The colonel let me track down the details and I ended up getting the story in bits and pieces. The Marines I talked to tended to ramble in little grief-stricken monologues, so I learned not only what Deme did that day, but also that he and his wife rescued pit bulls, that he wrote terrible rap songs and sang them over oddly soothing homemade beats, that his wife was “crazy hot, wanna-lick-her-ass-like-an-ice-cream-cone hot,” and that his daughters were “crazy fuckin’ retardedly cute.” But I also got, “There was a ceiling of small-arms fire,” and, “When I saw Vockler’s head snap back like a broken fucking doll,” and, in a hollow monotone from James Vockler himself, “I should be dead, not him.” Everything I needed, and I took those phrases and turned them into the flat, regimented prose the Corps requires for its medals.
Here’s what you won’t get from Vockler, who quickly became known in the battalion as “the guy Deme died saving.” The highlights:
After the (unidentified) enemy opened up on his squad in a narrow alley, Sergeant Deme rushed to the front of the squad, realized he had three helplessly wounded men, organized suppressive fire, and ran into the kill zone to rescue his guys. I don’t have any experience with combat, and I certainly don’t have any experience with organizing suppressive fire, running into kill zones, or rescuing people, but I’m reliably informed by Marines who know about those things that it takes huge fucking balls.
With bullets flying everywhere, ricocheting off the narrow walls of the alley like some pinball machine of death on tilt, Sergeant Deme ran up and grabbed the unconscious Vockler by his flak and pulled him out of danger. Then he ran back and was pretty much immediately shot in the face. So it’s more accurate to say that Sergeant Deme died while trying unsuccessfully to save the lives of the other two Marines in Vockler’s fire team than it is to say he died saving Vockler.
As an added bit of irony, Vockler might not have even died if Sergeant Deme had left him there. Unlike the other two Marines, who were bleeding out in an exposed position, Vockler was neither in any immediate danger nor in need of immediate medical care. An AK round had smacked into the top left side of his helmet, true, but it hadn’t penetrated. The force of the glancing shot knocked Vockler out and sent him sprawling backward into a relatively safe position behind a marginal bit of cover in the trash-filled alley. So it’s possible Deme could have left Vockler there.
Nobody ever told this to Vockler. As far as he knew, he went through a second of gunfire and terror, got shot (sort of) in the head, and woke up to his squad telling him that Sergeant Deme, whom he revered, had proven once and for all how goddamn Marine he was by dying in the most heroic way a Marine can—saving your stupid, worthless, not-even-badly-injured-enough-to-need-a-MEDEVAC ass.
None of this discounts Deme’s heroism, but if Vockler knew the full truth, it’d weigh on him even heavier than it already did. Unlike your average American citizen, Vockler could locate who had died for him in a particular human being. A particular human being he’d known and loved with the sort of passion Marines have for good combat leaders. Even most marriages can’t compare with that, because most partners in a marriage aren’t routinely aware that they’d be way more likely to get killed every day if their partner wasn’t such a hell-of-a-baller spouse. So to add to that the notion that, hey, maybe Deme could have left you where you were and possibly saved one of your fire-team buddies before getting himself killed… that wouldn’t help.
Rough, even to get it secondhand. The experience of talking to Deme’s squad put life into all the phrases I’d seen trotted out in all the awards I’d ever processed. And this wasn’t just any write-up. It was for the Medal of fucking Honor, which a part of me knew wasn’t going to happen, but still, it didn’t matter. Deme would get something, maybe even the Navy Cross, and he’d at least be considered for the big one. Just writing the words was exciting.
Medal of Honor recipients are the saints of the Corps. You’ve got Dan Daly in Belleau Wood and Smedley Butler in the Banana Wars and close to three hundred others in American conflicts stretching from the Civil War to the present day.
So I wrote the citation with my every frustration melting away in the excitement of the thing. Like reaching out with my fingers and touching a god through the keyboard of my computer. My job, I felt, meant something.
I even wrote about Deme in the personal statement I submitted, midway through the deployment, as part of my application to law school.
“Even the best adjutants aren’t saving lives, like Sergeant Deme, or risking their life on daily patrols, like your average grunt. But the best of us make sure those sacrifices are honored by providing them the administrative support they need, whether it be getting them absentee ballots or in assisting them with their wills. There isn’t any glory in this kind of work. The adjutant’s job is generally only noticed when it goes wrong. Both of my deployments have been spent at a desk, relieving Marines of burdens they will never know could have existed. That’s enough for me. It’s more than enough. And it’s what has led me to desire a public interest career in law.”
What I didn’t mention was that the death toll for our battalion by the end of the deployment was five, meaning that alley had been responsible for more than half of our total casualties. I also didn’t mention that that alley was in an area where the previous commander had warned our battalion to avoid aggressive patrolling. “We’re not going to see success here until we develop better relationships with the local population,” he’d said.
The reaction of the unit had been unanimous: “Those guys are idiots! We’re Marine infantry! We don’t avoid the enemy, we close with and destroy the enemy!” Lieutenant Colonel Motes, our CO, had an aggressive style, and the battalion didn’t really get on the COIN train until afterward.
That he’d sent his platoon into a death zone was not lost on Boylan, who had spent every moment since second-guessing every decision he made, convinced better leadership could have saved those Marines’ lives. His instincts about that were probably right. Boylan came back to the States thirty pounds lighter than when he’d left—skeletal, with bruise-purple skin underlining eyes that looked out from the bottom of an ocean. I’d never had a personal relationship with any of the five fallen Marines, so I tended to think of their deaths with a solemn, patriotic pride rather than the self-loathing and self-doubt so clearly tearing Boylan to shreds.
When we got back from Iraq he was a mess, embarrassing himself at the Marine Ball, blacking out every weekend and probably weekdays, too. I remember him one time walking into the admin office, eight in the morning, hung over, with a huge dip of chewing tobacco in his lip, asking, “Anybody got a dip cup?” Nobody wanted to let him spit into anything they owned, so he shrugged, said, “Ahhhh, fuck it,” and then grabbed the collar of his cammie blouse and spit into his shirt. The Marines talked about it for weeks.
That was one approach. Vockler had another. Pretty much as soon as we got back, he’d started angling to get on a deployment to Afghanistan. Iraq was running down; that much was already clear by the tail end of our deployment. So he stalked a company commander from 1/9 until he got them to reserve a line number for him. Which led him to the admin office, my office, and instead of having my Marines handle his shit, I had them send him in to me. I wanted to see him again, face-to-face.
“So you want to go to Afghanistan?” I said.
“Yes, sir, that’s where the fighting is.”
“1/9,” I said. “The Walking Dead.” As battalion mottos go, they’ve probably got the best. Thanks to Vietnam, 1/9 boasts the highest killed in action rate in Marine Corps history. Marines, who like to think of themselves as suicidally aggressive rabid dogs and who sometimes even live up to that self-image, consider this “cool.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know,” I said, “they set minimum dwell time for a reason. Just because you think you’re ready to deploy again doesn’t mean you are.”
“There’s a lot of Marines from 1/9 who’ve never deployed, sir.”
“And you’ve got the experience they need?”
“Yes, sir. They’ll need good NCOs.”
Marines often speak to officers in platitudes, so it’s sometimes hard to tell how much of what they’re saying they actually believe.
“1/9’s got a lot of Marines who’ve been over three, four, five times,” I said.
He nodded. “Sir, I know what it’s like to have really bad things happen.”
Impossible to argue with that.
“It’s very hard,” he said, his voice calm, as though he were describing weather patterns. “Chances are, these guys are gonna have to deal with the same thing.”
“Some probably will.”
“I’m good with people,” he said. “I’d be good with that.” He spoke with absolute composure. It made the room around him feel cold and still.
“Good to go,” I said. “I’m glad you’ll be over there. They’ll need good NCOs.”
I went through some of the steps he’d need to take as he checked out, then sent him on his way. The last thing he asked me was, “Sir, do you think they’ll give Sergeant Deme the Medal of Honor?” It was the only point where a little of his composure seemed to crack to let some emotion through.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so.” It hardly seemed a decent answer.
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I saw Vockler only two more times after that day in my office. First was at the ceremony where they awarded Sergeant Deme the Navy Cross, where he and Boylan both tried and failed to avoid crying. That was the week I got my acceptance letter from NYU. I was certain I wouldn’t have gotten in without my Marine Corps résumé. To NYU, I was a veteran. Two deployments. That meant something to them.
The last time was the day Vockler left for Afghanistan. I was doing a three-mile run during my lunch break and his company was staged up off McHugh Boulevard, waiting for the buses. The families had enough U.S. flags that if you’d draped yourself in the Stars and Stripes it’d have constituted camouflage, and it was hot enough that every fat uncle there had pit stains big enough to meet in the middle of their chest.
Vockler was in a circle of Marines, all of them smoking and joking like they were about to go on a camping trip, which from a certain perspective was true.
I stopped my run and dropped by. Vockler saw me and grinned. “Sir!” he said. He didn’t salute, but it didn’t seem disrespectful.
“Corporal,” I said. I put my hand out and he shook it vigorously. “Good luck over there.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You’ll do great,” I told him. “Handling your transfer, that’s one of the things in my job I get to feel proud of.”
“Oo-rah, sir.”
I thought about making some sort of joke, like, “Stay off the opium,” but I didn’t want to force anything. So I continued on my run, and three weeks later I was out of the Corps.
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There’s a month after my discharge I can’t really account for. I traveled. I moved to New York, and then I think I spent a lot of time in my underwear, watching TV. My mom says I was “decompressing.”
At the time, most of my college friends were in corporate law or investment banking or were reevaluating life after dropping out of Teach for America.
Strangely, I started feeling more like a Marine out of the Corps than I’d felt while in it. You don’t run into a lot of Marines in New York. All of my friends thought of me as “the Marine,” and to everyone I met, I was “the Marine.” If they didn’t know, I’d make sure to slip it into conversations first chance I got. I kept my hair short and worked out just as hard as before. And when I started at NYU and I met all those kids right out of undergrad, I thought, Hell, yeah, I’m a fucking Marine.
Some of them, highly educated kids at a top five law school, didn’t even know what the Marine Corps did. (“It’s like a stronger Army, right?”) Few of them followed the wars at all, and most subscribed to a “It’s a terrible mess, so let’s not think about it too much” way of thinking. Then there were the political kids, who had definite opinions and were my least favorite to talk to. A lot of these overlapped with the insufferable public interest crowd, who hated the war, couldn’t see why anybody’d ever do corporate law, didn’t understand why anyone would ever join the military, didn’t understand why anyone would ever want to own a gun, let alone fire one, but who still paid lip service to the idea that I deserved some sort of respect and that I was, in an imprecise way that was clearly related to action movies and recruiting commercials, far more “hard-core” than your average civilian. So sure, I was a Marine. At the very least, I wasn’t them.
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NYU prides itself on sending a high number of law students into public interest, “high” meaning 10 to 15 percent. If an NYU student gets a public interest job that pays under a certain amount, they get partial or full debt forgiveness, saving them more money than the average American makes in three years. Like everybody else without a Root Scholarship or wealthy parents or a fiancée at a hedge fund, I’d sat through NYU’s presentation on the program and thought, Oh, they want me to work my ass off and live in Bed-Stuy for six years. With incentives like that, four out of five NYU students take a good look at public interest jobs, hem and haw, consider the trajectories of all the fire starters they admire, and then go to the same huge law firms as everybody else.
Joe-the-corporate-lawyer told me, “Do Legal Aid. Do the Public Defender’s Office.”
We were having drinks at a rooftop bar with a stunning view of the Chrysler Building. The drink Joe had bought me was made with a cardamom-infused liquor. I’d never had anything quite like it.
“I’m not really an idealist anymore,” I said.
“You don’t have to be,” he said. “You just have to be a guy who doesn’t want their life crushed doing shit that isn’t even mentally challenging. Sometimes I hate my clients and want them to lose, but that’s actually a rare improvement over most cases, which involve huge corporations where I can’t even bring myself to care. Aside from bonuses, which get smaller every year, I’m on a set salary. But I bill by the hour, which means the equity partners make more money the more I work. And nobody works their ass off for ten years to become partner because they’ve got a burning ambition to improve the lifestyles of first-year associates. They do it for money. And so do I.”
“You’re paying off law school and college debt,” I said.
“Which you won’t be,” he said, “thanks to the G.I. Bill and the Yellow Ribbon Program and your savings from the Corps. If you go my route, you’ll be stuck doing doc review every day and every night and every goddamn weekend and you’ll want to blow your brains out.”
Joe was right about the debt, but I already had some experience as a true believer, and if the Marine Corps was any indication, idealism-based jobs didn’t save you from wanting to shoot yourself in the head.
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Paul-the-Teach-for-America-dropout told me, “If you go public interest, be careful where you go.”
We’d met up in Morningside Heights at the railroad apartment he shared with his two roommates. The place was schizophrenically decorated with old “Rage Against the Machine” posters, framed New Yorker covers, and Tibetan prayer flags.
“America is broken, man.” Paul took a swig of beer. “Trust me, you don’t want to be the guy bailing water out of a sinking ship.”
“Iraq vet,” I said, pointing at my chest. “Been there, done that.”
“Me too,” he said. “I’ll throw my middle school tour against your deployment any day.”
“They shoot at you?”
“One day a student stabbed another kid.”
That wouldn’t have trumped Vockler or Boylan, and it sure as hell didn’t trump dead, heroic Deme, but it trumped the shit out of me. Closest I ever came to violence was watching the injured and dying come into the base hospital.
“Saddest thing in that school,” he said, “was the kids who gave a shit. Because, honestly, that school was so fucked the smart option would have been to check the fuck out.”
“So what’s the solution? Charter schools? No Child Left Behind? Standardized testing?”
“Yo, I got no idea. Why you think I went to get a master’s in education leadership?” He laughed. “So if you go public interest—”
“I need to make sure I’m not the Band-Aid on a giant sucking chest wound.”
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