Nathaniel Fick

BIO

Nathaniel Fick was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1977. He graduated with high honors from Dartmouth College in 1999, earning degrees in Classics and Government. While at Dartmouth, Fick captained the cycling team to a US National Championship, and wrote a senior thesis on Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and its implications for American foreign policy.

He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps upon graduation, and trained as an infantry officer.

Fick led his platoon into Afghanistan and Pakistan only weeks after 9/11, helping to drive the Taliban from its spiritual capital in Kandahar. After returning to the States in 2002, he was invited to join Recon, the Corps' special operations force. Fick led a reconnaissance platoon in combat during the earliest months of Operation Iraqi Freedom, from the battle of Nasiriyah to the fall of Baghdad, and into the perilous peacekeeping that followed.

Fick left the Marines as a captain in 2003 and is currently pursuing a masters degree in International Security at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and an MBA at the Harvard Business School. 60 Minutes, the BBC, and NPR have featured his work. Fick's writing has appeared in newspapers across the country, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The International Herald Tribune.

He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Author Talk

October 2005

Nathaniel Fick, a Recon Marine Lieutenant who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, chronicles the ordeals of battle in a memoir titled ONE BULLET AWAY: The Making of a Marine Officer. In this interview, Fick discusses his journey from studying classics at Dartmouth to leading a platoon in one of the most dangerous military conflicts since Vietnam. He also explains how his experiences in the Armed Forces have positively impacted his civilian life, and shares his opinions on controversial topics in today's media, such as the possibility of a draft and the military's equipment supply (or lack thereof).

Question: What did you do in the Marines?

Nathaniel Fick: I served as an infantry officer. When people think of the military, they usually think of infantrymen. But actually, the infantry is only about 10% of the total force. I was drawn to its purity --- the simple acts of leading and living on your wits. The infantry hasn't changed much since ancient Greece. During the summer between my junior and senior years at Dartmouth, I went to Officer Candidates School, and then was commissioned a second lieutenant after graduation in 1999. I trained for a year in Virginia before joining the First Battalion, First Marines in San Diego as a platoon commander. My infantry platoon was 43 men and, according to the Corps, I was responsible "for all it did or failed to do." My Marines' average age was about twenty, so you can imagine it was an adventure in more ways than one. When we got home from Afghanistan, I was invited to try out for Recon --- the Marines' special-operations force. I trained for another seven months before taking command of my Recon platoon. Recon Marines are older and more experienced. Even as the commander, I was one of the younger guys in the group. Recon platoons are also smaller --- only 23 men. So we knew each other very well by the time we went to Iraq.

Q: Your path --- from Dartmouth classics major to Marine combat officer ---  is unusual. Why did you do it?

NF: It's said that the nation that draws too great a distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools. Military service in America has increasingly become the career path of those for whom it's a family tradition, and those without many alternatives. It's a travesty. Studying classics in college really emphasized civic duty, the responsibilities of citizenship. In the ancient world, one of the greatest of those responsibilities was military service. Allowing a gulf to grow between the military and the rest of American society is bad for all of us. Tom Ricks, then the Wall Street Journal's Pentagon correspondent, spoke at Dartmouth during my junior year, and he argued for putting ROTC back on all the Ivy League campuses. A woman stood up after his talk and said that ROTC at Dartmouth would militarize the campus. Ricks told her she was wrong, that it would liberalize the military. And that's a good thing, not only for the military, but for every citizen. The military in a democracy cannot be "them;" it has to be "us," collectively, all Americans.

Q: How does the military train young people to be leaders under such stressful conditions?

NF: It's about trust. If you trust people, the good ones step up to the plate and at least you have a basis on which to judge the rest. Twenty-year-old Marines are out leading combat patrols, responsible for a dozen other lives, while some of their college counterparts aren't trusted not to spill their coffee in the school library. The Corps also teaches that decisions have consequences. In combat, they can be swift, severe, and irreversible. I'm in grad school now, and all the emphasis is on team-building. They tell us that's how government and corporate American work. Well, that's how a Marine platoon works also. I reached a realization about midway through my training that all the hazing and abuse wasn't about how much I could take. It was about how much I could give. And when you have a group of forty guys all come to that same realization, you have a very powerful group that can suffer unbelievable hardship together and take care of one another as a team. That bond is why men who served in the same combat units tend to keep in touch for the rest of their lives. Since leaving the Corps, I've been to many of the weddings of my Marines, and we still have a lively email dialogue about the daily headlines from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Q: How is ONE BULLET AWAY different from the many other books about Iraq?

NF: NF: There aren't many books by the people on the front lines who actually fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. My platoon ran its first mission in Operation Enduring Freedom on October 19, barely five weeks after 9/11. Then we crossed the Iraqi border on the night the invasion started and led the Marine Corps advance all the way to Baghdad. Most of the other books fall into one of two categories --- reporters' accounts and retired generals' memoirs. Some of the reporters do a great job recording the events of the wars, but they're observers. They can't capture the psychology, the decision-making, and the stress in the same way a combatant can. The generals provide an important angle, but they were usually far from the front lines. I give a first-hand account of both wars.

Q: Should public service be mandatory for young people? Should we have a draft?

NF: Absolutely not. We hear the argument against the draft from civil libertarians all the time, and we hear it from people who are self-interested --- kids of draft-age and their parents. But the biggest opponent of a draft today is the U.S. military. Ask anyone who served in both the conscripted force prior to 1973 and the all-volunteer force afterward. They're like night and day. The all-volunteer force is one of the great social successes of the 20th century. There are no more "dumb grunts." Today we have what the Marine Corps calls the "strategic corporal" --- one young guy who, because of CNN and modern firepower, makes decisions with strategic consequences. Individual draftees served with great distinction but, as a system, it's far inferior to what we have. Today's force is the smartest, best-trained, most-capable in American history because it's made up of volunteers.

Q: You mention in the book that only one of your five humvees had armor. Does the military have what it needs to fight?

NF: I was on a ridgeline in Afghanistan one night in November 2001, and a re-supply helicopter brought in mail from the States. So there I was, watching bombs fall on Kandahar and eating cookies baked by my sister ten days before. Overall, my units were remarkably well-equipped, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, especially when you consider the phenomenal distances and remote locations involved. I made a conscious choice not to use armored humvees in Iraq. Recon platoons were offered armored humvees or non-armored humvees. More armor means less fuel, less water, less ammo. Armored humvees are heavy --- they break axles and get stuck more often driving off-road. We chose speed and maneuverability over armor. That was for the invasion, before roadside bombs were an issue. I would probably make a different choice today.

Q: You joined a peacetime military. What was it like to be caught up so suddenly in this conflagration?

NF: I left the U.S. on a routine Western Pacific cruise in August 2001. We were in Darwin, Australia on 9/11, training with the Australian army. Early morning in New York was late evening there, so 5000 Marines and sailors were eating, drinking, and partying when all of a sudden the record stopped. We streamed down the street to the docks, and got back on our ships, and by sunrise we were already out of sight of land on our way to the North Arabian Sea. I think peoples' attitudes pretty much reflected American society. I was grateful, frankly, that we were able to go to Afghanistan and avenge the terrorist attacks. Iraq was a lot different. It seemed colder, more premeditated. There were plenty of Marines who thought the war was a bad idea. But we take an oath to the Constitution, to follow the legal orders of a democratically-elected civilian government. So you salute and do your duty. That said, I know guys who are now on their fourth combat deployment since 9/11. You have to wonder whether that's sustainable.

Q: Marine General Mattis, who commanded your units in Afghanistan and Iraq, was recently quoted as saying it's fun to shoot some people. Was he out of line?

NF: It's a curious feature of our society that we like to honor our warriors without really addressing what they do. In Afghanistan, I frequently walked the lines at night to check on my Marines. It would be two a.m, three a.m., in December --- windy, freezing, pitch black. And I'd come up on a position where there should have been two heads, and I'd see three silhouetted against the sky. It was General Mattis, out there talking with his troops. Answering questions, assuaging concerns, just letting them know they weren't alone. That's leadership. It's the kind of leadership parents with sons and daughters in uniform should want their kids to have. But there's a broader issue too. Being a Marine was, for me, like being a trauma surgeon. You see terrible things every day, and you can respond either by crying or by laughing. If you cry, you lose your ability to function, to do your job. So you build up a shell that allows you to distance yourself. Black humor is self-protection, and it's necessary. Unfortunately, that state of mind doesn't play very well when it's lifted out of its context. But we have to understand that it's exactly the attitude we need our warriors to have, and to castigate them for it does all of us a grave disservice.

Q: This was clearly an intense experience for you. What's it like to come back and live a normal life again?

NF: It took me a year to adjust after coming home from Iraq. Afghanistan was different --- it wasn't very violent and we came back on a ship. I had a month, including some vacation time in Perth and Sydney, before getting back to the States. But I left Iraq on a Sunday night, and was in San Diego on Tuesday. It was surreal. I had all the stereotypical little signs of post-traumatic stress disorder --- jumping at loud noises, nervous in crowds, short-tempered, insomnia. And you know what? I came back to a loving family and supportive friends. I had a good education and solid prospects for the future. This experience almost unhinged me. What about all the men and women who don't have the support I had? What happens to them? This is a question the military --- and our society more generally --- should be addressing. We'll have something like half a million combat veterans trying to reintegrate into American society over the next few years. They can be a source of wisdom or of destruction. It depends on how well we care for them.

Q: Would you do it over again?

NF: Without hesitation. As I headed off to OCS back in 1998, my dad told me, "The Marines will teach you everything I love you too much to teach you." And he was right. My favorite time of day in Afghanistan and Iraq was right around dusk, when the daytime missions were over and the night-time missions hadn't yet begun. Marines would gather around campfires, brewing coffee, telling stories, hashing out what we were doing and how they felt about it. Sometimes I'd just hang around, trying to invent things to say, because I didn't want it to end. I grew up in the Marines. It's where I learned to be a citizen. It's where I learned to use words like duty, and honor, and love without being cynical. I learned that decisions aren't without consequence. Marines seem like the ultimate cynics, but most are closet idealists. In college, I actually considered joining the Peace Corps before deciding on the Marine Corps. Public service, challenge, travel --- they attract people for a lot of the same reasons. I miss it already.

Q: Then why did you decide to leave?

NF: I became a reluctant warrior. On the eve of the Iraq invasion, General Mattis told us to "fight with a happy heart." He's right; it's good advice. But I was no longer able to do it. I know Marines who remind me of ancient gladiators --- they can strap on their breastplates, pick up their swords, and wade into the gore. They're good at it. I respect them for it, and I tried to emulate them, but it never came naturally to me. Part of it, too, is fate. I led platoons in two wars, and brought all my men home alive. Would I want to try a third time? Getting a Marine killed would have been, for me, a fate worse than my own death. So, in some cosmic sense, I had to walk away from the table while I was up. This country needs its professional warriors. It also needs people in other walks of life who know what the decision to go to war means.

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