Ken O’Friel

This is why Americans are the deadliest fighters on earth. I met a priest yesterday who just got accepted to chaplain school in Newport. I asked him the obvious question: Marines or Navy? Navy, he said. His face fell a little. He told me he could never be a Marine because every Marine is a rifleman, and as a priest he can’t carry a weapon. He’s hoping to get assigned to a Marine unit anyway. All chaplains are Navy officers, so that’s the only door in. I laughed. I feel a little bad about that. Then I explained to him what “Devil Doc” means. The Marine Corps doesn’t have medics. They use Navy Corpsmen. I told him: when you get out to the fleet, find a Marine sergeant with a couple of Purple Hearts and tell him Devil Docs “aren’t real Marines.” Be prepared to duck. Marines are violently particular about who gets to wear their uniform. Navy Corpsmen and Navy chaplains who have eaten dirt alongside them in combat qualify. Full stop. My dad was Air Force. Not even Navy. I remember going to VFW halls with him as a kid. Someone would ask him what service, he’d say Air Force, and the room would chuckle a little. Then they’d find out he was a medic, and the air in the room changed. Something close to reverence. Dad hated being honored. He had one line he used to deflect it: “I didn’t do much. Save your praise for my cousin the PJ.” That always broke the ice. PJs are the Air Force special operators who go into hell to pull downed pilots out. They will take casualties and are prepared to die to rescue a single pilot or crewman. The math doesn’t math out. Why would any combat force take multiple casualties to rescue one air force jet jockey? What the padre is about to learn is that the military has a hierarchy that has nothing to do with rank, and nothing to do with the service stitched on your chest. Have you deployed? Have you seen combat? In every firefight there are men who move toward the guns and men who hang back. And when the guy at the tip of the spear is pinned down, bleeding, with rounds cracking past his head, there is exactly one word he screams into the radio. “Medic.” Here is the catch, and it is the whole reason America fights the way America fights. That Marine is willing to push forward into fire BECAUSE he knows the Corpsman is coming. He knows the medevac birds will land in the hot LZ. He knows the Devil Doc will drag him out by his plate carrier if it comes to that. And, if the medic can’t help, if he has what Dad called “injuries incompatible with life,” he knows that chaplain will crawl on his belly to administer last rights and deliver him to heaven. The F-15 pilot punching out over enemy territory knows the same thing. He knows the PJs will move heaven and earth to reach him, and turn whatever is shooting at him into a smoking crater of hell on earth on the way in. This is the quiet math underneath American violence. Our warriors are the fiercest on earth not because they are more aggressive, not just because they are better trained, or better equipped, though they are all of those things. They are the fiercest because they know, in their bones, that when they key the mic and call for help, help is coming in hot. Take that away, and you don’t have the U.S. military anymore. You have a security force.