Joker One (27 page)

“Well, what the hell are you alls waiting for! Move, move, move!”

We did, continuing north for another block until the CO reached me via PRR.

“One, we need to move west. I don’t know exactly where third is, but they’re somewhere in the next couple of blocks. Move west, off of Easy, and
do it quick. Third’s got one dead and some badly wounded. We’ve gotta get to them soon.”

“Roger, Six.”

The PRR sprang to life again, this time with a broken transmission from Staff Sergeant. “One-Actual … moving where you are … moving …”

“Say again, Staff Sergeant. Say again.” I was desperate for news. I still had no idea where my second squad had gone or whether they had any killed or wounded.

“Moving to you. We’re moving to you …”

“Do you have any wounded, do you have any wounded, Staff Sergeant?”

“Negative … Okay … no … hurt … see Weapons. We’re coming.”

“Okay, come find us. We’ve gotta keep moving to third. Marines are dying.”

I listened, but didn’t hear anything else. Teague was looking back at me, so I motioned him to head west down the nearest street. He nodded, then moved off at quick patrol pace. The rest of us followed, and when I turned around to make certain that the squad was still together—that no one had been wounded without us knowing—I saw something amazing. Citizens were standing at the entrances to their houses, watching us pass them by. The gunfire down the street had slackened, but it hadn’t died away altogether, and just a few blocks away we could hear fierce, unremitting fire from wherever third platoon was pinned. None of that seemed to matter to the locals. Now that the worst of the fight had passed their street by, they wanted to see what was going on outside their front doors. Some of them even darted across Easy to get a better look, and, amid all the running, I noticed a few people calmly carrying sacks of goods across the main street.

I shook myself loose from the surprise of this outbreak of everyday life in the midst of our war. Teague and first squad were still moving, and the insurgents were still ferociously attacking third platoon somewhere nearby. I turned around and trotted off, again moving straight toward the noise of heavy firing.

T
he sounds of continuous fighting were very close now, perhaps only a few blocks away. As I pressed myself up against a compound wall located
somewhere in the middle of the city, about four blocks due south of the Saddam mosque, I again heard the cracks of passing bullets. The fire seemed to be coming from behind us, from our east, not from our west, where third platoon was still fighting desperately. Noriel swung around and spotted a window with some flashes, and he pointed it out to Feldmeir, who aimed his grenade launcher in its general vicinity and somehow managed to put a grenade right through that window. The opening filled up with smoke and the firing ceased for a moment. Then it picked back up again. First squad stopped advancing and took cover as best it could.

I ducked around the nearest corner, intending to head toward this most recent fire to get a better picture of our attackers’ positions. Suddenly, I saw two men dressed head to toe in black, from the ski masks on their heads to the black tennis shoes on their feet, standing twenty feet away and staring at me. The all-black getup was the standard battle dress of the hard-core insurgents, the uniform they favored for the all-out, stand-and-fight battles. The men and I made eye contact, and in that quick instant both they and I knew exactly what I was going to do next. Before I could lift my muzzle high enough, though, both men ducked through the open steel gates in front of which they had been standing; then they clanged the doors shut. I loosed off about fifteen shots, hoping to hit the men through the thin sheet steel, and I called for a grenade. Walter ran up and slapped one into my outstretched hand. I carefully popped the thumb clip off the spoon, pulled the pin, and then lobbed the little round, smooth object over the compound gates. We ducked up against the wall and waited for the explosion; when it went off, I screamed at Walter for another.

“We’re all out, sir. No more left,” he shouted back.

“Roger that. Let’s hit this house.”

We charged the compound, kicked down the door, and streamed through, weapons raised to fire. Nothing was inside save a large hole in the dirt, some dark streaks on the wall, and some dark dribbles on the ground. They had probably only been wounded. We cleared the courtyard and then turned around and headed back the way we had come.

W
e headed west again, still trying to locate the beleaguered third platoon. Coming around another corner, I saw Corporal Hayes—a third-platoon
team leader—and one other Marine crouched down on our street’s sidewalk, just one block to our north. Finally we had linked up with at least part of the missing unit. I ran over, and, as I got closer, I noticed that Hayes was white-faced and shaking slightly. He was bleeding from one of his hands.

“Hayes, where are the rest of your guys? Are any more wounded? Who do we need to get?”

He stared blankly at me for a bit, then, despite his pain, pointed out a spot one block to our north. “Sir, last I saw them, they were somewhere around there. We got separated early on. Now all of us’re wounded.” He stopped talking after that, exhausted and in pain.

The Marine to his right was also injured, and he was crying and rocking to himself. As I walked off, Noriel walked up.

“Hey. It’s gonna be okay,” he told them, and knelt down and put his arms around the crying Marine. “Now give me your magazines,” he said, more softly. “I’m low on bullets, and you won’t need them anymore.”

Doc Camacho moved up and immediately got to work on the wounded Hayes, so I moved off, trying to locate the rest of Hayes’s team, including the one dead Marine that I knew about. Ten feet in front of me, another wounded third-squad member suddenly staggered around a corner toward us. It was third’s Lance Corporal Gentile, and he was weaponless. Both hands were pressed against his face and neck; they were covered in blood, and blood was seeping through his closed fingers. Gentile had taken a round through the back of his neck, and it had blown off part of his nose and most of his right cheek when it exited his body through his face. I motioned Gentile back toward Doc and then moved up to the street from which he had emerged. Glancing down it, I saw the dead body of Moises Langhorst sprawled out, arms akimbo, in the middle of the street, maybe thirty feet away from me. Even from that distance, I could tell that Langhorst had been stripped of his weapon and all gear, leaving a strangely naked-looking body clad only in cammies and boots.

Noriel came up alongside me and, glancing over at Langhorst, asked, “Sir, do you want to go get him?”

I pondered the question briefly, and, right at that moment, two Army ambulances appeared out of nowhere and started rolling down our street. They stopped right at Doc Camacho, and an unknown Army colonel
jumped out of the vehicles, ran up to the CO, and offered to evacuate our wounded for us. Seeing this, I turned back to Noriel.

“No. My concern right now is for the living. Let’s keep moving north. Let’s find the rest of third.”

We were still missing half of Hayes’s squad and two other full squads from third, and I knew they had at least one other seriously wounded Marine in their ranks. We couldn’t do anything for Langhorst now, and, even though the firing around us had ceased, our first priority was still breaking through to the besieged and helping the people we could. Noriel and I moved off north, to the end of the block, and I called the CO over the PRR to see if he knew where to go from here. He was still the only one with a long-range radio, and still the only one who had even some idea of where the rest of third was located.

When the CO didn’t reply, I glanced back, only to discover that he and the Army colonel were busy conferring at the entrance to the street containing Langhorst’s body. They suddenly straightened, and the CO and one other Marine, probably Mahardy, took off down the street to retrieve Langhorst. Behind them, the Army colonel started firing down the same street with a shotgun. I had no idea what he was shooting at, since the enemy guns around us had halted altogether, and I hadn’t seen any worthwhile targets on that street thirty seconds ago. Maybe it was random covering fire.

No help was going to come from this quarter for the time being, so I turned my PRR to third platoon’s channel and started calling out to them. After the third try, I heard Sergeant Holt, Corporal Hayes’s squad leader, bark back at me.

“Goddamn, sir, it’s good to hear you guys. How close are you?” he said.

“Holt, I don’t know. I don’t know where you are, but you’ve gotta be within a few blocks if I can hear you on this.”

“Well, sir, can you fire something in the air? Maybe we’ll see it.”

“Wait one.”

Sergeant Noriel had heard the whole exchange, and before I could turn to him, he slapped a red star cluster—a small aluminum canister that fires a red flare one hundred feet into the air—into my hand. “You can shoot this, sir.” Then he started tugging at my cammies, but I was too engrossed with finding the rest of third platoon to pay attention to him. I fired the pyrotechnic
up into the air, and Holt informed me that we were only a block and a half away, just to his south.

I set off again, Noriel following me, still tugging at my cammies—later he told me that he felt like a little kid, tagging along after a distracted parent. Finally it dawned on me that he had something to say.

“What do you want, Noriel?”

“Just wanted to say, sir, that you’re a pretty tall guy. Maybe you should think about kneeling or taking cover occasionally. You keep this up, you’ll get shots soon.”

S
hortly after we arrived on the scene, the firing at Sergeant Holt’s squad

slackened enough to allow them to leave the housing compound where they had taken refuge. The seven remaining able-bodied men moved just behind my first squad, and shortly after all of them had left their building, yet another third-platoon squad emerged from a nearby housing compound. They, too, inserted themselves among us, and I told Noriel to head off again, farther into the city. I started walking again before being stopped dead in my tracks by one of Sergeant Noriel’s team leaders, Corporal Brown, calling over the PRR.

“Sir,” he said, “I’m standing next to a dead Marine here. What do you want me to do?”

Dead bodies are classified as routine medevacs, but there’s never anything routine about zippering up the lifeless husk of one of your comrades and loading him like so much cordwood into the nearest vehicle. For three minutes, that’s exactly what we did. Then we headed west again to find the still-living—the priority and the urgent medevacs.

B
y midafternoon I had managed to hook up with my full platoon as well as most of third, and all 1,200 of 2/4’s Marines had deployed in force into Ramadi to crush the fighters. We had now been fighting for almost five straight hours, and I felt tired and frantically busy. Fire would erupt fiercely and die down again just as quickly as small pockets of resistance all around us sprang into life, then disbanded. During one of those quick firefights, I was moving with Leza when the bullets started snapping all around.

“Get the guys into a house. Strong-point and return fire,” I yelled, meaning they should guard the doors and windows.

“Roger, sir,” came the reply. “Carson, get us inside the gate.”

I looked behind me, and, sure enough, Lance Corporal Carson had just rammed his entire body against the sturdy metal gate of a compound wall. He rebounded, then shook his head just like a bull in a bullfight and charged again. This time the gate exploded inward, and second squad streamed inside to relative safety. Leza started running inside, then paused, turned around, and grinned at me despite the heavy fire.

“Hey, sir. That’s Carson for you, huh?”

For the first time, I found myself grinning during a firefight. “Yeah, it sure is. Let’s get the hell inside, huh?”

We poured into the building and climbed up to the roof, ignoring the people inside, if there even were any. Rows and rows of nearly identical housing compounds surrounded us, and, looking at them, I realized we were on the very western edge of the Farouq district, almost at the edge of the gigantic aboveground cemetery that marked the city center. Hes and the final squad from third platoon had taken cover among its tombstones.

H
alf an hour later, Hes and the rest of his men were found at the very western edge of the cemetery. It was early evening, and by now the fire inside the city had ceased altogether. The CO worked out a grid containing most of the butchers’ district and all of the Farouq district, and he put fourth platoon, mine, and the remnants of third into action searching every house along the east-west streets of the grid. The streets of the city were devoid of traffic, but the occasional pedestrian walked the sidewalks, sometimes even passing us, and from every third or fourth compound we passed residents stared at us from their rooftops or their open doors. Seeing them silhouetted against the evening sun made me slightly nervous, but I was still numb to most emotions outside my extreme focus. Once citizens had been identified as nonthreats, I lost all interest and moved on to the next task and/or suspicious person.

I walked by an open compound gate and glanced briefly inside. I saw a kid, about fifteen years old, with curly black hair and the very beginnings of a mustache tracing his upper lip, dressed in a black Adidas jacket and black
nylon pants. Both hands were in his pockets. If he had been standing upright, he would have been leaning almost jauntily against a wall, with one leg crooked at the knee to rest on the other. He wasn’t standing, though. He was lying down, and his legs were twitching spastically. He had a neat red hole between his eyes. I walked on.

A
fter an hour we finished searching the grid and patrolled back into the

base on foot. I was trudging back inside the base’s walls, right next to Hes, carrying my helmet in my left hand with my right dangling limply at my side. My M-16 hung neatly across the front of my chest, suspended by its three-point sling, and all of my gear was still on. It had been a long day of fighting, roughly eight hours, and we were exhausted and filthy, covered with dirt, sweat, and gunpowder residue. Hes had blood all over his cammies, but he wasn’t visibly wounded, so it likely wasn’t his. We walked in silence for a bit, then he spoke up.