thedrifter
08-25-06, 08:03 AM
The 'F word' Marines won't say
GORDON DILLOW
Register columnist
GLDillow@aol.com
It's a hot July night on the other side of the world. I'm standing by a concrete and sandbag bunker at a place called Camp Fallujah, west of Baghdad, looking at the stars and thinking too much.
I am afraid.
I'm not afraid about right now. Camp Fallujah is a huge American base, a sprawling collection of air-conditioned trailers and lavish dining halls and honest-to-God flush toilets. Right now I am safe.
It's tomorrow I'm afraid of.
Tomorrow morning I'm going out on patrol with a platoon from Weapons Company of the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, home-based in Camp Pendleton. Although every venture "outside the wire" in Iraq is potentially dangerous, there's nothing particularly unusual about tomorrow's patrol, nothing that portends to set it apart from the dozens of other missions I've been on with Marines in Iraq in the past three years. It promises to be, by Iraq standards, routine.
But I'm still afraid. Lord help me, I don't want to go.
Maybe it's a case of "short-timer's disease." I'm heading home in just a couple of days; tomorrow's patrol will be the last one on this trip, probably the last one I'll ever go on. To get hurt or killed, "schwacked" as the 1/1 Marines call it, on your last patrol would be ironic – and short-timers worry that fate relishes irony.
Or maybe it's simply a function of age. I'm 55 years old, with most of my life behind me – and yet, the less life left to me, the more desperately I want to hold on to what remains.
As usual at times like this, I seek reassurance in the numbers. In three years of war in Iraq, American troops have completed more than a half-million individual tours of duty here – and of those tours, 2,600 have ended in death. Statistically, it's a tiny percentage; the odds of any one Marine, or any one journalist, getting killed on any one patrol are slim.
But the numbers are also slim comfort. Because a hundred yards from where I'm standing, in a hallway at the 1/1 battalion headquarters, there's a powerful reminder that death here is all too possible and all too real. A display in that hallway titled "Fallen Heroes" bears the names and pictures of the 10 Marines killed so far during the battalion's tour of duty.
Richard Waller, Philip Martini, Marcus Glimpse – that's Lance Cpl. Marcus Glimpse, 22, of Huntington Beach, killed in April by an IED or roadside bomb – Stephen Perez, Robert Posivio, Steven Freund, Ryan Cummings, Benjamin Williams, Brandon Webb, Christopher White. They all tragically beat the odds and died here – and every one of the remaining 1/1 Marines knows that he can beat the odds and die here, too.
And yet tomorrow the Marines will go out there, outside the wire, to face once again the very things that killed their friends.
As it turns out, I'll go with them; there is no honorable way to weasel out of it. Also as it turns out, the patrol will be routine, a hot, dirty, exhausting 22-hour-long exercise in manning vehicle checkpoints, searching for IEDs and setting up overwatches, with no sniper or roadside bomb attacks.
But on my last patrol I'll wonder again what I've wondered about so many times during three short tours with Marines in Iraq.
How do they do it? How can they go out there every day?
How can they not be afraid?
"Am I ever afraid?" says patrol commander Staff Sgt. Raymond Browne, repeating my question – a question that seems a little perplexing to him. It's not something that Marines talk about much.
Browne, 28, started college as a music major – he plays the trumpet – then switched to chemistry. After two years of chemistry he switched to the Marines. He's been to Afghanistan once and Iraq twice. He has a wife, Mary, and a 3-year-old son, Aiden. In his pocket, for luck and inspiration, he carries a silver cross wrapped in one of Aiden's tiny socks.
Right now Staff Sgt. Browne is overseeing the 30 Marines of his platoon as they set up a vehicle checkpoint on a stretch of two-lane blacktop north of Karmah, a road some of the Marines call "the insurgent superhighway." Just a month earlier, and just down this same road, three Weapons Co. Marines from another platoon were killed by an IED that struck their Humvee.
"I'm never nervous going out" of the wire, the staff sergeant says on reflection. "If you're going to be over here, this is where it's at. But yeah, I guess I'd have to say that I've puckered a couple of times. But never to the point of freezing up."
Staff Sgt. Browne glances over at the Marines working the checkpoint – his Marines, his men, his friends, his responsibility. And I can see that just the thought of being afraid, debilitatingly afraid, holds more terror for him than any IED or sniper's bullet.
"I couldn't afford to let that happen," he says. "I just couldn't let that happen."
"I'm always a little bit scared," Navy corpsman Christian "Doc" Salcedo tells me later as we're walking along a dirt road, the Marines poking among rocks and probing the sand, looking for IED wires. "On a scale of 10, it's maybe a two."
Doc Salcedo is 23, from New York City. When he joined the Navy, he never dreamed that he'd wind up humping through Iraq with Marine grunts; somehow his recruiter forgot to mention that possibility.
"I thought I'd be on a boat," Doc says.
Nevertheless he's here, the first medical responder if any of the Marines get hurt. Like Staff Sgt. Browne, he's more afraid of being afraid – not-being-able-to-do-his-job afraid – than he's afraid of anything else.
"That's the only thing that really scares me," Doc says. "That I won't be able to get all of my guys home safe."
"I'm not scared for myself," Cpl. Nathan French – inevitably, he's "Frenchy" to his buddies – tells me. "If I get killed, hey, I'm not going to miss me."
It's the sort of breezy dismissal of death, and life, that comes easy when you're 21. But it doesn't mean that Frenchy, who's from Perry, Fla., and who volunteered for this combat assignment – "My mom wasn't happy about that at all," he says – isn't afraid of anything.
"I'm scared for my friends," Frenchy says. "That's what I'm afraid of – that something will happen to them."
And so on and so on, again and again I hear it from these Marines, and from most of the grunts I've met. In a largely selfish, cynical, look-out-for-number-one world, these young Americans have come to an emotional place where self is secondary. Most of these men would rather die – literally rather die – than allow fear to cause them to let their brothers down.
The Marines will hoot and jeer and make don't-ask-don't-tell style jokes if they ever read this; they would never say the word out loud. But on this last patrol, I understand once again that what moves them, what keeps them going, is love – love of country, to some extent, love of the Corps also. But mostly it's love for their brothers.
It may sound strange to even talk about it in this distant, violent place. It may be hard for most of us to understand, or even to believe.
But love is here, every day, outside the wire in Iraq.
And it's a love that's stronger than fear.
Ellie
GORDON DILLOW
Register columnist
GLDillow@aol.com
It's a hot July night on the other side of the world. I'm standing by a concrete and sandbag bunker at a place called Camp Fallujah, west of Baghdad, looking at the stars and thinking too much.
I am afraid.
I'm not afraid about right now. Camp Fallujah is a huge American base, a sprawling collection of air-conditioned trailers and lavish dining halls and honest-to-God flush toilets. Right now I am safe.
It's tomorrow I'm afraid of.
Tomorrow morning I'm going out on patrol with a platoon from Weapons Company of the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, home-based in Camp Pendleton. Although every venture "outside the wire" in Iraq is potentially dangerous, there's nothing particularly unusual about tomorrow's patrol, nothing that portends to set it apart from the dozens of other missions I've been on with Marines in Iraq in the past three years. It promises to be, by Iraq standards, routine.
But I'm still afraid. Lord help me, I don't want to go.
Maybe it's a case of "short-timer's disease." I'm heading home in just a couple of days; tomorrow's patrol will be the last one on this trip, probably the last one I'll ever go on. To get hurt or killed, "schwacked" as the 1/1 Marines call it, on your last patrol would be ironic – and short-timers worry that fate relishes irony.
Or maybe it's simply a function of age. I'm 55 years old, with most of my life behind me – and yet, the less life left to me, the more desperately I want to hold on to what remains.
As usual at times like this, I seek reassurance in the numbers. In three years of war in Iraq, American troops have completed more than a half-million individual tours of duty here – and of those tours, 2,600 have ended in death. Statistically, it's a tiny percentage; the odds of any one Marine, or any one journalist, getting killed on any one patrol are slim.
But the numbers are also slim comfort. Because a hundred yards from where I'm standing, in a hallway at the 1/1 battalion headquarters, there's a powerful reminder that death here is all too possible and all too real. A display in that hallway titled "Fallen Heroes" bears the names and pictures of the 10 Marines killed so far during the battalion's tour of duty.
Richard Waller, Philip Martini, Marcus Glimpse – that's Lance Cpl. Marcus Glimpse, 22, of Huntington Beach, killed in April by an IED or roadside bomb – Stephen Perez, Robert Posivio, Steven Freund, Ryan Cummings, Benjamin Williams, Brandon Webb, Christopher White. They all tragically beat the odds and died here – and every one of the remaining 1/1 Marines knows that he can beat the odds and die here, too.
And yet tomorrow the Marines will go out there, outside the wire, to face once again the very things that killed their friends.
As it turns out, I'll go with them; there is no honorable way to weasel out of it. Also as it turns out, the patrol will be routine, a hot, dirty, exhausting 22-hour-long exercise in manning vehicle checkpoints, searching for IEDs and setting up overwatches, with no sniper or roadside bomb attacks.
But on my last patrol I'll wonder again what I've wondered about so many times during three short tours with Marines in Iraq.
How do they do it? How can they go out there every day?
How can they not be afraid?
"Am I ever afraid?" says patrol commander Staff Sgt. Raymond Browne, repeating my question – a question that seems a little perplexing to him. It's not something that Marines talk about much.
Browne, 28, started college as a music major – he plays the trumpet – then switched to chemistry. After two years of chemistry he switched to the Marines. He's been to Afghanistan once and Iraq twice. He has a wife, Mary, and a 3-year-old son, Aiden. In his pocket, for luck and inspiration, he carries a silver cross wrapped in one of Aiden's tiny socks.
Right now Staff Sgt. Browne is overseeing the 30 Marines of his platoon as they set up a vehicle checkpoint on a stretch of two-lane blacktop north of Karmah, a road some of the Marines call "the insurgent superhighway." Just a month earlier, and just down this same road, three Weapons Co. Marines from another platoon were killed by an IED that struck their Humvee.
"I'm never nervous going out" of the wire, the staff sergeant says on reflection. "If you're going to be over here, this is where it's at. But yeah, I guess I'd have to say that I've puckered a couple of times. But never to the point of freezing up."
Staff Sgt. Browne glances over at the Marines working the checkpoint – his Marines, his men, his friends, his responsibility. And I can see that just the thought of being afraid, debilitatingly afraid, holds more terror for him than any IED or sniper's bullet.
"I couldn't afford to let that happen," he says. "I just couldn't let that happen."
"I'm always a little bit scared," Navy corpsman Christian "Doc" Salcedo tells me later as we're walking along a dirt road, the Marines poking among rocks and probing the sand, looking for IED wires. "On a scale of 10, it's maybe a two."
Doc Salcedo is 23, from New York City. When he joined the Navy, he never dreamed that he'd wind up humping through Iraq with Marine grunts; somehow his recruiter forgot to mention that possibility.
"I thought I'd be on a boat," Doc says.
Nevertheless he's here, the first medical responder if any of the Marines get hurt. Like Staff Sgt. Browne, he's more afraid of being afraid – not-being-able-to-do-his-job afraid – than he's afraid of anything else.
"That's the only thing that really scares me," Doc says. "That I won't be able to get all of my guys home safe."
"I'm not scared for myself," Cpl. Nathan French – inevitably, he's "Frenchy" to his buddies – tells me. "If I get killed, hey, I'm not going to miss me."
It's the sort of breezy dismissal of death, and life, that comes easy when you're 21. But it doesn't mean that Frenchy, who's from Perry, Fla., and who volunteered for this combat assignment – "My mom wasn't happy about that at all," he says – isn't afraid of anything.
"I'm scared for my friends," Frenchy says. "That's what I'm afraid of – that something will happen to them."
And so on and so on, again and again I hear it from these Marines, and from most of the grunts I've met. In a largely selfish, cynical, look-out-for-number-one world, these young Americans have come to an emotional place where self is secondary. Most of these men would rather die – literally rather die – than allow fear to cause them to let their brothers down.
The Marines will hoot and jeer and make don't-ask-don't-tell style jokes if they ever read this; they would never say the word out loud. But on this last patrol, I understand once again that what moves them, what keeps them going, is love – love of country, to some extent, love of the Corps also. But mostly it's love for their brothers.
It may sound strange to even talk about it in this distant, violent place. It may be hard for most of us to understand, or even to believe.
But love is here, every day, outside the wire in Iraq.
And it's a love that's stronger than fear.
Ellie