by John Renehan
Weapon assembled again, he set it on the crisply made bunk and sat down next to it. He stared at the door and realized that sleep would not come quickly if he lay down. He thought of Caine’s warning, but only briefly, as he rose and stepped out into the hallway.
—
“Good way to get shot by mistake, sir.”
The soldier cocked one eye over a shoulder from behind his machine gun as Black ducked his head and stepped into the guard post. Other than that, he and his friend had hardly acknowledged Black’s arrival at all.
He had nearly lost his way getting back to the roof, turning back once or twice before finding himself in the chem light passageway. Quietly up the breezy stairwell and past Oswalt’s little wall hootch, which was finally dark inside and emitting beefy snores. Then up and out across the planks.
Caine had not been exaggerating about the fog. From the higher parts of the Valley, down the river run, it had flowed and swelled until it filled every available space. Then it rose. A silent gray sea lay before them, stretching across the Valley, its near shore only a couple hundred feet below the outpost.
Black stood with his hands in his pockets, mesmerized. Finally the first soldier spoke.
“Probably clear out Sniper Town at least.”
“What’s that?”
The soldier pointed upward, indicating the hillslopes above Vega.
“Watch our asses all the time. But they hate this crap. Usually go home when it comes out.”
Black said nothing.
“Their own goddamn valley and it even creeps them out,” the soldier said, shaking his head. “Superstitious about it. You know what they call it, sir?”
“What?”
“‘Devil fog.’”
“What’s that mean?”
“You know, sir,” the kid said, making disdainful quotes in the air. “‘Folklore’ and stuff.”
“Like what?”
The soldier shrugged.
“You know, like, the bogeyman,” he said. “Got all kinds of stories about it. Like, the Devil walks in the fog and steals your babies and shit.”
“Oh.”
“Which is hilarious, ’cause what they should be scared of is themselves,” the soldier continued. “All these fucking tribes with their chiefs always assassinating each other and raping each other’s daughters ’cause somebody took your goat a hundred years ago and all that bullshit.”
The kid shook his head.
“Jackasses,” he concluded.
The other soldier, the one called Bosch, was leaning back against the wall again and regarded Black idly from behind dark, unimpressed eyes.
“I see you found the laundry service, sir,” he said dryly, eyeing Black’s fresh uniform.
In response, Black rooted in his pockets and pulled out a pack of smokes and a lighter. He mouthed one and offered the pack to the first soldier, who frowned at the lighter.
“Light discipline, sir.”
Black shrugged.
“We’re under cover. You said the snipers are going home anyway.”
The soldier said nothing. Black held the pack out to his friend instead. He recognized a kid who broke rules just to prove something when he saw one.
Bosch looked at it a moment and then took one. They lit up. Black inhaled slowly.
Don’t cough like an amateur.
After a minute or two of first-puff haze, the first soldier spoke up.
“So, sir, can I ask a dumb question?”
Black gave a What’s that? flick of his head as he blew a streamer out past the machine guns.
“Um, what are you doing here, sir?”
“Wanted to see the fog.”
The soldier frowned.
“No, sir. I mean, what are you doing at Vega? We haven’t seen any other officer here besides the L.T. in, like, never.”
Black blew out a streamer of smoke and shrugged nonchalantly.
“Gotta take care of some bullshit.”
The soldier nodded gravely as though that were as thorough and forthcoming an explanation as anyone ever needed to give for anything in the Army.
“Roger that, sir.”
They shot the breeze.
The first one had a girl who he’d been having problems with since he deployed, which was nothing new for soldiers. He was round-faced and freckled, jaded in a mellow Midwestern way. Most of his high school friends were home doing meth.
The other soldier, Bosch, didn’t say a lot, but he seemed like a cynic with principle, which Black approved of. An observer. Black felt his skeptical eyes on him even when he was talking to the other soldier.
He was smallish but solidly constructed, not short enough to be called short, but just short enough to be called not tall. His hair pushed the limits of Army regulations and looked as though it would flourish into dark curls had it been allowed to grow any longer. He wore a permanent Yeah, what about it? scowl, and a thick mustache straight from the ’70s.
Black reminded himself to ask about his funny name if the kid ever opened up a little. He guessed Bosch had kicked more than one bigger kid’s ass over it.
“Where you from, sir?” the first soldier asked him.
“In the Army, or the world?”
The soldier shrugged.
“Either one, I guess.”
“Long story.”
“Army or world, sir?”
“Both.”
The Army was full of people who took a lot of long roads to wherever they were standing at that moment. Some of them didn’t like talking about those roads. The soldier was unoffended and unfazed.
“Cool.”
They smoked and watched the Valley fill up with fog.
“How often do you guys get hit?” Black asked.
They told him. It ran the gamut. In the outpost and out on patrol, large ambushes, small ambushes, solo snipers, heavy weapons and light, anyplace and anytime.
Except in the past two weeks. Things had been quiet, except when they left the COP on foot for patrols. No real attacks on Vega to speak of. Hardly any sniper activity even.
“Which just means they’re gonna hit us again,” the first soldier said. “Hard.”
He drummed his hands on his legs.
“Always do. They’re just watching our asses out there. Just figuring shit out.”
Drum, drum.
“Who’s watching you?” Black asked.
“Shit, you tell me, sir,” the soldier spat. “Half the time we don’t even know who the hell it is attacking us. Supposedly the Valley tribes hate the Taliban and stuff, but then we know for a fact that it ain’t always Taliban dudes that are coming at us. We’ll get in a firefight and find dead bodies of fuckers we just saw in the village the day before, so we know Valley guys are mixed in there too.”
He shook his head.
“Smile at our asses in town and then try to kill us on the mountain.”
“Why?”
“Fuck if I know, sir. These Valley assholes got so much shit going on with all their alliances and breaking alliances and drugs and feuds and changing sides every day, who the hell knows how the Taliban fits in with it all? The shit’s so complicated you may as well ask why you got kicked off yearbook staff.”
I miss joes, thought Black.
“Fuckin’ Taliban,” the soldier muttered. “Fuckin’ Valley dudes.”
He turned to Black.
“Gimme one of those— I mean, sir. If it’s all right.”
He pointed at the pack of cigarettes, which Black had left sitting on the window ledge. Black made a Be my guest motion. The soldier grabbed one, peeked over his shoulder toward the stairwell, and lit up.
“This place,” he announced sagely, “is fucked.”
That pretty well summarized in four words all the intell
igence that had ever come across Black’s desk concerning the Valley. He said as much. The kid laughed.
“Yeah, well, welcome to it in three-D, sir!”
He swept his hand across the panorama before them.
“Hope you get a good show before you gotta go.”
“Pass,” said Black dryly.
The soldier chuckled.
“When’s your next patrol down to the town?” Black asked.
“Day after tomorrow, I think.”
The three of them lapsed into silence and stared at the gray ocean rising toward them. Its blanket seemed to silence everything in the Valley. Through the open windows Black heard not a single noise of night.
He thought back to his days as a trainee at Officer Candidate School—OCS—back at Fort Benning, deep in the mountainous woods of western Georgia. The instructors would send the candidates, as they were called, out into the wilds to test their land-navigation skills.
You’d get a topographic map and a compass and a sheet of paper with a set of grid coordinates. The grid coordinates were your “points.” Each point on the map represented an actual little signpost planted in the woods somewhere.
A point might be on top of a mountain or in the bottom of a ravine. Wherever. Each trainee got his own sheet of paper with his own set of points. Each point had a hole punch with a unique imprint hanging from it. You traveled alone, and you had a certain amount of time to find a certain number of points and punch your paper at each of them.
It was a pain. The training course was a few miles on a side. It had some of just about every kind of woodland topography you could think of inside it. Swamps, mountains, rivers, forest so dense you could barely squeeze between trees, sticky vines that cut your face, tempting logging trails that looked like dirt but turned out to be made of Benning’s famous orange clay and became ultraslick mud-butter in the rain. Trainees regularly came out of the course soaked to the skin, bruised, faces lacerated.
But “Land Nav” training got you out of the school’s main complex where the instructors screamed at you all day and woke you up all night, and into the woods where you finally had some peace and quiet. If you were fast enough finding your points, you could even lie down and take a nap, and not a soul on Fort Benning would know where you were. Everyone loved Land Nav. At least the daytime sessions.
The night sessions were different. You had animal sounds and invisible gullies to fall into and your own overactive imagination to deal with. There were trainees who took their sheet of points and just walked fifty meters out into the woods and sat down against a tree for three hours, thinking about the vastness of the black course before them. At the end of the session they came back to camp and said, Sorry, I couldn’t find any of my points tonight.
Most hated the nighttime runs. Black loved them. He loved the challenge of finding a way through the dark. Loved the mental discipline involved. Being alone in the woods at night scared the hell out of him.
Some trainees were shooting the breeze after a session one night, warming up around a burn barrel. One of the guys told the others how he had been at the bottom of a shallow valley looking for one of his points. He’d been blundering around in circles where the infernal signpost was supposed to be, not finding it, losing momentum, starting to feel the woods close in.
He looked up and in the dim light he saw a fog bank at the top of the rise. A real fog bank, like in a movie, coming slowly down the slope toward him. It was like a living thing.
He turned around and ran. Literally ran away from it. He saw it coming and his response was so instant and visceral he forgot all about finding his point and just bailed out, tripping over logs and branches, to get away from the thing. When he told the story he didn’t even bother trying to pretend that he hadn’t nearly peed himself.
He took some ribbing over that. But now, staring out at the ghostly layer before them, Black knew exactly what the guy had been talking about. He realized he’d have run too.
The closer the fog layer got, the quieter the Valley sounds seemed to get. Even the animals seemed to retreat from it. Black crossed his arms against the cooling air. No wonder the people who lived in the Valley were scared of it.
“You’re right about the fog,” Black said finally. “It’s creepy as hell.”
“Yeah, right, sir?” said the soldier. “Sick of looking at this shit.”
He blew out a long jet of smoke.
“What time is it?” Black asked.
“Oh-dark-thirty,” the first soldier muttered without looking at his watch.
Oh-dark-thirty. From the way military times were stated. Oh-four-hundred. Oh-six-hundred. Oh-dark-thirty was a time of night that was obnoxious even by Army standards.
Oh-dark-thirty was what it had been the very first morning at OCS. They’d all been up until the wee hours the night before, slogging through inprocessing stations, scribbling out paperwork hunched over in one-piece desks ripped off from an elementary school, standing in sleepy lines to get needles in the arm. Finally to their bunks for what seemed like fifteen minutes. Then metal trash cans clamoring down the hallways in the dark. Their instructors, saying good morning in the middle of the night.
Off into the January woods. A “terrain run,” the instructors called it. Streams to slosh through. An obstacle course tucked away in a lonely glade, sodium lamp atop a pole casting orange shadows on their struggling forms. Sprints up and down a paved hill overlooking a sprawling airfield. Hand-to-hand fighting in icy puddles. Then back into the black trees.
Hours later, they emerged exhausted onto a dewy field in the morning half-light. A mile-long running track awaited them. The instructors’ final joke on their charges. Everyone twice around for time, fast as you can go. Miss the standard and you’re out, “recycled,” to wait around for weeks and hope to make it into the next class.
He ran. The first half mile, his shins burned and pains shot from his back down through his legs. The next half mile he decided to quit. In the last mile his body limbered and he ran like the wind.
He stumbled through the scrum of trainees huffing beyond the finish line and found his friend. The wiseass who would one day send him novelty lamps and witty e-mails. He stomped up to Black and they threw a spontaneous arm around each other’s shoulders: We’re actually here. It was one of only two times Black could remember when his friend had dropped his wry, cultivated façade and allowed himself to be seen.
“Well, anyway,” Black said, stubbing out his cigarette. “Probably get going.”
“Take it easy, L.T.”
“Yup.”
He was turning to go when Bosch spoke up.
“Hey, L.T.,” he said. “So why the fuck are you really here?”
Black told them about the 15-6.
“Wow, sir, you weren’t lying,” said the first soldier. “That is some bullshit.”
“Like I said.”
The soldier appeared to be thinking about something.
“Well, then I guess it’s lucky me and Bosch weren’t in Darreh Sin that day, right, sir?”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, ’cause if you’re the fifteen-six officer, then we’re not supposed to be shooting the shit like this, right?”
Black stuck his hands in his pockets and shrugged.
“Damn, sir,” the kid said. “You really don’t give a fuck, do you?”
He made for the stairwell, moving briskly across the pallets. He was almost there when he caught the movement.
Just a shadow moving against a shadow. He stopped and squinted.
A man squatted in a parapeted corner of the roof, back to Black, working intently at something. Black fell to a crouch, fingering his pistol, before he was able to make out that the man was wearing American camouflage fatigues.
“Who’s that?” he called in a stage whisper, feeling mildly foolish.
> The man whirled around, startled, and had to put a hand out to keep himself from toppling over.
“Danny! Danny!” he whisper-called back, holding his palms high in the dark. “Chill, man!”
His voice was heavily accented. Black trotted in a crouch over to where he was, squatting next to him just below the top of the roof-wall.
The man shrank back, eyeing him uncertainly. He was slender and olive-skinned, deep ochre eyes set in a narrow and inquisitive face topped by scrubby black hair. Black guessed him at about thirty. His slight frame struggled to fill the fatigues, which were blank except for a tape over his left breast that said U.S. ARMY, and another over his right that said DANNY.
“You’re the ’terp,” Black stated.
Any platoon having regular contact with Afghan people would have an interpreter—a ’terp—embedded in it. Most were Afghan guys who risked a great deal for the good pay that came with working as a contractor for the Americans.
Most used a false name, usually a Western one. It wasn’t so much courtesy as self-protection. Didn’t want Americans accidentally spitting out a real name in front of some dude who might come back later and slit the ’terp’s throat and his family’s too if he found out who the guy was and where he was from.
The guy nodded and stuck out his hand.
“Danny,” he said, stating the obvious.
Black shook it, seeing Danny examining his own rank and name tapes.
“I’m Black,” he offered.
Danny furrowed his brow. He clearly knew enough about the Army to know that there wasn’t room in one platoon for two lieutenants.
“You are the new L.T.?” he asked.
Black shook his head.
“I’m just here a week.”
“Okay, man,” Danny said, nodding again. “Cool.”
’Terps were generally pretty traditional guys. Danny didn’t pry further than what was offered.