After the meetings, Major Wille dressed our wounds: “Don’t worry, guys. You’re doing great. No one ever joined the Army to be a staff puke. I know it sucks. But you’re making this battalion run. You’re in an infantry unit—you have to love the suck.” He was right about the last part. Misery, even as a staff officer, was in an infantryman’s job description. Later I overheard Wille defending us behind the closed door of the colonel’s office.
Since the boxing match, my opinion of Wille had changed. He recognized that the biggest problem for Afghans in our province was their failing farms, not the Taliban. Although agriculture was absent from the infantry field manual, “Farmer Paul” Wille improvised. He spent dozens of hours online figuring out which fertilizer and seeds to buy. Then he tasked our engineer with designing cheap modular greenhouses that we could teach Afghans to build. Wille even managed to get money from Kandahar to purchase tractors. Maybe he wasn’t the meathead I had pegged him to be. And since our boxing match, Wille had cut me slack for my bookishness. As long as I delivered the reports he needed, he didn’t say another word about the language tapes.
I had a strange “office.” My desk consisted of a few two-by-fours and a piece of plywood. The stone wall in front of me featured bullet holes and powder burns from its old days hosting a Soviet brigade. Above me was a wafer-thin tin roof that rattled like a snare drum on the rare days when it rained. I fought a daily battle to keep the sand and dust from destroying my laptop. I waged war against spreadsheets of personnel numbers and edited stack after stack of award citations.
I was hermetically sealed in the headquarters, watching the war unfold on a projector screen, with patrols reduced to geometric shapes on maps. I paid attention to Alpha Company’s rectangles and chafed at being so far removed from my men. The only weapon I would use from now on was a red pen.
I was sitting at my computer one afternoon when rockets impacted a hundred yards away. I put on my Kevlar helmet and body armor and continued typing. There was nothing else to do. The rocket either landed in our headquarters and I burned to death, or it landed somewhere else and I wrote the report. Under no circumstance would I find myself hurtling out the gate in a Humvee on the chase. One such rocket attack had interrupted Gallo’s lifting session. He threw a helmet and vest on and reclined on a folding chair in his shorts, waiting it out.
Major Wille walked in, took one look at Gallo, and grinned. “Well, aren’t you cool, sitting there in your shorts with your balls hanging out.” We were still laughing when the next rocket hit.
Later, long after I had returned from Afghanistan, I would bring my history students to see Journey’s End, a British play written by a World War I veteran. After a barrage of artillery fire, one officer inquired of another about the damage. His typically British response—“There’s nothing worse than dirt in your tea”—had me bent over laughing. The rest of the audience was silent, and I shrank into my velvet seat.
THE FIRST SNOWS BEGAN to fall in the middle of November. Orgun grew more desolate by the day. The snow muffled the sound of our boots crunching paths between barracks, headquarters, and the latrine. Like an ice-fishing hut, the outhouse stood by itself with silvery stalactites dripping from its eaves.
I was busy one morning typing a report when a frenzy of radio reports echoed from the operations center down the hall. My ears perked up when I heard the call signs of Shkin firebase.
“IED . . . cargo Humvee . . . small-arms fire . . . grid . . .”
I knew the six-digit grid by heart: Losano Ridge. I stood up and walked into the operations center. A million thoughts raced through my mind. Were my guys patrolling today? Who would have been in the cargo Humvee? McGurk?
“Two wounded . . . one litter, urgent . . . one ambulatory, shrapnel . . . ”
The radio rattled off their battle roster numbers, a letter-number combination that uniquely identified members of the battalion. I wrote down the numbers, but my hand was shaking violently. I moved to my computer to match the numbers to names. As the adjutant, I was responsible for sending casualty reports up the chain of command.
Please don’t be my platoon. Please don’t be my platoon. I scanned down seven hundred rows of numbers and names. It wasn’t Chuck. It wasn’t Grenz. It wasn’t Howe or McGurk. Each name I crossed off in my head eased the tension. Finally, I had my answer. It was Story. He was the “ambulatory, shrapnel”—wounded but walking.
The details of the attack paralyzed me. My platoon was with Bravo Company, conducting an orientation patrol along Losano Ridge. Story kept telling Bravo Company to stay off the roads, but the terrain kept pushing the convoy back onto old tracks. Suddenly, a powerful blast lifted the six-thousand-pound Humvee off the ground and hurled it thirty feet away. The Humvee had nothing but ad hoc sandbags to deflect the blast of the roadside bomb. Pieces of metal burned Story’s face in the bed of the Humvee, but he was okay. Just a few more scars for an ugly face, he would probably say. The “litter, urgent” description belied the severity of the second wounded soldier. Shrapnel had ripped through the thin metal floor of the cab and mangled his leg. Despite his own injury, Story got the badly wounded soldier on the medevac. Later, the doctors had to amputate his leg. Given the power of the explosion, he was lucky to have escaped alive.
My stomach was a figure-eight knot. That could have been me. That should have been me. I traveled that route three times a week. The wounded soldier, a squad leader, had sat in my seat. Like the mortar that should have killed me on Losano Ridge, the roadside bomb explosion made me angry at fate’s razor-sharp distinctions. I had felt lucky before. Now I felt guilty: Not being with my men cost another soldier his leg. It wasn’t fair. Life wasn’t supposed to work this way.
I also had a vicarious pride in my men. Despite being thrown from the Humvee, despite the chaos that followed, they had instinctively returned fire. They were my men, and they were good. Yet I wasn’t there with them. I should have been leading that fight instead of sitting at a desk.
I passed the casualty notification to Kandahar. As I did, I kept seeing Evan’s body on the stretcher. I watched Chris bleed out in front of me. Over and over and over again. I couldn’t take the sterility of the operations center anymore, the calm recitation of grid coordinates and medevac arrival estimates. It was all incredibly disjointed and alien. I walked outside and stared at the snow.
STORY AND MCGURK BURST into my office on Thanksgiving morning. The platoon had just arrived from Shkin. Story had a fresh scar on his face from the shrapnel.
“You look even uglier now.”
“You ain’t so pretty yourself, sir.”
We thumped one another’s backs with closed fists.
“You should have seen the guys the other day,” said McGurk. “They just responded instinctively, as if they’d been in dozens of ambushes.”
“I wish I could’ve.”
Story left to get the men settled in their new barracks, and McGurk caught me up on the platoon. By his description, it seemed as if I had been gone a year. I hadn’t realized how much I missed them. Compared to being a platoon leader, being an adjutant was a lonely post. We all shared a table at the Thanksgiving dinner. Gallo had coordinated the delivery of turkeys, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and even Starbucks Frappuccinos. Major Wille had negotiated with local butchers for a half-dozen freshly slaughtered lambs. Around us, the chow hall was bedecked with paper turkeys and gaudy cornucopias. Every table had a bottle of sparkling cider. I looked around at my men. I knew each one of them would walk through fire to save my life, and I knew I would do the same for them. No matter the distance and the deprivation, celebrating Thanksgiving with my men was one of the best holidays I could recall.
Still, despite the camaraderie, being away from home during the holidays was difficult. I wasn’t there when my family needed me most. I missed our stupid family traditions: watching The Sound of Music (we had the sing-along version) and gorging myself with my mother’s cookies. I wondered what the new house looked like. Did
my mother still put up two trees to accommodate all the ornaments she had collected over thirty years? I remembered my father, sitting in the recliner in his flannels, drinking his coffee black, watching us open presents on Christmas morning, and then frying bacon and eggs for all of us to eat. I missed him. Who would take on that responsibility now that he was gone?
Gallo and I made do with what we had. We put up a two-foot plastic Christmas tree in our room, decorated it with tinfoil from the mess hall, and stuck a cardboard star on top. We watched the end-of-season Army-Navy football game at 1 a.m., cursing as Navy ran up the score against Army. I tried in vain to spot my brother’s head in the crowd. In the distance, crackling gunfire reminded us how much had changed since West Point, which in retrospect seemed carefree, quaint, and utterly disconnected from the war we were waging. Did Gary know how much he hadn’t learned yet?
We each received a special present on Christmas morning. I helped the commander arrange for the Army Chief of Staff to present the Combat Infantryman’s Badge to every soldier in the battalion. Established during World War II, the CIB (or “C. I. Been There,” as it was sometimes called) was designed to recognize the courage demonstrated by infantry grunts in active combat. Since then, it had become an emblem on uniforms separating the combat-tested from the combat virgins. After the presentation, Red found me and dragged me over for a picture with the whole platoon. “Come on, sir. You got your CIB with us. You oughta be in our photo.”
THE LAST MONTHS IN Afghanistan crawled. Snow fell in pelts six inches thick. Blizzards blocked the airfield for weeks, and without helicopters, we had no mail. We watched the same pirated DVDs over and over again as treatment for acute cabin fever. The snowdrifts stopped the rocket attacks, but they also stopped our Humvees from pushing out from the firebase into the surrounding hills and villages. Snowball fights replaced gunfights. In a stroke of comic brilliance, one enterprising soldier built a snowman and draped a captured ammo vest and AK-47 over its shoulders. It was the only Taliban anyone saw for months. The new enemy was boredom.
Concentrating became increasingly difficult. I filled in crossword puzzles compulsively; I doodled in meetings; and, often, I just sat on my cot and stared at the wall. I began to have more nightmares about the firefights. I fingered a piece of rocket shrapnel incessantly. I jumped every time one of our cannons fired, and I wasn’t the only one. There was always some soldier in the barracks who would yell “outgoing” to differentiate it from an “incoming” rocket. I began to wonder about the transition to normal life. Was I the same person? Was I going to go crazy? Was I already gone? Many of my former soldiers were already taking antidepressants. Others probably needed to but were reluctant to ask for help. One day two of them got into a fistfight over a guard rotation. The smaller guy was beaten within an inch of his life. I told Meena about the fight in the platoon but tossed it off as typical barracks antics. “It’s just stress,” I said. “I’m sure everything will be normal once we’re back.”
“This isn’t just stress, Craig. Given what you all have gone through, you probably need therapy.”
“They’ll screen us before we get back. Don’t worry about it,” I said but without much confidence. At what point would I forget what “normal” was? Had I already?
Our replacements began to arrive in March, just as the snowdrifts began melting. The lightning bolts on the shoulder patches of the 25th Infantry Division were beautiful to our eyes. They made our return home close enough to touch. Over two weeks, the proportion of 10th Mountain Division soldiers in Orgun dwindled rapidly. A core group, including Gallo and me, remained to coach our replacements. On my last morning in Orgun, I gathered my bags by the airfield. The air shuddered as the Chinooks touched down. A sergeant ticked my name off the manifest as I passed him with my bags. I threw them to the crew chief on board and took my seat, placing my rifle between my legs. I waved at no one in particular as the helicopter pulled off the ground.
36
Purgatory
Go with this man . . . ; take care to bathe his face till every trace of filth has disappeared, for it would not be fitting that he go with vision clouded by the mists of Hell.
DANTE, Purgatorio
KANDAHAR TASTED LIKE SAWDUST. MY TONGUE WAS like sandpaper despite gulping water in half-gallon increments. It was only April, yet the temperatures were already soaring above the three-digit mark. It was like having a hair dryer blown in my face. Two hundred of us were trying to escape the midday heat inside a temporary hangar. It was as big as a football field and lined from end zone to end zone with cots caked in silt. Soldiers were splayed out on their cots, trying to increase surface area to decrease the discomfort of the heat. A few soldiers tossed a football back and forth.
Sweat dripped onto my dog-eared copy of The Red Badge of Courage. Stephen Crane had written his masterpiece about a young soldier in the Civil War without ever stepping on a battlefield. As a high school student, I had wondered with a groan why I had to read it. The Civil War was ancient history. What was courage to a fifteen-year-old? It made no sense at that age, but it made sense now.
Henry Fleming, the main character of the book, is a young soldier in the Union Army. He isn’t sure how he will stand up in battle. He postures along with the others, cloaking his fears in bombast. In his first test under fire, he runs. When next pressed into battle, Henry rises to the challenge, carrying the colors forward under withering fire. He redeems his shame. In both fights, fear is a constant. It is Henry’s will to face that fear that changes.
I tore through the book, scribbling in the margins. Henry’s meditations on courage intrigued me now that I had observed courage firsthand. If, as some of Henry’s fellow soldiers contended, courage was an immutable characteristic, then you either had it or you didn’t; you were a hero or a coward. That wasn’t what I had observed, though. In combat, men were all heroes and cowards, at the same time and in varying degrees.
All my training had been one pressure cooker: Plebe hazing, jumping out of planes, wrestling, Ranger patrols, even travel. West Point taught us in boxing that fatigue makes cowards of men. Pain is weakness leaving the body. Perhaps courage was more like a muscle than an innate character trait. Maybe courage was a capacity for chaos and danger that increased with exposure. Maybe the fight at Losano Ridge, with its pressure and pain, had prepared me for the next battle. Maybe combat was both the ultimate test of courage and its classroom.
KANDAHAR WAS JUST AS strange after nine months on the frontier as it had been when we first arrived in Afghanistan. I was used to certain rhythms and rituals: bringing my rifle with me to the shower, shaving in cold water, and lying on my cot listening to language tapes like a meditation mantra that took me away from it all. I had spent the last five months in Orgun trapped inside a five-acre base. I knew the numbers of steps between my room and the outhouse (thirty-seven), the time every night when our artillery would fire blindly into the hills (two o’clock), and what Major Wille wanted in his coffee (nothing). Waking up in Kandahar was like a prisoner’s first day out of jail. There was no mission for us, no daily schedule. Now we were just waiting for a Freedom Bird to take us home; it could be tomorrow or two weeks. We could eat as much as we wanted, whenever we wanted. American contractors even provided hot showers with individual stalls. This was luxury.
The first night there, after the temperature dropped to a bearable 90 degrees, I went for a walk with Gallo. Kandahar Airfield—or “Kaf,” as everyone here called it—housed thousands of soldiers, the majority of whom had never left the base; their only contact with Afghanistan was a weekly bazaar in a wired enclosure near the perimeter. This was the Army of the twenty-first century: For every “trigger puller” in the field, there were at least five soldiers supporting him with food, ammo, and intelligence. Distances on base were long enough that you had to watch out for John Deere tractors ferrying people around at thirty miles an hour. Soon after the sun set, overhead lights came on everywhere. It was like the dawning of the first day
in Genesis.
The electric sunshine made our jaws drop when we saw it. For 278 days I had navigated a path to the bathroom by a red-lens flashlight. Gallo echoed what I was thinking: “You’ve got to be kidding me. It’s like Disneyland here.” In front of us was a boardwalk surrounding two beach volleyball courts straight out of a pro tournament in San Diego. Gallo fumed, “That’s where all the lumber’s gone that I requested for our guard posts. A fucking boardwalk!”
Apparently this was the social hub of Kaf. A line snaked a hundred yards from the Green Beans café, which was selling iced chai soy lattes. The base exchange next door sold flat-screen televisions. This week they were on sale. Every season of The Sopranos was available; no need to miss a single episode. Around the boardwalk thronged crowds of male and female soldiers. I overheard one conversation reminiscent of bachelor parties in Vegas: “What happens in Kaf stays in Kaf.” A look in the base store validated my hunch: It was stocked with fifteen varieties of condoms. Every soldier was on the prowl. They preened in tight-fitting T-shirts that showed off the muscles they had had nine months to sculpt in the Kandahar gym. I saw the gym the next day with its thirty-foot climbing wall and Nautilus machines. An attendant handed out towels. Aerobics began at 8 p.m.
The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education Page 36