Captain Fick (One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, by Nathaniel Fick; Houghton Mifflin, 384 pp., $25) was caught in an ambush outside Muwaffiqiya, Iraq. Running through bullets, he sensed time “expanding and contracting like a Slinky.” A Slinky? The simile is out of place in a chronicle replete with martial jargon, with enfilading and suppressing fire, with M4s and MK-19s, with QuikClot and tourniquets. Out of place, but also one of the book’s most telling details. It’s a remnant of what Fick put behind him—a civilian culture of prolonged childhood—when he chose the course that led to his service in the Marines’ elite First Recon Battalion.
Fick enlisted in the Marines as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, where he’d majored in classics. To him, the Corps embodied duty and sacrifice, ideas rarely discussed without cynicism in academia. While his friends were busy interviewing or interning, Fick attended Officer Candidate School at Quantico—where “individual” is a term of opprobrium and candidates learn what it takes to lead U.S. Marines. In OCS’s final test, “the Crucible,” Fick spent sleepless days running through forests, barbed wire, and snake-infested bogs—and thinking of the “soft and homogenized” society he’d abandoned.
On September 11, Fick was in Australia; his Pacific cruise aboard the USS Dubuque had been interrupted for artillery drills in the outback. The Dubuque was put on “THREATCON DELTA” and the Marines were off to the Arabian Sea at 20 knots. Responses to the attack ranged from the maudlin—”Amazing Grace” piped through the ship’s PA system—to the grimly tongue-in-cheek, as with the soldier who said he would be fighting for “cheap gas and a world without ragheads.”
Fick rallied his platoon: “If we’re lucky, we’ll be the ones to get revenge for this.” What worried him was being responsible for his men’s lives; the Afghans, after all, were battle-hardened. His team’s first mission was to recover a Black Hawk helicopter that had crashed on the Pakistani border, before it could become a propaganda set-piece. “I didn’t think about the sweep of history,” writes Fick, who hoped only that he wouldn’t “do anything stupid and get people killed.”
That mission was a success—but it was only the beginning. Shortly thereafter, manning a roadblock outside Kandahar, the Marines got a taste of Afghan audacity. A truck approached; men leapt out of it with AK-47s and were mowed down. Then “a minibus and a dump truck, carrying dozens of armed men,” joined the fray. A Navy jet swooped down, and “trucks full of Taliban soldiers disappeared in the flash, leaving only twisted metal and charred lumps of flesh.” Combat, adrenaline, and the stench of death were palpable.
After the Afghan war, Fick was selected for Recon, the capstone of the Corps. This meant more training: Airborne, dive school, even mock field interrogations. Then came Iraq: Despite his experience and special training, the Iraq war pushed Fick to his limits. His account is rapid-fire, vertiginous. The early days, depicted on television as a cakewalk, were anything but for the troops on the ground.
Fick brilliantly evokes the split second before the first muzzle flashes of an ambush, the frustration of a shamal sandstorm, the terror of finding one’s vehicle stuck in terrain like “crème brûlée”—hard on top and tar-like clay beneath. We wince when one of Fick’s men observes that, where people at home complain about litter on the beach, Iraqis stoically accept heads in the streets and dogs eating corpses.
Fick’s account doesn’t shy from the appalling “human cost” of war. In the book’s single most affecting story, he finds himself contending with orders not to give medical attention to children who have been shot by accident: “I could hold [the objecting officer] hostage until he called that helicopter. There was just enough cool self-awareness left in my mind to stop me.” In the end, Fick shames a major into evacuating the boys. He comes away from the ordeal shaken, knowing now that it’s impossible to do good without, at times, shouldering the responsibility of failure.
Fick’s father had told him that the Marines would teach him everything he loved him too much to teach him. Fick’s book is a treasury of that knowledge. No matter how much he endures, he is never comfortable with his job. He doesn’t want to kill; he doesn’t want to risk his men for orders that are the product of laziness, poor planning, or ignorance of the shifting reality on the ground. Nevertheless, Fick’s awareness of duty and his sense of accountability are total. As he says of some dead Syrian fighters, “The men were adults who chose to be here. I was an adult who chose to be here. . . . The fight was fair.”
His career a success, Fick decides that war is not his calling. “Many Marines reminded me of gladiators. They had that mysterious quality that allows some men to strap on greaves and a breastplate and wade into the gore. . . . I could never be like them.” He’s alarmed by the fact that he’s come to look forward to firefights as if they were a “game of Ultimate Frisbee.” Out of the service, he recalls, “When a driver cut me off in a merge lane, I visualized, without emotion, pulling his head back and cutting his throat with my car key.” This wasn’t a feeling he wanted to encourage. He thought of St. Augustine, who wrote that the condition of anyone who experiences evil “without anguish . . . is even more tragic, since he remains serene by losing his humanity.” One cannot read Fick’s words without appreciating his intractable humanity. It’s one thing to risk one’s life, another to risk one’s mind. Fick risked both, and, miraculously, emerged more or less intact. His story is truly—as one Marine motto has it—leadership by example.
