Nathaniel Fick - One Bullet Away

Table of Contents

The books enormous power derives from the quality of Ficks writing and the intensity of his moral vision. The prose is terse, clean and unmannered, the eye misses nothing. An Afghan sunrise, an Iraqi slum, or a Marine Corps sergeant is drawn in a few words, the dialogue is sharp, and the action sequences tight and tense. Fick is especially good at conveying his own feelings in battle

Ben Shepard, TLS

There is much of worth here. The author is... thoughtful, humane and reflective and has some keen insights. He is far from the mindless gung ho marine of the movies and would be a good man to go to war with

Herald on Sunday

A terrific account of basic training and active service... an excellent book which is timely and thought-provoking Glasgow Herald

Harrowing... deserves close reading and serious discussion

The Washington Post

Ficks descriptive and exacting writing... guarantees One Bullet Away a place in the war memoir hall of fame

USA Today

One can hardly imagine a finer boots-on-the-ground chronicle of this open-ended conflict, no matter how long it may last

Kirkus

One Bullet Away is a crisply written, highly readable, pacy march through the life of a combat leader. In each page, the reader can smell the cordite and see the chaos of combat, yet can also feel a tangible sense of the ethos and very essence not only of the United States Marine Corps but also of leadership, both at the military and the human level

RUSI Journal

Nathaniel Fick read Classics at Dartmouth, graduated in 1999 and joined the US Marine Corps. He passed officer training and joined a battalion just before 9/11. Fick saw action in Afghanistan, then joined the elite Recon Battalion in time for the invasion of Iraq. Among the first soldiers to enter Baghdad, he left the Marines in 2003 after being promoted to captain. He is now in a joint degree programme at Harvard Business School of Government.

One Bullet Away

NATHANIEL FICK

Orion

www.orionbooks.co.uk

A Weidenfeld & Nicolson ebook

A PHOENIX PAPERBACK

First published in the USA in 2005
By Houghton Mifflin Company
First published in Great Britain in 2006
by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
This paperback edition published in 2007
by Phoenix,
an imprint of Orion Books Ltd,
Orion House, 5 Upper St Martins Lane,
London WC2H 9EA

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright Nathaniel Fick 2005

The right of Nathaniel Fick to be identified as the author of
this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the copyright owner.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN : 978 0 2978 5705 1

www.orionbooks.co.uk

This ebook produced by Jouve, France

TO

CAPTAIN BRENT MOREL

Bravo Company, First Reconnaissance Battalion,
First Marine Division. Killed in Action 7April 2004,

Al Anbar Province, Iraq

AND

THE BRAVE MOTHERS

OF UNITED STATES MARINES

PART I

Peace

We should remember that one man is much the same as another, and that he is best who is trained in the severest school.

THUCYDIDES

F IFTEEN OF US climbed aboard the ancient white school bus. Wire mesh covered its windows and four black words ran along its sides: UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS. Dressed casually in shorts and sandals, we spread out and sat alone with our bags. Some sipped coffee from paper cups, and a few unfolded newspapers they had brought. I found a seat near the back as the bus started with a roar and a cloud of smoke blew through the open windows.

A second lieutenant, looking crisp in his gabardine and khaki uniform, sat in the front row. He had just graduated from Officer Candidates School, and would escort us on the hours drive to the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. Shortly after we pulled away from the recruiting office, he stood in the aisle and turned to face us. I expected a welcome, a joke, some commiseration.

Honor, courage, and commitment are the Marines core values, the lieutenant shouted over the engine. He sounded scripted, but also sincere. If you cant be honest at OCS, how can the Corps trust you to lead men in combat?

Combat. I glanced around the buss gunmetal interior, surprised to see people reading or pretending to sleep. No one answered the lieutenants question. He stood there in the aisle, glaring at us, and I sat up a little straighter. The lieutenant was my age, but he looked different. Shorter hair, of course, and broader shoulders. It was more than that. He had an edge, something in his jaw or his brow that made me self-conscious.

I turned toward the window to avoid his gaze. Families drove next to us, on their way to the lake or the beach. Kids wearing headphones gawked, surely wondering what losers were riding a school bus in the summertime. A girl in an open Jeep stood and started to raise her shirt before being pulled back down by a laughing friend. They waved and accelerated past. I thought of my friends, spending their summer vacations in New York and San Francisco, working in air-conditioned office towers and partying at night. Staring through the wire mesh at the bright day, I thought this must be what its like on the ride to Sing Sing. I wondered why I was on that bus.

I went to Dartmouth intending to go to med school. Failing a chemistry class had inspired my love of history, and I ended up majoring in the classics. By the summer of 1998, my classmates were signing six-figure contracts as consultants and investment bankers. I didnt understand what we, at age twenty-two, could possibly be consulted about. Others headed off to law school or medical school for a few more years of reading instead of living. None of it appealed to me. I wanted to go on a great adventure, to prove myself, to serve my country. I wanted to do something so hard that no one could ever talk shit to me. In Athens or Sparta, my decision would have been easy. 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.

Dartmouth encouraged deviation from the trampled path, but only to join organizations like the Peace Corps or Teach for America. I wanted something more transformative. Something that might kill me or leave me better, stronger, more capable. I wanted to be a warrior.

My family had only a short martial tradition. My maternal grandfather, like many in his generation, had served in World War II. He was a Navy officer in the South Pacific, and his ship, the escort carrier Natoma Bay , fought at New Guinea, Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, often supporting Marine invasion forces ashore. At 0635 on June 7, 1945, so the family story went, only two months before the end of the war, a Japanese kamikaze crashed into the Natoma Bay s flight deck. The explosion tore a hole in the steel twelve feet wide and twenty feet long. Shrapnel peppered my grandfathers body. My mother remembers watching him pick pieces of metal from his skin twenty years later. He had some of that shrapnel melted into a lucky horseshoe, which was shown to me with great reverence when I was a child.

My father enlisted in the Army in 1968. When most of his basic training class went to Vietnam, he received orders to the Army Security Agency. He spent a year in Bad Aibling, Germany, eavesdropping on Eastern bloc radio transmissions and waiting for the Soviets to roll through the Fulda Gap. He completed OCS just as President Richard Nixon began drawing down the military, and took advantage of an early out to go to law school. But my dad was proud to have been a soldier.

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