The fallen, the fallen!
The buddies, the sharers of foxholes
the tellers of stories, the dreamers
without words, the singers without music
Our fallen, our fallen!
We clasp them—once and for good—
mightily, tearfully, each to our breast.
—Dan Levin, Marine Staff Sergeant, Iwo Jima, March 1945
On a routine combat patrol outside Marjah in January 2010, a squad of marines from Second Platoon, Charlie One-Six, crept cautiously toward an adobe compound in a farm village, hunting a Taliban gang who were making and planting IEDs, the deadly bombs responsible for the majority of American dead and wounded. The marines had just arrived in Afghanistan, and three squads—about thirty men in all—were assigned to a remote base called Outpost Husker. It would be a few weeks before Joey Schiano would raise his rocket launcher against the adobe wall of a farmer’s compound not far away.
Now, stepping warily at point, at the head of the patrol was Lance Corporal Zachary “Smitty” Smith. He was nineteen years old, taller than his dad—a New York state trooper—but with his dad’s engaging grin. Growing up in small-town Hornell, New York, he’d been deeply affected by the terror attacks on 9/11. When he was in the sixth grade, he’d glued an image of Osama bin Laden on a cardboard box and took potshots at it with his grandfather’s .22 rifle. Before he left Camp Lejeune with One-Six that November, Smitty had gone home and married his high-school sweetheart, Anne. Now he was barely a month into his first combat experience.
As he stepped carefully, an IED suddenly erupted beneath him, tearing off his legs and scything down other marines with shrapnel and blast wounds. Corporal Zachary Auclair rushed to save him, kneeling and frantically pulling out tourniquets and bandages, and Auclair was soon bathed in Smitty’s blood.
“Watch for the second one! Watch for the second one!” The Taliban often laid IED traps in pairs of bombs, and the senior leader on the patrol, twenty-eight-year-old platoon sergeant Daniel M. Angus, was frantically warning his marines, and then he himself stepped on the second IED. The blast blew him apart, killing him instantly and spraying Auclair with blood and viscera. In the chaos, Staff Sergeant Warren Repsher, wounded in the face by shrapnel, was on the radio calling for a medevac bird, and Smitty lay dying in Auclair’s arms.
It is difficult to comprehend the emotional shock and grief that slammed into the marines of Charlie One-Six. Of course they realized that they were at war, and they knew, as they often said, that bad shit happens. Most of them had already done one deployment in Afghanistan, but that was a relatively benign tour in Garmsir, the trading-post river town down south where I had deployed with the marines. This was different: the Taliban would fight viciously to keep the Americans out of Marjah, and Charlie One-Six knew that, even though they’d been here barely a week. So the emotional shock didn’t come from surprise as much as from the catastrophic loss of deeply loved comrades, obliterated in an instant of horror seared forever into the souls of the survivors.
What lingers after the shock wears off is the deep moral injury of grief, perhaps the most common psychological wound of the generation that fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. While Charlie One-Six was attempting to absorb the loss of Smitty and Angus, the army surgeon general’s Mental Health Advisory Team was arriving for its seventh survey of the emotional health of the troops, finding that just under 80 percent of combat soldiers and marines had experienced a death in their unit.
The pain that these men and women carry is not only the most common emotion but perhaps the most difficult to share with outsiders. The survivors often feel guilt for having not spotted the IED that killed their buddy or for surviving when a buddy goes home in a body bag. Many veterans find it impossible to convey the depth of emotion that binds members of a small unit like Second Platoon and why each combat death thus cuts so deep. Coming together as they do, these emotions of grief, sorrow, shame, guilt, and loss endure as a powerful moral injury.
Relationships that develop and deepen at war are different from those most civilians experience. By some mysterious process the moral obligation hammered into green recruits—You are responsible for your battle buddy, no matter what!—grows into a loving and steely devotion that leads military people and especially those engaged in ground combat to value the lives and well-being of their comrades more deeply than their own. Friendships are shorn of pretense and affectation by shared hardship and the forced intimacies of communal living under stress. It’s difficult to act aloof and superior when everyone in your squad is bathed in the sweat and filth of weeks without a shower and has been defecating in holes in the ground or in bags of kitty litter. There are no secrets out there; the strengths and weaknesses of every man and woman are magnified and exposed. It is life lived vividly.
The narcotic of this web of relationships is why wounded grunts, medevaced to distant surgical wards and swathed in bandages and tubes, will struggle to get back to their guys. It is why returning combat troops may find old relationships with spouses and friends to be flat and dull. It is why, when their tour of duty is complete and they’re back in civilian life, the separation from their buddies produces the empty ache of loss. The shared intimacies and shared risks are experiences that separate them forever from those who weren’t there.
But camaraderie in war is dangerous. As in any loving relationship, death can be devastating to the survivor. Soldiers and marines at war are used to seeing dead bodies, even those of other Americans. But you can’t distance yourself from the mangled face of a dead loved one. Psychologist Ilona Pivar once studied the prevalence of grief among Vietnam War combat veterans. What she found was stunning: many of them had lost beloved buddies in combat; their grief, more than thirty years later, was deeper and more painful than their sorrow at the recent loss of their spouse.
In the bloody chaos of that awful day in Afghanistan, Angus was dead, and Smitty was dying, and his best friend, Xavier Zell, knew he should go over and grip Smitty’s hand to give some comfort in his last moments. But Smitty was a bloody mess, and Zell, twenty-two, told himself he had to pull security, taking his place in the outward-facing defense perimeter the marines had set up, anticipating an attack and waiting frantically for the medevac chopper to come in. Zell was torn, knowing he should go to his friend, but he was afraid. It was too much. He couldn’t even look.
The helicopter came, and Smitty and Angus were zipped into body bags and put on stretchers and carried out to the landing zone and loaded on board, and away they went. Darren Doss watched them go. Afterward, he thought, We just got here and this already happened? How the fuck are we going to make it out of here?
In some ways, Doss seemed the most fragile of Charlie One-Six. He depended heavily on his buddies for support, yet he could appear untethered, so that events would lift him to giddy heights or drop him into black despair. He laughed the loudest and sorrowed more deeply than the others. That Christmas of 2009, he told me, “I woke up early and [Lance Corporal Justin] Shreve was on fire watch, and he was like ‘Hey man,’ and he puts his arm around my shoulder, and he’s like ‘Merry Christmas, Doss,’ and I’m like ‘Merry Christmas, Shreve,’ and he just, like, slips me two little shooter bottles of vodka.” Remembering, Doss blinked away tears. “It was just… yeah.”
Doss told me this story years later, when he and Nik Rudolph and Stephen Canty and I met to talk one long afternoon in a Philadelphia hotel room. They’d gone out for smokes and more beer and then settled back in and took up the story.
The day that Smitty and Angus were killed was bad. Doss had just come back from a patrol with his squad. From a distance, he’d heard the blast and seen the column of smoke, and he knew. In telling the story now, Doss spoke mechanically, his words dead.
“I saw the gunny and first sergeant zip them up in the body bags. Angus, both his legs were gone, and one arm was gone, and the other was kind of fused in an awkward position. They put the bags on stretchers and went out to the helo single file, and the helo took ’em away. And I went back to my tent, and Auclair was sitting there, and there were, like, guts hanging off his helmet and blood all over his stuff. He was crying, and he had baby wipes, but the baby wipes were all dried up, covered with blood. He was trying to clean under his fingernails, and I sat down and I wanted to talk with him, maybe try to cheer him up. But I didn’t know what to say. I like gave him a pack of baby wipes I’d gotten in the mail, and I went outside and just… that was about it.”
The next day the three marine squads occupying the combat outpost held a memorial for Smitty and Angus. Auclair had taken off his stained cloth helmet cover and never wore it again. He and the others stood respectfully. “The chaplain came and pulled us together and, like, gave us this speech,” Doss remembered. “And it was basically, he said, like, this shit, you know, happens, and… he didn’t really help much, everyone was kind of like ‘Yeah, he meant well,’ but everybody was walking around with tears in their eyes the whole day. We had to go out the next day. We had the memorial, and [later] that day we went out on patrol, and we got ambushed.
“We were in open desert,” Doss said, “and you could hear rounds bouncing off the rocks, and no one could take cover because we are like just flat open.” Finally they were able to fire back with rockets and grenade launchers. “We hit this [Taliban] dude and fucked him up, and another guy was dragging him, dragging him behind a wall, and he was fuckin’ throwing up after he dragged the dude, and then we leveled the place, we went insane, and the gunny was yelling ‘That’s enough! That’s enough!’”
The room was silent for a moment. “What happened next?” I asked.
Doss: “We walked back in and I had an MRE!” The room exploded with laughter.
Laughter, in fact, is the mental health therapy that combat marines and soldiers use to survive. The explosive release of laughter can keep grief at bay, at least for a while. “If we really get down and think about what we did,” Canty said once, “it’s a slippery slope. Avoidance is a great strategy.”
As the story of Smitty and Angus was still reverberating, someone started telling the one about the tent stakes. Adjacent to the marines’ outpost was an encampment of Afghan National Army soldiers who lived in a U.S. military tent that was pegged to the desert floor with huge wooden stakes. Across the way, the marines would build a fire at night, and since wood was scarce, they began eyeing those tent stakes.
Doss: “Every night we’d go over to the ANA tent and sneak off with a couple of their stakes and use ’em for the fire, but we were careful to take only one or two at a time.”
One night a transport helo came in with water resupply, landing in a hurricane blast of dirt and pebbles, and the marines took cover. “When we went out to get the water,” Doss said, “we look across the dirt and, like, the Afghan army tent is one hundred percent gone! All their cots are sitting in a row, but the tent itself is gone because we had burned every one of the stakes.” We’re all helpless with laughter at this. “They had no idea what happened,” Doss said, recovering and wiping tears from his eyes. “They were standing around, like, baffled!”
Then there was the Christmas-tree caper. At their base in Marjah, the marines had stacked their empty conex boxes three high, and that December, the battalion chaplain had a couple of marines erect a decorated Christmas tree on the top. One day, one of the platoon sergeants said to the Charlie One-Six marines, “Hey, I got a mission for you guys. See that Christmas tree? After chow I want that Christmas tree in our tent. Get the Christmas spirit!”
So that night, said Doss, “we dress in all black. Fuckin’ climb up there and cut the rope securing it, and we make it down to like the first conex box, and all of a sudden ‘Hey! What are you doing?’” No matter how many times the marines have told and retold this story, they are laughing and shouting over one another trying to tell it again.
Nik Rudolph takes over. “We get caught, and we’re up there and some of the guys book it out of there, and we’re, like, fucked. And the chaplain comes, and he’s like ‘I want your fuckin’ name and rank and who you’re with.’ And I’m like ‘I’m Second Platoon,’ and he goes ‘What’s your name?’ and I’m like ‘Rudolph, sir.’” And the chaplain is beet red with rage, bellowing up at Rudolph. “And he’s like ‘You’re trying to tell me your name is Rudolph and you’re stealing my Christmas tree? On Christmas? I don’t fuckin’ believe it.’” They put the tree back up but hopped down off the other side of the conex boxes and escaped punishment. “But… oh, man,” Rudolph said, chuckling and shaking his head.
Around that time there was an Afghan kid who used to come around the marines’ outpost, basking in their attention. One day he kept trying to get them to go outside, wanting to show them something. Doss and Canty and some others finally went with him into an adjacent field toward a tree line and discovered a desiccated corpse, a man the marines had shot a while back. Canty remembered the shooting. The man had been acting suspiciously and wouldn’t respond to the warning shots the marines had fired in accordance with the ROE, and so he was shot and killed. Now his body had been ravaged by dogs.
It turned out that the corpse was the boy’s father, who was deaf and mute and couldn’t hear or respond to warning shots, the boy explained, and that’s why he appeared to ignore the marines and why he was shot and killed and was now lying dead in a field.
“I’m not sure how that feels,” Canty said, when I asked him how he’d reacted to that awful news. “Here we are trying to do our American ideals all over the place, and we’re being arrogant cowboys.” In the accumulation of such events, he said, “the morality did wear down.”
But Doss took it harder. That killing, and the realization of how it had taken place, created a grief that seemed to penetrate deep into his soul. Few knew it at the time, but his own father was in poor health, in and out of hospitals with an autoimmune condition among other problems, and he’d had surgery and a pacemaker implanted in his chest. He’d been sick since Doss was in the sixth grade. He would joke to Darren and his two sisters that his pacemaker sometimes would “shock the shit out of me,” and the kids would laugh. But they realized that meant his heart was stopping. Michael Doss died in 2012, two years after Darren came home from Afghanistan.
After his father’s funeral and burial at the Niskayuna Reformed Church just outside Schenectady, New York, Darren began to have nightmares, exploding awake in horror. He spoke about it in the videotaped interviews that Stephen Canty has done with members of Charlie One-Six, and we watched the interview with Doss one afternoon as a dozen marines and I were sprawled across hotel-room beds. Doss had gone home earlier.
In the video, Doss is saying that in his nightmares he is back in Afghanistan, going out into that field with Canty and the Afghan boy, and they find the corpse, but instead of the Afghan man who’d been dead for days, it’s his father, and his father’s face is partially eaten away… And on the videotape Doss is breaking down in gulping sobs of anguish. But he manages to finish “eaten away… by dogs,” and he ducks down out of the camera’s view, and the sound of sobbing fades slowly.
In our hotel room there is dead silence for long moments. Then someone says, “I love you, Doss.”