Dakota Meyer: Into the Fire

“If I’m going to be in the Marines, I want to be in the infantry. I want to fight, not sit behind a desk.”

In 2006, our country was in two wars. We had been attacked on 9/11. I was thirteen when I watched on television as the Twin Towers caved in. I was more than willing to fight the bastards who had murdered three thousand Americans.

“I’ll guarantee you a tryout at boot camp,” the sergeant said. “If you make it through, you can become a grunt.”

An hour later, he followed me out to our farm, where we sat around the kitchen table and he told me about the fighting in Fallujah.

“A lot of shots at five hundred meters,” he said, “straight down the streets.”

“I could hit at that range,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

I don’t know whether he believed me or not. We sat without saying much more until Dad walked in after work. He looked at the two of us.

“Ko,” he said, “what have you done now?”

The three of us talked for the next hour. There was no hard sell. The recruiting sergeant and my father left the decision up to me.

“I don’t want to go to college, Dad,” I said. “And I don’t want to stay here herding cows. I want something better.”

“Well, Ko,” he said, “I don’t disagree with your choice.”

The good-byes were somber when I left for boot camp. Dad was okay, but not really happy to see me go. Granddad told me I’d do fine if I didn’t piss off any of the sergeants. My guidance counselor, Ann, was somber. Her husband, Toby, a state trooper, had worked on our farm when I was about eight. Ten years my senior, he taught me how to spear tobacco and stalk turkeys. Ann and Toby had spoken up over the years whenever I needed it. None of my family came right out and said it, but my desire to be a Marine grunt in combat naturally did concern them. I’m sure there’s not one family in America that doesn’t have worries when a son or daughter goes off to war.

I sat among twenty other quiet recruits for the fourteen-hour bus trip from Louisville. At three in the morning, the bus started along the causeway that crosses the swamps around Parris Island, South Carolina. At the front gate, a sergeant boarded the bus.

“Put your heads between your legs!” he yelled. “Don’t move or blink.”

Then the bus door closed and we continued on for what seemed like the longest drive ever.

We came to a stop and the door opened. I heard the slow stomp of footsteps.

“Get your asses out of those seats!” a drill instructor boomed at us. “Outside! Keep your mouths shut and follow the yellow footsteps.”

So it began: close haircuts to strip away your old identity, exercises to prove you’re not half as strong as you figured, simple tasks that show you are mentally weak, drill instructors who mock your attempts to look tough. It’s right out of the movies, but it never stops.

We were handed a blanket and two sheets and told to make our bunks and then stand against the wall.

“Time’s up!” our drill instructor, Sgt. Brady, yelled a few minutes later.

About half the forty bunks in our squad bay were made in time.

“Rip ‘em off! Start again!”

Thirty bunks made. Brady would walk through and inspect a neatly made bunk. He’d nod, move to another bunk. Not good enough.

“Rip ‘em off!”

Eventually, we figured out that the exercise was about helping each other: one fails, everyone fails.

Not all the weakest links would survive, however, and the idea of returning to Kentucky in disgrace terrified me.

I’d crawl under my blanket at night, turn on my flashlight, and write letters to Dad. I missed my life back in Kentucky.

The second month is the turnaround, when they build you back up. Sgt. Brady made me a squad leader, meaning he yelled at me for the mistakes of ten other recruits. That was all right; he had his job, and I had mine.

The third month of boot camp was actually fun. We spent time on the rifle range, which I enjoyed, and Sgt. Brady took to harassing me for the sheer glee of it.

On family day, the day before graduation, Dad introduced himself to Sgt. Brady.

“Looks like you’ve taken a few pounds off, Dakota,” Dad said. Then, turning to Brady, he said, “He seems in fighting shape. You don’t have an easy job. Sergeant, I’d be pleased to buy you dinner.”

Graduation Day was impressive: a band with the deep drums and sharp bugles, the pennants waving proudly, four hundred new Marines marching in step, colonels saluting generals, and friends and family applauding and waving.

I spent the next two months in the SOI (School of Infantry). Only 15 percent of the Marine Corps (and the Army) are in the infantry. In today’s military, there are more combat pilots than infantry squad leaders.

At SOI, a hundred fundamental tactics were hammered into me, such as laying down a base of fire before maneuvering, understanding enfilade and grazing fires (an enfilade position lets you fire down a long line of the enemy, like you’re at the end of their trench; grazing fire is just sweeping the ground with heavy fire a foot or two up over the wide terrain of the enemy’s position), and learning how to read terrain and translate squiggly lines on a map into your position on the ground.

A Marine squad is comprised of three four-man fire teams. Everything you do as a rifleman revolves around that four-man team. One man carries a weapon more powerful than those of the others, but that’s a minor point. In the field, you don’t do anything without those three other guys. You don’t shit, sleep, eat, or move without the other three knowing about it.

A Marine squad with those three fire teams is like a boxer with three arms. One arm jabs with bursts of fire to keep the opponent off-balance while another arm loops around with a left hook, with the third arm ready to follow up wherever there’s an opening. If one arm is wounded, the other two can keep fighting. Fire to pin down the enemy; maneuver to finish him off: fire, maneuver, fire, maneuver.

Five months after joining up, I finally joined a real Marine rifle battalion: the 3rd Marine Regiment in Hawaii. On the day before Thanksgiving, 2006, I lugged my seabag up the steps of a dilapidated barracks in paradise. By way of greeting, some old salts on the second deck pelted me with beer bottles and shouts of “boot!”

I was assigned to a four-man fire team led by Lance Cpl. Daniel Kreitzer, age thirty, who had enlisted in response to the Twin Towers attack. He would lead us to Iraq, where he had already served.

We three team members lived in one dingy room, while Kreitzer lived down the hall with other team leaders. He let us know we were nothing until we proved ourselves in Iraq.

Kreitzer loathed the improvised explosive device, or IED—a primitive land mine that ripped your legs off. You hear about the big ones, designed to take out a Humvee, but they also made smaller IEDs to kill a soldier just walking down a street. The insurgents would bury a plastic jug filled with homemade explosives, insert a long wire, hide nearby, and touch the wire to a flashlight battery as you walked by. On his prior tour, Kreitzer had picked up the blown-up body of one of his buddies.

We spent a lot of time moving fast in seventy pounds of armor and gear, losing a gallon of sweat in the high humidity. No matter how tired we were, we never moved without one team member watching over the other three, checking for anything out of the ordinary. We learned how to skirt around trash piles, avoid freshly turned dirt, and take each step knowing that if you relax, you’re dead—or, even worse, your friends are.

In February of 2007, four months into Hawaii, I saw a bulletin announcing openings in the sniper platoon. In the barracks, I had heard that the firefights in Iraq’s Anbar Province—the Marine area—had slackened. The war was rapidly winding down.