Neff's So Navy

By Brendan M. Neff | Friday, October 21, 2005

BOOK REVIEW

One Bullet Away The Making of a Marine Officer
Nathaniel Fick '99
Houghton Mifflin, 2005

Editor's Note: Nathaniel Fick '99 will be signing copies of his new book, One Bullet Away, in the Rockefeller Center at 4:30pm on Armistice Day, November 11.

Like so many other Dartmouth students, Nathaniel Fick '99 matriculated at the College intending to attend medical school.

But by his junior summer he found many of the typical post-graduate opportunities unappealing. He was not enticed by the six-figure contracts his classmates were signing to become investment bankers and twenty-two year old consultants. Neither was he tempted to spend another half-decade at graduate school. He wanted to live, but he did not want to join one of the "acceptable" deviations from the beaten path, like the Peace Corps or Teach for America. He wanted to do "something so hard that no one could ever talk s**t" to him. Inspired by the ethos of the ancient Greeks and Romans he read as a classics major, he wanted to become a warrior. He decided to become a Marine—the toughest of the armed services, the ones who would teach him "everything I love you too much to teach you."

Fick found himself unprepared for the stark realities of modern warfare, he wrote in One Bullet Away, a new book about his war experiences. While at Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia, Fick unlearned what he had learned. He learned that to survive, he must obey orders and not question them, to act as part of a team and not as an individual. And during simulated combat drills in the South Pacific, he learned that he was only "one bullet away" from commanding his company, since a single bullet is all it would take to take his commander's life. He learns that mental and physical toughness is essential for victory.

Like so many, Fick's life was inexorably altered by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Already deployed to the Pacific, he would have the opportunity to put his skills to the test and avenge the thousands murdered that day, including one of Fick's Dartmouth classmates who died on the 104th floor of the North Tower. A lieutenant in Afghanistan, Fick described the daily life of a field officer, his men and especially their psychology. All were eager to finally see action—and all found the endless waiting to be excruciating. The battles were surgical, over almost too quickly.

But even the quick wins in Afghanistan left a poor taste in Fick's mouth. From tactical errors to political spats with nominally friendly Pakistani officers, he bore firsthand witness to the outcomes of policy decisions taken thousands of miles away.

Iraq tested the training Fick, a captain in the elite First Recon Battalion, had undergone to that point. He described combat there as a "form of vertigo," where no two men see the same thing and where time and space expand and contract unpredictably. In one twelve hour span Fick had been "shot at by other Marines, overseen the killing of a group of men intent on killing [him], watched artillery pour into a crowded town, nearly been killed by [his] own CO, and now was about to be launched on a long-range mission into enemy territory." In another instance, when two civilians were inadvertently shot, he and his men were "abandoned to suffer the consequences of other people's poor decisions."

While he felt clearly that his every action had potentially monumental consequences, he also believed that his life was all but in free fall, his life no longer in his hands. In many cases his unit was saved only by the "Iraqis' impatience and tactical incompetence." But despite the stress, Fick became "aware enough to be concerned that I was starting to enjoy it."

While he never acted on his thoughts while in uniform, Fick wrote that he was often discomforted by the prosecution of the war on terror. Particularly frustrating to Fick was the tendency of officers, more eager to protect their own fiefdoms than to do the right thing, to blithely ignore their underlings. In Iraq, for instance, his company discovered a suspected mobile weapons lab, but a careful inspection revealed it was merely an enemy field kitchen. Later, confronted with hungry Muslim clerics after the liberation of Baghdad, Fick and his men looked dubiously on the decision to rename the Saddam City neighborhood after radical Shiite leader, Muqtada al-Sadr. Fick's discontent with the military hierarchy is best reflected in his portrayal of headquarters officers in occupied Baghdad strutting about in clean uniforms, laughing and taking souvenir pictures of the dead, while his Marines lie exhausted from constant battle and stress.

Fick tells a story of a soldier just following orders, a soldier so-well trained and eager to put his training to use that there is no room for political critique. He makes it clear, though, that this training, however rigid and unthinking, is the key to American military success: the ability to follow orders without question is among the military's most deadly weapons.

The end of Fick's tour of duty in Iraq ultimately meant the end of his career in the military. He had been a field officer in both Iraq and Afghanistan and had not lost a single man under his command, but he could not continue to serve. Fick explained that he left the Marines because he had "become a reluctant warrior." He had joined the Corps because of his faith in a warrior ethos, and he found that he was still able to fight. But he could never again risk the deaths of men who he respected, emulated, and loved. Reflecting on his combat experience in an interview with The Dartmouth Review, Fick admitted it was "in part because of luck," that none of his men died. Nonetheless, he credits the training and experience his men received—a theme he touched on again and again in his book.

Having quit the Marines after rotating out of Iraq, Fick wrote about the necessity of a "critical reassessment" of the conduct of the war in Iraq. The solutions espoused by our politicians, he said, have become "entrenched in two camps," each equally poor. On one side is the White House and its constant refrain of "stay the course," which he says is surpassed in logical paucity only by the Left's calls for a precipitous withdrawal. To win in Iraq today, Fick told the Review, the American military must adapt its tactics to the insurgents faster than the insurgents can adapt to the Americans. The tactical incompetence of Saddam's warriors has been replaced by cold efficiency of al Qaeda terrorists, Fick said, and winning the adaptation race key is the key to victory.

Despite his pessimism about politics, Fick says he would still join the Marines today—despite the very real dangers—and he encourages more "good, smart, thoughtful, articulate people" to join up. One Bullet Away suggests that many of the problems in today's military are caused by a lack of intelligent consideration. While obeying orders is important, he says, so is a healthy questioning of authority, a willingness do what's right even if an officer says otherwise. This "thinking man's fight" cannot be waged by the Lyndie Englands of the world.

Neff's So Navy

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