The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education

by Craig M. Mullaney

  “That was a tough fight,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” I replied.

  “You were pretty intense. I haven’t seen that before. Where’d it come from?”

  “It’s part of who I am.” I didn’t have time to explain my father’s focus and intensity.

  “Are you that intense when you go outside the wire?” he asked, dropping the condescending tone I was accustomed to.

  “I think so.” I paused. “But it’s different. Out there it’s like boxing with a blindfold.”

  “Craig,” he began, using my first name for the first time, “you’re smart and you’re tough.” He laughed as he gestured at his swollen left eye. “You have to combine the two. You don’t have much longer as a platoon leader. Make it count.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” I tried not to show him what the compliment meant to me—a reconciliation of heart and head, of physical and intellectual that I had been trying to achieve my whole life. In my mind I had been boxing my father.

  STORY WOKE ME AT DUSK. “Come on, sir. It’s chow time. You earned it.”

  My headache had subsided, but my rib cage ached and my muscles radiated pain. My mouth was cottony from dehydration. I chugged a nonalcoholic beer and emptied a canteen. Outside the chow hall, the entire company was standing in line.

  “What’s the occasion?” I asked Story. Food here wasn’t usually in such high demand.

  “You forgettin’, sir? Get hit too hard?” Story guffawed.

  “No, seriously, what’s for dinner?” I asked again.

  “Beef. Red meat, fresh from the butcher.” Story grinned, and I recalled Worthan’s scheme. He had bought a whole cow from a local villager. A few of the boys from Texas had been slow-roasting hunks of beef all day. I savored each juicy bite of my medium-rare rib eye steak. I melted a thick slab of butter on top of a baked potato and devoured a mountain of baked beans as the sun ducked below the high western wall of the compound.

  In the middle of the compound, soldiers erected an enormous stack of pallets, doused them with fuel, and sparked a raging inferno. The company gathered by the bonfire, waddling like dusty penguins with the added ballast of all-you-can-eat steak. My platoon congregated together, deploying camp chairs to recline by the fire. I returned to our hooch and dug out the cigars a friend had sent in the last mail drop. I opened the box and buried my nose beneath the lid, inhaling deeply. The scent of cloves was powerful and enticing.

  By the fire I distributed the cigars like ammunition. There were enough cigars for everyone in the platoon who wanted to smoke. Grenz opened his Zippo lighter and lit my cigar. The smoke burned my lungs.

  After the company sang “Happy Birthday” to Captain Worthan, squads of actors took turns performing skits, often mocking another platoon. We roared with laughter disproportionate to the comedy. It was so good to laugh. Three months had elapsed of our tour in Afghanistan. We had gone through so much pain together that laughter became a rarity. Captain Worthan beamed underneath his black watch cap.

  Some of the privates in my platoon got up to do a skit. Grenz smirked mischievously. They reenacted a training exercise at Gardez when my Humvee had hit an enormous pothole and I had dropped my rifle out of the vehicle. They poked fun at the indifference I had feigned afterward when I asked to drive back to “check the targets.” I hadn’t realized that everyone knew.

  Their gentle ribbing made me glow. I was one of them. For the first time since Losano Ridge, the platoon cohered. The laughter had finally balanced the tears. We were a family again. As we smoked our cigars down to smoldering nubs, the fire dimmed to orange cinders. Flicking my cigar into the dust, I ground the ashes under my boot and walked through the night with my sergeants. I went to bed light-headed, unsure whether it was the tobacco or something else entirely.

  33

  Redemption

  For this is your duty, to act well the part that is given to you.

  EPICTETUS

  I LAY STARING AT A FLY DANCING ACROSS THE CEILING. It zipped down to settle on my chest, making no imprint on my dusty uniform blouse. Restless, the fly dive-bombed my left ear, and I swiped at it aimlessly. I was awake before my men again and unable to recall the nightmare that left me even colder than the October mountain air.

  Our remaining days at Shkin were drawing short. In a couple of weeks another company would take our place, and we would winter at battalion headquarters in Orgun. Our patrols over the past two weeks had been unnervingly uneventful. The much-heralded Taliban fall offensive had shifted to other provinces after the fight on Losano Ridge.

  At dawn, as the cooks began clattering in the field kitchen, I quietly laced up my sneakers and slipped out to the compound perimeter for a run. Through the razor wire I could see an endless band of morning mist hovering above the hard ground. The mountains to the east fractured with shards of rose and amber as the sun rose from Pakistan and settled on Afghanistan. The moment evaporated as quickly as the fog, another platoon’s trucks kicking up whirlwinds of dust as they exited the firebase for a morning patrol. My platoon remained at the base as a quick reaction force. Things had been quiet, and I hoped, against reason, that today would preserve the streak.

  Afghanistan forever cured me of liking surprises. Continuing a pattern that had begun with the first rocket attack at Gardez, silence was punctured abruptly by emergency. An hour after breakfast, Captain Worthan found me and briefed me on a developing situation. The thick-muscled, bearded special operators who occupied a compound on our base had been ambushed thirty miles south while patrolling with their Afghan militia at Khand Narai Pass, the next mountain pass south of Shkin. They had been exploring one of the infamous “ratlines,” a route over the Hindu Kush preferred by insurgents, between an al-Qaeda stronghold in Wana, Pakistan, and Kandahar, Afghanistan. One operator was already dead, and several Afghans were seriously wounded. Via satellite transmission, they requested our help in repelling the Taliban assault, securing a perimeter, and evacuating the wounded.

  It took at least thirty minutes to line up the convoy of a half-dozen Humvees. Worthan’s unarmored flatbed rolled up last, filled to capacity with the usual farm of antennas. In addition to his radio operators, I noticed that Worthan was bringing our field surgeon, an Air Force team that could direct Air Force jets against ground targets, and Sergeant Major Watson, the Mogadishu veteran. I briefed the bare bones of a plan to Story, Chuck, and McGurk, and I barreled out of the gate in the lead truck. Time was precious.

  Sitting in front of me, next to the driver, was “Chris,” our guide. I had seen him around the base with the other special operators from the OGA—Other Governmental Agency. I doubted his real name was Chris. The pseudonyms regularly used by the operators added to their mystique, of course. Everyone on base watched these guys with admiration. They had custom-made rifles, custom-made vehicles, and custom-made physiques straight off the pages of Men’s Health. They swaggered around base with well-deserved confidence, long hair, and cool gadgets. They had satellite television and, it was rumored, a secret stash of beer.

  At a signal from Worthan, we ripped downhill into the wadi and south toward the Khand Narai Pass. Chris rolled down the bulletproof glass on the Humvee and suspended his arm against the door frame. His long blond hair swept back from a tanned, wind-burned complexion. Ray-Ban sunglasses rested on a stubby nose. A plain white T-shirt poked out from beneath his body armor. Although he exuded nonchalance, I also sensed that Chris knew exactly where we were, where we were going, and what he would do when we arrived.

  “How long do you think it will take us to get there?” I asked.

  “Probably three or four hours with a convoy this size,” Chris responded. “As the crow flies, it’s thirty miles. As the Humvee drives, it’s a lot longer. The map is misleading. The terrain gets really ugly up ahead. We’re going to have to do a lot of tacking and jibing.” Chris turned and pointed on the map to a glacial valley we would have to descend between two ridges. “It gets pretty hairy here where we en
ter the gorge. With so many vehicles, it’s going to take time.”

  Sometimes it is better not to know what you’re heading into. Three hours was a long time to contemplate driving into a firefight. The expectation of enemy contact was both exhilarating and terrifying. My heart pounded even hours away from the objective. I anticipated the lethal force I would be able to deliver with our Humvee-mounted machine guns and mortars and the leverage of Air Force jets and Apache helicopters. Power coiled up inside me. My confidence soared as I reflected on the training we had done over the last few weeks. We were ready. There was nothing like commanding a well-trained, experienced rifle platoon. That confidence pulsed through my veins.

  Nevertheless, I doubted whether I was ready. What do we do now, sir? Would my answer today be better than on Losano Ridge? Unfortunately, the convoy wasn’t going to pause while each of us conversed with our personal gods. We pushed south, marching toward the guns.

  THE SUN HAD CLIMBED steeply since my morning jog. An hour into our drive, we pulled to a stop before a pair of enormous boulders straddling the goat trail we had been following south toward Khand Narai Pass. Chris popped his door and walked briskly to the front of our vehicle.

  “Why’d we stop?” I rushed to catch up with Chris.

  As I approached, he motioned with a sweep of both arms, “Voilá!”

  Beneath us, the skirt of the gorge plunged a hundred yards before shallowing into a dusty U-shaped valley edged on either side with fierce eight-thousand-foot peaks. Far below, a sinuous wadi traced through the valley. I informed the convoy of the changing terrain, emphasizing the need to keep distance between the vehicles as we followed gravel switchbacks to the valley floor. I was keenly aware that our route would leave us surrounded on three sides by high ground. I assumed the worst, that our adversaries would have anticipated our route and planted mines or an ambush.

  “Watch the high ground,” I radioed to the rest of the convoy. A half-dozen machine-gun barrels pivoted toward the ridges.

  The convoy inched slowly down the escarpment and through the sandy wadi. Our progress was frustratingly slow at six miles an hour. If we had had enough transport helicopters, we would have been at the objective by now. At this pace I wondered whether there would be a fight left to join. An hour later we came abreast of a hard-packed dirt road leading due east through the Khand Narai Pass toward Wana, Pakistan. This was where the operators had been patrolling for al-Qaeda. Finally, we picked up their radio signal, and John, the leader of the ambushed patrol, coached the convoy toward his position.

  The pace accelerated quickly. The convoy pulled up next to the punctured hull of a white Toyota Hi-Lux pickup. The windshield was a spider web of cracked glass. Like BB pellets through cheap plastic, I thought. One of the operators had been shot dead in the truck during the initial ambush.

  I got out of the Humvee with Chris and crouched in the lee of the Toyota with Worthan and Story. John, the OGA patrol leader, pointed out his Afghan militia grouped in twos in a 360-degree perimeter around our position. Forty-foot-tall knobs of dry dirt embraced the curvy truck track on both sides. Small trees sprouted randomly from their crests. Firing had ceased an hour or so before our arrival, and John didn’t anticipate any more trouble. Apparently, an A-10 strafing run had already cut down al-Qaeda’s reinforcements. Before we returned to Shkin, John wanted Chris to sweep east a hundred yards with a squad of my men while I drove south with the gun trucks to retrieve a fatally wounded enemy fighter.

  I took Chris’s front seat in the Humvee. Chris joined Story, Howe, McGurk’s squad, and our medic. They disappeared over the hill as I drove south along the gravel road. We didn’t have to drive far before we reached the al-Qaeda fighter, groaning as he bled into the dust. He was a more complete version of the severed torso we had found after our fight on Losano Ridge. This time I didn’t have the same impulse to retch. We pulled up short. I didn’t make it two steps before a loud gunshot cracked the air. I immediately reached for the radio handset. There was heavy traffic on the radio, but it was broken and hard to decipher. I recognized Story’s voice and a wave of goose bumps erupted on my arms.

  “Contact, front. I repeat, contact front. . . .”

  “Fuck,” I muttered. “Let’s move!”

  We ripped the gravel out of the road moving back to our original position in the saddle of the hills. “Stop here!” I ordered and bounded toward the antenna farm three-quarters of the way up the hill that Chris and McGurk had disappeared over. The climb was steeper than it looked from below, and the ground stung my hands as I tried to get a purchase. I had to get a situation report from Worthan; Story’s garbled radio transmissions were worthless. Worthan pointed three hundred yards down the other side of the hill, where I could just make out bobbing helmets popping above the network of narrow four-foot-deep wadis crisscrossed like stitches on a wound. At least one sniper was harassing my squad below, and Story was demanding—between bursts of fire—a medic and a radio. Howe and the medic were with him, weren’t they? Worthan thought he had heard a casualty report from Story, but it was hard to make out. I figured Story was using his platoon walkie-talkie, a weak signal baffled by the occluding terrain.

  I ran back toward my truck, tripping frequently and just barely managing to stay vertical. I yelled to the company medic, panting as I reached the bottom: “Get your aid bag. Let’s go.” I tried to catch my breath as I waited the agonizing seconds for him to grab his medical backpack. We started up the hill again at a slow gallop. The medic kept falling behind.

  Bits of Story’s transmissions were coming through on the platoon walkie-talkie. “KIA.” Killed in action. How many I couldn’t hear. My mind raced through the possibilities. Who was hit? I was desperate to know. I had to assume it was one of my guys. “WIA.” Wounded in action. Was this a correction to his original transmission or an additional casualty? Why wasn’t Howe transmitting the messages for Story? Was Howe hurt? I gripped my rifle even tighter and prayed it wasn’t Howe.

  “Hurry up!” I yelled at the medic as he crawled up the hill on all fours.

  “I’m trying, sir.”

  I ran back downhill twenty yards and yanked the aid bag from the medic. Indignant, I threw it on my back and continued the climb.

  “Stay on my ass. There’s at least one casualty down there, and I’m going to need you.”

  I clambered the last few yards to Captain Worthan and an OGA operator grabbed my shoulder.

  “I’m coming with you. I’m a medic.”

  His confidence was invigorating. “Stay low,” he whispered as if someone might hear us above the typewriter crackle of gunfire.

  Together, the three of us plunged over the crest of the hill and lurched down at breakneck speed toward the lattice of trenches three hundred yards below us. My legs had never moved that fast. I was a bullet train, unstoppable. I had no fear.

  A machine gun ripped bullets through my silence. I hoped it was ours. It wasn’t. Fuck. Puffs of dust erupted in the tracks we had made moving downhill. Another burst of adrenaline propelled me faster. My left boot struck a rock. I somersaulted through the air ass-over-helmet and landed with a thud in a four-foot-deep, six-foot-wide natural trench. We moved hunched over through the lattice of trenches. Up ahead I saw two camouflaged uniforms crouched by a boulder. I crossed myself in gratitude as I recognized Howe and the platoon medic.

  “Where’s Story?”

  “Up ahead.”

  “You’re coming with us. I need the radio, Howe. And Doc, there’s a couple of casualties. Stay in the back until I link up with Story.”

  We continued moving through the gulch with our knuckles nearly dragging across the gravel. The shooting increased in frequency and amplitude, just inches over our heads. We turned a bend. There was Story, his back to the trench wall, peeking furtively over the top. Grenz was farthest away, popping off rifle shots between grenade rounds. Sergeant Major Watson was helping him spot targets. McGurk was hunched over on his knees, his back toward me, his rifle
lying across his boots. He looked like a Catholic at confession. Slowly, McGurk turned his face to look at me. I followed his eyes to a body prostrate in the dust.

  It was Chris. His white T-shirt was shredded and red, deepening in color toward the center of his chest where his blood spurted in irregular bursts. McGurk’s stained hands tried to stop the bleeding. My mouth agape, I stared at Chris. He was so pale. I took off my gloves and touched his face. Beneath the stubble, his cheeks were cool, but the blood on his chest was still warm. With two fingers I touched his carotid artery. His pulse was faint.

  Story dragged another body down from the front of the wadi—one of our Afghan militiamen. Our medics went to work on him while the OGA medic assisted McGurk with Chris. Their attempts to resuscitate him were becoming increasingly futile; Chris had already lost too much blood. Under my fingers, his pulse disappeared.

  Story shoved a radio headset into my chest. “Sir.”

  Pause.