October and November were a blur of routine physical activity for Golf Company. As we hiked the hilly terrain around the base, ran muddy trails through the various training areas, and conducted patrolling exercises through the Southern California scrub brush, the NCOs and I did our best to prepare our understrength platoon in the absence of a specific mission. For the Army soldiers in Iraq, however, it was a completely different story. By November 2003, it became apparent that the ever-widening violence in the country was not, in fact, the spastic death throes of the former regime. In some places, the fighting between U.S. forces and their attackers had grown quite fierce, and a strapped Army had its hands full trying to rebuild the major and minor civil institutions of Iraq while simultaneously trying to contain a slowly coalescing insurgency.
Though occupation, with its emphasis on reconstruction, infrastructure, and noncombat operations is not the specialty of the Marine Corps, dismounted (that is, on foot) light infantry is, and as the fighting spread so did rumors that the Marines would eventually be needed in Iraq to help shoulder the military’s load. In 2/4, none of us knew exactly what would happen, but speculation was rampant that the battalion might just get its shot at combat after all. One afternoon in early December, Colonel Kennedy called for his battalion to assemble on the basketball courts. Such gatherings happened only rarely, and they were generally convened only for announcements of the greatest importance. As we made our way toward the courts, tense with anticipation, it occurred to me that I might be spending my second anniversary in the same place as I had spent the first, Iraq, though likely in less comfortable circumstances. If this battalion formation was just a ploy to announce another in a series of asinine and restrictive base policies purportedly designed to make us safer, then I was going to be severely disappointed.
For about twenty minutes, Marines poured toward the assembly. NCOs in all platoons barked orders, and slowly several hundred camouflage suits shuffled into the shape of a horseshoe. Once the maneuver was complete and all Marines had been accounted for, Colonel Kennedy took his place at the middle of the horseshoe. As he began to speak, I could see the battalion leaning forward in anticipation.
“The Marines,” Colonel Kennedy announced, “are going back to war.” He paused, then added what everyone so hoped to hear. “And we’re going with them.”
Grunts and cheers erupted, and Kennedy waited for them to die down before continuing. The Army, he explained, had screwed everything up in Iraq by being too hard on the civilians, and now, typically, the Marines had been called in to clean up the mess. In all likelihood, Kennedy’s statement reflected the fine tradition of interservice competition as much as it did his belief in the Army’s Iraq mismanagement. Hearing this, most of us smiled; I know I certainly did. It felt good to be needed. The colonel continued: Running true to form, the Corps had volunteered to assume control of one the most violent pieces of Iraq—the volatile Sunni-dominated Anbar province—not the relatively quiescent Shiite south that the Marines had occupied before their recent withdrawal. As one of only a handful of infantry battalions in the Corps that had not yet been to Iraq, 2/4 had been selected by higher headquarters to be in the first wave of Marine returnees (or, in our case, first-time visitors). Make no mistake about it, Colonel Kennedy told us. You are going to be in combat soon enough.
However, no one knew our departure date or our final destination just yet. The colonel told us that we would definitely assume control of an important area, likely a town called Habbaniyah, and that we would probably leave sometime in the late spring or early fall of 2004. However, he took pains to emphasize that nothing was certain—higher headquarters was still hashing everything out. One thing, though, was quite clear: We could not go back at half strength, and the battalion was more likely to leave sooner rather than later. Prepare yourselves, Colonel Kennedy said. We’re going to get a whole host of new Marines, and from now until we leave, things are going to go very quickly.
Afew days after the announcement, Golf Company received the first of the promised new arrivals: two new second lieutenants who would lead the second and third platoons. Eric Quist and Jonathan Hesener (“Hes”) both came straight from Infantry Officer Course, the Marine infantry officers’ finishing school. Hes was a U.S. Naval Academy grad and a leukemia survivor—he had contracted the disease during his first year of college, had a complete bone marrow transplant during his second year, and somehow managed to complete the rigorous program three years later. Standing five foot ten with sandy brown hair, light eyes, pale skin, and a long, thoughtful face, Hes struck me as smart but completely physically nondescript, at least until he raised his shirt to reveal the Lord’s Prayer tattooed in Aramaic across his ribcage. Quist came from a Marine family (his father was a colonel in the Corps) and he looked exactly how he acted: slightly pinched and nervous and extremely smart. With graying hair, steel-rimmed glasses, and wrinkles already starting to appear at the corners of his constantly squinted eyes, the six-foot-tall Quist had taken a roundabout way into the Corps: He had sold commercial off-the-shelf software for about five years before deciding to follow in his father’s footsteps.
Not long after their arrival, Golf got a fourth lieutenant, Craig Flowers, who rejoined the company after a six-week absence occasioned by a winter survival course in Alaska. After a few days, we found out that Flowers had graduated from West Point and then, improbably, had managed an inter-service transfer to the Marine Corps, something quite rare.
Happy as I was to have three compatriots, there was a problem with their arrival: The company still had only two understrength platoons, mine and the Ox’s weapons platoon, so the new lieutenants and Flowers were platoon commanders with nothing to command. Once Hes and Quist had finished checking in, though, the CO remedied the situation by splitting my platoon into three pieces. I kept Bowen and most of his twelve-man squad, along with Teague, Leza, and Carson. Quist got my second squad, which was now renamed second platoon, and Hes got my third, becoming, in turn, third platoon. Flowers took over Weapons, and the Ox moved to the position of executive officer (XO), a move that made him the CO’s right-hand man and put him one bullet away from controlling our lives. Thus, by mid-November, Golf Company had the standard four platoons, each manned by roughly one-third of its usual strength. When the rest of the promised Marines arrived, the men in these platoons, most of whom currently served as basic riflemen, would, ready or not, all become team and squad leaders.
The Corps has specific courses to help Marines make this transition from follower to leader, but we didn’t have the time to send anyone to them, because less than a week after its reorganization, Golf Company received its first wave of new-enlisted Marines, and that wave was huge. To fill the skeleton-like 2/4 to full fighting capacity, Marine finishing schools started shunting graduates to our battalion as quickly as possible. Instead of the normal batch of roughly a dozen new Marines that an infantry company gets at each school graduation, Golf received nearly fifty during the third week in November. It was a substantial administrative and logistical nightmare to swallow such a huge chunk of new joins all at once, and our difficulties were compounded by the fact that among this wave of new Marines, there was not a single one with any previous experience in the operating forces. They were all fresh out of infantry school, and my NCOs called them “boot drops.”
The term “boot” is one of the most derogatory in the Corps. In a Marine’s mind, if someone is a boot, then that someone is essentially raw, untrained, and unfit for whatever position they find themselves in. A huge amount of time and effort needs to be poured in as quickly as possible to ready the new one for even the most mundane tasks of the infantry, let alone for combat. By that definition, then, first platoon doubled in size, from thirteen to roughly twenty-five, with nothing but straight-up boots.
As I met our new arrivals, there were a couple of things that they all had in common aside from their lack of any worthwhile combat training. First, they were all short and skinny. In sharp contrast to most members of the existing group, not a single one of my new Marines stood over six feet tall or weighed over two hundred pounds. Second, they had baby faces, every single one of them, and if I had had to guess their ages individually, without knowing that they were Marines, I might have put each of them at around fifteen to seventeen (their actual ages were between eighteen and twenty-one). Third, they were all very nervous. The new Marines spent a lot of time stuttering, snapping to attention randomly and unnecessarily, and throwing frantic salutes while addressing everyone in sight as “Sir.”
As the boot drops poured in, we got to work straightaway, following the time-honored leadership principle that states that if our Marines fail, it won’t be because they were poor raw material, but because we were poor teachers. My first order of business was to assign all the new men to one of my three squads so that first platoon could begin drilling with the standard three subunits. Within a few days, we had done so, and Teague took over first squad, Leza, second, and Bowen, third. As the squad leaders took command of their brand-new, slightly understrength squads, we kept an eye out for a suitable radio operator (RO) among the new Marines, because in the infantry the only thing more important than having men who can shoot straight and walk fast is having at least one who can talk well.
Enter Private First Class (PFC) Yebra, a first-generation Colombian American who came to us fresh from his immigrant parents’ dairy farm in Wisconsin. He did not immediately impress me. Standing a wiry five seven, with black hair and nearly black eyes, Yebra spoke so softly that I had to strain to hear him the first time he snapped to attention. He was so gentle and un-Marine-like that I wondered how the little PFC had made it through basic training. However, a few days later, as Yebra proceeded to run three miles in under fifteen minutes, handily beating everyone in the platoon, I realized that this Marine would lead by example. I watched, stunned, as he cruised through the finish line running at a pace that would have been an all-out sprint for me. As it turned out, before joining the Corps, Yebra had been a high school cross-country star, even receiving a few college scholarship offers. In addition to being a physical prodigy, Yebra soon proved calm, cool, and deliberate (all necessary qualities for a Marine RO), so the squad leaders and I decided to reward Yebra’s physical ability and mental presence by making him carry thirty extra pounds—the radio and its spare batteries—every time we trained.
With our maneuver units set and our primary communicator identified, first platoon headed out to its maiden platoon training event, one planned by our new XO and training officer extraordinaire, the Ox. Even though his recent appointment had made him a staff officer with no platoons or squads to command, the Ox hated to let his status as Captain Bronzi’s subordinate stand in the way of his deserved supreme command authority. Thus he tried his utmost to control every aspect of the company’s training day, from when we worked out to how we patrolled to which sorts of classes the platoon commanders taught their men. Unsurprisingly, soon after Golf’s four new platoons had sorted themselves into maneuverable units, the Ox announced one afternoon in late November that he had generously reserved a specific fortified hillside for all of us to attack with our respective platoons the next day.
Hearing the news, Flowers shook his head and sighed. Less familiar with the Ox than he, the rest of us didn’t fully understand the horror that this dictate implied, so we were cautiously enthusiastic about the exercise—after all, it would be our first real test drive with our new Marines, and the training seemed straightforward enough. Armed with weapons and firing blanks, one platoon would man the trenches cut into the side of the hill while another assaulted the position as it saw fit. Leading up to the hillside was a broad, flat plain covered with a fairly complex system of obstacles, the heart of which was three rows of double-stranded concertina wire, the military version of barbed wire in which the barbs are replaced with double-sided straight razors. It’s nasty stuff that rips up anyone who tries to move through it. Were the training a real-life assault, that wire meant that anyone conducting a frontal attack on the hillside without serious artillery/air support and a heavy smoke screen would have been cut to ribbons by the defenders. Of course, the wooded hills of California were nothing like the urban jungles of Iraq’s cities or the desolate moonscapes of Iraq’s deserts, so conformity to real life didn’t have a high priority in the Ox’s training scenario.
My platoon had gotten to the training area first, so we were allowed to conduct the first attack. I had no desire to shred my Marines in uselessly breaching row after row of wire, so, rather than assaulting frontally, we moved through the thick forest bordering the plain, breached a single strand of wire using an entrenching tool and some rope, and assaulted the trench line from its side, running quickly down its length while pretending to throw grenades and saying hello to our third-platoon friends who were playing the bad guys. When our “attack” finished, we took third platoon’s places in the trench line.
Up on the hill, I thought that the exercise had gone reasonably well, but down at its base, the Ox was livid. He had wanted all platoons to attack the way he would have done it, which would have been an all-out frontal assault through the wire. Furthermore, he wanted everyone to practice breaching concertina wire again and again, never mind the fact that none of us had breach kits, ladders, or even sheets of plywood to lay on top of the razors. Without those, the quickest way to cross the wire is to have one Marine who is geared up in his Kevlar vest and helmet take a running leap and launch himself on top of the razors in a technique known as “the Flying Squirrel.” The rest of his platoon would then run across his back, using the Marine as a bridge over the wire and lacerating his legs in the process. The delightful prospect of multiple Flying Squirrels greatly excited the Ox, and first platoon had disappointed him.
So an enraged Ox commanded Hes, Quist, and Flowers to assault the obstacles frontally. Being new, Hes and Quist complied, and my men and I watched in astonishment as Marine after Marine performed the Flying Squirrel and then limped painfully off the mock battlefield once the rest of their platoon had laid railroad tracks across their backs. The new Marines were wide-eyed; for all they knew this kind of absurdity was standard. Carrying the radio for me, Yebra leaned over and asked, even more softly than usual, “Sir, why are they doing that? We would have just shot them all in the first minute anyway, sir.”
“Yebra, I have no idea, but I’m sure there’s a reason that second and third are assaulting frontally. If nothing else, it’s good obstacle-breaching practice,” I replied somewhat lamely.
My RO didn’t say anything else after that.
Fortunately for his men, Flowers flatly refused a head-on assault, and the afternoon concluded much more pleasantly. The exercise highlighted the Ox’s greatest strength—his unthinking, unhesitating aggressiveness—and his greatest weakness—his unthinking, unhesitating aggressiveness. When the situation called for a frontal assault on a well-fortified enemy position, the Ox would attack fiercely. Similarly, when the situation called for diplomacy or the restrained use of force, he would attack fiercely. And when the situation called for patience or for a measured retreat, never fear, he would attack fiercely. Like Hes, Quist, and Flowers, I treated the Ox’s lack of tactical sense mostly as a joking matter; a few days after the training event, we first reversed the letters of his XO title, giving him the sobriquet by which he would be known from that day forward.
Even in those earliest days, though, platoon leadership wasn’t all tactics and training and “follow-me-let’s-get-’em”-type exercises in the hills and forests of Camp Pendleton. Good leadership, it seemed, entailed spending quite a bit of time on administrative details that I never dreamed would have been the responsibility of an infantry platoon commander. Teague, Bowen, Leza, and I spent countless hours determining the shoe and trouser sizes of each new man, taking counts of how many pairs of military-issue glasses we needed to order (it could take up to two months to get them from the procurement system), making certain that everyone’s pay was going to the proper bank accounts, scanning personnel files to see who had what relatives, and doing various and sundry other nontactical things to ensure that our new men were being taken care of off the battlefield as well as on it. Most of this work, though, was simple diligence and detail, and it wasn’t until a week after the hillside assault that our first major leadership head ache cropped up. One of my brand-new Marines, Lance Corporal Mahardy, was accused of underage drinking.
Any offense involving the use of alcohol is considered a deadly and often unforgivable sin in the American military—the peacetime, zero-defects leaders of the 1990s entirely eliminated the drinking culture that has been a proud part of military heritage worldwide since the days of Herodotus. Having grown up in the ‘90s military, Colonel Kennedy and Captain Bronzi were both determined to make examples out of alcohol offenders, and they planned on throwing the book at Mahardy. As he was ultimately my responsibility, I decided to call my Marine into the company office to hear his account firsthand before I took the official logbook’s word for it. So, late one afternoon, a relatively tall (six-foot), extremely skinny (160-pound), twenty-year-old Marine with pale skin, sandy-blond hair, and light freckles across his cheeks and arms stood at parade rest and explained his side of the story to me. He had been on his way to do his laundry and had stopped by another Marine’s room to say hello. He found a group of Marines passing around a case of beer, but he hadn’t actually drunk any of it. After hearing Mahardy’s explanation, and observing his demeanor as he gave it, I believed that my man was guilty of nothing more than wandering into the wrong room. I didn’t believe that he deserved harsh punishment, or any punishment at all, for that matter. But by the rules of the Corps, which prohibited his very presence in a barracks room containing alcohol, he was guilty as charged.
As I pondered what to do about Mahardy, I ran into another of the constant tensions faced by young officers: the tension between justice and mercy, and, to some extent, between respect and love. Respect from your Marines is founded on a number of different leadership traits, but foremost among them are competence and justice, and justice hinges on leadership applying an even, consistent system of punishments and rewards. A uniform set of standards across the Marine Corps outlines the criteria for both, and the Marines can always reference those standards if they have any questions surrounding what they can reasonably expect to result from their actions or the lack thereof. They anticipate, then, rewards for outstanding achievement, and they justifiably fear reprisals, often severe, for misdeeds or laziness.
To my surprise, I later found out that my Marines could accept even the harshest punishment with equanimity provided that 1) they understood the rules well in advance of the infringement, 2) they felt that the mandated sentence was appropriate for the misdeed, and 3) they were confident that you, as the punishment’s administrator, would have doled out the same penalty to anyone else in their situation. The Marines should absolutely fear what their lieutenant, company commander, or NCOs can do to them, but they should never, ever believe that those appointed over them either apply punishment out of a rush of emotion or occasionally suspend deserved sentences for reasons unknown. Failing to administer justice, or at least to push for justice to be done, is one of the absolute best ways of cutting your legs out from under yourself as a young leader.
My first thought, then, was simply to let the CO determine the correct punishment. This would have been the easiest course of action, and nobody, including Mahardy, would have held it against me, but it didn’t sit well with me because I believed that Mahardy hadn’t been drinking. Furthermore, even in my inexperience, I had some intimation that in spite of the need for consistency, there are moments when simply following the letter of the law is a cop-out, and ultimately hinders your efforts to pull the best out of your men. In my opinion, the latter requires a love founded on humility, self-sacrifice, and, in some cases, mercy. Sometimes a punishment may be warranted because the letter of the law was violated, but you believe that the sentence should be suspended because of mitigating circumstances surrounding that violation. Or you might believe that the offender rates by law a specific punishment but that the offense was committed out of ignorance rather than malice. Maybe your Marine is a good kid who has potential that would be crushed by such treatment, or maybe they, in your best judgment, simply deserve a second chance.
I wasn’t sure exactly which of these situations applied to Mahardy’s case, but I believed that at least one or two of them did. If I abided solely by the letter of the law, I worried that I might come across as an automaton in my men’s eyes. But it was important not to signal a willingness to defer justice on a regular basis; though this might make the Marines like me more, I needed to be their leader, not their friend, and maintaining this boundary at all times is crucial. What, then, should a young officer do to navigate the delicate tension between justice and fear, between mercy and love?
I certainly don’t have all the answers to this age-old question, but I have found one way that a lieutenant can resolve this tension, and I applied it as best I could to Mahardy’s case. This thing can’t be done every time that you might like to, and even when you can do it, it is often extremely personally unpleasant. The way to satisfy both justice and mercy is, quite simply, to take the hit for your men, to divert whatever punishment they may rate onto your own head if you believe that mercy is warranted. This trade-off is just because as the lieutenant, you are held accountable for everything that your men achieve or fail to achieve, for everything that they do or that is done to them. While you may not be directly responsible for the deeds and misdeeds of your men, you are certainly qualified to interpose yourself between them and justice, should you so choose.
This concept of an acceptable proxy goes much further than merely the dispensation of justice and mercy—ultimately it translates into the lieutenant’s greatest and sometimes final responsibility: to lay down his life for his Marines in combat, if such an action is necessitated by circumstances.
The idea is very, very simple and clear. If you wear the bars on your shoulders, then it is your job to consistently practice the greater-love principle. If you didn’t want that job, then you shouldn’t have accepted the commission.
In this case I couldn’t directly take the hit for Mahardy, so I tried the next best thing: I stuck my neck out for him with the CO. After sending Mahardy away and mulling over our conversation, I went into the CO’s office, where I related to him the story as Mahardy had related it to me. The CO looked extremely skeptical throughout. When I tentatively broached the idea of deferring punishment, the CO cut me off and proceeded to explain to me that I was young and didn’t realize yet that enlisted Marines often couldn’t be trusted. Marines in general, he explained, were extremely “fucking sneaky,” and they often relied upon the naïveté and bad judgment of inexperienced lieutenants to get away with heinous crimes. That wasn’t going to happen on his watch, he told me.
We held the formal punishment ceremony a few days later. Colonel Kennedy sat at a desk, while those accused and their leaders stood at attention off to the side. When Mahardy’s time came, I publicly stood at attention and voiced my opinion that my lance corporal should be spared. He wasn’t, but he was given a lighter punishment than the CO had originally threatened, and a few hours later I pulled Mahardy aside to talk to him, to explain that he had a choice to make going forward. He could either sulk at the injustice and retreat within himself, which, since we were going to war, would probably only get people killed, or he could work doubly hard going forward to prove everyone wrong, to prove that he wasn’t the Marine they had judged him to be.
Standing at parade rest, with his hands behind his back and his blue-gray eyes locked on mine, Mahardy nodded throughout my short pep talk, and when I finished, he responded simply, “Sir, don’t you worry. I know what I’ve got to do. I’m gonna prove to you and everyone that I belong here in the infantry. Don’t worry, sir.”
Mahardy would not be my only leadership challenge in those early days. One day after training, Leza approached me and told me that one of our new Marines, a lance corporal by the name of Feldmeir, had been falling asleep everywhere he went, and at all times. It seemed that we had a genuine narcoleptic in our ranks. Unfortunately, Feldmeir didn’t offset this weakness with other strengths. He wasn’t big or particularly fit; in fact, Feldmeir was on the smaller side of the curve, standing a wiry five feet, eight inches tall. With a completely shaved head and ears that stuck out at an almost perfectly perpendicular angle from his scalp, Feldmeir looked like the children’s book character Curious George. It wasn’t exactly an image guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of enemies. His shooting was average, his hiking was average, and his reaction time to most stimuli was slightly slower than average. I have no idea how Feldmeir made it through basic and infantry training, but make it he did, and it quickly became apparent that if the narcolepsy didn’t improve, he might jeopardize the safety of his fellow Marines on the battlefield.
In talking with Feldmeir about the situation, I learned that there might have been some explanation outside of genetics for his condition: Feldmeir had been raised in a series of foster homes and adoptive households ever since he had stopped living with his mom at the age of ten. The narcolepsy was one of his ways of dealing with the resulting trauma. A few days after the problem was brought to our attention, the squad leaders and I decided that Feldmeir would need huge amounts of special attention, so we assigned him to Corporal Teague, who had continued to distinguish himself as one of the best and fittest of our squad leaders. We would have preferred to reassign him to another unit, but we couldn’t afford to. We were going to combat very soon and, understrength as we were, we could ill afford to lose another man.
Fortunately, Feldmeir proved the exception rather than the rule, and as November ticked by in a blurry haze of paperwork, patrolling, and endless lines of shots and gear draw, I continued to learn the ins and outs of my new men. Many, like my radio operator, Yebra, had either disenrolled from college or turned down college scholarships after 9/11 to serve in the armed forces. Others wanted to carry on a family’s military tradition, or sought adventure and camaraderie. Though the individual reasons for joining varied, nearly all of my men were with us because they very much wanted to be with us. Indeed, when I asked each of my Marines why they had joined the Corps, during the one-on-one interviews that I scheduled with all of them, nearly to a man they gave me a variation of the same answer: Sir, I love this country and I wanted to serve and I wanted to be the best, so I joined the Marine infantry, sir.
In fact, several of my men were so motivated to be Marine riflemen that they had surmounted serious physical difficulties to make it through boot camp. PFC Henderson was one of these. Not long after he joined, we sent him for a medical screening because he mentioned in passing that he was having fairly intense chest pains following each run (additionally, Henderson looked roughly fifteen years old—he had an amazing baby face—so it couldn’t hurt to get a doctor’s second opinion regarding our man’s true age, or so Leza told me with a wink). A series of tests indicated some cardiovascular abnormality, but the doctors couldn’t identify the condition and they couldn’t determine whether the unknown was serious. Predictably, they erred on the side of caution and forbade Henderson from any and all strenuous training, so we stuck him in the company office and gave him a desk job. He hated it, but he worked hard anyway.
I was disappointed—Henderson was a genuinely sweet kid who had tried hard to help everywhere he was placed, and staffed as we were at just over 50 percent of our standard fighting capacity, first platoon could not afford to lose one man so soon after gaining him. However, less than a week later my spirits perked up, because Golf received a much-needed addition: a company gunnery sergeant. Alongside every officer chain of command is an enlisted one, and the company gunnery sergeant (“gunny” for short) is the enlisted counterpart to the company XO. Together they are responsible for all the administrative and logistical groundwork that keeps a company fed, equipped, trained, and fighting. Without a gunny, the day-to-day operations of the infantry would likely grind to a halt. As our old gunny was about to retire—he had one foot out the door already—things were bound to improve. And indeed, while I didn’t know it at the time, that day in late November when the new gunny joined Golf Company was one of the best days of my life.
The man’s full name and title were Gunnery Sergeant Winston C. Jaugan, but I will always remember him as simply the Gunny because, as far as I’m concerned, there’s only one gunny that matters—Golf Company’s Gunny, the best in the Corps. The Gunny was born in the Philippines and retained the distinctive dialect of the Tagalog people, the Philippines’ second-largest ethnic group, making for bizarre English syntax in general and exceptionally amusing swearing when the Gunny got worked up. He had come to us straight from an assignment as a drill sergeant, so, aside from the weathered, cragged face that had clearly seen its share of lessons learned the hard way, the Gunny looked as if he had just stepped out of a shrink-wrapped box. His wide shoulders and thick chest tapered down to a narrow waist, and the forearms that protruded from his perfectly rolled sleeves were cabled with muscle.
And the Gunny didn’t walk; he stalked. Everywhere he went, his head and shoulders were thrust aggressively forward as he swiveled his eyes this way and that, searching for the lost in need of instruction. Within a day of his arrival, Golf Company started functioning with noticeably more efficiency. Even better, the Gunny took all of the young lieutenants under his wing because he was a true professional, and he realized we needed it. The best senior enlisted NCOs usually take it upon themselves to teach and mentor the younger officers, and the task requires a deft hand, because every officer, no matter how young or inexperienced, outranks every enlisted man. Within a week of his arrival, the Gunny was already teaching me, helping me to better understand both my men and myself. When he found me deeply engrossed filling sandbags with a few of my men, for example, the Gunny waited until I was alone and then gently suggested that since I was a lieutenant and my time was limited, I might want to focus on planning and coordination and let the men deal with the details.
I was grateful for the help, and soon enough I began to rely on the Gunny for more than just straightforward leadership advice and general company efficiency. You see, not long after the Gunny’s arrival, I received my own enlisted counterpart—my platoon sergeant. If the gunnery sergeant is the enlisted equivalent of the company executive officer, the platoon sergeant is the enlisted equivalent of the platoon commander. In theory, an infantry platoon sergeant should be a lieutenant’s right-hand man, seeing to logistical and administrative tasks so the commander can focus his attention solely on tactics, on finding and defeating the enemy and accomplishing the mission. With at least ten years in the Corps under his belt, a platoon sergeant should also serve as the enlisted leader of the Marines, a trusted voice of experience who anticipates their needs because, as a young Marine, he once had those very same needs. He should be a careful mentor to the young lieutenant, protecting the inexperienced officer from himself, and with time a platoon sergeant should become the lieutenant’s best and closest confidant. In theory, the two should function as two halves of a whole unit dedicated wholeheartedly to taking care of the men in their charge.
Unfortunately, with my platoon sergeant, whom we’ll call simply Staff Sergeant, reality diverged wildly from theory. Even though he had served in the Corps for a little more than eleven years by the time he got to us, Staff Sergeant had spent at least half that time in nonleadership roles, and he hadn’t been in the infantry for the past six years. The time off showed in his physique—tall, skinny, and flabby all at the same time. Staff Sergeant stood nearly six feet, three inches, with long, gangly arms and legs that connected to a hunched torso and a slightly concave chest. With his cammies on, Staff Sergeant looked almost skinny, but when his top came off it became apparent that most of the weight he carried wasn’t muscle. And though he was only twenty-nine years old, Staff Sergeant’s pitted, lined face made me initially put him at closer to forty than thirty.
Most recently, my platoon sergeant had toured with the Marine Corps Rifle Team, a select group of the Corps’s best shooters, who tour the country and represent the Marines at various shooting competitions. He had considered the job his own personal heaven. Within a week of his arrival, Staff Sergeant began to share this view with my Marines by complaining vocally about his pitiful new lot in life in the infantry, and I had to pull the man aside and tactfully remind him that, as a leader, he no longer had the luxury of complaining down.
His response did not fill me with hope.
“Sir, I have no idea how to be a platoon sergeant.”
I was at a complete loss as to how to respond. Fortunately, the Gunny saw my dilemma, and when he wasn’t mentoring officers or smoothly running the company, Gunny Jaugan took it upon himself to “supervise” my platoon’s latest addition. After two weeks of the Gunny’s tender care, Staff Sergeant literally cowered at the sight of the fiery Filipino. Consummate professional that he was, the Gunny never let me see his sessions with my platoon sergeant. All I knew was that occasionally the Gunny would roar “Staff Sergeant” and my platoon sergeant would drop whatever he was doing and start running.
In truth, I was somewhat ambivalent about having an effective staff sergeant anyway. Over the past two months I had become quite jealous of my status as the sole authority for my men, and I feared and distrusted anyone who threatened to diminish it. I, in my inexperience, was unwilling to admit that when it came to leading a platoon, there was more than enough responsibility for two.
So, by December 2003, an inexperienced platoon sergeant and a jealous lieutenant had been paired together to lead a whole clutch of boot Marines into a combat deployment. Fortunately, I had three excellent squad leaders in Teague, Leza, and Bowen, terrific younger Marines like Carson and Yebra, and solid compatriots in Hes, Quist, and Flowers. As for Staff Sergeant, Henderson, Mahardy, and Feldmeir, only time would tell how they would work out, but we had time enough before we deployed, I believed.