by John Renehan
Black tolerated these with more patience than he ordinarily would, because while most officers in the battalion either ignored him completely or were openly hostile, Gayley was merely insufferably patronizing. That he could work with.
Besides, there were aspects of Gayley that Black genuinely respected. He was not fat, for one.
And Gayley had not, in his methodical hand-over-hand up the Army ladder, lost the ability to be succinct. Somehow, despite being known throughout the battalion as a Dudley Do-Right with golden hair and a six-sided jaw who harangued unsuspecting soldiers at length about the power of positive thinking, Gayley could still get to the point when it came to actual work. True to form, he tossed the packet of papers across the table so Black could see it.
“Fifteen-six officer.”
“Sir?”
He picked up the sheaf.
“Fifteen-six, son. It’s your turn.”
Army Regulation 15-6 governs investigations of misconduct within a military unit. The 15-6 investigation is the commander’s initial inquiry into possible wrongdoing. The offense might be significant or trivial, might lead to nothing or to court-martials and ended careers. But it all starts with the 15-6.
The investigation must be conducted by an officer of greater rank to the individual or individuals suspected of the wrongdoing. Because most of the people in the Army are not officers, and because most higher-ranking officers don’t want to spend their time serving as amateur internal affairs investigators, most 15-6 investigations can safely be shunted off on lieutenants, the lowest-ranking officers, without violating any rules.
Black remembered how a friend had explained it to him when he drew his first 15-6, involving a break-in at a barracks back in the States.
You are investigating soldiers who don’t know you, because the regulations require that the fifteen-six officer be from a different unit from where the misconduct happened. So they see you only as a rat. You get no help from the unit itself, because you are a rat, and also because you are a lieutenant, and no one respects lieutenants because they haven’t proven anything to anyone yet. No one trusts you, you get no help, and the whole thing will suck.
No sense drawing out the pain. Black began skimming the cover sheet. Gayley said nothing.
He recognized the unit involved. Third Battalion, 44th Infantry Regiment, abbreviated 3/44, had its headquarters and barracks on the far side of FOB Omaha. Black often passed through its neighborhood on foot while walking across the base.
He stopped short when he got to REASON FOR INVESTIGATION. He looked up at Gayley, confused.
“A warning shot, sir?”
“Whole new war, Lieutenant.”
He was talking about the change.
With the military pushing further and further into the rural backlands, its leadership in Washington had pushed out new “rules of engagement” for when and how American troops would use force. Someone had figured out that it’s tough to convince civilians you are there to protect them when you keep shredding cars full of people who didn’t realize they had to slow down at the checkpoint, or vaporizing four homes with a five-hundred-pound bomb when you really only wanted to get the one bad guy in the one house.
These stern directives, filtered through ordinary bureaucratic tendencies, predictably resulted in many, many routine 15-6 investigations over largely routine uses of force, even when that force resulted in no harm to people or damage to property.
Black realized he was looking at one of these situations right now.
Some soldiers had fired warning shots near some Afghan civilians in a tense situation in a village a few weeks earlier. Had accidentally killed a local man’s goat the night before, apparently, and there had been some kind of confrontation the next morning when they went to make amends. It looked like no one had been harmed and, aside from a broken flower pot or something, there had been no property damage. The situation dissipated, and the man had been paid in cash for his loss.
So now Black would have to trudge across Omaha, corner these soldiers on their free time, and grill them over having, by the looks of it, done the right thing.
“When are they coming in, sir?”
“Huh?”
Gayley seemed confused.
“Their next trip in from the field, sir.”
Ordinarily, for an incident occurring away from the FOB, you’d wait and interview the soldiers at their unit during one of their periodic resupply trips back to base. Another plus, then: He’d be interrogating guys during their few precious hours of downtime in the middle of a war.
And they’re gonna spend their one rest day answering some strange officer’s questions and feeling like criminals and thinking about what a fat lot of good doing the right thing did them.
Gayley shook his head.
“They’re not coming back in.”
Now Black was confused.
“They’re busy fighting a war, Lieutenant,” Gayley explained. “They’re not coming back for this. You’re going to them.”
Busy fighting a war.
“Sir, can I ask a question?”
“Shoot.”
“I haven’t been to the field since I came to Omaha, except to fly out for R&R leave and back again last week.”
He cleared his throat.
“Am I the best choice here?”
Gayley didn’t blink.
“It’s the new selection system,” he grumbled. “Integrity in selection or some bullshit. Apparently I can’t be trusted to pick my own investigating officers anymore.”
He was talking about the other change that had come out along with the new rules of engagement. Now 15-6 officers were to be assigned by computer at the division headquarters, multiple levels above Gayley’s office. It was essentially random.
The colonel’s face betrayed nothing. But Black had hung around the S-1 shop long enough to know that nearly any regulation like this allowed leeway for a commander to decide that a given officer was not fit for a given duty. Either Gayley thought more of Black than he let on, or he recognized the task for the pointless makework it was and didn’t want to spend one of his other lieutenants on it.
Hard to say.
“Where are they located, sir?”
Gayley cleared his throat.
“Combat Outpost Vega.”
He did not elaborate. Just looked at Black as though waiting for a reaction.
“I’m not familiar with that location, sir.”
Gayley nodded once and picked up a folded map. It was covered with topographic markings and military grid lines. Black saw a lot of green.
Gayley flipped it like a Frisbee. It spun across his desk and straight into Black’s lap, startling him.
“You’re going up the Valley.”
—
There were many valleys in the mountains of Nuristan, and many were hard places where people died hard deaths. But there was only one Valley. Black didn’t even know its proper name. But he knew about the Valley. Everyone at FOB Omaha did.
It was the farthest, and the hardest, and the worst. It lay deeper and higher in the mountains than any other place Americans ventured in Nuristan, beyond the front range you could see from Radio Hill, and beyond the peaks that lay beyond those. You had to travel through a network of interlinked valleys, past all the other remote American outposts, just to get to its mouth.
From there the Valley wound upward, snaking this way and that through the steep mountainsides and apparently, as Black had heard from tales whispered and retold, terminating at its highest point in a narrow pass that crossed over the ridges and into Pakistan. No one could say, because no American had been that far.
Black knew that there were outposts in the Valley, though he didn’t know how many or how far in. Stories circulated back to Omaha periodically, tales of land claimed and fought for, or lost and ov
errun, new attempts made or turned back, outposts abandoned and retaken.
They were impossible to verify. Everything with the Valley was myth and rumor. No one on the FOB seemed to have met anyone who had been there.
Black would hear the young soldiers in the S-1 shop talking once in a while. Did you see the Valley guys in the chow hall last night?
Then skepticism from another soldier, followed by protestations to the contrary, joined by another soldier whose buddy said he talked to them and yes, they were Valley guys.
Black concluded that the place was far enough away that any soldiers who went there mostly stayed there—spent most of their tour in the mountains and rarely returned to the FOB. When or if they did, they probably just kept to themselves or slept.
He didn’t blame them. The only hard information he had seen were the casualty reports, which came down from Brigade headquarters weekly. 3/44 Infantry regularly had the highest counts. Now, 15-6 paperwork in hand, Black understood why. They had been cursed with the Valley.
Whatever the rest of the truth of the place was, he had only been certain that he would never know.
“It’s six hours by ground convoy,” Gayley was saying, “and a hell of a lot shorter by air.”
Black considered the mess of paperwork now splayed across his lap. Combat Outpost—COP—Vega seemed small. Tiny, really.
A “cop,” as the joes said it, typically didn’t comprise more than several hasty structures with incomplete barriers around them. COPs were meant to be compact and highly defensible, to the extent a tiny base in the middle of enemy territory could be defended.
Vega looked typical in this regard. It had been built right on the slope of the mountainside, well above the river that ran along the bottom of the valley. It had limited views and was surrounded by high ground on all sides. A nice fat target.
“I don’t know how Three-Four-Four’s gonna get you there yet,” Gayley went on. “Their commander’s gonna let me know.”
He pointed across the desk at the map draped over Black’s knee.
“But I would hope for ground, because helicopters don’t stay airborne very long up in that place. Those fuckers get shot down all the time when they fly down below the mountaintops.”
Black brought the map up to his face. The outpost was accessible by a road, or a track, or what passed for it. But from the reports in his hands it sounded as though at some points there was no road or trail whatsoever, other than what had been worn by American vehicles, which were not exactly making daily trips up there.
“That’s what I’ve got,” Gayley said tersely. “What are your questions?”
It was the line that squared-away Army officers always used at the end of a briefing.
Black rooted in the file and brought out a personnel roster generated by the S-1 shop over at 3/44’s headquarters. COP Vega was manned by a single infantry platoon, not at complete strength. Forty-seven guys, unless someone had died since the last report had been generated.
Which was entirely possible. The outpost came under attack, frequently. It had been in place roughly a year, and whoever did not want it there had clearly not given up on the idea of making it go away.
“Why there, sir?” he asked. “Why such a poor tactical location?”
Gayley raised an eyebrow at hearing the word “tactical” cross Black’s lips.
Let it go.
“They had to build it there,” Gayley explained.
Vega’s mission was interdicting the flow of foreign fighters crossing the border from Pakistan, down through the higher parts of the mountains and into the rest of Afghanistan. The Valley was a key route. The express lane.
“Everything funnels through there.”
Black nodded.
“What else?” Gayley pressed, ready to get back to his evening.
“That’s it, sir.”
Gayley nodded once and watched Black wrestle the paper pile together.
“These Vega dudes are no joke, Lieutenant.”
Black looked up at the colonel.
“Their world is no joke. They’re strung out and they’ve lost a lot of buddies. They are not going to be happy to see you poking your nose around their outpost.”
“Roger, sir.”
“Ask your questions, talk to everyone you need to talk to, and write it up straight. Do not be ignored.”
“I won’t, sir.”
“But do not get in their way, and do not fuck up their operations. Do the job, write the fifteen-six, and come back here.”
—
The S-1 shop door was padlocked. Everyone back in their bunks playing Xbox and watching movies on their laptops, or at the FOB gym.
Black turned his key in the padlock and pulled open the door. He wove his way through desk-shaped shadows to his own area, at the rear. The place of honor.
He clicked on the desk lamp. A smart-alecky friend had sent it to him in the mail as a joke, after he’d been given the S-1 desk job. It was a little music box number with a painted lamp shade that rotated when you turned it on, wraparound scenes of glorious south Pacific locales crawling around its surface in tacky Technicolor. He tossed the map into the pool of rainbow-hued light and only at that moment, with a faux island ditty tinkling softly at him, realized that he was still clutching in his other hand the manila envelope he had taken with him to Gayley’s office.
He tossed that to the side and bent down over the map.
He’d been in New York City years before. He remembered the feeling when he first stood beneath the Trade Center, his brain processing that this thing he’d read about and imagined was real, enormously, almost frighteningly real. That was how he felt looking at the map of the Valley, seeing this almost mythical place in specificity, in actual topographic representations, in symbols and annotations proving its existence, looking back out at him declaring I am here.
It turned this way and that like a serpent as it rose through the mountains. Vega was not the only American presence there.
Down at its mouth lay another outpost. Combat Outpost Arcturus. Some officer was on an astronomy kick, apparently, when the names for the Valley posts were assigned. Somewhere in the sheaf of paperwork Gayley had given him he had seen it noted that soldiers called the place COP Heavenly.
I’ll bet.
Vega was a few miles further in beyond Arcturus. There were no other posts on the map. Vega was the limit of the American advance.
The Valley kept winding its way onward and upward, terminating—just as lore had told it—in a narrow pass several miles beyond the outpost. That would be the Pakistani border, roughly. The precise location of the frontier was a little hazy in the Nuristan mountains. No one who lived there, it seemed, had ever really needed to know with precision.
He put the map aside, out of his sight in the shadowed part of his desk, and switched on his computer. While it warmed up he considered the unlikelihood of him being selected for this particular job. About Gayley’s admonitions.
His civilian e-mail account came up. He opened a blank message and sat a moment, thinking, before typing in a subject line:
The Final Insult
The recipient was a trusted friend whom Black had known since they were both civilians fighting for slots at the Army’s Officer Candidate School. They’d gone through training together, but they never saw each other anymore. He was the one who’d sent the lamp when Black had come to FOB Omaha. It arrived without a return address, as befit a package from someone who was increasingly disappearing into the world of classified military operations.
The friend was a highly intelligent wiseass who liked to be entertained and preferred witty banter to plain speech. This could be wearying, but having few American friends on the FOB, Black was usually happy to oblige. Chances were slim he would get the message in time, but if he did, the guy might have some useful advice.
As you are a connoisseur of bureaucratic inanity you will appreciate this. As a perfect cap-off to a stellar military career, your intrepid correspondent will be leaving Forward Operating Base PastGlory to venture alone into the broad sunlit uplands of neighboring Berzerkistan, where he will be welcomed warmly by the hale lads of the 44th Foot and regaled thereby with tales of ales (drank back home) and males (military-aged) over which and whom they have prevailed; and where he will also put the Fifteen on the Six, having been selected as fit for this singular duty by the great churning motherwheel of Army bullshit human resources efficiency.
If I put in words the triviality of the subject matter, you would cry.
Wherever you are on the Earth’s many lands, may you be drunk and insufferable. Or killing bad guys.
Care of
He pulled the map of the Valley over and extracted a grid coordinate.
Oscar Zulu 36119 81534. God save your spleen.
Yours from the Land of Mediocrity,
—Lord of the Files
Good enough. If his friend got it, he might actually be amused enough to reply.
He had just sent it when his desk phone jangled. He picked it up.
Gayley. Calling with word on the transportation situation.
“Sir?”
“Ground convoy. They don’t like flying helicopters into that place unless someone’s dying, and not even always then.”
“Okay, sir. When do I go?”
“Tomorrow night.”
He’d wanted more time. But Black knew better than to say nothing, or splutter sir? or otherwise register his dismay.
“Roger that, sir.”
“I know,” Gayley said, reading his thoughts. “Their resupply convoy only makes runs up there once a week on Sundays.”
It was Saturday night.
“They leave from Three-Four-Four’s headquarters at seventeen hundred. Take tomorrow off and get your gear ready. Be there with your stuff no later than sixteen thirty.”
“Roger, sir,” Black replied. “Sir, does that mean—”
“Yeah, it does. You’re gonna stay out there a week.”