The Lucky One (Louis Tomlinson Fan Fic)

Chapter 8- Tomlinson

Chapter 8- Tomlinson

The Marine Corps is based on the number 3. It was one of the first things they taught you in basic training. Made things easy to understand. Three marines made a fire team, three fire teams made a squad, three squads made a platoon, three platoons made a company, three companies made a battalion, and three battalions made a regiment. On paper, anyway.

By the time they invaded Iraq, their regiment had been combined with elements from other units, including the Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, Firing Battalions of the Eleventh Marines, the Second and Third Assault Amphibian Battalions, Company B from the First Combat Engineer Battalion, and the Combat Service Support Battalion 115. Massive. Prepared for anything. Nearly six thousand personnel in total.

As Tomlinson walked beneath a sky beginning to change colors with the onset of dusk, he thought back to that night, technically his first combat in hostile territory. His regiment, the First, Fifth, became the first unit to cross into Iraq with the intention of seizing the Rumaylah oil fields.

Everyone remembered that Saddam Hussein had set most of the wells in Kuwait on fire as he'd retreated in the First Gulf War, and no one wanted the same thing to happen again. Long story short, the First, Fifth, among others, got there in time. Only seven wells were burning by the time the area was secured. From there Tomlinson’s squad was ordered north to Baghdad to help to secure the capital city. The First, Fifth was the most decorated marine regiment in the corps and thus was chosen to lead the deepest assault' into enemy territory in the history of the corps. His first tour in Iraq lasted a little more than four months.

Five years after the fact, most of the specifics about that first tour had blurred. He had done his job and eventually was sent back to Pendleton. He didn't talk about it. He tried not to think about it. Except for this: Zack Williams and Phil Rogers, the other two men in Tomlinson’s fire team, were part of a story he'd never forget.

Take any three people, stick them together, and they're going to have differences. No surprise there. And on the surface, they were different. Zack grew up in a small apartment in Midland, Texas, and was a former baseball player and weight-lifting fanatic who'd played in the Minnesota Twins farm system before enlisting; Phil, who played the trumpet in his high school marching band, was from upstate New York and had been raised on a dairy farm with three sisters.

Zack liked blondes, Phil liked brunettes; Zack chewed tobacco, and Phil smoked; Zack liked rap music, Phil favored country-western. No big deal. They trained together, they ate together, they slept together. They debated sports and politics. They shot the breeze like brothers and played practical jokes on each other. Phil would wake with one eyebrow shaved off; Zack would wake the next night with both of them gone. Tomlinson learned to wake at the slightest sound and somehow kept both eyebrows intact. They laughed about it for months. Drunk one night, they got matching tattoos, each proclaiming their fidelity to the corps.

After so much time together, they got to the point where they could anticipate what the others would do. Each of them in turn had saved Tomlinson’s life, or at least kept him from serious harm.

Phil grabbed the back of Tomlinson’s flak jacket just as Tomlinson was poised to move into the open; moments later, a sniper wounded two men nearby. The second time, a distracted Tomlinson was almost struck by a speeding Humvee driven by a fellow marine; that time, it was Zack who grabbed his arm to stop him. Even in war, people die in auto accidents. Look at Patton.

After securing the oil fields, they had arrived at the outskirts of Baghdad with the rest of their company. The city had not fallen yet. They were part of a convoy, three men among hundreds, tightening their grip on the city. Aside from the roar of Allied vehicle engines, all was quiet as they entered the outlying neighborhoods. When gunfire was heard from a graveled road off the main thoroughfare, Tomlinson’s squad was ordered to check it out.