The front lines.(One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer)(Book review)

One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, by Nathaniel Fick (Houghton Mifflin, 384 pp., $25)

CAPTAIN FICK was caught in an ambush outside Muwaffiqiya, Iraq. Running through bullets, he sensed time "expanding and contracting like a Slinky." A Slinky? The simile is out of place in a chronicle replete with martial jargon, with enfilading and suppressing fire, with M4s and MK-19s, with QuikClot and tourniquets. Out of place, but also one of the book's most telling details. It's a remnant of what Fick put behind him--a civilian culture of prolonged childhood when he chose the course that led to his service in the Marines' elite First Recon Battalion. Fick enlisted in the Marines as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, where he'd majored in classics. To him, the Corps embodied duty and sacrifice, ideas rarely discussed without cynicism in academia. While his friends were busy interviewing or interning, Fick attended Officer Candidate School at Quantico--where "individual" is a term of opprobrium and candidates learn what it takes to lead U.S. Marines. In OCS's final test, "the Crucible," Fick spent sleepless days running through forests, barbed wire, and snake-infested bogs--and thinking of the "soft and homogenized" society he'd abandoned.

On September 11, Fick was in Australia; his Pacific cruise aboard the USS Dubuque had been interrupted for artillery drills in the outback. The Dubuque was put on "THREATCON DELTA" and the Marines were off to the Arabian Sea at 20 knots. Responses to the attack ranged from the maudlin--"Amazing Grace" piped through the ship's RA. system--to the grimly tongue-in-cheek, as with the soldier who said he would be fighting for "cheap gas and a world without ragheads."

Fick rallied his platoon: "If we're lucky, we'll be the ones to get revenge for this." What worried him was being responsible for his men's lives; the Afghans, after all, were battle-hardened. His team's first mission was to recover a Black Hawk helicopter that had crashed on the Pakistani border, before it could become a propaganda set-piece. "I didn't think about the sweep of history," writes Fick, who hoped only that he wouldn't "do anything stupid and get people killed."

That mission was a success--but it was only the beginning. Shortly thereafter, manning a roadblock outside Kandahar, the Marines got a taste of Afghan audacity. A truck approached; men leapt out of it with AK-47s and were mowed down. Then "a minibus and a dump truck, carrying dozens of armed men," joined the fray. A Navy jet swooped down, and "trucks full of Taliban soldiers disappeared in the flash, leaving only twisted metal and charred lumps of flesh." Combat, adrenaline, and the stench of death were palpable.

After the Afghan war, Fick was selected for Recon, the capstone of the Corps. This meant more training: Airborne, dive school, even mock field interrogations. Then came Iraq: Despite his ...