Nearby an old man unfurls a red-and-brown rug as the children gather around and join the limbless adults in prayer, their voices echoing off the valley walls.
“They know not what they say,” Torres says. Wintric guesses he means the children, repeating the chant they’ve heard since birth, but maybe he directs the jab at the entire group, kneeling and bowing and rising in unison.
“And they’ll kill that one before too long,” Big Dax says, nodding at a young man, maybe sixteen, standing and running his fingers through his dark hair as the others pray. “‘Motherfucking infidel’ is what the rest are thinking. They seem like they’re praying, but they’re begging for that dude to be hit by lightning.”
“He’s not praying,” Wintric says.
“Holy shit, Ellis,” Big Dax says. “You’re a genius.”
“But.”
“Think about it, brother,” says Torres.
“But the dude is . . . local.”
“Do you know there’s someone, right now, playing the trombone in Afghanistan?” says Torres.
“What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“There’s an Afghan right now, in this country, looking at porn,” says Torres. “Someone planting a bomb, reading Hemingway. Someone building a bridge, listening to Celine Dion, getting off, not praying.”
“Yep.”
“Don’t let it surprise you,” Torres says.
“Fine,” Wintric says.
“Not everyone wants to kill us,” Torres says.
“Seems like they do.”
“You haven’t been here long enough to say that. You haven’t done shit. You’re a baby.”
“I’m in this valley,” Wintric says.
“You’re a kid.”
“I’m here like you are.”
“You heard of the saying ‘Be polite, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet’?”
“No.”
“Too bad,” Torres says. “It’s some Marine shit, but it’s perfect.”
“Yep.”
“There are a ton of people praying that we all die,” Torres says. “Enough to keep us sharp.”
But Wintric has stopped listening. He eyes the young man combing his hair with his fingers as the others rise and bow, rise and bow, not twenty feet from him. The move is something Wintric performed a thousand times before his enlistment, and he raises his right hand and rubs the stubble on his shaved head, still sensing the phantom weight of his once-long hair. Wintric wants to know what the young man is thinking, wants to ask him how he can just stand there, doing nothing. Is he afraid? Bored? Something else? The young man scratches his crotch and the atmosphere of wonder lessens. Still, Wintric wants to rise and walk over to him, but he fights the impulse and stares at the grass between his knees. He digs a clump up and inspects the individual blades.
Wintric isn’t yet aware that Torres’s comment will stay with him: occasionally, in the future, when he witnesses something out of the ordinary—in this country or his own—he will think, Someone’s playing a trombone.
At last a C-130 lumbers overhead, drops a flagged transmitter, then circles back. High above, a parachute opens. Two crates full of prosthetic arms and legs float down to them. Torres recalls watching Air Force Academy cadets drift under blue parachutes, then he wonders out loud if the Afghans think Allah is a C-130 pilot, or the plane itself.
“Rain down the healing,” Torres says.
Big Dax says it’s all about personal will and raises his thick arms to the sky.
“Do they thank Allah for our bombs?” he asks.
Wintric stays quiet. He stares at the crease between his forearm and biceps, then fingers the skin there. At Fort Carson he saw soldiers with new carbon legs and arms, men and women, usually silent and alone, rubbing on their bodies, their stumps. He peers over and studies the armorless Humvee they will ride back to base. The hulking vehicle seems invincible, but he’s seen videos of convoy ambushes: the dark cloud, pressure shock, and heavy Humvees slamming back to earth as mangled coffins.
Wintric already longs for his 1985 Ford Bronco. He installed a six-inch lift, a tow kit, and oversized, gnarly mud tires. The tire-tread hum on the highway drove Kristen mad, but he would take her mudding, or farther still into the forest to fool around. Sometimes he’d take his revolver and throw lead at squirrels, paper plates, or posters of basketball players he used to hang in his room.
But here, deployed half a world away, his back-slung rifle has the safety on, and he doesn’t know when he’ll need to summon his shooting skill. He considers the menacing but helpless Humvee and hopes that when they’re done today, the dirt road will just be a dirt road.
Once the replacement body parts are sorted by limb, the three men help fit everyone. Most of the arms are too long or the wrong shade of skin, but the limbless smile, cry, hug the soldiers. After everyone has been fitted, a few artificial legs are left over, so the Americans send the confused villagers home with extras.
Before dark the soldiers climb into the Humvees, confirm emergency plans, coordinate with the other vehicles in their convoy, and start the engines. As they drive away, Big Dax rolls his window down and gives a thumbs-up to the newly limbed as they limp away, grappling with plastic legs piled high.
“Vote for us,” he yells.
A month and a half later, late on a hot July morning, red and yellow kites fly above Kabul. They veer and shake. One darts off, away, descending toward the roofs.
On a street corner, Big Dax, Torres, and Wintric scan the foot and auto traffic and swap stories. Smells of chai and lamb mix with exhaust from gridlocked vehicles. Wiping the sweat from his face an hour into their four-hour patrol, Torres oversells a harrowing skiing experience at Breckenridge. Someone whistles to their right before a car bomb explodes, the pressure fire blowing the men back.
Torres vomits on his boots and Wintric is knocked unconscious, then comes to with Big Dax cursing and dumping water onto his face before running off.
Bodies and flames, shit and screams litter the street. Dazed people run and stumble away.
Torres picks a scrap of metal out of his biceps, then reaches down to drag a silent girl away, and with his rescue yank the girl’s shoulder detaches, the surrounding skin separates, and her thin arm slides from her body.
A man runs in to help and Big Dax almost shoots. A bearded man in white linen snaps photos, steps over slithering bodies. He covers a charred corpse’s genitals with a blue cloth before clicking away at the carcass. He kicks the corpse before hurrying away.
Wintric tries to yell to him, but nothing comes out, and Wintric goes to walk, but nothing happens, and he feels wet inside and sees in waves. He screams but hears nothing, now aware that he is somehow trapped within his body.
Smoke and sky, someone firing a rifle into the air, then Big Dax, running nearby, waving at Wintric, saying something, nodding, thumbs up, then reaching far down, lifting him up.
Ambulances arrive in the dissipating smoke, then leave. People with various flags on their uniforms fill out paperwork, take photos, then depart. Afghan men and women shriek in the streets, then go, and workers tend to the debris that covers a once-busy intersection.
That evening, as Wintric dozes off in the corner, cleaned up save a smattering of dried blood spotting his throat, Torres listens to the calls to prayer. Torres’s limbs and mind ache, and he sifts through the day’s events. He touches the bandage on his arm and ponders the size and shape of the future scar. He monitors his fingers and wills them to stop trembling, but they refuse. Emotion pools within him and he finds himself on his knees, hoping to tap into some communal source of faith and belief. He tries to focus, but soon his mind drifts to the millions of people praying against him and his country. He pictures a vast field, an enormous crowd of white-robed men and women bowing in unison, the haunting force and beauty of mass synchronization.
Torres thinks of how he has taught his daughters to pray and what to pray for: safety, food, recovery. His youn
ger daughter, Mia, is old enough now to speak a simple offering. Torres’s wife sent an e-mail with the words Mia recited every night, said she always finished with “Thank you.” Torres envisions his wife, Anna, and Mia at the side of her bed, kneeling, with their elbows on the Finding Nemo comforter. Anna said they were working on “Amen,” but she thought that “Thank you” was just as good. For the first time Torres considers the purpose of “Amen,” and after whispering the word three times realizes he has no idea what it means. He considers waking Wintric, but he won’t know, so he says the word one more time as the melody from the minarets filters through the window. In Afghanistan everything he knows about the world has a different name and, worse, he doesn’t know the meanings of the English words he uses for salvation.
Big Dax smokes outside, his dirty, dry skin irritating him. He takes a drag and thinks of his high school friend Alston, how surprised he would be by Dax’s cigarettes, even more so by the confident, uniformed man smoking them. He remembers when Alston left town in the middle of the night with his girlfriend, headed for Key West. Alston’s last postcard had a picture of a clear lake, a small boat, and a golf course putting green floating right in the middle of the water. On the bottom: “Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.”
Dax has heard that the army is building a new public pool nearby. What he would give for a few laps without his Kevlar vest and helmet and heavy boots—to purge the dust from his ears, mouth, and chest. Dax pictures all the pools he has swum in. Not that strong in the water, he still desires the chlorinated depths. To immerse himself in a swimming pool would be to return home. He misses the cool water and the chemicals, the tanned female lifeguards, community pools, post pools, a banana-shaped pool at a Vegas resort he once visited. His neighbor’s pool in Rutherford, New Jersey, where he grew up. That one had a four-foot-tall diving board, way too high for the six-foot-deep pool, but Dax and the neighbor kids would cannonball and jackknife off the board and float in the summer air and bet each other to belly-flop, although no one did. But while he starts to dwell in his comforting memory, he imagines a shadowed man there, in his neighbor’s back yard, strapped with explosives, in a slow-motion diving board jump. The board fully flexes before launching the man high into the air, and eleven-year-old Dax and a couple of local kids watch the terrorist click the handheld detonator again and again, but nothing happens, only a violent fall into a too-shallow pool.
Big Dax wasn’t in Rutherford the day the towers fell. Up visiting his grandparents in Watertown, New York, already signed up for the army but waiting for basic training, he watched the news for two days straight in disbelief. Dax pictured himself in camouflage, taking aim at people, missing, and he felt the nerves in his body ping. He would have to kill now, something he’d hoped to avoid when he signed up for the G.I. Bill and travel. In his transforming world, this is why he despised the terrorists: people dying, diving from the towers, it was dismal business to be sure, but now, after joining the army in a time of relative peace, he would be asked to shoot, and probably be shot at.
After returning home to three funerals in a week, Dax stayed up late replaying television clips of people jumping from the buildings. The news had stopped running them, and he couldn’t understand why. Without these clips the whole disaster was like any other demolition of steel and concrete, but these scenes showed living men and women falling through the air. This is where the pain lived, in impossible choices on a clear late-summer morning. Dax had never considered choosing between flame and gravity, but watching the people fall to their deaths, weighing which way to die, he guessed he would pick gravity.
One night his father spied him watching the clips.
“We think we’re more important than we are,” he said. “Each one of us. It’s our biggest mistake. Remember this—you can love God, but God doesn’t give a shit. You want to celebrate births and winning the lottery and graduations? You give credit to the heavens? Fine, but you better celebrate this shit as well.”
Dax hadn’t thought much about God, about intervention or justice, so he sat there in his living room and stared at his sober father pointing at the television.
“It’s okay to feel good when you make them pay.”
Tonight, in Afghanistan, Big Dax smokes his third cigarette down and snuffs the nub out on his forearm before flicking it away. Typically he performs this forearm trick in front of others, but lately he continues the move when alone, the singe becoming more and more bearable.
As he enters the room he sees Torres on his knees. Big Dax considers saying, “No one’s listening,” but he swallows it down easily and walks to his bunk, lies back, and lets the nicotine work.
One day while on patrol in a mud village in the midday heat, Big Dax, Torres, and Wintric drink tea with a man rather than detaining him because there’s no sign he’s killed four Americans and a Dane over the past five months. As they leave, the man smiles and waves at them.
Later in the afternoon, an elderly man offers what the men guess is his daughter to Wintric. It’s the opposite of what they’ve been briefed, that Afghan men would purposely disfigure—often with acid—the faces and bodies of adulterous women. Brown-eyed, short, and thin, the daughter smiles and widens her eyes when her father taps her leg with his cane. She offers her hand to Wintric in the narrow alley, and he steps close and takes back the girl’s hijab to reveal her dark hair. The men are hot in their gear, but the shade of the alley helps.
“Hey,” Big Dax says, “don’t do anything. There, I said it.”
“Second that,” says Torres, and strokes his rifle. “But seriously, don’t do anything. You have five minutes to check that house for weapons. She can help. Be careful. We’re not screwing around here.”
The father moves down the street, and Torres follows him for a few steps.
Big Dax leans on the thick mud wall of the building, waiting, thinking about the shade and the smell of roasting meat. He catches some kids staring him down from a house nearby, and he wonders if he had been born in that very alley what Afghan Dax would think of this man, with this rifle, leaning against this wall. He senses empathy there, but in scattered, fleeting fragments, not enough to care, not now, not with a few months to go.
After Wintric enters the shabby dwelling with the girl, he takes off his helmet and she turns to him and smiles. She motions him to a back room, but Wintric stays a couple steps inside the door. The girl walks back to him and touches his chest, but he can’t feel the pressure underneath his Kevlar vest. He hasn’t touched or been touched by a woman in months. She keeps her hand on his chest and raises her eyes to his. He watches the girl, not sure what’s expected of him or why he’s here, but he takes his time. On her right cheek, a tiny circular scar. Her lips are dry. She reminds him of no one and he feels a focused but nervous desire to touch her face.
Wintric reaches out and the girl’s arms fall to her sides and she closes her eyes. He stops his hand inches from her face. He lifts his left arm and senses a weight and remembers he’s holding his helmet. He sees it in his hand. He’s here, in this home. He’s in Afghanistan. When she opens her eyes, he turns and leaves.
The men walk in the dusty afternoon, and they soon pass a quail fight inside a tiny hall. Dozens of men circle a brown mat and cheer the frantic, bobbing birds.
“My state bird,” Wintric says. “Little bastards are easy picking where I’m from, and good eats.”
“Jersey doesn’t have a state bird,” says Big Dax.
“I thought every state had one.”
“Isn’t Jersey’s the Shit Bird?” says Torres.
“We do have a horse and two ugly bitches on our flag,” Big Dax says. “That much I know.”
“We got a grizzly bear on ours, but no grizzlies,” says Wintric. “We got black bears. One ate the dog I grew up with.”
“Torres,” Big Dax says, “we found a true California hick.”
Wintric seizes the opportunity and talks about his rural hometown of Chester, about playing football on a losing t
eam that carried fourteen guys total, about his respect for those who leave the logging town for other parts of the country.
Big Dax and Torres let him carry on. They don’t ask any questions about the girl in the alley, but later, after drinking enough smuggled booze to feel something, Wintric tells them that he began to undress her but stopped himself. He says she grabbed his hands and placed them on her bare shoulders, and he left his hands there for a moment before walking out. He says he wouldn’t be able to live with himself—a girl waits back home.
“No one’s ever waiting, my friend,” says Big Dax. “They’re living and moving on. And don’t get mad. It sucks, but it’s true.”
“That’s bullshit,” says Torres.
“You know it’s not,” says Big Dax, raising his voice. “You know about Billings and Winston and Henlish. What are their wives doing right now?”
“If you had someone at home, you’d know,” says Torres. “I feel sorry that this is all you have. It’s pathetic.”
Big Dax turns to Wintric. “Billings and Winston and Henlish are trying to stay alive over here and their wives are banging the shit out of dudes at home.”
“Okay,” Wintric says.
“Okay?”
“Okay. I don’t know them. That has nothing to do with me.”
“Fine,” says Big Dax.
“You have right now,” says Torres. “Then, when that’s gone, you have the next moment, then that’s it. What do you look forward to, man? If all it is is surviving, that’s shit.”
“I see,” says Big Dax. “I’m crazy for seeing things the way they actually are. Reality tells me it’s dangerous to believe that someone’s waiting for you back home. Their lives are shit. We stay busy, keep our minds working. They get to worry and pretend they’re fine with us dodging bombs over here. And you know they have to act as if they’re fine with it because if they don’t, if they actually speak their minds, they’re unpatriotic and bitches and everything else. You hate me for saying it. Fine.”
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