23 Nov 2004

As I walked in the pitch darkness from the head trailer back to my hootch, I stared up at the Big Dipper, its edge resting just above Fallujah. The sky was clear and the starry night was one of the most beautiful I had ever seen. I thought of an anonymous “Dear Hero” postcard I had read about being miles apart but looking at the same stars and I wondered who else could see these stars and who was looking at them at the same moment.

It is hard to remember just where you really are sometimes. Surrounded by Americans, eating American food, watching- however reluctantly- FOX News on the chow hall TV, wearing the same thing to work you have worn everyday for the last four years, arguing over baseball scores and football lineups... Then four 120mm rockets shudder the building and you remember that people are trying to kill you.

It was a long day and I had spent it around the camp working on different projects. I decided to walk down the hallway to talk to my Marines who work in a different room. I opened the homemade plywood door from the Combat Operations Center (COC) and entered the quiet calmness of the dark vestibule. The outer door to the command post swayed gently in the evening breeze and the parting glow of the sun cast a serene blueness through the crack.

Completely unannounced, a loud boom froze me in mid-step and a shockwave hit my chest as it faded. With the artillery battery down the street, one spends a lot of time trying to figure out if the booms are outgoing or incoming projectiles. “That was incoming,” I heard the Commanding Officer (CO) shout out of his office. I returned to the COC and entered the watch, where they track all current operations, to see the status of the attack.

As a unit, we launched into our procedures, but as individuals, we were in the throes of indecision; not wanting to seem afraid, but not wanting to die for something stupid like not wanting to seem afraid. We were uber-green and new to this Fallujah routine; we had only been there for a few weeks. MSgt Davis, a salty old Marine sitting near me reached for his flak jacket and began to put it on. “That was a little too close…” he said as he closed the Velcro on the front flap. In the middle of the COC, a meeting that was in progress carried on indifferently. I had no urge to run and hide, but part of me wished our CO and XO would, and all the Marines would follow suit.

I went down the hall to see what the status was on the accountability of my Marines. A few had gone to the ammunition holding area to make sure it was OK (it had become something of a magnet for incoming fire and one direct hit had cooked an entire warehouse of ammo weeks before we arrived). This worried me. I didn’t want my Marines rolling around the camp after dark while we took rocket fire. I gave instructions to have Sergeant Ski, my NCO in charge, come see me when he returned.

I had only been in Fallujah for 30 minutes when I experienced my first rocket attack. We had just poured ourselves out of our trucks after a tense three-hour convoy when the impacts shook the ground, killing a sailor somewhere else on base. It was an indicator of things to come. The Fallujah-based resistance groups taunted the Marines and challenged us to “fight to the death” on CNN. I knew lots of Marines who wanted to. The Marines were angry they had been pulled out of the city in April; they had risked everything and some of their friends had given their lives. “It’s right there over the hill,” My friend Ryan said to me at lunch. "All the bad guys are right there…it would make this all seem worthwhile, give the Marines some tangible sense of accomplishment.” Ryan was a Reconnaissance Marine who was sent on all kinds of secret missions. He was on his second tour in Iraq.

Many Marines, in their capacity as armchair generals, believed that another all-out battle in the area was an inevitability as the US leadership became more angry with the slum and the guerilla war it was waging. However unsuccessful the Al Qaeda-led Al Anbar attacks were, Americans were still dying.


I was in the COC when the casualty report came in from Bravo Surgical Company. I wasn’t supposed to see it, but I did. No one from our Battalion had been killed, but I did see one name I recognized immediately on the Wounded In Action (WIA) list. It was Col. Nelson, a commander of one of the infantry regiments. His command post was very close.

MSgt Davis and I stood together in the watch, listening to the artillery Marines shooting counter-battery fire. With radars that detect points of origin for enemy projectiles, they then immediately fire on that position. “Kill ‘em all sir,” MSgt muttered. It was not the first time I had heard this mantra.

For some it was intensely personal. Staff Sgt. Richard, while sucking on a Marlboro, showed me where he was standing when a mortar round hit a stone tower next to our COC. The concussion knocked him down, shrapnel cut a communication line, peppered the building, and hit LCpl Wong, a data technician, who survived and is back on full duty and cocky as hell about the whole thing. SSgt. sucked his cigarette and looked at his dirty boots, kicking one against the other. “Fuck them and fuck this place, sir,” he said. That is a sentiment I can hardly fault a man who almost lost his life and never saw his wife and kids again.

With death as random as it is in and around Fallujah, there is nothing to do but assume it won’t happen to you. Statistics are on your side, and perversely, you start hoping for excitement as much as you pray for safe passage.

Col. Nelson was in the right place and time to catch some shrapnel- start his deployment with a Purple Heart. Guiltily, you almost want to run around the camp trying to catch mortars as they fall, to prove you were there, especially if your job doesn’t take you outside the wire much. But when someone dies, you wise up real fast. Embarrassed by your own naivete and insecurity, you vow not to "be a hero" about anything. But you know that this rationality is fleeting. Why else would you be a Marine? You're sick, hellbent on glory.


I walked past the HESCOs, which are large dirt fortifications used to protect structures that cannot be dug in. I looked to the sky and saw a glow over Fallujah. Sometimes it seemed like the city must be burning as F/A-18s flew overhead and you argued with your friend if they were inbound or outbound on a target. AC-130s would shoot 105mm shells at suspected bunkers and strongholds and let off bursts of mini-gun fire on insurgents. I wondered if anything was going on in Fallujah at that moment, and I remarked how bizarre it was that I was walking back to my hootch under the beautiful starry night, with the largest mujahideen stronghold in Al Anbar just over the hill from me.

As I began to write this down, my friend Tim stopped in on his way to sleep. “Did you hear the latest? Col. Nelson and the Sergeant Major got shrapnel, and someone was Killed In Action (KIA) right in the command post. I was just there today,” he said uncomfortably.

Everywhere you go on this camp you see a place where someone was killed; where a mortar hit or a rocket impacted. Your own death is just a surprise away; a Purple Heart away. There is nothing to do but completely ignore it.


I wrote this in Fallujah after a few months in country. Edited a little. Names have been changed.