It was a running play, nothing special. Jake Wood propelled himself forward into the Bettendorf High School lineman, pushing him back and down—and then a devastating force crashed into his left foot. It was friendly fire: one of his Pleasant Valley teammates pushing into the pile. Jake heard his foot crack—not a snap or a twist, not a broken toe—it sounded as if his entire foot had cracked in two. But he didn’t feel anything. He disentangled himself from the pile, stood up, and started to walk back to the huddle, thinking: “It doesn’t hurt yet, but I know it’s going to fucking kill me pretty soon.” The quarterback called the play, and Jake started walking back to the line of scrimmage. With each step, he heard a series of smaller cracks—metatarsals snapping off from his tarsus, the main bone in his arch, all five of his toes. His arch collapsed, and now the pain came on. He managed to get down into his three-point stance, but the agony was overwhelming and he fell over, drifting away from consciousness. The quarterback thought he’d had a heart attack.
Jake had spent his adolescence growing into serious plausibility as a football player. As he grew, and then grew some more, he’d been moved from fullback to tight end and, finally, to the trenches—he was, in fact, an offensive line coach’s dream, a huge kid, strong not fat, who loved to work and had bulked himself up to nearly 270 pounds, with a minuscule amount of body fat and a maximal amount of brains. You had to be clever to be a good offensive lineman; you had to figure out ways to jujitsu the bull-rushing defensive linemen, stand them off, or fake them into an overreaction. Jake sneered at defensive linemen; he considered them a reflexive, Neanderthal life-form. Jake also sneered at his coaches at Pleasant Valley High School, who didn’t take things, especially the rivalry with Bettendorf, seriously enough. Pleasant Valley was too well-named. Jake wanted a major league strength and training program—he had to bulk up if he was going to be a blue-chip college lineman—but the weight room was open only on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The coaches had ordered a perfunctory “Bigger, Faster, Stronger” training program off the internet, but Jake didn’t think it was enough. He did his own research, found a more elaborate physical training regime, and convinced his teammates to join him.
By the middle of his junior year, it was clear that Jake had real talent, and the college recruiters were out in force. The fact that he was riding a 3.8 grade average in advanced placement classes, with a 32 (out of 36) on the ACT college aptitude exam and was class president and very active in community service projects made him an irresistible prospect. He was recruited by Harvard, but they didn’t send many ballplayers to the pros. He received full-ride scholarship offers from prestigious schools like Stanford and many of the Big Ten football factories.
Those were all at risk now. At home that night, he lay on the couch in the family room. His mom and dad, Jeff and Christy, and his two sisters were bawling. The Iowa State coach called and said, “Don’t worry. We still love you, Jake.” But no other coaches called, even though the word of his injury was flashing around the internet. The high school football prospect network was hot-wired, and Jake’s left foot was a national story. The Woods’ next-door neighbor was an orthopedic surgeon who came over that night and said, “I need you in my office first thing tomorrow.”
The X-rays showed a podiatric disaster. “I’ve got to tell you, Jake, this is a very serious Lisfranc injury and very rare for football—it’s more like a rodeo injury, like someone getting their foot twisted in the stirrup. A lot of people don’t recover from this.”
Jake had five surgeries his senior year. He suffered two staph infections in the foot, which forced two of the operations, and another when one of the screws holding his arch together broke. Still, he continued to work out—no running, but plenty of lifting—to get ready for college football. Many of the schools that had been chasing him pulled their offers after Jake was hurt, but Stanford, Wisconsin, and Iowa State were still interested. (Jake would remain infuriated in perpetuity that the University of Iowa, his local Big Ten school, pulled its offer.) His father wanted him to go to Stanford; his mother wanted him to stay as close to home as possible. Christy Wood called Jake the “President of the Mama’s Boy Gang”—a family joke, but it was true: he adored her.
Christy and Jeff were worried about their son. He had never faced any real adversity before. He had always been sunny, unflappable. Jeff was an expert in the scientific management of manufacturing processes. When Jake was six, the family had moved to a small town in Austria, near Graz, for several years. There were no international schools nearby; Jake had to go to the local public elementary and take all his classes in German. Jeff and Christy hired a tutor for their three kids, but Jake was the one who really excelled—he just dived into it, became Jakob Wood, not only fluent in German but also earning the highest grades in his class.
When they moved back to the States—to Danville, Illinois, for a few years—they put Jake and his sisters into a Lutheran school, and once again, Jake dived into it. He had always been interested in Jesus—at the age of four, he had “creeped out” his father by sitting at the dining room table for hours with a scroll of computer paper, drawing pictures of Jesus on the cross, and now, at the age of ten, he dived into the Bible, really studied it, and had serious conversations with Christy’s brother, a Lutheran minister, about faith and service. The family assumption was that he was going to be a minister—although that wasn’t a certainty: he was serious, but not in a righteous way. When he received an errant B in high school and Jeff bawled him out, Jake said, “Forget it, Dad. I’m going to enjoy myself in high school.”
Even when he was obnoxious, he was fun. When he scored his 32 on the ACT, he danced into the family room with his arms over his head, singing, “32 . . . Ba-bee, 32 . . . Ba-bee.”
“Jake, that’s just not fair,” moaned his older sister Sarah, who had managed a pretty impressive 30 herself. “I’m supposed to be the smart one. You’re supposed to be the charming one. Megan is supposed to be the athlete.”
The truth was, he had it all. And he was easy with it—even after the injury, when nothing was as easy as it had been. He was in a wheelchair with his leg extended for two months. He was on crutches for months after that.
He decided to go to the University of Wisconsin. “It’s just so beautiful,” he told his mom. And it was even more beautiful when Wisconsin stayed with him after his injury. It also didn’t hurt that the Badgers’ offensive line coach, Jim Hueber, had a remarkable track record of getting his starters drafted into the National Football League. When Jake arrived in 2001, the Badgers were a Big Ten powerhouse, winners of the previous two Rose Bowls.
Jake was back on the field, and running, the summer after he graduated from high school. He excelled in freshman camp, at first. Then the rest of the team arrived. In his second serious practice, playing with the freshmen against the starters, he was tossed aside by Wendell Bryant, an all-American defensive tackle who went on to play in the National Football League with the Arizona Cardinals. He landed hard on his shoulder. Jake knew it was dislocated, which was not the end of the world. The trainers simply snapped it back into place. What Jake didn’t know, but soon found out, was that he had torn his labrum, the tendon that holds the shoulder in place. He tried to play on—dislocating his shoulder several more times—before the coaches decided that he had to have season-ending surgery.
He still dreamed of playing in the NFL, but he knew he was falling behind. His natural position was left tackle, but Wisconsin successfully recruited Joe Thomas—a major stud who would go on to become an All-Pro tackle with the Cleveland Browns. The coaches moved Jake inside to left guard, and he had just about won the starting job in his junior year when he dislocated his other shoulder. “I am fucking made of glass,” he lamented to his friends. He continued to work hard to stay in shape, but it wasn’t easy. Varsity football was a forty-hour workweek, beginning at five a.m. every day. He worked out relentlessly and then watched film in the mornings; he practiced every afternoon. All that muscle required feeding, or it would begin to wither. He had to stuff himself at mealtimes and scarf down ten thousand calories of protein shakes every day to stay at 295 pounds—and the coaches wanted him at 310. The prodigious effort to turn an ectomorph into an endomorph played havoc with his body. His growing assortment of injuries limited the amount of time he could stay on the field; he lived in the land of whirlpools, liniment, ice packs, and bandages. By senior year, he knew that the NFL wasn’t going to happen. Which raised the question: What was?
Even with all the football, Jake had made the dean’s list several times and was carrying a 3.5 grade-point average. He was double-majoring in business and political science; he loved the politics but figured that business was his fate. There was, however, another option, to his parents’ dismay: he had always been interested in the military.
It started when he was a boy in Austria, on a trip to the Mauthausen Concentration Camp Memorial. The camp was situated in a quarry, the inmates worked to death. There were pictures of the haunted survivors, all eyes and bones. It was the U.S. Army, his dad told him, who liberated those people. He and Jeff spent the next few years in Europe collecting World War II memorabilia. He grilled his grandfathers for every detail of their service in the war. Before Jake became a football stud in his junior year of high school, he had given serious thought to applying to West Point. He researched the physical requirements and began to work at them. And then, when the September 11 terrorist attacks happened during his first weeks at Wisconsin, Jeff Wood said to Christy, “I just hope Jake doesn’t do something stupid and sign up.”
He wanted to sign up. He almost signed up. And it nagged at him when the Arizona Cardinals’ safety Pat Tillman quit his team and joined the Army to fight Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Jake figured that if he had any guts, he would do what Tillman had done. We had been attacked; he had skipped weeks of classes, watching cable news after September 11. But if he quit school and went to war, he would have to kiss the NFL good-bye, and he just couldn’t bring himself to do that.
The military wasn’t very popular in Madison, a notoriously liberal redoubt, and, as George W. Bush began to shove the nation toward war in Iraq, the atmosphere on campus became toxic. Jake hated the anti-American rhetoric; he hadn’t really studied the situation in Iraq—and he was too young to know much about Vietnam—but he figured that Saddam Hussein was certainly part of the problem in that region. There were large antiwar demonstrations on campus now, so Jake tried to organize a pro-America demonstration after the Iraq invasion. About twenty supporters showed up, as did a handful of opponents, one of whom spat on him.
Then, in Jake’s senior year, Pat Tillman was killed in action in Afghanistan. Jake saw the news and began to cry. It was a blub that had been a long time coming after the frustrations of the past four years, a mixture of sadness about Tillman and shame that he hadn’t had the guts to quit school and enlist. It ended with resolve: he was going to join the military.
But that turned out to be ridiculously complicated, too. He figured he would join the Marines or the Army. Those were the two services actually fighting the wars on the ground. He wanted the real deal; he wanted to lead men in combat. The Marines were the mythic way to do that; it didn’t hurt that a few years earlier he had read an article in Inc. magazine arguing that Marine officer training was better than an MBA: “Preparing for Business Battles? Learn Some Lessons from the Marines.”
Jake played his last football game, a loss to the Georgia Bulldogs in the Outback Bowl in Tampa, Florida, on January 1, 2005. He visited a Marine recruiter a few weeks later, still bulked up, which—the recruiter told him—was not the Marine way. “I don’t know if you can hack it. How many pull-ups can you do?”
Pull-ups were not part of his PT program. They were the opposite of what he had been training to do. “Fourteen, last time I checked,” Jake said.
“A Marine officer needs to be able to do twenty,” the recruiter said. “Have you had any serious injuries?”
Jake cataloged his woes. He felt as if he were trying to sell a used car.
“Whoa!” the recruiter said. “That’s an awful lot of paperwork. Why don’t you call me back in a month?”
Jake did, having shed twenty pounds and reached twenty pull-ups. He left a message; the recruiter never called him back. He shed another twenty pounds without effort—the muscle bulk was just burning off naturally. Meanwhile, the war was intensifying. A year earlier, four American contractors had been incinerated and hung from a bridge in Fallujah; a big battle was under way. Jake tried the Army recruiter, hoping for a special forces or Ranger contract. But once again he was told he would need a medical waiver for his foot. He continued to research his choices: Did he actually have to become an officer? Everything he read, everyone he spoke with, pointed in the same direction: this was a squad-level war. That was where the real action was. Squads were led by Corporals or Sergeants. All he had to do was enlist.
But even that wasn’t easy. His foot, again. At the end of June 2005, however, he lucked into a Marine recruiter who desperately needed to make his monthly quota. Somehow he was able to get expedited waivers for Jake’s foot and shoulder—and Jake Wood was a Marine, bound for Camp Pendleton.
He starred in boot camp and the School of Infantry—first in his class in both—and found himself ticketed for the Marine Air Ground Combat Center at 29 Palms in the middle of the Mojave Desert, a notoriously dreadful place. Jake was now at the bottom of the ladder again: a newbie or, more commonly in the Marines, a boot—and also something of a zoo show. Word got around the camp that there was a boot who’d actually played football for Wisconsin. People sidled by just to look at him. Marines are tough, as advertised, but they tend to have a larger cohort of little guys than big guys—historically, the Corps has been the most direct path for a little guy with something to prove to prove it. Among those who were curious about the Jake Zoo Show was Corporal Jeff Muir of the First Platoon of Golf Company, of the second battalion of the 7th Marine regiment (2/7, for short). Muir was the son of a Peoria police officer and an average-sized Marine, just short of six feet tall. He had just returned from a combat deployment in Fallujah, which gave him street cred with the new recruits. He therefore had the credentials to amble over and check out the new guy with some of his friends. “Some boot here play football for Wisconsin?”
“Hey, Wood . . .”
Jake stood. Jaws dropped. “Uh . . . okay,” they said. “Good to meet you.” And slunk away. “Dude’s large,” Muir’s Sergeant said.
“A big target,” Jeff said.
“You want to get close to him downrange. They won’t even see you.”
A few weeks later, Muir was transferred into Third Platoon, and he found that he wanted to get close to Jake, but not because he was a big target. Jake wasn’t your normal, pimply eighteen-year-old boot; he was Jeff’s age, twenty-three, and seemed to have his act together. When they went out on maneuvers, Jake always had his gear in good order—he could produce his knife, his compass, an extra canteen without even looking for it. He listened carefully, followed orders well. He had studied the field manual, and he knew stuff. When Muir would ask, “What’s the proper response to an L-shaped ambush?” Jake would know. A fair number of the guys with whom Muir had deployed couldn’t do that.
Quietly, Jake was dismayed by the quality of his fellow boots—they were slow, incompetent. These were Marines, the toughest fighting force in the world? How could he entrust his life to all these fools? But he kept it to himself. Indeed, in the field, Jeff Muir began to notice other things about Wood. When guys in their squad were lagging on a hike, Jake picked up their gear and carried it. He didn’t advertise it, didn’t say, “Here, let me help you with your gear!” so that everyone would notice. He quietly said, “I got it,” and carried on. So Muir and Wood became friends, and even there, Jake had all the nuances covered. He called Jeff “Lance Corporal,” respectfully when other people were around; he stood at parade rest when Jeff spoke to him in the presence of others. He did neither of those things, however, when he and Jeff drove the three hours to Hermosa Beach on weekends. They got drunk, chased girls, watched insane amounts of college football at an apartment owned by some of Jake’s friends who weren’t in the military.
They were joined by a third amigo—Clay Hunt—who was also older and smarter than most of the other recruits, and a solid guy. Jeff noticed that Clay would never bitch, even when they had to do something crappy, like go on patrol at 0300. “Let’s do it!” Clay said, always cheery, entirely dependable.
Clay wasn’t as easy as Jake, though. He had been kicked out of recon school, the Marines’ equivalent of the Green Berets—kicked out in spectacular fashion during his very last exercise, an ocean swim with full gear. The Sergeant had been ragging him, making fun of him, telling him he was fucking up. It was all bullshit. Clay stopped in the water and gave him the finger. And that was it. He was out.
It was an utter disaster in a mythic Marine fuckup sort of way. Clay, of course, didn’t see the humor in it. He was back to boot, back to the regular infantry, and his superiors would hassle him about it—and Clay would turn red and get angry, which made them rag him all the more. He was a little guy, about five eight, and given his closeness to Jake, his littleness seemed all the smaller. So it was: “Hey, tiny.” “Hey, recon dropout.” And when he responded, they’d say, “Hey, emo.”
When Clay talked about playing football in high school, they would go, “That’s bullshit dude—you’re too small to play football.” Actually, Clay was a fine athlete—especially when it came to individual sports like hunting, skiing, and biking—and he was tough, a total gym rat, a PT fanatic, which he and Muir had in common. But that counted for nothing. His fellow Marines had found a target of opportunity. They even ragged him when he got a Marine Corps tattoo: a Ka-Bar knife with the words “Death Before Dishonor.”
Jake and Jeff tried to help Clay through the hazing. Ignore those assholes. It’s part of the game. They do it to everyone. But Clay wasn’t buying. One day, Jeff Muir found Clay in a screaming fight with his team leader, Oscar Garza, who was tossing Clay’s stuff—his sleeping bag, his clothes, his helmet—around the barracks. Clay picked up his helmet and tossed it in the general direction of Garza, not quite at him, but close enough. Muir stepped in and stopped it, which was not a good thing to do: he had intervened to help a boot. It hurt Jeff’s standing with the senior noncoms, but he didn’t care—Clay and Jake were his brothers now. Seniority was important, but not that important.
Jake arrived in Iraq a newly minted lance corporal and leader of a four-man fire team. His first impression was filth. There was garbage everywhere, especially those little plastic shopping bags and shreds of bags, swirling in the wind. It also stank to high heaven. There was open sewage. The people were poor in the countryside; most had no running water or electricity. Most of them hated the Americans after four years of occupation. But they also hated the Al Qaeda fanatics who wouldn’t let them smoke or watch TV and forced marriages with their daughters. A change was coming—the Sunni tribes would switch sides that spring—but the members of Third Platoon, Golf Company, couldn’t sense it yet.
Three weeks into their deployment, on February 18, 2007, word came to headquarters at FOB (Forward Operating Base) Viking, where they were stationed, that a Humvee convoy had gotten stuck in the mud, outside the wire but near them, and needed security while it waited for a tow. Jake’s squad saddled up and headed out at sunset, hoping to get back to Viking in time for dinner. They drove along the main highway, MSR Mobile, looking for Route Reds (all the local roads were named after baseball teams) as it grew dark and cold—as it does in winter in Iraq—with Jake and his fire team in the third Humvee. They made a turn onto a darkened route, which should have been Reds but wasn’t—there was a big bridge over a canal on Reds—and the convoy stopped and tried to figure it out.
Jake unfolded himself from the Humvee and stepped into ankle-deep mud. “I thought this was supposed to be a fucking desert,” he said and squished his way over to Sergeant Rosenberger in the lead vehicle, which was driven by Blake Howey, a friend of Clay’s. They consulted maps. Jake had a pretty good sense of where they had gone wrong and volunteered to turn around and take the lead; Rosenberger told him it wasn’t necessary. He’d stay in the lead, with Howey driving . . . but now Howey’s Humvee was stuck in the mud. Jake and three others got in back and pushed, mud splattering their faces, their jumpsuits, everything. The mud tasted like shit. Iraq was a field of shit. “I don’t see how this night could get any worse,” someone said.
“Don’t. Fucking. Say. That,” Jake said. “Don’t ever say that.”
They traced back to Reds and saw the bridge and then a white puff of smoke. Jake realized he was suddenly near-deaf; he could barely hear a thing. From a very great distance, someone—Bullard, up in the turret—was yelling, “IED . . . Howey hit an IED.”
Jake was out of the Humvee quickly, pulling Doc Campanili with him. The IED had been placed under the bridge—the lead Humvee should have stopped to check it out, but they were already late, and so they had breezed through. Now the bridge was on fire, a gagging reek of gunpowder, gasoline, and burning rubber in the air. Jake saw Sergeant Rosenberger limping toward him; a big piece of shrapnel had gashed through his calf. Jake began to run toward the bridge. He saw Latcher pull himself out of the turret, and then he saw Latcher and Sergeant Payne pulling Howey from the driver’s side. Jake was on the bridge now, skipping through puddles of burning gasoline. He reached the Humvee and started giving orders. He told Latcher to set up security about fifteen meters farther down the road—it was entirely possible that the IED was the beginning of a complex ambush. He told Sergeant Payne to go twenty-five meters down the road that ran along the canal. He didn’t stop to think that he was giving a superior noncom orders, and Payne, a very good guy, didn’t seem to mind. “I’m on it,” he said.
And then he looked down at Howey.
His legs were covered in blood, missing flesh. Jake would later write in an unpublished memoir, “His right arm lay at an impossible angle, mangled and charred and bloody. His flak jacket was torn open and scorched black, revealing a chest peppered with shrapnel. But all that still looked vaguely human. It was his face, Howey’s face, which no longer bore resemblance to the carefree California kid we all knew. The blast had warped the size and shape of his entire skull, cruelly leaving his features intact, so that what remained looked humanoid, but not human.”
The Humvee was engulfed in flames now, and ammunition began cooking off. Jake and Doc Camp moved Howey off the bridge and into a nearby field. They called in a medevac, and Jake stood in the field, half-warmed by the fires, half-chilled by the air, twirling a string of red warning lights over his head, a signal for the choppers. His shoulder ached, but he kept twirling until the birds came in a gush of wind and another splatter of mud. He got on the medevac with Sergeant Payne, Latcher, Doc Camp, and several others who’d been stranded on the far side of the bridge. He fingered his dog tag, thinking, “If they’d let me lead the convoy back to Reds, that would have been me.”
Back at FOB Viking, word of the attack was cascading and distorting through the camp. There were five KIA. No, there were two KIA, six WIA. Wood had burns over 90 percent of his body. Wood? Jeff Muir ran over to the operations center (TOC) and asked, “Who got hurt?” No one knew. Muir began praying, “Please don’t let it be Jake or Nick Roberts.” And then he thought, “How fucked is it that I’m praying that someone other than Jake or Roberts got hurt?” But he couldn’t stop praying. And he thought about Clay, who was out on a three-day dwell op with his squad: How would Clay handle it if Jake had bought the farm?
By the next afternoon, Muir had assembled the details—Jake was fine, but he was still at al-Taqaddum air base and wouldn’t be coming back to Viking for a couple of days. Muir was walking back to his hooch when Clay’s squad came in, and he told them what happened. The news was greeted by torrents of shits and fucks, but Clay didn’t say anything. He just stared straight ahead as if, Muir thought, he were trying to work his way through a complicated math equation.
Two days later, Muir found Clay sitting on his bunk, staring across at Howey’s empty rack—again, just staring at it. “Dude, you okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Clay said. “Fine.” But he didn’t sound fine.
That night Clay had moved down into Howey’s bunk. “I just want to be close to him,” he said.
It was that night or maybe the next that Clay called his dad, Stacy Hunt, back in Houston. “Dad, we lost a couple of guys a few days ago,” he said. Stacy couldn’t make out much of what Clay was saying; the connection was awful, and the call didn’t last very long. But Stacy heard a quality in his son’s voice that he’d never heard before. The boy was scared.
“This is hard, Dad,” Clay said. “Really hard.”
Ten days later, Jake and Clay’s platoon hit a village market at the corner of Routes Angels and Pirates. There was supposed to be a significant ammunition cache in the market warehouse; there was bound to be AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq) security and resistance. But the mission turned out to be a dud at first, another false alarm, Iraq as usual.
Jake blew the lock on the warehouse door with his Benelli shotgun. There were no weapons inside, no AQI security. The other squads began to collect and interrogate the men in the market to see if any useful information could be gleaned from the wasted morning.
Lieutenant Clevenger told Jake to deploy his five-man team atop a house about two hundred yards above and behind the market. It was a standard Iraqi structure, cinder block, one story with the hope of two, rusted steel rods poking up from a flat roof, with a staircase leading to the top. It was amazing how everything looked unfinished or partially destroyed in Iraq. On the roof, Jake had his radio operator, Cartwright, set up a communications line with HQ and then sat there, sweating like a banshee in the stupefying dust-sauna, watching the heat ripple across the field to Route Pirates and beyond, past the ancient irrigation canal on the other side of the road, which brought water from the Euphrates River. The area was thick with reeds and bulrushes, biblical stuff: these lands between the Tigris and Euphrates had once, in legend, been the Garden of Eden. It wasn’t exactly how Jake had pictured it in Sunday school.
The heat seemed to intensify, radiating off the black tar roof. The dust raised by their convoy hadn’t yet settled, or maybe it had; everything in Iraq was sepia-toned. Communications were hard, too—his radio on the rooftop was the only connection with HQ. Jake could raise Lieutenant Clevenger by unit intercom, but that connection was sketchy at best. So his team was it, the only contact with the rest of the world.
He heard children singing and laughing. He looked down from the roof and saw two little girls—the children of the house—playing and eating the candy that his squad had given them, their innocence blatant, egregious. The intercom was scratching on and off with orders and info. Jake heard that one of the prisoners collected in the market was talking; Clevenger wanted a gunshot residue (GSR) test kit to check if the guy had recently used a weapon. Jake watched a Marine get out of one of the Humvees, two hundred yards away, and struggle to open the rear hatch in search of the kit.
The Marine—Jake couldn’t tell who it was—jerked suddenly, a marionette pantomime, he would later write, “as if an unseen string attached to his right shoulder had been violently pulled.”
Then, instantaneously, crack—the sound of the rifle shot. The Marine seemed to crumple in slow motion. He was still standing upright, but as he brought his hands up to his neck, his knees began to fold, and blood geysered through his fingers. And now there was gunfire everywhere. The noise was hellacious, ear-crushing, as if someone had just turned on the car stereo, full volume, to AC/DC at its most suicidally stupid loud. Jake saw three, maybe four enemy machine-gun positions across the road, camouflaged by the heavy vegetation. He saw the four turret machine gunners in the Marine Humvees turn in unison and begin firing back into the reeds. Then, to his right, he saw a white sedan pull up on Pirates facing the convoy; the doors swung open, and two men began firing.
He ordered Cartwright, the radio man, to call in a 9-line medevac request1 and told Bullard, who carried the M-249 SAW machine gun on the northeastern corner of the roof, to light up the sedan. There were machine-gun rounds flying over their heads, punctuated by gorgeous, luminescent red and green tracers—and he ordered Arguello to go to the back of the house and make sure there wasn’t fire coming from their six, from behind.
Jake had always wondered about actual combat. He was surprised that, in the noise and chaos, everything seemed to be moving in slow motion—and in good order. He was jazzed, but clear. He felt great.
Bullard wiped out the sedan with his SAW. Jake, staring at the disintegrating spiderweb tracery that used to be the windshield, ordered him to cease fire.
Cartwright called in the medevac.
The helicopters were on their way to the intersection of Pirates and MSR Mobile. But there was a problem.
They couldn’t raise Clevenger to tell him about the medevac.
Well, Jake thought, we’re going to have to go down there and tell them ourselves. They were going to have to get down there eventually, anyway, to get out of Dodge.
He organized his team into two groups. He ordered them to bound the two hundred yards down to the convoy. He and Cartwright would lead on the left flank; the other two men would follow on his right.
“Moving!” he yelled. And he was racing across the field of fire. Eight-step bounds: left-right, left-right, left-right, left-right, down. “Set!” he yelled.
“Moving!” the right flank yelled and bounded past him.
“Set!” They dropped.
“Moving!” Jake yelled.
Machine-gun rounds were snapping the air above Jake’s head. When he got closer to the convoy, there were machine-gun rounds skipping through the dirt beneath him. This was it: actual combat, like in the movies. The sort of thing that almost never happened in Iraq. He wasn’t panicked. He was flying with each bound.
His foot didn’t hurt. He wasn’t even aware of it, which, after five surgeries, was a rare blessing. For six years now, his foot had defined his level of physical competence, which was central to Jake’s life as a football player—and as a human being—and then as a Marine. It made him a mediocrity in close order drill, which was important but not that important—he had been named Guide, the top recruit in boot camp and then, again, in the School of Infantry. Mesmerized by the constant pain, he had even screwed up handing off the damn guidon at his graduation ceremony. But he wasn’t thinking about his foot at all now; combat was liberation from that particular ball and chain.
He had no idea how long it took to bound the field. Minutes, certainly; it could have been five or fifteen. Finally they reached their destination, the berm that rose up to the elevated road. They dropped down and began firing their weapons at the unseen enemy through the ground level crevices of the convoy. Jake and Bullard looked at each other and smiled guiltily with the same thought: that shit was fun.
The firefight was still very much on, but Jake knew the convoy would be leaving soon to move the wounded Marine to the medevac. He led his squad down the convoy, back to the truck that had brought them, an armored deuce and a half. They sat in the truck, giddy, swapping stories as bullets pinged off the outer armor. Jake’s doubts about the quality of his fellow Marines had evaporated in combat. His fire team had done everything right. They had been fabulous, perfect. He totally loved them.
But, he realized, the convoy wasn’t moving. The medevac helicopters were going to arrive down the road, at Pirates and MSR Mobile, the main highway between Fallujah and Ramadi, and they wouldn’t hang around for very long. Jake got out of the truck and ran up to the front of the convoy, where Lieutenant Clevenger was with the wounded Marine who was being worked on by two medics. There was still heavy fire incoming. He looked down at the wounded man—the Humvee had been turned around to protect him from the incoming—and it was Nathan Windsor, face white, lips blue, a gurgling sound coming through the hole in his neck.
He told the Lieutenant they had to get out of there; the birds were on their way. Clevenger said Windsor had to be stabilized before they could move. They were still under intense fire. Jake dropped down and studied the field across the canal, trying to figure out where the machine-gun nests were. He saw movement in the reeds on the right . . . and, using the passenger-side seat of the Humvee as a vault, climbed up and slapped Wherry, the turret gunner, on the helmet and directed him, “Move your sector to the right.” Wherry couldn’t hear him. Jake cupped his hands and yelled, “Right flank!” Wherry got the message and moved his sector to the right, and Jake clambered down, missing a step, stumbling and falling to the ground, his hand landing in something wet. Windsor’s blood. He looked at his bloody glove and wiped it on his camouflage tunic. Then he took it off and threw it away.
“I think I have him stabilized,” Lacea, the medic, yelled over the machine-gun fire. Windsor could now be evacuated. But, Lacea warned, they had to lay him flat, or the wound would rip open again. They had a highback Humvee with a flatbed and up-armored sidewalls farther back in the convoy. They tried to contact Little, who was in the highback, but the coms were just not working very well—and Jake decided to run back and commandeer the vehicle. More running. But he flew and jumped into the driver’s seat—into the most insanely refreshing air-conditioned chill—and drove through a tracer-beaded curtain of bullets to the front of the convoy, where he helped get Windsor on board. Then he sped to the LZ—praying that AQI hadn’t planted IEDs in the road as part of the ambush—just in time to meet the medevac.
Windsor was still alive. The medic was holding his hand and saying, “Hang in there, Windsor.” They loaded him onto the Chinook, but he died in the air.
1. The nine lines were location, radio frequency (call sign), urgency, special equipment needs, number of patients by type (litter or ambulatory), security of pickup site, method of marking the pickup site, nationality and military status of patient(s), and presence of nuclear, chemical, or biological agents at the landing zone.