Free Joker One by Donovan Campbell Page A

men clearly responded to his unswerving dedication and he quickly became one of the best leaders in the platoon, myself included. So, as per the Corps’s propensity to punish its most competent performers, in mid-January I separated Bowen from his squad and packed him off to an Arabic immersion course.
    This brand-new course was part of a larger 1st Marine Division program to prepare 2/4 for a mission that none of the platoon commanders had ever heard of before: SASO, short for Stability and Support Operations. The acronym’s relative obscurity had a simple explanation—it was an Army term coined to describe the duties of foreign occupation. Ironically, at the same time that the Marines chose to adopt the Army’s terminology for our future mission, my division was busily engaged disparaging the Army’s performance in its current one. “The Army is all screwed up,” we were told in a speech by Colonel Kennedy. “They’re too hard on the Iraqi people—it’s no wonder that they’re having problems.” Our division commander, General Mattis, clarified this point in a number of different newspaper articles, the gist of which was the following: “The Army is always bringing down the iron hammer on a timid and abused populace, but the Marines will be different. We’re going to extend the people the velvet glove. We’re going to make the Iraqis our friends. We’re going to be nice to them and win hearts and minds.”
    If there were still any questions outstanding about how we were going to differentiate ourselves from the Army, General Mattis laid them to rest when he told his officers that when the Marines returned to Iraq, “One civilian death equals mission failure.” The division motto had even been changed to: “First Do No Harm—No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy.” It was somewhat strange to see a line from the Hippocratic Oath adapted to fit our line of work, and we knew even then that the general had set a nearly impossibly high standard, but we believed in all of it wholeheartedly. After all, most insurgencies desperately need the support of at least some portion of the indigenous population, and if we could drive a wedge between theIraqi people and the enemy fighters, we could cut our foes off from their lifeblood. The general knew bone deep that in any counterinsurgency the people are the prize, and he took every step necessary to instill this strange population-centric mind-set into a force oriented toward high-intensity combat against a well-defined enemy.
    So, two weeks into January we shifted much of our time and effort away from proficiency in traditional missions and toward a new goal: learning how to avoid offending the Iraqis. My Marines, 50 percent of whom previously probably could not have named Islam as a major world religion, now learned the intricacies of the historical and doctrinal conflicts between the Sunni and Shiite Islamic sects. We crammed Iraqi cultural nuances down their throats as fast as they could swallow them. Showing the bottom of your shoes is a horrible offense, we told our new men, and touching people with your left hand is even worse. Don’t stare at the women and talk only to the men. Be polite and smile a lot. Wave when you patrol and don’t paint your faces in urban areas. After all, the Iraqis’ lives are scary and miserable enough; we certainly don’t want to make them worse. We are the friendly Marines, here to help.
    The rationale underpinning this new training emphasis was well in line with our population-centric approach, but it was also very risky, because Marines always have default settings that inform their actions in those precious first moments of a firefight. By training as we did, we flipped our Marines’ default switches from “be fierce” to “be nice”; we told them to hesitate, to ask questions before shooting, and to assume greater personal risk to better protect the civilians. It was a calculated risk, and one that we suspected might cause