Places and Names

by Elliot Ackerman

  Lonny is dead. Ryan will survive.

  * * *

  Nearly two years later, during the pivotal al-Anbar Awakening, when Sunni tribes united against al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, fifty veterans of the Battle of Fallujah gathered in an auditorium in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Ryan Shane would be decorated for his actions. Since Lonny died, Ryan’s 220 pounds had withered to 150. After countless surgeries, he’d been medically discharged from the Corps. The toll his stomach wound had taken on his body could be seen in his atrophied frame, but it was the forced separation from the Corps he loved that left the deeper wound. You could see that in his eyes.

  I sat in my uniform a few rows back. We came to attention as the adjutant read the citation for Ryan’s Bronze Star. Our commanding general pinned it on his chest and then ceded the floor to Ryan. He thanked all of us for coming to the ceremony. He thanked his family for their care during his slow, ongoing recovery. Then his voice thickened. He held his stare upward, into the glare of the auditorium lights, as if speaking to a place outside of this room.

  “I’m finding it really hard,” he said, “to accept that my greatest achievement as a Marine, this medal, also comes from my greatest failure. I didn’t save Lonny that day.”

  Dangling from Ryan’s shirt pocket was the scarlet ribbon pinned with a small brass V, which denotes valor—the conquest of fear. The fear Ryan must have felt as he ran onto Highway 10 is a sensation I am familiar with: that clench in the chest, that sluggishness of the limbs, the slowing of time, and the premonition of a violent death that lurks beyond each shut door you must shoulder open or alley you must sprint across. I know the way it makes my mouth dry. The way it has stalked me long afterward.

  I can describe to you how fear feels, but not courage.

  Courage is not an emotion. It’s a virtue. You don’t feel brave.

  Then what did Ryan feel? What force overpowered his fear as he went after Lonny, compelling him to stand against the thick snaps of machine gun fire while he dragged his friend toward safety, until one of those snaps found its mark in his stomach?

  Ryan and Lonny both served in Bravo Company, a close-knit group of nearly two hundred Marines. As a gunnery sergeant, Ryan mentored the younger noncommissioned officers, the corporals and the sergeants who, like Lonny, were coming up through the ranks. He and Lonny had trained for the better part of a year together and endured months of toil guarding an ammunition depot in the Iraqi desert before the battle. It’s safe to say that Ryan saw a younger version of himself in Lonny. Ryan, as a senior enlisted Marine, was also a key leader in Bravo Company, and as such, he felt responsible for Lonny—he felt love for him.

  Such love is the opposite of fear. It is why Ryan ran out to save Lonny.

  Yet Ryan’s feeling of failure reveals a painful paradox of combat. As he and Lonny lay bleeding in the center of Highway 10, our entire battalion, including our regiment and division, thousands of Marines, had phase lines our commanders had ordered us to reach. These phase lines, points of advance deeper inside Fallujah, indicated on the maps we carried, marked our mission for that day. We had to reach them, or fail. From the general commanding our division to the corporal commanding the three privates in his team, the mission came first. Before the Marines. This is the nature of war. If our lives took precedence, no hill would ever be taken, no building stormed or city seized, because some of us would die achieving this mission. The courage shown by Ryan, by Lonny, by many others, is essential to that success. It is a courage bred from love, from months spent training together, knowing each other’s families, suffering shoulder to shoulder. Becoming friends. These bonds, fully realized, inspire incredible sacrifice in service of one another. And in service of the mission.

  Therein lies the paradox.

  The mission still comes first. The price is your friends. So you destroy what you love. This is the heartbreak I could hear in Ryan’s voice. Your heart can’t break if you weren’t in love.

  “A lot of people have asked me about that day,” continued Ryan, “but nobody has ever asked who came to get me. After I was shot, there were two of us lying out along Highway Ten.” His eyes fixed toward the back of the crowd, on two lance corporals, not much more than twenty years old, who would receive no recognition, except for this nod from Ryan, an acknowledgment of how they felt about each other.

  One by one, we left our seats to shake Ryan’s hand. Many of us would go on to more deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, but a battle as big as Fallujah never came along again, though there were others like it.

  In valleys, hamlets, and cities too countless to number, Ryan Shane’s words held true. Our greatest achievements were tied to our greatest failures. It’s a paradox as old as war: love is fear’s opposite, the will to fight is ultimately bound with the will to destroy those you love, victory always couples with defeat.

  Like a lot of guys, I learned this in the rain.

  WHAT’S BURIED IN THE DEVIL’S MOUNTAIN

  BERLIN

  Just before Christmas, I take my daughter Coco, who is now four years old, to Berlin for the weekend to visit Jack and his family who are now stationed there. This trip was nearly six months in the making, though its purpose is simple—Jack and I haven’t seen each other in a year and we want to catch up. Maintaining our friendship has become important to me: when I chose to reenter civilian life after fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, Jack and I had an argument about that decision which nearly ended that friendship. I had been slated to work as his deputy on a deployment to Afghanistan, but had pulled out at the last minute. As I wait for him on a bench in the arrivals terminal of Berlin’s Tegel Airport, Coco curls up against me, clutching an iPad, her imagination transported by The Princess Bride, while my imagination becomes equally transported, staring out the window at an impenetrable lid of clouds.

  Jack’s a few years older than me, and though we’re hardly old men, it now seems we were quite young when we first met. I was twenty-two, he was twenty-six, the two of us students at the Amphibious Reconnaissance School, the special operations course where one qualified to become an elite Recon Marine. That summer, not even a year had passed since the Twin Towers had collapsed. The Afghanistan War had begun, the Iraq War hadn’t, but we all wanted in on it. Jack was a lieutenant with a few years in the infantry and a couple of peacetime deployments to Okinawa under his belt. I was still a Navy ROTC midshipman, and this was my last summer in college before becoming an officer. In Marine circles, the rigor of the course was legendary: hikes with nearly one hundred pounds of equipment in the Virginia woods, days without sleep on patrol, open ocean swims that went on for several miles. Less than a third of the Marines who started the Amphibious Reconnaissance School graduated. There were many ways to wash out, and succumbing to heatstroke was one.

  A few weeks into our training, on a particularly hot July day, we had a stalking exercise. Wearing heavy ghillie suits, a uniform covered with burlap and used by snipers, our assignment was to crawl unseen at a snail’s pace for over a mile in order to sneak within a few yards of an instructor who was searching for us with a set of binoculars. Having not brought enough water, my canteens ran empty within a couple of hours, and a couple of hours after that I was dangerously dehydrated. Flat on my stomach, creeping toward the instructor, my vision began to tunnel, and every time I flexed a muscle, pinpricks of light exploded into view. In the early afternoon the instructor blew his whistle, the signal that all of us should stand and show our progress. As I attempted to come to my feet, I instead sunk to my knees. Almost immediately, I felt a set of arms loop under mine. It was Jack. While a few instructors shouted after him, asking if everything was all right, he dragged me beneath a nearby tree, ripping off the bush hat I wore and dousing my head in cold water from his canteens before a medic or anyone else could realize I’d already suffered heatstroke. Then, once I’d gathered myself, and with no one the wiser, we walked over to the trucks that would drive us to
our barracks.

  * * *

  When Jack’s minivan pulls up to the arrivals terminal, I am staring out at the overcast sky, the day holding just above freezing, thinking about the heat of that afternoon twelve years before and how my friend had saved me from washing out. Coco has fallen asleep watching her movie, and after I scoop her up in my arms, Jack helps me strap her into one of the three car seats in the minivan’s back. With Coco securely napping, I gather our bags from the curb. “You look good,” Jack says. I tell him he looks the same, which is to say neither good nor bad. He grins.

  Driving in from the airport, we pass by the Tiergarten, a park in the heart of Berlin where Frederick the Great once hunted wild boar. An afternoon mist lurks between endless rows of linden trees, and through it I can see the distant Brandenburg Gate. I crane my neck to get a better look and catch a glimpse of Coco behind me, still asleep. I don’t bother waking her. She won’t remember the sights anyway. While I take in the view, Jack and I catch up—his work, my work, the evolving logistics of our lives. That evening, after dinner, we gather around the undecorated Christmas tree in his living room. His wife is out doing some holiday shopping, and his three girls absorb Coco into their pack. While Jack’s daughters teach mine to dance to Taylor Swift and bedazzle her shoelaces, I feel how the context of our friendship has shifted onto a new foundation: the bond between two soldiers has become the bond between two fathers.

  With our girls tucked into bed, the two of us sit in his living room, him drinking a whiskey and me a coffee. We pick up a bit of our conversation from the car ride, Jack telling me about his new job, which he doesn’t love; me telling him about my move to Istanbul, which has been a challenge. We tell stories about old friends, some living, some dead, but we don’t talk about the argument we had more than three years before, when I’d chosen to leave the service. Heading off to my bedroom, I wonder if we’ll get to it that weekend.

  * * *

  After that summer at the Amphibious Reconnaissance School, I went back to college and Jack left for the invasion of Iraq. While he was embarked on a navy ship crossing the Atlantic toward Kuwait, the two of us swapped emails. His notes were filled with skepticism about whether the invasion would even occur; mine were filled with angst about missing the war. I even considered dropping out of college to enlist, leaving one semester shy of my degree. Then the invasion launched. I heard nothing from him for months, and I worried about my friend.

  That summer, Jack returned home. Having seen some of the toughest fighting, he’d been decorated for valor, and I began my training as a new lieutenant. The next year, the two of us were back in Iraq but on opposite sides of the country. Now and again I’d bump into a captain or senior enlisted Marine who knew Jack. They always said he’d mentioned me, and often I found they’d sought me out just as a favor to him, to see how I was doing. When people asked about our friendship, I referred to him as my “Marine big brother.” For years the two of us deployed in and out of Iraq, then later Afghanistan, never serving on the same battlefield but always finding one another when we returned home. Between these deployments, we’d keep up by going on long runs together.

  The next morning, more than a decade after this all began, the two of us bundle up in the foyer of his home, heading out on another run while our daughters sleep.

  Jogging out from his house, it is nearly seven a.m. but still dark. The two of us always get our miles in during the early hours; the quiet of that time seems to open a neutral space where we can offer up the guarded parts of ourselves—fears, frustrations, ambitions—and when we return in the day, these disclosures remain in that morning space. Weaving through narrow residential streets, we eventually find ourselves on the Kurfürstendamm, a broad avenue in the heart of Berlin. After a few miles we’ve spoken about the war in Syria, the pros and cons of sending our children to international schools, the Edward Snowden controversy, but still I feel us dancing around that old argument, which had also happened on a run, one looping a barren airfield in eastern Afghanistan, when I’d told him that deployment would be my last and I wouldn’t be coming to work for him. It was the only run the two of us never finished.

  There’s a church where the Kurfürstendamm merges with the Kantstrasse. Burnt and jagged, its half-amputated spire reaches toward the night sky like a tree exploded by lightning. Steel bands reinforce the buckling pillars on the church’s facade, and the cold winter air blows unrestrained through the stone-gabled windows and a gutted circular cavity once filled by a massive assemblage of stained glass. The Allies had bombed the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church nearly seventy years before, leaving it partially in ruins. After the war it was never rebuilt. It stands as a reminder that remembrance and reconciliation are often one and the same.

  Jogging in place on the sidewalk for a few moments, staring up at the spire, neither of us speaks. I want to say something but don’t know quite how. “Pretty amazing,” he says, “leaving it like that for everyone to see.” And before I can answer he adds, “Let’s get going.” By now the morning’s commuters have filled the sidewalks, and we turn back, dodging our way home through ever-thickening crowds.

  * * *

  We run the next two mornings, but I feel my chance to talk with Jack about our old argument evaporated in front of the Memorial Church. The days go by and we immerse ourselves in our children, taking them to the outdoor Christmas markets, walking with them in the expansive Grunewald Forest that abuts his house. The girls take to sleeping in the same room, making each night a slumber party. The older girls dress my daughter up like a princess, doting on her as if she were one of their younger sisters, and I think but don’t say how this feels appropriate, Jack having always been a big brother to me.

  The morning before I leave, we take a final run. Instead of heading through downtown Berlin as we’ve done the other days, we choose to take an easier route, through the Grunewald Forest. The floor of the forest is damp, silencing our steps. I think I might try one last time to bring up our disagreement, that old wound, how we hadn’t spoken for a year afterward, how I wonder if he’s now forgiven me. I begin by asking him if he remembers the stalking exercise from all those years ago, how he saved me from washing out, how hot it’d been that day. He doesn’t say much, and I continue to recount everything I owe him: how he’d looked out for me during all those deployments, how he’d taken it upon himself to call up each new commander I worked for in the Marines and tell them I was a solid guy, how if he hadn’t taken care of me that day in the sun my career and my life might have taken a different course. Still, Jack doesn’t say much. I think he can tell where I’m going with all this talk. By now we’ve finished our run. Strolling through the forest, we come upon the banks of the lake, the Grunewaldsee. The sun is up, the day clear, and across the lake there is a hill. We are barely walking now.

  “One of the things I love about running in this city,” says Jack, “is that it’s completely flat.” Then he points across the lake, to the hill that overlooks the entire forest. “That’s one of the highest points in Berlin. If you’d stayed longer, I would’ve taken you up there. It’s got a great view.”

  I nod, trying to figure a way back into our conversation, but before I can say anything else, Jack goes on. “It’s not real, though. The hill’s man-made.”

  “Who made it?” I ask.

  “After the Battle of Berlin, there was so much destruction lying around this city; rubble, tanks, artillery pieces, bodies—where do you put it all? You can’t leave it out. So they buried it in a huge pile and covered it with dirt and grass. You know what they call it?”

  I shake my head, no.

  “The Teufelsberg—‘Devil’s Mountain.’”

  Neither of us says much more. The particulars of that argument have become meaningless now. After three days together, Jack and I end our time in a quiet walk along the banks of the lake, looking at Berlin’s only mountain, which looms as an ever-present yet camouflaged
wound, integrated with—and thus inextricable from—the postwar topography of this city where we’ve met.

  MY LAST MOVIE NIGHT

  SHKIN

  At Shkin firebase, a remote outpost in southeastern Afghanistan, Thursday night was movie night. There were three hundred Afghans in the special operations unit I advised during 2010 and 2011, and our handful of Americans would invite their leaders to our corner of the compound to relax. We’d hang a bedsheet between two guard towers to make a wide-screen, and begin the show. Picking something to watch was an exercise in hurdling cultural barriers. What film could you offer a group of grizzled Pashtun tribesmen, most of whom spoke no English? More times than I care to remember, we viewed Rambo III (the one where he fights the Soviets alongside the mujahideen) or Troy (which surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, needs no translation). As the opening credits rolled, we’d hand out popcorn and fill brown paper cups with Jim Beam for the Afghans who wished to join us. By the time Sly bagged his first communist or Brad diced up his first Trojan, the Afghans would be cheering, red-faced and all grins. In the back row of foldout chairs, two of the senior-most troopers always sat together, the platoon commanders Mortaza and Sabir. I’d take a place next to them, and beneath a flickering projector the three of us would quietly talk.