It Happened on the Way to War (31 page)

Meanwhile, the pace of activity remained high across the spectrum of CFK initiatives. Soon after our new clinic manager joined, we began forming a major partnership with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which contacted us in search of a locally led organization with deep ties to the community. With time, it would become an innovative partnership that would further the evolution of my views on research and stand as an example of a responsible way to combine long-term study with action. For our clinic and the residents of Kibera, that action would eventually translate to free medical care for tens of thousands of people. Additionally, our Binti Pamoja Girls' Center published a coffee-table book of first-person narratives and photographs called
Lightbox
. The book would generate thousands of dollars for girls' scholarships. Our sports program was integrating reproductive-health education into its training clinics for coaches and captains, and we launched a new community-based waste-management program called Trash Is Cash (
Taka Ni Pato).

It was still exciting, though the organization was growing so rapidly that the volume of tasks outpaced our abilities to manage the U.S. office as volunteers. Up until Tabitha's death, CFK was often a source of release for me from the military. Since her passing, however, it began to feel more like a responsibility that kept me captive to a never-ending stream of e-mail and phone calls. When I neared my wit's end, I called Salim. His voice rejuvenated me, and we often talked about our personal hopes and fears. He was one of a handful of friends to whom I could bare a part of my soul.

Our deep friendship was especially important at that time not only because we lost our cofounder, but because of the wars. Salim detested war, and his feelings were especially sharp about Iraq and what he viewed as American aggression overseas. We didn't speak about it frequently, though when we did, we were candid. I respected his opinion and agreed with him on many points. Of course, in certain areas we disagreed. I had a higher tolerance for the use of violence and military hard power to defend a country and its interests. While Salim and I agreed that Iraq was an unjust war, we had a different view about the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. More important than our specific perspectives was that we discussed them and listened to each other. Had we not spoken openly about it, the wars could slowly have divided us. Salim wasn't happy that I was going to Iraq, but he accepted it as a duty that I had to fulfill. He supported me as a friend.

While our conversations covered a lot of important and sensitive ground, I could never bring myself to speak with Salim about my desire to “see the elephant.” That part of me remained in the shadows to all of my friends except a couple of my closest Marine brothers. I didn't know how to explain it to my loved ones who hadn't served in the military. I knew that they would find it difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend.

MY PARENTS FLEW down from Rhode Island in late August the weekend before I left for Iraq. We spent three days together on the beach. Dad was unusually worried.

“I'm sorry to ask this,” he said during a long walk. “Have you prepared a will?”

Although it was on my to-do list, I hadn't gotten around to it.

“Well, if you don't mind, tell me about it.”

“I'd like to pay off Tracy's debt from grad school, and if there's anything left, put whatever money remains to CFK.”

Dad's face twitched a bit below the scar on his cheek. “Why not write it down and send it to Mom and me before you leave. You need to stay focused on Iraq. Never let your guard down. But what are you thinking you will do after?”

I told my father that I was weighing options to stay in the Marine Corps or apply to Harvard for graduate school in business and public policy. My mother thought Harvard was a wonderful idea, “both intellectually and to have you so close to home.”

“Those are tough schools to get into, Rye,” my father reacted. “You know I got rejected once from Harvard Business School.”

“No, Dad, I didn't remember that. You had your Ph.D. in sociology. Why would you bother with HBS?”

“Organizational behavior. They're top-notch at it. You might want to have some backups.”

“I'll be competitive.” I didn't want to talk about it. It frustrated me that he didn't think I'd get in. I shifted gears to avoid an argument, and I told my father in general terms about the CIA opportunity that Captain Dubrule had suggested before he had handed over company command to Captain Burke.

“Sounds interesting, but what about your lady?”

“Well, that's why I'm not going to do it.”

“Good choice, son. What else are you looking at?”

The opportunities ran the gamut from counterespionage operations based out of Washington, D.C., to recruiting duty in Connecticut.

“Why not pick one of them for another three years and then get out after eight?” While he had never entirely objected to me making a career in the Marine Corps, he didn't encourage it either. He hoped that I'd get out, and I knew my mother wanted to see me in a different career. As independent as I sometimes was, the opinions of my parents still meant an enormous amount to me.

Before they left, my father handed me a thick manila folder. We embraced. I hugged my mom and struggled to hold back tears. I knew what was on their minds, though I tried not to think about it.

THE LAST WEEK at Camp Lejeune flew by in a flurry of activity as we made plans for our teams to attach to different combat units and prisons located throughout Al Anbar Province, the war-torn Sunni region about the size of North Carolina located west of Baghdad. Once we arrived in Iraq, Captain Burke would command the company from division headquarters in the provincial capital of Ramadi, and I would take my small team of three Marines and two linguists to the Eighth Marine Regiment in Fallujah.

My gunnery sergeant and I came up with our call sign, Talisman. We would support the Third Reconnaissance Battalion, the same unit with which my father had fought. I would serve as the regimental HUMINT officer. It was a staff job, though I intended to be operational in addition to leading my team and supporting three other teams attached to the regiment's infantry battalions.

Fortunately, I hit the four-year mark days before we deployed. My battalion commander pinned on my captain's bars. After the hasty ceremony, my commander, a lieutenant colonel, pointed to the new silver double bars on my camouflage collar and said, “Congratulations, Captain. Those ought to make your life at the regiment in Fallujah easier.”

Captain Burke walked up and shook my hand.

“Sir,” I said, “thank you.”

“It's Joe now, Rye.”

IT WAS USUALLY easy for me to sleep on flights. Most of our Marines were conked out with their rifles in their laps as the commercial Continental airplane carried us from Europe to Kuwait. I had been awake for more than thirty-six hours, the previous day having started with my farewell to Tracy at Camp Lejeune.

“I love you. Stay safe and come back” were her last words.

I felt the stretching sensation inside my chest as I embraced her. “I'll be back soon. I love you,” I said, picking up my dad's old duffel and leaving the woman I hoped to marry with a tear falling down her face.

I was thinking about our good-bye when I started flipping through the airline videos. One of my favorite movies was playing,
Kingdom of Heaven
. It was ironic to be flying to war in the Middle East and watching a movie about the Crusades.

My thoughts shifted back to my dad when the knighting scene began. The film's hero knelt as his father spoke on his deathbed: “Speak the truth always, even if it leads to your death. Safeguard the helpless and do no wrong. That is your oath.” The father slapped his son across the face, “And that's so you remember it.”

The scene shook me. I heard my father's voice and imagined a smack across my face. I stopped the movie, shocked by the realization that I had neglected to read what my father had prepared in the thick manila envelope. Rifling through my rucksack, I discovered a seventy-page manuscript that he had written for me in the months leading up to my Iraq deployment. It was about his year as a Marine counterinsurgent in Vietnam. It began, “My involvement in military life features opportunities gained and lost, variable probabilities, illusions and disillusions, and elusive uncertainties, some of which remain.”

Dad's fourth chapter was titled “My First VC (Viet Cong)—or Was He?” The chapter took place during his first month in enemy terrain, where he was in command of a weapons platoon assigned to monitor and defend a mountain pass outside of Danang. Hundreds of villagers moved through the pass each day. Most of them were older women carrying food and walking barefoot. One day, my father noticed that a young man with a bicycle was standing near the pass wearing leather shoes and watching the Marines curiously. Dad confronted the man, searched him, and discovered pencil marks on the inner lining of his jacket. The marks appeared to form a sketch of the platoon's firing positions.

“I stepped back, aimed my 45 [caliber pistol] at his heart, and motioned for him to start walking.”

My father walked the suspect Viet Cong to a nearby artillery battery and turned him over to the commanding officer for interrogation. However, he never received any feedback or intelligence about the suspect despite his many follow-up requests for information. Forty years later, Dad reflected, “Uncertainty abounded. Feedback from upper echelons was unreliable and scarce. Members of each unit seemed uninterested in anything but their own primary task. Few officers spent time acquiring and sharing possible new knowledge about the enemy and the nature of our conflict.”

I read this with great interest. It surprised me that military intelligence appeared to be so incomplete and one-directional in Vietnam. I didn't read it as a warning. I assumed that Marine Corps intelligence had dramatically improved. We existed to support the Marines on the ground, the warfighters such as my father. Surely we would not let them down.

In the final scene of his manuscript, Dad wrote about the ambush where he was shot in the face and leg. That was the attack in which the old smoke grenade that fascinated me as a child caught an enemy machine gun bullet heading for his heart. It felt like I was discovering a secret as I read:

After the gunfire died down, I crunched down off the trail and tried to figure out what was going on at the ambush site. It was silent and motionless. Brilliant beams of sunlight pierced down through the tall trees choked with vines. Sunlight and shadows. Lots of deep, concealing shadows. My Marines spread out into firing positions. One of them said, “They were up in the trees, lieutenant.” I looked up into the trees, but I couldn't see well. Someone yelled, “Corpsman up. The lieutenant's been hit.”

I wondered which lieutenant had been hit. I turned and saw our company executive officer, a strapping, proud, preppy fellow from “Hahvaad,” who was looking down at me. A corpsman pulled off my helmet and started swabbing my face and head in search of exit wounds. Then the executive officer grinned and said, “Schwartz, you lucky bastard. You just got yourself a million dollar wound. But you don't look too pretty.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Elephant and the Velvet Glove

Fallujah, Iraq

FALL 2005

STAY AWAKE, DAMMIT, STAY AWAKE
.

My eyes felt heavy. My head bobbed.

I had only been in country for a week. Already I was so tired.

Sweat built up beneath my body armor. The Humvee's air-conditioning roared, churning frosty air into my face. I sucked in a breath and held it, clenching my jaws, grinding my teeth.

They called it the City of Mosques, though from my vantage point on the bridge, I could only spot three minarets standing like chimney stacks in the haze. Everything was brown, dry, and dusty. Our Humvee crossed the Euphrates. A fish leaped, arcing gracefully above the ripples of the olive-green water. Fallujah didn't look like my childhood impressions of a flourishing cradle of civilization.

Blackwater Bridge stood to my left. Known as Old Bridge by the locals, it ran into the most densely populated, volatile part of the city—the Jolan Market. We rarely crossed that bridge. Eighteen months had passed since the charred remains of four U.S. contractors hung from its steel frame. It was an event that had sparked one of the bloodiest battles of the Iraq War—the Battle of Fallujah.

Colonel Berger, the commander of regimental combat team eight, sat in the front seat monitoring his Blue Force Tracker, a computer that charted the real-time location of military units in the region. Although I generally sat behind the colonel, that afternoon I chose the seat behind the driver to get a better view of the market. There, Iraqi children had been tossing grenades from rooftops at our convoys.

“Crossing checkpoint,” Colonel Berger said into the radio. We were now in downtown Fallujah.

WATCH THE ROAD!
I shouted silently to myself.

We were on patrol for barely three hours. Why was I so tired? This was enemy territory and Colonel Berger was a high-value target. I needed to be alert and on the lookout for improvised explosive devices, IEDs.

COMPLACENCY KILLS read the sign at the exit point of our base.

WAKE UP
!

I took in another breath and held it. I'd learned the tactic at the Basic School to prevent myself from falling asleep during PowerPoint presentations. Scouring the pockmarked road, I studied the rocks, upturned earth, and garbage piles. This part of the city resembled photographs of Dresden during the Allied firebombing campaigns of World War II. An IED could be anywhere.

A dozen Iraqi men stood at an intersection ahead. They appeared to be unarmed, though some had cell phones. Cell phones triggered IEDs.

“Fifteen hundred [hours] and these men are out doing nothing,” Colonel Berger snarled. “They're up to no good.”

A black plume rose from an oil drum. “Smoke up ahead,” I said.

“Could be a signal,” Colonel Berger replied. “Stay alert. Corporal, you got that?”

“Roger that, sir,” the corporal, our gunner, shouted from the turret, and trained the long barrel of his fifty-caliber machine gun toward the smoke. The only men who suffered higher casualty rates than our turret gunners in Iraq were the explosive-ordnance-disposal Marines, the heroic souls who cleared the roadside bombs.

A one-legged man stood near the oil drum on crutches, motionless, a scarecrow waiting for the wind to blow. His cataract-clouded eyes looked like golf balls.

I counseled my Marines to be vigilant, to expect the unexpected. What was my problem?

WATCH THE DAMN ROAD.

I scanned the sidewalks scarred by mortar fire and tank tracks. Three Iraqi schoolgirls in white-collared shirts and colorful shawls strolled up a side street. They stopped smiling when they saw our convoy. Kibera came to mind. There, the schoolgirls also wore pretty uniforms. They looked neat and clean despite the squalor.

BOOM.

My ears rang. We were engulfed by smoke. The corporal collapsed from the turret. I was dazed.

“Marine, you all right?” Colonel Berger turned and seized the corporal's arm.

“Uh, I think,” the corporal stammered. “Uh, yes, sir. Yes, sir.”

Our Humvee lumbered down Fallujah's main drag on two flat tires. When the smoke cleared, dozens of Iraqi men stood watching us. What were they looking at? I wanted the enemy to shoot at us again so that we could return fire. Colonel Berger wanted to fight as well. I could tell by the tone of his voice and the grimace on his hard face. We knew the enemy were looking at us. Yet all we could do was look back.

We pulled into a forward operating base in the middle of Fallujah. Baseball-size holes peppered our Humvee's armored shell up to its steel turret. Shrapnel had blasted into the undercarriage, slicing through the seat behind Colonel Berger. The gunner was lucky, and I was in a lucky seat. Dumb luck.

“Probably a one-five-five,” the colonel said, referring to a 155-millimeter artillery round, the most common ammunition used to make roadside bombs in Iraq.

We reported the IED as one of a dozen significant actions—SIGACTS—that had occurred to our regiment of five thousand Marines and Iraqi Army soldiers in the past twenty-four hours. That was it. If one of us was wounded or killed, we would have been added to the logbook of SIGACTS and become a statistic, another victim of another roadside bomb.

INSIGNIFICANT AS IT was in a long, explosive war, the bomb was the beginning of my baptism by fire. It was the first time someone had tried to kill me, though I wasn't personally the target. It was my uniform and what I represented. That evening, once the shock dissipated, I experienced a rush of ecstasy. It was an extraordinary but brief sensation. Moments later, I was planning that night's operations and thinking about my Marines who were out on dangerous missions.

The IEDs were the worst part of the war. They were excruciatingly difficult to spot from a moving vehicle, and we had little control over them. They drew blood every day, and as the war progressed, the bombs became more catastrophic. Shortly after I arrived, a fellow captain was killed with three of his Marines when a massive roadside bomb with four 155-millimeter rounds exploded, swallowing his heavily armored Humvee in a roar of fire.

“So you've seen the elephant,” Captain Burke remarked on the phone the following day.

Yes, I had taken a glimpse, a taste, a touch of a small part of something that was too large ever to fully embrace, let alone understand. Still, it was enough for me to think that I was ready for more if it came my way, and within days, I wanted more. I wanted to fight the insurgents who were trying to kill us. That impulse clouded the theory that I had studied. “The people are the prize,” I had read and believed. Yet whom could we trust, and what if we felt no connection to these people?

My reaction surprised me. I had assumed that I would be one of the strongest advocates for a counterinsurgency approach that emphasized building the capacity of local security forces over killing bad guys and kicking down doors. In this regard, the words of one of our most celebrated Marine generals, James “Warrior Monk” Mattis, had served as a guide. The general described the velvet glove approach to counterinsurgency in memorable terms:

Both the insurgency and the military force are competing for the same thing: the support of the people … We will be compassionate to all the innocent and deadly only to those who insist on violence, taking no “sides” other than to destroy the enemy. We must act as a windbreak, behind which a struggling Iraq can get its act together … to use the softer forms, focus on lights and water—and go in with small teams to kill the bad guys at night.
*

“An iron fist in a velvet glove,” so goes the saying attributed to Napoléon to characterize a gentle, soft demeanor layered over firm command. The velvet glove made sense when I first heard about it in a briefing at Camp Lejeune. Yet shortly after I hit the sandy soil of the lower Euphrates River Valley, my own thinking shifted. In a city where kids were lobbing grenades at us, everyone appeared to be a potential enemy. Logic could have told me that I was wrong, but my instincts were driving me. I wanted to attack the enemy, not help build the Iraqi security forces, which at the time were by American standards undermanned, poorly equipped, and unprofessional. During my initial months in country, I believed that we needed to kill the terrorists first and worry about the soft stuff later—or have someone else worry about it. What I didn't realize then was that the appropriate levels of force, as well as support, were always difficult to identify because they were based on fluid realities concealed by the fog of war.

General Mattis had called for the velvet glove at the end of 2003, before he returned to Iraq with a division of fourteen thousand Marines. By April 2004, the general had reluctantly removed his glove and swung his iron fist, launching the Battle of Fallujah, one of the largest and most destructive offensive operations since the “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad began the war. My company had arrived in the fall of 2005. We were trying to rebuild Fallujah and prepare for the first general election under the new constitution. It was again time for the velvet glove, and our senior commanders, including Colonel Berger, were advocating for more capacity building with the Iraqi Army and police. However, the policy and direction coming down from the high command conflicted with our combat-worshipping culture, and it struck many Marines as counterintuitive because insurgent activity was on the rise.

I didn't recognize that we probably needed more boots on the ground, and there was no talk of the possibility of a surge in U.S. military forces, at least not at my level. We were Marines. For the most part, we would make do with what we had. The one critical vulnerability that everyone seemed to agree on was the unacceptable shortage of Arabic interpreters. Most Marine patrols lacked interpreter support, and this severely inhibited our ability to communicate with the population whose support we needed to win.

Because HUMINT was a strategic asset, our teams had enough contract interpreters. However, there weren't enough of our teams to support all of the combat units. Some Marine infantry platoons went entire deployments without receiving our direct support. With such limited resources, our intelligence collection focused on targeting the enemy and gathering tactical information such as the location of IEDs. We didn't have time to report on atmospherics about local leadership and sentiment, and regardless, that reporting was of less interest to most Marines. Our instincts were to respond to violence with violence. That was how we were trained, and at the heart of it that's what we valued. Marines who had fought in the Battle of Fallujah were the envy of the Corps. Conversely, Marines attached to Iraqi Army units in military transition teams were often perceived as “bottom-feeders,” the low performers or staff officers who couldn't find any other way into the fight.

This was the group mentality, and it hadn't changed much since my dad's time in Vietnam. Indeed, it was so ingrained that even the words Warrior Monk Mattis could not shift it fundamentally. The combatants, not the capacity builders, were celebrated. I was a captive to this culture. I conformed to it in ways that, in hindsight, I would find disturbing. All of my experiences in Kibera should have enabled me to break from the clutches of groupthink. When General Mattis's boss commented to the
New York Times
that “our Marines just have to be able to be aggressive and hostile one moment and the next moment be able to play soccer with the kids,”
*
it sounded like the perfect duty for me. Surely, I had the training and experience to handle this dichotomy. Yet in those initial months in country, I couldn't have imagined playing soccer with Iraqi kids. I was too busy scouring their waistlines for concealed weapons, their pockets for grenades.

Kibera hadn't vanished from my consciousness. It was still there. But I treated it as a separate world, and I didn't think about the inherent contradictions of waging peace while fighting war, especially in the early months. I was still processing the shock of combat and trying to make sense of an environment that often felt like a hurricane. My coping mechanism was to fire wall my life. I wasn't always effective. Events on patrol in Iraq triggered powerful memories from Kibera. Occasionally a voice on a call to Kenya made me afraid of dying before our work there was done. However, most of the time I was in Iraq, the walls that I had erected in my mind separated the two worlds.

Kibera arrived in predictable bursts of e-mails and satellite phone calls. I usually had an hour each evening before our night assaults to write to Tracy, scribble some notes in my journal, and catch up on CFK business. This hour came at the expense of sleep, but it was an important outlet. While I often wrote to Tracy and in my journal about the war, Kibera offered an escape. It took my mind away from Iraq, and because of Salim and our team of a dozen Kenyan staff and hundreds of volunteers, the news was generally uplifting.

Shortly after my first IED attack, I received an e-mail from an editor at
Time
magazine. We had met in New York earlier that summer, and the editor had visited Salim in Kibera. He was particularly impressed by our approach to youth empowerment. “Congratulations,” he wrote.
Time
magazine and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had selected CFK as a “Hero of Global Health.” A month later, the actress Glenn Close presented the award to my friend and colleague Kim Chapman at a black-tie gala in New York City.