My brother glances at me, as if hoping I’ll assure him it’s all right not to talk about it. I don’t say anything; I admit that, like Dad, I’m curious too.
“Well,” Brian begins slowly, then stops and clears his throat. He continues haltingly. “It was kind of a fluke, actually. My unit was walking security patrol on the fringes of Kabul. We’d gotten some intell about an insurgency hideout, but when we got there it was our worst nightmare; a residential neighborhood with a million places to hide. Worst of all, in a setting like that there’s a pretty good potential for collateral damage, if you know what I’m saying.”
I don’t. “Collateral damage?”
Brian coughs dryly. “Civilians accidentally get hurt.”
Ah, now I understand: “collateral damage” means “killing innocent people that get in the way.”
Brian continues. “The insurgents must have gotten some intell of their own, because from the minute we showed up, we were getting hit with sniper fire. It was pretty nuts; rounds were pinging off of buildings and basically just hailing down all around us. We got a bead on where it was coming from and got our own sniper in position. Then we launched a mortar that pretty much wiped out the building where we figured they were hiding.”
“Nice,” Dad inserts, his tone admiring.
“There was a little lull in the action so we were able to advance. We were the force on the street, but the Bradleys were following along behind, backing us up.”
Listening to Brian, I can picture the scene as clearly as if I was watching it myself. Dust and debris floating in the air from the mortar explosive, Brian and the rest of his unit tense and shouting as they advance, their ears ringing from the din of artillery.
Brian has a faraway look, as if the whole scene is happening in front of his eyes too. “We set up temporary headquarters in an empty house. There were verses from the Koran written on the doorways and a painting of Mecca on the wall in the front room. Insurgents had clearly been there; there were dirty blankets on the floor, rotted food and garbage everywhere. Someone had taken a reeking shit in the stairwell. The whole thing got pretty intense; we knew there were more of them, but they were staying one step ahead of us. It was really pissing us off. Occasionally our sniper would get one and the body would be left lying in the street. After the sun went down, cats and dogs would eat on them.”
“Gah,” Dad says. Even he looks a little green in the flickering light of the lantern.
“So, by the second day of this, we were pretty shot. Someone radioed that they’d seen suspicious activity in a house up the way, so we headed over there. One of my buddies shot the door up and another guy started kicking it in. I was near the back of the pack while this was going on, and as we were heading in, all of the sudden I noticed this jumble of wires off to the side of the house. Something about these wires didn’t seem right, so I detoured over to check it out. And I find out that the wires are connected to a propane tank.”
“Rigged-up explosive,” Dad breathes.
Brian nods. “My thoughts exactly. I figure they’re trying to get us all in position and then, KABLAM. So I grab for my radio, and then … all of the sudden, the whole thing explodes.”
I stop breathing. “The propane tank?” This must have been how Brian was injured.
“No,” Brian says, reaching up to run a shaky hand through his hair. “The building. It was a set-up, but not the kind I thought. There weren’t a bunch of insurgents inside the house—there was only one. He’d wired himself with a bomb and detonated it once my unit was in range.”
“Jesus,” Dad says.
“If you’d gone in, you would have been killed along with everyone else,” I whisper.
My brother gives me a look I can’t read. “So, I caught some shrapnel in my eye and got hit with flying debris. My shoulder and ribs got nailed with something big, and something else hit me in the head, or maybe it was just the blast … I don’t know what happened, really, because I don’t remember anything after that. Blast concussion, they call it.”
“Everyone else was killed,” I murmur.
Brian nods. “Yeah,” he says hoarsely. “All of them. I was the only one who made it back to the safe house, and I don’t even remember how I got there. It’s amazing I wasn’t picked off; anyone could have easily taken me out. And to be totally honest, part of me wished it had happened like that.”
Neither Dad nor I know what to say to that. Chance, guardian angel, Brian’s usual luck … there’s no real sense to be made of what happened.
An invisible draft makes the lantern light waver; in it, I catch sight of Dad, whose face looks several years older than it did when Brian started his tale.
“I guess it just wasn’t your time,” Dad says finally.
“Wasn’t it?” Brian retorts, looking levelly at Dad. “And why not?”
Dad hesitates. I expect him to say something that will make it all make sense, but instead he shakes his head and pushes back his chair. “That’s quite a story,” is all he says. “Quite a story.” Dad clears his throat. “Well, it looks like we’re almost out of fuel, boys. Probably a good time to hit the hay.”
And that’s it. Without further discussion, we go to bed. It seems a little bizarre to me; Brian has just told us a terrible story … not just a story, but something that had actually happened to him … and now the three of us are all acting like we haven’t heard it. I don’t know what to make of it.
By unspoken default, I get the top bunk. I climb up gingerly, feeling the rickety structure tremble and shake beneath me with every movement I make. Once I’m satisfied that the mattress is going to hold my weight and not send me crashing down on top of Brian, I crawl into the cold nylon sleeping bag and zip it up to my chin. Dad puts out the lamp and uses the moonlight from the window to find his way to the other bunk across the room; it isn’t long before his snores begin to rumble through the silence. I imagine his feet twitching like a dog’s, deep inside his sleeping bag, as he dreams of tramping through the fields and trees, looking for things to kill.
I’m still wound up from everything Brian said and think at first that I won’t be able to sleep, but the sleeping bag contains my warmth and it isn’t long before my eyes began to grow heavy. I roll onto my side and am almost asleep when the bed begins to shake with movement from below, bringing me swimming back to consciousness.
I open my eyes a slit and watch as Brian emerges from beneath and stands up. As he creeps away slowly in the darkness, I lift my head to get a better view. My brother is rummaging around in his duffel, and the minute he withdraws his hand, I don’t need the light from the window to know what it is he was searching for.
As if I’m holding it myself, I imagine how the pistol feels in Brian’s hand—the cool, deadly heft of it. I know the weapon means something completely different to each of us: to me it’s an object of danger, but to my brother, it’s just the opposite.
I endure more bunk-bed jitterbugging as Brian crawls back into bed. A few minutes later, my brother’s snores are playing a duet with Dad’s. I wait as long as I can, then gingerly reposition myself, through a series of tentative maneuvers, until I can hang my head over the bunk’s edge.
Brian lies snoring in the bunk below, the gun clasped securely against his chest, asleep … but on constant alert against anything terrible that might come for him in the night.
Twenty-Seven
When Brian nudges me roughly awake the next morning, the sky outside the window is still waiting for a phone call from dawn. The wood stove in the other room must have burned down low, because my brother’s frosty breath makes him look like a smoke-breathing dragon. “Get ’er moving, Dov,” he says. “Time to do our part to reduce the deer population.”
When I finally manage to make it out to the main room, blinking blearily, Dad is already gone. Brian is sitting up on the couch, pulling on his boots.
“Aren’t we going to have breakfast?” I complain, even though I often don’t eat in the morning. It’
s simply a way to forestall the inevitable.
“You bet.” Brian tosses me a couple granola bars. Since my hands are cowering deep inside my pockets, “breakfast” hits me in the chest and falls to the floor at my feet.
“Great,” I mutter. I sink onto the couch beside him. “I seriously don’t think I can do this.”
“Don’t be a baby.”
“Sorry, Dad.”
Brian reaches for a pair of coveralls and tosses them toward me. “Put these on over your clothes. Dad brought in another jacket for you from the truck.”
He watches, grinning and impatient, as I struggle into them. It occurs to me that I’m not going to get any sympathy from my brother. He loves this.
“Ready to go catch up with Dad?”
“No.” Nevertheless, I follow Brian outside into the frigid air. “Cheese and rice,” I gasp. “Balls.”
“It’ll make a man out of ya,” Brian laughs. He takes in a lungful of frost-sharpened air. “Damn, I missed this!”
There’s nothing to do but get the show on the road. Loaded under backpacks containing what I presume is lunch, we head out, my brother carrying the rifle loosely in his right hand with the business end pointed toward the ground.
Despite the frigid temperatures, the sky is clear and painting itself with pink and purple streaks as the sun throws a leg up over the horizon. We walk along briskly, pushing white puffs of our breath into the air ahead of us. The grass is rigid with early morning frost, and makes a satisfying crunching sound as we crush it under our feet.
Brian glances sideways and catches me almost smiling. “It’s great to be out here, right?” he demands. “Come on, admit it.”
“Whatever.”
My brother chuckles. “You know what?” he says, looking around. “This kinda reminds me of being over there.”
I glance around at the flat brown landscape broken only by tall Minnesota pines. “Seriously?” I can’t imagine how this landscape could bear any similarity to Afghanistan.
“Of course, the terrain looks different. And it sure as hell smells different.”
“Yeah,” I say, like I know what he means.
“I guess it’s just the part about walking along like this, looking for … you know. Just looking for stuff. Except now we’re not the ones in danger. Sure glad about that.”
“Mm-hmm.” I wonder if we should be talking so much. Aren’t we supposed to be quiet so as not to scare away any deer?
Brian’s tone turns philosophical. “You know,” he says thoughtfully, “once you’ve been there awhile, everything starts to feel different. I mean, of course you’re scared, but it’s not that. It’s more like … like you’re living right at the edge of something. Your senses … the way you hear things and the way you see things and … it’s just all turned up to the highest level. You’d think it would be terrible, painful even, but it’s just the opposite, Dov. Everything is so real. Realer than real. It’s like you’re … awake, really awake and paying attention for the first time. Man, before I went over, I thought I was alive, but really, I wasn’t even out of the packaging yet.”
I nod, and in a way I do understand. I get that you can just drift along, letting life wash harmlessly over you; it’s a way of making sure nothing penetrates deep enough to hurt. My friends and I have mastered the art of living this way; I never suspected that my brother has too.
“I remember this one day,” Brian continues. “We were sent to check out this shelled-out village. We were looking for whatever … unexploded IEDs, people who needed help, whatever. There was nothing, though: everything was just decimated. Everywhere you looked, there was nothing but rubble. People’s homes ruined, their lives destroyed … for some reason, it was like the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Weird, huh?”
I nod. We agree on that, anyway.
“Even though I was scared over there,” Brian admits, “somehow it was also the best … the best thing I’ve ever done. I just kept thinking, ‘Man, this is life. Finally … life.’”
We tramp along, both of us thinking. I steal a glance sideways at my brother, the familiar line of his shoulders, the sharp cut of his jaw against the lightening sky. “At least you’re safe here,” I say finally.
“True dat, bro,” Brian sighs. “True dat.”
If I’m not mistaken, there’s something in his voice that sounds an awful lot like regret.
Twenty-Eight
(NPR)—Last month’s suicide toll among U.S. soldiers rose to 24, the highest monthly total since the Army began compiling statistics in 1980, and more than the number of deaths sustained in the same month by all other branches of the armed forces combined. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, vice chief of staff of the Army, told NPR’s Robert Johnson that the Army is actively researching the issue in an attempt to learn why suicide numbers continue to rise.
We tramp along for another mile or two as the frost burns off and the sun rises higher in the sky. I have no idea how Brian knows where we’ll find Dad, but he seems to be responding to some kind of internal GPS. We see no deer, although at one point a beaver scurries across our paths. It pauses to consider, regarding us with no real concern. “Don’t shoot him,” I whisper worriedly to Brian. I have no idea about the rules of hunting: perhaps anything that moves is fair game. I’m relieved when Brian chuckles. “Don’t be a moron,” he tells me. The beaver shakes its head as if it, too, is disappointed in me, then ambles off on its way, no worse the wear for having encountered a pair of baboons.
Hiking over uneven ground in Dad’s heavy boots is starting to make my feet hurt. I think about complaining, but Brian seems lost in thought, his eyes studying the horizon. I begin to wonder whether we might be lost. How far could Dad have gone, anyway?
Just as I’m about to raise the issue, a nearby shot breaks the mid-morning quiet. It sounds like a starting pistol. “Get ready … get set … kill!” I quip.
Brian doesn’t respond, but he changes our direction, heading us closer to Dad or deer, whichever we find first. “Keep watch,” he instructs me, although I’m not sure for what. As we approach a grove of trees, I suddenly see movement and a flash of hunter orange. “Hey.” I point. “I think that’s Dad over … ”
“DOWN! DOWN! DOWN!” Brian shouts, throwing himself behind a crop of boulders and dragging me down with him.
Bundled up in coveralls and unstable in Dad’s oversized boots, I fall awkwardly onto my side and lose my wind for a second. “What the hell are you doing?” I demand when I get my breath back.
Brian ignores me; he’s busy talking into his shoulder. “Alpha Company under attack,” he jabbers, his tone pitched higher and harsher than usual. “We’re on foot and mobile, but they’ve got us pinned down, Captain—must be three or four belt-fed SOBs. Requesting permission to be cleared for response.”
“Brian!” I snap. “Listen to me!”
“Holy fuck, there must be twenty of them, Wilkie,” Brian mutters, taking the safety off his rifle.
The seriousness of the situation suddenly begins to dawn on me, just as the sound of movement comes from the trees up ahead. “Wait!” I holler, just as Brian jumps to his feet, points the gun into the trees, and fires.
There’s a click but nothing more; as if he doesn’t notice, my brother grips his weapon as it jerks and jerks and jerks again, like round after round is firing at an unseen enemy.
I don’t know why the rifle jammed, and I don’t stop to think about it. Instead, I scramble to my feet and run as fast as I can toward the group of trees, nearly tripping over Dad’s boots with every step. “Dad!” I roar. “Get down!”
Behind me, I hear my brother fumbling with the weapon. “Sonuvabitch !” he curses to no one I can see. “I’m jammed! You’re on your own, Sarg—I can’t cover you!”
To my relief, Dad emerges from the trees, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he’s in mortal danger. “Stop that hollering,” he orders. “You’ll scare the deer. I’ve just found a bedding patch … where’s your brother?”
“Hallucination?” Dad echoes, looking at me but not comprehending.
“It’s like he thinks he’s in Afghanistan,” I manage, looking over my shoulder to the rock formation where I left Brian. He’s nowhere to be seen; for all I know, he’s circling around to ambush us from behind. “We have to find him and get the gun out of his hands. I’m afraid if he sees us first he might take a shot at us if he doesn’t come out of it.”
“Take a shot at us?” Dad’s turning into a regular parrot. “Your brother would never … ” Dad trails off, looking doubtful. Thoughtfully, his eyes follow mine back to the rocks.
“I swear to God, Dad. He’s losing it!”
Despite the fact that I’m trying to save his life, Dad glares at me. “Listen kid, if this is some kind of joke you’re pulling, you’re going to be awfully sorry,” he warns.
“No joke, Dad. He just kind of … snapped.” I think back to what we were doing, just walking along, listening to the birds and the distant sounds of gunfire …
“We heard shooting,” I say, understanding now. “It must have thrown him into some kind of flashback.”
I’ve finally gotten through: Dad looks genuinely worried. “Where is he now?” he asks. “What direction, anyway?”
“I wish I knew.”
Dad considers. “Well, we can’t just leave him out here running around with a rifle. We’ve got to track him down.”
Trying to look every direction at once, I follow along behind Dad as we head out of the trees in search of my brother, who’s probably also hunting for us. We don’t have to go far; as we backtrack across the field, I spot Brian sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree, his rifle leaning against his knee. I nudge Dad, my mouth gone dry. “Over there,” I manage.
Brian looks up and smiles as we approach, but I still don’t trust him. “What if this is some sort of trick?” I whisper to Dad. “You know … like a trap.”
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