Byliner is a new kind of magazine—literally unbound—that publishes individual pieces of long-form journalism as apps. Some of these stories have been published elsewhere, but many have been commissioned by the editors for purchase on digital newsstands or by subscription. What makes Byliner a magazine is the vision of the editors, whose passion for storytelling is shared by a community of like-minded readers. Since leaving the U.S. Army in 2005—he served two tours of duty as an infantryman in Iraq—Brian Mockenhaupt has written widely about soldiers both at war and at home. The story of three Americans in Afghanistan, “The Living and the Dead” offers readers what the National Magazine Award judges described as “an unforgettable sense of the reality of modern combat.”
Dedicated to the men of Patrol Base Dakota and their families
1. The Last Step
Tom Whorl decided at twelve years old, the night he met his father’s two friends at the Super Bowl party. They matched his physical conception—thick arms, straight backs, high-and-tight haircuts shaved short on the sides and just a little longer on top—but it was how they carried themselves that fascinated him: direct in speech but respectful, with a confidence that suggested they knew something about themselves and the world that many others did not. Leaving the party, Tom told his father he would join the Marine Corps.
He considered nothing else, and five years later he hustled off a bus in the early-morning darkness at Parris Island, South Carolina, and ran toward dozens of perfectly spaced pairs of yellow footprints painted on pavement, four abreast. He placed his feet on two footprints and willed himself to stillness as his heart hammered and men scrambled around him. Easy as that, the drill instructors had put their new recruits into neat rank and file. The recruits would soon do this on their own, moving in unison, as one organism.
Tom traded first person for the third. I and me and my vanished, replaced with this recruit, as in “Sir! This recruit does not know the answer, sir!” He picked that up quickly; those who slipped had the lesson reinforced with exercises in the sandpit that left them with trembling limbs and heaving lungs. The individual did not matter, except as an essential part of the whole. He was nothing on his own, and he knew nothing, until the Marine Corps taught him the proper way. To speak. To walk. To shower. To dress. To eat.
The specialized training came later, at the School of Infantry, where he learned the finer skills of the trade. But for thirteen weeks on Parris Island he learned how to be responsible for himself, and responsible for others. He could be punished for another recruit’s actions, and others could suffer for his mistakes. If sweat trickled into his eye, he let it burn rather than wipe it away and risk a drill instructor punishing the group for his lack of discipline. He learned to fear, above all else, letting down his fellow recruits. Others depended on him to do a job, and someday men would depend on him to lead them. His fellow Marines, once they had all earned the title of Marine, would trust their lives to him, and he would trust his to them, and they would sacrifice without hesitation. If the man to his front fell, he would step into the void.
Of course, the Marine Corps could teach recruits how to behave in war, how to push aside fear and charge through an open field as bullets kicked up spouts of dirt at their feet. But the Corps couldn’t tell them what war would do to them. Tom and his men would learn those lessons on their own, far from Parris Island.
In a few months the room would be a clay oven, holding the day’s heat deep into the night, and he would wake each morning lathered in sweat. But with the Afghan winter still pushing temperatures below freezing, Tom watched his breath roll out in a hazy plume when he woke. He squirmed out of his sleeping bag, swung his legs off the cot, and slipped his feet into his boots. He lit a Marlboro and worked his mind through the day ahead, patrolling the surrounding fields and villages, infested with buried bombs and Taliban fighters.
As the sergeant in charge of First Squad, Third Platoon, Fox Company, Second Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, he oversaw three four-man fire teams, the basic building blocks of a Marine infantry unit. His days had a simple rhythm: Wake up, patrol, come home, start over. Every day, he and his men pushed out on foot into the farmland around the patrol base, and every day the Taliban shot at them, sometimes just a few hastily fired rounds, but oftentimes accurate and sustained gunfire. The Marines shot back, and sometimes they saw fighters fall, but they never found bodies, only blood trails. The Taliban were good about taking their injured and dead with them, same as the Americans.
Thousands of Marines and Afghan soldiers had invaded the longtime Taliban stronghold of Marjah, in Helmand Province, a year earlier, in 2010, and driven out the insurgents. But progress was still tenuous, and success there was critical to any sort of lasting calm in southern Afghanistan. Third Platoon was a small piece of a security ring around Marjah, keeping the Taliban under pressure on the outskirts so a local government could take root and spread, with schools and markets and Afghan security forces capable of defending their own people.
The platoon had been split in two for the deployment, with the lieutenant and two more squads a kilometer to the east at Patrol Base Beatley. Tom’s squad, the platoon sergeant, a medic, and five Afghan soldiers lived at Patrol Base Dakota, an abandoned farmer’s compound with eight-foot mud walls, a foot thick, around a courtyard roughly one hundred feet square. The Marines lived in a row of small rooms along the northern wall that they had crowded with cots. From guard towers in each corner, outfitted with machine guns and bulletproof glass, they kept watch over fields and tree lines. Like cavalry troops in an Old West fort, they were surrounded on all sides by the enemy, and fought off attacks when they left the marginal safety of their outpost, while trying to win over an always wary and often hostile population.
The compound had been named for Corporal Dakota Huse, a nineteen-year-old Marine killed by a buried bomb during a foot patrol four months earlier. The Taliban had regularly attacked the building’s previous tenants, from Second Battalion, Ninth Marines, with fighters creeping so close they chucked grenades over the walls and once snatched a machine gun from one of the guard posts. The Taliban kept its interest in Dakota after Tom’s unit replaced them in January 2011, regularly shooting at the patrol base and lobbing a few rockets. From inside the compound, the Marines could hear the sharp rattle of machine-gun fire and the enormous whoomp of improvised explosive devices in the surrounding countryside, triggered by civilians, distant Marine patrols from other bases, or Taliban blowing themselves up while trying to build or plant bombs.
“Three IEDs have gone off in the last 24 hours,” Tom scribbled in a six-by-nine-inch spiral notebook, the journal he kept to document his platoon’s fight for northern Marjah. On the first page he had left instructions for the Marines who might one day have the grim duty of sorting through his gear: “This is to be returned to my wife, should that time come.”
A few feet away, on a canvas cot set against the opposite wall, the platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant James Malachowski, still lay cocooned in his sleeping bag, a fleece cap pulled over his eyes. He was “Staff Sergeant” to his subordinates, Jimmy to his friends. Tom was both, and called him Jimmy in private but never in front of other Marines.
Their narrow, dirt-floored room doubled as Dakota’s Combat Operations Center, the COC, which was really just a computer and two radios resting on a piece of plywood at the room’s far end, everything coated in a layer of dirt as fine as talcum powder. A Marine sat there day and night, monitoring the radios and the computer’s secret instant-messaging system, ready to report emergencies or relay communications from higher command.
Tom and Jimmy had given the room a few minimal decorations. An American flag hung on the wall above Tom’s cot, and another above Jimmy’s, alongside a black Jolly Roger—a Christmas present from Jimmy’s mother, a former Marine herself, which became the platoon’s flag. Jimmy’s family also sent some of his favorites for relaxation: herbal tea and slender Bad Boy cigars, made in Maryland not far from his home in Westminster, outside Baltimore. He listened to classical music, and though Tom initially scoffed at that, he quickly found he enjoyed it. After watching movies on Jimmy’s laptop at night—usually something light, like Office Space or Old School—they’d fall asleep to Bach or Brahms or, many nights, Samuel Barber’s mournful Adagio for Strings, known to them from the Vietnam War movie Platoon.
At quick glance, they seemed two very different sorts of Marines. Tom wore his dark brown hair cut close on the sides and back, but the top flopped nearly to his eyes, far from the typical high-and-tight cut. But that was Tom, more interested in actions than appearance after a dozen years in the Marine Corps. Jimmy, though four years younger, at twenty-five, was already balding, and he kept his head shaved. And while Tom was wiry, with a welterweight’s build, Jimmy was six feet and two hundred pounds of dense muscle, narrow waist, and massive chest.
But they shared a similar leadership style, very aggressive in combat, always pushing toward the enemy, and Tom respected Jimmy deeply for his devotion to and concern for his men, qualities he counted as crucial in a good leader. Like Tom, Jimmy didn’t often raise his voice. His men knew what he expected of them and knew he put their welfare first, without any blind deference to rank. As the Marines had prepared for the deployment back at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, the officer in charge of the platoon told the men not to worry, that everything would be okay. Jimmy knew better: he’d already served two violent tours in Iraq and had seen several friends die. He pulled the lieutenant aside afterwards. “Don’t tell them that,” he said. “We are not all coming back. We will take catastrophic injuries and we will have KIAs. Don’t tell them that, because it’s not true.”
He and Tom had met briefly four years earlier at Parris Island, where they worked as marksmanship instructors for new recruits. Friendship came later, after Jimmy arrived at Lejeune as the new platoon sergeant, a few months before the deployment. They had both grown up in Maryland—Jimmy in the north, in the wooded hills of Westminster, in Carroll County, and Tom in the south, in St. Mary’s County, on Chesapeake Bay. They talked about eating blue crabs down at the beach and argued over football—Tom for the Redskins, Jimmy for the Ravens. In those early conversations they learned that their families, generations deep in Maryland, had fought on opposite sides in the Civil War—Jimmy’s for the Union, Tom’s for the Confederacy. What that must have been like, they mused, their own state torn in two.
As a boy, Tom had visited the Gettysburg and Antietam battlefields with his father, and since then he had consumed books about the Civil War. He brought two with him to Afghanistan: Robert E. Lee on Leadership, by H. W. Crocker, and Pickett’s Charge—The Last Attack at Gettysburg, by Earl J. Hess. He’d filled the Lee book with scraps of paper, on which he’d scrawled notes. Awesome traits—tell them to my leaders: Know the ground; do your reconnaissance; be indefatigable; learn from your superiors; leadership is legitimatized by success under fire; leadership requires moral responsibility.
He read the Pickett book, heavy with raw accounts of battle, as a counterweight, to remind him that those theories of leadership played out with consequence. The scale of that destruction was remarkable, with hundreds of men killed in minutes, whole platoons and companies wiped out. For the foot soldier, war hadn’t much changed. War was still miserable, the rain and the cold, the heat and the fear. Soldiers at Gettysburg watched cannonballs cut their friends in half; in Afghanistan, improvised explosive devices did the same gruesome work. Shrapnel still sounded the same whizzing an inch past the face, which brought the same euphoric relief of death cheated. The cries of the wounded and dying still sounded the same, too.
As the day’s patrol snaked out of Dakota, through a gap in the triple stack of concertina that surrounded the compound, Tom imagined Pickett’s men lined up shoulder to shoulder, ready to march toward likely death, resigned to the unknown of the next few minutes. He and his men knew some of that trepidation, waiting for the first bullet to crack overhead, heralding the start of an ambush or the sickening, deafening thunderclap of a buried bomb exploding under the patrol.
The Marines searched a few of the area’s many abandoned compounds, for weapons and bomb-making materials, and chatted with the locals they passed. Most of these conversations followed a timeworn script: Tom asked if they knew anything about Taliban activity in the area; they said no. Some were no doubt Taliban sympathizers, or Taliban themselves. But many felt trapped in a vicious brawl. If they sided with one, they’d make an enemy of the other. Locals regularly found letters taped to their homes with terse warnings: “If you help the Americans, we’ll kill you and burn your house.”
Still, some must have figured the Marines had a chance of winning, or they’d simply grown weary of wondering whether they’d blow up while walking to their fields, like the farmer who told Tom, between nervous glances, about two bombs buried along a canal.
“So tomorrow we will be going IED hunting,” Tom wrote in his journal that night. “I hate doing it, but it must be done. FML.” Fuck my life.
To defeat the bombs, the Marines needed to disable the bomb-making network. This meant detaining or killing the men who transported the materials, assembled the bombs, and detonated them—rarely the same person—and searching buildings and fields for stashes of explosives, detonators, battery packs, and the low-tech electronics used for radio-controlled blasts. But if the bomb was already planted, a critical part of the fight had been lost. The best the Marines could do was find and disable the bomb before it found them.
At least two men in every patrol carried an electronic jammer, worn as a backpack, that blocked radio signals sent from the triggerman to the bomb. Another two men carried metal detectors, which they swept before them as they walked. The detectors emitted a tone that started low as they neared a metal object and rose to a high-pitched whine for larger objects and metal closer to the surface.
The Marines also had Holly, a yellow Labrador retriever trained to sniff out several types of explosives. Lance Corporal Matthew Westbrook, Holly’s handler, would walk with her near the front of the patrol and send her to investigate suspicious areas or possible choke points, such as a road passing between two walled compounds. If she smelled explosives, she’d lie down next to the suspected bomb.
Finally, the Marines themselves became expert at spotting telltale signs: a slightly discolored patch of ground in the road or a thin layer of dirt sprinkled over a wire.
But each of these methods had serious flaws. The jammers only thwarted radio-controlled bombs and were useless against pressure plates or bombs detonated by wires, which sometimes ran hundreds of yards from a bomb to the triggerman’s location. Set a metal detector’s sensitivity too low and it could miss a bomb; set it too high and the men might move a hundred feet in an hour, investigating every tiny metal scrap. Holly could hunt explosives for only an hour or less before she became distracted, and as temperatures rose she would spend more time jumping into the cool canal water than sniffing out bombs. And while the Marines were good at spotting the out-of-place, no one was good enough to see everything, and a few minutes of hard rain could hide the signs completely.
On patrol, they often tried to walk in one another’s footsteps. No sense taking chances with an untested patch of ground. But that didn’t always work, either. Stories abounded of bombs exploding under the very spot where another Marine had just stood or stepped. Maybe he wasn’t heavy enough, or hadn’t compressed the pressure plate just right. Lucky for that first man; not so for the next.
As the Marines had prepared to leap six feet across a canal during a patrol west of Dakota in mid-February, Corporal Ian Muller, Tom’s first team leader, spotted a tiny patch of yellow on the opposite embankment, next to a footbridge. Tom stepped into the canal and gently brushed away the dirt, revealing a piece of balsa wood wrapped in yellow tape. A pressure plate. Step on it and two metal contacts meet, sending electricity from a battery pack into a pressure cooker buried in the embankment, the same sort used in a kitchen, but this one packed with ten pounds of ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder, more than enough to blow a man in half. The Taliban knew the Marines would stay off the footbridge, so they put the pressure plate several feet away, at a likely crossing point.
This was a chess match: attack and counter.
The late-winter rains saturated the patrol base and the surrounding fields, turning everything to calf-deep peanut butter that could suck the boots off a Marine’s feet. Moving through the fields exhausted the men and kept them exposed to rifle fire from distant tree lines, but they felt somewhat safe there, away from roads and trails, which were more likely laced with bombs. Until a farmer told the Marines that the Taliban had planted bombs in his field. The development rattled Tom. “The placement of IEDs in open fields is horrible,” he wrote in his journal. “The worst feeling is not knowing when your last step will be. That’s what takes a toll on your brain.”
Over at Patrol Base Beatley, Sergeant Dan Clift had stepped on a land mine that raked his legs with shrapnel, but the wounds were light and he was expected back in a few days. Tom had to call in his own medevac helicopter that day, for an Afghan National Army soldier assigned to Dakota who had passed out during a foot patrol. “I hope I never have to call another medevac,” he wrote in his journal that night. “So many people don’t understand what it’s like to be responsible for the lives of the Marines and Navy corpsman under me. Every day is so stressful and I lose so much sleep worrying about the next day, planning and going over so much in my head, every move and decision calculated.”
The bullet smacked the dirt between Tom and Ian, inches from their feet, as they stepped out of the compound they’d just finished searching. A second later they heard the shot, fired from a string of houses along Route Animal, three hundred yards to the northwest.
“Let’s go,” Tom said.
As the patrol fanned out and jogged into the field, moving toward the buildings, more gunmen opened fire, from several spots along Route Animal and in Cocheran Village, farther north. Muzzle flashes twinkled from alleyways and darkened windows. The Marines at Dakota were terrified of buried bombs—the utter lack of control—but they loved firefights. Here they could influence the outcome. Many of them had joined the Corps with fantasies of moments like this—sprinting across open ground as bullets kick up dirt around them and snap overhead, then diving onto the ground and laying down cover fire as their comrades bound forward, leapfrogging toward the enemy. These were bread-and-butter infantry skills.
With Ian’s four-man team in the lead, Tom pushed the patrol forward, an exhausting movement through muddy fields crisscrossed by irrigation canals. Ian spotted a gunman firing at them beside a pump house near a mosque along Route Animal. He had been trained at the Marine Corps’s sniper school and carried an MK12 Special Purpose Rifle, a tricked-out version of the M-4 and M-16 rifles most Marines carry, fitted with a powerful scope. He could drop a man at a half-mile. He centered the crosshairs of his scope on the man’s head and fired as Tom, Lance Corporal Ryan Moore, and Navy Hospitalman Jesse Deller, the platoon’s medic, lobbed 40-millimeter grenades from launchers attached to their rifles.
They found the gunman later in an empty house with grenade shrapnel stitched across his back and a hole in his head, stuffed with gauze. Tom called in a medevac helicopter for the man, who would die soon, and the Marines kept searching. The other fighters had fled, but they found blood trails and a cache of three remote controls and six receivers, a little win for the day—fewer buried bombs and at least one less insurgent to fire a rifle or trigger a bomb.
But Cocheran Village had been an ongoing problem for the Marines, and killing a single Taliban fighter wouldn’t fix that. Fox Company would move into the area in force, search the buildings for weapons and bomb-making supplies, and kill or capture anyone who opposed them.
“The weather is getting warmer, and more fighters are coming in every day,” Tom wrote in his journal a few days later, on March 10. “Tomorrow we are doing a company clearing operation to the north, where the worst fighting has been recently.”
Jimmy’s and Tom’s men got the easy job: overwatch. Marines from First Platoon would sweep through and search the village while the Dakota Marines watched from a distance, to keep enemy fighters from moving into the village, and intercept or kill any insurgents trying to flee the area. Squirters, they called them.
In the compound where Tom and Ian had nearly been shot a few days earlier, Tom sent Ian onto the rooftop, where he’d have a clear view of the village, four hundred yards to the north, and the surrounding fields and roads. Jimmy climbed onto the roof with him to plot target reference points on his map, should he need to call in mortar fire. Though Jimmy outranked Tom, he didn’t micromanage on patrols, and he let Tom maneuver the men. A platoon sergeant mostly stays in the background, running logistics, making sure the platoon has food, water, and ammunition, the resources to fight. On patrol, he would call in air support during firefights, or medevac helicopters, should someone get hurt; otherwise Jimmy acted like a rifleman, ready to charge an enemy position.
Tom checked the perimeter security around the compound and then joined Ian and Jimmy on the roof. This was tedious work, hours of watching, waiting. But Ian was a talker, and as they lay on the roof watching the village, he told Tom and Jimmy about growing up with five brothers and a sister in a huge old farmhouse in rural Vermont, where their mother had home-schooled all of them and where he learned to play the viola. Every child played at least one instrument, and Ian’s brother Dylan made the viola and several of his siblings’ violins. Ian was the most adventurous and athletic, and he had mountain-biked, rock-climbed, and snowboarded in the nearby White Mountains. Now twenty-two, he’d been in the Marines for four years and wasn’t sure whether he would stay. Dylan worked for a Houston company called Canrig as a mud tester monitoring oil wells. Maybe he’d try that. Or he might go back to college, where he’d spent a year studying graphic design. A deployment offered plenty of time to plan a future.
First Platoon finished the search, and the Dakota Marines covered their withdrawal. Before Ian, Jimmy, and Tom climbed off the rooftop, Jesse, the medic, snapped a picture of the three peering down at him, then they filed out of the compound and started home, down a tree-lined dirt road, with Ian walking point, the most dangerous position.
Tom had conceded that argument weeks earlier. He had told Ian that walking point wasn’t a team leader’s job, that his place was farther back, directing movement. But Ian was determined: he didn’t want his men put at extra risk, men who had wives and kids. Before the deployment he’d even broken up with his girlfriend of more than a year because he didn’t want her saddled with the burden of constant worry, or caring for him should he come home crippled.
Matt Westbrook, the dog handler, and Ian had argued about walking point as well. Yes, Matt had a wife, but he also had a bomb-sniffing dog, and he couldn’t let Ian assume the added danger on his behalf. Ian agreed to sometimes let Westbrook run point, and earlier that day Matt had said he’d lead the patrol back to Dakota. But by midafternoon Holly was tired, and a tired bomb dog is useless.
“I’ll take us back,” Ian said.
Matt nodded and fell in behind him on the road, with Holly between them, zigzagging down the road, sniffing.
“Sergeant Whorl,” Ian called back, “do you want me to stay on the road or go through the field?”
Moving on foot through Afghanistan offered nothing but bad options. Of course the roads were dangerous. But now the fields were, too. The men were tired from being out all day, and a quick shot back to Dakota would limit their time exposed in the open.
“Stay on the road,” Tom said. Ian turned south, sweeping the mine detector before him, an olive-drab metronome. Tick tock.
With the mine detector, his rifle, ammunition, grenades, body armor and helmet, two radios, the bomb jammer, water, and medical supplies, Ian carried close to ninety pounds, more than any other Marine in the patrol. He could handle the load: at five foot seven, he had weighed 150 pounds when he entered the Marines in 2007, but he had since bulked up to 205. He figured carrying extra weight would increase the patrol’s overall effectiveness—a weaker and overloaded Marine falling behind put everyone at risk. Besides, that way other Marines couldn’t complain about their lighter loads, or not being able jump across canals with the awkward weight.
Ian turned south, onto a tree-lined road that split two muddy fields. In a month the fields would be thick with waist-high poppy plants.
Tick tock.
Fifty yards up, the road crossed a canal just in front of a large, high-walled compound to the left.
“Muller,” Tom said, “slow it up a bit.” The patrol had stretched out after the Afghan soldiers, farther back, stopped to question a farmer. Tom and Matt picked up their pace and closed the distance with Ian, who worked the mine detector back and forth.
Tick tock.
Holly sniffed the air, five feet behind Ian, as he stepped onto the dirt bridge that spanned the canal.
Tick tock.
Tick.
Matt still can’t figure out how Holly wasn’t killed.
2. Repercussions
With a patrol outside the wire, Dakota ran on a skeleton crew: a Marine in each guard post and a team leader manning the Combat Operations Center—that little desk in Tom and Jimmy’s room—to relay messages between the patrol and higher-ups. Today the job fell to Ryan Moore, at nineteen the youngest of Tom’s three team leaders.
He’d grown up in Navarre, a town of maybe fifteen hundred in eastern Ohio, moved out at sixteen, and spent his high school years lifting weights, repairing cars, and smoking weed. In the Marine Corps he found his groove. He listened and he worked harder than others, and when he arrived at Camp Lejeune after boot camp and infantry training, Tom noticed and soon put him in charge of three other Marines. Ryan would rather have been outside the wire leading his men and trying to kill Taliban, but he knew the importance of his role back at Dakota, should the patrol find trouble.
Before the Marines walked out of the patrol base that morning, Ryan had hugged Ian. They’d had enough close calls and heard enough terrible stories to know that life out here was utterly unpredictable. Many of the Marines made a point of telling their friends how much they cared about them.
“I love you,” Ryan said.
“I love you, too,” Ian told him.
From Ian’s first weekend at Camp Lejeune, five months before the deployment, Ryan drew him into his group of friends, and they spent much of their free time together, watching movies in the barracks or hitting the Jacksonville bars. Five-cent Pabst Blue Ribbon at Gus’ on Wednesdays. The mechanical bull on Fridays. All of which suited Ian. As he was always telling his friends, “Live each day like it’s your last.”
Where Ryan could be reserved, Ian was class-clown loud, all smile and uncontained energy, like at Sergeant Clift’s platoon party before they left for Afghanistan, when he ran around the house in an orange wig, slugging Jägermeister. After he’d passed out in a recliner, Ryan and the other guys posed with him for pictures.
Though Ian had been trained as an infantryman, he’d spent his first three years in the Corps with the Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team, a sort of Marine SWAT team. When he arrived at Lejeune, he was new to the role of infantry team leader, like Ryan. They traded knowledge and learned together, then taught classes for the rest of the squad on everything from the use and maintenance of machine guns to calling for medevac helicopters over the radio. They peppered Tom with questions about his job as squad leader so they’d know exactly what to do if they had to step up. They regarded their roles as young leaders with something close to sacred respect. Ryan tried to set an example for his men and could often be seen picking up trash around Dakota or fixing a broken piece of equipment—not because Tom had told him to, but because it was the right thing to do. “If I know what needs to be done every day, I’m not even going to make him waste his breath by coming over to tell me,” he says. “I’m going to make sure me and my guys already have it done.” Likewise, when one of Ian’s men had been caught sitting in his sleeping bag during a cold night on guard, Tom left it to Ian to decide the punishment. They filled a hundred sandbags for perimeter defenses—as a team, Ian included, because they were responsible for one another, and an individual lapse in judgment could affect them all.
At Dakota, Ryan and Ian still spent much of their free time together, watching movies or lifting weights. They worked out every day at Dakota’s outdoor gym, an elaborate collection of homemade equipment built from plywood and two-by-fours, with sandbags, metal stakes, and spools of concertina wire as weights. Ryan figured they might get in a good late-afternoon workout when Ian returned from the overwatch mission.
The patrol had been out for several hours, and he knew they’d be back soon. He tried to call for their current location over the radio, but transmissions could be spotty inside the building, so he climbed atop the generator in the courtyard. From there he could see over Dakota’s wall and send an unbroken line-of-sight radio message. As he raised the radio to his mouth, a bomb exploded near a string of trees a couple hundred yards north, just where he figured the Marines would be. Ryan saw an eruption of dirt, like a mini-volcano, that threw debris fifty feet into the field along the road, and a second later the sound reached him, a deep crunch and rumble.
He radioed for a situation report, and after a long moment Staff Sergeant Malachowski’s voice responded, calm and deliberate, with a medevac request.
“Muller’s hit,” Jimmy said. “Heavy lacerations, arterial bleeding, left leg and left arm.”
And then Ryan understood. That wasn’t debris arcing over the trees and into the field. That was Ian.
The blast had thrown Matt to the ground and slammed into Tom as if he’d been whacked with a giant mallet. A wave of dirt and rock washed over him, and shrapnel tore holes in his helmet cover. He staggered and caught himself and watched Ian fly through the air, over a twenty-foot tree. He heard him land in the field, a heavy thud, and he leaped across the canal and ran toward him. Even at a distance, he saw red on Ian’s body, everywhere. Matt, knocked unconscious for a few seconds, sat up in the road. Holly was unscathed by the bomb. She sat beside him, waiting for direction.
The medic, Jesse, was several men back in the patrol, and running forward before Ian hit the ground. A blast that big, someone up there would be hurt. Tom was already crouched over Ian when Jesse arrived. He threw down his aid bag, a backpack stuffed with thirty pounds of bandages, splints, IV bags, painkillers, and airway tubes.
Ian didn’t move. But he was alive, and struggling to breathe, choking on blood pooling in his throat from deep cuts across his face and internal bleeding. Tom and Jesse dragged him another thirty feet from the blast site—farther from any secondary bombs, a common insurgent tactic to compound casualties by hitting Marines giving aid to their injured. Jesse ran his finger down Ian’s neck and found the notch at his Adam’s apple, then sliced a half-inch slit in the cartilage and inserted a plastic breathing tube. He and Tom looped two tourniquets over Ian’s left arm and left leg, broken and gashed by the blast. A huge knot had already formed on his forehead, likely a sign that his skull had fractured and his brain was swelling.
On the road, Matt stood on weak legs. His tongue and face had gone numb, and his body tingled. He hadn’t yet started puking from the concussion, but he would soon. He needed to sweep the area for secondary bombs, but he couldn’t think clearly. He ordered Holly out to search, but she stayed beside him. Tom saw Matt standing in the road, unfocused and dazed.
“Westbrook, stop,” he said. “You need to sit down.”
The tourniquets had stanched the bleeding on Ian’s arms, and Jesse bandaged his torn face. He and Tom talked to Ian as they worked on him, but he didn’t respond. He lay motionless and pulled ragged breaths through the hole in his throat.
Several Marines pushed into the field to secure a landing zone for the medevac, which now raced toward them from the north, low over the fields, and Jimmy tossed out a green smoke grenade to mark their position. The massive twin-rotor Chinook helicopter, flown by a British crew, landed fast and hard, less than a hundred feet from Tom and Jesse, and they bent over Ian to shield him from the wave of dirt thrown up by the rotor wash. Together with the flight medics, they carried their friend onto the helicopter and watched him rise up and disappear beyond the trees.
Twenty-seven minutes after the explosion, trauma doctors received Ian in the hospital on Camp Bastion, a remarkable feat of battlefield medicine. Not that it mattered.
Nina Whorl knew before her husband that Ian was dead.
She was deployed, too, just thirty miles away on Camp Bastion, where she worked administration and logistics for a Marine aviation unit. From her office, she heard over the radio that medevac was delivering an “angel” from Tom’s battalion, the aircrews’ term for deceased service members. Fearing it was her husband, she made a phone call and learned that it was Ian, then she sent a simple e-mail, which waited for Tom back at Dakota: I already heard. Are you okay?
They had met on Parris Island, where, as a primary marksmanship instructor, he taught new recruits how to shoot and volunteered with the Burton Fire District in his downtime. She was a sergeant, like him, and had been in the Marine Corps since 2001. They had met briefly through a mutual friend, but when she stopped by to see him at a high school football game where he was on call with the ambulance in case of injuries, he was hooked: on the blond hair, the Tennessee accent, and the sass. “I’m not a touchy-feely guy at all,” he says. “People call me emotionless, but I looked at her and I knew.” It was surprising for Tom to be swayed by such whimsy, and for Nina, too. They had both had marriages end badly and leave them hardened. They had forgotten that two people can be good to each other, and good for each other.
“She no-shit saved my life,” Tom says. “I was in a downward spiral.” He compares his life before Nina to that of firefighter Tommy Gavin, of the television show Rescue Me: destructive and alcohol-fueled. Gently, she dialed him back, and she found her own release from the persistent suspicion that a man would be careless with her heart. “We have a good understanding of how life can be,” Tom says. “We leaned on each other at the same time.” They were soft with each other, playful. Early on, she locked the car doors while they were at a gas station and made Tom dance before she’d let him back in, and that became part of them. He’s danced in the rain and in front of his Marines.
Nina had two young boys from a first marriage—Lee, four years old, and Andrew, not yet a year—and from the beginning Tom regarded them as his own. “He’s very protective, of me and the kids and his Marines,” she says. “He reminds me of a dog. If he could pee on stuff to own it, he would.”
They married in October 2007, near her family’s home in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Tom left the Marines a few months later and became a full-time firefighter. But that put a financial pinch on the family, and by the next year he was back in the Corps. A year after that he was in Afghanistan, thirty miles south of northern Marjah in the Garmsir District.
That deployment stretched from May to November 2009, but he best remembers seven endless days in July that summed up the terror, frustration, and dark comedy of being a grunt in Afghanistan.
A convoy of thickly armored trucks called a Route Clearance Patrol had been crawling down Redskins, a road near Tom’s patrol base that the Taliban sowed with bombs as fast as the Marines could find them. The first truck used heavy rollers attached to its front end to detonate pressure-activated bombs. Trucks farther back had enormous mechanical arms for digging into suspicious-looking dirt patches and sophisticated electronics to jam radio-controlled detonators. Marines inside peered from three-inch-thick windows searching for signs: an exposed bit of wire running from the embankment into a field, or a plastic baggie that might hide a radio transmitter. This was nervous, slow-motion work, and while the patrol found many bombs, many bombs found them first, announced with booms like little earthquakes.
From his patrol base more than half a mile away, Tom felt the shock wave roll through him as a plume of dirt and smoke bloomed on the horizon.
The blast had heaved a fourteen-ton armored truck into a canal along the road. While maneuvering another vehicle to pull out the damaged truck, the patrol hit another bomb. Tom’s squad headed up Redskins, escorting a wrecker truck. Halfway there, the first vehicle, with Jesse in the back, rolled over a bomb. From the second vehicle, Tom watched the truck lift several feet off the ground and slam down. He ran up the road, popped his head in a blown-open door, and found Jesse and the others rattled but uninjured.
The wrecker continued to the first blast site, which left Tom with nine guys and one working truck. Sit tight, his bosses told him. They sent another wrecker the next morning, and a bomb destroyed it. Sit tight, they told him again, we’ll get you tomorrow. By day three, he and his men had drank most of their water and eaten all the rations stored in the truck, single-serving MREs. They ate watermelon from a farmer’s field and drank water from an irrigation ditch. Every day the Marines sent more patrols to get them, and the patrols hit more bombs. At night Tom listened to the Taliban attack other stranded patrols. On day five, a bridge collapsed, stalling another rescue. On day six, a wrecker finally reached them, but they found another IED on the drive home. Staff Sergeant David Spicer, a bomb disposal tech, crept up the road to rig it with explosives. Sergeant Michael Heede, a combat engineer who had been stranded with Tom, was walking up the road to help Spicer when the bomb detonated. Tom watched both men disappear. He and his men spent the seventh day picking up the pieces.
A month later, two men from Tom’s platoon, Lance Corporals Bruce Ferrell and Patrick Schimmell, died in a bomb blast while on a foot patrol. Again, Tom and his men searched for what remained.
Yet his squad was lucky, these thirteen men who had survived so many firefights and explosions without a single wound. Like the afternoon walking home along a field’s edge, in the quiet moments after another gunfight. A Talib had triggered a bomb under one of Tom’s light machine gunners, and an enormous concussion punched through the patrol. The bomb, big enough to kill but buried too deep for maximum effect, tossed the Marine into the air. He tumbled to the dirt, popped onto his feet, and fired into the tree line, where the triggerman likely hid. “You missed, motherfuckers!” he screamed. “You can’t kill me!”
When Tom came home, Nina greeted him with an eight-foot banner, using the nickname his company commander had given the squad: WELCOME HOME SGT. WHORL AND HIS IMMORTALS!
During the second deployment, she often thought about that nickname.
“He thought he was bulletproof,” she says.
Tom, Jesse, and Ryan stood over Ian’s cot and stared at everything that represented his life over the past two months. Cans of tuna and sardines his mother had sent. Headphones. A pair of flip-flops. The sleeping bag he had woken up in that morning.
“Start packing his gear,” Tom said.
He hadn’t yet read Nina’s e-mail, and hadn’t received official word about Ian. Maybe there was a chance. But even if Ian somehow lived, Tom knew he wouldn’t be coming back to Dakota, and the longer the Marines saw their friend’s gear and an empty cot, the more distracted they’d be on patrol.
This was quiet work that needed few words. They separated his Marine-issue equipment—night-vision goggles, hand grenades, GPS—which needed to be accounted for on property books. Tom had Ian’s bent rifle, shattered radios, shredded gear, and bloodied clothes in a pile next to his cot in the COC, which left the most personal possessions: his journal and his cell phone, letters from his family, his uniforms, and a crocheted cross from a family friend.
While Ian’s friends finished separating and packing his belongings, the Fox Company first sergeant, James Breland, sent Tom a message over the secure instant-messaging system. Tom read it and pounded his fist on the plywood desk, then called together the rest of the squad.
“Corporal Muller is dead,” he told them.
Some of the men cried.
“Tomorrow we’re going out,” Tom said. “The next day we’re going out. And we’re going to keep going out until our relief is here and we go home.”
Late that night, Tom walked into the darkness just outside Dakota, where no one could see or hear him, and he wept. He had trained Ian to replace him as squad leader, so sure was he that he’d be the one to die, that his time had come. He did not expect to return from the deployment, and he could accept that. But losing Ian broke his heart.
As Tom stood alone in the blackness of southern Afghanistan, a late-afternoon sun pushed long shadows across the streets of North Danville, Vermont, where Susanne Muller had been running errands. Groceries. Auto parts store. Library. The last stop was the post office, to mail a package to Ian. She’d sent more than a dozen already in the short time he’d been in Afghanistan, along with thirty pounds of cheddar cheese donated by Cabot and several boxes of jerky and smoked meat from Vermont Smoke and Cure. But this package could wait. Her phone battery had just died, and she couldn’t bear being out of contact, should her husband, Clif, or any of her other six kids need to reach her, but mostly if Ian called.
She’d last spoken to him on Sunday, five days earlier. “It’s so good to hear your voice,” she had said. “I was worried about you.” She’d never told him that before. Of course she felt it; worry consumed her, and she barely slept. But she didn’t want to add to his stress, and she wanted him to feel he could share anything with her. Two days earlier, when Ian told them he’d gotten his first kill, during the March 3 firefight, she had tried to sound supportive, even let out a little cheer.
“They take our sweet boys from our arms and they train them to kill,” she says, not meant as a criticism of the Marine Corps but as a pragmatic assessment. She wanted to prepare for what war would do to him. She read about the fight in Afghanistan, learned the Marines’ lingo, and watched YouTube videos of firefights to better understand what he was experiencing. She even got her passport before Ian deployed. If he was grievously injured, he would be evacuated first to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center at Ramstein Air Base, in Germany, where he might stay for several days if his condition was unstable. The Pentagon arranges travel to Germany for the families of service members injured so badly they may not make it home, but Susanne didn’t want to waste time.
Ian figured that time could be fast approaching. Talking to his dad after the March 3 firefight, he said the platoon had a big mission coming up, and that he was uneasy. In the past he’d felt he had a shield wrapped around him in battle. Now that confidence had faded. “My luck is running out,” he said.
By late afternoon on March 11, Susanne was home, sitting on the living room couch reading a biography of Osama bin Laden. The Mullers were a Christian family, and around Vermont, more people opposed armed conflict than supported it. “I wanted to be able to intelligently support my son at war,” she says.
“Mom, there’s a cop car outside,” said her youngest son, Reuben, walking down the stairs. “And there’s a gray car out there, too.”
That set her heart to racing. She rose and walked to the door and saw four men step from the car, all in uniform: a Navy chaplain and three Marines. For months to come, that scene would replay in slow motion, often as she cried herself to sleep.
Clif was beside her now as they stepped onto the front deck. She fell to her knees. “No. No. No,” she wailed. “My sweet Ian. My sweet Ian.”
“Come up and tell us what you have to tell us,” Clif told the men, trying to be strong enough for both of them. But it was more than an hour before Susanne’s hysteria had faded and she had stopped crying long enough for the Marines to deliver their official message: that Corporal Ian Muller had been killed by an improvised explosive device while on a foot patrol in Afghanistan.
“Did anyone else die?” Susanne asked. “Did anyone else get hurt?”
The Marines told her they weren’t authorized to release that information.
When the men left that night, Clif kicked the coffee table so hard a leg snapped, and then they cried together for hours, until every muscle in Susanne’s face ached.
At four a.m., Susanne looked at the casualty report the Marines had brought, which Clif had folded up and shoved in a pocket. Along with detailing Ian’s injuries—massive head wound, fractured left leg and right arm—it said he’d been identified by Staff Sergeant James Malachowski and the corpsman, Jesse Deller, so Susanne knew they hadn’t been killed. Through an online parents’ support forum, she’d become friends with Alison Malachowski and Wendy Deller, and only learned later that they were the mothers of the platoon sergeant and medic at Patrol Base Dakota. Alison and Wendy wouldn’t have heard about Ian yet, because of the communications blackouts initiated after any casualty to ensure that next of kin hear through the official notification process and not from another Marine e-mailing or calling home. So Susanne made two calls, long before dawn, when a ringing phone is often the harbinger of terrible news. She could say just a few words before she started sobbing: “Ian stepped on an IED, and he’s dead.”
The next morning at Dakota, the Marines made a battle cross memorial in the courtyard, the traditional farewell to a fallen comrade: a rifle stuck in the ground, bayonet first, between a pair of boots, with a helmet on the rifle buttstock. Ryan hung a pair of his own dog tags from the handgrip, because they didn’t have Ian’s. The men approached on their own, knelt by the display, shared a few words with their friend, then gathered for a group picture. Tom wore the same pants from the day before, smeared with Ian’s blood.
A convoy of armored vehicles rolled up to Dakota and delivered Lieutenant Colonel John Harrill, the battalion commander; Sergeant Major Richard Mathern, the battalion’s highest-ranking noncommissioned officer; and Captain Adam Sacchetti, Fox Company’s commander. They wanted to see the blast site, so Tom and his men would take them. And because Ian was dead and Matt was still rattled and puking from the explosion, Tom needed someone to lead the patrol.
“Fazenbaker,” he said, “you’re on point.”
Corporal Craig Fazenbaker nodded.
Tom could see the distress on his men’s faces. He felt it himself. They were shaken and scared, and rage knotted their guts. “You have to keep pushing,” he had told them. “You have to. There’s no option. Because if you don’t, then we’ve done nothing, we’ve accomplished nothing.”
So they left Dakota and walked north up through the fields and onto the road where Ian had been blown up. Not far from the first blast site they found a second IED along the road, and as they waited for the bomb techs from Explosive Ordnance Disposal to come blow it up, the Taliban opened fire from a cluster of buildings to the west. The higher-ups and most of the Marines with them jumped into a canal for cover. Maybe Tom was numbed by Ian’s death or had just become accustomed to being shot at, but he stood in the road, then walked into the field, rifle held casually at his side, to where Lance Corporal William Saunders and Moore lay on their bellies. Bullets kicked up bursts of dirt as the gunmen walked the rounds closer to the Marines. Saunders fired in the general direction of the incoming fire. Tom poked him with the toe of his boot. “Hey, you’re wasting ammunition,” he said. “You need to aim when you’re shooting.”
After the patrol, Tom took the satellite phone outside, sat on an ammunition can, and flipped through the notebook in which he’d written his men’s next-of-kin details. He tried to prepare himself for the conversation, but he didn’t know how. As he’d told Ian and his other men as they trained up for Afghanistan at Camp Lejeune, he could only give the broad strokes of what to expect and how to respond. “War is something I can’t teach you or explain to you,” he told them. “You can’t really fathom it until you go through it.” Facedown in a ditch as bullets skip off the ground around you. Or the sledgehammer force of a bomb blast. Or picking up pieces of a friend. Or calling his parents.
“Mr. Muller,” he said, “this is Tom Whorl, Ian’s squad leader.”
Susanne ran downstairs and picked up the other phone, and Tom told them what a strong leader Ian was, that he was Tom’s right-hand man. He did not tell them he’d been grooming Ian to assume his job, convinced that he’d die during this deployment. But he did tell them that their son had been unconscious the whole time and felt no pain.
Tom passed the phone to the others—Ryan, Matt, Jesse—who told her that her son was loud and funny and selfless, that he encouraged other Marines to work out at Dakota’s gym by poking fun of them, and that he carried so much gear and walked point so that others wouldn’t have to.
In Dakota’s Combat Operations Center, Jimmy sat on his cot with a notebook propped on his leg.
Mr. and Mrs. Muller,
I know how little my words mean when it comes to losing a son such as Ian. He is one of the finest Marines I have served beside, but more than that he was my friend. Ian was the type of guy that everyone could not help but like. He could lift everyone’s spirits just by coming into a room. Ian and I shared a lot of things in common. We would talk about dirt bikes and tubing down the Potomac river. Then one day I found out he had been to Westminster, MD, to visit his brother, with all of the same interests we share I was surprised we had never met before. Ian would hit the gym every day out here, and all the Marines would also do so hoping they could be in the same shape as him. He could not wait to go to the beach when he got back.
Ian would talk about his family all the time, he was very proud of his brothers, and would joke how they got all of the height in the family. One day I was listening to classical music when Ian told me all about how he played the viola his entire life, and how all of his brothers played classical instruments. He went on for a long time about how one of his brothers made second chair in the Vermont symphony orchestra. He was very proud of that.
Ian was the leader all Marines want to become and the friend everyone wants to have. Of the Marines I have fought beside, Ian is one I would choose to do so with again and again. I can remember one instance where the two of us were pinned down in a canal, with rounds impacting around him he was still directing his Marines to cover while he engaged the enemy.
On March 11th, Ian, Sgt. Tom Whorl and I were on a roof overlooking a small village. The three of us sat up there for three hours and joked and laughed about everything while we watched the village. Two pictures are enclosed of us on that roof top, taken by his friend, Doc Deller.
Your family is in the prayers of everyone at PB Dakota and we thank you for Ian. He is truly the type of man who will remain in our thoughts forever.
Staff Sergeant James Malachowski
3rd Plt., Plt. Sgt.
The letter wouldn’t reach the Mullers for two weeks, until the morning after they had returned from another funeral for a Dakota Marine.
3. “Building Clear”
A week after Ian died, the Marines pushed northwest again, back toward the villages of Five Points and Cocheran. But this time they took a dozen local militiamen, known as ISCI—Interim Security for Critical Infrastructure. They were mostly untrained in military tactics, wore civilian clothes, and looked more like Taliban fighters than soldiers, but they were reshaping the battlefield in ways the Marines couldn’t. The few Afghan National Army soldiers stationed at Dakota were from northern Afghanistan and could barely communicate with locals, since most of them spoke Dari rather than Pashto, the language of the south. They could sometimes read a situation better than the Marines, but they were still outsiders. The ISCI were locals. Most had lived in the area since birth and could pick up on everything the Marines couldn’t: out-of-town fighters, strange accents, and locals who were helping the Taliban.
A local elder had to vouch for them, to help ensure the Taliban didn’t infiltrate the force, and they were paid $150 a month. But they were motivated by more than salary. The Afghan army was plagued with apathy and poor discipline. Dakota had one excellent Afghan soldier, a few mediocre soldiers, and another who smoked marijuana all day and was too out of shape to move quickly under fire—a decent representation of the wider Afghan army. For the ISCI, though, the fight was personal. They and their families had suffered under or been hassled by the Taliban, and with the Taliban gone, they might get a sliver when the power was redistributed.
The Marines, Afghan soldiers, a few Afghan National Police, and ten ISCI left Dakota, with the militiamen in the lead. The patrol, three dozen people altogether, stretched out in a 150-meter column and pushed through the fields toward Five Points, where the sweep would start, then up Route Animal and into Cocheran Village, with the militiamen pointing out Taliban hideouts and questioning locals. Jimmy walked in the middle of the patrol, the best position from which to direct a fight. For a young Marine leader like him, this was a heady moment, moving into contested territory with a long column of heavily armed men. Counterinsurgency could often be frustrating, full of handshakes, meetings, and mild cajoling. But sometimes counterinsurgency also meant doing the traditional and straightforward work of a Marine infantryman: closing with and destroying the enemy.
As the patrol neared Five Points, a half-dozen Taliban fighters opened fire on them from Cocheran Village. Bullets threw up splashes of dirt in the fields like fat raindrops falling in puddles.
Before Jimmy could shout an order, the ISCI ran into the gunfire, up Route Animal toward Cocheran, where Tom saw a half-dozen muzzle flashes twinkling on rooftops and in tree lines. The Taliban fired shoulder-launched rocket-propelled grenades at them, and the militiamen returned fire with their own RPGs.
More gunmen fired at the patrol from the mosque and a house directly to the west. Tom and his Marines started an assault on Five Points, and Jimmy radioed up to Battalion, reporting the patrol in heavy contact from two directions and maneuvering on the enemy.
A Marine patrol under fire in Afghanistan may feel isolated, faces buried in the dirt as rounds snap inches overhead. But they’re far from alone. A radio call can bring helicopter gunships, fighter jets, and even bombers, cruising at twenty thousand feet.
As the firefight unfolded below, an unmanned aerial vehicle, a drone, slid into the airspace several miles above and peered down with its powerful cameras. In a darkened room more than 8,000 miles away, behind a doorway marked secret, at an Air Force base somewhere in America, a pilot and a sensor operator sat in tan leather chairs with hands on joysticks and watched the battle move across a chessboard of poppy fields and farmhouses, crisscrossed by dirt roads and canals. They saw muzzle flashes everywhere, from figures lying in the middle of fields, running down roads, crouched behind mud walls, and sprawled on rooft ops, and the telltale gray puffs and smoke trails of RPGs.
The ISCI pushed into Cocheran and the drone crew watched the Taliban withdraw, into fields to the north and east. The enemy fighters moved like Marines. One group bounded back to the protection of a canal or a wall and provided cover fire for the second group. The drone’s pilot and sensor operator could kill them with a Hellfire missile, but discerning friend from foe was tricky at that altitude. They knew the basic layout of the battlefield but needed to confirm the location of all the friendlies, and the ISCI didn’t have radios. They’d moved up so far and so fast that the Marines didn’t know their exact locations relative to the Taliban, and they couldn’t risk a missile strike killing their most effective allies.
With Corporal Justin Ramos on his heels, Jimmy ran up Route Animal, dipping behind buildings to dodge gunfire. This was elemental infantry movement. Find cover. Return fire. Sprint to the next covered position. Over and over. Faces flushed, thighs burning, and breath ragged, they reached the ISCI at the southern edge of Cocheran Village and called up the coordinates. At the drone’s control station in America, the sensor operator shined an infrared laser on a group of gunmen firing at Jimmy, Ramos, and the ISCI. The pilot squeezed a trigger, and a Hellfire was released from the drone’s wing and streaked toward earth at nearly a thousand miles per hour, following the laser beacon.
The drone captured the aftermath with its thermal camera, which shows warmer objects in black and cooler in white. The boiling cloud of flame and smoke cleared to reveal a man lying crumpled in the field. Two men ran toward him, and each grabbed him by a wrist. They dragged him toward a tree line, and he trailed a foot-wide ribbon of black. He had been cut in half at the waist, the rest of him scattered across the field.
Shortly after the Marines returned from the patrol, a water bottle was thrown over the concertina wire along the road outside the patrol base, a predetermined signal that their neighbor, Dr. Bahki, wanted to speak with them. He made house calls throughout the area—to militants and civilians alike, the Marines surmised—and was well respected. They didn’t know why he gave them tips, but the tips were always accurate. “They tried to kill you two times last night,” he had told them a few days earlier, after they’d walked to and returned from Beatley. “They kept pressing the button, but the bomb wouldn’t explode.” They didn’t tell him it was the electronic jammer; no need for his Taliban friends to know that. But the next day they found a battery near the road, and a fresh hole where the bomb had been removed.
If Bahki wanted to talk, it was probably important. Tom and Jimmy grabbed their rifles and walked over to his house.
“You killed Makeem today,” he told them.
This cheered them. They already knew the name, from other informants: Makeem had built the bomb that killed Ian, and paid the triggerman who detonated it under him.
But Makeem hadn’t made just the bomb in the culvert.
Tom had hit a wall with his workouts. Even though Dakota’s outdoor gym had just two proper weights—a pair of thirty-five-pound dumbbells—it had everything else in improvised form: dip bars, bench press, squat rack, even a pulley system rigged from sandbags and parachute cord for working triceps and lats. But Tom wasn’t getting any stronger or bigger from the daily workouts.
Jimmy could help with this. By far the strongest, fittest Marine at Dakota, if not all of Fox Company, he’d thrown the platoon into stunned silence the first time he took off his uniform blouse and they saw his biceps, which measured seventeen inches around in high school and had only grown bigger. As they stood under a noon sun outside the mosque at Five Points, he told Tom about a weightlifting program he’d read about the night before, in a fitness magazine his mom had sent. When they returned to Dakota later that afternoon, they’d start the new workout together.
But first, just a few feet from them, perhaps the most important moment in northern Marjah’s recent history was under way.
Every time the Marines neared this area, they were attacked by Taliban, who held sway over local residents less through allegiance than fear of reprisal. This was about to change. Hajji Gul Mala, a local power broker, had committed to keeping a permanent presence of his militiamen in Five Points.
Jimmy and Tom had nurtured this relationship with Gul Mala through many meetings, and they understood one another to be trustworthy. Now Lieutenant Colonel Harrill, several Marines from the battalion staff, and Gul Mala gathered with about twenty local elders and villagers near the mosque and told them over chai and a spread of food that the new security force would make the area safe and allow the villagers to stand up to the Taliban.
Gul Mala, now in his fifties, had fought the Russians with the mujahideen as a young man. But as he gained power in northern Marjah in the years afterwards, he turned against some of his former comrades, a philosophical and pragmatic shift. He owned many of the market stalls at a bazaar in northern Marjah, and as the Taliban tightened their hold on the area, they demanded taxes from Gul Mala and the shop owners, enforced with beatings. But while Gul Mala had both business and political interests to protect, he also wanted more personal and religious freedom than the Taliban espoused. One of his mentors was a Sufimystic who had traveled extensively through India and offered Gul Mala—the name means “beautiful flower”—a broader perspective than the extreme interpretation of Sunni Islam the Taliban embraced.
Gul Mala wanted both boys and girls to be educated, and he helped build the first school in northern Marjah after the Taliban destroyed the others. When the Marines asked for his help with security, Gul Mala’s six bodyguards became northern Marjah’s first ISCI, and he recruited more young men from the area. He would soon have seventy ISCI under him, his own private army.
“What compound do you want to occupy?” Harrill asked Gul Mala.
They had enough to choose from. Much of the area had been abandoned because of the fighting and Taliban threats.
“Right here,” Gul Mala said, and pointed toward the building next door, just south of the mosque, empty since before Tom’s unit arrived in January. The Taliban used it as a firing point, which meant it possibly had buried bombs or booby traps, a deterrent should the Marines ever try to storm it during a firefight.
Tom took Fazenbaker and Matt Westbrook to sweep the compound, half as long as Dakota and half as wide, surrounded by mud walls eight feet high and eighteen inches thick, with several small, simple rooms along the back, western wall. Holly led them through the doorway at the northeast corner. Tom and Fazenbaker worked across the weed-covered courtyard with mine detectors, the same type Ian had been using when he died. Tick tock. They swept in rows, back and forth, until they covered all the ground. They checked out the empty rooms in back, then swept everything again. Matt worked Holly through the rooms and around the courtyard. Nothing in her behavior betrayed danger.
“Building clear, building clear,” Tom called to Jimmy over the radio.
Jimmy passed word to Lieutenant Colonel Harrill, who filed into the compound with Gul Mala, Sergeant Major Mathern, and Captain Sacchetti. Together these men represented perhaps the best chance for calm in northern Marjah. Jimmy and a couple of Marines from the colonel’s security detail stepped in behind them.
Outside, Ryan Moore called Tom to the northwest corner of the building, where William Saunders had spotted a man a couple hundred yards away who seemed to be watching them. Probably just a curious farmer, Tom told him. Saunders kept watch over him and the distant tree lines through his rifle scope, and Tom and Ryan stepped back into the shade, next to Matt, just on the other side of the wall from where Jimmy stood. Tom leaned against the wall. The flag raising and meeting with Gul Mala might take another five minutes or an hour, and military service had honed their ability to wait. Smoke a cigarette, bitch about the heat, kick a toe in the dust. When it was time to move, they’d be told.
Harrill, Sacchetti, and Gul Mala stood in a cluster in the courtyard and watched Gul Mala’s men scramble onto the rooftop and raise a small Afghan flag on a makeshift flagpole made from a skinny tree stripped of branches. Mathern stood five feet away, closer to the flag. Jimmy stood five feet from them on the other side, near the northern wall.
Surely they shifted their weight as they stood there, maybe took a few absentminded steps. And then, a last step. A boot pressed down with just enough pressure, in just the wrong spot, on two strips of balsa wood buried just under the surface, separated by two slender carbon rods, taken from D-cell batteries, that were invisible to metal detectors. That pressure squeezed together two thin metal contacts and made the circuit whole. Electricity raced from the battery pack, buried maybe two feet deep—beyond notice of the metal detectors—up a wispy wire, through the pressure plate, and down to a blasting cap in a plastic jug packed with ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder.
The cap exploded, just a little pop, but enough to produce a detonation wave that collided with the ammonium nitrate and put the already unstable chemical under extreme pressure. Once the explosives reached a critical density, the molecules broke apart, starting a chain reaction that transformed the ten pounds of ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder into sixteen hundred liters of gas in a sliver of a second. All that gas needed somewhere to go. The explosion pushed a supersonic shock wave through the dirt and rock and into the compound.
Of the three blasts Matt had been next to, this one hurt the most, even with the thick mud wall separating him from the bomb. “Like you’re walking across the street and a fucking truck hits you,” he says.
Tom stumbled a few feet, his mind already grasping. Maybe someone had accidentally dropped a grenade, or the rocket launcher Jimmy had slung across his back had somehow detonated. No. Even in those first fragments of seconds, his rattled brain knew that couldn’t be. This was a bomb, the same sickening sound as the blast that killed Ian, and every other bomb he’d heard. But how? They hadn’t received a single hit from the two detectors or the bomb-sniffing dog.
As he ran back to the entryway on the northeast corner, he called up a medevac request. With an explosion that big and so many people nearby, someone would be hit. The local power broker and every important Marine in the area were inside that compound. Tom worked over the possibilities. Just about his whole chain of command could be dead.
He rounded the corner as Mathern led Harrill, Gul Mala, and Sacchetti through the doorway. Harrill and Gul Mala staggered, dazed and bleeding from their faces, necks, and backs. Sacchetti clutched his left arm, where shrapnel had ripped through his triceps.
From farther in the compound, he heard Jimmy calling for him.
“Whorl!” His voice sounded hoarse and strained.
“Whorl … Whorl!”
Smoke and dirt hung in the air, and Tom sucked in the pungent scent of detonated ammonium nitrate. Marines shouted—maybe inside the compound, maybe outside, but forever away. Tom heard nothing, saw nothing but Jimmy.
He lay on his back, a few feet from the wall, and writhed in the sunbaked dirt near a shallow crater, his left arm extended, hand grasping at the air. Red blooms spread across his pants. The blast had torn him nearly in half at the waist.
Tom knelt beside him and grabbed Jimmy’s left hand with his hands. The grip was still strong.
“It’s going to be okay,” Tom said. “We already have the birds spun up.”
Jesse and the Navy corpsman from the colonel’s security detail dropped to their knees beside Tom and Jimmy, pulled thick bandages from their aid bag, and packed them against Jimmy’s thighs and pelvis to stanch the bleeding. Tourniquets, the usual lifesaver after a Marine steps on a buried bomb, were useless. Jimmy’s wounds were so high on his legs, they couldn’t use the nylon straps to cinch off the femoral arteries near the crotch.
“I’ll be right back,” Tom said. Jimmy stared at him and nodded.
Be calm, Tom told himself. Be calm. Be calm. Be calm. This could get so much worse if he lost his shit, and he knew everyone was looking to him to make fast, sound decisions. He left the compound to check on the other casualties and establish a landing zone for the medevac in an empty field just across the street. Ryan and Ramos swept the field for explosives, and Tom pushed more Marines to the far perimeter for security.
He returned to Jimmy, knelt, and took his hand again. “I’ve already taken care of everything, everything’s going to be okay,” he said, and he knew it wouldn’t. He unsnapped Jimmy’s chinstrap and eased the helmet from his head. The color had leached from his face as his blood drained into the dirt and his body redirected the remaining blood to his main organs, a last attempt to keep the whole system from failing. He spit up bile. His eyes, alert and searching for the first few minutes, lost focus. “I’ll be right back,” Tom said again. “I have to go see where your helicopter is.”
Standing outside, he heard Jesse call out: “Starting CPR.”
The Marines lifted Jimmy onto a portable stretcher and carried him to the field’s edge, where they listened for a drumming on the horizon, the first sounds of the medevac helicopter. Sergeant Major Mathern crouched over him, one hand stacked atop the other, and pumped his palm against Jimmy’s chest, doing for him what his heart could not.
The helicopter landed in a swirl of dust, and left with Jimmy, Sacchetti, and a wounded Marine from Harrill’s security detail. Harrill and Gul Mala, though wounded, would walk with the patrol back to Dakota. They didn’t want the Taliban to know they’d nearly killed the two most important men in the area.
As the sound of the helicopter faded, Jesse wandered over to the mosque and sat down.
“Doc Deller, are you okay?” Mathern asked him.
Jesse stared at him, as though he couldn’t understand the question, then he wandered off, down Five Points Road, toward Dakota.
“Doc is done,” Mathern told Tom, and on Jesse’s face Tom saw what he himself felt: horror and heartbreak, guilt and anguish.
The Marines walked home and were greeted with the sight of Ian’s memorial in Dakota’s courtyard. Within minutes they had erected another beside it. Boots. Rifle. Helmet. Dog tags.
Nina once again heard the radio transmission that a medevac helicopter was bringing in an angel from Tom’s unit. She called a friend, heard the name, then sent Tom another e-mail, telling him she already knew and asking if he was okay. But he wouldn’t see it yet, because there was still work to be done. Nine days after they had sorted Ian’s gear, Tom and his men did it again for Jimmy.
That night, Tom lay down and stared at the empty cot across the dirt-floored room, where his friend had slept that morning. With Jimmy gone but his presence still there, the room felt haunted. A boyish fear crept through Tom, and he was afraid to sleep.
4. Maximum Fun
The next day, a convoy rolled into Dakota and delivered Navy Lieutenant Commander Nathan Solomon, the battalion’s chaplain, a forty-two-year-old Southern Baptist with red hair, a warm Tennessee accent, and an earnestness that could put a man at ease.
Solomon shuttled constantly between the battalion’s three main outposts and eleven small patrol bases and had already been to Dakota a few times, to give services and hang out with the Marines. He liked to stay for a day or two and tag along on a foot patrol, so they’d know he didn’t think his life more valuable than theirs. He could step on a bomb just as easily as them.
He would lounge on a cot in the shade of a camo net reading on his Kindle: Treasure Island, or Plato’s Republic, maybe Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. At night he’d climb into the guard towers, smoke his pipe, and chat with Marines as they scanned the fields and tree lines. He’d talk about religion if they asked, but usually they didn’t, so he’d just bullshit with them, or ask about their families. Often he just sat in silence, but that still had purpose. A ministry of presence, he called it.
Tom liked Solomon. He’d been around chaplains who didn’t seem to truly care about Marines. They just wanted to talk about Jesus, or thought their job was giving sermons from the safety of well-protected bases. But Solomon tried to understand the Marines, and what the killing and death and fear could do to them.
On his first visit to Dakota, while talking to Tom in his room, Solomon had noticed a few words written in black marker over the doorway, lyrics from a favorite song by Rise Against, just below Tom’s rifle, which rested on two nails: WE DON’T LIVE. WE JUST SURVIVE.
What’s that all about? Solomon asked.
“Well, we’re alive, but we’re not really living here,” Tom had said. “We just survive to go home and tell people how it was.”
Solomon considered that, offered a thoughtful sigh, and nodded.
Now, with the Marines still in a fog from Jimmy’s death, Solomon stayed in the background and waited for them to come to him. He didn’t sweep in to ask them how they were feeling, to offer prayers for their dead friend and tell them to trust in God. That wasn’t his style.
“The last thing a Marine needs to hear is this is all part of God’s plan,” he says. “I don’t think God wanted Jimmy Malachowski to die. I don’t think he wanted Ian Muller to die. I just reject that out of hand. I don’t want any part of a God that’s like that.”
But the Marines didn’t ask much about God anyway. “Most of the conversations center around the randomness of why one person dies and another doesn’t,” Solomon says. “Why one person becomes a double amputee and another doesn’t. ‘Normally I’m the third person in line on patrol; I wasn’t today, and the third person got blown up; I didn’t. I’m a bad person.’ Or ‘I walked over that spot three times. Why didn’t it happen to me?’ There’s no answer. I can’t make sense of that.”
Some told him they couldn’t sleep, or that they had nightmares. Others said they had bursts of rage they didn’t understand. “Good,” Solomon told them. “You’re normal. If you were totally cool with everything you saw and did, if it didn’t bother you at all, then you’d be messed up.”
“War is chaos and pain and destruction at its best,” he said. “We’re not supposed to see people with their legs blown off, or thrown fifty meters into the air by an IED. We’re not supposed to see that, and it leaves a mark.”
All of the Marines at Dakota bore those scars. But Solomon reserved a special worry for the leaders, like Tom, who had succeeded in the Marine Corps because they had taken very good care of their men, which often meant they hadn’t taken care of themselves.
Tom and the Dakota Marines saw Solomon again on March 27, a week after Jimmy died. They geared up that morning and walked the thousand yards to Patrol Base Beatley, a routine but dangerous movement. Imagine that, they told one another, we die walking to a memorial service. They were told to wear clean uniforms, though none of them had seen a washing machine in weeks. But this service wasn’t just for them. A convoy of armored trucks would deliver the Fox Company chain of command, several higher-ups from Battalion, Solomon, and even a general.
The Marines crisscrossed the patrol base, picking up scraps of litter, then rehearsed the movements and the order of speakers, culminating with a full practice run. They couldn’t quite believe it, practicing how to mourn their friends, but they knew the Corps left little to chance. “You do the whole thing once,” First Sergeant Breland told them, “so you won’t get choked up when you do the real thing.”
Wind tore through the base and brought a sandstorm that blotted the sun behind a brown veil and grounded helicopter flights, which meant the Marines would have no air support if they made contact on the way home from Beatley.
The men formed up in neat rows, and Solomon nearly had to shout to be heard above the wind. “It is difficult to see meaning and purpose in the events of the last two weeks,” he said. “Indeed to ascribe too much meaning would be to dishonor the dead and their memory. To make sense out of chaos is not our task.”
Remember your friends, he said, and live your lives to honor them.
The Marines chose Ryan to speak about Ian, and Tom about Jimmy. They told of how dutiful the two men were, how selfless, how funny, and of all they had learned from them about being good Marines, and good men.
“Amazing Grace” and taps played over a loudspeaker, a squad from First Platoon fired three rifle volleys, and then the Marines from Dakota geared up and walked home, down the same road, past the very spot where the Taliban had tried to blow them up earlier that month.
They returned to the war, but Tom took a breather. His commanders ordered it, and while Tom would never have admitted that he felt nearer the edge, with the ground crumbling beneath him, he welcomed the respite.
The past decade of war had retaught the Marines a lesson learned in every bloody conflict: a person can experience only so much horror before the mind’s ability to cope and carry on wavers, and a moment of distraction or hesitation on the battlefield can be disastrous. A short break from combat can have powerful restorative effects, so after the memorial, Tom’s commanders sent him to Camp Leatherneck, the Marines’ main camp in Helmand Province, where he could enjoy a few days without gunfire or explosions, the nauseating gamble of walking down bomb-sown roads, or the helplessness of watching another friend die. Captain Sacchetti also contacted Nina’s commanders, who gave her several days off to spend with her husband. Tom hadn’t seen her since his first few days in Afghanistan, before he’d been dispatched to Dakota.
They stayed in a giant air-conditioned and mostly empty tent filled with bunk beds, used as temporary housing for Marines passing through Leatherneck. They hung sheets in a back corner for a little privacy, once again able to take refuge in the other’s physical presence, and for several hours Tom told her about what had happened to Ian and Jimmy. But mostly they lay on the bed and spoke sweetly to each other and remembered the world beyond Afghanistan, and Tom felt some of the tension slip free.
Leatherneck was safe. Marines walked around free of helmets and body armor. They could watch movies at the morale building, exercise in gyms better equipped than some American fitness centers, and eat their fill in chow halls with plenty of choices and decent food. Tom stuffed himself, and after dinner every night he ate mint chocolate chip ice cream.
Walking to the chow hall one afternoon, he and Nina watched a Marine stumble and fall while trying to hop across a shallow ditch, and they both doubled over laughing. It wasn’t just that Tom’s men could leap across six-foot-wide canals wearing full combat gear. This was just how they were together: giggling at the inappropriate, just as they might when walking hand in hand around the mall in Jacksonville.
Nina saw something else, though, as they walked around Leatherneck. Even when they were immersed in conversation, Tom never stopped scanning the area around him, his eyes fixing on people, vehicles, bits of trash. As Nina stepped over a scrap of yellow caution tape, she didn’t give it a thought. But she watched Tom take a step and stop, his foot hovering over the tape. The hypervigilance was back.
After his first deployment, Tom could name the perfume his wife wore on a given day, not by the scent but because he noticed which bottle’s position had subtly changed on the bathroom vanity. He did the same with cars throughout the neighborhood. The gray van five doors down is parked on the other side of the street, facing south, same as last Thursday. He didn’t consciously search for the differences; he just couldn’t help but spot the out-of-place. After weeks of this, Nina took him into the bathroom, where she had rearranged the perfume bottles. “Now which one, Tom?” she said. “You have to stop noticing everything. You just have to shut your brain down and stop being aware of things you don’t need to be aware of.”
With the deaths of Ian and Jimmy stuck in his head, she wondered how much worse his readjustment would be this time.
They hung out for an afternoon with Jesse, who’d also been given a break from Dakota, and who was so happy to see Tom that tears slipped from his eyes. They stopped by the hospital to visit Corporal Ramos, who’d been shot in the shoulder a few days after Tom left. Out in northern Marjah, far from the insulation of Leatherneck, the war was alive, with points, edges, and texture. It was time for Tom to return and take over his dead friend’s job as platoon sergeant, responsible for the welfare of nearly four dozen Marines at Patrol Bases Dakota and Beatley.
In early May, Tom sent a patrol over to Beatley to pick up the satellite phone, and for the next couple of days he watched his men pace the courtyard at Dakota or sit in the dark, invisible but for the glow of a cigarette cherry, and talk to parents and wives, girlfriends and kids. Some hadn’t spoken to their families in several weeks. Tom could chat with Nina over the military’s secret e-mail network, a luxury his guys didn’t have, but he missed his boys. Once the other Marines had taken their turns, Tom called Nina’s parents in Tennessee, and Andrew and Lee told him how they’d been swimming every day in the backyard pool, and played soccer and baseball.
“Dad,” Andrew said, “are you done killing bad guys yet so you can come home?”
“Almost,” Tom told him. “Almost.”
With the western sky smeared pink behind silhouetted palm trees and stars rising in the east, Battalion called down with intel gleaned from two high-level detainees: a half-dozen Taliban commanders and scores of fighters had moved into Marjah and northern Marjah with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Tom strode through Dakota in his green shorts, shirtless after a sunset workout, sucked on a Marlboro, and refined his battle plan. He ordered another machine gun to one guard post and an extra grenade launcher to another. Marines stretched more concertina wire in the street, and Tom gave his men a rundown of the destruction-on-call: 60-millimeter mortars from Patrol Base Beatley and, from the larger bases, heavy mortars, HIMARS and Excalibur rockets, Cobra helicopter gunships, and F-18 jet fighters. Tom’s voice left no question: If the Taliban attacked, those who lived would retreat with their dead. The Marines trusted him; they believed him. And after so many nauseating steps, waiting to be blown in half, the notion of repelling a frontal assault on their patrol base cheered them.
“I’m getting pumped up, man, like right before a football game,” a Marine said from the gathering darkness.
“Fuck it, man,” another said. “Let ’em come.”
But the Taliban did not come, which was common. The intel from detainees and informants was often unreliable or exaggerated. Instead, the Marines continued the slow, frustrating, dangerous grind of counterinsurgency. Tom pushed patrols into the surrounding countryside and villages twice a day, to search compounds and talk to locals. This exposed his men to bullets and bombs, but the harder he pushed, Tom reasoned, and the more aggressive an image he projected, the safer his men would be. “This is our area of operations,” he told his men, “not the Taliban’s.”
Under a searing sun, the Marines waded through fields waist-high with poppies, and the fat bulbs atop each plant oozed tar-like goo that stained their uniforms with black streaks. Around them, workers scraped the bulbs and collected the resin, which would be refined into heroin. The Marines knew they would likely be fighting some of these men in the future. Laborers from Pakistan and elsewhere in Afghanistan brought in for the harvest might stick around to take a few shots at Marines, augmenting the ranks of hard-core Taliban, flush with fresh cash to finance their operations. But for now, Tom and his men enjoyed a bizarre truce, a welcome lull.
“We’ll see you in a couple weeks,” Tom told the laborers as he passed.
The patrol stopped in a village near Dakota, and, in a building empty save for a few dusty mats and cushions, Tom sat with Hajji Zaire. He controlled water in the village, a position of relative power, and had been kidnapped twice in recent weeks by the Taliban. Out in the fields, Tom was an infantryman; at the moment he was a salesman. The village still hadn’t elected an elder to serve on the local district council; no one wanted the job—they were convinced they’d be killed by the Taliban.
“We can’t help you if you don’t have an elder,” Tom said. “I can’t dig you a well, build you a school, or improve your road.”
He offered Zaire a cigarette, and the two men smoked.
“Many times the government has promised to help us, but they don’t,” Zaire told him, dancing around Tom’s request. “The people in this village are honest and hardworking. They just want peace. They’re tired of war.”
Tom knew Zaire’s position was difficult. Like many Afghans in the area, he seemed most interested in being left alone, farming and raising a family without the daily threat of traumatic death, and avoiding the ire of either the Taliban or the Marines.
“You have to understand the people,” Tom said after he and his men left the village. “You don’t have to like them, but you have to understand them.”
The Marines pushed north, through fields not far from where Ian had landed after the bomb blast, then cut west into Five Points, the site of so many firefights, but quiet now. After Jimmy died, the ISCI picked a different patrol base, an empty house just across the street from the mosque with more rooms and better views of the surrounding area.
Inside the compound, Tom took off his helmet and pulled a long draw of water from his CamelBak. Sweat matted his hair, and his cheeks flushed pink from the hump through the fields. He inspected the fighters’ machine guns and deemed them cleaner and better maintained than some Marines’ weapons. They asked Tom for sandbags to reinforce their guard posts, belts of machine gun ammunition, and bottles of water.
Working logistics for the ISCI was a hassle, but these were his proxies, and if they fought the Taliban, his Marines wouldn’t have to. Indeed, the turning point for the Marines at Dakota and across northern Marjah had been the day these men raised the Afghan flag over the abandoned compound. Hajji Gul Mala had cried when he saw Jimmy torn up by the bomb, and was so angered by the attack that he resolved that his men would never leave the Five Points village or let the Taliban return. Days after the bomb attack, Gul Mala opened a school just down the road for girls and boys, and in coming weeks he would help open three more. More important, he met with other elders and power brokers in surrounding areas and convinced them to work with the Marines and to encourage young men to join the new security force. Within three months of Jimmy’s death, more than two dozen local police stations like the one in Five Points would be established, pushing the Taliban into retreat. But the ISCI at Five Points had another problem, bigger than resupply: the homeowner wanted to move back in, which was actually a good sign: locals felt safe enough to return to the village. But they needed a new patrol base.
“Where do you want to go?” Tom asked.
A militiaman gestured across the street, to the building beyond the mosque.
“Where Staff Sergeant was blown up?” Disbelief and anger tinged Tom’s voice, then gave way to resignation.
“We’ll sweep it for you, but this is the last time,” he said. “You’ll have to have your guys guard it until you move in, because we’re not coming back to sweep it again.”
And so, for the second time, Tom took his Marines to clear the compound. They zigzagged back and forth, sweeping mine detectors before them. Tick tock. The courtyard had sprouted knee-high weeds in the weeks since the Marines had last been there, but the Afghan flag still flew from the skinny flagpole on the roof.
Tom kicked a piece of trash, then squatted and carefully brushed his gloved hand across a darkened swath of dirt. Nothing. He walked deeper into the courtyard, along the northern wall, then stopped, eyes fixed on the ground. He did not speak or move. He held his rifle absently at his side and stared at the shallow crater, the once loose dirt beaten flat by rain and hardened by sun. The hole seemed so small for the damage it had done. Birds flitted through the compound, a breeze swayed the little Afghan flag, and the mine detectors whined and chirped. Tom stared at the hole, and his heart drummed faster.
“We’re good, Sergeant Whorl,” Ryan called out.
Just like last time, the sweep had turned up nothing suspicious.
“Okay,” Tom said. “Let’s go.”
The patrol snaked back to Dakota through the poppy fields, past the men who might soon trade their sickles for rifles, maybe the same men who would detonate an enormous bomb under the truck behind Tom’s during a vehicle convoy from Dakota to Beatley, when Tom would again feel the sledgehammer blast wave as a giant fountain of dirt shot into the air. Fearing he’d just lost five men, he’d run to the truck, stuck in a deep crater, and find them bleeding, with battered brains and broken backs, but alive. He would dream about that moment often once he had returned to America—running up to the truck, smoking in the blast crater—but in the dream his men weren’t just injured. They were dead, in pieces.
That was all to come. For now, he and his men walked home, sweat-soaked and tired and forever anxious. On the front of his body armor, clipped to an ammunition pouch, Tom wore a white button labeled FUN METER, with a black needle that could be moved between blue, yellow, and red: minimum fun, medium fun, maximum fun. His dad had sent it to him in a care package. If Tom was in a good mood, he’d slide the needle down into the blue; such was his sense of humor. Now the needle surged into the red: maximum fun.
Tom barely slept that night, like every night. He’d lie on his cot and watch movies or listen to music on Jimmy’s laptop, and often he’d cry, quietly, rolling onto his right side, face tucked beside the mud wall, so the Marine on radio guard at the desk ten feet away wouldn’t hear him. He’d usually fall asleep sometime before dawn and sleep into midmorning. He’d wake bathed in sweat, swing his feet over the edge of the cot, prop his elbows on his knees, and prepare himself for another day. Ryan now slept on Jimmy’s cot, but that hardly made the room feel less empty. Tom only saw Jimmy, and felt his absence. On the wall above Jimmy’s old cot, he’d hung Ian’s and Jimmy’s pictures, from the Beatley memorial service programs, and beneath them scrawled an inscription: GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN THAN TO LAY DOWN HIS LIFE FOR HIS BROTHER.
In the heat of the day, after the morning patrol or before an afternoon patrol, when the farmers had retreated from their fields to lounge in the shade, Tom would unroll his foam sleeping pad in Dakota’s courtyard and sprawl in the sun, listening to music on a set of portable speakers. For that one hour every day, he was home, lying in the sand at Myrtle Beach. He and Jimmy had planned a beach trip to celebrate their August birthdays when they’d returned. He imagined waves breaking and his kids’ voices just beyond the music, a daydream occasionally interrupted by air strikes or roadside bombs in the distance, or fighter jets screaming overhead.
He wrote in his journal less and less after Jimmy died, then stopped, with a final, half-page entry: “I have been fighting a lot of demons. I feel so responsible and guilty for the deaths of Staff Sergeant and Ian. It’s going to be a long fight for me. Have been emailing and calling both families as much as I can. They are all amazing people. I can’t wait to meet them soon. This has been a nightmare of a deployment. I miss Jimmy and Ian so much.”
5. Home
On a steamy morning in late July, as Tom and his Marines finished their last patrols at Dakota, Alison Malachowski left her house on the wooded hilltop in Westminster and drove south, toward an office building in Rockville, Maryland. She had been planning this day for weeks. Her husband and daughter knew her destination and wanted none of it. A friend had offered to drive with her, and Alison declined. This was far too personal to share with anyone else. Her stomach turned from the nerves, and she talked to him as she drove. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do this. Jimmy, I’m not that strong. But she felt him pushing her.
Before a service member killed in Afghanistan is prepared for burial by a mortuary team at Dover Air Force Base, a pathologist performs an autopsy, which has helped and maybe saved thousands of other service members: details about battlefield trauma gleaned in the exams have highlighted deficiencies in body armor and spurred improvements in bomb-resistant vehicles and frontline medical equipment. Family members can read the autopsy reports and talk to those who perform the exams, but few ever do. Bullets, buried bombs, exploding cars: no mysteries there.
Army Major Dori Franco, who worked as a forensic pathologist out of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner’s office, in Rockville, had performed more than three hundred autopsies. But this was her first time meeting a parent to explain her work. “I’ve never done this before,” she told Alison, and Alison hadn’t imagined she’d want to know these details, until she spoke to Susanne Muller.
When Ian came home, the Mullers had met him at Dover, but he’d been hidden in a flag-draped transfer case as a Marine honor guard carried him from the plane. And though the family had an open-casket viewing before the closed-casket wake, they still didn’t see Ian. He lay in a perfectly arranged uniform, every ribbon straight, every button polished, white gloves on his hands and his entire head wrapped in white gauze, like a mummy.
A Vermont woman who works as a grief counselor for sudden traumatic death—car wrecks, homicides, workplace accidents—had told Susanne that viewing the body could be cathartic, especially when a loved one had died so far away. Susanne asked Dover for the autopsy pictures and viewed them with the counselor, who first described each photo, asked if Susanne was ready to see it, and then showed her as they sat in Susanne’s living room. Yes, his body was broken and torn. But the right side of his face was perfect. Were it possible, she would have been with him in that field and held his hand as he lay dying, but at least she could have stroked his cheek once he’d come home, one last time. Susanne told Alison that seeing the pictures had helped her.
Alison needed a different sort of closure. Jimmy’s wake had been open-casket, and the Malachowskis could see him, touch him. But she wanted to know exactly how her son had died, and whether anything could have been different. For three hours, with reports and photos, Major Franco told Alison what had happened to her boy, how the blast had ripped through him, crushing and splintering bones, puncturing organs, severing arteries, and shredding muscle.
Her curious boy, who had learned so much about insects that he won first place in entomology at the Maryland State Fair at nine years old, with exquisite collections that still hung in glass-covered frames on the living-room walls. Butterflies and crickets, ants, dragonflies and spiders.
Her boy, who had called from Iraq during his first tour, frustrated and furious that he’d been told to go count enemy dead, of whom nothing but pieces remained, telling her this as two women walked past Alison griping about the terrible selection at Lord & Taylor.
Her boy, who cooked and gardened and built furniture, who studied martial arts, loathed personal failure, and always seemed older than his years, a father figure to his Marines. She told Jimmy that if any of his men died during the deployment, she and James would attend the funeral in his behalf. So they had driven ten hours to Vermont, mourned with the Mullers, and driven home, and the next morning, as Alison worked in her garden, prepping flowerbeds that would be in bloom for Jimmy’s homecoming, a white van with government plates pulled into the driveway.
Here he was now, her only son, in two dimensions, pictures and diagrams. Alison asked questions and Franco answered. The pile of wadded-up tissues grew. They sat side by side in chairs, their knees almost touching. Close enough, Alison figured, that Franco must feel the pain and grief radiating from her body.
Franco walked her outside, and the wet heat swallowed them. “Are you going to be okay to drive home alone?” she asked. Alison nodded, but she wasn’t sure. She sat for several minutes in her stifling black Volkswagen Jetta with the broken air conditioner, then rolled down the windows and left. Maybe she was in shock, after hearing so many horrible details, but she felt fine as she poked along with the building rush-hour traffic, unburdened even. Thank you, Jimmy, she said. Thank you so much.
Three weeks after Tom and his men came home from Afghanistan, the Marines of 2/8 held a memorial service for Jimmy, Ian, and the six other men they’d lost around northern Marjah, and Alison drove down the coast to Camp Lejeune to deliver Jimmy’s absolution to the men of Third Platoon. Many of them gathered at Whorl’s house after the memorial to toast their dead friends, take shelter among the living, and let liquor dull the constant ache. Alison pulled a few of them aside, one at a time, those who were with Jimmy that day in the compound, and told them what she’d learned: Jimmy’s death wasn’t their fault. “There wasn’t anything anybody could have done, and he wouldn’t have wanted to survive with what was left of him,” she says. “I didn’t want them thinking if they’d just been faster, or tried harder, or been stronger … all those things that would have held them back and destroyed them.”
It wasn’t his fault. Tom heard that a lot. He didn’t kill Jimmy and couldn’t have done anything to save him. The Mullers told him the same about Ian, and so did everyone else. Nina told her husband that their deaths were in God’s plan. “The instant you’re born, the day you’re going to die is already set out for you,” she says. “That’s your destiny, and there’s no changing it.” The chaplain told him just the opposite, that God doesn’t pick and choose who dies and when; the randomness of war decides. Lieutenant Colonel Harrill told him that this job is bloody and terrible and friends will die, and that nothing can change the nature of war. Tom’s father told him that had he made different choices, things could have turned out far worse. Tom listened, and he tried to let their words help him. He knew his suffering tore at them, and he could see the truth in some of what they said. And he wanted to believe them—how easy that would have been, how quick the relief.
But Tom saw things differently. He had called the building clear. Just like he had sent Ian down that road. Simple as that. He made the decisions, and he failed them, and they died. If only. If only he had made different decisions. The guilt was obstinate and bullying. It rotted his thinking and wove roots into his days like weeds choking a garden, until it was everywhere, wrapping itself around him, squeezing, in quiet moments with Nina or during family dinners or driving across base, as he waited for sleep, while he slept, and when he woke.
Tom watched the videos of Jimmy’s and Ian’s funerals every day, maybe once, maybe a half-dozen times, to split the skin anew, to pull the wound open and expose the nerves. He figured he deserved that pain, since he had killed his friends, but he craved the pain, too. Better to feel something than nothing. “I looked at my wife and I didn’t feel love,” he says. “I’d think about Jimmy and Ian and I didn’t feel sad. I never felt happy. I just did not feel shit.”
He wasn’t alone in this. All of the guys were struggling, falling apart.
Jesse, who had always been so mellow, now snapped at superiors, in bright flashes of anger.
Ryan still couldn’t sleep. He’d lie in bed, not meaning to think about Ian, but sometimes unable to think about anything else, wondering how things might have turned out differently. When he did sleep, the dreams were bad. Some were of war and blown-up friends, but worse were the mundane dreams, bench-pressing at the gym with Ian, or drinking nickel Pabst Blue Ribbon with him down at Gus’ on Wednesday nights. And then he’d wake, and as his mind cleared he’d remember anew that Ian was gone.
Since the day Ian died, Matt hadn’t dreamed about anything else. Except Jimmy, of course, once he was dead, too. Some dreams were thorough, taking him through a whole day; others were just highlight reels, picking up right before the blasts. Three, four, five times a night. “It’s pretty much just reliving those two days over, and over, and over,” he says. “And no matter how many times I dream it, the outcome is going to be the same. And that’s what drives mental health crazy, because most of the time your dreams will fluctuate. In some of them things will be different, like Ian would have lived. But mine are consistent. They’re the same every time, just reliving the day.”
The doctors gave him sleep meds, but more sleep just meant more nightmares, and the pills to stop the nightmares didn’t work.
“Everyone keeps asking, ‘Are you okay? Is there anything we can do?’” Matt says. “And you know they mean well, but it gets so irritating and so taxing because you don’t want to involve them, because no matter how you explain it, they’ll never understand. When you sit up for three or four months watching movies with a guy every night, you consider him your best friend, and he dies ten feet in front of you, it’s going to fuck you up. When you search a building and call it clear, and then somebody who you looked to like a father figure dies, it’s going to fuck you up.”
The Marines sent Matt home from Afghanistan after Jimmy’s bomb—his third major blast—and now he was being medically retired, because of the nightmares and headaches and memory loss, symptoms of post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury. Even if he could stay in, he’d never deploy again, and he couldn’t imagine not being allowed to do his job. The Marines were all he’d known since he left Pike County, Georgia, after high school.
He still wasn’t old enough to drink a beer legally, but he’d aged terribly, and he knew he couldn’t handle seeing another friend die. “Transitioning back to civilian life scares the hell out of me,” he says. “You only have this handful of people you can turn to and talk to, who you know will be there for you no matter what, and will understand if you call them at three in the morning crying because you just had the worst nightmare yet. I’m scared to death to be away from them. They keep me sane.”
He told his wife about the three bomb blasts, and how his platoon had lost two men, but none of the details. He didn’t want to lay on her any of the weight that was crushing him. Ryan and Jesse and Craig Fazenbaker knew. They’d been right there. They could be wounded and broken around each other. They could tell each other about their terrible dreams, or say nothing at all and know that the others understood their withdrawal, anger, and frustration.
Except for Tom. He wouldn’t allow himself the vulnerability. As the pressure built, he didn’t tell his guys that he had the very same thoughts and struggles. He was their leader. They looked to him for support and answers. How could they trust him if they knew he was just as fucked in the head as them? He would have failed them. He didn’t tell anyone that he needed help, that he couldn’t navigate the emotional wreckage by himself.
While at Dakota and when he came home, Tom spoke to or e-mailed the Mullers and Malachowskis several times a week. Initially he did this as a duty to Ian and Jimmy, looking after their families the same as he would his Marines. The families wanted to know about their sons’ last weeks, hours, minutes. Their lives at Dakota. Their friendships. Their last words. Tom felt he had no right to deny them that. But he soon came to rely on the phone calls and texts, a friendly voice and shared history when few others could understand. “I had an escape,” he says. “When I talked to them, even though it brought back memories, that boulder was off my chest. That’s why it became so addictive—because of the feeling I had after talking to them. They were my outlet, and I was their outlet. I felt like I couldn’t talk to anyone else.”
Nina included.
Life had seemed good for a while. When Tom and Nina came home in early August 2011, they drove to Tennessee to pick up their three children and settled into being a family again. For the first two months, the Marine Corps eased them back into life off the battlefield, with short workdays and plenty of three-and four-day weekends. Tom lost himself in the old rhythms of home, everything he’d longed for while he baked in the Afghan sun, worried about his men, and stared at Jimmy’s old cot. Many nights he grilled out, Sam Adams in hand, in the fenced-off oasis Nina had built for him during his first deployment, and nearly every weekend they drove to Myrtle Beach with the kids. They careened down slides at the water park, lounged on the beach, and ate out at night, dipping into the thousands they’d saved during their deployments, between the extra combat pay, no taxes, and neither of them being home to spend money.
But the relief of home wore off, and Tom’s nerves frayed. Nina felt he was annoyed with her and the kids more and more, quick to lose patience as the kids raced through the house, banging doors. Don’t do that, she told them. Your dad doesn’t like it. She understood, far better than most spouses, the effects of a deployment. Of course loud noises might bother him, or the hassles of home life after the bizarre simplicity of war, and she knew how much he loved Jimmy and Ian. But this wasn’t just anxiety or grief. This felt different. He seemed so far away, beyond reach. She’d asked what was wrong and he’d say, “Nothing.” He sometimes told her he was thinking of Jimmy or Ian, but didn’t go deeper.
He didn’t tell her how the rest of the world fell away as Afghanistan came into focus, until he was both places at once—at home and over there, the two scenes playing on top of each other. The feel of Jimmy’s dirtied hand in his. The smell of Jimmy’s souring breath in his nostrils. His skin color draining to a waxy greenish yellow. His eyes pulling back, losing focus. Or the sound of blood gurgling in Ian’s throat as he and Jesse sliced an airway into his trachea, as the smashed bomb jammer strapped to Ian’s back beeped and its cooling fan whirred. Beep. Beep. Beep. “That’s the shit that doesn’t leave your head,” Tom says. “Ever.”
Tom swung open his bedroom door and bashed it against the wall, over and over, punching a jagged hole in the hallway wall with the doorknob. Andrew and Lee ran from their room into the hallway, screaming. Through the open doorway, Nina sat on the bed, an arm wrapped around little Gia, who’d been born a few months before Tom and Nina left for the deployment.
“Get out of here!” she yelled. “You’re not going to terrorize us. We didn’t do anything to you.”
Tom charged from the house, and Nina locked the front door behind him and phoned Jesse. “You need to get your ass over here. He’s flipping out.”
They had argued more often in the months since their homecoming. Sometimes Tom blamed her for what he’d been through. If he’d just stayed with the fire department instead of rejoining the Marines, Ian and Jimmy might still be alive, and his own life wouldn’t be falling apart. But the argument on this late November night hadn’t been anything, just a mundane spat, when a few words over taking out the garbage spins into a storm.
As Nina stood in the living room and talked to Jesse on the phone, Tom circled around to the open back door and walked into the living room, with a look she’d never seen, out-of-his-head crazy. Their marriage could run hot—for better, for worse. They fought and cooled down and made up. But now she was frightened of him, for the first time since she’d known him. The boys retreated to their room, and Nina ran into Gia’s room and locked herself and the baby inside. The house fell quiet. Tom stood outside the door. When he spoke, the anger had drained from his voice. “You’re not going to have to worry about me anymore,” he said. “I’m not going to be your problem.”
Nina heard the front door close, and she followed him outside. Tom sat in their blue Pontiac G6, parked at the curb. Nina called to him to get out of the car and talk to her, but she stayed close to the garage, figuring he might try to run her over if she neared the car. He pulled forward and back in the street several times, then backed up three hundred feet to the intersection and disappeared. Nina ran into the kitchen and opened the far right cabinet, where Tom kept his mini-pharmacy of prescription medications for insomnia, nightmares, anxiety, and pain. Gone, every bottle. She called the police, then Tom’s father, who left within minutes for the six-hour drive south from Maryland to Camp Lejeune.
Jesse showed up first, then Ryan and Craig Fazenbaker and his wife. None of them seemed overly concerned. They’d all been there recently, needing a little time alone to catch their footing. Ryan told her he’d talked to Tom for ten minutes the day before and he’d seemed fine. “He’s probably just going somewhere to cool off,” he said.
“No,” Nina said. “I know him. This isn’t normal.”
The Whorls use an iPhone application called Loopt that allows them to see the other’s location when they’re logged onto Facebook. In a dual-military household, with plenty of schedule changes and times when phones can’t be used, it’s an easy way for Nina to know that Tom is still out in Camp Lejeune’s vast training area at the rifle range, so she should wait on starting dinner. For two hours, she checked her phone every few minutes, but Loopt hadn’t updated, and still showed him at their house. She hoped he was a hundred miles away by now. Tom needed time, distance, and solitude when he was angry, so he usually would drive. After an argument in South Carolina, he drove to Florida. After another at Camp Lejeune, he drove to Virginia. He might drive for hours, but then he’d mellow, and she’d mellow, and they’d talk it through.
At ten p.m., his location finally changed on her phone, and she knew that he had gone to kill himself.
She left Jesse, Ryan, and Fazenbaker with her kids and sped toward the Jacksonville Mall, six miles away. There was the Pontiac, lights off, in front of the Ulta cosmetics store, which was Nina’s favorite, always their first stop on trips to the mall. And there was Tom, slumped against the window.
“I found him!” she shouted to the 911 operator.
She opened the door and Tom pitched forward, his shirt front covered in vomit. He moaned and mumbled, barely conscious. Nina screamed at him to stand up. She worked her arms under his arms, bloodied from knife slices on his wrists, and half dragged him to the Jeep as a police car raced toward her.
He lay unconscious in the intensive care unit at Onslow Memorial Hospital, a breathing tube snaked down his throat because his body was too weak to breathe for itself. On the sixth day, he woke up, puzzled and disoriented. He tried to lift his arms, which had been restrained at his side.
“Tom, do you know why you’re in here?” Nina asked him.
He shook his head. She showed him his bandaged wrists and the understanding washed over him, and he cried. Later he told her he thought it had been one more terrible dream.
Being home from Afghanistan hadn’t been easy for Nina, either, as she watched her husband fall apart and tried to keep the family upright. They had always been each other’s support—them against the world—but he’d retreated somewhere so dark that she couldn’t find the path to bring him home. To see him so distraught that he’d choose death broke her heart, but she flushed with anger, too. “It was the biggest betrayal,” she says. “It was selfish, and it was going to relieve his pain by giving me pain. I would have blamed myself for the rest of my life had I not found him.
“I just want to shake him and make it go away, make it stop and have my old husband back,” she says. “I have to learn to love him this way. If he’d gotten his leg blown off, I’d learn to love him that way. I have to realize that he’s not going to be like he was.”
The Marine Corps celebrated Tom as a hero for the moment that weighed on him most heavily.
On a cool January morning, nearly eight hundred men of Second Battalion, Eighth Marines gathered beside their redbrick headquarters at Camp Lejeune, arranged by company, in perfect rows. Tom stood before them, at the position of attention: back rigid, chest out, arms at his sides with his fingers curled against his palms. He’d been promoted to staff sergeant three months earlier, and he wore on his collar the metal rank insignia he had taken from Jimmy’s uniform that day in the compound.
His battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Harrill, who still had debris in his face from the blast that killed Jimmy, walked up to him in sharp, measured steps, stood nearly toe to toe, and pinned a red-white-and-blue ribbon to the left chest pocket of Tom’s uniform. From the ribbon dangled a Bronze Star, over his heart. A Marine read from the citation for the Bronze Star with Valor over the loudspeaker: “His leadership directly led to the defeat of the insurgency in the vast majority of his battle space. By his extraordinary guidance, zealous initiative, and total dedication to duty, Sergeant Whorl reflected great credit upon himself and upheld the highest traditions of the Marine Corps.”
The award references two days specifically: the running gunfight in Cocheran Village, in which they mortally wounded a Taliban fighter and recovered a cache of IED components, and the day Jimmy died. “His mental agility and ability to remain focused in a chaotic environment enabled him to rapidly coordinate a medical evacuation while simultaneously directing his squad into a security cordon. With disregard for his own safety, he repeatedly entered the blast site to treat a mortally wounded Marine and remain with him during his final moments.”
Tom’s father drove down from Maryland for the ceremony, and afterwards he took a picture of Tom, with the medal pinned to his chest. In the picture Tom is smiling, a rarity in the months since he’d come home. Yes, the medal reminded him—shouted to him—that Jimmy and Ian were dead, but it also made him proud of what the Third Platoon Marines, the living and the dead, had accomplished in northern Marjah.
In the weeks since he’d tried to kill himself, he had slowly started reframing the story of his time in Afghanistan, a messy, stumbling exploration that had begun as he lay in the hospital bed, wrists still bandaged, and his doctors asked if he’d like to speak with mental health.
His psychologist at Camp Lejeune hadn’t been in combat, which Tom counted as an immediate mark against him, but he didn’t say he knew how Tom was feeling, and that made up for plenty, because Tom was certain that almost no one could know that. The psychiatrist did tell him this: Yes, you lost two men. But you brought home forty-six, the result of thousands of good decisions. Of everything anyone had told him, the condolences and absolutions, the tough-love talks and the tips for coping, this made the most sense. “It’s a small thing, but for me, that’s what I needed to tell myself,” he says. “Every time I think of the two I lost, I think of the forty-six I brought home, who have babies now, who have gotten married, who are doing great things with their lives.”
That helped assuage the guilt, although Tom reached another conclusion, too: he may have brought home forty-six, but he couldn’t stand losing another. He was done. “I can’t do it anymore,” he told the psychologist. “I can’t lead eighteen- and nineteen-year-old guys into combat and not bring back one or two. I can’t perform the job. I can’t watch these kids get fucked up in the worst ways. I’m tapped out. And it’s a hard thing to admit.”
In June, Tom spent a month in Texas at an inpatient clinic for post-traumatic stress, where he learned how to better cope with the guilt and the sadness and how to pull himself back when he started obsessing over details, like the smell of Jimmy’s last breaths or the gurgle of blood in Ian’s throat.
Before he left for Texas, he told the Marines Corps he was finished, after thirteen years of service. He wanted a medical retirement. Upon his return, he moved to Camp Lejeune’s Wounded Warrior Battalion, a unit full of men with shot-off faces, missing legs, and rattled brains, where the whole mission is getting better. He sometimes had three appointments a day, with neurologists, psychiatrists and psychologists, chiropractors for a back wrecked by too many years as a grunt, and counselors who helped him plan for life after the military. He worked out five times a week, with elective sports like surfing and kayaking twice a week, and he spent more time with his family.
For the first time in his Marine career, Tom didn’t feel responsible for everyone else, and that was okay.
With Lee riding his bicycle outside on a warm Camp Lejeune evening, Andrew busy on the couch with a monster-truck video game, and Nina in the kitchen with Gia on her hip, Tom opens the closet door in his bedroom and drops to his knees. He slides out a scarred wooden toolbox, two feet wide, with three drawers and a hinged lid, passed down from his great-grandfather. He lifts the lid and his eyes flit across the contents, a story of origins and evolution, told through accumulated treasures and fierce heartache.
Great-Grandfather Mason’s ivory-handled butcher knives from his days in the slaughterhouse. Grandfather Whorl’s belt buckle, with its raised image of the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier, aboard which he’d served. A wooden checkerboard his grandfather Whorl had given his dad when he was a boy. Two musket balls from Gettysburg. A bag of sand, black and gravelly, that Tom collected on Iwo Jima in 2000. A ragged sliver of shrapnel Tom pulled from his own neck in 2009, and a black-and-white-checkered kaffiyeh scarf from that first deployment, given to him by an interpreter after Tom used his own to carry a Marine’s severed arm.
He unpacks the box, fingers caressing these pieces of himself. The Velcro patch with Jimmy’s name, rank, and unit that he stripped from Jimmy’s uniform before they loaded him onto the medevac bird, and the dog tags Jimmy wore that day. His Bronze Star with Valor. A wad of Afghan money. The pirate flag that hung above Jimmy’s cot from the first day of the deployment to the last, and the American flag that hung over Tom’s cot.
In time, he’ll drive up to Vermont and see Ian, out on the hillside in Danville Cemetery, with the White Mountains in the distance, and he’ll visit Jimmy in Arlington National Cemetery. He knows he won’t have any lasting peace until he does. But for now they meet here.
He flips through his journal, reminded of dates and names already grown foggy, his words pulling him back to Afghanistan. He unfolds a laminated satellite map from Third Platoon’s sector and traces a finger across the patchwork of fields, crisscrossed with roads and canals and sprinkled with buildings, which appear as tiny squares. There’s Patrol Base Dakota. The road where Ian was blown up. The building where Jimmy stepped on the bomb.
He sets aside the map and, with a reverence reserved for sacred artifacts, picks up the most cherished item, the picture of Ian, Jimmy, and Tom taken by Jesse an hour before Ian died, the picture that so disturbed Alison Malachowski when she first saw it because she feared Tom would be next, death moving down the line. Tom had figured the same, and the thought didn’t trouble him; he knew he would die in Afghanistan. After all the bombs, and the bullets that passed so close he could feel them slice through the air, he still can’t make sense of how he survived, or why.
When his boys are older, maybe when they have children of their own, he’ll give them the box. “I’ll tell them I served honorably,” he says, “and the men I led served honorably.” His boys can sift through the treasures, feel the jagged splinter of shrapnel pulled from their father’s neck, run a fingertip over the raised lettering on Jimmy’s dog tags, unfurl the Jolly Roger that hung above Jimmy’s cot, still washed in the dust of Dakota. Their ears won’t ring from the rifle fire. They won’t smell the pungent bite of explosives hanging in the air, or hear Jimmy cry out for their father. And perhaps by then the sharpest edges will have dulled for Tom as well.