Once a Marine

An Iraq War Tank Commander's Inspirational Memoir of Combat, Courage, and Recovery

Nick Popaditch, Mike Steere

• Publisher: Savas Beatie
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781611211443
• eBook ISBN: 9781611210378
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

The Silver Star–awarded marine chronicles his service in Iraq in this "transcendent memoir of military service and its personal consequences" (Ralph Peters, Lt. Col., ret., author of Looking For Trouble).
 
In April, 2003, an AP photographer captured a striking image seen around the world of Gunny Sergeant Nick Popaditch smoking a victory cigar in his tank, the haunting statue of Saddam Hussein hovering in the background. Though immortalized in that moment as "The Cigar Marine," Popaditch's fighting was far from over.
 
The following year, he fought heroically in the battle for Fallujah and suffered grievous head wounds that left him legally blind and partially deaf. But he faced the toughest fight of his life when he returned home: the battle to remain the man and Marine he was.
 
At first, Nick fights to get back to where he was in Iraq-in the cupola of an M1A1 main battle tank, leading Marines in combat. As the seriousness and permanence of his disabilities become more evident, Nick fights to remain in the Corps in any capacity and help his brothers in arms. Then, following a medical retirement, he battles for rightful recognition and compensation for his disabilities. Throughout his harrowing ordeal, Nick fights to maintain his honor and loyalty, waging all these battles the same way—the Marine way—because anything less would be a betrayal of all he holds dear.

PART 1—

BANG, I’M NOT DEAD

1

Bang

Wednesday, April 7, 2004

1300 Local

Jolan District, Fallujah, Iraq

The last human being I see with perfect clarity—the last I will ever fully see—does his damndest to kill me.

Though my right eyeball is now glass and the left mostly unserviceable, the mind’s eye sees 20/20. There the man stands at my 3 o’clock, no more than 50 feet away from Bonecrusher, the M1A1 Main Battle Tank I command. He’s skylined on the roof of a mud-colored building on a little cul-de-sac off the street the tank follows, its machine guns chewing up walls while a half-dozen enemy fighters zigzag out in front. They’re the cattle, trying like crazy to get away from this 68-ton cattle dog, which is rabid and roaring and spitting death. An M1A1 in a fighting mood makes a hell of an impression, and I always do what I can to amp up the enemy’s terror and cause uncontrollable panic.

For the four United States Marines crewing Bonecrusher—commander, gunner, loader, driver—this action is much more calm and quiet than you’d think. The rear-mounted turbine engine makes only a low electric-sounding whine. My helmet has built-in ear protection that knocks back our machine gun fire to a dull fast hammering that’s not even loud enough to be distracting. Visuals—looking for targets and watching our hits and misses—make a much bigger impression than sounds.

What little talking we do is over the earphones and mikes built into our helmets. Some tankers yell all this Hollywood nonsense—“Smoke check the motherfuckers!” “I got him in my sights!” “Grease him!”—but my guys would never dare. We communicate like doctors doing major surgery, and the crew’s reactions better be as efficient as the words. I will absolutely wear a man out if he doesn’t pull the trigger before I get to the r-sound in “Fire.”

On this street so far, Bonecrusher does all the shooting, but coming into this intersection, with the cul-de-sac right and a cross-street running left, seems like a good place to get popped. I push my loader, Lance Corporal Alex Hernandez, down below the armor line and keep my own head up just high enough to see. You can’t kill ‘em if you can’t find ‘em, and I do that better with my own optics than with the tank commander’s periscopes. I see my guy on the roof making a big beautiful target. Of course I return the favor, showing him the whole flank of the tank and a piece of my own personal armored turret, which is to say my head. And he’s got the drop on me, no question, his weapon already shouldered and in firing position. I’m square in his sights, looking straight at the tip of a rocket-propelled grenade, an RPG, the bad guys’ weapon of choice in Fallujah. I know he won’t miss Bonecrusher, not at this range and especially not with the trigger discipline he shows. He sets up to shoot the Marine way. Sight alignment. Sight picture. Slow steady trigger squeeze.

The fact that he’s the last person I see with two fully functional eyes must explain the extraordinary clarity and vividness of the picture in my head. Even now I can look it over, so to speak, and realize new things. The shooter is pretty much your typical Iraqi on the street, middle height and trim in a long dark shirt and dark pants, not old enough to show gray in his black hair or his beard but not so young, either. I have a strong impression he’s about my age, more than 35 and less than 40, and an equally strong impression he has a military background. Since we’re deep in the Saddam loyalist Sunni triangle, I would guess a former Republican Guard. Experience and professionalism show in the way he stands and aims, putting himself at risk in order to make the shot count. No enemy I have seen in Fallujah has done such a thing. They either shoot completely wild and run like rabbits or make fanatical attacks that accomplish nothing except give us some easy targets to shoot. Here, though, I square off with one of my own kind, a pro with some miles on him, too old to be doing what he’s doing but also too old to get scared or excited and fuck it up.

All this stuff comes to mind long after the fact. At the time I perceive a target and think, if you can call an instant brain flash thinking, “Kill him before he gets away.” I give the command “Driver stop.” The bad guy’s shot concerns me not one bit. He has one of the world’s shittiest anti-tank weapons, witness the dozen RPG hits taken in Fallujah by Bonecrusher, a model that happens to be the world’s best tank. In terms of combat effectiveness against an M1A1, the RPG is a great big paintball gun. It leaves a black splatter on the hull that we can wipe off with a rag. I’ve been wiping and laughing for days. As I duck down to put my eye to the sight and traverse the commander’s caliber-50 machine gun toward the shooter, his RPG makes a short sharp sssst in the air and explodes against the right front of the turret. The hit makes a sort of ringing thunk like banging one of the cardboard tubes that come inside rolls of gift-wrapping paper. I know from seeing a captured diagram that the enemy believes there’s a vulnerable spot about where the grenade strikes. This information is erroneous, but the guy obviously believes it, and going for the caliber-50 I feel better and better about my own shot. The guy has nowhere to go where my machine gun can’t get him. The walls of that building might as well be made out of paper.

Another one bites the dust.

Wrong.

Surprise, surprise, the shooter I am about to shoot has a buddy I never see, also with an RPG. As I reconstruct he has a position in the same cul-de-sac but in a different building, so he’s slightly behind my hatch and also above it. A great position—this I know because he makes a great shot.

Remember these are words put down on paper three years after the fact, and reading the rest of this sentence takes longer than the entire chain of events. While I duck and reach for the caliber-50 and the first hit still reverberates, here comes another ssst, which happens to be the last thing I will ever hear with two ears receiving the full range of frequencies. After the ssst, the whole world goes blinding white like I’m inside a camera flash. Then comes total darkness and a horrible electric-sounding hum in my ears. Though I’m off the air in terms of visual and auditory input, I know what happened. The RPG—a 4-pound missile going 300 miles an hour, more or less—hit and blew up on my helmet. There’s a feeling of impact like somebody just brained me with a sledgehammer and knocked everything up there loose, but nothing really hurts.

Get up! Get up! Get up! I yelled it at recruits who got knocked off their feet, and now I’m yelling it at myself. Once I’m standing I act like I’m still in charge, telling my crewmen to get the tank moving and trying to call in a contact report to Red Three, my wingman’s tank about a half-block back. Moving is right, because if the enemy hits you and you don’t move he will sure as hell do it again, but the urgent need to report to Red Three is pretty goofy. No way could he not know we have contact with the enemy, unless he somehow missed two grenades exploding on my turret. And nobody hears a thing I say because the grenade blast tore the talking parts off my helmet, which is no longer on my head, anyway.

Gunny still is Gunny, even blinded and deaf and pumping blood out of numerous new holes in my head. I wonder what the hell is wrong with Corporal Ryan Chambers, my gunner and second-in-command, because he fails to respond to my commands. I stop being annoyed when the tank gets going, after which I relax and assess the damage to myself. My hand touches nothing but goo on the right-hand upper quandrant of my forehead and face, and the blood gushes fast enough that I know I’ll bleed out pretty soon without expert medical attention. Dying is not authorized, though. I won’t even consider it. Two overwhelming urges come on: I want, in the worst way, to go to sleep. A soothing voice in my head says that if I do, everything will be fine when I wake up. But the Gunny voice says Forget that, Marine. Losing consciousness after a shot to the head is a good way to die. I also desperately want to puke, but I refuse to do so because I’m a wimp about throwing up. Besides the focus on not sleeping and not puking, a sense of surprise keeps coming up.

I can’t believe one of those bozos actually hit me.

In different circumstances—if I were out in the open or in unfamiliar surroundings—sudden blindness and deafness might throw me into a panic, but there’s nowhere on Planet Earth more familiar to me than the inside of an M1A1’s turret. Once we’re moving I give no thought to where we’re going. Who cares? Wherever it is, somebody there will help me.

After ten or fifteen minutes the tank pitches back, climbs, and then slams down hard. This tells me we just went over a berm under a railroad overpass up on the northwest edge of Fallujah, which marks the cityside perimeter of the Marines’ defensive position. A day-and-a-half ago I crossed the berm going the other way, toward the fight. Back on the safe side I know help will come running.

There’s no place like home.

2

The Animal Hospital

I climb up on the loader’s seat and stand with head and shoulders above the armor line. Nothing happens, and I wonder, What the hell? Who knows how many times I have drilled my crew to get a casualty off the tank as fast as humanly possible, so what is taking them so long?

In memory I wait and wait for somebody to get me, but I’m really there for less than a minute. And the problem isn’t the crew but the fact that I am blind and deaf and clueless about the pandemonium on Bonecrusher. Both my gunner and loader, Chambers and Hernandez, caught some of the RPG. Chambers isn’t hit bad, but Hernandez bleeds like a stuck pig from arm wounds. On top of that, the back of the turret is in flames. The tank’s fine, but the personal gear we keep up there is toast. Goodbye extra skivvies and socks, letter writing gear, and my book of pictures from home.

A TV crew records Bonecrusher’s return to safety, which viewers all around the world watch while I’m still on the table at our forward trauma center. April and I have it on DVD. The footage shows the tank pull up and stop, gear on the turret still on fire. Hernandez bails to get immediate treatment to stop his bleeding. I come up dazed and confused and looking like I just pulled my head out of a bucket of blood. Then Chambers stands on the turret favoring his injured arm and yelling at people to come up and help because Gunny is all fucked up. He also squirts water from a personal drinking bottle onto the fire, a gesture so useless it’s funny. I get the need to take action, though. We Marines like to joke that it’s better to do the wrong thing than nothing at all. Chambers yells some more before guys finally come up and get me. They hang back before climbing aboard because they’ve been taught to be very cautious around a tank, a dangerous machine even when there’s no hostile intent. As the tankers’ saying goes, it’s designed to kill and it don’t care who.

Bonecrusher’s crew earns my highest possible praise—they are real Marines. Were they anything less, the four of us would have been the lead story on Al Jazeera, not CNN, and the bad guys would have defiled our bodies just like they did to the four American contractors they burned and dismembered and strung up on a bridge a week before. That happened only a couple blocks from where I got hit. A wrong turn, taking us farther into Fallujah instead of out, would have been the end of the exercise, as would have throwing a track or smashing into a building and getting stuck. That must have been some kind of chaos on Bonecrusher. With me out of action and out of my mind and the seconds ticking away before I die from blood loss, Chambers takes command. Though bleeding like crazy, Hernandez stays up top and helps guide us through a maze of streets not much wider than Bonecrusher, all swarming with bad guys.

Our driver and boot, Lance Corporal Christopher Frias, really comes through. Barely a year out of high school and in his very first fight he expertly maneuvers a flaming tank carrying three wounded who are the same older Marines he depends on for experience and guidance. When there’s confusion about which way to turn, Frias picks out landmarks and finds the way. I can’t say enough about this kid’s courage and presence of mind. I can’t say enough about any of my guys who by the time we get hit have fought almost continuously for thirty-six hours, putting down more enemy fighters than entire companies did elsewhere. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Advance Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Colonel Bryan McCoy, USMC
• Collaborator’s Note: Working with Gunny Pop
• Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• PART 1: Bang—I’m Not Dead
• PART 2: Making This Marine
• Epilogue: The Tip of the Spear