By Nathaniel Fick
Marine Lt. Nathaniel Fick leads a band of brothers in his memoir of the Iraq War
By JASON WATKINS | San DiegoDowntown News
The most striking evidence of Nathaniel Fick’s abilities as a world-class military mind comes not from his Dartmouth education nor his reverence for Marine Corps history nor even the bulk of the decisions he made in battle, but rather from the single fact that he returned home from war with the same number of men he left with.
Fick makes only passing mention of this in his newly published book, “One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer,” in which he recounts his journey from Ivy League upperclassman through Officer Candidate School to the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. Fick downplays the survival rate of his platoon so much, in fact, that one is left with the false impression that this is something less than a monumental achievement.
But Fick is no ordinary officer and his are no ordinary Marines. Midway through his military career, Fick was invited to join the elite First Reconnaissance Battalion, the Corps’ elite fighting group that played a vital role in the invasion of Iraq and seizure of Baghdad. No other group in the Marine Corps trains more and fights harder than First Recon, and their failures and successes often make national headlines. Getting shot at, encountering roadside attacks, even being fired upon by fellow Marines – it’s a miracle any of them made it home alive, let alone all of them. Exactly how he managed to return with all 65 of his men still puzzles Fick, but he credits some combination of skill, luck and what one of his best Marines, Rudy Reyes, calls the “sacred geometry of chance.”
Enrolled at Dartmouth and headed for medical school, Nathaniel Fick was so moved by a motivational speech given by a former Marine that, within a few months, he found himself aboard a bus headed for Officer Candidate School (OCS) in Quantico, Virginia.
“I wanted to go on a great adventure, to prove myself, to serve my country,” he writes early on in the book. “I wanted to do something so hard that no one could ever talk shit to me.”
He chose his path wisely.
Three years later, Fick was leading a platoon of 22 men and one platoon leader – a hardened warrior named Gunny Wynn who is regarded by fellow Recon Marines as something of a legend – through battles in Afghanistan and Iraq. His platoon was part of the initial invasion of Iraq, breaching the southern border with Kuwait sometime in the morning hours of March 21, 2003, then crossing the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and eventually arriving in Baghdad just as the statue of Saddam was being toppled by U.S. troops.
Their journey was chronicled in Evan Wright’s acclaimed book, “Generation Kill,” and in his three-part series that appeared in Rolling Stone, but Wright’s account is strictly that of an embedded reporter while Fick’s was written by the man who was making the decisions. (In a sense, Fick’s telling of the same story proves how differently an event is viewed by each observer.)
One of the book’s many virtues is Fick’s ability to throw a shaft of pure light on the true makeup of his men. The notion of a United States Marine as a hardened killer with a piercing gaze is well warranted (and not altogether inaccurate) but Fick offers us another side of the story:
Christmas morning dawned clear and cold. The patrol had been uneventful, and I walked the lines to see the Marines. I thought some of the younger guys might have a hard time that day, but they were festive. A captured tumbleweed stood next to each fighting hole, pruned by hand into a triangular shape of a little pine tree. Candy and mini Tabasco bottles from MREs hung from the branches. There were even gifts. During the past week, Marines had squirreled away packets of cheese or pound cake — MRE delicacies — for their buddies.
On one occasion, after receiving orders from his commanding officer to move 10 kilometers on foot across rocky terrain, the Marines in Fick’s platoon carried 200 pounds of gear across the desert of Afghanistan under the light of the moon while another platoon moved in the comfort of Humvees. Evoking the spirit of Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” Fick writes:
I thought, then, of my favorite time at Quantico, those moments in the bunk after we sang “The Marine’s Hymn.” Now, as I had at OCS, I sensed an outpouring of grit, pride, and raw desire to live up to the traditions we’d inherited. These Marines came from places like Erie and Tuscaloosa and Bedford Falls. The most junior of them earned nine hundred dollars a month. Some had joined the Corps for adventure, others for a steady paycheck or to stay out of jail. Now they all kept walking for one another.
“One Bullet Away” makes no assertions of the validity or legitimacy of the war — it’s not entirely clear where Fick falls on the political spectrum except for a few brief glimpses into his upbringing. (“Some of my classmates had been hunters since they’d learned to walk, but I had fired a gun only two or three times in my life,” he writes.) But he is concerned with the legitimacy of his own men; after a particularly bloody battle with Iraqi insurgents, Fick writes, “I guessed the television news that night was full of reports of collateral damage and civilian casualties. I wished people could see how much we agonized over our decisions and prayed they were the right ones. These choices didn’t always translate into hesitation on the trigger or racking self-doubt, but sometimes it was enough to sit awake in the cold rain just thinking about them.”
Much has been made about that breed of otherwise virtuous soldier or Marine turning into to a callous, unfeeling murderer in a war zone, only to return home to face his demons with eventual unraveling. Contempt for this type runs deep throughout Fick’s platoon; each man deals with war in his own way, at the time of his own choosing, but no one falls so harshly upon himself as Fick:
As darkness fell over Valat Sukkar, I sat alone in the dim green light of the radios. I felt sick for the shepherd boys, for the girl in the blue dress, and for all the innocent people who surely lived in Nasiriyah, Ar Rifa, and the other towns this war would consume. I hurt for my Marines, goodhearted American guys who’d bear these burdens for the rest of their lives. And I mourned for myself. Not in self-pity, but for the kid who’d come to Iraq. He was gone. I did all this in the dark, away from the platoon, because combat command is the loneliest job in the world.
In a recent reader review on Amazon.com, an anonymous person who claims to be a part of Fick’s platoon takes him to task for writing such a book so soon after the events occurred, calling it political positioning that’s “20 years early.” Not that the reviewer, identifying himself only as “SaltyTex,” has much of an axe to grind: his only real gripe seems to be that Fick was paid to tell his story, a notion in which only an idiot could find fault and only a jealous colleague would point out. The reviewer’s other apparent goal is to call Fick out as a well-to-do, Ivy League “thinker” with a good military record who aspires to one day become a senator. (Why the American people would find fault in this behavior somehow eludes “SaltyTex.”) Fick himself admits that he has no desire to run for office, though that almost appears a waste, given that he’s currently earning his master’s degree at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at a little place called Harvard.
“I’m really interested in policy, I’m just not that interested in politics,” Fick said during a phone interview. “I really like walking down the street and being anonymous.”
But perhaps the most unsubstantiated claim by “SaltyTex,” and a difficult one to make, is that Fick’s book and Evan Wright’s “Generation Kill” paints Recon Marines in a bad light. Both books are honest depictions of a misunderstood (if not completely overlooked) generation within the military, and both portray these men as honest and caring, crude and violent, feared and respected killers. To suggest, like “SaltyTex” does, that these accounts “hurt our reputation” and expose the platoon’s bad side is to miss the point entirely. Fick’s book isn’t a piece of propaganda for the cause of the Recon Marine – or for the Corps as a whole – any more than “Full Metal Jacket” is an advertisement for war. Rather, the book is meant as a solitary voice among many. His view is simply that some stories need to be told, and that this happens to be one of them.
And this is exactly where Fick and “One Bullet Away” so masterfully succeed. In what he calls the “aftermath” of war, Fick is forced to face the evidence that his experiences as a Marine officer and as a veteran made him into a principled, honorable and heroic man.
“I took sixty-five men to war and brought sixty-five home,” he writes. “I gave them everything I had. Together, we passed the test. Fear didn’t beat us. I hope life improves for the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, but that’s not why we did what we did. We fought for each other.”
Ultimately Fick was spared from doing what he feared most. “I knew if anybody got killed, I was the one who was going to have to fly to their hometown and explain to their parents what happened,” he said. He never had to.
Both unsentimental and quietly introspective, “One Bullet Away” emerges as one of the clearest voices to come out of the current war. Nathaniel Fick is just one man telling one story about one particular moment in time, and yet he and his men prove that uncommon valor may well be an uncommon virtue.
