FALLUJAH, IRAQ – The first few pages of Marine Cpl. Tim Milholin’s small zip-up Bible are stuck together – drenched “too many times” from the sweat of battle, he explains. It lives under his armored vest in his chest pocket, with an inscribed metal plate: “The Lord is my strength and my shield.”
Corporal Milholin, a 21-year-old machine-gunner with a pencil-thin mustache, is girded for war in Fallujah with both book and sword. He is as well-versed in the King James text as he is in the killing potential of hollow-tipped bullets or the amount of C4 plastic explosive and TNT needed to blow through an Iraqi door. To him, they are all essential tools of his warfighting trade, as important as the photo of his wife, Brianne, that’s tucked inside his helmet.
“I pray earnestly every day, and believe that God puts his angels out before us, to protect us,” says the marine. As they search for their enemy, breaking through one closed door after another, the Raider platoon – the Death Dealers, as they dub themselves – are on the front lines in a city hammered to rubble.
Most took part in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And the common experience of combat has deepened a bond of brotherhood – a tie upon which their lives depend every day on the terror war’s most dangerous battlefield: Fallujah. In this crucible, they have seen death and delivered it, and grown mature beyond their years amid unrelenting rigors and danger.
PREPARING FOR BATTLE
Every day, sometimes twice or more in a 24-hour period, the scouts gather for final orders. The moment of deepest contemplation comes before each attack, often early in the morning, as on the group’s seventh day in Fallujah. In near silence and darkness, they clean weapons once more, pack rifle magazines with bullets, and load gear belts with explosives.
Not all are religious, but a few scouts, like Corporal Milholin, keep small Bibles in their chest pockets, close to pounding hearts.
Many use a black permanent marker to ink their hands or gloves with their blood type and “kill” numbers – information that will enable news of casualties to be passed immediately over the radio. It’s a habit that’s taken on greater significance in the course of a month of battle that has killed or wounded more than 20 percent of Charlie Company, 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance (LAR) battalion.
Not all are impressed. “I don’t write any of that [expletive] on me,” says Lance Cpl. Matt McClellan (X58, B+), a tattooed serial rule breaker. “It’s bad luck.” …
During pauses between operations, the men set up camp, living cramped in occupied Iraqi houses. It’s at such times that the marines try to digest the unpredictable moments of Fallujah, with feisty debates that erupt about everything from too-young girlfriends to the utility of God.
“I’m sure they see it in every war; so many people become religious out here,” says Milholin, sitting on a floor mattress covered with red satin. The windows of the house are gone – smashed out by the marines so that glass will not fly when mortars land nearby.
Milholin and two others are known as the “Three Wise Men.” “I put so much faith in God, I don’t know how people do it without being religious.”
Corporal McClellan knows how – and often takes issue with the Wise Men’s certitude. “I have confidence. Ever since I was a little kid, I knew I was not going to die, so I don’t need [religion] to lift me up,” says the machine-gunner from Clayton, N.J., turning down the volume on his heavy metal CD. …
McClellan racked up 26 counts of grand-theft auto while still a juvenile. He had six ear studs on one side, seven on the other, and a tongue stud – which once got stuck in his lip ring. Joining the Marines has tempered such behavior, but it hasn’t erased McClellan’s independent streak.
If anything, McClellan says he blames God for what goes wrong – a key reason being the fate of his friend Lance Cpl. Kyle Burns, of Red platoon, who was going to be the best man at McClellan’s wedding until he was killed in an ambush Nov. 11, 2004. McClellan took the death hard.
DEATH AND SALVATION
Burns’s death has become a point of debate within the unit. The marine shared McClellan’s animosity toward religion until just days before the ambush, when he “gave his life to Christ” at a church service, according to some who were there.
“God has a perfect plan,” says Cpl. Christopher DeBlanc, a team leader and one of the Wise Men. He keeps a red leather Bible in his rucksack, part of a pile of personal gear deposited upstairs in the Iraqi house. “For example, Red [platoon] got hit by a [mine], and after that they had a church service. They accepted God; Kyle accepted it. Kyle is in heaven now.”
“That was God’s gift to Kyle?” asks McClellan incredulously. “Great. You accept God, and the next day you get killed. That’s some advertisement. You are done at 20 years and three months, unmarried.”
That reaction doesn’t surprise Corporal DeBlanc, a tall, reliable marine. His path to the military, and to his overarching faith, has been circuitous. From the age of 12, he worshiped the guitar and played in rock bands, practicing for hours after school in Spotsylvania, Virginia, often falling asleep with the instrument in his hands. But his rock-star lifestyle didn’t take him far. “During my teenage years, I hit the bottom of the barrel,” DeBlanc says. “When I joined the Marine Corps, I was done living that way.”
His change of heart was sparked by the burial, with full military honors, of his grandfather, a World War II veteran and a man he wanted to emulate.
“I didn’t cry [at first], but when the honor guard got up there for the 21-gun salute – as soon as that first round cracked, it was Niagara Falls,” DeBlanc recalls. “I didn’t like how my life was going, so I gave it to the military.”
The marines instill a new set of values and “force you to grow up,” says DeBlanc. For him, that included a growing framework of faith that he applies in Fallujah. “The big thing is the spiritual battle going on in our lives – the fight we’re fighting is good against evil,” he says. He knows the Americans are not the only ones to call on divine power: On the wall of one house, written with yellow paint in Arabic: “God help [Iraq’s] mujahideen.”
DeBlanc easily reconciles war with the biblical commandment against killing. “Doesn’t the Bible say: ‘There is a time to pick up the sword, a time for peace, and a time for war?’” he asks. “I can pull the trigger here and have a clear conscience.”
To a degree, that goes for Lance Cpl. Jason Bell, the original Wise Man from Spokane, Wash., who tries to balance the battle with the message of his Bible, which he keeps on him in a plastic meal sleeve that also holds a stun grenade and an extra rifle magazine.
“I always prayed, before we came here, that Iraq’s innocent civilians wouldn’t look badly on us,” says Corporal Bell.
Bell’s faith was tested during a pre-dawn raid, when small fragments of a US grenade ricocheted and embedded in his cheek, effectively shielding this correspondent from the blast. “I thought it was a blessing in a weird way – [the wound] wasn’t that bad,” recalls Bell, who wants to go to Bible college and preach. “It’s kind of crazy: God told David he couldn’t build a temple, because he had blood on his hands.
“Though we’ve been in contact, I don’t know that I’ve killed anybody,” Bell adds. “I’ve never hesitated, but it seems whenever I’ve gone out, there was nothing out there.”
DeBlanc also plans to go Bible college, and has dreamed of himself as an elderly man at a pulpit, his wife with three children (as yet unborn) in the front pew. That’s a welcome change from the nightmares he had for a year after returning home from Iraq in 2003. “I would wake up, looking for my rifle,” says DeBlanc. “I dreamed I was in a fire hole and being overrun, and couldn’t find my gun.”