Craig & Fred

by Craig Grossi

  When the young marine serving as point man attempted to cross the canal, he was almost overcome by the current. We were all exhausted, carrying heavy gear and wearing armor. If you lost your footing in water like that, you’d get pulled under, swept away.

  A few other guys headed downstream to try and find a less treacherous place to ford the mini-river but came up short. Our patrol had been stopped for a while now in the open field. We were running out of time.

  Not far off, we saw an archway of packed mud, about shoulder width wide. A bridge.

  What if we took the easy route? We discussed it. It was too obvious: the Taliban knew where we were headed; they knew the muddy fields would delay us; they knew we’d end up here. A bottleneck. It was too risky. But it was also risky—incredibly risky—to be caught out in the open when the sun rose. We’d be sitting ducks. The bridge was tempting.

  The point man volunteered to check the bridge with a minesweeper. If no IED was found, we’d be out of here. The problem was, we never wholly trusted minesweepers. They only detected metal, and plenty of IEDs were mostly wood and plastic. Only the switching mechanism needed to be metal—sometimes it was something as simple as an aluminum foil gum wrapper. The sweeper could miss it altogether.

  Fifteen, twenty minutes had passed. Too long. We were still getting shot at; occasionally a round buzzed by, slapping the swollen earth. The sun would rise soon.

  Justin pulled Ysa aside. “I can’t let that kid go up there with that sweeper. We’ll be sending him to die,” he said.

  Then Justin volunteered to go. “Let me get up there,” he said. “If there’s an IED, I’ll find it.”

  Carefully, Justin approached the bridge, sweeping the metal detector from right to left in front of him, just like you’d look for coins on the beach. Ysa followed behind, maybe ten feet back, so he could talk with Justin while he worked. EOD technicians always work in teams. Our patrol fanned out in the field around them, and I stood back, next to my ruck, watching in the distance.

  When he reached the foot of the bridge, Justin placed the minesweeper behind him. He lowered himself onto his hands and knees. The only way to clear the bridge was through a manual, painstaking process. Justin pulled out a knife and methodically began pressing the tip of it into the dirt in front of him, then slowly lifting it. He progressed forward, carefully digging and lifting, digging and lifting. He was searching for wires. If he lifted the knife and pulled up wires attached to an IED, he’d determine the best way to separate the pressure plate from the jug of explosive. Or, since we wouldn’t have much time, we could simply rule out the bridge and be forced to figure out a way through the canal. Justin was expert at clearing IEDs. He’d done it more than a hundred times on his last deployment in Iraq.

  We waited in the field. I could just make out Justin working his way across the bridge, his hands moving steadily under the red glow of his headlamp while Ysa stood behind him.

  About a quarter of the way over the bridge, Justin’s knife caught something. Slowly, he lifted it, drawing two wires from the dirt. He’d found it.

  Cautiously, Justin got to his feet on the narrow mud bridge. He looked back at Ysa, signaling to confirm what he’d found. In the same moment, incomprehensibly, I heard a loud, deep blast. The bridge erupted in a black cloud of dirt and mud.

  I felt the blast in my body like a thud to the chest. My ears rang. Ysa was knocked backward.

  I stood, mind racing. Sometimes, IEDs didn’t completely detonate. Sometimes, they were just duds. Sometimes, no one got hurt. Sometimes, everything was okay.

  Then I heard Justin scream. I’ll never forget the sound. He wasn’t screaming in pain. It was a cry of disappointment. It was as though he was apologizing—to us, to himself, to his family.

  I started running.

  Ysa got to Justin first, followed by Doc Jones.

  At the site of the explosion, an IED blast crushes your body. The pressure destroys tissue. Justin’s right leg was gone from the hip down. His left leg was badly mangled from foot to thigh.

  Conscious but disoriented, he began trying to say he’d found the IED, that we shouldn’t take the bridge.

  “Is everyone else okay?” Justin asked Ysa.

  “Yes. We’re okay. We got you, buddy,” Ysa said.

  Justin had been thrown into the bank of a smaller canal that fed into the one we needed to cross.

  When I got there, Ysa and Doc Jones had already applied a tourniquet to each of Justin’s legs. He was on a litter. Doc Jones ran an IV and handed me the bag. Someone was on the radio. I knew we didn’t have much time.

  We kept talking to him. “Hang in there,” we said. “Justin, you’re the man. Don’t worry. Just breathe.”

  Justin’s breathing was labored; his blood pressure began to drop. Doc placed a mouthpiece over his lips with a tube attached to it. Ysa took the IV bag from my hands, and just like I had with Sean, I leaned over and breathed air into Justin’s lungs. Every few seconds, I exhaled, and Justin’s chest rose. The guys were all there. We continued to talk to him. He began to lose consciousness. It was as though he was falling asleep.

  Overhead, we heard an eerie whoop-whoop-whoop sound. Canisters of infrared illumination tumbled through the air like strange, slow fireworks. They’d been fired from the artillery battery on the Kajaki Dam to provide light so the helicopter pilots could safely land.

  We heard Tricky on the horizon. It’s a special medevac for amputees. The bird is a Chinook, the kind with two rotors—essentially a flying ER. I remember hearing the accents of the British crew over the radio. As the helicopter came down, we lifted Justin and ran through the mud toward its open hatch. I held the litter in my right hand while carrying Justin’s flak vest in my left. A part of my brain was on autopilot, from training; I’d picked up his vest because I knew you were never supposed to fly without it.

  We ran Justin up the ramp and laid him down among a team of trauma nurses and surgeons, who got to work immediately. I dropped Justin’s armor and stood there, unable to move. My face and hands were covered in blood and mud. I reached one hand out to my friend and touched his chest. Then I backed away.

  When the Chinook took off, we took cover from the rotor wash. Under the deafening sound, I lay facedown in the mud and screamed into the cold, wet earth until my throat hurt. My head throbbed. Nothing made sense. Part of me knew Justin was gone, but another part of me couldn’t comprehend it.

  Somehow, I got up. Ysa was collecting Justin’s stuff at the blast site, trying to do a quick postblast investigation. He picked up pieces of Justin’s rifle, which had been blown to bits, and we hooked Justin’s ruck to mine so I could carry it back. By now the sun was almost up. The QRF—quick reaction force—had arrived from our compound. They put ladders into the water so we could cross the canal. We made our way back.

  Ysa and I went into our little room. We started going through Justin’s stuff, getting it organized. The front of Ysa’s uniform was drenched in his friend’s blood.

  Without looking up, Ysa said quietly, “Justin didn’t make it.” He’d heard it over the radio.

  “I know,” I said quietly. “I’m so sorry, man.”

  We didn’t talk much that day. I think we all felt numb. The room was pretty dark and stayed cool during the day. We stayed in there and watched Dumb and Dumber and Step Brothers on my laptop between sleep. At some point, Ysa called home to his wife.

  Later, there was a patrol debrief meeting in the compound with everybody. I showed up. The RECON captain told the team that Justin hadn’t made it. There was bad news about Sean, too. He was alive but “expectant”—meaning he was expected to pass away. He was being flown to Germany, where his parents could come and say good-bye. He was gone.

  A few nights later, we extracted. Back at Leatherneck, for twenty-four hours, I didn’t do anything. Mac and Sergio and the rest of the guys gave me space. I showered, then lay in bed, trying to sleep. After that, I dove back into work. The detention facility was pretty full;
there were plenty of detainees to interrogate and process. The days were long. I’d spend hours in the interrogation booth, then hours afterward doing paperwork. I kept busy. I kept moving.

  The day of Justin’s memorial service on Leatherneck, I couldn’t bring myself to go. Instead, I purposely scheduled an interrogation. I was still too angry. I replayed the events of the whole mission over in my head, searching for mistakes. I went through all the what-ifs, over and over. What if I’d gotten more involved in planning the patrol? I could have looked at the compound the team planned to take and realized there wasn’t enough standoff. What if I’d said something different at the canal? Maybe I could have convinced the point man or Justin that the bridge wasn’t an option.

  What if. What if. What if.

  CHAPTER 15

  Disservice

  As we drove away from Portland and headed toward our last big destination of the trip, Seattle, we didn’t take the scenic route. I pulled the Land Cruiser onto the highway and pressed my foot against the accelerator, pushing the truck toward her top speed of fifty-five miles per hour. It was midmorning, midweek; the roads were quiet and the sky was gray. Fred, after nearly eight weeks on the road, knew the drill by now. He curled up on his blankets in the backseat, let out a sigh, and closed his eyes, resting up for wherever we were taking him next. But we weren’t headed toward a lake or a canyon or a trailhead or a campsite. We were taking Josh to the hospital.

  The issue wasn’t with his prosthetic this time; it was his good leg that was giving him problems. He thought it might be a blood clot, which scared the shit out of me. In Seattle, we planned to stay with a friend of Josh’s from the army, Matt, and go to the VA hospital in town.

  When we were back in Portland, as we’d walked around the city, I’d noticed Josh’s gait was different. He was leaning into his prosthetic more than usual, favoring his left leg and limping a little. When Josh said he was in pain, it became clear that he’d been uncomfortable for a while and had been keeping it to himself, maybe not wanting to deal with it or feel like he was holding us back. I thought about all the demanding hiking we’d done in Los Padres, the redwoods, and Crater Lake, wondering if we’d pushed it too far.

  When we pulled up to his apartment, Matt met us outside. He looked like he could have been Josh’s brother. The two of them were both tall and thin, with big smiles and similar mannerisms. They each tilted their heads in the same inquisitive way when they listened to someone talk, and Matt shared Josh’s knack for blunt sarcasm. Matt had been one of the medics in Josh’s unit. Now, he was in the army reserve and had a civilian job as an X-ray tech at a local hospital.

  “So, you’ve been on the road with a jarhead this long and you haven’t gotten lost?” Matt said jokingly to Josh after he introduced me.

  “No, but we had to stop a lot so this guy could call his mommy and ask if he could stay out a little longer,” I teased.

  Once the jokes and introductions were over, I knew I had to let Matt know what was going on.

  “We should get Josh to the hospital, though,” I said. “His leg is getting worse.”

  I wanted to be the one to say it—to take the pressure off Josh.

  We dropped off our gear with Matt, then Josh and I got right back in the truck. The VA hospital was just fifteen minutes away, but on the short drive over, neither of us spoke. I knew Josh’s biggest fear was that someday he’d have to have his good leg amputated. What if all the surgeries and all the physical therapy weren’t enough to repair the badly damaged tissue? He’d shown me the scars on his leg where shrapnel had sliced through muscle, where surgeons had worked to make repairs. I’d known other combat vets—and certainly Josh had, too—who eventually lost a limb that could never be saved.

  Yet, all summer, I’d made it a point to treat Josh the same way I would have treated any of my other buddies. I didn’t want him to feel that I doubted what he was capable of or that I was babying him because of his prosthetic. If we were on a trail and he needed to rest, I’d sit with him and wait. I didn’t look at him and ask, “Are you okay?” with pity or worry. I knew he wanted to push himself, and I wanted to help him do that, not to get in the way.

  Now that something was clearly wrong, it was hard to find the right words. I didn’t know what to say to my friend who had been through so much just to be able to walk. Josh had challenged himself more than I could even imagine throughout his recovery, and especially on our trip. He’d accomplished so much, and he’d been a good friend to me, listening to me tell Fred’s story over and over again to so many of the people we met without ever complaining, waiting for me when I wanted to mountain-bike, and just putting up with me for two months straight.

  When we got to the VA, I pulled Josh in for a quick hug.

  “Hey, man—at least you know your way around a VA hospital. You should be able to get seen pretty quick,” I said. Josh knew I was being sarcastic—no appointment at the VA could ever be described as “quick.”

  “Yeah, bro. I’ll be in and out,” Josh said, not looking at me. “Go have fun with Matt—he’s a great guy.” He rubbed Fred’s head and let the dog lick his face before turning and hopping out of the truck.

  Fred and I watched as Josh limped down the breezeway and through the lobby doors. I shifted the truck into drive and headed back to Matt’s, where we’d wait to get an update from Josh. On the drive, Fred didn’t climb into Josh’s seat, as he usually would have. Instead, he stayed in the back with his head down, as if he knew something wasn’t right. In the past two months, our tight little group had rarely ever separated from one another. I let out a sigh and glanced back at Fred in the backseat. I wanted to feel optimistic, but I couldn’t help the sinking feeling that this was where Josh’s trip ended.

  When you get home from combat, people have a way of talking to you like they’re waiting for you to implode. It’s kind of like the way your mom talks to you when you’re sick. There’s a different tone of voice—everything is a higher pitch. A simple “How are you doing?” feels loaded. When I first got home from Afghanistan, I resented that. So when it came to talking about Sangin with family and friends, I’m pretty sure I gave off a continuous I don’t want to talk about it vibe. I didn’t want people to think something was wrong with me, and talking about it only opened the door for that possibility. So it was a long time before I ever told anyone about what happened to Sean or Justin.

  One day, after I’d been home for over a year, Ysa called. He and another EOD technician, Ed, a guy who had known Justin, along with one of the RECON guys, Patrick, were heading to D.C. for a weekend course at Quantico, a base in Virginia. Ysa was still in the marines, and we talked every so often, but he spent most of his off-duty time, understandably, with his wife and kids. I was pumped that the guys were coming to my city, and I invited all three of them to stay with me. In my tiny studio apartment, the guys laid out sleeping mats and crammed in. All weekend, we partied like fraternity brothers. It felt good to be around guys who had seen combat, who had been to Sangin and had known Justin—guys who got it.

  That Saturday, I planned a big night at my favorite bar, the Pug, and invited my high school buddies. “You need to come meet my guys from Afghanistan,” I told them. I was looking forward to having my best friends all in one place.

  That night, I had everyone drinking whiskey and Stroh’s, that beer Justin and I joked about in Afghanistan. I always drank it at the Pug in his honor. Irish punk music played in the background as Tony and Chaz, my favorite bartenders, dished out shots and beer. It was crowded, but most of the people were locals and regulars I recognized. I felt at home, and we were having a blast.

  Then, at one point, I walked up to a conversation between Ysa and my high school friend Brian. As I approached, I realized Ysa was telling the story of the night Justin was killed. I stiffened up. He was describing the mud bridge and the IED. Ysa pointed to me, saying how I’d helped perform first aid on Justin before the Chinook arrived.

  I felt a cool rush of an
xiety sweep through me. I thought about that night all the time. Every time it was quiet—late at night in bed, as I was trying to sleep—my mind went to Afghanistan. I’d lie there restless and half-awake, and the visions from Sangin would come. They felt like dream-memories—part real, part imagined. Sometimes I saw myself sitting around a fire in the compound with the guys. Other times, I stood at a murder hole looking through the scope of my rifle. In the crosshairs, a figure carrying an AK-47 would appear. I’d pull the trigger and the figure would drop, but then I’d spot another one and another until I’d wake up. And other times—many, many times—my mind went back to the night on the bridge with Justin. I relived the last moments by the canal. I retraced each word that passed our lips before Justin decided to clear the bridge. Why didn’t you stop him? I’d ask myself, again and again.

  At the bar, Ysa saw the look on my face and began to realize what was going on. The friends I’d been hanging out with all this time—the people I’d known practically all my life—didn’t have a clue about that night. I’d told them stories from Afghanistan, about Fred, of course, and Leatherneck and the RECON marines, but I’d never talked about Justin or Sean. I shot Ysa a look, as if to say, “Please, dude, shut up.” He wrapped up his story, then the two of us found a spot at the bar.

  “Let’s do a shot for Justin,” I said. Now that Ysa had brought it up, my mind was awash with memories. Chaz poured three shots of Jameson: one for me, one for Ysa, and one for Justin. We took ours and left the third sitting on the bar.

  My eyes fell on the untouched glass of Justin’s whiskey, then to Ysa’s wrist, where I’d noticed he wore a memorial bracelet. It was a black metal wristband with Justin’s name, title, and KIA date and location. It was common for guys to wear them in remembrance of friends they’d lost.