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11.08.05

Standing down: A Marine returns from Iraq

As brutal as the war in Iraq could be, ex-Marine Nathaniel Fick has learned one of the biggest challenges is coming home.

In his dreams, it's always summertime. He stands by a lake. A family reunion. His cousins splash in the water while the adults talk. No one pays him any attention. They can't hear him; they don't see him. He looks down. He's wearing desert camouflage. A rifle is slung across his chest. His clothes are covered in blood.

The dream came a dozen times in Nathaniel Fick's first few months home after returning from Iraq in June 2003. A Baltimore native, he had been a lieutenant in the Marine Corps, and during two combat tours had distinguished himself with bravery and compassion.

But coming back was its own, unexpected challenge.

"All of a sudden, I was by myself," says Fick, now 28 and the author of the recently published One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer. "It was extremely isolating, even if you have people who care about you. You don't know quite how to relate."

It wasn't just the dreams. On his first Fourth of July home, he dove behind a car at the blast of a firecracker and reached to his hip for a pistol that wasn't there. While driving on a highway in California, he swerved wildly under overpasses, a tactic he had been taught in Iraq to avoid bombs being dropped from overhead. And when a car cut him off, he envisioned pulling the driver's head back and slitting his throat with a key.

On a visit to his family's Cockeysville home, Fick spent his sister's 22nd birthday in front of the TV, absorbed in the news of Saddam Hussein's capture. When she mentioned he had forgotten her birthday, Fick exploded. What was happening in Iraq was more important, he yelled.

In some ways, he was still there. Fick and the 22 men in his platoon had spearheaded the U.S. invasion. He'd come under enemy fire and seen two of his Marines wounded; he'd battled Iraqis and Syrians armed with semiautomatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars; he had encountered wounded civilians and children; and he had survived on less sleep, food and water than ever seemed possible.

The Marines had prepared him for all of that. But not for what he would face when he got home.

"His soul has changed," his mother, Jane Fick, said in an interview. "I can't say for better or worse, but his soul has changed."

As a boy, Nate Fick had enough GI Joe action figures to invade a small nation, but his family never thought he'd end up in the military. He played lacrosse and football at Loyola Blakefield. He cycled competitively. He was an altar boy. He talked about being a doctor.

At Dartmouth College, one chemistry course was enough to convince Fick he wasn't cut out for medicine. He switched to classics and was soon entranced with the ancient Greeks and Romans, their legendary battles and belief in the citizen-warrior.

Fick, who stands 6-foot-2 and looks like he stepped out of a J. Crew catalog, took inspiration from those soldiers and wanted to serve his country as they did. At Dartmouth, that set him apart. His friends were going to law school and medical school, or signing six-figure contracts to work at investment banks and consulting firms.

"I didn't understand what we, at age twenty-two, could possibly be consulted about," Fick wrote in his book. "I felt as if I had been born too late. There was no longer a place in the world for a young man who wanted to wear armor and slay dragons."

But the Marines came closest to what he was looking for. After completing officer training, Fick was put in charge of a platoon of 44 Marines, based at Camp Pendleton in California. They boarded the USS Dubuque on Aug. 13, 2001, to be part of the U.S. force in the Pacific. It was a six-month assignment that would take them to Hawaii, Guadalcanal and Australia.

That's how Fick came to be in a bar on Australia's northern coast, drinking a Victoria Bitter, on Sept. 11, 2001.

A month later, he was launched on his first wartime mission: the rescue of a Black Hawk helicopter in southern Afghanistan. When Fick's platoon got to the crash site, they found the Pakistanis had beaten them there. An officer poured him a cup of tea.

That set the tone for his time in Afghanistan. He never fired his weapon, though he did call in several air strikes. He said his most anticipated mission, an attempt to capture Osama Bin Laden in Tora Bora, was canceled because of fear of casualties.

Iraq would be different.

Marine officers are taught they have three responsibilities: to be ready always, to win every time and to return their Marines to society better than they found them.

"The first two things were frankly pretty easy to do," Fick said. "That's what we were equipped to do, and we were lucky we were fighting a pretty incompetent enemy at that point [early in the war]. But the returning your Marines to society part is tough."

In late March 2003, when the war was about a week old, Fick's platoon was ordered to capture an airfield in central Iraq. A commander had declared the field "hostile," meaning shoot first and ask questions later. As the platoon approached the airfield, some Marines spotted men in the distance who appeared to be carrying rifles. The Marines fired on them and then seized the airfield, which turned out to be deserted.

While Fick's platoon made camp, they noticed villagers approaching with two bundles wrapped in blankets. The bundles contained two wounded young brothers, one shot in the leg, another with four bullet holes in his abdomen. On inspection, it was evident their wounds had been caused by 5.56 mm rounds. Only Americans used those rounds, and the only Americans there were Fick's men.

Fick immediately knew what had happened. The people his men fired on at the airfield had been carrying shepherd's crooks, not rifles. What appeared to be muzzle flashes was the sun reflecting on a windshield.

"We'd shot two children," Fick wrote.

The boys needed to be airlifted to a field hospital if they were to survive. Fick ran to his company headquarters to get permission. A captain told him he wasn't authorized. A major said to tell the boy's family to take them back home. And the colonel was asleep, not to be disturbed.

"Our values were being inverted, and it threatened to destroy us," Fick wrote. He didn't want his Marines to see these boys die. So Fick arranged to have them loaded on stretchers, carried to the major's tent and set down at his feet.

Fick told the major, "Here you go, sir. You want to let them die, they can die right here in front of your tent." That got his attention. The major woke the colonel, who ordered the boys' immediate evacuation.

The Marines in Fick's platoon were impressed. They had only been thinking about their immediate survival, while Fick was worried about how they'd survive once they got home.

"Ethics, morality, demanding a higher consciousness were all put to the side and completely compartmentalized, and we focused on survival, survival, survival," said Sgt. Rudy Reyes, who was in Fick's platoon. "Little did we know how much those other parts of our psyche would be affected and carry burdens when we were done with this."

Later, while searching an amusement park north of Baghdad, Fick's platoon was approached by an Iraqi family looking for a hospital. A 13-year-old girl named Suhar had been wounded by a bomb. Her leg was broken and infected.

Fick had to decide between completing his mission or tending to Suhar. He told his corpsman to treat the girl. It took three hours, and Fick's platoon wasn't able to finish its search of the park. The next day, another platoon completed the search and found dozens of surface-to-air missiles, but it appeared that some had been removed overnight.

In the months that followed, Fick would brood about those missiles: Was one of them used later to shoot down an American helicopter and kill 15 or 25 people?

"I don't know," he said. "But that's abstract, and Suhar was laying bleeding in front of us. It certainly felt like helping her was the right thing to do. And I can say psychologically, for my platoon, I think it's much better off that we did what we did."

Leadership is part theater, Fick says, but it never seemed so real as one night in March 2003 on the road outside Muwaffiqiya. Fick's platoon was to secure the bridge leading into town, but as the Marines approached, they realized it was blocked. They had driven into an ambush. Fick's platoon was in five Humvees - none of them armored - clumped together on the open road.

The enemy (later determined to be Syrians) was on three sides, and the Marines opened fire on them with machine guns and grenade launchers. The Syrians hit back with rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers.

Fick had to get his men out of there, but saw only one option: He climbed out of his Humvee to give orders on pulling out. The enemy was shooting low, and as Fick walked on the road, his Marines would later say, it looked like he was dancing between the bullets.

"He stepped out, and he walked into the maelstrom," said Evan Wright, a Rolling Stone journalist embedded with Fick's platoon. "It was a quiet act of heroism."

The platoon escaped with two injuries: One Marine was wounded when shrapnel hit his leg, and another took a bullet through his foot. Both continued fighting.

Wright wrote a book, Generation Kill, about his time with Fick's platoon. It included a quote that has gotten Fick in a bit of trouble. Before his platoon set out on the mission to secure the bridge, Fick told his men, "The bad news is, we won't get much sleep tonight. The good news is, we get to kill people."

When a graduate school admissions officer asked Fick to explain that comment, he refused. Those who weren't there can't understand. But he acknowledged in his book that he was getting hooked on the adrenaline and excitement of combat.

"I was starting to look forward to missions and firefights in the way I might savor pickup football or playing baseball," he wrote. "I didn't have the luxury of much time for reflection, but I was aware enough to be concerned that I was starting to enjoy it."

In an interview, Fick said he threw up a mental barrier after being exposed to so much trauma and violence. "I felt like we had a job to do and so you have to build an emotional wall, and that's what I did."

Shortly after the end of official combat operations in Iraq, Fick's platoon was relieved by Army units. He left Baghdad on April 19, 2003 - 10 days after the fall of Hussein's regime.

After a few months in southern Iraq, Fick returned to Camp Pendleton in June. He left just as the insurgency was beginning, but he was there long enough to see that the U.S. tactics weren't working, focused as they were on killing insurgents rather than helping civilians.

His own platoon, for instance, was told to stay indoors in Baghdad at night while chaos reigned in the streets.

"There was a window in time, in the spring and summer of '03, when the Iraqis were waiting expectantly to see what the Americans would do," Fick said. "And we failed. We let their capital city be looted. We let the Shia enact some terrible revenge killings against the Sunni. We failed to get the lights back on and the water pumping and the oil pumping. We failed to provide concrete, tangible evidence that our system was better than the old one."

Fick was promoted to captain, and he could have stayed in the Marines. But he was finished with war. He had been a platoon leader for four years, and the stress of constantly being responsible for the lives of others had worn him down.

"Twice," Fick said, "I had brought everybody in my platoon home safely, and I didn't want to cheat fate again."

It's a sunny day in late October, and Fick sits in a restaurant off Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass. He wears a blue checked shirt and jeans, and he picks at a pear and walnut salad. He looks at home among the students and academics in this college town, where he's in graduate school. But Fick says he sometimes feels he has more in common with the veterans who camp out in the square, selling odds and ends.

"Suddenly I realized how the people wearing camouflage jackets and selling pencils got there," he said. "It was extremely hard, and it caught me totally unaware. I thought everything would be OK."

So did his mother. Jane Fick said she researched how her son might react when he returned home. She called Camp Pendleton and Walter Reed Army Medical Center. She read Jarhead, a grunt's account of the first Gulf War. She talked to the doctors at Sheppard Pratt, where she's a social worker.

"And everybody told me the same thing - he's an officer, he's smart, he's young, he's going to be fine," she said. "And I believed them. Nobody ever gave me that idea that something was going to be wrong."

Fick hit bottom during the holidays of 2003. He scared even himself with his outbursts of anger. He felt he couldn't talk to anyone about what he had been through, but he could write about it. He began the book in January 2004 as a private form of therapy, and things got better.

Much of it was written at the desk in his apartment in Cambridge, where he's in a dual degree program at the Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government.

On the wall to the right of the desk, Fick has mounted the oar his Marines gave him when he left the corps. He received it during a traditional ceremony after his platoon returned from Iraq. Fick sat in the center of a circle, and the members of the platoon passed the paddle among themselves, each recounting a story, before handing it to Fick.

Some of those soldiers have returned to Iraq. Fick's platoon is part of the elite 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, now in Fallujah and Ramadi. He's in e-mail contact with them, and sometimes wishes he could be there, too. But he knows he left for good reason.

He had become, he says, a reluctant warrior.

"I realized that something in my temperament had changed," he said. "You have to go into this very gung-ho. And I had lost that. I could still do my job. But different people have different tolerances, and I had met mine."

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