Marines face toughest fight - in themselves

[MORTARDUDE]

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/trib.../s_131457.html

Marines face toughest fight - in themselves

By Carl Prine
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, April 27, 2003

One was a commander who had few friends. He made decisions few liked, but did so with humor and intelligence, and led his men 380 miles to Baghdad.

Another, a Carnegie Mellon University graduate, was a lieutenant kicked out of the command of his platoon -- a man who bore the brunt of humiliation, and did so with grace and dignity.

The third was a private first class, new to the Corps, who endangered other Marines in a "friendly fire" incident.

All three fought wars within the war and became heroes for the quiet ways they won inner battles. All three came out of the war new, better men because they triumphed on the battlefield of the soul.









Commanding an experiment

Few commanders are born to lead men into battle, but Lt. Col. Mike Micucci might have been. The son of a decorated Marine, Micucci and most of his Italian-American siblings joined the military. He's had to salute his sister -- the Army's recruiting boss in Chicago -- because she outranked him. A brother, living in Sweden, is a high-ranking naval officer.

But Mike Micucci was the star. He made his mark in the 1991 Persian Gulf War by leading a company of engineers and became the model of the Marine combat officer: gruff and tough, his chest spangled with medals.

He rose steadily through the ranks, finally plucking one of the most coveted posts in the Corps: commander of the 2nd Combat Engineer Battalion in Camp Lejeune, N.C., where he was born 41 years ago.

The Pentagon, planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom, sent him to Kuwait to command the largest collection of engineers in Marine Corps history. Two years shy of retirement, he would lead nearly 2,000 men from camps in California and North Carolina.

About half of them would be parceled off to infantry, tank and reconnaissance units at the front, commanded by men Micucci barely knew. The rest, glommed together in a "supersized battalion," would stay with him. He knew just a handful of the officers and men he'd have to lead. And the sheer bulk of the battalion, with its trucks, armored bulldozers and platoons of combat engineers -- grunts who blow things up -- would become an ungainly gaggle heading north into combat.

So Micucci made his first unpopular decision. He broke the battalion into three groups. He would stay with the combat-engineer-heavy "forward attack" unit, a small force intended to face withering enemy fire, risking their lives so that the others would make it to Baghdad.

"It was an experiment, sure," Micucci said. "I can't tell you I wasn't nervous about it. No one had ever tried this before, not in the Marine Corps. And I knew it would take a while to make all the parts work together, and we didn't have a lot of time."

Micucci was forced into shortcuts. Rather than train a new staff, he imported his headquarters from Camp Lejeune, often promoting officers of junior rank to coveted posts. That rankled some leaders from the California contingent who lost out to North Carolina officers.

It got so bad that only days before crossing into Iraq, the California "Motor T" section accused their Eastern peers of stealing spare parts. Guards were posted, ordered to protect their trucks from fellow Marines. Officers traded insults.

"Time was of the essence, and we didn't have much of it," Micucci said. "I know it might have alienated some officers when they weren't put on my staff. But I had to have men I knew, who knew me and who I could count on immediately. I didn't have time to train a new staff.

"Did it make enemies? No, I don't think so. But I know a lot of them were unhappy about it. Now that we're in Baghdad, I think they understand why I did it that way."

Many junior officers became naysayers and malcontents. They gossiped that a third of his vehicles would die in the desert, becoming victims of bad maintenance and a lack of spare parts. They predicted the Combat Engineers would become known as the "Hansel and Gretel" battalion because a trail of broken bulldozers and trucks would lie in their wake.

The kibitzing carried on all the way to Baghdad, mostly behind his back. Then, in the capital, it came to a head. At a meeting of commanders, Micucci reminded a California captain that he had to wear his helmet at all times, an order from the division commander. The officer snapped back that it "didn't fit" and rolled his eyes before plopping his Kevlar helmet onto his head.

Many senior leaders would've screamed at the younger captain, maybe even drummed him out of the Corps for grumbling at an order. But Micucci knew he needed the man, and canning him would destroy morale. So he smiled, let the insult pass and focused on how the battalion would wage war that day.

Lieutenants and captains didn't realize Micucci heard all their insults and jeers. He said nothing, leading by example, pressing division generals for tougher combat missions during the day and giving orders to his captains with a smile at night. Friendly, but firm.

And maybe that's the true mark of a skilled commander. He was smart enough, and patient enough, to make everyone else different, too.

After the helmet incident, everyone began to realize that the complaining and second-guessing didn't get them to the capital. Micucci did.

And along the way, they destroyed more than 100 enemy howitzers, tanks and rockets. They held and cleared three Iraqi airfields. They helped secure from Saddam Fedayeen militias the vital Highway 1 up the gut of Iraq, keeping the flow of war supplies moving. Then they rode into the Al-Tuwaitha atomic plant and held it for coalition inspectors.

"I am very, very proud of what these Marines and sailors have done," Micucci said. "And I do understand the burden of command. Maybe my officers didn't always understand why I did things the way I did. But I couldn't be the kind of commander who yelled and threatened everybody, like a bully. Not in this war. That's one form of leadership, but I couldn't use it because it would've backfired.

"To succeed, I had to convince. I had to be patient and wait until everyone came together. And the bottom line is that they did, and it all worked out, like I knew it would."

'Haicks don't quit'

At Camp Pendleton, Calif., 1st Lt. Brent Haick admits he made mistakes. He was "abrasive." He quarreled with senior commanders and tried too hard to earn the respect of his men, not his superiors. While on desert maneuvers, a key piece of heavy equipment broke at a demolition range. Rather than blame his men, he took full responsibility and lost his job.

"An officer is always ultimately responsible for what happens. The officer must set the tone," said Haick, 25, of Jackson, Miss. "There is no justifying what I believe, I guess. Maybe I idealize that. But an officer must be held accountable for everything in his command. That's the way it should be, and what happened before I got here is my full responsibility. I'm a man and an officer. I accept the consequences."

In December, while his peers prepared their men for combat, Haick was transferred to become "an officer without a billet" on a bloated headquarters staff at Camp Matilda in Kuwait. In the Marines, he was a nobody with a silver bar, too junior to matter to staffers, too senior to fit in with the enlisted grunts his own age.

Some lieutenants barely spoke to him. Captains gave him menial tasks to "put him in his place," as one of them said.

He tried to snatch a combat post with the infantry or Marine reconnaissance, but no one gave him a shot. He was stuck in the Combat Engineers Battalion, where nobody wanted him. In a war where all men, at some time, feel lonely, no one was lonelier than Haick, a Carnegie Mellon University graduate with a degree in mechanical engineering.

He crossed into Iraq with a rifle, a Tom Clancy book, no friends and no mission. That meant weeks riding shotgun in a Humvee or sitting for interminable hours in front of a military radio, keeping notes for his superiors on what other platoon commanders said and did during the war.

When he was depressed, he remembered what his mom told him when he tried to leave seventh-grade football: "Haicks don't quit." So he didn't.

As the war wound down, Haick got his chance for redemption. He volunteered to tag along with an elite group of older, senior enlisted combat engineers who ventured daily into Baghdad, destroying enemy cannons and munitions.

The engineers didn't want to take him at first. He had to prove himself, spooling together enough explosives to tear down a skyscraper, then blasting Iraqi guns five stories into the air, sometimes with enemy gunfire ringing around him.

It took a week, but he finally earned the respect of some of his combat engineers. Maybe the top officers in his command will never shake his hand, but the enlisted men who sweated to win the war will.

On his last night in Baghdad, Haick didn't eat his rations with other lieutenants. He ate sitting in a circle with the decorated noncommissioned officers. He played a few rounds of hearts with veterans from past Marine wars, amid convivial conversation. He was happy, a Mississippi man propped on a box of rations, smiling in the quiet company of mutual, unspoken respect, occasionally spitting out a chew of Copenhagen, listening to the bullets rip the night.

"I can't regret anything that happened to me," Haick said. "It happened, and that's that. I just wanted a second chance. I wanted to prove myself. I guess, in the end, I did. I hope I did. Maybe that's always been my mistake. I always look for the respect of enlisted men. I should've been working just as hard, no, harder, to impress the officers above me."

The Cajun joker

He looks eerily similar to another New Orleans man, musician and actor Harry Connick Jr. But at 5 feet 6 inches tall, Pfc. Brent Bourgeois is shorter and skinnier, maybe 130 pounds with his boots on.

The smallest combat engineer in the security platoon, Bourgeois, 19, was constantly ribbed about being tiny. Maybe that's why he displayed a goofy, class-clown kind of humor.

But he has grown combat-hard. A third-generation Marine, he lugged the same heavy pack, muscled the same kind of machine gun into his foxhole at night and took the same risks as any of the bigger men.

Because the Marines needed more than a thousand combat engineers for the assault on Iraq, even the youngest kids just out of school, like Bourgeois, got orders to Kuwait.

They're called "boots" because they recently graduated from boot camp. When they hit the fleet, they face a year of menial tasks -- scrubbing toilets, burning trash, picking up litter.

A boot like Bourgeois knows he's in for a nasty job when a corporal calls, ''Pfc.'s up!''

They learn to take orders so that someday, a few years later, they know how to give them. Along the way, they make mistakes, which are often not so gently corrected by young corporals.

Unless, of course, they make a mistake no corporal can fix. That's what Bourgeois did.

The moon was rising over an airfield south of Baghdad. He'd been shoveling sandbags for hours, a boot job, his rifle slung on his back. It was time for him to man his post, guarding the perimeter from snipers. He'd sleep later. That's what boots do.

"I guess when I was filling sandbags, the safety came off," Bourgeois recalled in Baghdad. "The rifle just went off. Bang! It scared everybody. It scared me! I never expected that to happen. Never."

The slug bit into the dirt behind him, then ricocheted, ripping through a tarp near a group of senior noncommissioned officers. Marines take ''friendly fire'' accidents very seriously. Before his rifle went off, Bourgeois had been considered for a meritorious battlefield promotion. Now, even though no one was hurt, there was talk of busting him down to private.

His squad leader no longer let him keep a bullet in his rifle, ready to fire at the Republican Guard soldiers moving around him. He was the only Marine in the entire battalion with a weapon like that. To his fellow enlisted Marines, it was the ultimate indignity.

''I was under the spotlight, that's for sure," he said. "I mean, now the corporals and sergeants come up and check to make sure I don't have a round in the chamber. They check on my magazine. They want to make me an example of weapons safety.

"Yeah, it's tough."

Some Marines, when hit with constant disapproval, fold up. They become indolent miscreants until they're forced out of the Corps.

Bourgeois only worked harder, to prove himself. Even when the other boots made fun of him for letting go of the round, he trudged on, sometimes making his tormentors chuckle with a self-deprecating joke, always with that Cajun smile.

That was the hard way to do things. But Bourgeois won't have it any other way.

"War is funny," he said. "I was nervous, sure, but I can't say I was ever scared. I was never shaking. I never was, 'Oh, God, what if I die?' That never came across my mind. If I die, I die.

"That's the way I've got to go through life, you know? Yeah, I had that accident. It was bad. It is bad. But I learned from it. And someday, when I become a (noncommissioned officer), I'm not going to treat my guys like I was treated. I've been treated like an idiot.

"I'm going to show them how they should act by the way I lead, by example, you know? And when one of them makes a mistake, I'm going to turn to him and say, 'Yeah, I made a mistake once, too, and it was during the war. And it was hard after that. Real hard. And I got over it. And you will, too.'

"That's the way I'm going to be."


Carl Prine can be reached at cprine@tribweb.com.