by Sean Parnell
In the field, his attention drifted. We discovered he could not speak the local dialect, which made him almost useless when visiting villages. His translations frequently made no sense, and the ones that did made us wonder if he was telling the truth.
Bruce Lee made me appreciate Abdul all the more. For the next six days, I’d be going into Indian country without my Tonto. I was not happy.
We sortied beyond the wire, heading into our area of operations five Humvees strong. We hadn’t gone far when I got a radio call from the base operations center telling us to turn around and come home. There was no explanation.
We swung around and drove back through the main gate. Soldiers were running in different directions, and there was a charged atmosphere that had been lacking when we left.
We dismounted. Sabo and Baldwin linked up with me. “Any idea what’s going on, sir?” Baldwin asked.
“No. Let me see if I can find out. Turn the trucks around and make sure everyone stays close.”
“Roger, sir.”
I walked to the operations center, where I found First Sergeant Christopher overseeing controlled chaos. When I asked what was going on, he said, “Delta found the body of a local national.”
“Where?”
“Midway between here and Shkin.”
Shit.
First Sergeant Christopher added, “Abdul is missing. We’re trying to determine if it’s him.”
Focus.
“What can we do to help?” I managed.
“Captain Waverly is out there right now. He’ll need you out there with him.”
“We’re ready to roll.”
I walked back to my platoon, my mind a frenzy of activity. All I could think about was Waverly’s refusals to help Abdul.
By the time I returned, the men had already heard the news. Everyone had gone quiet. Baldwin and Sabo had returned to their respective trucks. Wheat had ceased his whittling; Emerick had stowed his pen and pad. Chris Brown sat behind his gun and stared straight ahead. I climbed into my rig and exchanged a glance with Pinholt. His jaw was set, but I could see anger in his eyes.
The call to leave the base and join Captain Waverly came a few minutes later. We saddled up and sped out to the scene.
Maybe it isn’t him.
Thirty minutes later, we reached Captain Waverly, who directed my rigs to establish outer security. As soon as we were emplaced, I went to talk with our company commander.
He looked pale, but otherwise he showed no emotion.
“Sir, what’s the story?” I asked.
Waverly told me that another patrol had discovered a dirt bike lying beside the road. It looked like one of the red Yamahas the ’terps used for transport. A body lay next to the road about a half kilometer south of the motorcycle.
“Let’s go take a look,” Waverly said.
My throat went dry.
Uncle Matt warned you about this moment.
“Roger, sir.”
Lieutenant Marbury, our half-African-American, half-German fire support officer, joined us. Apparently he’d already seen the corpse. He offered, “He was shot in the leg.”
At our family’s last Christmas together, I had found myself alone with a beer, standing at the threshold of the kitchen. The rest of the adults had congregated in the kitchen. I had lingered on the periphery, listening and wondering if I’d be around next Christmas for a repeat of this moment.
Marbury pointed the way. “He’s down a ways, around the bend in the road over there.”
We began to walk that way. Not a word passed between us.
I had just finished off the can of Miller Lite in my hand when my uncle Matt approached. He was the cop in the family and had served with a department just outside Pittsburgh for more than twenty years. He was the kind of man who could walk into a room and command instant respect without ever saying a word. He was a presence.
“How’s the beer?” he had asked.
“Awful. Next time, we gotta get Bud Lite,” I had replied
Over my uncle Matt’s shoulder, I saw my dad edge a little closer to us.
“Sean, with where you’re going, there’s something you need to be aware of.”
I waited for him to continue. He struggled to find the words he wanted.
“What’s that?” I asked lightly, hoping that would get him over the hump.
“Look, Sean, I will never forget the first time I saw a dead body. It affects you. A lot.”
At the edge of the kitchen, my uncle Matt had told me the story of the first corpse he’d encountered. The man had been murdered and dumped in a puddle of water. He was bloated, and the pool had turned crimson with his blood.
“At some point, you’re probably going to experience something like that,” he had said in a low voice. I’d nodded, thinking I understood what that meant. Perhaps intellectually that was even true.
“Sean, you need to steel yourself for that moment. Be prepared.”
My dad had hovered, pretending not to listen. His face looked torn. He had wanted to hear, but he didn’t. Beneath the conflict, I had sensed that he felt a low-grade form of panic. The unknown awaited his son, and there was nothing he could do but stand and watch me wade into it.
Actually, the unknown awaited both of us.
I kept pace alongside Captain Waverly and Lieutenant Marbury. The walk to the victim seemed to take forever. With each step that drew us closer my mind screamed at me to stop.
Could this actually be Abdul?
We came over a rise and could see down the road. Fifty meters away, the body lay sprawled in a drainage ditch. The man was wearing old-style desert camouflage pants and khaki man jams. When I saw his pants, my feet stopped and I sucked air.
Keep walking. Be ready.
Be ready? My uncle Matt had warned me, but in this moment I realized he’d never told me how to be prepared. I guess he knew that each man would have to prepare and cope in his own way.
The corpse had fallen facedown. A red motorcycle helmet concealed his head. We were going to have to take it off to identify him.
We drew alongside and stopped. Lieutenant Marbury had been right. The cyclist had been shot in the leg. It was twisted under him in an awkward position.
“What do you think happened?” I asked.
Waverly said nothing. His eyes were devoid of emotion. But I knew him to be a sensitive man. Inside, he must have been reeling. Leaders make decisions based on the best information available and a thorough game boarding of possible outcomes. But even the most competent leaders cannot account for everything. Life has a way of breeding unintended consequences. If it was Abdul, he would shoulder the guilt of this day for the rest of his life.
Lieutenant Marbury looked back up the road and spoke softly. “I’d say he was coming back north out of Shkin and was ambushed here. Maybe he tried to drive through it, but he got hit in the leg and fell off the bike.”
I nodded. Made sense so far.
“See how his leg is broken too? Probably happened when he hit the ground.”
Blood had congealed around the leg wound. Flies were lapping at it.
Marbury continued, “He tried to get away. But they caught him. Executed him. See the bullet hole in the back of his head?”
I hadn’t seen it. I couldn’t take my eyes off the flies.
You have to look. If it is Abdul, at the very least you owe him that.
Some of the squad leaders had called Lieutenant Taylor and me “ ’terp lovers.” They’d been through a tour here already and had come away with disdain for and distrust of all Afghans. They’d seen betrayals. They’d seen that here; loyalty shifted like the desert sands. As armor from such things, they’d built a wall between themselves and the people we were sent to protect.
We bent down and unstrapped his helmet. When we pulled it off, black-
red pudding drizzled out of it. The lifeless head flopped into the dirt.
Lieutenant Marbury was right, the man had been shot in the back of the head. I could see the entry wound surrounded by matted black hair.
It was Abdul.
Marbury exhaled sharply. “Fucking sons of bitches.”
Captain Waverly went still and said not a word.
The bullet had exited above his right eye. It had blown a half-dollar-sized chunk of his skull out. At least he had died instantly when the last bullet was fired.
I stared at my friend, and my mind filled with white noise. It was difficult to process what I was seeing.
Steel yourself, Sean. Be prepared.
Nothing can prepare you for seeing the corpse of a man you called friend, not even the death of a little girl in your arms.
Unable to sit idly by with his family in danger, Abdul had done the only honorable thing. He’d gone AWOL in the night, slipping out of the Afghan side of our base on the dirt bike, speeding south to his home in Shkin.
He’d reached his family. But there must have been eyes watching their qalat. When he’d approached, a few furtive cell phone calls had set the ambush in motion. The enemy had picked a spot equidistant between Abdul’s home and our base. As he’d rushed back to us and the morning mission he knew we would need him on, they had struck out of the darkness.
Gunfire had knocked him off the bike, which had stayed upright and continued north a ways before finally tipping over. With his broken, bullet-torn leg, he could not have hoped to get away. Had he fought? His AK-47 was missing, as was his chest rack full of extra magazines for it. I saw no spent shell casings to suggest a last stand.
As he’d lain crippled in the dirt, the enemy had reached him, flung him onto his belly, and executed him with that single shot to the back of the head. They’d stripped him of all valuables and left him in the ditch for us to find.
They’re sending a message to us.
With one cunning move, they’d just taken out our best ’terp— the man who had been my bridge to the people I had hardly begun to understand.
Message received. They know us. They know our weak points. And the enemy has a long, dark reach.
Yusef would be our head ’terp now. Nobody else had enough experience and the languages to hack the job. Bruce Lee was a train wreck. Shaw was okay, but he was shy and never volunteered for anything. He offered the bare minimum. Abdul had been my guide.
We gathered up his body, and part of the company escorted it back to Bermel. The rest of us made a mournful journey south to Shkin, where the family waited. When we arrived, Captain Waverly and Lieutenant Marbury went to the blue metallic front door with Bruce Lee. I stood next to my Humvee some distance away, watching as Abdul’s mom answered their knock.
She knew without any translation needed. A wail escaped her lips. She collapsed inside. Marbury, Waverly, and Bruce Lee stepped in after her. Marbury did most of the talking.
As his mother cried, my men stood guard around Abdul’s family’s home, their eyes cold and filled with anger. For all the danger the rocket attacks had posed for us, they were impersonal. Getting hit with a 107 was akin to being struck by lightning. If it happened, it was your time, like an act of God; or, for the atheists among us, a random moment of chaos.
This assassination made the war personal for all of us.
Suddenly, Abdul’s younger brother bolted through the front door and ran to a nearby woodpile. He dropped to his knees, covered his head with his arms, and began to sob. The moment had no end. We stood our vigil, game faces secured. But beneath them, we seethed.
I thought about Abdul’s brother all the way back to Bermel. The image of him by that woodpile lingered with me long after the rest of the platoon turned in. I stayed up, typing out my report of the day while suppressing the grief I felt. My words describing Abdul’s murder were stilted, formal, remote. Army-speak. I stared at my laptop’s screen, editing my sentences to further scrub them of any emotions. When I finished, I felt a sense of shame. Abdul’s death deserved something more than this sterile retelling, but I had nothing else to offer him.
It was after 0100 when I finally put my report onto a jump drive and walked over to the company operations center, where I sent it to Lieutenant Colonel Toner. When I returned to my room, I discovered a plate of food sitting on my desk. A steaming mug of coffee sat beside it. Not a soul had been moving outside when I had come back from the operations center, and everyone in my hooch was snoring, sound asleep.
The food looked inviting. Whoever prepared it had heaped the plate with cold cuts, cheese, and bread. I sat down at the desk and reached for the meal, suddenly feeling famished. I hadn’t eaten after we returned to Bermel, and the paperwork had kept me from dinner that evening.
Could Dave Taylor have done this for me? We’d both been so busy recently that we’d barely had time to talk to each other, even though his room was only a few doors down. What about Baldwin or Sabo or Campbell? I thought about it as I chewed each bite. Finally I quit speculating. What was the use? There was no way to know for sure who was responsible. What mattered was that somebody had cared enough to make the gesture. And that felt good. Frankly, after the day we’d experienced, I needed a few minutes of feeling good.
Two days later, we held a memorial for Abdul. Captain Waverly had scheduled us to carry out the patrol we had been forced to abort, so we were not going to be able to attend the service. But as we prepared to leave that morning, I stole a few minutes for myself and Abdul.
The grief I’d felt as I stood in the ditch next to his body had given way to a slow burning rage. Rage at the enemy. Rage at the decisions that had led to his death. Rage that we had been unable to save the one Afghan upon whose loyalty I could always depend. Left without him, I feared what would happen the next time I had to interact with Major Ghul or anyone else of his ilk.
His coffin had been placed in the ’terp hooch. As I walked over there, I ran into Yusef.
“Good morning, Commander Sean,” he said to me.
Abdul called me Lieutenant Parnell.
“Good morning,” I replied awkwardly. I asked how Abdul’s family was doing.
Bitterness filled his voice. “How do you think they are doing?”
Before I could answer, he pulled a small, yellowed piece of paper from a pocket. It looked like parchment, and for a disorienting second I thought of pirate maps and buried treasure.
He held it out to me. “The night letter,” he said coldly.
I couldn’t read it. But the scrawled words looked angry.
He tucked it back into his front pocket and abruptly walked off.
Alone, I entered the ’terp hooch and stood beside Abdul’s coffin. It was simple, made of wood. A pauper’s burial vessel.
Abdul had been trapped between two cultures the moment he elected to avenge his father’s death. Never one of us, no longer able to fully trust his own people or be trusted by them, he’d existed in a never-never land where we returned his loyalty with constant reminders of his second-class status.
I put a hand on the lid. The wood felt cold to the touch. To my dismay, there had been no effort to prepare Abdul’s memorial as we would a soldier’s. There was no photo of him propped on a stand. There was no rifle propped between his boots, no rack of medals on his body armor’s chest plate. There was nothing save this bland coffin that revealed nothing of the man laid to rest inside.
He had worn the Combat Infantryman Badge with great pride. Though reserved for U.S. infantrymen who have undergone direct fire from the enemy, the 173rd had bestowed this honor on him after he had fought alongside them so valiantly. I hoped that somebody had given it to his family and explained its significance.
No tears came; I felt no depression. The shock and disbelief had worn off. But I could not escape the rage.
Abdul and I were kindred souls, bon
ded by a similar sense of purpose imposed on us by Al Qaida’s 9/11 attacks. His mission had cost him his life. Now I knew in my heart that it could cost me mine as well. Or worse yet, the life of one of my men.
I lifted the coffin’s lid. I saw the outline of his body but could not bring myself to look at his face.
With my other hand, I reached to my left shoulder and removed the Ranger tab my father had placed there at graduation. It felt light in my palm. I stared at it and thought of the pride I’d seen shining in my dad’s eyes that graduation day.
“You earned this, Abdul.”
I reached into the coffin and placed it between his fingers.
I understood his blood feud and the burn inside that it had caused. I understood it, because it had now become mine.
I eased the lid closed.
Without a word, I slipped out of the ’terp hooch into the warm spring morning. The burn inside suddenly felt good, like energy waiting to be harnessed. Maybe it was hate. Maybe it was fear. Or perhaps a combination of both. Either way, Abdul was dead and this war had suddenly become personal.
Part II
The Spring Offensive
Four
Only Do, or Do Not
May 7, 2006
We were on the road again, this time scheduled for a six-day patrol behind Rakhah Ridge. With the good spring weather had come increased enemy activity. In Afghanistan, warfare has traditionally been seasonal. Winter is the time to heal, train, and prepare. The spring sunshine draws the enemy from their lairs. It has been that way since Alexander the Great.
Our base had a Prophet Section composed of signals intelligence spooks. Its job was to listen in on the enemy’s radio chatter to detect patterns, probable intentions, and location. Our ’terps also listened to the enemy’s conversations and translated them for the Prophet spooks, who passed that information to us while we were in the field. In the past week, they had heard a lot of talk on the enemy radio net. Something was afoot.