The Front Lines

One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, by Nathaniel Fick (Houghton Mifflin, 384 pp., $25)

CAPTAIN FICK was caught in an ambush outside Muwaffiqiya, Iraq. Running through bullets, he sensed time “expanding and contracting like a Slinky.” A Slinky? The simile is out of place in a chronicle replete with martial jargon, with enfilading and suppressing fire, with M4s and MK-19s, with QuikClot and tourniquets. Out of place, but also one of the book’s most telling details. It’s a remnant of what Fick put behind him-a civilian culture of prolonged childhood-when he chose the course that led to his service in the Marines’ elite First Recon Battalion.

SB

About the Author

Stefan Beck

Stefan Beck is a writer living in Hudson, N.Y.

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One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, by Nathaniel Fick (Houghton Mifflin, 384 pp., $25)

CAPTAIN FICK was caught in an ambush outside Muwaffiqiya, Iraq. Running through bullets, he sensed time “expanding and contracting like a Slinky.” A Slinky? The simile is out of place in a chronicle replete with martial jargon, with enfilading and suppressing fire, with M4s and MK-19s, with QuikClot and tourniquets. Out of place, but also one of the book’s most telling details. It’s a remnant of what Fick put behind him-a civilian culture of prolonged childhood-when he chose the course that led to his service in the Marines’ elite First Recon Battalion.