by Sean Parnell
Cowan found me, his face crestfallen.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The dogs are gone,” he said, his voice flat.
“Did they get out again?”
“No.”
We locked eyes, and I knew what he was going to say. And I didn’t want to hear it.
“The Mail Bitch said Zeus bit her.”
“That’s bullshit. I saw it happen. He just barked at her and scared her.”
Cowan looked stricken. “I know. Somebody killed all of them, sir.” For a long moment, he couldn’t speak. Then he added, “I could understand Zeus, but why all of them?”
The story came out in pieces over the next few hours. After the Mail Bitch claimed she’d been bitten, our chain of command had had to act. Staff sergeants are taken at their word, and the dogs were an indulgence in direct violation to standing theaterwide orders.
While we were gone on patrol, a medic from battalion had flown in to carry out the job. He had taken them to the aid station and, one by one, injected Zeus, Jumper, and the puppies. The men on base who had seen him do it said the medic seemed to be getting a thrill out of the job. Whether or not he did didn’t matter to me. What mattered was the platoon’s reaction to that news, and it was not good.
The medic had carried the dogs to the burn pit and thrown their lifeless bodies in with the trash.
It was a good thing he’d left the base soon after he’d finished his work. The men had wanted to pulverize him.
The next day, as we gathered for the morning mission, the platoon carried with it a mood of profound sadness. I wanted to do something—anything—for them, but there was nothing to be done. It was a fait accompli.
I suppose if we’d had a psychologist out there with us, we would have all been diagnosed with severe depression at that point. The men had been hammered in so many different ways, they’d stopped caring. To do so would only have invited more pain. Instead, they wore their sadness like a defensive shroud.
As we loaded up in our Humvees, Chris Brown stood in my turret, his eyes distant.
“How you doing, bro?” I asked gently as I opened the passenger side door.
His chin sank to his IBA, and he shook his head. “How many times are we going to get kicked in the crotch?” he finally asked, more to himself than to me.
Anger and indignation I could work with. The infantry feeds on such emotions; it motivates and makes us eager to release violence upon our foe. There was no fight in Chris that morning, and he was the barometer of the platoon’s morale. I saw his resignation reflected on everyone’s faces. Cowan moved like a sleepwalker. Even Sabo appeared affected.
As I watched the platoon struggle that morning, I realized that I had overlooked a reality of Afghanistan. We were facing two enemies, not one. The Haqqani Network’s fighters we could handle. Any time they chose to challenge us, we would smite them with firepower and make them pay for the effort. We would not give ground, and I knew we would never know defeat.
But this other enemy was more devious. How does one do battle with FOB politics? At the moment, I was at a complete loss. Without a doubt, we needed to figure out a way to do it, because more blows like this one could tear the platoon apart.
It was with relief that we put Bermel in our rearview mirrors. The countryside was ours, devoid of politics, stupid rules, and petty slights. It was the one place where most feared to tread. We were among our own kind, depending on men we trusted and loved. And the danger the insurgents presented at every turn seemed a small price to pay for these respites.
While we were gone, wheels began turning around the battalion. The Mail Bitch’s presence at Bermel came under scrutiny. Late at night, I had heard her enter R. Kelly’s room on several occasions, where they would whisper to each other for hours. She should never have been in our hooch in the first place, as it was in violation of General Order #1. Professionally this was an inappropriate relationship, one that could have cost both NCOs their rank. After their connection was brought to the attention of our chain of command, the Mail Bitch was never seen at Bermel again.
Not long after we departed, Delta’s capable and hard-nosed first sergeant got wind of the situation and initiated an investigation into R. Kelly’s behavior. The first sergeant discovered that while the men whom R. Kelly was supposed to be leading in combat were out on patrol, their leader would not roll with them. He would disappear for extended periods of time to fly to other bases. The excuse he gave our chain of command—that he was trying to sort out his platoon’s snarled mail situation—wore thin. Delta’s first sergeant came to Bermel and tore into R. Kelly with a cold fury. Before leaving, the first sergeant gave R. Kelly a direct order: Patrol with your men. Do your job.
Truth be told, his behavior had destroyed any chance of earning a warrior’s respect. When he grudgingly began rolling with Delta’s platoon, the men tolerated him but did not follow his orders without first looking to Big Red for affirmation. In combat, those who are willing to fight follow only those who are willing to lead, and lead competently. When bullets fly, rank does not matter. R. Kelly became just another body in a Humvee.
As soon as the heat died down and R. Kelly’s first sergeant’s attention was diverted to other matters, he stopped going out again. He excused it by saying that the logistical demands of a platoon sergeant required his full attention on base.
When I heard that whopper, rage flared up in me.
Tell that to Greg Greeson.
Twenty-one
Village of the Damned
Late July 2006
Afghan-Pakistani border
The boy could not have been more than a couple of feet tall. Dressed in rags, he limped in circles, head to the afternoon sky. I sat in the right seat of my Humvee, staring through the dirt-encrusted windshield as he spun and staggered in the road ahead.
What now? Did somebody get this kid high?
I ordered the platoon to halt a safe distance away from him. We were deep in bad-guy territory, behind Rakhah Ridge again and only a few clicks from the Pakistani border. After what had happened to us all spring, my men stayed alert, ready for any ruse the enemy might spring on us.
Was the kid their bait? I wasn’t going to put it past them. When we had first arrived in country, we had expected an enemy that had no tactical prowess or creativity. Farmers with guns and maybe a few RPGs and mortars, nothing more. Instead, they had schooled us on the fine art of light infantry warfare for the past five months. Now, at the midpoint of our tour, we took nothing for granted.
Tires ground to a halt in the parched dust of the mountain trail. Most of the roads here would not qualify as cattle runs in the United States.
Campbell dismounted from our lead truck. Since Baldwin had gone down, Campbell had been our point man and had done a great job. He stepped cautiously toward the boy. With our vehicles idling, I could hear the child now, keening in a high-pitched whine. Was he crying? It didn’t seem like it, but that voice was soaked in fear.
He made another half turn and wobbled on rubber legs along the road, chin on chest. To his right was a steep slope that ran up several hundred meters. A tiny Afghan village stood on its peak, overlooking the trail. It was one of the few left in the area that had not been destroyed or abandoned in five years of fighting. I supposed that its sheer remoteness had protected it from the ravages of war. Though we’d been all over the area, we had not yet visited it.
Campbell suddenly slowed, and my alertness level ratcheted up a notch. He’d clearly seen something. I suppressed an urge to call out to him. Campbell would tell me in his good time, and as leader I had to trust that.
Another step closer, then he paused. The boy stopped his looping circles and stood, shoulders sagging, in the middle of the trail.
“Um, sir,” Campbell called over his shoulder to me. “I think you need to see this.” His voice had an odd
quality of weakness that I’d never heard before. It spurred me out of my rig.
Greeson dismounted and appeared alongside me. In one hand, he carried a can of nonalcoholic beer. During World War I, British officers charged German machine guns carrying swagger sticks and whistles. My platoon sergeant never failed to wield his can of faux brew.
I was glad to have him back from leave. Greeson and I had bonded in a way I had never experienced before. In combat, our sixth senses worked on the same frequency. It allowed us to intuit what the other needed. That proved an invaluable asset in the heat of a fight and made sure we could function smoothly even when we faced annihilation, as we had on June 10.
“Somethin’ ain’t right, sir,” Greeson said in that sleepy Sam Elliott voice of his. The years of smoking and drinking had given it a gravely, rugged quality. Indomitable, really.
“Nope,” I said, shaking my head under my helmet.
Campbell was kneeling in front of the boy now, talking in a low, comforting voice. The boy whined, his head waving from side to side. He seemed disengaged, lost in his own tormented world.
Who the hell would give dope to a little kid? Would the ANA do something like this?
Fifteen feet from the boy, we both gasped and stopped in our tracks. Under a shock of dirt-encrusted black hair, we saw a disfigured face about six years old. His eyes had been gouged out, the sockets burned black by whatever heated implement had been used to do the deed.
Next to me, Greeson exhaled sharply. “Jesus Christ, what is this?”
The boy opened his mouth again. Another whine spilled out between cracked lips. Behind them, we saw ruptured gums and no teeth.
“You’re fuckin’ kidding me?” Greeson said.
“Get Yusef and Doc Pantoja,” I said to my platoon sergeant.
Yusef reached us first and looked down at the boy. Either he’d seen this sort of thing before, or a half decade of war had steeled him to such sights. The boy’s condition evoked no visible emotions in my ’terp. He stood quietly next to me, his used-car-salesman affectation stowed for the moment.
A moment later, Doc Pantoja came forward. He knelt next to Campbell, talking in a reassuring voice to the boy. The compassion in his words touched me.
Without prompting, Yusef spoke to the boy, translating for Pantoja. In stark contrast to my medic, Yusef’s tone was clipped and devoid of sympathy. For a second I wondered what he was actually saying to the boy. Once again, I wished Abdul were here. Trusting a ’terp to translate accurately without injecting his own agenda or machinations into a conversation requires trust. With Abdul, such a leap of faith was easy. With Yusef, not so much.
The boy calmed but said nothing in reply.
I looked up the slope and saw the village’s mud-walled dwellings in the flat morning sunlight. Could he have stumbled down the hill and gotten lost? He was a good six hundred meters from home, a considerable distance given his age and condition. Perhaps his family was up there, searching for him.
Next to me, Greeson swore softly. His eyes, always hard and capable, looked totally vulnerable now, as if this child had opened up something in him that he had worked hard to conceal from us these past months. Underneath that steel-belted exterior, Greeson had a huge heart. All great infantrymen do.
I didn’t want the rest of the men to see the boy. They’d been through enough already, and the platoon’s morale had not recovered from the day our dogs had been tossed into the burn pit. I was starting to worry about the state of mind of even the most hard-core members of the platoon. Leaving them behind would be a risk. What if we climbed the slope and walked into an enemy stronghold? Our little group would be in serious trouble, and help would be more than half a kilometer below us.
But then I thought of Cowan’s crushed expression as he had come to tell me about Zeus. The Mail Bitch, the FOB politics. I thought of the many little injustices they’d faced, the Alamo rockets, June 10. Brown venting at the ANA.
Protecting them from this sight was worth the risk.
“Let’s take him up to the village.” I said.
Doc Pantoja scooped the little boy into his arms. The boy offered no resistance. As Pantoja held him, the boy curled his tiny hands around my medic’s neck and lay the side of his ruined face against his armored chest.
“Ready, sir,” Campbell said in a reedy tone. This was getting to all of us.
We started up the slope, the jagged peaks of the Hindu Kush the backdrop of our half-kilometer hike.
This was the land that time had forgotten. Civilization, progress—those things had never taken root here. It was not a stretch to imagine the first cave dwellers gazing upon the exact same view thousands of years ago.
The village was a frightful sight. A clean bed would have been a priceless luxury in this place. The mud-walled huts were barren of even the most basic essentials. Little food, no clean water. The ground between the dwellings was riddled with human feces, animal dung, and filth. The smell of such a place is one that none of us will ever forget. It lingered like a tangible presence in the air. I could feel it seeping into my clothing, and for a second I flashed back to my first day in country. After the girl had died in my arms, I had burned my blood-soaked ACUs.
No amount of cleaning would ever get this stench out.
A boy perhaps six years old limped out of a nearby hut and took station near one corner, watching us with burnished black eyes. There was a wary worldliness in them that I’d never seen back home. Welts and bruises ran the length of his face, neck, and arms. He’d been badly beaten.
Movement inside a nearby shed caught our attention. In its gloom, we glimpsed a hint of a shape, a shadow of a bent knee kicking weakly at the darkness. Campbell went to investigate. He stopped at the entrance, and the color vanished from his face. He looked away.
“Doc. Get over here,” he said.
Doc put the boy down. Greeson knelt next to him, and I heard him quietly soothing the boy with words softly spoken. Gone were Sling Blade and Sam Elliott from that voice, replaced by a soft Arkansas tone that rang of fatherly devotion.
A little girl peered out from one of the huts. The girl’s face, once beautiful, was striped with purple and yellow bruises. I smiled at her, wondering how old she was. It was impossible to tell.
She smiled back at me, her lips raw and torn.
Pantoja reached the shed. “Oh shit.” I turned to look at him, his bronze face ashen.
“Sir?” he managed. I walked over to him.
Lying on the shed’s dirt floor was another boy, perhaps a year old. He was partially naked, and flies had infested his body. They crawled in his eyes, through his nose, ears, and mouth. His breathing was labored and came in short, spastic gasps. One impossibly fragile hand waved listlessly at the insects.
His legs, covered in slicks of drying diarrhea, kicked and twitched, as if he were trying to get out from under covers in a bed. The effort was exhausting him.
“Doc, do whatever you can for him.”
“I don’t think there’s much hope, sir. They’re eating him alive.”
I looked over at Campbell. “Go back to the trucks. Get all our medical gear, food, and whatever water we can spare.”
“Roger, sir.” Campbell seemed relieved to get away from the place. I watched him disappear over the crest of the mountaintop on his way back to the rigs.
An ancient man, clad in dirt-marred clothes, emerged from one mud hut. His beard was dyed red, something that all village elders do to show their status as community leaders. When he saw us, he paused and offered a guarded greeting.
Then he saw the eyeless boy. His composure cracked, and a look of pure love and relief crossed his face. He hurried over and wrapped the boy in his arms. The two shared words, and the elder held the boy in a fierce, protective embrace.
He looked at me, the boy’s head tucked under his jaw and pressed agains
t his neck, and I could see that the old man’s eyes had grown wet. He began to speak to me.
Yusef listened, then said in his clipped and professional tone, “The village elder thanks you. This boy is his grandson.”
Greeson, his voice barely a whisper, said, “Yusef, find out what happened to this kid.”
Yusef nodded and engaged the village elder in a long discussion. We listened as the two conversed in their native language, anxiously awaiting the answer. At last Yusef turned his attention to us, his face a mask, and matter-of-factly told us the elder’s story. The enemy had swept into the village a few weeks ago, bent on punishing its inhabitants for supporting the coalition. I doubted that any Americans had ever visited this place.
The enemy had kidnapped the elder’s oldest grandson. He was the future of the family, the boy most cherished and revered in Afghan culture. Taking him was a blow that nobody in the village would forget.
They had taken the elder’s grandson back to one of their mountain hideouts, where they gouged his eyes out. They had turned him into a sexual plaything, knocking out his teeth to increase their pleasure with him. They had raped this six-year-old boy for weeks.
The village had formed a posse of its most capable men. They had tracked the enemy gang back to their lair and somehow liberated the elder’s grandson. But by then it was too late. The enemy had inflicted so much torture and trauma on the boy that he had ceased to function. After he’d been carried back to the village, his family had cared for him as best they could. On this morning, he had somehow simply wandered off and could not figure out how to get home.
Doc Pantoja appeared. “Sir, the boy in the shed is in the final stages of what is probably malaria. There’s nothing I can do for him.”
He looked down at the elder, crouched on his knees now, embracing his grandson.
“What happened to him?” our medic asked.
Greeson seethed. He dropped his cigarette and crushed it out with a boot. “Believe me, Doc, you don’t wanna fucking know that.”