Tough as They Come

by Travis Mills

  Our guys climbed the hill, started digging, and took fire almost immediately. We shot back. Eventually the shooting died down, and our guys went back to digging. That first day the pit they dug was eight feet deep, a good enough trench for us to guard the right flank. The next day we kept going. Eventually, our trench system became complex. Days passed, and turned into weeks. It rained off and on, and the nights were often wet and cold. We rotated guys up the mountain and back to the compound, but some guys decided they liked it better up on Coors Light and wanted to spend all their time there. Eventually, we hewed three huge fighting pits, plus a living area, a crapping area, and a storage area—all out of the rocky Afghan mountainside.

  The compound below the hill was nothing to write home about. It was surrounded by an eight-foot-high mud wall. When you walked through the entrance of the compound into the breezeway, maybe fifteen meters, there were some trees and a building to the left and a building to the right that we turned into our headquarters and living quarters. A little garden was there, and growing in it were some sort of vegetables, onions, tomato plants. Nearby was a peach tree. The peaches in the compound weren’t ripe now, but they would be by the time we left.

  Inside the buildings we positioned green sleeping cots and our gear. We brought up a few metal army chairs and used a few MRE boxes to sit on. There was no furniture in the compound from when the Taliban used it. We brought up a diesel generator so we could run radios and lights and plug in our laptops. An outhouse was already built, but it had no seat, just a squat hole. We took a steel chair, cut a hole in the middle of the seat, and taped padding around the sides. Someone found a bunch of old magazines the army had lying around—Motor Trend, Popular Mechanics—stuff like that. The magazines were at least six years old, but they made the outhouse really homey. I tell ya, with an outhouse like that, we were really living.

  One day near dinnertime, I spotted a guy in the distance with an AK-47 on his back and binoculars in his hand. Pender was with me. We were on guard on the rooftop of one of the buildings in the compound. The other guys were below us munching on MREs. We knew what we needed to do. Whenever we shoot an enemy fighter under these circumstances, we need to get permission first. So I checked with our platoon sergeant to get it cleared. Word came back that we were good to go. Pender had his M14 with him—it’s the standard-issue long-range rifle, and he started shooting before I could get my Mark 19 automatic grenade launcher ready. The Taliban dropped from Pender’s shots and Pender yelled, “I got him!” But just then the fighter hopped up again and started sprinting for cover. He’d only been playing possum. By then I had my Mark 19 ready, and I dropped the Taliban with one shot.

  It turned out the enemy fighter hadn’t been alone. Shots started whizzing in from three directions at once. Pender yelled that he’d spot for me, which meant he’d call out positions for me to fire the Mark 19 as accurately as possible. The ammo for a Mark 19 is belt-fed and comes out of a slit-shaped canister, similar to how the ammo for a machine gun is fed. Earlier, Pender had grabbed an ammo canister without checking its contents. While firing, I looked down into that can and noticed the rounds were backward. Earlier, the rounds had gotten rusty from all the rain we’d had. So we’d taken them out and scrubbed them up, but the private who had reloaded them had loaded them backward. So right in the middle of that firefight, Pender and I needed to stop and clear the gun. It was an easy fix and didn’t take long, but I knew Pender and I were both going to take crap for it from the rest of the guys. They’d razz us by saying, “You jammed the gun up.” Stuff like that’s funny to an infantryman. You have to be there to get the humor. I don’t remember now the specifics of the ribbing they gave us, but if there was ever a chance to give another dude a hard time, rest assured, the guys took it.

  For some time, that’s how our days went. Fighting and digging, fighting and digging. Typically we woke up to hear the Islamic call to prayer. It was piped all over from loudspeakers set up in town. We took a leak, ate an MRE, downed a bottle of water, and brushed our teeth. After that, the fighting would start. If someone took a shot at us, we shot back. Most days we fought until the sun sank. Then we ate another MRE, had another bottle of water, and lay down to sleep in shifts. That was our routine.

  —

  After two and a half months at Impala, I guess the Taliban realized we were there to stay, so they quit fighting us so intensely. They didn’t stop altogether, but from then on the action was sporadic. It wasn’t daily anymore, but just enough to keep us on our toes. Each day we went out on patrol. Sometimes we got shot at, but many days were quiet. We didn’t have much contact with the locals in this area. If they walked by the compound we’d say hi, and usually they’d say hi in return. But it was really difficult in this region to know who was friend and who was foe. We’d arrived in BMG in March. Winter turned into spring, and spring turned into summer. The weather turned hot.

  In April, I celebrated my twenty-third birthday. I ate an extra MRE that day. Birthdays are never a big deal when you’re on deployment—and that was fine with me. The military was my home away from home, and it was good to be with my men. On my birthday, I thought back to a few months earlier when I’d reenlisted in the army for another four years. We’d been at Robat then, and guys were joking that reenlisting was a bad idea, but I didn’t care. The military was more than my job. It was the place I belonged.

  To reenlist, I knew I’d need to raise my right hand and swear to defend the Constitution of the United States—and I valued that. But when you reenlist on deployment and you’re out in a compound in the dirt and muck, the tone is more relaxed. I wrote “I ‘heart’ boobs” on my palm so that my guys could see it when I raised my hand. I wasn’t a squad leader then, only a team leader, and the guys all got a good laugh at that. Anything to keep it light.

  Late-spring and summer days in Afghanistan can be miserable—I’m talking 115 degrees Fahrenheit, even sitting way up on a mountainside. On those days, if we weren’t fighting or digging or patrolling, Hubbard and I would sit out in the compound in our PT shorts and flip-flops and dump bottles of water over our heads, chests, and shorts, and then time how long it took to become completely dry. Ten minutes wasn’t unusual.

  At night, the buildings grew so hot that we dragged our cots into the interior courtyard to see if we could find a breeze. We slept out under the night sky, and the stars looked the same as in America, only clearer because we were so far away from any city. Up on the mountain, the moon could be so bright it lit up the sky almost like the sun.

  Boredom set in, and we went back to talking about everything and nothing. We talked about food. We reminisced about the past. We talked about career plans, and a couple of guys wanted to stay in the military and go into Special Forces. Hubbard wanted to get back to snowboarding. Jon Sy talked about going to college in California. Pender was from Oxford, Michigan, and had attended Michigan State University for a while. I was a big fan of the University of Michigan (go Blue!), so he and I spent endless hours debating the old rivalry of Wolverines versus Spartans and the merits of each football team.

  Pender and I were good friends. He was probably my best friend on this deployment, which is funny considering he was the guy I’d needed to discipline once earlier on. But he’d hung out at my house quite a bit before we left, and he knew Kelsey, and he was simply a great guy all around. Hubbard was a good friend too. All the guys were. We were all good ol’ boys at heart, just-get-it-done type of guys, upbeat dudes making the best of a crappy situation. We were always willing to fight and willing to do the work that needed to get done. I don’t remember anyone ever complaining.

  Guys would rotate home on leave every so often, and after the fighting died down at Impala, I had ten days’ leave. It was a bit of a pecking order in terms of who could go first, but rank wasn’t the final say by any means. Say, a guy had a wedding anniversary coming up, then that would take precedence over a guy who just wanted to go home and shoot the bull with his friends. If there was
ever a conflict between two dates, then the guys would hash it out and come to an agreement.

  On the morning I was set to go, Sergeant John Barton tripped over a random piece of metal stuck in the ground in the compound. He started digging around. The rest of us joined him. We discovered we had positioned our sleeping cots on triple-stacked Taliban mines that were wired to blow. Sleeping on IEDs—how’s that for a thought?! The only reason the bombs hadn’t blown was because they’d been in the ground too long and their batteries were dead.

  The days leading up to me going home felt like I was just killing time. I couldn’t wait to get home and see my family again. At Impala, we weren’t doing as many patrols by then, so a lot of days we’d just go through inventory, clean and polish the gear, and do nothing and everything to help pass the time.

  Finally the date arrived. I left BMG in May and caught a series of connecting flights home to America. I gave Kelsey a huge kiss at the airport in Dallas and when I got back to the house I gave our dog Buddy a big hug. It felt great to be back, but it also felt surreal—and this was the strange part of this leave time. I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. At home, I could take a hot shower anytime I wanted. I could sit around on the couch and play video games. I could drink a beer and eat a cheeseburger outside on the back porch. Nobody was shooting at me. Nobody stunk. Nobody was sleeping on triple-stacked IEDs.

  Kelsey was finishing up the semester with college and work, so I bought a truck, and we drove up to Michigan to see my parents. We had a few bright and happy days with them, then it was soon time to go, just like that. I hugged my parents, gave Kelsey a big kiss, and flew out of Detroit to head back overseas to BMG.

  It felt oddly good to be back to Afghanistan. The feeling is difficult to explain. In America, when I’d hung around with some friends in Dallas and got reacquainted with some of my buddies from high school back in Michigan, I’d seen firsthand how most of the people my age lived. If a dude was twenty-two or twenty-three like me, he was usually finishing up college or hanging out trying to find an internship or entry-level job. He might be living in his parents’ basement, trying to scrape together enough money to move out. Or maybe he was partying hard on weekends, or maybe still in a frat. He was almost always short on money. Almost always wondering what to do with his future. Not that there was anything wrong with any of that. A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do.

  But by contrast, at my age in the military, I led people in combat. I controlled firefights. I handled hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment. I made decisions that affected whether people would live or die. It felt real.

  On a personal level, I made decent money. I was married. I had a good credit score. I was thinking of buying a house soon.

  It felt good to be trusted with this much responsibility. I was proud of my drive and sense of accomplishment. I was already a man.

  —

  My brother-in-law Josh Buck was stationed at FOB Todd, a few miles away, and I saw him a few times on this deployment. He ran the aid station at FOB Todd, and was on the resupply route for a number of other posts, so if the trucks were coming up to Impala he’d sometimes catch a ride up and see me. That was always good, a real change of pace. For a while there, we saw each other almost once a week. We didn’t solve the world’s problems, we just BS’d back and forth, but it helped lighten things up and felt like a home connection.

  It felt strange to be sitting in the midst of hostile territory with so little to do. The last few weeks at Impala, most of the time we were bored. We occupied ourselves with the usual shenanigans, despite the still-tense environment around us. A guy would be sleeping and we’d put shaving cream on his face. A guy would go to take a piss and we’d come up behind him and grab his ass like a joker or shake his shoulders so his stream would go cockeyed. Middle school stuff. We may have been wiser than our years, but our humor wasn’t. We threw rocks and dirt clumps at nothing in particular. We talked about the food we were going to eat when we got home. Sergeant Andrew Gutierrez went out with a few of our guys and got into a pretty good firefight one day. When he got back to the compound he said, “Man, that was close.” But that was the only serious firefight for our unit during those last few weeks.

  The ANA guys living down the road at Corvette made us some food with fresh tomatoes and peppers. They liked us fine and we worked side by side nearly every day, so we trusted them. Yet we had learned by then that we played Russian roulette whenever we ate local food. I’d eaten it before with mixed results. But with only two weeks to go in-country, I decided to take another chance. A couple of guys joined me. We got dysentery so bad we constantly sprinted to the can. We just laughed about it. That’s the way we rolled.

  —

  At the end of August 2010, our unit was rotated home for good. Our brigade as a whole had 45 soldiers killed in action and about 300 wounded. I was sad about that, but we hadn’t lost anybody specifically from our platoon, so that was an accomplishment. When the helicopter took off, we heard the rotary wash above us. We lifted off from BMG, and everybody inside let out a loud cheer.

  We’d lived in BMG for six months. Six stinking months. Part of me wanted to stay right where we were, because I knew the job wasn’t finished. But I was excited to go home, to see my wife, drive my own vehicle, and eat my own food. High on my mind was a stop at Jersey Mike’s sub shop. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a Big Kahuna Cheese Steak. Grilled onions and peppers plus mushrooms, jalapeños, and extra cheese. It’s not called the Big Kahuna for nothing.

  We flew back to FOB Stone to the south of the city of Herat where we’d begun our deployment. This was the larger FOB, and I took a hot shower there, washed my clothes, and ate a hot meal. After that, my job was just to police my guys and make sure they didn’t do anything stupid before they got home. We played pickup basketball and went for runs. After three or four days, we flew to Kyrgyzstan, then to Ireland, and then back home to America, where they had pizza and beer waiting for us at Fort Bragg.

  I figured the Taliban had concluded we were too tough for them, so they’d eased up on us and were waiting for the next unit to rotate in. Our colonel had sources among the locals, and he discovered that the Taliban had called us “unrelenting savage dogs that kept fighting and fighting.” I felt fine when I heard that. You’ve got to be cocky to be part of the 82nd. Even your enemies respect you.

  Sure enough, a team of light infantry soldiers from the army’s 4th Infantry Division took over for us, and the area heated up again quickly. We received the report soon. In their first ten days in BMG, four men from the 4th were either killed or wounded.

  Do I regret anything that happened in BMG?

  Only that I didn’t kill more Taliban while I was there.

  Kelsey picked me up from the base at Fort Bragg when I returned home from deployment, and she needed to drive, because I didn’t know the way home.

  In July 2010, while I was still in BMG, Kelsey had bought us a house. Her season of staying at her parents’ place in Texas was finished, and she knew we would need a place to live once I got home and we were both at the base again. When I returned in August, I hadn’t yet seen my own house except in pictures.

  From the base, our home was about half an hour away. We drove into the small town of Raeford, North Carolina, and headed toward our subdivision and I thought about what I knew so far about our house. It was a three-bedroom, two-bath basic starter-level home, about 1,800 square feet, on a cul-de-sac and a quiet street. There was a nice deck out back and a fenced-in backyard for the dog to play in. The yard was landscaped with shrubs and red cedar mulch. That was about all I knew.

  The streets looked a little familiar. Josh and Deanna Buck and their family lived about a quarter of a mile away. I had to hand it to my wife. Amazing was the word that came to mind. I was so proud of her—I mean, it isn’t easy to buy a house. While I was overseas, Kelsey had run down various choices of places to live, which I could see on a laptop screen at Impala. But in
the end, she picked out the place herself, worked with a real estate agent to negotiate the deal, secured the loan, signed the mountain of paperwork that accompanies house buying, and moved our stuff in. She was twenty-one and I was twenty-three, and we were homeowners. It felt amazing to be able to make those kinds of big purchases at our young age. I felt secure knowing I could trust my wife to make them for our family.

  “We’re almost here,” Kelsey said. “Close your eyes.”

  I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. Thoughts of why we’d taken this plunge of house buying ran through my mind. When I’d reenlisted, I reenlisted for stabilization, so I could stay in the 82nd. After deployment ended, I was guaranteed three months at home for integration, then another twelve months at Fort Bragg, then another deployment (which meant we wouldn’t be moving to another base in the U.S. during that time). So it seemed smarter to buy a house and make an investment rather than renting an apartment again.

  “We’re here,” Kelsey said. “Welcome home.”

  We parked in front of the house. I leaned over and gave Kelsey a kiss. We jumped out of the car. She took me by the hand and led me indoors. She showed me the new furniture she’d bought, a leather couch and a recliner. She’d hung up pictures already. The walls were painted cool colors. I loved all her choices. We were home, truly home.

  “We need to have a party,” I said. “A big housewarming party.”

  Kelsey just grinned.

  Sure enough, we held that party a few days later. My parents flew down from Michigan. Josh and Deanna were there, and some of the guys from my unit came over. I manned the barbecue. The smell of charcoal-fired hamburgers drifted over the neighborhood, and I felt like the luckiest man alive. Kelsey and I had a dog, two cars, and now a house. We were a young family living the American dream.

  Still, I couldn’t help but notice the way Josh Buck picked up his young daughter and carried her around, showing her the backyard. I held that picture in my mind for a long time, and I wondered why, even though Kelsey and I had so much, something still felt like it was missing.