Marine Corps News Room

http://www.ajc.com/search/content/opinion/stories/2007/06/17/isbishop0617a.html

By John Matthew Bishop
For the Journal-Constitution
Published on: 06/17/07

For many of the young men present, today's combat will be the first of their Marine Corps careers. Long have they sought this reckoning, each wondering what he would do when, deep in his psychological subterrain, he felt the grim hour being tolled. In the Corps, it's known as a "gut-check." Today, upon this blood-soaked patch of earth the sons of Western civilization must unlearn their inhibitions and kill unflinchingly, for Death has taken the field, the Valkyries are upon the air and over the hesitant and hindmost do their shadows move first.

In search of this fight, several hundred recruits from around the country join the Marine Corps infantry each month, shunning safer military jobs. From operating forklifts to repairing nuclear submarines, all service members have the opportunity to earn money for college or learn the cutting-edge skills so widely advertised in military commercials.

So why does an 18-year-old man choose the infantry? To stand face-to-face with his own mortality, to suffer the piercing gaze of Death, to understand that its terrible eyes are ultimately his own? This is why a young man chooses to come here, of all places, and to do this, of all things. As infantrymen, we revere combat as a brutal rite of passage, the culminating test of our monomaniacal, obsessive training; as human beings, we undertake it as a spiritual trial. We want combat, and we want to kill.

Today, as the fleeing gunmen open fire upon us, it appears we may get our chance. Above, the Humvee's roof shivers as my gunner's enormous .50 caliber machine-gun wades into the fray, its angry thump-thump-thump rattling the teeth in my gunner's skull. For the next 30 seconds, we tear blindly across the desert before finally emerging from the dust. The white sedan sits approximately 200 meters away with its doors ajar, and as we pull abreast of it, I discover the cause: The path has dead-ended against a large embankment. The remainder of the chase will take place on foot.

Scrambling up the embankment, I assess the situation. All four car doors were open, so the car probably contained four or five occupants, and they have two options now; they can evade us, hoping to escape, or, if bent on slaughter, they can lay an ambush. A sobering view greets us as we reach the hilltop —- sprawled before us lies a labyrinthine waterworks of numerous hills interspersed with deep irrigation canals. Whatever the fugitives opt to do, the terrain offers abundant concealment.

A comrade points wordlessly to the far side of the waterworks, which is about 300 meters wide. Everyone understands; if we hurry, we might be able to encircle them. Off we go. Over hills and through ditches we run, rifles held ready, splitting off one at a time as new paths diverge and sweeping the waterworks as thoroughly as possible in our haste. A long, narrow pipe extends across a deep canal and with no other options available, I mount it, praying I don't fall into the water below and drown under all my gear. Both narrower and longer than the training logs used back in North Carolina, the pipe might pose a problem if not for my adrenaline, which carries me over it quickly and easily. Alone now, I soon emerge on the far side of the waterworks, beyond which stretches empty farmland. As I catch my breath, my comrades emerge at various points around the perimeter, establishing a hastily thrown cordon.

The long search

Back at the abandoned car, a preliminary search uncovers a veritable arsenal in the trunk: multiple suicide-bomber vests, explosives, detonation devices, rockets, AK-47s, grenades, handguns and plenty of ammunition. Additionally, there are computers, passports and a stack of foreign currency. Everything suggests that this is a handsomely financed, well-trained team of operatives imported from abroad —- probably by al-Qaida, but potentially by any of the estimated 20 active terrorist organizations within Iraq.

The stakes are high, so without air support or K-9 teams, our platoon scours the waterworks one canal at a time, a painstaking search through tall, riparian reeds and under steep banks that continues for five grueling hours. In the 125-degree heat, wearing close to 80 pounds of equipment and with no skin exposure, it's an exhausting, dizzying ordeal.

The fruitless search continues into the evening, and as the sun lowers, so do our hopes. Perhaps they escaped before we cordoned the area; even if not, we will need a miracle to find them after dark. Nobody is giving up, though —- everyone understands the consequences of losing a team of suicide bombers. As if to punctuate our solemnity, some barefoot kids begin a game of twilight soccer in the distance, their shrieks of delight rippling through the evening air. Tomorrow, as they crowd the local marketplaces alongside siblings and mothers, they will become targets to men such as these fugitives. Boys missing limbs, girls burned into lifelong disfigurement —- innocent survivors of suicide attacks can be seen in nearly every Iraqi town. Mothers in the black garb of mourning testify to the fates of the rest.

And then something happens. Amid the children's shouting, a different cry pierces the deepening dusk, a desperate scream that means people are about to start dying. Reinforcing its grievous finality, as though charioted behind its sound, machine-guns explode into full assault about 40 meters ahead of me. Later, the Marine who discovered the gunmen would recount the eerie moment when, staring down into the water of a nearby canal, he suddenly noticed the water staring back at him —- the men were almost completely immersed and covered with mud. In an instant the nearest screamed one last time, praising Allah as all four raised their AK-47s from 20 feet away and began emptying their magazines.

I'm running toward the canal when my mind starts working again, before which my memory is blank. Everything around seems to be exploding. Enemy grenades and rockets blow towering geysers of earth into the air. Just ahead of me, across the canal, three Marines have begun darting heroically up to the canal's bank at intervals, shooting, then dropping back again as the enemy targets them. Constant, unrelenting ferocity is the primary tactic of the Marine Corps infantryman, and my comrades' methodical, coordinated waves of attack have already silenced one of the AK-47s by the time I join them on the other side of the canal.

Tearing out the safety pin of my M-67 fragmentation grenade, I wait until my mates fall back a few steps under a withering gunfire. Gleaning my intent as I signal them from across the canal, they take cover, preparing their own grenades. Seconds later, three dark spheres disappear over the lip of the canal. As though the eye of the hurricane were passing over us, all grows still and hushed in the dying light. My comrades and I prepare for the killing blow.

The concussion of the blasts thumps the ground underfoot, and then the gunmen below us are also overhead, lingering momentarily before splattering wetly down upon us. Rushing the canal, we fire a volley into the bodies below —- for insurance —- and as we lower our muzzles, the last shot echoes through the waterworks and night overtakes all.

Mean —- and 'sweet'

It's strange —- the most common occurrences here in Iraq seem somehow impossible when, recalling them, I attempt to reconcile them with fonder memories of home. Dragging cold, twisted dead men out of the muddy ditch in which we slaughtered them . . . did I —- the man who my father taught to always hold the door, the one my mother after 25 years still insists on calling her "sweet little boy" —- really do that? Did I really pacify, blindfold and curse suspected insurgents as their onlooking wives and children sobbed and wailed, begging us to stop? While I suffer no feelings of remorse owing to the unpleasant necessities of war, I sometimes lie awake wondering that this place can occupy the same world as the place I once called home, that I hold doors in one and kill children's fathers in the other.

That I will never wholly exist in either of those places, I know. For with each "gut-check" sought and found, a civilized man —- if we here may still call ourselves such —- displaces himself a little farther outside the bounds of civilized existence. The very walls of abstention and self-denial behind which he once barricaded himself, behind which he renounced his savagery —- those walls which, in their aggregate among a people, constitute the great, protective edifice of civilization itself —- do not admit re-entry to those who, discontent with a life girded, choose to stray outside.

To take the battlefield is to forevermore exist —- within the world and within one's soul —- in a state of limbo between civilization and wilderness. When the hour of reckoning is tolled, we fight, kill, and come to understand ourselves as we come to understand the world around us —- neither good nor bad, but simply wild.

For such, ultimately, is humanity —- taming itself here and there, now and then, but never completely or permanently.

THE JOHN MATTHEW BISHOP FILE

Military rank: Corporal

Military branch: U.S. Marine Corps

Military occupational specialty: 0331, Machine-gunner

Current duty station: Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Theater of operations: Northern Iraq

Birthdate: Aug. 9, 1981

Birthplace: Northside Hospital, Atlanta

Age: 25

Education: North Gwinnett High School, 1996-1999, University of Georgia 1999-2004 (A.B.-English)

Contact: Bishop@desertpen.com

This is another installment in an occasional series of essays by Atlanta-born Cpl. John Matthew Bishop, a Marine who is serving his second tour of duty in Iraq. For operational security reasons, the exact location of where this battle occurred cannot be revealed. The firefight occurred in early May.