BATTLEFIELD REQUIEM
“MARINES, ON ME.” Sergeant Major Carlton Kent walks toward the center of our broken platoon.
“Huddle up.”
We move around him and listen as he speaks from the heart. He’s the senior staff NCO in the First Marine Expeditionary Force. Tall and proud, he has the slender, chiseled face of a true warrior. I’ve never met him before, though I know of him. He’s a legend in the 1st MEF. He’s charged with the well-being of something like sixty thousand Marines here in Iraq, but he doesn’t hide on a rear echelon base and let himself drown in paperwork. Instead, he rolls out every day to check on his Marines. He shares our risks, and genuinely cares about us. Someday, he’ll be the sergeant major of the Marine Corps. Of that, we have no doubt.
He speaks to us of love—love of the men we’ve lost, love for one another. That bond is what makes us Marines so strong in a fight.
“Every man here is a warrior, and I want you to know how proud of you I am. These Marines who didn’t make it—they’re heroes. We all know that. They died fighting for their brothers, and there’s nothing more meaningful than that.”
They didn’t die for nothing.
His words are sparse, but well chosen. As he continues, I can see every one of us has choked up.
“I know it’s tough right now. I know you’re hurting. We all are. But I want you to keep your heads up. We’re in a fight with a determined, fanatical enemy, and I’m going to need each one of you in the weeks to come.”
There is nothing we wouldn’t do for this man. He understands us.
As he speaks, he makes eye contact with each one of us. “You’ll have a couple of days off. Get some rest, then pick yourselves up and keep fighting.
“Whatever happens in the future, wherever you go and whoever you become, you need to do one thing: Remember their sacrifice. Honor it with your memory. Don’t let these Marines disappear. They gave everything for us today and showed us the true heart every Marine has.”
He looks us over. Our morale is shot. We’re all in shock, depressed, grieving, and in physical pain. “You men fought hard today. There was nothing more you could have done.”
He moves from Marine to Marine, hugging each one of us and sharing a few words. When he reaches me, he says, “Don’t forget their sacrifice.”
When he finishes doing his best to console us, he tells us, “Okay, go get some chow.”
Behind our young Lieutenant Butler, we straggle off to the mess hall in silence. When we reach the front door, some rear echelon POG bars our way. His cammies are pressed and spotlessly clean, and he’s got a booney cover on instead of the Kevlar that we have. “Hey!” he shouts at us with scorn, “there’s no way you’re coming in here looking like that. Go clean up.”
Lieutenant Butler goes absolutely postal. His tirade sends the POG fleeing in retreat. Butler watches him go, then throws open the door and tells us, “Don’t let anyone give you shit. Send him to me if you have to, but I want everyone to eat. That’s an order.”
Once inside, we sit together and practically dare the POG’s to challenge us. The mess hall is full of them, and we stand out among their clean uniforms like a Steelers fan at a Browns game.
The entire platoon section suffers from shrapnel wounds, and as we try to get some food into our stomachs, we continue to bleed onto our cammies.
Wisely, everyone else in the mess hall keeps their distance.
“I can’t believe I’m still alive,” I say under my breath. Kraft hears that and just nods his head. I’ve never seen him so filthy. Usually, he’d be working himself over with a whole box of baby wipes by now. This afternoon is different. He doesn’t care.
When we finish up, we leave blood splatters on the deck beneath our tables.
Don’t forget their sacrifices.
I don’t even know how they died. I just know one minute Raleigh was alive. The next, he’s on his back with that frown of pain eternally etched on his face.
At some point, we’ll all sit down and share our stories until we can make sense of the day. Right now, nobody has that in them. We’re too shell-shocked.
I limp into my hooch and drop my gear. My flak vest will need to be hosed down, my weapon needs to be thoroughly cleaned, but I don’t care. I toss them against one wall and collapse onto my cot. All I can do is stare at the ceiling, my mind moving so fast I can’t make sense of a single thought.
Twenty minutes later, Doc Sunny comes in to check on me. “Workman, let’s take a look at your leg.”
“I’m fine,” I lie. “How’re Levine and Hebert?”
“They’ll be okay. Richeson’s in pretty bad shape, though.”
“What the hell happened?”
Doc shakes his head. “I don’t know, Workman. I don’t know.”
He steps to me and starts looking over my wounds. I have a decent chunk of grenade shrapnel in my right leg, and he digs around in it until he’s able to extract it with a pair of forceps.
I’m so far gone, I don’t even notice the pain.
Three hours. Three dead brothers. As Doc finishes cleaning out my leg wound, I realize that nothing will ever be the same. I don’t even recognize myself now.
“Let me see that elbow,” Doc orders. I hold up my arm, and he tells me to take off my cammie top. Stripped to my T-shirt, we both see that my arms are striped with tiny shrapnel cuts. A bloody piece of metal sticks out of my elbow. Doc plucks it out with his forceps and swabs the cut with iodine.
“Hold still,” he tells me as he pulls another sliver out of my flesh.
“Thanks.”
He finishes up and packs his instruments. “Hell of a fucking day.”
He leaves me to my thoughts. I stare at the ceiling, unable to make sense of anything that’s happened today, until sleep finally overtakes me.
I wake up in the middle of the night with tiny shards of metal peppering the bunk under me. It feels like I’m lying on a cactus. I flip on the light switch and brush the cot clean. When I lie down again, I still feel prickly.
I have scores of splinter-sized fragments of metal in me. They’re working back out of my skin and falling to the cot with me. When I run my hand along one arm, it feels like a porcupine’s back.
The next morning, we are all so stiff and sore as to make walking difficult. Still, we have one last job to do. Kraft and I meet in Raleigh’s room. He and Eric Hillenburg shared a hooch together. Its emptiness is overpowering. Reverently, we gather up their personal belongings—letters, clothes, souvenirs, and photographs.
Kraft says, “What do we do with these?” as he holds up two penis pumps.
Both of us try to laugh, but for me it feels like a sob. As a joke, we all bought penis pumps off the Internet and had them sent to us. The entire platoon carried M16’s, mortars, and penis pumps with us to Fallujah. Now, the joke just underscores the grief and sense of loss.
“I think we ought to keep these here.”
“Agreed.” We set them aside and continue with this brutal task.
When we finish, we gather their weapons. We’ve got to turn them in so they can be reissued, probably to some Stateside Marines fresh from infantry training who’ll fill the gaps in our ranks. The thought of that makes my stomach clench.
We carry the weapons to the battalion headquarters. As we walk, Mimoso joins us. “Hear what happened last night?”
“No.”
“Lima Company went into that neighborhood after you guys left.”
“What for?” I ask. There was nothing left of it. What was the point?
“Battle damage assessment,” Mimoso explains.
“Okay, What’d they find?”
“The place was blown to shit. But they took fire right around the same house you guys were in. Or what was left of it.”
Kraft and I stop walking. “You’re kidding?”
“No. Lima lost a Marine.”
“Unfuckingbelievable,” I spit.
“Yeah. But they also found a live Muj. They pulled him out of the rubble and our guys just finished interrogating him.”
“And?” Kraft says.
“The fucker was loaded on coke and atropine.”
Kraft and I share a look. This explains why they didn’t die when we shot them.
Lieutenant Butler joins us. He fills in some more details. “Battalion says that there were eight high-value targets in the house. At least twenty-five to thirty insurgents on the second floor.”
We were fighting thirty men?
Mimoso nods. “Lima says they found forty bodies in the neighborhood, not counting the guy they took alive.”
Our platoon section numbered less than half that.
We fought for three hours outnumbered and outgunned.
“There was some sort of a meeting under way in the house. We interrupted it.”
I wish we’d known all this at the time.
We turn in the weapons. I still don’t know all the details, but right now, I know enough. I know we failed to save our friends as they fought and died for us.
As we leave battalion headquarters, Kraft pauses and looks around. It’s another sunbaked Fallujah morning. The sun is rising high again; the shadows are in full retreat.
“What next?” he asks.
“Let’s go see Levine and Richeson before they send them home.”
Together, we walk to Bravo Surgical to say our goodbyes.