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thedrifter
12-31-05, 06:38 PM
A 'Reluctant Warrior' in Iraq
By Bay Fang
US News & World Report

Just days after graduating from Dartmouth College in 1999 with a degree in classics, Nathaniel Fick entered the Marines and by 2001 found himself on the front lines of the war on terrorism. His new book, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, provides a close-up and often harrowing look at his service in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Fick, now a graduate student at Harvard, spoke with U.S. News about how he came to see himself as a "reluctant warrior." Excerpts follow.

Not many Ivy Leaguers join the Marines--how have you straddled the two worlds?

There is a huge gulf between the opinion-making class and the military. When we divorce the military from the rest of society, there is no one who represents our broader ideals. I can walk into a room of marines and break the Dartmouth/Harvard stereotype, and I can walk into a room of Ivy Leaguers and break the military stereotype. When I was in Afghanistan and Iraq, I spent comparatively little time fighting, a lot more time doing the work we would think of as the work of NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] or the State Department. Reconstruction work, diplomacy. The military does more face-to-face diplomacy on the ground than anyone else. Soldiers are the public face of the U.S. If they screw it up, it does exponentially more damage than we think. There is no place in the military anymore for dumb grunts.

Give me an example of the work you did.

In April of '03, my platoon's job was to deliver 2,000 gallons of fresh water to a neighborhood north of Baghdad. We were confronted by a Shiite cleric, who came out and demanded we distribute through him, rather than directly to the people. So the question is, do you work within the power structure, even if he might deny water to Sunnis and Kurds? That's not a question that the military prepares you for, but it's a very touchy one--if you turn a guy against you, you've created a neighborhood dangerous for Americans to operate in. But then do you empower someone who is going to be another [radical Shiite cleric] Moqtada al-Sadr? That's something the State Department is supposed to handle, but I was the Marine platoon commander, and I had to decide.

So what did you do?

We initially decided to be equitable, so we set up a station to pass out the water--but nobody came. It was like a picket line. They had received very clear instructions not to take water from the Americans. So in the end, we had to work through him. We laid out what our expectations were, but whether he did it, I can never know. That example is happening 10,000 times a day in Iraq.

Do you encounter a lot of criticism from your nonmilitary friends?

I get the question a lot at Dartmouth: Why am I throwing away my education to go into the military? There's the idea that everyone in the military is a goose-stepping automaton. But I was amazed at the degree of flexibility I had to call the shots at my level. You're making life-and-death decisions for a platoon of people every day.

When you wrote the book, did you think we would still have soldiers in Iraq today?



I frankly didn't think it was going to devolve into this drawn-out counterinsurgency fight. We made mistakes in the spring and summer in 2003 that created the situation that we're in today.

What was the biggest mistake?

We had enough troops to fight the war, but we did not have enough troops to secure the aftermath. I look at the experience of my platoon, and I extrapolate it out over the entire force. I had 23 marines, and we would go on patrols where we were given responsibility for a sector of 60 or 70 or 80 square kilometers. And in that area lived literally hundreds of thousands of people. And that basic failure--to have the troop strength on the ground to establish order, to provide medical care, to stop the looting, to put some sort of damper on the revenge killing--what that did was sap the average Iraqi citizen's belief that the United States was going to be the winning horse in Iraq. I didn't see many fanatics in Iraq; I saw pragmatists who wanted the same things you and I want. We want the electricity to be on 24 hours a day. We want a functioning sewerage system. We want to be able to walk down the street in our neighborhood at night without getting shot.

So given all that, how long do you think the troops should stay?

There was a Marine commandant in the '80s named P. X. Kelley, who said, in countering popular pressure to pull the Marines out of Beirut: "If you set a date and the date is too soon, your enemy will wait you out. And if you set a date and it's too far away, they'll drive you out." As a military guy, that strategic ambiguity in not setting a date is a weapon. And to cede that to our opponent unnecessarily doesn't make sense. You're voluntarily giving away a part of your plan, and you're not getting anything in return. So it can't be calendar based. It has to be event based.

Ellie