One Bullet Away

1

FIFTEEN OF US climbed aboard the ancient white school bus. Wire mesh covered its windows and four black words ran along its sides: UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS. Dressed casually in shorts and sandals, we spread out and sat alone with our bags. Some sipped coffee from paper cups, and a few unfolded newspapers they had brought. I found a seat near the back as the bus started with a roar and a cloud of smoke blew through the open windows.

A second lieutenant, looking crisp in his gabardine and khaki uniform, sat in the front row. He had just graduated from Officer Candidates School, and would escort us on the hour’s drive to the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. Shortly after we pulled away from the recruiting office, he stood in the aisle and turned to face us. I expected a welcome, a joke, some commiseration.

“Honor, courage, and commitment are the Marines’ core values,” the lieutenant shouted over the engine. He sounded scripted, but also sincere. “If you can’t be honest at OCS, how can the Corps trust you to lead men in combat?”

Combat. I glanced around the bus’s gunmetal interior, surprised to see people reading or pretending to sleep. No one answered the lieutenant’s question. He stood there in the aisle, glaring at us, and I sat up a little straighter. The lieutenant was my age, but he looked different. Shorter hair, of course, and broader shoulders. It was more than that. He had an edge, something in his jaw or his brow that made me self-conscious.

I turned toward the window to avoid his gaze. Families drove next to us, on their way to the lake or the beach. Kids wearing headphones gawked, surely wondering what losers were riding a school bus in the summertime. A girl in an open Jeep stood and started to raise her shirt before being pulled back down by a laughing friend. They waved and accelerated past. I thought of my friends, spending their summer vacations in New York and San Francisco, working in air-conditioned office towers and partying at night. Staring through the wire mesh at the bright day, I thought this must be what it’s like on the ride to Sing Sing. I wondered why I was on that bus.

I went to Dartmouth intending to go to med school. Failing a chemistry class had inspired my love of history, and I ended up majoring in the classics. By the summer of 1998, my classmates were signing six-figure contracts as consultants and investment bankers. I didn’t understand what we, at age twenty-two, could possibly be consulted about. Others headed off to law school or medical school for a few more years of reading instead of living. None of it appealed to me. I wanted to go on a great adventure, to prove myself, to serve my country. I wanted to do something so hard that no one could ever talk shit to me. In Athens or Sparta, my decision would have been easy. I felt as if I had been born too late. There was no longer a place in the world for a young man who wanted to wear armor and slay dragons.

Dartmouth encouraged deviation from the trampled path, but only to join organizations like the Peace Corps or Teach for America. I wanted something more transformative. Something that might kill me — or leave me better, stronger, more capable. I wanted to be a warrior.

My family had only a short martial tradition. My maternal grandfather, like many in his generation, had served in World War II. He was a Navy officer in the South Pacific, and his ship, the escort carrier Natoma Bay, fought at New Guinea, Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, often supporting Marine invasion forces ashore. At 0635 on June 7, 1945, so the family story went, only two months before the end of the war, a Japanese kamikaze crashed into the Natoma Bay’s flight deck. The explosion tore a hole in the steel twelve feet wide and twenty feet long. Shrapnel peppered my grandfather’s body. My mother remembers watching him pick pieces of metal from his skin twenty years later. He had some of that shrapnel melted into a lucky horseshoe, which was shown to me with great reverence when I was a child.

My father enlisted in the Army in 1968. When most of his basic training class went to Vietnam, he received orders to the Army Security Agency. He spent a year in Bad Aibling, Germany, eavesdropping on Eastern bloc radio transmissions and waiting for the Soviets to roll through the Fulda Gap. He completed OCS just as President Richard Nixon began drawing down the military, and took advantage of an early out to go to law school. But my dad was proud to have been a soldier.

The Army sent me a letter during my junior year at Dartmouth, promising to pay for graduate school. The Navy and Air Force did the same, promising skills and special training. The Marine Corps promised nothing. Whereas the other services listed their benefits, the Corps asked, “Do you have what it takes?” If I was going to serve in the military, I would be a Marine.

A few months before, I’d seen a poster in the dining hall advertising a talk by Tom Ricks. Then the Wall Street Journal’s Pentagon correspondent, Ricks had recently written a book about the Marines. I sat up most of one night reading it. I arrived early to get a good seat and listened as Ricks explained the Corps’s culture and the state of civil-military relations in the United States. His review of the Marines, or at least my interpretation of it, was glowing. The Marine Corps was a last bastion of honor in society, a place where young Americans learned to work as a team, to trust one another and themselves, and to sacrifice for a principle. Hearing it from a recruiter, I would have been skeptical. But here was a journalist, an impartial observer.

The crowd was the usual mix of students, faculty, and retired alumni. After the talk, a young professor stood. “How can you support the presence of ROTC at a place like Dartmouth?” she asked. “It will militarize the campus and threaten our culture of tolerance.”

“Wrong,” replied Ricks. “It will liberalize the military.” He explained that in a democracy, the military should be representative of the people. It should reflect the best of American society, not stand apart from it. Ricks used words such as “duty” and “honor” without cynicism, something I’d not often heard at Dartmouth.

His answer clinched my decision to apply for a slot at Marine OCS during the summer between my junior and senior years of college. I would have laughed at the idea of joining the Corps on a bet or because of a movie, but my own choice was almost equally capricious. Although I had reached the decision largely on my own, Tom Ricks, in an hour-long talk on a cold night at Dartmouth, finally convinced me to be a Marine.

But even joining the Marines didn’t seem as crazy as it had to my parents’ generation. This was 1998, not 1968. The United States was cashing in its post-cold war peace dividend. Scholars talked about “the end of history,” free markets spreading prosperity throughout the world, and the death of ideology. I would be joining a peacetime military. At least that’s the rationale I used when I broke the news to my parents. They were surprised but supportive. “The Marines,” my dad said, “will teach you everything I love you too much to teach you.”

The Marine Corps base in Quantico straddles Interstate 95, sprawling across thousands of acres of pine forest and swamp thirty miles south of Washington. Our bus rumbled through the gate, and we drove past rows of peeling warehouses and brick buildings identified only by numbered signs. They looked like the remnants of some dead industry, like the boarded-up mills on the riverbanks of a New Hampshire town.

“Christ, man, where’re the ovens? This place looks like Dachau.” Only a few forced laughs met this quip from someone near the back of the bus.

We drove farther and farther onto the base — along the edge of a swamp, through miles of trees, far enough to feel as if they could kill us here and no one would ever know. That, of course, was the desired effect. When the air brakes finally hissed and the door swung open, we sat in the middle of a blacktop parade deck the size of three football fields. Austere brick barracks surrounded it. A sign at the blacktop’s edge read UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS OFFICER CANDIDATES SCHOOL — DUCTUS EXEMPLO. I recognized the motto from Latin class: “Leadership by Example.”

I hoped a drill instructor in a Smokey Bear hat would storm onto the bus and order us off to stand on yellow footprints. Pop culture has immortalized the arrival of enlisted Marine recruits at Parris Island, South Carolina. But this was OCS, and the lack of theatrics disappointed me. A fresh-faced Marine with a clipboard took the roll by Social Security number and then handed a pencil to each of us, saying we had a lot of paperwork to fill out.

For two days, we shuffled from line to line for haircuts, gear issue, and a battery of physical tests. Candidates who had returned after being dropped from previous OCS classes explained this routine: the schedule was designed to minimize the number of us who flunked out for high blood pressure. On day three, with physical evaluations completed, the hammer would fall.

We slept in squad bays with fifty bunks per room. There, on the evenings before OCS really started, I got my first lesson in esprit de corps. OCS is competitive. Since the peacetime Marine Corps needs a fixed number of officers, a certain number of candidates are earmarked to graduate while the rest are destined to fail. I thought this put us in competition with one another, but the candidates who had been dropped before, or who had served as enlisted Marines, shared their knowledge with the rest of us.

The Corps is a naval service, with nautical vocabulary. Doors are hatches, walls are bulkheads, and floors are decks. Signs at Quantico, miles from the sea, read WELCOME ABOARD. They also taught us the more arcane language of the Marines. Running shoes were called gofasters. Our flashlights, worn on the hip at OCS, were moonbeams. When we looked confused, one of the prior-service Marines laughed. Just wait till you get to the Fleet, he told us. Three different pieces of equipment were known as a “donkey dick” — a radio antenna, a brush for cleaning mortar tubes, and a funnel for fueling Humvees.

In the beginning, my strongest impression of Quantico, apart from its isolation, was its timelessness. Looking around the squad bay, I could imagine Franklin Roosevelt in the White House. No plastic, no advertising, no bright colors. Just two-high metal racks, as our bunks were called, a green linoleum floor, brick walls, and bare bulbs overhead. The only decoration was a sign of two-foot-high letters stenciled along an entire wall: HONOR, COURAGE, COMMITMENT. I already had the feeling that the Marines were a world apart, that what we did at OCS would be separate from the rest of my life.

When another candidate dragged a wooden footlocker next to mine and sat down, I was glad of the company.

“I’m Dave Adams.” He stuck out his hand.

Dave was a football player at William and Mary. His brother had gone to Dartmouth. His easy smile made me like him right away.

“So what do you think?” I tried to ask the question with less trepidation than I felt.

Dave smiled and said, “I think we’re in for a shitty summer. But I’ve wanted to be a Marine since I was a kid. What’s that saying? ‘Pain is temporary. Pride is forever.’”

“I saw a bumper sticker in the parking lot that said ‘Nobody ever drowned in sweat.’” I was nervous. Not scared or intimidated — that would come later — but apprehensive. The Marine transformation is one of American life’s storied tests. I knew its reputation was earned.

We had the barest taste of it at the supply warehouse on the morning of the ominous third day. All the candidates lined up and moved from bin to bin, selecting green camouflage blouses and trousers, nylon belts with two olive-drab canteens attached, and odd items such as bug spray labeled “Repellent, Arthropod.” Two young Marines in the warehouse took advantage of the chance to hassle a group of future officers.

“Get at parade rest!”

It was an alien command. I clasped my hands in front of me and tried to look respectful.

“You gonna gaff us off? Get at the position of attention.”

The candidates around me stood a little straighter, with their hands at their sides. The two Marines told us there were only two ways to stand at OCS: parade rest — feet shoulder-width apart, hands clasped in the small of the back, eyes straight ahead; and at attention — heels together, back straight, hands at your sides with thumbs along the trouser seams.

Later, we assembled for lunch in a Word War II-era Quonset hut. Baking in this sun-beaten aluminum oven, we munched processed meat sandwiches and apples — a prepared lunch the Marines called a “boxed nasty” — as the school’s commanding officer (CO) outlined his expectations of us. The colonel’s lantern jaw, craggy nose, and graying hair were straight from a recruiting commercial. He looked as if he could wrestle any of us to the floor, and authority ran deep in his voice.

“We seek to identify in each candidate those qualities of intellect, human understanding, and moral character that enable a person to inspire and to control a group of people successfully: leaders,” he said. “A candidate’s presence under pressure is a key indicator of leadership potential. In trying to identify Marine leaders who may someday face combat, we want to see who can think and function under stress. Stress at OCS is created in many ways, as you will see.”

When the colonel concluded, he called forward the school’s staff, introducing each Marine. All had served as drill instructors. At OCS, though, they were called “sergeant instructors,” and we would address them by that title, their rank, and their name. The staff marched smartly down the aisle and stood at attention before us. Khaki uniforms with splashes of colored ribbons, eyes focused over our heads on the back wall of the room, no smiles. They were sergeants, staff sergeants, and gunnery sergeants, mostly men with ten to twenty years in the Corps. I saw scars and biceps and tattoos. With introductions complete, the colonel turned to the staff and uttered ten words that ended our civilian lives: “Take charge and carry out the plan of the day.”

Tables turned over, chairs clattered to the floor, and I forgot all about the half-eaten apple in my hand. The staff charged us. We ran out the back door of the Quonset hut. I wanted to keep running, to disappear into the woods, make my way out to the highway, and hitchhike home. But pride trumps most other impulses in young men, and I fell into a ragged formation with my new platoon-mates.

“Stop eyeballing the freakin’ area, maggot.” My eyes were locked to the front. I didn’t think he was talking to me. Warm, wet breath on my cheeks. If not me, then someone right next to me.

“Lock your body!”

Spittle across my eyes and lips. The Marine strutted up and down our crooked ranks. He spoke to the group, but in a way that made it personal for each of us.

“If you so much as breathe, I’ll hear it and rip your freakin’ windpipe out. Now grab your freakin’ trash and move with purpose. Pretend for me that you want to be here.”

We shouldered our bags. Candidates with foresight had brought hiking packs. They stood comfortably, looking ready to strike out down the Appalachian Trail. The truly lost labored with their leather brief bags and suitcases. I fell somewhere in between, striving mightily to be inconspicuous with an oversize duffel bag.

I snuck a look at the instructor’s nametag. Olds. Three stripes on his shoulder. Sergeant Olds. He was yelling, veins popping, eyes bulging. His arms waved from broad shoulders that tapered to his waist with all the menacing grace of a wasp. I looked at Sergeant Instructor Sergeant Olds, sensing he had just become a fixture in my life.

“Don’t eyeball me, candidate. Do you want to ask me out on a date? You look like you want to ask me out.”

“No, Sergeant Instructor Sergeant Olds.”

“Go ahead, candidate. Keep whispering. And keep looking deep into my eyes.” His voice dropped to a whisper, and he moved in close. I watched a vein throbbing in his temple and struggled not to make eye contact. “I dare you to ask me out. Your chucklehead classmates here might get a laugh out of it, but I swear it’ll be the last thing you ever do.”

This is theater, right? I had seen Full Metal Jacket. It’s all a joke. But it didn’t feel like a joke. When Olds spoke to me, icy adrenaline washed through my chest. My legs shook. The worst part was that Olds knew he’d gotten to me. He would, I feared, increase the pressure.

For now, Olds pivoted on a spit-shined heel and struck out across the parade deck. Lacking better options, we followed him. Large raindrops splotched the dark asphalt. The splotches grew bigger and closer together until they finally merged into a single, dark stain. I dragged my duffel bag along the pavement, struggling to keep its strap from biting into my shoulder. The bag had felt lighter when I’d hefted it the night before. I had packed only the required list: three sets of civilian clothes, running shoes, a toiletry kit, and the combat boots mailed weeks before so I could break them in. I folded the clothes crisply, careful to crease each trouser leg and keep the shirt fronts smooth.

Sergeant Olds had opened a gap of fifty yards between himself and the straggling platoon. He stood facing us with his hands on his hips. “Dump your trash. I want to see who’s trying to sneak naked pictures of his boyfriend into my squad bay.”

I hesitated, unsure whether he actually meant for us to dump our belongings onto the puddled pavement. Steam rose as the rain hit the ground.

“What are we, deaf? I said dump your trash. Do it now. Move!”

I unzipped my bag and placed the boots on the blacktop. Then I stacked my clothes on them and put the toiletry bag on top to deflect the rain. Olds’s attention landed on my carefully constructed pile. He kicked it over and put a boot print on the chest of my neatly ironed shirt.

“What’s in here?” He grabbed my toiletry bag. “Drugs? Booze? Maybe a tube of K-Y jelly and a big cucumber?”

One by one, my toothbrush, toothpaste, razor, and shaving cream fell to the ground.

“You must have hidden it pretty well, candidate,” Olds growled. “But I’ll find it. Oh, yeah, I’ll find it. And when I do, I’ll run your ass out of my Marine Corps before you can even call your congressman.”

Olds moved on to his next victim, and I hesitantly began to piece my life back together, wondering again why I was at OCS. Next to me, Dave caught my eye with a smile and mouthed, “Semper fi.”

2

AT EXACTLY FIVE O’CLOCK each morning, candidates roaming the squad bay on the night’s rotating guard threw the switch on the fluorescent lights. It was like shooting the day from a cannon. The instructors burst out of the office at the head of the long room. We had five seconds to launch from our racks, slide into our black rubber flip-flops (referred to as “shower shoes” in the Marines), and assume the position of attention with our toes along a black line that ran the length of the squad bay. No head starts. No wearing shower shoes in the rack. Don’t yawn, don’t wince, and don’t be late.

Olds was always the loudest. “I’m looking for morning wood. I want to find the candidate who was thinking dirty thoughts about me in his sleep.” He prowled up and down the line, bent at the waist to stare at our crotches. The other two instructors were Staff Sergeant Carpenter and Staff Sergeant Butler. They were the ultimate masked men. In ten weeks, we never learned a thing about them. They dominated our every waking hour, but the interaction was almost purely animal.

A favorite morning ritual of theirs was getting dressed by the numbers. With the candidates toeing the line, we began a screamed, scrambled version of Simon Says. “Put your left sock on now.” We had three seconds to take the shower shoe off and slip on a black boot sock.

“Too slow! Take it off!” Olds howled in cadence, as if to a drumbeat.

We returned to the starting position, holding a sock loosely in each hand. In the corner of my eye, I noticed Candidate Dunkin next to me. I had been cursing the alphabetical arrangement of the racks, since Dunkin had become a lightning rod for hate and discontent. He was overweight and undermotivated. While the rest of the platoon played along with the sergeant instructor, Dunkin was slowly getting dressed on his own. Olds noticed, too.

“We have an individual.” Olds spat the word like it was a synonym for child molester. “Candidate Dunkin, what are you doing?” The drumbeat again.

Dunkin didn’t answer. He removed his socks and returned to the starting position, staring blankly at the wall across the squad bay. Olds levitated two inches in front of his nose, hissing in a whisper only those of us closest to him could hear.

“I got you pegged, boy. But you’re gonna suffer before I send you home.” Dunkin blinked, and Olds inhaled before bellowing at the platoon. “Right sock!” This time, he didn’t even wait to see how quickly we moved. “Too slow!”

After ten repetitions with the socks, we ended up with our boots on our hands, clomping around the squad bay on hands and knees, “marching” to cadence. Olds explained that orders slowly executed meant advantages lost. My OCS fear had subsided, to be replaced by frustration. I didn’t understand the point of the games. It seemed like fraternity hazing, and I expected more from the Marine Corps. I crawled in a circle with my boots on my hands and fantasized about quitting, about going home and spending the rest of the summer as a lifeguard. This wasn’t the warrior rite of passage I was looking for.

When Olds declared the games over, we got dressed and piled outside to form up on the physical training (PT) field.

The centerpiece of the PT field was a red wooden platform. Atop it, silhouetted against the rising sun, stood a British Royal Marine color sergeant. He was on exchange from the U.K. and clearly enjoyed beating platoons of aspiring American officers into shape. “Ah, good morning, candidates. Your steady diet of Big Macs and Jerry Springer has surely prepared you for this morning’s activities. Remember, nothing proves your effort to me like projectile vomiting.”

I already had a history of Corps-induced vomiting. A few weeks after Tom Ricks’s talk, I had walked into the Marine recruiting office in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Above the government-issue metal desk were posters with slogans such as “Superior thinking has always overcome superior force” and “We’re looking for a few good men.” I liked it. The crisp sergeant behind the desk looked me up and down and laughed. Sure, he said, he’d sign me up right now, and I’d be on a bus to Parris Island by the end of the week. But since I was a college student, he thought I’d prefer an officer program, and his office only handled enlisted Marines. I confessed that I barely knew the difference. He handed me a business card and wished me well. Sitting in the car, I looked at the card. Captain Steven Ettien, Officer Selection Office, Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Three weeks later, I made the trip to Portsmouth. The office was hidden in a nondescript professional center. An efficient receptionist greeted me and sat me on a couch. The waiting room was neutral, softly lit, almost corporate — not what I expected. I stood when the door to the inner office opened. Captain Ettien was trim and fit, looking in his dress blues like every recruiting poster Marine in my mind.

“So you think you have what it takes to be an officer in my Corps.” It was a statement, almost an accusation, not a question.

My first hurdle would be passing the Marines’ physical fitness test. Three hundred was a perfect score, and officer candidates were expected to score better than 275. There were three events: pull-ups, crunches, and a three-mile run. A score of 300 required doing twenty dead-hang pull-ups without dropping off the bar, followed by one hundred crunches in under two minutes, and then completing the run in under eighteen minutes. Like a triathlon, none of the individual events is especially difficult, but in combination they test overall fitness. I had played football and lacrosse in high school and was a strong bicycle racer at Dartmouth, so I left Portsmouth that afternoon intent on conquering the fitness test.

Captain Ettien greeted me on my next visit by asking in what order I’d been training for the three events. Grateful that he was taking my preferences into account, I told him I relied on pull-ups, crunches, run.

“Great.” He grinned. “Then we’ll start you with the run, followed by crunches, and then pull-ups.” It was my introduction to the Marine Corps way.

I must have blanched, because he added that he’d come on the run to motivate me. Two minutes later, I sprinted out of the parking lot with Captain Ettien behind me at the wheel of a government van, honking the horn and shouting to pick up the pace. I ran three miles in 17:30. Moving over to the grass, I lay on my back with the captain on my feet. At his whistle, I started crunching. Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred. Ten seconds to spare. Another perfect score. I was rolling. We moved over to the pull-up bar. Every breath formed a cloud of condensation. My body was sore from the run and the crunches, but my arms felt good. Jumping up to the bar, I started curling my chin over the metal pole as Captain Ettien counted aloud.

“Thirteen, fourteen, fourteen, fourteen.” What am I doing wrong? “Stop kipping — fourteen, fourteen.” What the hell is kipping?

By now, I’d done twenty pull-ups but his count stuck at fourteen. My arms shook, and despite the cold, sweat dripped into my eyes. I dropped off the bar, buckled at the knees, and poured my breakfast into the grass. When the heaves stopped, I asked, “What’s kipping, and why did you stop counting at fourteen?”

“Swinging your body back and forth. You have to move up and down in a straight line. I’m tempted to give you one for effort because of the puke.” Ettien paused and looked at his clipboard. “Two-seventy — not bad. Just keep working on it and you’ll qualify for OCS.”

By the time I stood in front of the color sergeant that morning, I was a machine. I could run three miles in sixteen minutes and do twenty-five dead-hang pull-ups. Unfortunately, OCS rarely tested what we’d already trained for.

“This morning you will do the log run. Give me a squad to demonstrate.”

Twelve candidates jumped up and jogged to the front of the group. In unison, they snapped to parade rest.

“Pick up the log.”

The candidates hoisted a full-size telephone pole onto their shoulders. It was twenty feet long and weighed six hundred pounds. The pole reeked of creosote and rubbed off brown on their hands and shoulders.

“Now run,” the color sergeant ordered.

They trotted in a circle around the field.

“See, it’s simple. Even you wankers should be able to figure this one out. Each squad grab a log. Catch me.” He took off down the trail.

We strategized. “Tallest to shortest — otherwise the short guys won’t be bearing any of the weight. Tall guys in front will keep the pace high.” Dave and I were the tallest guys in our squad, so he stood at the front of the pole, with me a foot behind.

A dozen squads of a dozen men each struggled off down the trail, looking like millipedes beneath their logs. Legs moved quickly, but progress was slow. We slopped over muddy roots and banged between trunks. Once or twice, the log threatened to roll off our shoulders and crush our feet. I wrapped one arm up over the log and used the other to wipe sweat from my eyes.

Ahead of us, the color sergeant bounced along in his running shoes and white tank top, bemoaning the future of the Marine Corps. “Your Corps has been around for two hundred twenty-three years, right? Not a bad run. A respectable try, really. The Army will pick up your slack.” He reached a fork in the trail and turned left.

“He’s headed toward the ford. I wonder how we’re gonna do that.” The voice came from behind me, where candidates were struggling with the weight and the slippery footing.

The ford was a deep pool of stagnant water sitting in the middle of the trail. Stopping at the water’s edge, the instructor picked up a rock the size of a bowling ball. He waited for the squads to pant into position all around him before heaving it into the ford. When it splashed into the water and sank out of sight, four little heads popped up.

“You’re doing a good job, so I’m showing you where the snakes are. Go get wet.”

We joined the snakes in the ford, splashing out to the deep water and swimming next to the log like tugboats pushing a barge. Our boots filled with water and threatened to drag us to the bottom. I had grown up on Chesapeake Bay, a strong swimmer, but being trapped underwater was my private terror. A short candidate at the back of the log was yelling encouragement when his hand slipped off the muddy pole and the words turned to gurgles as his head went under. I hardly heard him because I was focused on keeping my own hands on the log and my own head above water.

“Let’s go, fellas. Just a little farther. Good job.” Ahead of me, Dave was pushing the log and looking back at the rest of the squad. He was soaked, red-faced, and squinting to see. I could tell he was in pain, but he was turning his energy and attention outward, pulling the rest of the squad behind him.

An hour after we’d started, Dave led us back onto the sunny field where we had begun. He was singing cadence, and we echoed with all the breath we had left. “Born in the woods. Raised by a bear.” Dave jogged easily under the log. “Double set of dog teeth. Triple coat of hair.” The pain started to subside for me, too. “Two magazines and my M-16. I’m lean and mean.” By suffering together, we could spread the hardship around until it almost disappeared. “I’m a U.S. Marine.”

Olds was waiting to march us back to the squad bay. “Cut that trash out. You ain’t Marines.” I thought I saw a glimmer of satisfaction beneath his dismissal. “PT showers. You have four minutes. We’re already late for chow.” It wasn’t even seven A.M.

PT showers were one of OCS’s many small indignities. They were cold, soapless soaks with forty of your closest friends. The staff turned on all the nozzles in our communal bathroom while the platoon stripped. Then we walked in single file, “nuts to butts,” past the spraying shower-heads. It was enough water to turn dusty limbs muddy, but never enough to get clean. We toweled off, dressed, and marched across the parade deck, still breathing hard from the log run.

The platoon marched in three columns of about a dozen candidates each. In addition to marching everywhere we went, we usually spent an hour or two each evening on the parade deck. Olds called it “driving the bus.” We would march from one end to the other, about-face, march back, and repeat. We carried M-16s on our right shoulders, gripping the buttstock with a hand extended parallel to the deck. In the beginning, Sergeant Olds had called our cadence, but he slowly shifted the responsibility to us. It wasn’t words so much as a haunting wail, rising and falling like a plaintive southern spiritual. But the wail had a beat, and our heels struck the pavement in unison. Halfway across the parade deck on our way to the chow hall, Olds pulled me from the formation to take over calling the cadence.

I screwed it up from the first note. My lefts were rights, my rights were lefts, and the tempo surged and sagged. The platoon worked not to expose me, but it was too confusing. They collapsed into a pitter-patter of mismatched heels, like a group of tourists out for a morning stroll. Olds lit into me.

“Daggone it, candidate. You know what happens to lieutenants who can’t even march a platoon?”

I croaked, “No, Sergeant Instructor Sergeant Olds.”

“They get their Marines killed in combat.” This fate, at OCS, was promised not only to candidates who couldn’t march but also to those who failed to blacken their boots, polish their brass belt buckles, or put on their socks quickly enough. “You want to get your Marines killed?”

“No, Sergeant Olds.” I realized my mistake the second it left my lips.

Olds shrieked, “What did you call me? You think we’re drinking buddies? You want to date my sister?”

“No, Sergeant Instructor Sergeant Olds,” I yelled as loudly as I could.

“Candidate, I think you’re a soft one.” Olds dropped his voice to a low snarl and put his face inches from mine. “And I run the soft ones out before they can get Marines killed. You just remember that.”

Olds rattled me. I slunk back into the platoon, where my buddies whispered encouragement, saying everyone got his day in the sun. But I was nervous. I wanted to be there, and I tried hard. For the first time in my life, desire and effort wouldn’t be enough. I was learning that in the Marines, the only easy day was yesterday. Success the day before meant nothing, and tomorrow might never happen. I woke up each morning at Quantico wondering whether I’d still be there that night.

The candidate chow hall was in a low-slung building on the banks of the Potomac River, across a set of railroad tracks from our squad bay and the parade deck. We crossed the tracks on a footbridge, winding up and down the ramps twice for each meal, three times a day. Three hundred seventy-eight crossings during the course of the summer. OCS didn’t allow candidates to wear wristwatches, and wall clocks were intentionally few. We measured time from meal to meal.

I shuffled through the food line holding my tray in front of me and parallel to the ground, elbows bent ninety degrees, thumbs and forefingers touching in small circles. Sergeant Olds demanded this posture because it mimicked the way we held our rifles at shoulder arms while marching. Those with the best muscle memory, he said, will graduate. Those without can join the Army. A gauntlet of screaming instructors lined the path from the chow line to the tables. After my ass-chewing on the parade deck, I was desperate to avoid being singled out. I ducked my head and plunged through, not wanting to waste my precious meal time at the position of attention listening to a spittle-laced lecture on the virtues of endurance or loyalty. The harassment, I suspected, wasn’t random. The staff pulled candidates they thought needed punishment or a challenge. Apparently, I’d had my dose for the morning because I slipped among the tables untouched.

I sat at a Formica table with my back straight and my heels together at a perfect forty-five-degree angle. The genteel posture was a façade. There were no manners here, no conversations with tablemates. I shoveled food into my mouth, dripping flecks of syrup and gravy down my camouflage blouse. My mission for the next three or four minutes was to consume enough calories for my body to recover from the log run and make it through the morning.

Classes filled most of each day between morning PT and evening drill practice on the parade deck. We marched to the classrooms, usually Quonset huts or converted aircraft hangars, and filed silently down the rows of tables. We couldn’t sit until Olds gave the command. When the whole platoon stood at attention by its chairs, Olds would roar, “Ready. Seats!”

“Kill!” we shouted in response. It was an early step toward acclimating us to violence. We had one second to drop into our chairs, or else we’d stand and do it again. Each candidate carried a binder filled with loose-leaf paper and outlines of the classes. The instructors were mostly officers, captains and first lieutenants, and they stuck to the Marine Corps’s formulaic teaching method. We memorized the names and dates of famous battles and the exploits of renowned Marines. We learned the fourteen leadership traits, the eight principles of camouflage, and the six battlefield disciplines.

The curriculum seemed ridiculous at first. My liberal arts education had valued discussion, debate, and nuanced interpretations of complex ideas. But in combat, we were told, there’s rarely time for discussion and debate. Complex ideas must be made simple, or they’ll remain ideas and never be put into action. The leadership traits were bearing, courage, decisiveness, dependability, endurance, enthusiasm, initiative, integrity, judgment, justice, knowledge, loyalty, tact, and unselfishness. We drilled them, and every other list, over and over again. I memorized them in the classroom, in line at the chow hall, and in my rack at night. The purpose, we were promised, was to make them instinctive. They would become innate to our decision-making process and infuse everything we did without even a conscious thought.

One of the captains stood at the front of the classroom and read a quote from T. E. Lawrence, leader of the Arab revolt against the Turks in World War I. “Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool and that is the test of generals. It can only be ensured by instinct, sharpened by thought practicing the stroke so often that at the crisis it is as natural as a reflex.” He said we would be taught one tenth at OCS and another five or six tenths at The Basic School (TBS). If we were lucky, we’d pick up an additional one or two tenths in our first platoons. The final tenth could be learned only in combat. That tenth, for us, seemed impossibly remote.

During the first three weeks, I slept in five different racks, since we continually shifted to fill the gaps left by dropped candidates. Their transgressions varied. Two fell out of three runs in a row. “Not physically qualified.” Another couldn’t grasp the concepts in our written work. “Academic failure.” They were kicked out, taunted by the staff as they emptied their footlockers, and then ridiculed after they had gone. The fourth, though, was treated more solemnly.

Candidate Dunkin had been struggling since the first week when Olds had singled him out as an individual. The accusation proved true. I was learning that the staff valued enthusiasm and loyalty above all else. They wanted candidates with heart who could work as a team. A struggling candidate could redeem himself by trying harder, wringing performance from effort. Dunkin chose a different course.

Dietary supplements were strictly forbidden. We drank water, not Gatorade, and ate chow hall food, not laboratory-engineered performance bars. Every candidate was warned that being caught with a supplement of any kind would be an honor violation, meaning instant dismissal from the course.

As we toed the line one evening, ready for taps, the staff announced a footlocker inspection. Hidden in Dunkin’s shoeshine kit was a bottle of ephedrine. He stood there, blubbering, as Staff Sergeant Carpenter calmly told him to pack his bag and go stand in the hallway. No screaming or theatrics, just a stern dismissal, a clear statement that he was not Marine officer material. The platoon stood at attention, watching in silence as he packed. No one said a word as he shouldered his seabag and walked between the rows of racks.

Dunkin had broken the cardinal rule — the bond of trust between leaders and led. The leadership traits were more than a list to memorize for a test. Dependability. Integrity. Judgment. That evening, I understood for the first time the relationship between the sergeant instructors and the officer candidates: learn to obey before you command. For ten weeks, the staff owned us. They could yell and scream, make us put on and take off our socks fifteen times each morning, and harass us from reveille to taps. But after commissioning, the authority would shift. The candidates would become lieutenants, then captains and colonels. They would be the commanders leading enlisted Marines in battle. The staff had a very real, vested interest in killing bad candidates before bad officers killed Marines.

3

HALFWAY THROUGH OCS, I was in the spotlight. I couldn’t march, failed to appreciate the importance of aligning the right edge of my belt buckle with the right edge of the top button of my trousers, and had a masochistic reaction to being screamed at: I stared into my assailant’s eyes, prompting a whole new round of abuse. Olds had singled me out so many times that he stopped using my name. He’d say, “Well, well, well, look who it is,” or “What a surprise.” I was in danger of dismissal for “failure to adapt.”

On a Friday afternoon, we lined up our folding campstools in the back of the squad bay and sat at attention, backs straight and hands on our knees, waiting for a speech by our platoon commander, Captain Fanning. I later learned that OCS platoon command is just a holding tank for young captains returning to Quantico for advanced training. It’s a cushy job to decompress after a Fleet tour — easy hours, little supervision, and no real responsibility. OCS is run by sergeants, staff sergeants, and gunnery sergeants — the notorious “gunnies.” But the truth was still hidden from me in the summer of 1998, and the captain was power personified. He walked down the aisle, and we jumped to our feet.

Captain Fanning was a soft-spoken helicopter pilot. I stared at the silver bars on his collar and the gold aviator wings pinned above his left breast. He held a single piece of paper and told us to sit down. Fanning looked at us with a mixture of empathy and disdain.

“Five weeks down. The mission of OCS is to train, evaluate, and screen. Mainly screen. We want to see who has Marine officer potential. It’s a game. You have to play by the rules. Our rules, the Marine Corps’s rules. Most of you are probably college athletes.” Candidates nodded, grateful for the human connection. Fanning went on, “This is no different from football: learn the rules and play the game. Trust me, this isn’t the real Corps. Just do what you have to do here, and then you can get on with your career and your life. Four more weeks till the Crucible starts.”

The Crucible was our final exercise. We’d all heard rumors about three or four days of running through the woods with no food and no sleep. I was distracted thinking about it when Fanning looked down at his paper and changed the subject. “I want to talk with you today about leadership — five of the Marine Corps’s leadership principles that helped me in the Fleet.”

I uncapped my pen, thinking it futile to reduce such complex ideas to a list. But Fanning didn’t only run through the five principles. He told us what they meant and how he, as an officer, had used them. “First,” he counseled, “you must be technically and tactically proficient.” There was no excuse for not knowing everything about the weapon, radio, aircraft, or whatever else it was you were trying to use. “Being a nice guy is great, but plenty of nice guys have gotten half their Marines killed because they didn’t know their jobs.

“Second, make sound and timely decisions.” According to Captain Fanning, one of the gravest errors was waiting to have all the information before making a decision. In the fog of combat, you’ll never have all the information. A good plan violently executed now, he urged, was better than a great plan later. Be decisive, act, and be ready to adapt.

Fanning’s third piece of advice was simple: “Set the example.” As officers, all eyes would be on us. We would set the tone, and the unit would take its cues from our attitudes — good and bad. “Why do we care here about how your uniform looks?” Fanning asked us. “Because your Marines will care.” Sloppiness begets sloppiness, and small inattentions would set us on the slippery slope to large ones. That, according to the Marine Corps, was the causal link between the alignment of my belt buckle and the survival of my future platoon.

“Fourth, know your men and look out for their welfare.” Fanning smiled as he remembered Marines he’d served with. They will, he said, follow you through the gates of hell if they trust you truly care about them. “This is not about you.” Fanning spoke the sentence slowly, emphasizing each word. He explained that the Corps existed for the enlisted infantryman. “Everyone else — you aspiring infantry officers included — is only support.

“Finally,” Fanning exhorted us, “train your men as a team.” A unit’s good morale and esprit de corps depend on each man’s feeling part of it. Marines need to know one another’s jobs. “That includes you and your platoon sergeant,” he added. A new lieutenant and his enlisted second-in-command had to share their responsibilities. Too often, Fanning said, platoon commanders focused on the mission while platoon sergeants focused on troop welfare. “Each of you has to do both.” Fanning drove the point home with a question: “What’s the difference between you and your platoon sergeant?” He paused and then answered it himself. “One bullet.”

Captain Fanning wasn’t General George S. Patton in front of an American flag. He didn’t rant and rave and wave a pistol in the air. Because of that, his words resonated with me. He gave us a glimpse beyond the fantasy world of OCS. We began to see the connection between practicing and playing, between fake pressure and real pressure. Captain Fanning had explained the purpose of the game.

From that afternoon on, I accepted the rules and lived by them. When getting dressed by the numbers, I tried to move faster and yell louder than anyone else. When Olds made me call cadence, I did it with heart and never backed down. He stopped caring that my calls confused the platoon. Marching didn’t matter. It was about cool under pressure. It was about detachment. We had to retain our ability to think when the world was crumbling around us. Not for ourselves, but for our Marines.

Starting the next afternoon, we got twenty-four hours off. My dad picked me up at Quantico’s gate and took me to Annapolis for the day. I tried to describe OCS, but the stress and the chaos were laughable, a million miles away. It embarrassed me to seem too affected by them. After all, this was training, really nothing more than a summer job. But it was more. The bullets were blanks, and the screaming was an act, but the test was real. By the Marine Corps’s own admission, I was being screened to see if I had what it takes to be a combat leader. It was a rite of passage, my generation’s chariot race or duel. I wanted to pass that test more than I had ever wanted anything in my life.

Growing up, I’d tested myself on the athletic field. A bad football play or a lost lacrosse game could be shaken off — commiserate with teammates and look forward to next week. In college, I was never truly challenged. I worked hard to do well but never doubted the outcome. I knew from the first day of freshman year that I would graduate. At OCS, my commission was mine to lose. And I could lose it at any moment.

The future disappeared, and my selfish motives went with it. I existed only in the present. The one thing keeping me going was being part of a group, knowing each mistake made my comrades a little weaker. Group punishment, shunned in most of American society, was a staple at OCS. Platoons fight as groups. They live or die as groups. So we were disciplined as a group. The epiphany struck one morning the next week as I locked my body in the leaning rest — the “up” pushup position. Sergeant Olds put the whole platoon in that posture while he berated a candidate at the far end of the squad bay for having scuffs on his boots. The message wasn’t in Olds’s words; it was in recognizing that this wasn’t about how much we could take, but about how much we could give.

As we moved into the last month of the summer, the days seemed to accelerate. Riding the bus through Quantico’s gates felt like a long time ago. I thought of my early mistakes and laughed. At least they’d kept me around long enough to learn from them. The Crucible was only a week away. We would put together all the classes and PT in one final test. There were rumors of a ceremony after the Crucible. We would receive an Eagle, Globe, and Anchor, the traditional symbol of the Marine Corps: a token of our survival.

During the final week, each day ended as it began, with our platoon toeing the line along the length of the squad bay. We stood at attention in brown T-shirts, green shorts, and shower shoes. The sergeant instructors strutted past, berating us mostly, but then including a few nuggets of praise.

“You candidates are the worst we’ve seen yet. The slowest. The dumbest. The most selfish.” Olds pointed at a different candidate with each pejorative tag. I exhaled when he moved on without pointing at me. “We may still send most of you back to college. Back to playing tennis and mixing martinis and thinking you’re better than the men who defend your freedom.” He wasn’t bluffing. We had lost another platoon-mate earlier that week — this time to a stress fracture. “But a few of you have heart. And we’ll make those candidates into Marines. They’ll go out and kill communists for Suzy Rottencrotch.” Suzy was a Marine Corps metaphor for every cheating wife and girlfriend we’d left behind. Nothing in our lives was sacred to Olds except our ability to lead Marines. He finished with one of his most often repeated pieces of advice: “A little heart will get you a long way in the Marine Corps.”

We took it as praise.

At the end of each night’s monologue, we hydrated. “Hydrate” is another entry in the Marine lexicon. Marines don’t drink; they hydrate. Many of our platoon’s casualties spent their last hour as Marine officer candidates sprawled in a tub of ice, getting jabbed with a rectal thermometer called “the silver bullet.” Heat stroke in July in Virginia does not discriminate between tall and short, black and white, or good candidate and bad candidate. It knows only hydrated and dehydrated. So there was no resistance to the nightly command to hydrate. We tilted our heads back and poured a whole canteen of water down our throats, holding the empty canteen upside down over our heads to prove it was empty. Some candidates had a hard time keeping so much liquid down, heaving streams of regurgitated water across the aisle to pool around the feet of the men on the other side, who kept their eyes stoically to the front to avoid the wrath of the stalking instructors.

Olds pointed to the puddles, deeply offended. “This is my house. That water better be cleaned up by reveille. And none of you maggots better get out of your racks tonight either. The Marine Corps Order says sleep, so sleep.”

At the command “mount the racks,” we clambered into our bunks. But even then the day wasn’t over. We lay at the position of attention, arms at our sides with fists clenched and thumbs on our imaginary trouser seams, heels together with feet at a forty-five-degree angle, eyes on the ceiling.

Olds stood in the center of the squad bay with his hands on his hips.

“Reeeaaaaddddy!” The word came not from his mouth, or even from his lungs, but from someplace deep inside known only to drill instructors and Italian tenors.

“Sing!”

“From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli.” Forty-five voices in the first week, then forty-one, then thirty-eight as the summer progressed, bellowed “The Marines’ Hymn.” Not “The Marine Corps Hymn” but “The Marines’ Hymn,” the song that belonged to the Marines.

“First to fight for right and freedom, and to keep our honor clean.” All the pride, all the striving, all the heart was there in those lyrics being shouted at the ceiling.

“If the Army and the Navy ever look on Heaven’s scenes, they will find the streets are guarded by United States Marines.”

That moment at the end of the hymn, when silence roared in our ears and I could hear my fellow candidates catching their breath, was my favorite time of the whole day.

“The more we sweat in peace, the less we bleed in war. Good night, candidates.” Sergeant Olds always said “we,” never “you.” He flipped out the lights, leaving us at attention in the darkness with the airfield’s rotating beacon flashing across the walls.

I woke up early on August 7. Normally, I was so exhausted I slept until the lights came on. But I was excited. The Crucible would start that night. Only one week left before graduation. We sweated through our morning workout and marched to chow. The platoon functioned as a single organism now, humming along under its own power. We strutted across the parade deck, calling our own cadence. As we crossed the bridge, I saw Staff Sergeant Carpenter watching us from the concrete pad outside the chow hall. He looked stern.

Holding up a hand to interrupt our march, he motioned us toward him.

“Candidates, bring it in and listen up.” I expected to be berated for some imaginary transgression, such as leaving dirt on the squad bay floor.

“Terrorists have attacked the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Blew ’em up. Marines guard those embassies. Some of my brothers — your future brothers — are probably dead. Oughta get your blood up. Y’all are about to be in a growth industry. Go eat chow.”

We lived in an information vacuum — no weather forecasts, no baseball scores, certainly no analysis of the destruction of two American embassies.

Candidates whispered urgent conversations in the chow line.

“What does this mean?”

“War.”

“Bullshit. It don’t mean anything. Not for us at least. The guys in the Fleet might get some play, but not us.”

“Maybe eventually.”

“No way. This ain’t World War Three. Just a couple of bombings. We’ll lob some missiles at ’em, and that’ll be that. Damn. They burned the pancakes again.”

The Crucible started at ten o’clock. After a full day, Sergeant Olds had us sing the hymn as usual. But instead of turning out the lights afterward, we shouldered our packs and left the squad bay for a ten-mile hike through the dark woods. Olds didn’t scream much anymore. He just told us what to do, and we did it. We started off down a gravel road in two columns. I walked next to Dave. He smiled and whistled, relentlessly upbeat. I half expected him to start skipping. When we turned off the road, the platoon stretched out in single file along a narrow dirt path. We paralleled the swamp I’d seen from the bus and passed the airfield where the president’s helicopter, Marine One, was based. Quantico didn’t feel like a prison anymore.

In the dawn light, Sergeant Olds said it was time for the Quigley. I had heard about the Quigley. We had all heard about it. Most of OCS was successfully kept under wraps, so each day brought unwelcome surprises, but this muddy trench had become an icon of Quantico’s training, the sort of thing generals recalled in speeches.

We jogged down a trail through the woods. After a night of hiking without sleep, we stumbled along at half speed. The temperature was already ninety degrees, and sweat soaked my uniform. Canteens thudded against my hips with each step and the pack straps cut into my shoulders. Candidates strung out along the trail, urging one another on. I panted into a clearing and saw the trail disappear into a bog. A wooden pier extended across it, clearly not intended for me. My path lay in the mud beneath strands of barbed wire next to the pier.

I dove under the first strand into the stinking beige water, eager to impress the instructors with my gung ho. It was deeper than I expected, and I sank beneath the water. I recovered and began to crawl, scratching my way forward beneath the banks of mud.

Another candidate struggled along in front of me, and I made it my goal to close the gap between my hands and his boots. Suddenly, he stood straight up, shouting and waving. Something long and black hung from his upper arm: a snake.

Christ, I thought, there are snakes in here. I started to stand.

A boot heel between my shoulder blades drove me, face-first, back beneath the water.

“What do you think you’re doin’, boy? Crawl.”

“Aye-aye, Sergeant Instructor.” It came out garbled because mud stuck to the roof of my mouth like peanut butter. I continued pulling myself forward, past the candidate with the snake on his arm. The instructor who had kicked me was waiting as I climbed out of the Quigley.

“You can’t compromise a mission and get men killed for a harmless little snake. Not even for a poisonous big snake. Discipline always. Now get out of my sight.”

His message was clear: you need discipline most when it’s hardest to muster — when you’re tired, hungry, outside your comfort zone. I struggled for the next two days to stay alert, stay disciplined, and keep my focus on the candidates around me. We worked in squads of twelve, rotating as squad leader and attacking through acres of humid woods. Our tactics were unsophisticated: walk as quietly as possible to the objective and then charge it, wildly firing blanks from our M-16s. The mission of OCS was more to gauge spirit than to teach us skills.

It rained through both nights, and we slept in Korean War-era pup tents seemingly designed to collect water and channel it onto us. The rain and the gnawing hunger (we received only one meal per day) conspired to keep us awake. By the third afternoon, the dirt-encrusted faces of the candidates around me reflected the countless attacks and long runs with all our gear that we had endured. Just a few hours before the Crucible’s end, I was digging a hole to stay awake.

“What the hell are you doing, Candidate?” Olds’s voice suggested that whatever I was doing was not what I ought to be doing.

“Digging a foxhole, Sergeant Instructor Sergeant Olds.”

“Digging a what?”

“A foxhole.” I paused, trying to stand at parade rest while holding a shovel and pushing my helmet up so I could see him more clearly.

“Foxes dig holes to hide in. Marines dig fighting holes to kill the enemy from. Are you planning to hide in your hole or to use it as a weapon to kill the enemy?”

In the Marines, anything can be a weapon; it’s a whole new way of thinking. My plastic MRE (Meal, Ready-to-Eat) spoon was a weapon if I used it as an insulator on a radio antenna so that I could talk to jets and call in air strikes.

“Weapon, Sergeant Instructor.”

“Right. Now who’s providing security for you while you dig this weapon?”

I looked into the brush, searching for the other three candidates in my fire team. They were snoring.

“Candidate, Marines do everything in pairs. We fight in pairs. We patrol in pairs. We dig in pairs. Go to Thailand on deployment, and you’ll see that we even fuck in pairs. A Marine alone is easy to kill. A Marine with a buddy is hard as hell to kill. Don’t let me catch you alone again.”

Train your men as a team. I cursed myself for letting fatigue get to me.

Later in the morning, we packed our gear and hiked down to the parade deck. Hulking gray CH-53 Super Stallions, bigger than school buses, waited to ferry us over to TBS. It was my first helicopter ride. We sat on nylon benches along the sides of the cargo bay, and I looked past the tail ramp as the parade deck and our barracks fell away beneath us. Crossing I-95, I looked down at the cars filled with commuters. Clean people, well-fed, rested, in control of their days. I realized I wouldn’t trade places with any of them.

Candidates were grouped in fours as we gathered at the edge of the TBS landing zone. A second lieutenant met each group. These men had been on the Crucible not long before and knew to take us straight to the chow hall. We filled our plates with macaroni and pizza and ate slowly. No sergeant instructors lined the paths to our seats. No one threatened us for looking around the room or failing to keep our boot heels together. It felt rebellious. We went back for seconds.

Outside the chow hall, the platoon assembled in a formation. We were filthy but stood straight. Our rows and columns were perfectly aligned. Sergeant Olds made his way down each row, stopping before every candidate to shake his right hand and press a cold piece of metal into his left. I hoped Olds would say something encouraging to me, maybe note my improvement or say he had enjoyed having me in the class. Instead, he locked me with unblinking eyes and said, “You ain’t done yet.”

But we were done. I held the coveted Eagle, Globe, and Anchor. I snuck a look when Olds moved on to the next candidate in the formation. One inch across and anodized in black, it was a pin, eventually for wearing on a dress uniform. It was the symbol of the Marine Corps, immortalized on bumper stickers and baseball caps across America. With it in hand, I could go back to college for my senior year. When I returned to Quantico, it would be as a second lieutenant.

4

ON JUNE 12, 1999, in Dartmouth’s Baker Library, I raised my right hand to take the oath of office as a Marine Corps second lieutenant. “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

My mother pinned the gold bars on my epaulets, and my father presented me with the Mameluke sword. I knew from my summer at Quantico that the sword was a reminder of Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon’s expedition against the Barbary pirates in 1805. But I had no idea what it meant to be a Marine. Wearing my dress blues for the first time, I felt like an impostor in a Halloween costume.

After OCS graduation, I could have walked away from the Marines with no obligation. The Marine Corps liked the program because it attracted people who might not sign up for four years otherwise. Candidates liked it because we could return to school for a year and debate whether we wanted to go back to the Marines for a longer stay. For me, it was no decision at all. OCS had planted the hook. I hadn’t suffered through ten weeks at Quantico for nothing.

My classmates would soon be marching off to their graduate schools and consulting jobs, but our paths had not yet diverged. We still lived in the same world. Walking together out into the sunlight on the Hanover green, I felt the first twinge of impending separation. I had already noticed a subtle change in my worldview. My tolerance for abstract theories and academic posturing had evaporated. Instead of classes in philosophy and classical languages, I gravitated toward national security and current events. When the Marines went into Kosovo, Macedonia, and Liberia, I followed their progress every day. The world’s problems felt closer and more personal.

I had orders to check into TBS on a Sunday in November 1999. On the way down to Quantico from my parents’ house in Baltimore, I detoured off the highway in Rosslyn, Virginia. It was a spontaneous decision. High on a hill above the Potomac stood the Marine Corps War Memorial. My last visit had been as a child, and I wanted to see it again.

The night was starry and cold, and Washington’s monuments glowed across the river. Floodlights bathed the statue. An American flag flapped above five faceless Marines and a Navy corpsman, modeled on Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima in 1945. The anonymity of the statue appealed to me. Six men. No names, ranks, or distinguishing features. They were Marines.

As I circled the memorial, I read the roll of battles burnished in gold on the granite base. Revolutionary War, when a newspaper ad had sought “a few good men” for the new Marine Corps. Spanish War, when correspondent Richard Harding Davis had reported, “The Marines have landed and have the situation well in hand.” Belleau Wood, where, in 1918, First Sergeant Dan Daly had led his men over the top, yelling, “Come on, you sons of bitches. Do you want to live forever?” Iwo Jima, where nearly 6,000 Marines had died and 17,000 had been wounded capturing an island one-eighth the size of Washington, D.C. Admiral Chester Nimitz had had the last word on that campaign: “Uncommon valor was a common virtue.” Korea’s Chosin Reservoir, where the First Marine Division had fought its way out of a Chinese trap in weather so cold that gasoline froze. Lebanon, where an early shot in the terror war had been fired on October 23, 1983. A truck bomb had ripped through the Marine barracks, killing 241 Americans.

The carved band of campaign names stirred me. But it wasn’t the past that gave me pause. It wasn’t the names already engraved. It was all the blank space next to them for battles still unfought. I looked at the expanse of smooth black stone flecked with gold and tried to imagine the names to come. On that quiet night in 1999, it seemed inconceivable that I might be part of them.

The TBS campus, called Camp Barrett, looks more like a dilapidated community college than the cradle of the Marine officer corps. On that first Monday morning, I watched lieutenants hurrying back and forth between classes. They carried brief bags and plastic coffee mugs, like graduate students. Camp Barrett’s dozen anonymous buildings include two barracks, several classrooms, a pool, a theater, and an armory, all surrounded by flat expanses of grass that double as playing fields when not being used as helicopter landing zones.

The compound’s only distinctive feature is Iron Mike, a bronze statue of a Marine holding a rifle in his right hand and waving on unseen men with his left. The name is a misnomer because the figure is actually Lieutenant Colonel William Leftwich. In 1970, Colonel Leftwich had commanded the First Reconnaissance Battalion in Vietnam. We new lieutenants knew nothing of First Recon, except that it boasted the best unit insignia in the whole Marine Corps: a skull and crossbones superimposed on the blue diamond of the First Marine Division, surrounded by the words “Swift, Silent, Deadly.”

Colonel Leftwich had ridden along on every emergency extraction of his reconnaissance teams. These were the most dangerous missions of all — teams calling for emergency extract had usually been compromised and suffered casualties and were being chased by larger enemy forces. After rescuing a team called “Rush Act” on a stormy day, the helicopter carrying Leftwich and his Marines had flown into a mountain-side, killing everyone aboard.

It was next to Iron Mike that our class assembled that morning. I stood by the statue, conscious again that I was being intentionally steeped in the history of the Corps and its heroes. Around me stretched the six platoons of Alpha Company, 224 newly commissioned second lieutenants. A lanky guy with a wry smile stood next to me, and I turned to introduce myself.

He took my hand, saying, “Jim Beal. Tennessee.”

I couldn’t know that morning how much Jim and I would share in the coming two years. I knew only that his laid-back confidence was reassuring, another indicator that TBS would be different from Officer Candidates School. Jim’s barracks room was next to mine. Platoons of forty lieutenants were divided into squads of thirteen or fourteen, and the squads were further divided into fire teams of four or five. Jim and I were half our fire team. We would spend the next six months at Camp Barrett, learning all the basic skills we would need as Marine officers. The Corps’s mantra is “Every Marine a rifleman.” Its corollary is “Every Marine officer a rifle platoon commander.” In the Marine Corps, jet pilots, clerks, and truck drivers are all infantrymen first. TBS would teach us those basic infantry skills, plus all the rules, regulations, and administrative requirements that are part of a peacetime military. The greatest topic of conversation at TBS was MOS selection. Military occupational specialties are the specific jobs in the Corps — aviator, artillery, logistics, tanks, infantry, and others — and they’re competitive. We would be assigned to the various specialties according to class rank. The most coveted of them was infantry.

President Harry Truman once said that the Marines had a propaganda machine second only to Stalin’s. He was right. My impression of the Corps, even as a newly commissioned officer, was one of a lean, mean fighting force, all teeth and no tail. I was shocked when my platoon commander, Captain McHugh, told his assembled lieutenants that only 10 percent of us would be infantry officers. The rest would go to the other combat arms — artillery, amphibious assault vehicles, and tanks — or to support jobs such as supply, administration, and even financial management.

McHugh urged us to keep an open mind and learn about each job before deciding which to compete for. I nodded but knew that only one thing would satisfy me: infantry officer. I wanted the purity of a man with a weapon traveling great distances on foot, navigating, stalking, calculating, using personal skill. I couldn’t let a jet or a tank get in the way, and I certainly wasn’t going to sit behind a desk. I wanted to be tested, to see if I had what it takes. The Marine Corps had recently unveiled a recruiting campaign using the motto “Nobody likes to fight, but somebody has to know how.” It was dropped because Marines did like to fight and aspiring Marine officers wanted to fight.

The grunt life was untainted. I sensed a continuity with other infantrymen stretching back to Thermopylae. Weapons and tactics may have changed, but they were only accouterments. The men stayed the same. In a time of satellites and missile strikes, the part of me that felt I’d been born too late was drawn to the infantry, where courage still counts. Being a Marine was not about money for graduate school or learning a skill; it was a rite of passage in a society becoming so soft and homogenized that the very concept was often sneered at.

During our first week at TBS, Captain McHugh asked us to prepare a list of our MOS choices from first to twenty-fourth. He said he would use the lists while evaluating us over the coming months and would do his best, while remembering the paramount “needs of the service,” to assign us to one of our top three choices. I turned in a paper listing my top three choices as infantry, infantry, and infantry.

“Lieutenant Fick.” The captain had scanned through the sheets and called me to the front of the room. He sounded pained. “Don’t be a smart-ass. Put down three choices.”

“All I want is to be an infantry officer, sir.”

“We don’t always get what we want, Lieutenant. Half the men in this class want to be grunts. The Marine Corps will put you where the Marine Corps needs you. The only way to have your pick of jobs is to graduate first in your class. Do you think you can graduate at the top of this class?”

Remembering my struggle just to graduate at all from OCS, let alone at the top, I chose amphibious assault vehicles and tanks as my second and third choices.

I loved TBS as much as I had hated OCS. Jim joked that the acronym stood for “The Bleeding Sphincter,” but the pace was high, the material was clearly relevant, and we were finally being trained instead of screened. We spent our first month on the rifle range, learning to shoot the M-16 and the Beretta 9 mm pistol. Some of my classmates had been hunters since they’d learned to walk, but I had fired a gun only two or three times in my life. The Marine Corps is a gun club, the infantry most of all, and I realized I was starting with a deficit. I had three weeks to pay attention and learn how to shoot. On the last morning, Qualification Day, we would shoot for score, and the score would determine what shooting badge we wore on our uniforms. Those who barely qualified would be Marksmen, above them were Sharpshooters, and the best riflemen would be Experts.

“It’s like condoms,” Jim explained. “Large, extra-large, and extra-extra-large.”

I laughed, but in my mind no self-respecting infantry officer could stand in front of his first platoon with anything less than an Expert shooting badge.

The Marines’ known-distance shooting course features slow and rapid shots at human-size targets from two hundred, three hundred, and five hundred yards. Slow shots work out to about one round per minute from the sitting, kneeling, and standing positions. Rapid shots emphasize firing, re-aiming, and firing again — ten rounds in a minute. We aimed through “iron sights,” not scopes, and learned that good shooting is a matter of discipline. There is no Zen involved, and hardly any luck. Do what you are told, and you will hit the target.

The Corps teaches three fundamentals of marksmanship: sight picture, bone support, and natural point of aim. Sight picture is lining up the rifle’s front and rear sights with the target — a simple enough proposition. Bone support means resting the rifle on the steadiest surface available: bone. Muscles and tendons waver and shake, but bone resting on earth is like a tripod for a camera. The third element, natural point of aim, is the most important. With each of the shooter’s breaths, the rifle muzzle rises. It settles with exhalation back to a natural resting point between breaths — the natural point of aim. Make the bull’s-eye your natural point of aim, squeeze the trigger near the bottom of your breath, and you’ll hit the target.

For two weeks, we ran through the fundamentals, arriving at the range in the predawn darkness and staying until midafternoon. I learned that consistency is key, and I was maniacal about it: same (light) breakfast each morning, same layers of clothing, same method of cleaning my rifle at the end of each day. The weather was gorgeous, cool mornings giving way to warm sun with almost no wind. It was perfect shooting weather.

We began firing for score in the third week, but only Thursday would count. There were 300 possible points on the course, and I needed 220 to qualify as an Expert. On Monday, I shot 180. Tuesday, 210. Wednesday, 220. Hovering at the cusp, I went to bed Wednesday night thinking about consistency. I had to replicate everything perfectly. The only element out of my control was the weather.

I woke at 0400 on Thursday and pulled open the blinds on my only window. Rain streaked the glass, and naked trees danced in the wind. A cold December morning. Damn. We drew our weapons from the armory and formed up in the parking lot outside Graves Hall for the three-mile hike to the range. Less than an hour after crawling out of my warm bed, I was chugging up the aptly named Cardiac Hill, a steep climb from a creek bed made more difficult by the mud, my heavy pack, and a line of vomiting lieutenants whose breakfasts had been heartier than mine.

It was still dark when we reached the range. I could barely make out the red wind flags through two hundred yards of blowing mist. They snapped parallel to the ground, the strongest wind I had ever shot in. I sat on my ammo can in the dark, shivering and waiting for enough light to start. I thought about the fundamentals as I rubbed a clear spot on the frosty ground at the two-hundred-yard line. Sight picture, bone support, natural point of aim. Do what you’ve been taught, and you’ll hit the target.

Chills shook my body. I had a sweater and jacket in my pack but fought the urge to put them on. Consistency. I hadn’t worn a jacket on the warm days earlier in the week. That extra millimeter of fabric on my arm now would have an outsize effect on the little black disk five football fields away. I willed myself warm.

“With a magazine of ten rounds, load!” The range master’s voice echoed through the fog from his perch in the tower above and behind us.

“Make ready!” I racked my charging handle to the rear and chambered a round.

“Shooters, you may fire when your targets appear.”

I settled my breathing, letting the muzzle rise and fall naturally. I centered the rifle’s front sight post in the aperture of the rear sight and put it on the black target. I pulled my elbows in tight to my body, squirming in the mud to make one connection between rifle, bone, and dirt. Breathing naturally, I made little adjustments until every exhalation put the target in the center of my sights. Then I squeezed the trigger.

Wide to the right. I dialed in a click of windage to correct for the gusts and fired again.

Wide to the right.

Relax. Easy breaths. Back to the basics. Ignore the distractions. No cold, no rain, no wind. Do what they taught you. Line it up. Good support. Easy trigger pull.

Bull’s-eye.

My next twenty shots were all in the black. Shooting was mechanical, rote. The key, as we’d heard so many times, was practicing the stroke and making it instinct. The only skill involved was learning the lessons of those who’d gone before. By the time I walked off the five-hundred-yard line, I had shot a 231.

Learning institutional lessons is the overarching theme of the classes at TBS. Our instructors were fond of pointing at the pile of tactics manuals on each of our desks and saying, “These books are written in the blood of lieutenants and captains who went before you. Learn from their mistakes; don’t repeat them.” The Marine Corps adheres to a crawl-walk-run philosophy, so we spent much of our time in the classroom before going out to the woods to practice what we’d learned. In the beginning, that learning was formulaic, just like OCS.

We learned the six troop-leading procedures by the acronym BAMCIS. Begin planning. Arrange for reconnaissance. Make reconnaissance. Complete the plan. Issue the order. Supervise. We used METT-T to estimate a tactical situation in order to complete the plan: mission, enemy, terrain, troops and fire support available, time. Most of all, we began to issue orders. Not yelled commands in mid-assault, but multipage written orders built around the five-paragraph format called SMEAC: situation, mission, execution, administration and logistics, command and signal. We wrote dozens of them.

Instruction at TBS goes far beyond rote memorization, growing into some amalgamation of chess, history, boxing, and game theory. We studied the fog and friction of war, how the simplest things become difficult. During our written test on the subject, the instructors cranked Metallica at full volume, hurled tennis balls at our heads, and sprayed our faces with water pistols. The lesson was focus: ignore the distractions and do your job.

We learned about warfare’s dynamism. We wouldn’t be fighting wax men in castles. In our instructors’ words, “The enemy has a vote, too.” When confronting an opposing will, we fight people who are also fighting us. They will learn as we learn. Their tactics will evolve as ours do. The key consideration in any tactical move is “to turn the map around.” Look at your own situation from the enemy’s perspective. What are your vulnerabilities? Where will he hit you, and what can you do to defeat him?

Speed, we were taught, is a weapon. Be aggressive. Keep the tempo high. The Marine Corps’s hallmark is maneuver warfare, slipping around the enemy’s hard surfaces and into his open gaps. Never attack into the teeth of the guns. We learned that indecision is a decision, that inaction has a cost all its own. Good commanders act and create opportunities. Great commanders ruthlessly exploit those opportunities and throw the enemy into disarray.

The focus on commanders recognized that war is a human enterprise. Even in the twenty-first century, wars are fought by people, not machines. Commanders must command from where they can influence the action. Marine officers, we were told, lead from the front. They thrive on chaos. We learned that the Corps relies on mission-type orders: “Tell me what to do, not how to do it.” Decentralize command and allow subordinates to operate freely within the framework of the commander’s intent. Train them as a team. Develop trust, loyalty, initiative.

This is the art of war. Some of the terms were new, but the principles had been recorded by Thucydides, Sun Tzu, and Clausewitz. We wanted to get out in the woods and apply them.

5

OUR EVALUATION AT TBS was in three columns: leadership, academics, and military skills. The last was the most significant, and first among those skills was tactical command. We spent much of the winter in the woods and fields surrounding Camp Barrett, practicing tactics as squads and platoons. We attacked and defended, ambushed, raided, patrolled, and did reconnaissance. Lieutenants rotated as leaders of the missions. Before every operation, the leader wrote and delivered a formal order. Sometimes the orders stretched into dozens of pages, accounting for every detail of navigation, communication, resupply, and actions upon running into the enemy.

We bitched and complained about the onerous process of writing orders. Would we have time for this in combat? Of course not, and that was the point. We wrote so many orders in SMEAC format that its components became ingrained. In December, when I was given a tactical problem and one minute to identify key considerations, I may have come up with five. By March, I saw thirty. In May, fifty. Our assessment process sped up, and with it our actions. We learned to use speed as a weapon, to create opportunities and exploit them.

But the learning process was painful, sometimes humiliating. One snowy afternoon, I was chosen to lead the squad in an attack against a defended hilltop. I got disoriented in the white ravines, lost track of our position on the map, and led my twelve Marines up the wrong hill. Sheepishly, I followed an exasperated captain to the correct hill, and we resumed the attack. A few weeks later, after resolving never to screw up my navigation again, I was chosen by Captain McHugh to lead the platoon in a daylight ambush patrol. I picked a trail where we guessed our enemy was operating and split the platoon in half to ambush any traffic from two directions instead of one. We hid in the snow for hours, watching the path. Near sunset, a four-man fire team walked slowly toward us. I sprang the ambush, and the woods erupted with the pops and roars of blanks fired from thirty-five rifles and machine guns. Just as I began to feel smug, Captain McHugh called me over. “Your geometry’s all fucked-up. That half of the platoon,” he pointed at the group across the trail, “would have killed this half if you guys had real bullets. I sat here for two hours waiting for you to notice.”

One of TBS’s most important training evolutions was a five-day field exercise called O&D Week, short for offense and defense. It took place just before MOS selection, so the staff used it as a final vetting of the lieutenants who wanted infantry slots. Captain McHugh turned up the heat on me. On our last full day in the field, he pulled me aside. We stood on a low hilltop and could see through the budding trees for a hundred yards in every direction.

“Lieutenant Fick, I have a mission for you.” McHugh reminded me of the Civil War hero Joshua Chamberlain — a tall, austere New Englander. His smile hovered between mischievous and sadistic. “The Marine Corps fights at night. This evening, for the first time, your platoon will fight at night. I want you to be platoon commander for our first night attack.”

Captain McHugh ran through the scenario, using METT-T. Intelligence assets reported an enemy platoon somewhere in the area. They were static, guarding a cache of supplies. My job was to locate and destroy the platoon before midnight. McHugh smiled and added, “The terrain will be Quantico-like.” It had become a running joke that all our missions, in hypothetical countries around the globe, were conducted on Quantico-like terrain.

Bird-dogging me on the mission would be one of the staff instructors, Captain Gibson. Gibson was a tight-skinned little infantry officer. I had first noticed him in his dress blues in Camp Barrett’s bar. He wore the only combat valor award I had ever seen in real life. One of the lieutenants asked him how he’d earned it.

“I did my job,” he replied.

Now Gibson stood next to me, watching a helicopter drop into the landing zone behind us.

“That smell… that smell.” Gibson closed his eyes as if remembering a particularly delicious meal. “The smell of jet exhaust pumping out the pipes of a helicopter waiting to take you and your Marines to kill the enemy. I love that smell.”

I was unsure what to make of him, so I focused on the mission. A night attack. Thirty-five people. Unfamiliar terrain. I clicked through the checklist of tactical considerations we had learned in the classroom. First we had to locate that enemy position. Turn the map around. I unfolded the laminated sheet from my cargo pocket. Supplies meant supply lines — roads. There were only two road intersections in our zone, and we had patrolled within a hundred meters of one of them earlier in the day. It hadn’t been occupied. I was willing to bet my shot at infantry on the enemy platoon being at the other intersection. Begin planning, arrange reconnaissance, make reconnaissance.

“Sir, I want to recon this road intersection.” I pointed at the spot on the map. “And I want to leave now so I can get there before sunset.”

I settled the platoon into a loose perimeter. They would guard the hilltop until we returned. I gathered three other Marines and we set off toward the intersection, with Captain Gibson shadowing a few meters behind. We were racing the sun. I wanted to reach the intersection in time to see the terrain in daylight and then return to brief the platoon before it was completely dark. Following trails, rivers, or other “natural lines of drift” is a lazy Marine’s death wish, a tactical sin we had been taught never to commit. I led us straight down a creek bed, imagining Captain Gibson crossing out “infantry” in his notebook and replacing it with “supply.” But the risk was calculated, not a gamble. We had to hurry, and this little valley would be a comfortable feature to steer the platoon in the dark. Fog. Friction. Keep it simple.

For the first time all week, I was grateful for Virginia’s humidity. Moisture in the air muffled our whispered voices and dulled the clanks of rifles and gear vests on branches. Sodden leaves deformed compliantly underfoot, and we padded along as if on pile carpet. Draws cut into the hillside to our left. According to my map, the third one we passed would lead us up to the road intersection. I counted them, trying to match the lines on the map to the rolling terrain. When we reached the third notch in the hillside, I knelt down next to an oak tree and motioned the Marines around me.

“This is our turn. Take a good look and remember it for later. I’m taping an IR chem light to this tree so we have a guide in the dark.”

I unwrapped an infrared chemical glow stick, visible only through night vision goggles, and cracked it. Using a roll of electrical tape looped around a carabiner on my web gear, I taped the chem light to the tree trunk at knee level, positioning it to be visible from down the valley we would approach from, but not from higher in the draw near the road intersection.

Slowly and silently, we began to move up the draw. Less than three hundred meters from the tree where I’d taped the chem light, I dropped to a knee again. The human eye notices movement and contrast. Up ahead, through the dense leaves, I saw a color lighter than anything around us. Too light. Man-made light.

We crept forward, inching along on our hands and knees and moving diagonally out of the draw to the high ground on the side where we could take a better look. The color was dirt — freshly turned, piled, reddish orange dirt. Fighting-hole dirt, dug by the enemy platoon. I eased down onto my stomach and debated whether to move closer. We had found them. Now, with a little more snooping, I could figure out how they were set up, maybe even locate the end of their lines so we could come back with the whole platoon and turn their flank. Rather than attack into their defenses, we could go around and hit them from behind. Maneuver. Captain McHugh would be impressed.

But I fought the urge. This reconnaissance mission had already been a success. We located the enemy and marked a route by which to return. Greed could cost me all my gains. We would probably be compromised if we tried to get closer in daylight. The smart thing to do was to back away and be thankful. I remembered the “80 percent solution” — a good plan now was better than a perfect plan later. We had crossed the threshold of action. This was enough information to do the job; now the task was to do it. We backed slowly down the side of the draw. The other Marines fell into formation around me, and we looped back up the river valley to the waiting platoon, careful not to retrace our steps.

In the fading light, I briefed my squad leaders. There wasn’t time for a full operations order. I was thankful for all those months of repetition. Mission. Enemy. Terrain. Signal plan. Casualties. Navigation. Fire support. We huddled under a poncho to hide the red-lens flashlight. I ran through the plan. The other lieutenants nodded, confident that we had covered the most likely contingencies. We would step off one hour after sunset.

I guided the point man through the trees with silent glances and hand motions. A quarter-moon shone overhead, bright enough to see the outlines of Marines among the trees but not enough to cast shadows. I scanned ahead with my night vision goggles, hoping the infrared chem light was making good on its advertised eight-hour burn time. Every Marine is a cynic, and every cynic knows our equipment is made by the lowest bidder. I cursed myself for not taping two lights to the tree. For the cynic, two is one, and one is none.

Just when I began to worry that we had passed the turn, I saw the light ahead. I steered the platoon up into the draw and signaled for them to stop. Each Marine dropped obediently to a knee, turning the moving column into a stationary, cigar-shaped perimeter. I peered over the hill and saw the faint outlines of turned dirt. A dim red-lens flashlight bounced along in the hand of a person walking the lines of the enemy position. They were still there, and apparently they didn’t know that we were again here.

I grabbed Jim Beal, who was in charge of our machine guns. “Take the guns to the top of this hill. Set up quietly. I’m taking the platoon around to the right.” Jim nodded, and I whispered, “We’ll initiate with a radio call, green star backup, and then you suppress all along the ridgeline as we sweep across from right to left. Consolidate on the objective. Got that?”

Jim flashed a thumbs-up. I planned to start the attack with an order on the radio. If that didn’t work, I would fire a green flare into the sky as a signal to open fire. The machine guns would shift their fire across the enemy position in advance of our attacking Marines, hopefully mowing down resistance like a scythe.

As Jim crawled up the hill with his machine gunners in tow, the squad leaders took their Marines around its base to set up for our assault. We had to move quickly. This was the time of maximum danger — lots of people moving close to the enemy position. Conventional doctrine says that attackers should outnumber defenders by three to one. We were about one to one. To be compromised would rob us of our only advantage: surprise. The guys up near the road intersection were Marines, too, trained in the same school as we were. They would have security patrols out, and avoiding them in this darkness would be largely a matter of luck. I hoped ours would hold.

We reached our assault position without any shouting or gunfire disturbing the dark woods. I took a deep breath and a last look at my compass. It would be unforgivable to begin firing the machine guns and then charge off in the wrong direction.

“Machine guns, begin your suppression,” I whispered into the radio.

Jim’s only answer was the rat-a-tat-tatting of the guns. Even shooting blanks, the things sounded formidable. Ripping, guttural roars shattering the night.

“Let’s go,” I shouted. No more whispering now. Trying to strike my best Colonel Leftwich pose, I pointed my rifle at our targets and waved the platoon forward. Marines streamed up the hill, lit in the eerie, swaying light of overhead flares. Our positioning was perfect. We hit the enemy position squarely on its eastern flank. The goal of every attacker, and the fear of every defender, is enfilading fire — shooting along a position’s length so that more bullets have a better chance of hitting a target. We fired straight down the enfilade of the trenches. Marines in their sleeping bags struggled to find weapons in the dark and were shot point-blank.

Not everything went our way, though. Through the smoke and noise, I saw Captain Gibson and Captain McHugh moving across the hillside like angels of death. “You’re dead. You’re dead.” They pointed to my Marines and the defenders alike, pushing shoulders and backs to the ground, personifying the fate and caprice of the battlefield. “You, get down. You’re dead.”

To my left, the machine guns sparkled, shooting fake bullets but firing real tongues of flame from their muzzles. Standing in the center of the enemy position, with Captain Gibson at my side, I yelled to the Marines on the hillside, “Consolidate!”

Dark shapes appeared from fighting holes and clumps of trees, forming a loose circle around the crown of the hill. With a lot of luck and some good reconnaissance, we had accomplished one of the hardest infantry missions: locating and capturing a fortified position in the dark. I was elated.

“Lieutenant Fick, come with me.” Captain McHugh led the way back down the hill toward the trench lines. “Good attack. Well organized, fast, and accurate. But I want you to take a look around.” He reached into his cargo pocket and launched a white flare up through the trees. It hissed overhead, swinging in its parachute, casting moving shadows across the hill. Crumpled on the ground were the bodies of my fallen Marines. Eleven of them from a platoon of thirty-five.

“Even when you win, you lose. By the books, these are great numbers. You captured a fortified position, outnumbered, and lost less than a third of your people. But that’s eleven letters to eleven mothers, eleven funerals, eleven names you’ll never forget for the rest of your life. Nice job tonight, but you paid a price for it.”

I looked around at the bodies as the flare flickered out.

Captain McHugh smiled. “Dead Marines, rise. You are healed. Go forth and conquer.”

The lumps rose, dusted themselves off, and jogged up the hill.

McHugh motioned for me to follow them and put a hand on my shoulder. “This was an easy attack. No air to coordinate, no artillery, no other units to your flanks. We’re gaming the game: your enemy was stationary, and you knew where he was. It’ll be a lot harder at the Infantry Officer Course.” I froze and looked back at McHugh. “It won’t be official for another month,” he said, “but I’m going to make you a grunt.”

TBS graduation was a big deal for everyone except the grunts. Jim, the laconic Tennessean I had met six months earlier, moved to Oklahoma for artillery school, and our other classmates left for places like Pensacola or San Diego. We carried our few belongings to a row of rooms along an upstairs hallway in the barracks. The Infantry Officer Course (IOC) was just across the street. Its single brick building had an aura of mystery. The sign in front read DECERNO, COMMUNICO, EXSEQUOR — “Decide, Communicate, Execute.” None of us called it IOC. It was “the Brick House” or “the Men’s Club.” IOC was, in our terms, all balls, men only. If the Marine Corps was a last bastion of manhood in American society, IOC was its inner sanctum. Just before graduation, the twenty-eight future infantry officers in Alpha Company were called over to IOC for a meeting.

We went as a group and pushed hesitantly through the glass doors. Awards from Marine units and foreign militaries covered the walls: Ka-Bar knives and colorful patches on plaques with mottoes such as “Death on Contact” and “Whatever It Takes.” The building was cool, dark, and quiet. A sandy-haired captain bounded down the stairs and pushed us all into a classroom. His chest and shoulders threatened to burst through his camouflage uniform, and he grasped the sides of the podium with hands that could palm basketballs.

“Gents, I’m Captain Novack, your class adviser. I’ve got a task for you.”

We all looked at one another, wondering what our first mission at IOC would be.

“The class ahead of you is going to the field this week.” We had heard that our barracks rooms would be little more than storage lockers. Classes went to the field all week, every week. “I need you to mow the lawn and weed the beds while we’re gone.” Novack looked back over his shoulder as he turned to go. “And welcome to IOC. It’s not what you think.”

6

IOC’S MISSION WAS to train the best small-unit infantry leaders in the world. It was a tall order for ten weeks. If we crawled at OCS and walked at TBS, then IOC was a full-out sprint. Classes built on what we’d already learned, adding nuance and complexity. We studied the full spectrum of Marine operations — not only conventional combat but also the countless gradations of peacekeeping and nation-building that had occupied the military since the end of the Gulf War.

It was the summer of 2000, before the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen and before 9/11. The U.S. military, from our perspective as fledgling officers, was equipped to fight the Soviets and training to fight another Somalia. But the Marine Corps was innovating. The whole institution was leaning forward, trying to feel out the next fight. The summer’s buzz phrase was “low-intensity conflict.” We learned that the interventions of the 1990s had taught the Marines a lesson: “low-intensity conflict” was not “combat light.” The unspoken assumption among earlier groups of officers was that a platoon that trained to attack a fortified position knew how to hand out MREs. A platoon that ran a good ambush patrol could figure out how to build a school. The IOC staff acknowledged that this was mostly uncharted territory and promised only that we would do our best to prepare for it. Their candor made sense to us. We had grown tired of attacking wooded hilltops. The world, we knew, was more than Quantico-like terrain.

Low-intensity conflict put special demands on young officers and their Marines. We learned about the concept of the “three-block war.” In this model, Marines could be passing out rice in one city block, patrolling to keep the peace in the next, and engaged in a full-scale firefight in the third. Mental flexibility was the key. A second concept we labored over was the “strategic corporal.” Twenty-first-century warfare places massive destructive power in the hands of even the junior-most Marine and then beams his image in real time to living rooms around the world. A single Marine’s actions could have strategic repercussions, good or bad. With no major conflict looming, we trained to do riot control and humanitarian missions and to work with the media.

Infusing all this was a strong dose of moral reflection on the nature of our job. I was learning that most Marines, behind the tough-talking façade, are idealists. Captain Novack, a TV-perfect infantry officer, told us earnestly that our responsibilities as leaders would be three: to be ready when called, to win every time, and to return our Marines to society better than they were when we got them. We learned that moral courage is as important as physical courage. Leaders have an ethical responsibility to serve as buffers, protecting their subordinates, and a moral obligation to act from the courage of their own convictions. The moral courage of their leaders is what separates combat units from armed mobs.

Captain Novack had pinned a quotation on the classroom wall from Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, about the Spartans at Thermopylae:

Novack sometimes interrupted class to point at the paper on the wall. “Gents, it’s all there. We don’t carry swords, but our job’s the same.” I wrote the quote in my notebook to take with me to the Fleet.

Despite the heady classroom sessions, IOC is a war-fighting school. During most of our three months there, we left Camp Barrett on Monday morning and returned on Friday evening, spending our weeks shooting machine guns and mortars, calling in artillery and close air support, and training for urban combat in a mock city of cinderblock buildings called Combat Town. There I learned one of my training’s crucial lessons on a hot July morning.

I was the acting platoon commander, tasked with assaulting a building in the center of town. A rebel warlord and his cadre were holed up inside, and the streets for blocks around teemed with bands of armed supporters. Given ten minutes to plan the mission, I briefed the staff that we would advance methodically from block to block toward the target building, covering the platoon’s movement with mortar fire and support from armored vehicles. It was the kind of incremental approach that had worked so well for me during the night attack at TBS.

Novack threw his clipboard into the dirt, shouting, “Your mindset’s all wrong! No good tactical plan grows from a timid mindset.” He calmed down, and the earnestness returned. He wanted me to learn. “Execute every mission with speed, surprise, and violence of action.”

He explained that Americans, especially young American men, exhibit posturing behavior. Two guys in a bar bump chests, get up in each other’s faces, and yell. If a fight follows, it’s about honor, saving face. That’s posturing. Marines on the battlefield must exhibit predatory behavior. In that bar, a predator would smile politely at his opponent, wait for him to turn around, and then cave in the back of his skull with a barstool.

The new mission plan had us rappelling from helicopters onto the roof of the target building itself. No bluster, no incrementalism. Predators.

Near the end of IOC, our focus shifted to a Marine’s most deadly weapon — his mind. Novack had taught us about the combat mindset, both the tactical need to be a predator and the moral imperative to know where to draw the line. Thus primed, we were deemed ready for a formal introduction to society’s ultimate taboo.

I slid into the classroom early one morning with the other lieutenants, tracking wet boot prints across the floor. Rain drilled against the windows. We were loud and happy to be inside with Styrofoam cups of coffee and cheese danishes instead of getting soaked in Combat Town. A single word in block letters covered the chalkboard: KILLOLOGY.

Spending a morning talking about death and calling it work felt illicit. Around me, the class pretended to banter about baseball scores and weekend adventures, but our eyes kept flickering back to that solitary word on the chalkboard.

The door opened, and Captain Novack led an anonymous man to the podium. “Good morning, gents,” Novack said. “You’ve heard me run my mouth about speed, surprise, and violence of action. Violence of action doesn’t start with weapons and tactics. It starts in your head.” Novack turned to the man by his side. “This is Dr. Clete DiGiovanni. Dr. DiGiovanni — we call him Dr. Death around here — is a psychiatrist. Before he started shrinking heads, he was an officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and the Special Operations Group in Vietnam. He speaks your language.”

Novack started to turn the podium over to Dr. DiGiovanni but leaned back toward the microphone.

“One more thing. Lieutenant Fick, the doctor is a Dartmouth grad, too. You can trade squash tips after class.”

“Good morning, Marines.” Dr. DiGiovanni spoke with solemn control. “My nickname is unfortunate, because my job is to help keep you and your troops alive.”

He defined “killology” as the study of healthy people’s reactions to killing. Its corollaries are the factors that enable killing and the maintenance of psychiatric health during prolonged exposure to mortal danger. DiGiovanni explained that an infantryman’s effectiveness is more fundamental than his ability to shoot a rifle or carry a heavy pack. All else is predicated on psychiatric health. He identified five things an infantry leader can do to help maintain the psychiatric effectiveness of his men in combat: minimize fatigue by sleeping whenever possible, build confidence as a team, encourage communication, use spare time to practice emergency medical training, and do after-action critiques to address the shock of combat and killing.

“And trust me, gentlemen, it will be a shock,” he said.

A slide projector whirred to life, casting a square of blank light on the screen at the front of the room. DiGiovanni explained that the first step toward understanding the topic was exposure to violent death.

“The pictures you are about to see are very graphic. Young infantry officers, like yourselves, in Vietnam.”

The photos were indeed of young men like us, but after suffering horrific trauma to their heads and torsos. I had to squint and tilt my head to separate the victims’ eyes from mouths from cheekbones. High-velocity rifle bullets tear through bone and flesh, destroying all vestiges of animate humanity. I could not help but contextualize the pictures. Platoon commanders, recent graduates of this same school, who shipped off to take their first commands. They woke up one morning, pulled on their boots, ate breakfast, and never guessed that nightfall would find them as exhibit A in the killology curriculum of other lieutenants.

Like most Marine training, hands-on experience followed DiGiovanni’s class. The closest battlefield to Quantico was the Anacostia neighborhood of southeastern Washington, D.C. On Friday night, two other lieutenants and I stood discreetly against the wall in D.C. General Hospital’s emergency room, waiting for the casualties to pour in.

The doctors and nurses welcomed Marine observers on nights filled with drug and gang violence that sometimes spilled into the hospital itself. For us, the program was a chance to see gunshots and stabbings in a sterile place, without the additional stresses of combat, command, and dying friends.

A young surgical resident escorted us. We must have looked bored, hugging the wall and watching a steady stream of sore throats and twisted ankles.

“Don’t worry, guys,” she said. “It’s a hot summer night. After ten or eleven o’clock, the ambulances will be backed up outside. You’ll see plenty.”

She was right. The first trauma patient of the evening was a teenage girl with a dozen knife wounds in her back. Her lungs had been punctured, and she blew little pink bubbles with each faint breath. Next came a guy our age whose legs had been broken by an attacker with a hammer. Bones sticking out of his skin reminded me more of a roast chicken than a human being. Sometime after midnight, we noticed the doctors scrambling to meet a gurney at the door. They hadn’t done this before. We asked what was coming.

“Gunshot to the head.”

The man on the stretcher looked as if he was made of wax. Powder burns surrounded the entry wound — a point-blank shot. It was small caliber, maybe a .22, and there was no exit wound. The bullet had just bounced around inside his skull, turning brain to mush. This was the first dead man I had ever seen, and it was, as Dr. Death had promised, a shock.

We left the following Monday on a major field exercise. I was sitting on my pack at the edge of the landing zone, waiting for a helicopter, when Captain Novack appeared, calling my name and three others. We scrambled over to him, and he led us into the trees, out of sight and hearing of the rest of the class.

“Gents, when you get back over there, tell the class I had to counsel you for failing the last written test.”

I must have looked surprised.

“You didn’t really. I have a secret task for each of you. Your squads will be operating independently out there this week. Starting tomorrow, each of you will become progressively more withdrawn. You’ll be uninvolved, uninterested, and, eventually, uncooperative. The missions culminate on Thursday with a night attack. Confusing as hell. By then, you have to be in full revolt.”

A lieutenant asked Novack why we would be doing this.

“Feigning psychiatric casualties. Giving your buddies a taste of the chaos of not being able to trust one of their own. They’ll think you’re an asshole, but we’ll debrief it Friday afternoon with Dr. Death, and they’ll understand you were playing a role.” He glanced up at the approaching helicopters. “Here come the birds.”

I sat near the door, enjoying the cool slipstream and dreading our plunge back into the steamy woods. Our acting squad leader, VJ George, gave the two-minute warning, and I clicked a magazine into my M-16.

I had first met VJ on the pull-up bars outside Graves Hall during TBS. He had been shirtless, cranking his arms like hydraulic pistons. A lieutenant next to me had turned and whispered, “That guy’s the best athlete in Alpha Company.” Big praise in the Corps. VJ was an unlikely Marine. His parents, Indian immigrants, wanted him to go to med school, and his brother was a Silicon Valley programmer. His main interests were classical music and libertarian economics. VJ had gone to the Naval Academy, where he competed as a powerlifter and developed a distaste for military customs such as short hair and addressing people by rank. After IOC, we were going to the same infantry battalion in California and planned to be roommates.

VJ led us off the landing zone and through our first two days of patrolling. I tried to distance myself slowly from the work of the squad — carrying less of our common load of radio batteries, ammunition, and water; participating only halfheartedly in digging our defensive positions when we stopped; and abstaining from conversations and decision making. On Wednesday, just before sunset, we halted on a hillside above a gravel road. It was a bad position, visible from the road and at the mercy of a commanding ridgeline above. A voice was screaming inside me to move higher on the hill, to get into a defensive position where we would be less visible and more able to control the ground around us.

“So, Nate, I’m planning to stop here for a few hours. What do you think?” VJ crouched next to me, eyes lost beneath the brim of a floppy bush hat.

I shrugged.

“Man, I’m asking your opinion.”

He was testing me. The position sucked. He knew it. I knew it. He knew I knew it.

“Whatever. Your call.”

VJ swore under his breath and moved back to the rest of the squad, leaving me sitting alone next to a fallen tree. I could hear them speaking together in low voices. About me. About what an asshole I was. Unreliable. Self-centered. Dead weight. VJ moved the squad to a better position, and I followed silently.

By dawn on the day of the final attack, the distance between me and the rest of the squad had become personal. I could tell they were questioning how they could have misjudged me, concerned that we had orders to the same battalion in the Fleet. The squad took a security halt, dropping quietly to the ground for fifteen minutes to make sure we weren’t being followed, and I refused to go any farther. The other Marines stood to keep moving, but I stayed on my stomach.

“Yo, Nate.” A scuffed boot kicked me gently in the hip.

I looked up but didn’t respond.

“C’mon, man. We’re moving.”

I kept quiet. VJ walked back to me, half-stooped under his heavy pack.

“What the fuck, Nate? Are you sick?” I shook my head. “Then why are you being a bitch? I thought you were a fucking Marine, a fucking infantry officer.”

I no longer cared about Captain Novack or the training. VJ plucked my strings, appealing to my duty and my pride. I couldn’t let my friends down, couldn’t be seen as the weak link, even knowing it would all be cleared up on Friday afternoon. My will collapsed.

“It’s an act. Dr. Death set me up to be a psychiatric casualty. I was supposed to be withdrawn, give you guys a chance to deal with someone losing his shit. I can’t take it anymore.”

They looked as if they didn’t believe me.

“Goddamn it. I’m telling the truth. Give me some of the extra batteries and water. We’ve got a long way to go still.” I opened my pack to fill it with gear. “And VJ, that position yesterday fucking sucked.”

VJ’s smile glowed white from his dirty, black-painted face. “Good to have you back, man.”

But I was less enthusiastic. The more I thought about it, the more unhappy I was with what I’d done. Captain Novack had given me an order. I understood it, acknowledged it, and disobeyed it. In doing so, I chose my short-term emotional comfort over the long-term benefit to my buddies of dealing with a psychiatric casualty in training. We never talked about it again and slid through the debrief with everyone implicitly knowing what not to say. But it gnawed at me. After a full year at Quantico, impulse could still overcome training.

We graduated from IOC on a Friday morning in September. My father came down to Quantico for the ceremonial breakfast, and I was proud to have him sitting there next to me. Camouflage poncho liners covered the tables. We ate steak and eggs, the traditional preinvasion breakfast. In slow succession, each of our twenty-eight men shook Captain Novack’s hand, received his diploma conferring the coveted 0302 MOS — Infantry Officer — and faced the room to deliver a martial quote.

I chose the creed of the Spartan infantry: “When you return from battle, you will either bear your shield or be borne upon it.”

VJ picked a line from former Navy secretary and Marine infantry officer James Webb: “I wouldn’t cross the street to watch Jane Fonda slit her wrists.”

After coffee, Captain Novack rose. He congratulated the class on completing one of the most challenging small-unit leadership courses in the world and passed on some last-minute advice. “Your Marines will expect four things from you: competence, courage, consistency, and compassion.” Taking a notebook from his pocket, he flipped open its spiral-bound cover. “Historically, about four of you will one day be colonels, and point-five will be a general.”

Novack paused, looking to the empty place setting at the head table. Every Marine dining hall keeps an empty place in honor of Marines missing in action. “One of you will die in the line of duty.

“No more blank ammunition, gentlemen,” he continued. “From now on, when this country dials 911, it’s calling you.”

7

STARING AT MY REFLECTION in a car window, I straightened the shooting badges on my chest and wiped fingerprints from the gold bars on my shoulders. I’d worn this uniform only once before — at the tailor’s shop. After IOC graduation, I drove across the country to Camp Pendleton, north of San Diego. VJ and I rented a house near the ocean and got ready to report to the First Battalion of the First Marine Regiment, known as 1/1. Being “the first of the first” sounded good to me, but I was anxious. This wasn’t just another school. It was my first command in the Fleet. I hoped I knew enough to avoid embarrassing myself or getting someone hurt.

I walked across the gravel parking lot, dust settling in a thin layer across my spit-shined shoes. A sign over the door of the battalion headquarters proclaimed: FIRST BATTALION, FIRST MARINES — FIRST ON FOOT, RIGHT OF THE LINE. “First on foot, right of the line” was the position of honor in a military formation, so I guessed it was an accolade bestowed on the battalion for some past triumph. A list of those exploits hung next to the door, a series of red wooden slats painted with yellow names. I stopped on the steps to read them. Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Okinawa, Inchon, Chosin Reservoir, Da Nang, Dong Ha, Hue City, Quang Tri, Khe Sanh, Desert Shield, Desert Storm. Empty hooks, ready for the next addition, hung from the lowest slat and reminded me of the Marine Corps War Memorial’s blank granite.

Marines in boots clomped back and forth down the halls. I tried to blend in, but a cherry lieutenant is obvious. Their eyes rolled from my shoes to my hair before settling back onto my face with a reserved “Good morning, sir.” I found the battalion’s admin office and dropped my stack of records on a desk just inside the door. “Good morning, Sergeant. I’m Lieutenant Fick — new guy checking in.”

“We have you slated for Bravo Company, sir.” He tore the orders from my record book and handed it back to me. “Captain Whitmer. Downstairs and to your left.”

I took a deep breath and rapped three times on the cinderblock wall outside the door marked COMPANY COMMANDER.

“Come on in.”

“Good morning, sir. Lieutenant Fick, reporting as ordered.” I snapped to attention in front of the metal desk, with my eyes locked on the rear wall.

Captain Whitmer stood to shake my hand. He looked like the actor Ed Harris, chiseled and gray.

“Rich Whitmer. Welcome aboard. Grab a seat.” He pointed to the small sofa in front of his desk. A helmet and flak jacket lay on the floor next to it, and I tried to absorb other details in the room without his noticing my wandering gaze: a Michigan State mug, a photo of a little boy, and engraved awards from an infantry platoon and a counter-narcotics unit in Thailand.

Captain Whitmer’s defining feature was calm. He spoke slowly, choosing every word, asking about IOC, my family, my background. His office felt soundproof, and the bustle in the hallway receded. Answering his questions, I thought I sounded loud and inarticulate. But it wasn’t an interrogation. Whitmer laughed easily and soon put me at ease.

Once we got down to business, he seemed to know exactly what was on my mind. Each of an infantry battalion’s three rifle companies has a primary means of getting to and from its objectives: helicopters, amphibious assault vehicles called “amtracs,” and rubber Zodiac boats. At IOC, we’d learned that most Marines go ashore by helo. Our consensus was that if we were stationed near the relatively warm Atlantic, boats would be impractical but fun. In the cold Pacific, boats would be miserable. Now Whitmer said, “Hope you don’t mind freezing — Bravo Company is boats.”

Next he told me that I would command Bravo’s weapons platoon. Each infantry company has four platoons — three rifle and one weapons. Leading a rifle platoon, forty Marines with M-16s, is a new lieutenant’s typical first job. But weapons platoon is different. Its forty-five Marines are divided into sections for machine guns, assault rockets, and mortars, the bulk of the company’s firepower. Since employing the weapons platoon is complex, its commander is usually a senior first lieutenant who’s already led a rifle platoon. Captain Whitmer asked if I was comfortable taking weapons on my first day in the Fleet.

“Yes, sir. Absolutely.” In fact, absolutely not.

Whitmer nodded with a smile that said he understood my reservation but expected me to figure it out. “Go ahead and get settled. The company’s in the field until this afternoon.” Standing to shake my hand, Whitmer said, “I do things a bit differently, as you’ll see.”

Bravo Company’s four platoons shared an office down the hall from Captain Whitmer’s. Lockers filled with tactics manuals and gym clothes lined the walls, and Marine posters covered the empty spaces between lockers. The smell reminded me of my high school football coach’s office — rancid sweat, stale coffee, and disinfectant. Eight desks were pushed together to make an island in the center, one each for the four platoon commanders and platoon sergeants. I carried my gear from the supply warehouse and piled it in an empty locker. Then I grabbed a manual about weapons platoon from a shelf near the door and sat down to read.

IOC primarily trained rifle platoon commanders. Weapons platoons, unlike their rifle counterparts, don’t fight as units under a single commander. The machine gun and assault sections frequently beef up the rifle platoons to augment their firepower. The mortar section provides mortar fire for the whole company, usually controlled by the company commander and the rifle platoon commanders. With all his Marines working for other people, the weapons platoon commander serves as the company’s fire support coordinator. This means controlling artillery, air strikes, and bombardment from naval ships — complicated missions I had never practiced; missions that would kill many people if I screwed them up. I had a lot to learn and little time to do it.

When Bravo Company hiked onto the parade deck that afternoon, I went outside to watch. I hoped to catch a glimpse of my platoon, but the Marines were indistinguishable in two long lines of dusty green. A lieutenant smeared with camouflage paint separated from the mass of troops and walked toward me. He stooped beneath body armor and a vest festooned with smoke grenades, flares, a knife, and canteens. His rucksack stuck out on both sides of his body, and a whip antenna swayed above his head.

“You must be the new weapons guy,” he said as he lumbered right past me. Without stopping, he added, “I’m Patrick English, First Platoon commander. Come into the office. I have to drop this gear.”

Inside, Patrick’s ruck thudded onto the floor, and he shrugged out of his web gear. Sweat soaked the uniform beneath. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to be rude.” He stuck out his hand. “Welcome to Bravo Company.” Patrick cracked open a Gatorade bottle and sat on one of the desks. He was a New Yorker, sharp-featured with close-cropped hair. Patrick had played lacrosse at Holy Cross and worked in the district attorney’s office in Manhattan before starting OCS.

It seemed as if we should be talking about work, but I barely even knew the right questions. “So what’s coming up on the calendar?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

He replied that the company would spend the next four months on conventional infantry skills such as shooting and patrolling. Then in February, the battalion would be attached to the Fifteenth Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable) as its ground combat element. A MEU (SOC), I knew from TBS, is a seaborne task force of two thousand Marines built around an infantry battalion and a helicopter squadron. At any given time, one is deployed from the West Coast and one from the East Coast. We would hone our MEU skills for six months, mostly raids in the boats. Then in August 2001, the Fifteenth MEU would sail from San Diego to cruise the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf for six months, training with foreign forces and acting as first responders in case of a crisis.

Every few minutes, Marines came into the office to update Patrick on the count of his platoon’s weapons, the status of missing equipment, or the progress of paperwork for people’s promotions and other training exercises. He bantered with me and gave them instructions without even pausing. I was surprised to learn he’d been at 1/1 for only two months.

He talked fast, describing the battalion and its key personalities, and starting with what I most wanted to hear: “Captain Whitmer’s fucking solid — best CO in the battalion.” He then assured me that “the LPA gets together for beer and tacos every Thursday night up near San Juan Capistrano.” I knew about this venerable tradition: every unit has an informal Lieutenants’ Protective Association. “Some guys,” Patrick confided, referring to the battalion’s other platoon commanders, “have to lean on each other since they have weak platoon sergeants. I don’t have that problem, and you won’t either.”

Every young lieutenant remembers meeting his platoon sergeant. The relationship between a fresh officer and his salty second-in-command is almost as mythic as boot camp. Patrick and I were still talking when Staff Sergeant Keith Marine walked into the office. The first thing I noticed about him were his ears, sticking out from his regulation haircut like fins on a fish. The second thing I noticed was his remarkable name. I didn’t comment on it, figuring he’d heard too much already on that score.

Marine quickly dispelled any mythic overtones our first encounter might have had: “Sir, you’re sitting in my chair.” He insisted we go out for coffee — “it’s a tradition for officers to buy” — to talk about tactics and training plans for the platoon. We traded autobiographies on the walk across the parade deck to the chow hall.

Staff Sergeant Marine had grown up in the coal country of West Virginia. Even without his name, Marine’s background seemed to destine him for the Corps. His grandfather had served as a Marine in the bloody campaigns of Bougainville, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. His grandfather’s brother had been killed at Leyte Gulf, where my grandfather had fought. Marine had already served ten years in the infantry. Before that, he had been stalking deer with a rifle while I had been playing with blocks. He had spent the last year working for the gunner, the battalion’s weapons expert, and knew every detail of every infantry weapon in most of the world’s militaries.

“So,” I asked, “how do you think the M-16 stacks up?” Most Marine grunts carry M-16s. The Corps instills in a young Marine an intense, almost obsessive attachment to his rifle.

“I don’t know what dickhead designed the M-16, but it shoots a varmint round. You don’t want a fucking squirrel gun in your hands in a firefight.”

I paid for our coffee, and we slid into a booth near the window. Marine took a can of Copenhagen tobacco from his pocket and snapped it between his thumb and forefinger. After cramming a wad inside his lower lip, he offered the can to me. “Dip, sir?”

“No, thanks.”

“I won’t hold it against you.” Marine sounded as if it was a major concession. “At least you’re drinking coffee. Your illustrious predecessor didn’t even do that. He was a shitbird.” Marine paused, lost in thought, and shook his head. “The road to hell is paved with the bleached bones of second lieutenants who didn’t listen to their staff NCOs. The one before him got shot in a porta-shitter out at the rifle range. So at least you got small boots to fill.”

Sipping my coffee, I asked Marine to tell me about the platoon. I expected a continuation of his earlier sarcasm, but he turned serious. Instead of talking about the Marines’ performance, he focused on their personalities, families, and interests.

“You gotta care about ’em for real, sir. If the Marines trust you, you can order ’em to yank Satan off his throne by the balls. Almost anybody can do this job. You want to make the Marines care enough to do it well.”

I sat quietly, happy to listen as long as Marine cared to talk. He must have sensed it because he paused, sizing me up, and asked bluntly how I saw my role in the platoon. For a second, I was taken aback. I hadn’t expected a quiz on my command technique, and I certainly wouldn’t have asked the same question of Captain Whitmer earlier. But his directness impressed me. I thought for a moment and told Marine I didn’t want to roll in like the new sheriff in town, changing the rules before I knew how things worked. I told him I tended to give people the benefit of the doubt and then nail them to the wall if they took advantage of me. Without using Captain Novack’s words, I tried to promise him competence, courage, consistency, and compassion.

In return, I expected that Marine would back me up in front of the troops. We would disagree behind closed doors. He nodded. Marine was a new staff noncommissioned officer (NCO), but I sensed from the start that he was of the old school and knew that seasoning me was a primary, if unspoken, part of his job. As if to affirm this, Marine told me about Chris Hadsall, his platoon commander in 1/1’s Charlie Company two years before. Hadsall had apparently become the yardstick by which he judged officers. “We’ll get you up to speed like Lieutenant Hadsall in no time, sir,” he assured me.

By the time we’d finished our third cup of coffee, Marine and I had staked out our respective roles in the platoon. My greatest fear had been clashing with a platoon sergeant I didn’t like or couldn’t trust. But I liked Marine, and I trusted him instinctively. Most platoon sergeants, I suspected, feared an overeager and domineering young lieutenant. I pledged to be neither. On our way to the door, Marine said the words I’d been waiting to hear since OCS: “Time for you to meet the platoon.”

I thought I’d be nervous. The new lieutenant meeting his first command was supposed to be like first love or losing your virginity. Staff Sergeant Marine called the platoon from the armory, where they were cleaning weapons after the field exercise. I watched them walking in groups of two or three across the parade deck, hands blackened with carbon, wearing green T-shirts and camouflage trousers. This was my platoon. I would train them, deploy with them, and maybe even go to war with them. Their performance would directly reflect my leadership. I wasn’t nervous at all.

The forty-five Marines fell into a formation of three ranks, one for each section. They were so young. Half of them looked under twenty. I was only twenty-three, but that small gap cast me in the role of coach or big brother. So the authority came naturally. Staff Sergeant Marine stood six paces from the center of the front rank. He took reports from each of the section leaders and about-faced toward me.

He saluted and called out, “Good afternoon, sir. Weapons platoon, all present.”

I stood at attention in front of him and returned his salute. Marine stepped off smartly, leaving me alone in front of the men.

The last thing they needed was a Pattonesque monologue from a newborn lieutenant, so I introduced myself and said I was happy to be the newest member of the platoon. I told them I wanted to meet with each man individually over the coming week and asked if they had any questions for me. There were none. Staff Sergeant Marine dismissed them, and they headed back to the armory. I thought I heard approval in his voice as we walked back to the office. “No bullshit, sir. Marines appreciate that.”

The next ten months were a graduate seminar in infantry tactics, our last chance to learn before doing it for real. Captain Whitmer was the professor, and his style was unlike anything I’d seen at Quantico. Many of my buddies in 1/1’s other companies complained that their commanders kept a thumb on them. They shunned boldness for fear of making an attention-grabbing mistake. The prevailing culture of 1/1, at least among the officers and senior NCOs, was careerist: laugh at the colonel’s jokes, don’t get anyone hurt, and stay under the radar.

Not Captain Whitmer. The standard Marine Corps brief before live-fire training began with the words “Safety is paramount.”

“If safety were paramount,” Whitmer declared, “we’d stay in the barracks and play pickup basketball. Good training is paramount.” Whitmer’s idea of good training reminded me of something I’d read about the Roman legions — their exercises were bloodless battles so that their battles were bloody exercises.

He drove the point home one night on a windy ridge above the Pacific. The battalion’s three rifle companies were moving independently toward a cinderblock town. Our mission was to link up near the town no later than 0100 and capture it for follow-on forces to use as a staging base. A reconnaissance team was observing the town, and the battalion’s plan of attack kept changing as the team updated its reports on how the defenders were set up.

Bravo Company had come ashore from a Navy ship a couple of hours before. We stumbled along a ridgeline in thick mist, still a mile away from where the battalion planned to link up. Wind blew the fog in whorls and eddies across the trail and down into the darkness that fell away to either side. Behind me, machine gunners and mortarmen carried their heavy weapons as quietly as they could, stifling the grunts and groans and clanking metal. Every few minutes, Captain Whitmer passed the battalion’s updates over the radio to his platoon commanders. I cursed in the dark, trying simultaneously to navigate, keep track of the changing plan, and inform my section leaders of the updates as we pressed closer to the linkup point. Staff Sergeant Marine must have walked twice as far as the rest of us, moving back and forth through the column to pass word and keep tabs on the Marines. The platoon rolled with the changes. No complaints. No hesitation. We arrived at 0045, exhausted and disoriented, but on time for the attack. The other companies reported over the radio that they were still an hour away.

Whitmer’s lieutenants converged on him while we waited. He circled us close, soaked and shivering, and pointed out the night’s lesson. “The other company commanders stopped moving each time a change came over the radio. They called their platoon commanders in and showed them the new plan on their map. Now look — they’re fucking late.” He paused, and I looked at Patrick, seeing the lesson crystallizing in his mind as it was in mine.

“You guys were probably cursing me for briefing changes on the fly.” We nodded in confession. “But I did it because you have to learn to operate that way. Any one of you,” he whispered with emphasis, pointing at each of us, “is one bullet away from commanding this company. You need to learn it here, not in Iran or Somalia or wherever.”

I looked at my watch and saw that the other companies were still more than half an hour away. Captain Whitmer must have done the same, because he followed up with a question: “So what should we do now?” He wasn’t looking for advice; he wanted to critique our decision making.

“We should attack, sir.” I said it with a confidence I didn’t feel. “We have a whole company here. Recon reports only about a dozen guys in the town. The battalion set its timeline for a reason.”

Captain Whitmer replied that we, as infantry officers, had been trained to be aggressive. Nods all around. “But there’s a fine line between aggressive and foolish.” Good commanders, he explained, could operate right at that line, without crossing it. We had to know the difference between a risk and a gamble. All commanders take risks. They are calculated decisions to make gains in a dangerous environment. Gambles are pure chance — closing your eyes and running the gauntlet. “Attacking that town right now, Lieutenant Fick,” he said with renewed intensity, “would be a gamble. Don’t ever be in a hurry to get your Marines killed.”

When the other companies arrived, the battalion attacked the town and secured it. I watched proudly as my platoon moved confidently through our sector of cinderblock buildings. They were having fun. With the overwhelming force of three companies, we suffered no casualties, and the slight delay to the battalion’s timeline didn’t matter. I felt chastened.

We took a more direct route back to the boats, eager to be far from the beach before daylight. The moon was a fuzzy spot behind the clouds, and the wind had picked up, flecking spray through the air and blasting us with sand. Waves thundered onto the beach in sets of three. The company’s coxswains had remained behind with the boats. They had them near the water’s edge when we arrived, ready to launch.

Staff Sergeant Marine and I knelt together in the sand, struggling into our wetsuits. I noticed that his was twice as thick as mine. “Why the polar bear suit, Staff Sergeant?”

He looked smug and replied, “I been in boat company before, sir.”

I looked out at the wind-whipped ocean. “I’m gonna freeze my tits off tonight, aren’t I?”

“Just remember that there are two kinds of people in the world,” Marine said sagely. “Those who piss in their wetsuits and those who lie about it.”

After we got dressed, Marine ran from boat to boat, counting the troops and making sure weapons were tied to the aluminum deck plates. He gave me a thumbs-up. The platoon was on its game.

My six-man boat crew dragged its Zodiac into chest-deep water, holding the ropes that ran along the gunwale tubes. My breath caught in my throat. Each surging wave raised the water to my neck. I floated off my feet, struggling to keep the boat’s bow pointed into the breakers. It would broach if it turned sideways, dumping our gear into the water and forcing us back to the beach to try again.

The coxswain clambered aboard and started the engine, yelling, “All in!” We struggled up over the sides and fell into the bottom of the boat in a tangle of legs and rifles. “Get some weight in the bow,” he shouted. Ahead, a line of white, five feet above eye level, raced from the darkness — the foaming crest of a wave. The coxswain opened the throttle, and we streaked toward the wave. We climbed its base and teetered at the top. I tried to will our center of gravity over onto the back side of the wall of water threatening to throw us up onto the sand.

The engine shrieked as the propeller broke out of the water. Then our bow settled, and we were through. Surf passage complete. We steered for the bobbing shapes of the company’s other boats, and I took my radio from its waterproof bag.

“Pale Rider, Pale Rider, this is Oden. Touchdown. I say again, touchdown.” “Touchdown” was our code word to the ship for “mission complete.” Had something gone wrong, we would have said “foul ball.”

“Pale Rider copies touchdown. Be advised we’re tossing pretty hard out here. May be unable to recover you aboard. Do you have fuel for alternate extract?”

The waves had grown over the course of the night, and the ship’s crew doubted that they could pick us up safely. Alternate extract meant a long, cold, punishing ride down the coast to the Del Mar Boat Basin at Camp Pendleton. My wool watch cap, soaked with salt water, kept slipping over my eyes. I pushed it back to look at Captain Whitmer.

He squinted through the blowing spray. I imagined him hearing the siren song of warmth and rest for his troops on the ship and the satisfaction of running a mission as briefed. But this was training, and Captain Whitmer would do whatever challenged the company most, forcing it to improvise, adapt, and overcome.

“Run the alternate,” he ordered.

The trip took two hours. Icy spray stung my exposed skin like needles as we crashed down the waves. In every trough, I thought we were about to be swamped by the next roller. Headlights crawled along I-5 to our left. I imagined the drivers on their early commutes, warm, listening to the radio, sipping coffee. In the bow of the boat, one Marine slipped into hypothermia. He stopped shivering, and his lips turned pale with bluish edges. We wrapped around him to share body heat and shelter him from the frigid spray. Through it all, Captain Whitmer sat on the gunwale tube. He betrayed no discomfort, no concern, no rush to get back.

When we pulled into Del Mar shortly after sunrise, I confronted Whitmer; his rationale was still unclear to me. “Sir, why didn’t you at least try to get aboard the ship? Why make the Marines suffer? We’ll never use these boats anyway.”

Captain Whitmer looked at me for a long moment, as if surprised I didn’t get it. “Nate, it’s not about the gear. Not even about the mission. It’s about the people.” He looked around at the Marines, now laughing and cleaning the boats in the morning sunlight. “When this company suffers, we’re not wasting time or abusing anyone. The Marines are learning to hang together when things get bad, and that’ll come back to us in spades. If there’s ever a real mission for this battalion, Bravo will get the call, and we’ll be ready.”

Shortly before we deployed, I arrived at the office one morning to find Jim Beal, my friend from Quantico, sitting at my desk. We hadn’t seen each other since TBS graduation. I dropped my duffel bag and grabbed his hand. Jim explained that he’d been sent to 1/1 as an artillery forward observer, or arty FO. This man works hand in hand with the weapons platoon commander in a MEU to run the company’s fire support. I couldn’t believe my good luck and asked Jim how he’d ended up in Bravo Company.

“I asked which weapons platoon commander was the most fucked-up, and they sent me to you.”

“Whatever. They probably match the shitbird FO with the shit-hot platoon commander.”

My happiness was short-lived. A note on my desk announced that a senior gunnery sergeant would be joining the platoon later in the week. I knew what that meant. I would have to demote Staff Sergeant Marine from platoon sergeant to leader of the mortar section. I stormed into Captain Whitmer’s office, but he could only shake his head. Out of his control. I tried the first sergeant, responsible for personnel changes in the company. Same reaction. The bureaucracy had deemed Bravo short one gunny and that was that. These more experienced Marines knew better than to waste too much time and emotion fighting the machine.

It hurt. Why mess with a good platoon just before it deployed? Why did the platoon commander, and even the company commander, have no say in the matter? Marine and I had bonded. We worked well together. When I called him into the office to break the news, I was ready for a fight.

But I should have known better. Staff Sergeant Marine ended up consoling me, saying that the new gunny was a good Marine and that he would enjoy working with mortars, even if they had a low CDI factor.

I took the bait. “What’s CDI?”

“Chicks dig it, sir. Football team: high CDI. Chess club: low CDI. Platoon sergeant: high CDI. Mortar section: low CDI. Doesn’t matter that mortars have all the firepower. Life’s unfair. Didn’t they teach you that in college?”

8

FEELING LIKE AN ACTOR on a movie set, I stood at the ship’s rail in my khaki uniform. On the pier far below, throngs of people cheered and waved American flags as two tugboats pushed us away. A breeze rippled the water of San Diego Bay. At precisely ten A.M. on August 13, 2001, the USS Dubuque slid beneath the graceful span of the San Diego-Coronado Bridge, turning west past Point Loma for the open Pacific. On the flight deck, Marines and sailors lined the rails, hands clasped behind their backs and eyes straight ahead. The only sound was the wind as each man soaked up his last view of the city skyline, the beaches, California.

The Dubuque and two other ships, the USS Peleliu and the USS Comstock, made up an Amphibious Ready Group. The ARG’s three ships carried the Fifteenth MEU (SOC). Two thousand Marines were in the MEU, including our infantry battalion, a helicopter squadron reinforced with four Harrier jets, and attachments such as a recon platoon, four tanks, and logistical support units. For the next six months, we would be America’s “force in readiness” for half the globe.

Staff Sergeant Marine joined me at the rail as I watched the coast turn misty and gray in the distance.

“Congratulations, sir. This is your first step toward becoming an old campaigner like Lieutenant Hadsall.”

“I’ll have to land on a few foreign shores before I feel like much of a campaigner,” I replied, but I smiled at the thought that I might be catching up with the ideal in his head. “What’re your predictions for this float?”

Marine leaned on the rail with his hands out over the water, and the mischievous gleam faded for a moment. “Well, I heard a gunner in Fifth Marines say something real smart once. We had just come home from months of sitting in the desert after Saddam kicked out the U.N. inspectors back in ’98. Lots of missed birthdays, anniversaries, births, and all that crap. Marines were a little discontent about not doing anything. This gunner said to us, ‘Never regret not doing a real mission. Now you can have all golden memories and no ghosts.’ I try to remember that when the war fever takes over.”

The Dubuque had been commissioned in 1967 and served off the coast of Vietnam. Five hundred sixty-nine feet long and displacing sixteen thousand tons, the ship carried its four hundred crew members and five hundred Marines at about fifteen knots. A five-story superstructure covered the forward third of the ship, and a flight deck stretched across the rear two thirds to the stern. Below it, the Dubuque’s dominating feature was a well deck, a sort of garage for boats that could be flooded and then pumped dry again. At the stern, a huge clamshell door provided entrance to the well deck. In accordance with the Navy’s hierarchy, enlisted Marines and sailors lived beneath the deck of the ship in catacombs of narrow passageways lined with steam pipes and electrical wiring. Officers, both Navy and Marine, lived in staterooms in the superstructure.

Life aboard a warship at sea, especially one nearly forty years old, is like moving between a small closet, an apartment building boiler room, and a machine shop. The dominant features are movement and noise. The ship pitches and rolls constantly, throwing food from tables and men from bunks. As it moves, the steel creaks and groans. Engines throb, boilers hiss, and the ocean gurgles beneath the hull. Metal hatches must remain closed in case of flooding, so traffic, day and night, is marked by the rasps and clangs of closing and locking doors. Whistles, buzzers, and bells announce the events of the day — reveille, meals, drills, and taps. The ship’s intercom and constantly buzzing telephones round out the cacophony. Newcomers quickly learn to carry earplugs.

The Dubuque was configured to serve as a fleet flagship, which meant there was a second bridge for the admiral and extra officer berthing. Since the Peleliu was, in fact, the flagship of our small flotilla, the Dubuque carried far fewer officers than it was equipped to handle. So I had a four-man stateroom to myself. The price I paid for this luxury was that my living space doubled as a storage room for everyone else’s things. A glance into my stateroom revealed the intentions of the Dubuque’s Marines: three surfboards, four bags of golf clubs, four guitars, and a pile of Hawaiian shirts for liberty ports. Absent were maps of central Asia, down parkas, and Pashto and Dari translation guides. We still lived in a peaceful world.

Every western Pacific cruise starts with a trial period — the five-day steam to Hawaii. It’s a time to get used to the rhythm of life at sea before pulling into a safe harbor. I settled into a comfortable daily routine, waking up at five-thirty to run on the flight deck before the day grew hot. Then I took a tepid, vaguely salty shower and ate breakfast in the officer’s mess, called the wardroom. I dedicated the morning to work — planning training, cleaning weapons, and slogging through administrative paperwork. My favorite pastime was teaching classes to the Marines. I used my IOC manuals to keep our tactics fresh and reached back to my college courses to teach about famous battles. Patrick did the same, but he had studied economics. The company’s office in the superstructure often overflowed with Marines learning about efficient markets and elasticity.

Training was limited by our tight confines, but we held races to assemble and disassemble machine guns while blindfolded, shot off the ship’s stern at targets on the flight deck, and rappelled down elevator shafts into the well deck. Lunch was the day’s high-water mark, followed by an afternoon slide of naps, reading, and lifting weights in the small triangular gym wedged into the bow. The old shipboard adage was “Sleep till you’re hungry, then eat till you’re tired, and repeat for six months.”

My favorite time of day was the early evening. After leaving the gym, I’d climb to the Dubuque’s highest outside deck, just below the towering mast of radio antennas. There, on a rubber mat, Rudy Reyes led his trademark conditioning workouts — stretching, abs, breathing, and more stretching. Rudy was a sergeant in the MEU’s recon platoon. Recon is the Corps’s special operations force, trained to collect information behind enemy lines. But Rudy’s demeanor in this gung-ho world was so decidedly nonmilitary that his platoon-mates called him “the Associate.” Even the colonel stopped calling him Sergeant Reyes. He was Rudy. Afterward, I would lie on my back and watch the sky turn pink as the rocking ship made the clouds appear to swing overhead.

The morning we pulled into Pearl Harbor, I woke early to watch our approach to Oahu. I wanted to see this fabled port from the deck of a Navy warship. As the sun began to light the sky, we rounded Diamond Head and glided west along Waikiki to the harbor entrance. The narrow channel cuts north past Hickam Air Force Base before turning hard to the right at Ford Island.

A carpet of manicured lawns and stands of swaying palms flanked Hickam’s lush waterfront. The green was startling after five days of empty sea. I stood at the rail, looking down at the ship’s crew at work on the bridge below. It was fully light by the time the Dubuque made the turn at Ford Island. The previous evening, at the ship’s nightly operations/intelligence brief, the navigator had said that this turn would be preceded by one long blast from the ship’s whistle to ensure no traffic came barreling through from the other direction.

“Oh, hell no!” A salty, prior-enlisted officer was quick to disagree. “The admiral and chief of staff live on the point right near that turn. A wise captain” — this punctuated with a glance at the CO — “will make a radio call in advance to be sure the channel’s clear.”

The Dubuque slid silently past the point and the homes of the sleeping admiral and chief of staff. Rounding the turn, we looked directly down the barrels of the USS Missouri’s sixteen-inch guns. Off her bow, gleaming white in the morning sun, floated the delicate span of the USS Arizona Memorial. It sags in the middle to symbolize initial defeat but stands firm at the ends in testament to resolve and ultimate victory. Above it, an American flag snapped in the breeze against a smudged backdrop of mountains, with piles of clouds threatening to pour across and drench us.

When the gangplank dropped, Patrick and I escaped to catch a launch out to the Arizona. We spent our allotted fifteen minutes on the memorial watching oil still bubbling from the wreck after sixty years. Among the names on a bronze tablet listing the ship’s casualties, we noted a lone Marine lieutenant. After leaving the memorial, the launch passed the Dubuque at its pier. Patrick and I watched the other tourists snapping pictures of the ship.

“What would they think if we went to the parking lot and took pictures of their cars?” Patrick mused.

Although we blended into the crowd in T-shirts and sandals, I didn’t really feel part of it. “Do you feel different?” I asked him.

“We are different. They’re going back to hotels on Waikiki, and we’re staring at six months in that big gray box.” Patrick paused and looked around Pearl Harbor. “But different in a good way, too. Especially here.”

We sailed the next afternoon for the two-week steam to Darwin, on Australia’s north coast. Life fell once again into the easy shipboard routine of training, working out, and reading. I spent the evenings after Rudy’s workouts in a chair at the ship’s rail, watching our bow wave push toward the setting sun and reading Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places,” Hemingway wrote. “But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure that it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

Steaming southwest at fifteen knots, we were in no special hurry either.

At six o’clock on a Friday evening, two weeks and six thousand miles from Camp Pendleton, we sailed south of Guadalcanal. I had learned a few days before that we would be passing by the island and worked to prepare a presentation about the Marines’ first great battle of the Second World War. When I gathered the platoon on the upper deck, a reddening sun cast streaks above our heads. Guadalcanal’s green mountains climbed from the sea and disappeared in a ring of clouds.

In the late summer and fall of 1942, the entire First Marine Division, including 1/1, had battled the Japanese army for control of Guadalcanal. I saw the Marines looking at the island while I spoke, probably imagining, as I was, the lines of landing craft, geysers of water where Japanese shells fell, machine guns raking the beach. Infamously, the Navy had abandoned the Marines ashore after four of its ships were sunk. With limited supplies, the Marines had pried the island from Japanese control at a cost of more than a thousand dead and four times that many wounded. They had killed twenty-five thousand Japanese.

History is the Marine Corps’s religion. I’d seen it throughout my training and felt it at the Marine Corps War Memorial, as I read the list of battles outside 1/1’s headquarters at Camp Pendleton, and even when I saw the name of the lone lieutenant killed aboard the Arizona. Past deeds are a young Marine’s source of pride, inspiration to face danger, and reassurance that death in battle isn’t consignment to oblivion. His buddies and all future Marines will keep the faith. Some people in my life would call that naiveté, but I was coming to know it as esprit de corps. My platoon lingered at the rail that evening, talking softly and watching Guadalcanal fade in the gathering darkness.

A week later, we pulled into Darwin for two days of training in the outback. Half the platoon joined the company for live-firing exercises, while the mortar section and Jim and I rode a bus three hours inland to a desolate training area, where we planned to drop mortars, artillery, and bombs. We arrived after dark and found the battalion combat operations center (COC) fully outfitted with lights, running water, tents, and showers. They were courteous enough to direct us several miles down a dirt road to our bivouac site in a burned-out field full of termite mounds the size of telephone booths.

We settled in uncomfortably, remembering the battalion surgeon’s warning that Australia is home to nine of the world’s ten deadliest snakes, including the death adder and taipan, which can render a man, in his words, “completely fucked.” We were briefed that even the cute mini-kangaroos called wallabies can grab a person with their little hands and try to kick off the person’s head with their powerful hind legs. The Marines around us snored as Jim and I opted to stand by the Humvee and talk rather than take our chances on the ground.

After two days of shooting, we returned to Darwin for a day off before our departure. Jim, Patrick, and I drove to the Adelaide River and spent the afternoon feeding crocodiles from a riverboat and swimming in waterfalls. That evening, we found a bar for dinner and drinks. Our ships were scheduled to leave at nine o’clock the next morning.

I sipped a Victoria Bitter and looked at my watch, trying to calculate the time on the East Coast of the United States. Ten-fifteen P.M. in Darwin made it eight-fifteen A.M. the same day in Maryland. I couldn’t remember the date, but it was Tuesday, so maybe I could catch my dad at his desk.

I walked across the street to the pay phones in a hotel lobby. My dad and I talked for ten minutes, he asking about our trip and I asking about news from home. Neither of us had anything interesting to tell. I said I’d send him an e-mail soon from the ship and hung up. As I walked out, I saw Patrick talking on a phone farther down the wall.

“What’s the word, bro?” Jim pushed a fresh beer my way and asked what was happening in the States.

“Nada. Pretty morning in Baltimore. Nothing to interest you guys.” I had barely settled back onto my stool when Patrick burst through the door.

“Fucking terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.”

“Relax, bro. Have a beer.” Jim and I laughed. Then we saw that Patrick was serious. Abandoning our drinks, we filed out the door and across the street to join a growing crowd around the lobby’s big-screen TV.

Slowly, we realized the impact this would have on us. Jim summed it up best: “Fellas, history just bent us over.” We had to get back to the ship.

Marines and sailors mobbed Darwin’s streets, all streaming down the hill to the docks. As we joined the crowd, a car pulled up, and a young Australian couple asked if we needed a lift. We gratefully accepted and piled in the back seat. Minutes later, the car skidded onto the pier, where floodlights lit the three ships and armed sentries already stood along the rails. The driver shook our hands and said, “Guess you blokes are headed for war.”