I spent that night thinking over what Rodriguez had told me, parsing the words until I wasn’t sure he’d said anything at all. I kept thinking, They only shot when shot at. That seemed to be what he said. Maybe he was talking about a traffic stop where they killed a family that failed to brake in time. That sort of thing tore Marines up.
“Don’t let this upset you,” David had said about the death of Uriah, “the sword devours one as well as another.” I built up a scenario where Rodriguez was talking about a bad judgment call, not a real violation of the ROE. That story ran through my mind enough to let me know I was avoiding the issue. By the next day, during morning prayers, I found my resolve. A coward, I thought, would tell himself it was all right. So I had to talk to someone or be a coward. Less than a priest. Less than a man.
But who to talk to? The obvious choice was to go to the company commander, who’d have the authority to step in. But Rodriguez’s company commander was Captain Boden, and Boden was a lunatic. And if the rumors my RP told me were true, he was an alcoholic as well. Possibly self-medication for PTSD. Boden’d been in Ramadi in 2004, and his unit held the record for most casualties in the division. When you were in conversation with him, the first thing you’d notice was the abnormal eye contact—aggressive staring and then quick, paranoid looks around the room. His affect was off, too, alternating between quiet periods of deep sadness and barely suppressed rage. And he had vicious scars across his face—battle scars that gave him immediate credibility with his Marines. The man knew combat.
I wasn’t the only one who thought there was something off with Boden. He’d seriously disturbed the trainers at Mojave Viper, the month-long predeployment workup in the California desert that the Marine Corps uses to prepare units for war. “These are a people who do not understand kindness,” he’d told his company during a brief on Iraqi culture. “They see kindness as a weakness. And they will take advantage of it. And Marines will die.” Charlie Company took his advice to heart, roughing up several role players during training. These were Iraqi Americans who dressed up and strolled through fake villages, playing either civilians or insurgents. If you followed Charlie on a practice cordon-and-search, you’d hear Marines screaming, “Put that bitch in the chair!” or, “Shut that motherfucker up!” to the civilians. When one of them lectured Charlie on how that style of counterinsurgency wasn’t likely to win hearts and minds, Charlie found the complaints funny. Even funnier was the trainer from Civil Affairs who told the whole assembled battalion, “I’m very concerned that this battalion is overly focused on killing people.”
You could see smirks everywhere. “I guess that pogue thinks he joined the fucking Peace Corps,” I heard Boden stage-whisper to his first sergeant, loud enough for the Marines around him to hear. “Oh no,” he continued in a mocking, high-pitched voice, “some real men might go out and kill some al-Qaeda. But I just wanna be friends.”
That was his attitude before his company got dropped in the most violent sector of the most violent city in Iraq. I couldn’t go to Captain Boden. He wouldn’t care, and he wouldn’t want me, a chaplain of all people, meddling.
Who else? The battalion commander wasn’t much better. Lieutenant Colonel Fehr was universally loathed among the staff and paid attention to none of them. Before the deployment, before I’d even met him for the first time, our operations officer, Major Eklund, had felt the need to prepare me.
“He’s gonna do this handshake,” the major said. “It’s called the dominance shake. He does it to everybody.”
Eklund was a Catholic convert and had a tendency to tell me more than he should, inside the confessional and out.
“The dominance shake,” I said, amused.
“That’s what he calls it. He’s going to take your hand in his, grip it real hard, and then twist his wrist so his hand is on top of yours. That’s the dominance position. And then, instead of shaking up and down, he’ll pull you in and slap you on the shoulder and feel your bicep with his free hand. It’s Fehr’s little way of peeing on your personal tree.”
“You think he’ll do it to me? I’m a chaplain.”
“He does it to everybody. I don’t think he can help it. He did it to my nine-year-old son at the battalion Easter egg hunt.”
Then I met the colonel, got dominance handshook, and received the vague introductory pleasantries that let me know this commander looked at chaplains as the pray-at-ceremonies guys, not as trusted advisers. Fehr was worlds more composed than Boden, but he didn’t seem to care much for ROE either. Two months after our first meeting, I saw him interrupt a trainer at Mojave Viper going over escalation of force procedures.
“If a vehicle is coming toward you fast,” the trainer said to the assembled Marines, “it might be a suicide bomber, or it might just be a frustrated, distracted Iraqi trying to get to work on time. If the first couple steps of EOF don’t work, you can fire a round in front of the car, not trying to injure—”
Here’s where the colonel jumped up and stopped the lesson. “When we shoot, we shoot to kill,” he shouted. The Marines roared in response. “I’m not having any of my Marines die because they hesitated,” the colonel continued. “Marines do not fire warning shots.”
The trainer, a captain, was stunned. You can’t contradict an O5, especially not in front of his men, so he didn’t say anything, but the whole unit had just been taught to ignore MEF policy. The Marines got the message. Kill.
? ? ?
In the end, I went to Major Eklund. I figured he’d at least hear me out.
“I’m worried about Charlie Company.”
“Yeah, we’re all worried about Charlie Company.” Major Eklund shrugged. “They’re led by an idiot. What are you gonna do?”
I gave him a condensed, anonymous version of Rodriguez’s story about doing naked jumping jacks to attract fire.
Major Eklund laughed. “That sounds like a lance corporal solution.”
“You think this is funny.”
“I’ll bring it up with Captain Boden.”
That hardly satisfied me. “The Marines don’t seem to see much difference between civilians and combatants. Some Marines have been hinting at worse than stupid tactics.”
Eklund sighed.
“Perhaps,” I said, “some of their firefights could be looked into a little more. To make sure we’re targeting actual enemy.”
Eklund stiffened. “An investigation?” He shook his head. “Into what?”
“There are some questionable—”
“Only the commander can recommend an investigation.” He shook his head. “And Chaps, all respect, but this is way the fuck out of your purview.”
“Marines talk to me,” I said, “and—”
“This is nothing,” he said. “Last month Weapons Company shot two hajjis I know they didn’t follow ROE on. And Colonel Fehr didn’t think that was worth an investigation. You know what he told me? ‘I don’t want my Marines thinking I don’t have their backs. And I really don’t want them hesitating to shoot when they need to.’ And that was the end of the story, Chaps.”
He hadn’t even paused to consider what I was suggesting. “You’re saying this is weaker than that.”
“Weak, strong, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “You think Lieutenant Colonel Fehr will ever become Colonel Fehr if he tells higher, ‘Hey, we think we did some war crimes’?”
It wasn’t a question I wanted to answer. Eventually, looking at my feet, feeling childish, I said, “I suppose not.”
“And he’s the one who decides if there’s something worth investigating. Look, you know how I feel about that man, but he’s handling Charlie Company about as well as anybody could. They came to Iraq to kill people, so he gave them the kill people AO. And he’s been shrinking their AO as Bravo gets better control of theirs.”
What he was saying didn’t really register. “Bravo?” I said.
“They’re getting more responsibility while Charlie’s getting less. And at the end of the deployment, Captain Boden will get a FITREP that makes sure he’s never given a command again. Happy?”
He could see I wasn’t.
“Look, Father,” Eklund said. “In a war like this, there’s no easy answer. Neighborhood gets roughed up, sometimes. Sometimes, by accident, there’s civilian casualties. It’s not our fault.”
That was too much. “No?” I said. “It’s never our fault?”
He leaned toward me and pointed his finger in my face. “Look, Chaps, you have no idea what these guys are dealing with. On my last deployment I saw a couple insurgents literally hiding behind a group of Iraqi children and shooting at us. Do you know how hard it is to get shot at and not respond? And that’s what my Marines did. They let themselves get shot at because they didn’t want to risk hurting children.”
“That’s not what’s happening now.”
“Most Marines are good kids. Really good kids. But it’s like they say, this is a morally bruising battlefield. My first deployment, some of those same Marines fired on a vehicle coming too fast at a TCP. They killed a family, but they followed EOF perfectly. The driver was drunk or crazy or whatever and kept coming, even after the warning shots. They fired on the car to save the lives of their fellow Marines. Which is noble, even if you then find out you didn’t kill al-Qaeda—you killed a nine-year-old girl and her parents instead.”
“Well,” I said, “if Bravo’s doing okay, and Charlie’s—”
“Bravo’s got good leaders and a calmer AO,” he said. “They trained their Marines right. Captain Seiris is good. First Sergeant Nolan’s a rock star. Their company gunny is retarded, but all of their lieutenants are good to go except maybe one, and he’s got a stellar platoon sergeant. But not everybody can be competent. It’s too late for Charlie to be anything other than what it is. Our Kill Company. But this is a war. A Kill Company’s not the worst thing to have.”
? ? ?
A few days later I voiced my concerns, in somewhat stronger language, to the JAG. I got the same response. What Rodriguez told me didn’t warrant anything other than a discussion with the company commander, who would handle it as he thought appropriate. Nothing would happen. I felt I was letting Rodriguez down, but I had no power. And the war ground on.
Three weeks later we had our thirteenth casualty. Gerald Martin Vorencamp. IED. Two weeks after that, our fourteenth. Jean-Paul Sepion. Neither from Charlie Company, though they had a few more serious, nonfatal injuries during the same period.
? ? ?
Not long after Sepion’s death, one of the Divine Office’s morning prayers was Psalm 144: “Blessed be the Lord, my help, who trains my hands for battle, my fingers for war.” Kneeling against my rack in my spare little trailer, I faltered. I turned back to the previous prayer, from Daniel: “Today there is no prince, no prophet, no leader, no holocaust, no sacrifice. No offering, no incense, no first-fruits offered to you—no way to obtain your mercy.”
I stopped reading and tried to pray with my own words. I asked God to protect the battalion from further harm. I knew He would not. I asked Him to bring abuses to light. I knew He would not. I asked Him, finally, for grace.
When I turned back to the Divine Office, I read the words with empty disengagement.
? ? ?
That afternoon I met another Marine from Rodriguez’s platoon, a lance corporal. He did little to calm my worries.
“This is fucking pointless,” he told me.
The lance corporal wasn’t Catholic, nor was he in need of religious counseling. He came to me when Combat Stress refused to give him what he needed—a ticket out of Iraq. I couldn’t give it to him either, but I tried.
“What’s pointless?”
“This whole fucking thing. What are we doing? We go down a street, get IED’d, the next day go down the same street and they’ve IED’d it again. It’s like, just keep going till you all die.”
He stared at me without breaking eye contact. I thought of Captain Boden.
When I asked him why he felt the way he did, I got a long list. Since the deaths of two of his friends six weeks before, he’d been having mood swings, angry outbursts. He’d been punching walls, finding it impossible to sleep unless he quadrupled the maximum recommended dosage of sleeping pills, and when he did sleep he had nightmares about the deaths of his friends, about his own death, about violence. It was a pretty complete PTSD checklist—intense anxiety, sadness, shortness of breath, increased heart rate, and, most powerfully, an overwhelming feeling of utter helplessness.
“I know I won’t make it out of combat alive,” he said. “Every day, I have no choice. They send me to get myself killed. It’s fucking pointless.”
I tried to get him to talk about positive things, things that he liked, to determine if there was anything he was holding on to. Anything keeping him on the good side of sane.
“The only thing I want to do is kill Iraqis,” he said. “That’s it. Everything else is just, numb it until you can do something. Killing hajjis is the only thing that feels like doing something. Not just wasting time.”
“Insurgents, you mean,” I said.
“They’re all insurgents,” he said. He could see I didn’t like that and got very agitated. “You,” he said, hateful, “you want to see something?”
He pulled out a camera and started flipping through photos. When he got to the one he wanted, he turned it around so I could see.
I braced myself for something terrible, but the frame only showed a small Iraqi child bending over a box. “That kid’s planting an IED,” he said. “Caught in the fucking act. We blew it in place right after the kid left, because even Staff Sergeant Haupert didn’t want to round up a kid.”
“That boy can’t be older than five or six,” I said. “He couldn’t know what he was doing.”
“And that makes a difference to me?” he said. “I never know what I’m doing. Why we’re going out. What the point of it is. This photo, this was early on when I took this. Now, I’d have shot that fucking kid. I’m mad I didn’t. If I caught that kid today, I’d fucking hang him from the telephone wires outside his parents’ house and have target practice till there’s nothing left.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“Besides, some of the other guys…” He paused. “There’s lots of reasons somebody’s al-Qaeda. He’s driving too slow. He’s driving too fast. I don’t like the look of the motherfucker.”
After the meeting, I resolved that I’d do something. It wouldn’t be like with Rodriguez. I would push.
First I spoke with his platoon commander, Staff Sergeant Haupert. He informed me that Combat Stress had diagnosed the lance corporal with combat and operational stress reaction, which was common and not a condition recognized as an ailment or a reason to remove a Marine from a combat zone. Furthermore, he said, while the lance corporal talked tough, he performed his duties fine and I shouldn’t worry.
When I spoke to Boden and the first sergeant, I got the same. When I talked to Colonel Fehr, he asked me if I was a trained psychologist. When I talked to Combat Stress, they told me that if they sent home every Marine with COSR, there’d be nobody left to fight the war. “It’s a normal reaction to abnormal events,” they said. “Ramadi is full of abnormal events.”
Finally I talked to the chaplain at Regiment, a Presbyterian minister with a good head on his shoulders. He told me that if I really wanted to piss people off, I should put my concerns in an e-mail and send it to the responsible parties so there was a clear record in case anything went wrong.
“They’ll be more likely to play the CYA game if it’s in an e-mail.”
I sent an e-mail to the colonel, to Boden, to Haupert, and even to the docs at Combat Stress. Nobody responded.
In retrospect, it made sense. The lance corporal’s breakdown—his lack of empathy, his anger, his hopelessness—was a natural reaction. He was an extreme case, but I could see it around me in plenty of Marines. I thought of Rodriguez. “They’re all the same to me. They’re all the enemy.”
In seminary and after, I’d read plenty of St. Thomas Aquinas. “The sensitive appetite, though it obeys the reason, yet in a given case can resist by desiring what the reason forbids.” Of course this would happen. Of course it was banal, and of course combat vets like Eklund and Boden wouldn’t really care. The reaction is understandable, human, and so not a problem. If men inevitably act this way under stress, is it even a sin?
I found no answer that night in evening prayer, so I flipped through the books I’d brought with me to Iraq to cast about for some help. “?Cómo perseveras, ?oh vida!, no viendo donde vives, y haciendo por que mueras las flechas que recibes de lo que del Amado en ti concibes?”
There’s always the saints to show us a way. St. John of the Cross, imprisoned in a tiny cell scarcely larger than his body, publicly lashed every week, and writing the Spiritual Canticle. But nobody expects sainthood, and it’s offensive to demand it.
? ? ?
A journal entry from that time:
I had at least thought there would be nobility in war. I know it exists. There are so many stories, and some of them have to be true. But I see mostly normal men, trying to do good, beaten down by horror, by their inability to quell their own rages, by their masculine posturing and their so-called hardness, their desire to be tougher, and therefore crueler, than their circumstance.
And yet, I have this sense that this place is holier than back home. Gluttonous, fat, oversexed, overconsuming, materialist home, where we’re too lazy to see our own faults. At least here, Rodriguez has the decency to worry about hell.
The moon is unspeakably beautiful tonight. Ramadi is not. Strange that people live in such a place.
? ? ?