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PART II

War

Archidamus gave a great defeat to the Arcadians, in the fight known by the name of the Tearless Battle, in which there was a great slaughter of the enemy without the loss of one Spartan… The old men and the women marched out as far as the river Eurotas, lifting up their hands, and thanking the gods that Sparta was now cleared again of the disgrace and indignity that had befallen her, and once more saw the light of day.

— PLUTARCH

9

MARINES CROWDED THE FLIGHT DECK. Only an hour after the attacks half a world away, most of the Dubuque’s sailors and Marines were already back aboard and far more restrained than usual this late on a night in port. My platoon milled around, clad in sandals and Hawaiian shirts. No one spoke. On the stern, two sailors manned a machine gun. They trained it on the cars depositing passengers at the gangplank. The ship rumbled and smoked from its funnel. The Dubuque was making steam, getting ready to sail.

I climbed up to Captain Whitmer’s cabin, to let him know his officers were all aboard. I found him sitting at his desk, wearing sweatpants and looking relaxed. His incense burner smoldered, and acoustic guitar played softly in the background. This was Captain Whitmer at his best, embodying the line from Rudyard Kipling’s poem about keeping your head when all around you are losing theirs. Yes, he knew about the attacks. Yes, he expected we’d be sailing earlier than planned. No, he saw no need for concern. We would hold a company formation at 0100 on the flight deck. Standing there in flip-flops and a T-shirt, I wanted to salute him but only nodded and closed the door.

At 0100, the flight deck looked like a party that had been halted in midstream. Marines, mostly drunk but acting very sober, bobbed and weaved in a rough formation. The ship was at THREATCON DELTA, wartime footing. I counted my men and found them all present. In fact, every sailor and Marine on the Dubuque returned to the ship within two hours of hearing the news from the States. Just as people at home were gathering together to absorb the blow, we did the same.

Even on the flight deck in the middle of the night, I recognized the pivotal moment. It was like a weight settling on my shoulders. I scanned the platoon’s three ranks of faces. They looked worried, disoriented, uncertain — the same way I’d felt before I saw Captain Whitmer. They would take their cue from me just as I had taken mine from him. A dumb-ass lieutenant banging on his war drum would be of no help.

“Fellas, get some rest,” I said evenly. “I’m sure the ship’s e-mail will be shut down pretty soon, so try to get a message off to let your families know you’re OK. I don’t know how this affects our plans, but I’m sure we’ll have more information tomorrow.”

Captain Whitmer’s calming effect was contagious. I could see that my reaction surprised them. Already, the worry lines began to disappear. Before dismissing the platoon, I turned it up just a little bit. “When the shock wears off, we’re gonna be pissed. Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll be the ones to get revenge for this.”

It resonated with them, and I saw a flicker of resolve. My emotion surprised me. Looking at the Marines, I saw football stars and thugs and baby-faced eighteen-year-olds. Black and white and Hispanic. They were my platoon, my men, my responsibility. Ruefully, I remembered Staff Sergeant Marine’s comment about golden memories and no ghosts.

“Semper fi. Dismissed.”

I stood on the dark deck and looked out over the lights of Darwin for a minute before slowly climbing the superstructure to my stateroom. There was an e-mail message from my dad. “Stand tall,” it read, “but come home physically and psychologically intact.” When I woke at six, we were already out of sight of land, three hours before our scheduled departure.

The ARG was ordered to “proceed at best possible speed” and join the U.S. Fifth Fleet in the Arabian Sea. Fifteen knots crept to eighteen and then to twenty, as fuel consumption became unimportant. Our scheduled stops in Singapore and Hong Kong were canceled. But the MEU interrupted its sprint for a daylong humanitarian mission in East Timor, the former Indonesian province then struggling for independence. I rode to the beach in Dili aboard a landing craft filled with lumber, grain, medicine, and, inexplicably, a crate of ThighMasters. Apparently, someone far up the chain of command wanted us to extend an olive branch to one nation before blowing the hell out of another.

Energy on the ship began to build. I learned that one of my Dartmouth classmates had died on the 104th floor of the North Tower. Marines had fathers and brothers in the New York City Fire Department, and sailors swapped the Dubuque baseball caps they normally wore with their uniforms for hats emblazoned with FDNY or NYPD. One Marine captain played bagpipes for the New York City Police Department band. He led a sunset memorial service on the flight deck, piping the mournful notes of “Amazing Grace” out over the empty ocean. Patrick, another New Yorker, received a note from a classmate whose boyfriend had died in the towers. She had been on the telephone with him when the line went dead. Patrick’s father, a doctor, had waited for the injured at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan. On a wall in the gym, a Marine painted a mural of a bald eagle sharpening its talons with a file.

Lacking a definitive mission, the MEU prepared to do everything. Captain Whitmer spent most of our westward transit aboard the flagship Peleliu, where he could more easily keep up with the ever-changing plans. Consequently, Patrick and I camped out in TACLOG, the ship’s radio room for Marine communications, living on scraps of information passed back to us. “Great concern about possibility of multiple noncombatant evacuations. May want to focus on such an operation in and around Pakistan.”

Over the next two weeks, reams of information flowed to the MEU in preparation to evacuate up to nine thousand Americans from Pakistan. Bravo Company was tasked with flying to Islamabad to secure the U.S. embassy and ready its staff and their families for movement out to the ships. The ship’s executive officer wondered aloud how many people we could squeeze onto every available inch of deck space: four hundred? six hundred? What if the ambassador wants to bring her cat? Central Command gave us detailed blueprints and aerial photographs of the embassy and its grounds. Common features of American embassies and consulates are lovely soccer fields and lawns that double as helicopter landing zones. Patrick and I scoured the pictures looking for light poles, electrical wires, or anything else that would hinder our approach. We studied the buildings and surrounding gardens so we would waste no time with maps while rushing through them in the dark. By the end of the week, I knew the American embassy in Islamabad as well as I knew my parents’ backyard in Baltimore.

* * *

After reaching the Arabian Sea south of Pakistan, the Dubuque steamed in circles. The ocean had been carved into six boxes, named along a 9/11 theme: Pentagon, Pennsylvania, WTC North, WTC South, NYPD, and FDNY. The ships moved continuously but stayed within the boundaries of their assigned boxes in order to avoid collisions. It was a legitimate concern. By early October, dozens of American ships steamed circles in the same small patch of ocean.

The MEU slowly pulled back from its plans to evacuate civilians from Pakistan. Marine security guards at the consulate in Karachi and the embassy in Islamabad reported the situation well in hand. Nonetheless, we shared the general expectation that American strikes against Afghanistan would prompt a virulent anti-American backlash in neighboring countries. So we kept the evacuation plans on ice and began to focus more intently on Afghanistan.