As it turned out, my absolute best day in Iraq happened during that fleeting late April calm. The events took place mainly in and around Joker lOne’s house, although the day did begin somewhat inauspiciously outside the Combat Outpost. In fact, the day began with Joker One being blown up on a mission. It was April 28, and we had just completed the morning’s route sweep and were heading back to the Outpost in five unarmored Humvees (after early April, ammunition, including much-needed grenades, equipment, and vehicles had been showered on us from above). About halfway through the Farouq district, the second one, Bolding’s Humvee, disappeared in fire and smoke as an IED exploded directly underneath it.
When I glanced back, shocked at the explosion, I once again believed that I had just lost five men, but soon enough the wounded vehicle crawled forward out of the all-enveloping dust cloud. Despite being unable to feel his left arm, Bolding had managed to drive the vehicle out of the kill zone, and, half an hour later, the entire convoy made it back to the Outpost. As soon as we parked the vehicles, Bolding excused himself to go to the medical station. It was only then that I found out that the blast concussion had knocked out the feeling over much of the left half of his body. Later, in the doctor’s room, I offered Bolding the rest of the day, or even the week off, but he tactfully refused. Smiling broadly, he informed me that he just wanted to get back to the squad—according to him, that would be all the healing he needed.
Shaking my head, I wandered out of the medical office, once again amazed by my Marines. Were I in Bolding’s shoes, I probably would have taken the day off, and you could be damn sure that I wouldn’t be smiling if I was still having trouble moving my arm.
A few hours later, I spotted Noriel walking by the hangar bay’s entrance carrying two shovels and a pick. Very unusual. By now, I had learned the hard way that nearly all of the unusuals, no matter how small, needed to be at least cursorily checked lest weirdness run too rampant among Marines with too much downtime between missions. I called out to him.
“Hey, Noriel, what are you doing with those things?”
“Oh, hey, sir. Staff Sergeant says every Marines has got to fill twenty sandbags apiece. The ground, he is hard, sir, so I got the platoon some picks and shovels. It’s hard to dig with our little e-tools.”
“Every Marine in the platoon has to fill twenty bags?”
“Oh yes, sir.”
“Okay, very well, make sure that you have twenty empty bags for me. I’ll be over shortly to fill them.”
Noriel smiled. “Roger that, sir,” he said. Then he trooped back to the house with his armful of gear.
I hadn’t really thought through the decision to dig with my men when I made it. In my mind, it was simple: The whole platoon had a dirty, menial task to perform, which meant that I had a dirty, menial task to perform with them. Maybe I should have considered the choice a bit more, though. Maybe the digging somehow diminished my status as an officer; maybe I should have had better things to do with my time than hack cursingly away at the rock-hard earth under the scorching desert sun. Maybe I violated an earlier admonition from the Gunny to be a lieutenant doing a lieutenant’s work, not a lieutenant doing a lance corporal’s work. There are a lot of maybes, things that might have happened had I decided to allocate my time somewhat differently on that day, but one thing remains certain: The decision to spend the afternoon sweating mindlessly with my Marines—getting blisters on my palms from the stupid shovel handle and a piercing dehydration headache from the stupid desert sun—gave me my best day in Iraq.
About twenty minutes after my conversation with Noriel, I walked over to the platoon’s house and found my Marines already digging. Just five feet away from our courtyard, a large mound of soft, loose dirt had been piled high by some sort of construction vehicle. To my surprise, the Marines were completely ignoring this ready-made source of sandbag-filling material, instead laboriously chipping their own dirt out of the hard desert ground. Puzzled, I queried my platoon sergeant, who, when I arrived, had been smoking a cigarette and “supervising” the Marines’ efforts.
“Hey, Staff Sergeant,” I said. “Why are we bothering to scrape our own dirt out of the ground? Why not just scoop it out of this nice pile here and fill up as many sandbags as we can until it runs out? Then, if we need to, we can fill up the rest with the dirt we dig up ourselves.”
“Oh no, sir,” came the prompt reply. “That’s the Gunny’s dirt. We can’t use it.”
I stared blankly at Staff Sergeant for a few seconds. The connection between the Gunny and a pile of dirt escaped me, so he clarified.
“Sir, the Gunny told me a couple of days ago that that dirt is his and that he may use it for something in the future. We can’t take it from him, sir. We just can’t.” Staff Sergeant looked horrified at the very thought of touching the Gunny’s precious dirt.
By now, most of the Marines had either stopped digging altogether or were just going through the motions, looking at us out of the corners of their eyes and waiting to see how the conversation between Staff Sergeant and I played out. I thought briefly about the Gunny and his dirt, then decided to assume that he must certainly have been saving that dirt for us to use for sandbag filling. If I was wrong, the Gunny might correct me, respectfully, of course, but if he really didn’t care that much (and I suspected that he didn’t), then we could save maybe an hour or two of scraping away at the unyielding desert floor. Normally, I didn’t like to go against Staff Sergeant in front of the Marines, but this time I didn’t see any graceful way to change course.
I glanced around—the Gunny was nowhere in sight—so I turned back and smiled wryly at my platoon sergeant. “Well, Staff Sergeant, I didn’t know that the Gunny was into real estate speculation in Iraq, so why don’t we assume that he’s been saving this dirt for us. If the Gunny asks you any questions, just tell him that I ordered the Marines to use it and send him my way.”
Having made my little statement, I propped my M-16 up against the courtyard wall, pulled off my cammie blouse, and, dressed ridiculously in boots, pants, undershirt, and a floppy camouflage sombrero, I took a big scoop out of that beautiful, soft dirt mound. The Marines started cheering, really, and poor Staff Sergeant stared helplessly at me as everyone else attacked the dirt with gusto. Just a bit later, someone rustled up a pair of tinny little speakers and a CD player, and Niles assumed DJ duties and started blasting horrible punk music as loud as the pathetic speakers would allow. A digging party had begun.
Shovels and picks rose and fell in no particular rhythm as the Marines started arguing fiercely among one another as to which bands truly qualified as punk. Mahardy and his best friend, Lance Corporal Waters, fell into a heated discussion on the topic, but Waters cut the debate short by shouting “I’ll show you punk” and then punching Mahardy squarely in his solar plexus. The whole platoon laughed uproariously at this clever rhetorical device. When, after at least half a minute, he finally straightened up, a hurt and embarrassed Mahardy announced, “God, Waters, you suck. I hate you so much. You’re so stupid,” before sulking his way back inside the house. The platoon cheered Waters’s victorious debate. Ten minutes later, Mahardy reappeared, smoking, of course, and resumed chatting with Waters. With no words of apology exchanged, the two had seamlessly transitioned back to being best friends.
A few CDs later, everyone grew tired of Niles’s happy punk music, and he was forced to abdicate the DJ throne amid universal protest featuring such delicate comments as “What the hell is wrong with you, Niles?” “You suck, Niles, and your music sucks, too,” “I can’t believe they let you be a Marine, punk-boy,” and “Give up the CD player before I beat you” (Carson). I think the last one sealed it.
Ott quickly took his teammate’s place and started booming out some hip-hop, much to the delight of most of the platoon. After a few songs, a fierce chant swelled among the Marines until it reached nearly the volume of a small roar. At first I had trouble understanding it, but the word soon became intelligible (if entirely unilluminating):
“Gooch! Gooch! Gooch! Gooch! Gooch!”
I had no idea what was going on. As I looked around for some explanation, I noticed that every one of my guys had stopped digging and was now staring expectantly at the exit from the house’s courtyard. I leaned on my pick and waited. I had no idea what was coming, but I did know that whatever it was, it was bound to be interesting.
I wasn’t disappointed. Within a few minutes, a filthy, dirt-covered, now Private Guzon strode out of the house, dressed in his full combat gear and carrying a liter bottle of water in the right cargo pocket of his pants. The whole platoon erupted into cheers. From his DJ’s perch, Ott announced, “This song’s for you, Gooch. Make it happen.”
A smooth, heavy bass line started thumping out, and Guzon began slowly turning around, shimmying his shoulders, wiggling his butt, winking suggestively at the rapt crowd. The Marines howled. Off came the Kevlar helmet. Guzon twirled it above his head, then flung it into the crowd. Someone caught it on their chest with a loud thump. The flak jacket was next, shed oh-so-slowly off the back as Guzon looked over his right shoulder at us and gyrated his hips. By now the rest of the Marines had worked themselves into a frenzy of catcalls. If any of us had had dollar bills, we would have thrown them at him.
The camouflage blouse was next, and trousers and undershirt followed. Gleeful Marines caught each item of clothing as it was tossed into the crowd. Guzon was now wearing only the green hot pants and a pair of combat boots. I had never seen such a ridiculous sight in my life, but I was laughing so hard that my stomach had started hurting. The best, however, was yet to come. Just when I thought that he had to be finished, Guzon reached down and picked up the water bottle that he had carefully staged before beginning his little routine. The crowd went silent as Guzon unscrewed the cap, lifted the bottle high above his head, and proceeded to slowly pour the water over his face and onto his chest, running his free hand through his hair and sighing in mock ecstasy. The Marines exploded into cheers, applause, and unsolicited commentary.
“Damn, Guzon, that’s the hottest thing I’ve ever seen. Do it again.”
“You’re a sick man, Guzon. You’re sick. Sonofabitch, that was cool.”
“I feel dirty. Somebody give me some water.” And so on.
However, the act was apparently a one-show engagement, and no amount of peer pressure, enticement, or threat of imminent bodily harm could motivate Guzon to perform again. He put his pants back on, and I noticed that the dirt and dried sweat now ran in little tigerlike streaks all over his torso. It had been days since we had had any shower water.
A few hours later, all the required sandbags had been filled, and the Marines and I retired to our respective living quarters to escape the oppressive heat. I don’t know exactly why, but for some reason, digging mindlessly until my hands were bloody, watching my Marines physically assault one another, and applauding wildly as a filthy, five-foot-four private performed a risqué striptease had all somehow combined to create the best day I ever had in Iraq. Maybe it had something to do with admiration and envy for the way a group of nineteen-year-olds pushed aside the fact that they had been blown up not four hours ago (and the fact that they had five more months of explosions to go) and took sheer, unadulterated joy in the moment they had been given. Maybe while I was digging with them, that joy had touched me, and I had, for a time, been able to forget about the weight of all of their lives on my shoulders.
That evening as I lay awake in bed, I was smiling contentedly.