The platoon lived in a carport a hundred feet long and twenty feet wide. Concrete pillars supported a concrete roof above the concrete floor. There were no walls. The concrete absorbed so much heat during the day that it was too hot to sleep near at night. It radiated like an oven until dawn, when it began recharging for the next night. I wanted to sleep under the sky, but disease-ridden sand fleas infested every patch of ground, so I settled for wrapping up in a waterproof sleeping bag liner and sweating through the night. Sleep was intermittent anyway. Living in a field of human waste spread dysentery through the platoon. The closest I came to willing my own death in Iraq was while curled up in the dust outside a plywood latrine, too weak to swat the jellybean-size flies clustered on my head.
Rumors swirled of surveillance missions along the Saudi border or patrols into Ad Diwaniyah. Eighteen thousand Marines slowly assembled at Paige, enough for almost any mission imaginable. The Marines kept active — studying maps, prowling for intelligence around the division’s headquarters, and working out with an improvised weight set of discarded Iraqi tank parts. But after three weeks, we received the order to turn over all our ammunition to other units driving north. On the division’s status board, a little green card next to First Recon’s name was changed to red. We were done.
Combat missions had galvanized the battalion. Without them, the pettiness of peacetime military life returned. One morning, the captain assembled our company for PT: a run around Paige followed by calisthenics. We stood in rows in the dust, wearing green shorts and tan combat boots, resigned to working out without a shower. The Marines were sullen; they resented taking orders from a leader they no longer respected.
The captain chose pushups as our first exercise. While he counted the repetitions, the whole company was supposed to echo him loudly. Instead, fifty Marines grunted silently through a set of twenty-five, mumbling numbers at the dirt. Crunches were next. The captain asked for a volunteer to lead the counting, and Gunny Wynn trotted to the front of the formation. He dropped on his back and began counting out loud. The company roared in unison, “One… two… three… four!” The Marines around us stopped to watch as they realized that a small mutiny was taking place. I smiled, staring at the sky as I curled my crossed arms to my thighs and tried to out-shout them all.
The captain summoned me that afternoon to his makeshift office in an old barracks building. I found him sitting behind a desk, wearing his full uniform instead of the trousers and T-shirt we usually wore in the heat. When he didn’t invite me to sit on one of the MRE boxes strewn across the floor, I knew I was in trouble.
“Lieutenant Fick, I’m relieving Gunny Wynn for insubordination.”
I started to reply, but he cut me off. “In Ar Rifa, he challenged my orders in front of the Marines,” he said. I tried again to speak, but he looked down at his paperwork and said, “Dismissed.”
My gut impulse was to throw my metal lieutenant’s bars on the captain’s desk and tell him I quit. But of course I couldn’t do that. Wynn and I were a team. We felt we had a duty to protect the platoon from the caprice of the larger corps. The Marines’ loyalty to Wynn was fierce, something like love. Relieving him would be a blow to their morale and to their trust in the battalion. I decided we had to put our pride aside and figure out a way to keep our jobs.
When I got back to the carport, Wynn was supervising the cleaning of the platoon’s sniper rifles. He looked up when I walked over.
“Let’s take a walk, Gunny.”
We left the camp and started down the road that ran for a mile along Paige. I felt light without my body armor, carrying a pistol instead of my rifle. Around us, Marines scrubbed weapons, counted ammunition into piles, and repaired their vehicles for the long drive back to Kuwait.
“The CO plans to relieve you for disobeying his orders,” I said.
Wynn took the news quietly and kept walking. Finally, he replied, “Bullshit. I only disobeyed his orders when they would have gotten people killed for no reason. I’ll go to the colonel.”
“No.” The word sounded harsher than I’d intended. “You need to let me deal with this.”
“Sir,” he protested, “these guys are attacking me when they’re the ones who screwed up. I’m going to the colonel.”
“Mike, this isn’t about you,” I said, trying to appeal to his sense of duty. “It’s about the platoon. You’re the only thing between these guys and our Marines. Listen to me: I will deal with it. I know it’s crazy, but I have more firepower right now.”
When we returned to the carport, I sat down to figure out what to say to the captain. He was a bad combat leader but not a bad person. It didn’t seem right to hold poor decisions under fire against him. To a greater or lesser extent, we had all made such mistakes. But vindictive decisions after the fighting was over were another matter. I thought the captain had a grudge against Wynn.
When I went back to the captain’s office, he looked up wearily.
“Sir, I feel obligated to warn you that you’ll have most of your company in revolt if you relieve Gunny Wynn,” I said.
This time he asked me to take a seat. To his credit, he listened while I explained that relieving Wynn over my objections meant that he no longer had faith in my judgment. If that was the case, then he should relieve me, too. When I hesitated, he waved a hand for me to continue. “Sir, we’re almost on our way home,” I said. “The company did its job and nobody died. Can’t we just let it go and get back to our lives?”
Gunny Wynn kept his job, and I kept mine.
On a Friday afternoon in May, I gathered the platoon at the center of the carport. I had been working on a secret project for the previous week — wrangling permission from the division for a visit to the ancient city of Babylon. Colonel Ferrando pressed hard on our behalf, and almost unbelievably, it was granted. After major combat ended, the First Marine Expeditionary Force moved its headquarters to one of Saddam’s palaces near the town of Hillah, seventy miles north of Ad Diwaniyah. The palace overlooked Babylon’s ruins. Part of my desire came from studying the classics in college. I had tramped through crumbling cities in Greece, Italy, Spain, and North Africa. But nothing compared to joining the handful of Westerners who, in the past thirty years, had visited one of the ancient world’s greatest cities. Part of it, too, was the welcome change of pace for the Marines and a chance to go home with memories of something truly good. Seeing Babylon was a way to get out from behind the gun sight.
We left Paige at seven o’clock the next morning. Iraqi vendors lined both sides of the road, hawking beer, AK bayonets, Arab porn, and crude Iraqi flags of painted canvas. We disciplined ourselves to stop only for two coolers filled with sodas and a bunch of ripe bananas. Turning north on Highway 1, the platoon accelerated. Army supply convoys lumbered along in the slow lane as we flashed past on their left. Hikers in San Diego joke about not needing to outrun mountain lions; they only have to outrun other hikers. The same principle applied on Iraq’s highways. For a month or two, though, the roads were mostly safe. The war had ended, and the insurgency hadn’t yet begun. Still, when I briefed the Marines about the trip, I acknowledged that some of them might think it foolish to take the risk of going sightseeing. Anyone who preferred not to come was free to stay at Paige. They all chose Babylon.
The exit toward Hillah led us through miles and miles of palm groves. Holes in the frond canopy marked where American planes had blasted Iraqi tanks. Fresh growth would soon cover the blackened patches of earth, and maybe someday tourists would poke at the rusting hulks as they do in the South Pacific and Normandy. Closer to Babylon, we noticed changes in the modest homes along the road. A stainless steel Sub-Zero refrigerator dominated the front yard of a one-room mud hut. Slabs of pink marble and two ornate wardrobes stood near another. A decrepit Datsun pickup truck held a crystal chandelier. It looked as though a palace had been looted.