Free Joker One by Donovan Campbell Page B

us to take higher casualties in the short run in pursuit of longer-term aims.
    But 2/4 hadn’t seen combat yet, so friendly wounds weren’t real to us in January 2004; we couldn’t truly feel yet what the words “higher casualties” meant. Besides, none of Golf Company’s leadership could disagree with the idea of trying to protect the innocent at our own expense. After all, it was why most of us had joined, only, in this case, the innocent were not our fellow countrymen; rather, they were citizens of a strange land, and they spoke a strange language and kept strange customs. In keeping with this sentiment, my CO made a bold decision to eliminate his weapons platoon altogether, a move that ran counter to at least twenty years of past standardorganization but that made a lot of practical sense for our future success. We would almost certainly be deployed to an urban environment, and, given the counterinsurgency nature of our mission (and general morality), our company was highly unlikely to be firing mortars and rockets regularly into a densely populated city. So, with a little horse trading, the CO transformed Golf Company from three rifle platoons and one weapons platoon to four straight-up rifle platoons. We kept the mortars and the rockets, though, and if things got really bad we could always re-form the teams to use them.
    It was a brilliant if unorthodox call, and it would make our company significantly more flexible in combat than the others. However, the decision came with a very personal cost: Corporal Teague, whom I had come to depend upon as one of my best young leaders and as one of my most competent individual Marines in general, would be replaced as our first-squad leader by a new sergeant from Flowers’s platoon whom nobody, including Flowers, knew. I had told the CO that I preferred to keep Teague, but I was overruled, so I had to break the bad news to my now-former first-squad leader. Fearing the conversation and tempted to postpone it, I managed to force myself to pull Teague aside fairly soon. When I told him that we were getting a new sergeant, and that my request to send the man somewhere else had been overruled, he nodded, then told me simply, “Sir, even if I ain’t called a squad leader, I’m never gonna stop acting like one. You need anything, sir, you can count on me. I’ll be there for you and the new guy.”
    Whoever this new sergeant was, he had better be damn good.
    I f you had told me when I was a young undergraduate that, for the rest of my life, I would owe a deep debt of gratitude to a tattoo of a naked she-devil, I would probably have laughed in your face. It goes to show how much I knew as a college student, because I am, as it turns out, eternally grateful for one of the most tasteless tattoos I’ve ever seen in my life, for that tattoo combined with the CO’s organization decision to give me Sergeant Mariano O. Noriel, the man who would become my first-squad leader and the closest thing that I had to a confidant and friend.
    Noriel was our mystery sergeant, and the reason that no one knew him was that until very recently, he had been stationed at a recruiting office somewhere near San Diego. With six years in the infantry and one straightyear in Okinawa, Noriel had earned himself a break from the action for a while, and recruiting was supposed to have been it. However, shortly after starting his cushy new desk job, the good sergeant had to have all his tattoos photographed (the Marines have strict guidelines limiting the number and type of tattoos on a potential recruit, and they expect their recruiters to adhere to the same guidelines). When my future first-squad leader removed his shirt for the photos, his then-bosses were horrified to find that pasted across Noriel’s entire right shoulder was a tattoo of a squatting naked devil woman, complete with horns, tail, and all the other pieces that make for an anatomically correct female devil. Immediately thereafter, Noriel’s