Redeployment(83)

As an added bit of irony, Vockler might not have even died if Sergeant Deme had left him there. Unlike the other two Marines, who were bleeding out in an exposed position, Vockler was neither in any immediate danger nor in need of immediate medical care. An AK round had smacked into the top left side of his helmet, true, but it hadn’t penetrated. The force of the glancing shot knocked Vockler out and sent him sprawling backward into a relatively safe position behind a marginal bit of cover in the trash-filled alley. So it’s possible Deme could have left Vockler there.

Nobody ever told this to Vockler. As far as he knew, he went through a second of gunfire and terror, got shot (sort of) in the head, and woke up to his squad telling him that Sergeant Deme, whom he revered, had proven once and for all how goddamn Marine he was by dying in the most heroic way a Marine can—saving your stupid, worthless, not-even-badly-injured-enough-to-need-a-MEDEVAC ass.

None of this discounts Deme’s heroism, but if Vockler knew the full truth, it’d weigh on him even heavier than it already did. Unlike your average American citizen, Vockler could locate who had died for him in a particular human being. A particular human being he’d known and loved with the sort of passion Marines have for good combat leaders. Even most marriages can’t compare with that, because most partners in a marriage aren’t routinely aware that they’d be way more likely to get killed every day if their partner wasn’t such a hell-of-a-baller spouse. So to add to that the notion that, hey, maybe Deme could have left you where you were and possibly saved one of your fire-team buddies before getting himself killed… that wouldn’t help.

Rough, even to get it secondhand. The experience of talking to Deme’s squad put life into all the phrases I’d seen trotted out in all the awards I’d ever processed. And this wasn’t just any write-up. It was for the Medal of f*cking Honor, which a part of me knew wasn’t going to happen, but still, it didn’t matter. Deme would get something, maybe even the Navy Cross, and he’d at least be considered for the big one. Just writing the words was exciting.

Medal of Honor recipients are the saints of the Corps. You’ve got Dan Daly in Belleau Wood and Smedley Butler in the Banana Wars and close to three hundred others in American conflicts stretching from the Civil War to the present day.

So I wrote the citation with my every frustration melting away in the excitement of the thing. Like reaching out with my fingers and touching a god through the keyboard of my computer. My job, I felt, meant something.

I even wrote about Deme in the personal statement I submitted, midway through the deployment, as part of my application to law school.

“Even the best adjutants aren’t saving lives, like Sergeant Deme, or risking their life on daily patrols, like your average grunt. But the best of us make sure those sacrifices are honored by providing them the administrative support they need, whether it be getting them absentee ballots or in assisting them with their wills. There isn’t any glory in this kind of work. The adjutant’s job is generally only noticed when it goes wrong. Both of my deployments have been spent at a desk, relieving Marines of burdens they will never know could have existed. That’s enough for me. It’s more than enough. And it’s what has led me to desire a public interest career in law.”

What I didn’t mention was that the death toll for our battalion by the end of the deployment was five, meaning that alley had been responsible for more than half of our total casualties. I also didn’t mention that that alley was in an area where the previous commander had warned our battalion to avoid aggressive patrolling. “We’re not going to see success here until we develop better relationships with the local population,” he’d said.

The reaction of the unit had been unanimous: “Those guys are idiots! We’re Marine infantry! We don’t avoid the enemy, we close with and destroy the enemy!” Lieutenant Colonel Motes, our CO, had an aggressive style, and the battalion didn’t really get on the COIN train until afterward.

That he’d sent his platoon into a death zone was not lost on Boylan, who had spent every moment since second-guessing every decision he made, convinced better leadership could have saved those Marines’ lives. His instincts about that were probably right. Boylan came back to the States thirty pounds lighter than when he’d left—skeletal, with bruise-purple skin underlining eyes that looked out from the bottom of an ocean. I’d never had a personal relationship with any of the five fallen Marines, so I tended to think of their deaths with a solemn, patriotic pride rather than the self-loathing and self-doubt so clearly tearing Boylan to shreds.