The platoon jumped into action. Two teams took over security, while Doc Bryan went to work on the boys. He triaged them and turned to the gut shots first. Tearing open his med kit, he grabbed IVs and saline bags, blankets, scissors, and gauze. I reached down to help, recoiling unconsciously as blood seeped into my gloves, turning the green to black. The urge to help was overwhelming. This couldn’t happen. I had to make it right. Bryan was gentle in reminding me that I could be more useful in other ways.
“Sir, we have this under control. Can you get Dr. Aubin over here and try to get an aerial casevac? Tell ’em we have an ‘urgent surgical.’”
I expected everyone else to feel the same urgency we felt, but I was wrong. I ran into company headquarters, breathless, and explained what had happened. The captain simply said that a decision to help the kids was above his head. There was no time to fight with him. I moved on. Major Benelli sat in the shade of the battalion headquarters tent, digging at an MRE.
“Sir, I have two wounded children in my lines. We shot them during the assault this morning. My corpsman’s doing what he can, but one of them’s urgent surgical.”
He shrugged. “So?”
I explained again that we had led the attack just after the call that all personnel on the field were declared hostile. We had seen people, flashes, maybe rifles, and had fired. But they weren’t soldiers. We had shot two kids, and now at least one of them was bleeding to death in front of my platoon.
“The colonel’s asleep. Just tell them to go back to their house. We can’t help them.” He went back to his food, dismissing me.
My vision narrowed to a tunnel. There was no clean, clinical explanation for what I felt and what I wanted to do. I wanted to tell the major that we were Americans, that Americans don’t shoot kids and let them die, that the men in my platoon had to be able to look themselves in the mirror for the rest of their lives. I wanted him to get out there and put his hands in the kid’s chest to stop the blood that flowed in rhythmic spurts from the holes. I wanted to cradle the major’s head between my arms and twist.
But there wasn’t time. I was still conditioned to accept senior officers’ decisions, regardless of their stupidity, criminality, or inhumanity. So I walked away and found the battalion medical officer, Navy Lieutenant Alex Aubin. I briefed him quickly. Aubin’s eyes were wide. He grabbed his equipment and went to join Doc Bryan while I returned to battalion headquarters. We still needed permission to evacuate the boys, and I couldn’t do that on my own. Benelli smirked when I approached.
“The colonel’s still asleep, Lieutenant. I’m not waking him, and I’m not endangering Americans to evacuate those casualties. Deal with it.”
Those cracks in my trust were getting wider, growing into chasms, filling with fear and rage, sorrow and regret. I felt impotent, but I wasn’t powerless. I had an assault rifle in my hands. I could shoot the motherfucker. I could hold him hostage until he called in that helicopter. There was just enough cool self-awareness left in my mind to stop me. This was one of those times I’d been told I’d face. After all that training, all the ego-inflating and power-tripping that went with being a Marine, this was it. My very own leadership challenge. I drove back to the platoon.
Our values were being inverted, and it threatened to destroy us. Good Marines were sent on a stupid mission governed by harebrained rules of engagement, and now they were being abandoned to suffer the consequences of other people’s poor decisions. I thought of the untold innocent civilians who must have been killed by artillery and air strikes over the past week. The only difference was that we hadn’t stuck around to see the effects those wrought. Our actions were being thrust in our faces, and the chain of command was passing the buck to the youngest, and most vulnerable, of the troops.
I hadn’t been seized by a sudden burst of conscience. Pro-war. Anti-war. War for freedom. War for oil. Philosophical disputes were a luxury I could not enjoy. War was what I had. We didn’t vote for it, authorize it, or declare it. We just had to fight it. And fighting it, for me, meant two things: winning and getting my men home alive. Alive, though, set the bar too low. I had to get them home physically and psychologically intact. They had to know that, whether or not they supported the larger war, they had fought their little piece of it with honor and had retained their humanity. If they got killed or went insane, I had to be able to look at their mothers and explain that they hadn’t been victims of their own comrades’ mistakes. Those Iraqi boys could die, but I couldn’t let them die in our hands.
