Craig & Fred

by Craig Grossi

  Typically, though, the Taliban weren’t so obvious. Most IEDs were planted at night. Sometimes a network of IEDs lay dormant and disconnected during the day, for the safety of the farmers, and were then activated at night. When they were connected like that, we called them daisy-chained. Step on one and the whole network would go off.

  From the canal, we watched the group come closer. I turned to Ali and the nearest marine to me, and said, “Come on.” We ducked into a canal running perpendicular to ours and ran down it while the rest of the guys fanned out. I was certain the guy we had spotted had bribed the boys with candy, or threatened them, and now was walking them around all night, sending them into fields to dig holes and plant bombs. We were going to put an end to that right now.

  The canal was narrow, only about three feet wide, and we moved quickly, trying not to let our gear noisily scrape the sides. The group was ahead of us now, and the canal came right up alongside their path overhead. My heart raced. As we silently ran up to their position, us down in the canal, them on the pathway above, I hoisted myself up over the edge and reached for the man with my right hand, grasping his shirt near the collar and pulling him down into the canal while the RECON marine corralled the boys.

  “WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?” I shouted.

  I pinned him down in the dirt with my knee, bearing down on his chest. I leaned toward his face so he could see my eyes.

  “Who are you?” I growled. “Are you Taliban?” I spat the words, not waiting for an answer.

  The man couldn’t have been very old—maybe in his twenties or thirties. He had a black beard and a shaved head. Most of the men we met in Afghanistan grew their hair out through the seasons, then buzzed it off once each year. I could tell he had just shaved his because his scalp was still raw and pink. He wore plastic sandals, a dusty white robe, loose pants, and a tan vest.

  Stunned, he was stumbling over his words, eventually gathering more momentum as he repeated a phrase again and again that I didn’t understand. Before Ali could translate, the RECON guy reached down and grabbed me by the shoulder.

  “Look at this,” he said.

  He was pointing to the sack the guy had been carrying, opening it so I could see inside. Beside him, the kids were stunned silent. They were young, maybe between six and nine years old, and they sat huddled together. The whites of their wide, fearful eyes were bright in the moonlight.

  I peered inside the sack, expecting to find homemade explosives, wires, pliers. Instead, it was full of books. Confused, I pulled them out. There were math books, religion books, notebooks, pencils. School supplies.

  I turned back to the man. We looked at each other for a moment, then I took my knee off his chest and pulled him up so he could sit. Ali and I brushed the dirt from his back.

  “I’m a teacher,” he was saying in Pashto, tears in his eyes. “A schoolteacher.”

  I’d never heard the word teacher in Pashto before.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, stunned. “We thought you were Taliban.”

  Ali and one of the guys helped the kids down into the canal for cover, and we sat and talked.

  “You’re a teacher?” I asked, and Ali began to interpret his words. The man told us his name was Asif. He and his older brother had created a makeshift schoolhouse in a compound in the nearby village. It was just a small room tucked away in a house where kids sat on a rug on the floor. At night, Asif and his brother would make their way through the surrounding villages and gather children, bringing them back to the schoolhouse to teach them under the dim light of an oil lamp. They had to hide because the Taliban prohibited any form of education. No books. No music. No writing. No school.

  “If the Taliban find out, they will kill me,” Asif said. “Like they killed my brother.”

  In Pashto, the word for Taliban is simply Talib, so I could always make it out, even before Ali translated.

  About a month earlier, Asif said, the Taliban had somehow found out what he and his brother were up to. They captured both brothers, then forced them onto their knees side by side. They shot his brother in the head and left Asif to bear the message.

  I looked over at the kids, who were still sitting quietly, watching us. They hadn’t said a word this entire time. I doubt they’d ever interacted with someone from the military before. They looked so terrified and small.

  I tried to find out about Asif’s brother’s killers, but Asif didn’t know much. He remembered four or five men but didn’t know who they were. After that night, he’d never seen them again.

  Between the damp walls of the canal, everything smelled like earth. The sky above was dark, still.

  Trying to focus, I told Asif it was dangerous at night, that it wasn’t safe to move around in the fields with the kids. “We could have shot you,” I said.

  He looked at me. His eyes had dried, and his voice was calm and measured. “I’m not going to stop teaching,” he said. “Whether you kill me or the Taliban do.”

  My eyes met his, and I understood there was nothing I could say to try to convince him.

  “Please, just stay in one place, at least for tonight,” I pleaded. He pointed to a village nearby, saying they weren’t going much farther.

  We helped Asif and the boys out of the canal and returned their things. As they continued through the night, the books slung over Asif’s shoulders, the patrol watched them till they reached their destination.

  Back at the compound that night, as I lay on my mat with Fred curled up between my legs, I couldn’t stop thinking about the schoolteacher and his brother, about the children huddled in the ditch of the canal, their wide eyes. Our mission in Sangin was to beat back the Taliban, clear IEDs, make the area safe, and hopefully, eventually, supply electricity. I thought of all the money and resources that were being poured into the country. All the weapons. But was that really what those kids needed from us? Sometimes I wasn’t sure.

  Each day, from sunup to sundown, Taliban bullets and bombs crashed in and around our compound. But I felt the threat of the Taliban most deeply when I met people like Asif. Here was someone who had every right to retreat into despair, anger, and fear, yet instead, in the midst of the horror, he had staked his claim on the world, pledging to make it better.

  On one particularly hot day, Fred and I took refuge from the sun under a makeshift tarp awning. Sangin’s afternoon heat could be brutal, and this was one of the worst waves yet. The day was quiet and oppressive, with no activity from the Taliban. It was as if everyone in the desert were suffocating.

  Under the tarp, I wiped the sweat from my forehead and finished up a report while Fred snoozed nearby. As I typed in my final notes, I caught sight of an Afghan commando pacing around the compound. The commandos from the Afghan National Army had been embedded with us to help communicate with the villagers and contribute to our mission. Jason, a royal marine, was training them.

  Sometimes, the commandos were an invaluable resource—they had cultural insight and interpretation capabilities that we lacked, and they could be great liaisons between us and the villagers. In Trek Nawa, we worked with a group of ANA guys who were incredible. They patrolled with us frequently and one of them, a teenager named Ali, volunteered to be an interpreter when our Ali needed a break. He was a talented, hardworking kid who had learned English from watching bootleg American movies.

  In Sangin, though, the ANA group had a different mentality. From the start, they had disagreed with our approach of patrolling at night—it seemed too risky to them—and so they didn’t join us. But since our night patrols made up most of our activity, that left the commandos with very little to do. They spent most of their days inside the walls of the compound, and without electricity, running water, good food, or jobs to perform, a few of them started to seem sick of it all.

  The member of the ANA team that I had my eye on was notoriously vocal about his frustrations—the monotony, the heat, the lack of work. At one point, after seeing one of us give Fred a bite to eat, he exclaimed, “How can you
marines expect respect when you treat this disgusting dog like he is person?” Usually, we just ignored him. He had a way of getting ornery in the heat, and we also understood that taking care of Fred probably did seem a little strange to him and the other Afghan commandos. We weren’t in a part of Afghanistan where it was customary to have pets. When it came to Fred, most of the ANA guys either didn’t pay him much attention or just shook their heads and laughed when they saw us taking care of him. One of the commandos, a nice guy who spoke English, once walked by while Fred was sleeping on my mat. “He’s in your bed? Aren’t you mad?” he asked me, smiling curiously. Treating the dusty critter like a companion who had full rein of our sleeping quarters probably seemed crazy to them.

  As usual, the commando I was watching pace the compound looked irritated. In his dark green cammies and heavy boots, he huffed around kicking up dirt. Fred, who was having a tough time staying cool, got up and sauntered toward his dirt patch under the bushes. As I watched their paths start to converge, I held my breath. Before I could really think about what was happening, the commando shifted his weight onto his left leg, lifted his right, and sent it swinging into Fred’s rib cage. The force of the kick lifted Fred off his paws. He let out a loud whimper, spun around, and looked up at the commando in confusion.

  Before I could react, one of the EOD guys on the mission, Dave, jumped up and got in the commando’s face. Dave was a tough-looking guy from Michigan with a MADE IN DETROIT tattoo across his wrist. He was an attachment like me, so we often hung around each other. This was his fourth combat deployment, and he didn’t take any shit. When it came to Fred, though, Dave was a big softy. I’d catch him looking for Fred or calling him over to give him a pet and sneak him a treat.

  “Kick that dog again and I’ll bury you out here,” Dave said, his voice tight but steady.

  The Afghan commando wasn’t fazed. He’d been looking for some kind of entertainment, and now he had someone’s attention.

  “He’s a filthy, shit dog,” he said. “I kick this dog if I want to! Forget you!”

  The commando raised his foot again. As he wound up for a second blow, Dave swiftly brought his own foot up, kicking the sole of his boot directly into the commando’s chest. The commando flew backward and landed in a heap of dust.

  By now a crowd was forming. As the other ANA guys walked over, I was shocked to see their AK-47s in their arms. The commando got up, and the group stood around him, holding their guns.

  Across from them, the RECON guys picked up their M4s and stood on the other side, shirtless in their green silkies and flip-flops. I got to my feet and looked around at the marines. Our beards were caked in dirt and our skin had turned brown from the sun and the dust. We looked emaciated. Living off MREs and in a constant state of low-grade anxiety, we’d all dropped ten, fifteen pounds easy. We were angry. Exhausted.

  Then I looked down at Fred, who was at Dave’s heels. He stood there, panting in the heat, his tail tucked down, confused.

  The commando brushed himself off and looked from Dave to Fred. With a rancor that knocked the air from my lungs, he said, “I’m going to shoot this fucking dog,” and reached out for a gun from the hands of the guy next to him.

  CHAPTER 7

  To the Canyon

  Here’s the thing: there’s no manual on how to come home from war. When I first got back from my deployment, my command sent me on a weekend-long postdeployment retreat. There would be sessions on how to identify post-traumatic stress, how to work with the VA and get connected with other resources, and all the other how-to stuff you might expect. Only the retreat I got sent to was in Atlanta, Georgia. So when I showed up in Atlanta and started going to the classes and briefs and meetings, all the speakers and organizations at the retreat were, naturally, Atlanta based. In meeting after meeting, the presenter would stand up and say, “Hi, I’m so-and-so from the Atlanta Veterans Affairs office. I’ll be your point of contact for your medical appointments and for filing claims.” Meanwhile, I was thinking, I live in D.C., so how are you going to help me? It seemed like a big waste of time. Pretty soon I was skipping classes and hanging out at the hotel bar.

  There was only one other person in my family with combat experience—my uncle John—so I took a page from his book. As a kid, Uncle John was like a grandfather to me. He had served in World War II and fought in the Battle of the Bulge, where his whole platoon was just about wiped out. For two weeks, John was missing in action, presumed dead. In fact, he was carefully making his way out from behind enemy lines wearing a stolen German trench coat. He escaped, survived, and made it home. According to the story, by the time Uncle John got back to the States, he was nursing a gunshot wound and had a nasty case of trench foot. But he recovered, settled down with my aunt Alma, had a successful career, and made a happy life for himself and his family in the D.C. area.

  The message was simple: you come home and you move on. That’s what I planned to do, too, and for a while, it worked. Coming back to my hometown made it easy. I started hanging out with my high school buddies again and reunited with my girlfriend. I worked. I didn’t talk much about Afghanistan because I didn’t have to; I was surrounded by civilians.

  I started checking off all the boxes I thought I should. The first one was a job. My former commanding officer, Tom, helped line up a position for me at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), where he also worked. There, I’d be a reports officer, reviewing, editing, and releasing intelligence reports from collectors in the field, guys with jobs similar to the one I’d held in Sangin but with bigger paychecks.

  The next box to check was a new car. I’d always driven beat-up trucks, like the hand-me-down Jeep Wrangler I got from my sister after I graduated boot camp. My friends used to love to tease me about that car, which had a vanity plate that read WLDFLWR from when it was Sarah’s. After boot camp, when I was stationed in Charleston and started getting my first real paychecks, I put some work into Wildflower to give her more of an edge: mud tires, a three-inch lift, and a winch on the front. To my friends, though, she would always be Wildflower.

  When I finally sold the Jeep, I got an ’88 Toyota 4Runner, and later, an ’85 Toyota pickup, bright red with a gray interior. I loved that truck. I drove it throughout intelligence training and school, but then the engine died right before I left for my deployment. I wanted to fix her up when I got home, but my dad didn’t want me to leave the truck in his garage, and my girlfriend didn’t want anything to do with it, either. She hated how it rode rough and that the A/C never worked. So with nowhere to keep the truck, I ended up selling it for next to nothing to a local shop. I was heartbroken.

  Once I got back, I felt pressure to avoid getting another “money pit,” as my dad and girlfriend liked to call my old trucks. So I bought a brand-new Toyota Tacoma. It had a shiny fresh coat of maroon paint, four doors, and the off-road package. When I drove it off the lot, it was gleamingly perfect, but it wasn’t me. It came with a hefty monthly payment, too, and insurance costs like I’d never seen. But I tried to tell myself it was time to grow up and be practical.

  Next box: getting serious about my relationship. Through most of my training and later through my deployment, I had the same girlfriend. We knew each other from home, where we’d gone to different high schools with mutual friends. When I got back, we found an apartment and moved in together.

  I felt like I should propose, so I planned a vacation for us in Puerto Rico the week before I started the DIA job. We went to one of those cheesy resorts that felt like it could have been anywhere. We ate American food, drank Coke and fruity cocktails, and lounged by the pool. I proposed in the hotel lobby. I planned it so the staff knew ahead of time, and they all came down and stood in a big circle around us. When she said yes, everyone clapped. Upstairs, I had our room filled with flowers and bottles of champagne as a surprise. She went straight to the balcony, though, without seeming to notice, then lit a cigarette and texted pictures of the ring to her friends. I sat at the edge of the bed and
watched the smoke rise from her profile in the lounge chair.

  And so, within a few months of being home, I’d checked all the boxes I was supposed to check: I had a new car, a new job, a new apartment, and a fiancée. I had done it; I had moved on.

  Then summer came around. In D.C., everything was vibrant, green and lush, and in the mornings, you could see the heat rising off the asphalt. People walked around carrying towels over their shoulders, wiping their foreheads on their way to the metro.

  In our small apartment, my fiancée had a dog of her own—a little pug whose company Fred didn’t particularly enjoy. The worst moments came at mealtimes, when Fred would lie at my feet. The pug would come over to the table, hoping to be handed a morsel of food, but Fred would flip out when he got close, barking and chasing him into the other room. The tension between the two dogs added to tension that was also growing between my fiancée and me.

  At the new job, the work was far from glamorous. I had high hopes the position would lead to something bigger—eventually, I thought I could become a case officer, managing intelligence operations with an impact at the national level. But at the start, I was sitting all day in a cubicle, in front of a computer, reviewing reports. Most of the intelligence coming through was insignificant and obscure. I started realizing many of the reports were essentially generated to meet a quota. The guys in the field were under pressure from their command to produce a certain number, so they wrote up whatever they had, even if it barely qualified as intelligence in the first place. I was frustrated but tried to remain optimistic.