual energy. It’s the life force that influences everything we do. The old man bled a lot before we got him out of the truck, and I’m just trying to clean up a bit while we have the time.”
I knelt next to Rudy and ran my finger across the jagged hole where the AK-47 bullet had pierced the Humvee’s frame. The bullet had been traveling upward when it hit. I remembered those machine gun rounds sparking as they ricocheted off the road. It was reassuring to know that my snap judgment at the bridge had been right. “Did you find the bullet?”
Rudy smiled and reached into a pouch in his vest. “I’m saving it for Pappy.” He held up a shiny 7.62 mm rifle bullet. It was hardly deformed at all. Thankfully. Had it tumbled or mushroomed after hitting the Humvee, it would have torn a ragged chunk from Sergeant Patrick rather than passing cleanly through. I took it in my hand — it was heavy — then gave it back.
“The sacred geometry of chance, sir.”
“I like that.”
“Espera and I talked about it earlier. We can do a lot to influence the outcome, but sometimes it’s out of our hands,” Rudy said, then mimed firing a rifle. “A running man shoots a burst into a moving Humvee. Why do some miss? Why do some hit? Why a flesh wound and not a femoral artery? Aim and skill have nothing to do with it. The difference between life and death out here is seconds and millimeters — the sacred geometry of chance.” He looked down at the AK bullet in his hand. “Pappy’s time came. He was in Somalia and Afghanistan before this. You can only dodge for so long.”
“How are you and the team, Rudy? Let Gunny Wynn and I know what you need, and we’ll shuffle things around to support you.”
“We’ll be fine, sir. They’re all good guys, and Pappy trained ’em right — they can go on without him. I just can’t believe he’s not here. I miss him already.”
“Me too.” I stood to leave, then stuck out my hand. Rudy took it. “You’re the team leader now, Sergeant Reyes. I know you’re up to it.”
The infantry battalion pushed through Muwaffiqiya without resistance. Any foreign fighters and fedayeen in the town had simply melted away. We followed behind the grunts, crawling along a road paralleling the river. Ornate masonry walls surrounded waterfront parks, and wide sidewalks swept along the roadside. Shuttered storefronts lined the stone buildings, clearly a holdover from some earlier, more prosperous era in that part of Iraq. A dedicated afternoon of trash collecting and whitewashing could have vaulted the place into respectability, but that afternoon had never happened.
“Jesus, Gunny, look over there,” I said. To our right, across the river, stood a clump of trees by the side of a small bridge — the site of our ambush the night before. The trees, buildings, and bridge were just as I remembered them. We could even see the pile of debris dragged into the road by the Syrians. It was eerie, seeing the scene from the enemy’s perspective.
“That machine gun must have been set up right here.” I looked around for a telltale pile of brass shell casings but saw nothing. The buildings along the river had been on the receiving end of our heaviest fire — artillery, Cobras, and tanks. Rubble spilled into the street. Whole city blocks had been replaced with piles of shattered bricks. Explosions had cleaved some rooms in half, leaving their intact remnants visible where walls once stood. Furniture still filled the rooms, and pictures hung on the walls. I caught fleeting glimpses of people peeking at us from the ruins. Sympathy was tempered by the knowledge that a handful of foreign fighters could not have remained there to
