“You see any cell phones come out, you interdict that individual,” said Lieutenant Schumacher.
“Interdict?” Chang chuckled. “You don’t gotta show off your SAT words all the time, sir.”
“We can’t all get by on our good looks like you, Chang,” the lieutenant told him. “Just grab anyone you see pull out a cell phone.”
“Aye-aye, Skipper,” said Chang.
“Dempsey.” Lieutenant Schumacher turned to me. “I want you to go ahead into that second house and search it with Loki. First squad will pull security for you.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, glad to have a job.
“Second squad, perimeter,” said the lieutenant. “Third squad with me.”
About twelve guys peeled off with Lieutenant Schu and went up to start talking to some of the old men. The lieutenant wanted to see what we could learn and how we might help the village. It was all part of trying to win over the hearts and minds of the local population … so that they wouldn’t try to kill us.
We stepped up to the wooden door of the house, and Chang pounded on it. A younger man with a heavy black beard opened the door. Our unit translator came forward and chatted with him. They had a quick back and forth. It seemed like they were arguing about something.
“He says he has no weapons here,” the translator told us.
“Well, tell him we’ve got to search anyway,” Chang said. “Tell him we’re coming in the easy way or the hard way.”
The translator spoke again, and the man sighed and opened the door.
Four marines whose names I didn’t remember went in to round up all the people inside and clear them out of Loki’s way. Sergeant Gaffley stood with the rest of the squad, watching the street, although I knew he had one eye on me. A crowd had gathered around us, some of them talking to the translator, who told them to step back.
“Clear!” we heard the guys call from inside after a few minutes.
Chang nodded at me.
“Okay, Loki.” I bent down to my dog’s face. “Here we go, buddy.”
It was time to get to work.
Loki’s tail spun like a helicopter blade. His snout rose in the air. He could sense that something was about to happen. Even though this was new to me, Loki had done this before.
I pulled his toy from my pocket. He immediately perked his ears up and hopped from foot to foot. His tail stopped wagging and pointed, ready for action. I slipped the toy back into my pocket, so he knew he’d only get it as a reward for finding what he’d been trained to find.
For Loki, the game had begun.
I glanced at the crowd on the street around us. Chang and the others on the squad were watching them closely. A mixture of faces, young and old, now all had their eyes fixed on me. For some of them, it was just curiosity about the American and his dog. But there were probably some who were watching my every move as spies. I felt very exposed on that street and was grateful for Chang by my side.
I took a deep breath.
“Seek, seek,” I commanded, unclipping Loki’s leash from his thick leather collar and pointing him toward the house. He bolted away, through the open doorway and into the shadows, snuffling and sniffing in every corner. I followed with Chang right behind me. I had to stay close, encouraging Loki and pointing, telling him where to focus his attention, all my senses on high alert. The place could be booby-trapped.
It was a one-room house, with a carpet hanging toward the back to separate the cooking area from the rest of it. There was one bed, and a lot of rugs and mats rolled in the corners. A small door led to a terrace, and there was a single window, filled right now with the faces of curious boys, eager to see an American dog team at work.
Loki was gulping in air through his nostrils, a loud nasal snort that sucked in all kinds of smells. They say a human nose has about six million smell receptors. A Labrador retriever has around 150 million of them. Humans usually only notice smells that are good or bad, but a dog smells the way humans see colors, with different shades and hues and brightnesses.
They can smell objects and the different people who have touched those objects. They can smell moods, like fear, and they can even tell time with their sense of smell — how long it’s been since a smell showed up, how quickly it’s fading. Loki was trained to smell explosives and weapons, but his nose could also pick up on places where explosives or weapons had been.
I had to watch him closely. If he picked up something on a blanket, it could mean that the blanket had been wrapped around guns or bomb parts, and that could mean the owner of the blanket might know something about the bad guys, might even be working with them. That also meant that if Loki picked up on something and the owner noticed, the owner might attack us.
Loki crawled under the bed. He sniffed at a rolled rug. He pawed through the drawers of a dresser, sniffing at the clean clothes. The whole time, the owner of the house stood on his tiptoes at the edge of the room, watching over Chang’s shoulder and yelling. I couldn’t understand his words, but he was obviously objecting to the dog crawling all over his stuff. If I were him, I’d be angry too … Loki’s paws were filthy. But his shouting was making me nervous. I didn’t want him watching my dog work.
“Get him out of here,” I told Chang.
Chang and the translator started to move the man out of the room, just as Loki and I got to a bin filled with vegetable scraps and bits of bone. It was some sort of composting bin, but it was weird that they’d keep it in the house. Even I could smell it without a powerful dog nose. Who would want to live with that smell?
Loki started to act funny. He sniffed around the edge of the bin and then paced back and forth in front of it. He looked back at me. I knew the look from training. It said, Hey, boss, I think I might be on to something here.
He stood on his back legs, his paws on the lid of the bin, and took in big snorts of air, checking and double-checking what his nose was trying to tell him. Then he paced back and forth again and sat right in front of the bin, alert and still. That was his way of telling me he was sure. He’d found something.
The owner of the house was really shouting now, waving his arms in the air.
Chang pressed him against the wall and ordered him to stay still and stay quiet. I approached the bin slowly and flipped the lid open. The stench of rotting vegetables and the sour smell of old meat almost overwhelmed me. I worried Loki had picked up a false scent or was just saying he wanted some of that meat. Just because he’d found something didn’t mean he’d found what we were looking for. Only I could confirm that.
I pulled out my utility knife and sorted through the disgusting heap of garbage. I pushed down into it until my wrist was covered in filth. Then my elbow. I heard Loki let out a whimper, eager to know if he’d done well. Eager to get his prize.
My heart raced, hoping to find something, terrified I’d find something.
I reached deeper, all the way to the bottom of the bin, and my knife clanged on a hard object — a plastic tube.
“We’ve got something!” I shouted, and Chang passed the message outside. Some of the other marines came over to unload the bin. They pulled out wires and a sack of ammonium nitrate … all the ingredients to make an improvised explosive device. An IED.
“These yours?” Chang yelled at the owner of the house. “These belong to you? Huh? You trying to hurt marines with these?”
We didn’t need the translator to know the man was trying to deny it, to make excuses. The tone of his voice was just like that of a kid in trouble at school for something he knows he did, but didn’t think he’d get caught at. Someone went to get the lieutenant.
I turned to Loki.
“That’s a good boy!” I praised him.
The bad guys were smart. They weren’t using any metal in their bomb parts so that our metal detectors wouldn’t pick up on it. They hid the pieces in a disgusting bin of rotting food, figuring we wouldn’t go poking around in the garbage.
But they didn’t count on Loki and his amazing no
se.
I pulled his toy out and tossed it straight up. He leaped and snatched it from the air and snorted with glee, prancing around in circles with the toy in his mouth. He knew he’d done a good job, and he loved showing off. That was probably a bad habit too, but I let it slide. He’d just given us a success our first time out. I smiled watching him.
Lieutenant Schu came in with a few of the village elders trailing behind him. Our translator spoke rapidly, repeating in English what they were saying in their Pashto language.
“He’s a good man,” they were saying.
“Fighters make him hide things here or they kill his wife, his children,” they were saying.
“He had no choice,” they were saying.
“Tell them that there is always a choice,” Lieutenant Schumacher told the translator. He turned to the elders and spoke slowly so that the translator would have time to repeat what he said accurately. “If you have a problem with fighters coming here and hiding things in your homes, you tell me. You know where to find me. The base is right up on the hill. You come tell me that fighters are threatening you, trying to use your village to hide their weapons, and I’ll come after them and they will regret it. My marines and I are here to protect you. But you keep secrets from me, you make me come here with my dog and find this stuff — this stuff they use to hurt and to kill my marines — well, then I think you’ve made a choice. You’ve made a bad choice, and I can’t help you if you’re going to make bad choices.”
When the translator finished, the elders shook their heads and spat on the ground. They didn’t like what they were hearing. I guess they also didn’t like hearing it from a guy who was less than half their age. He didn’t even have a beard. None of us did. We were clean-shaven Americans. In their culture, all the grown men had beards. So it must have been doubly humiliating because Lieutenant Schumacher looked like a boy to them, and yet he had a fully armed marine platoon and the might of the United States Military to back him up. They couldn’t so easily dismiss what he said as childish.
“Now I’m gonna take this man to answer some questions,” the lieutenant explained, pointing at the owner of the house, who was kneeling on the floor with his hands behind his head, while Chang stood above him with his M16. “He’ll be treated fairly. We’re not going to hurt him, but he is going to come with us now, understood?”
Whether the elders understood or not, it didn’t really matter. The lieutenant nodded, and a marine tied the man’s hands behind his back with a tight plastic band, then put a blindfold on him. Standard operating procedure for arresting a suspected insurgent.
The lieutenant called in a helicopter to come get the man and take him to Camp Leatherneck, the biggest base in the region, where he would be sitting down with some military interrogators. What happened to the man after he got there was up to someone else, higher ranked officers than Lieutenant Schumacher. We were the knights in the field. Big decisions were made by kings back in the castle.
“He says he had no choice.” The translator repeated the man’s pleas in English as we waited for the helicopter to come get him. The rest of the platoon were standing around, watching the crowd.
“Nice work, Dempsey,” Sergeant Gaffley said, although he said it with more four letter words than that. “Hajji takedown number one.”
Hajji was a term of honor for a Muslim who had made a pilgrimage to the Muslim holy places, but Sergeant Gaffley didn’t mean it as a compliment. He called all the locals hajji even though we’d been told in basic training that using the word that way was an insult. I guess it was easier for him to call them names than to see them as real people, especially when some of them were trying to kill us. Sergeant Gaffley had been in Afghanistan a lot longer than I had.
I suddenly felt a knot in my stomach. My pride left a chalky taste in my mouth. The man was being taken away because of me and Loki. I started to wonder … What if he was telling the truth? What choice did he have if the terrorists had really threatened his family?
But what choice did we have either?
If we didn’t take that stuff, it’d be turned into a bomb and probably used against us. We’d all end up like Loki’s last handler. And maybe the man was lying. Maybe he was working with the bad guys of his own free will. Maybe he’d even fired the shot that had killed Corporal Eliopulos.
That’s what war was. A series of bad choices, one worse than the next, and from the moment a war starts they fall like dominoes. Fighters came into this area, so the marines came into this area. Fighters used the village to hide, so the marines searched the village. Fighters shot at the marines, so the marines shot back. Innocent, guilty, for or against the war … It didn’t really matter.
The dominoes were already falling when we got here.
I envied Loki. For him it was all play. He did what he’d been trained to do without question, and he enjoyed it. I decided then and there to take the same approach. Find the weapons, stop the bombs, protect my marines. I’d let the officers and the politicians worry about the rest of it. If I looked too far past the end of my leash, I’d lose my mind.
“You did good work today,” Lieutenant Schu said. He put his hand on my shoulder and looked me right in the eyes, like he could see the chaos in my brain at that moment. “I hope you know that. Finding that stuff probably saved lives, understood?”
“Oo-rah,” I said quietly, and scratched Loki behind his ears.
Once the helicopter lifted off again, in a swirl of noise and dust, the lieutenant had us move out of the village. It was late afternoon and he wanted to get back to base before dusk, when the long shadows on the mountains gave the bad guys more places to hide and wait in ambush.
“Dempsey, you and Loki take point again,” he ordered.
“Aye-aye, sir,” I said, feeling good about our success as a team and ready to keep showing what we could do.
“We’re gonna get hit,” Chang said as we started the march. “I can feel it. The whole valley knows we’re here and they know where we’re going. They’d be crazy not to attack us.”
“Just keep your mouth shut and your eyes open,” Douglass said, cradling his heavy machine gun in his arms. “Like Dempsey and Loki.”
I smiled. I guess being good at the job was more important than being the most fun guy in the platoon. I was starting to like Douglass.
“Will you scratch behind my ears if I do?” Chang joked.
“I’ll put you on a leash,” Douglass replied.
Their back-and-forth banter went on for a while as we made our way through the irrigation ditches to the footpath that led up the mountain. I found the banter calming. It was like the chatter in the locker room in high school. It made it feel almost like we were just some normal guys going for a walk after gym class.
We passed the spot where Loki had scared off the boy and his goats. The tops of the mountains on the other side of the valley were shrouded in mist. Our own mountain sloped up in front of us, the afternoon haze hiding the outpost from our view. It was nice to know they were up there somewhere, watching over us with their heavy artillery, ready to help out if we got into trouble.
Loki snuffled at the last ditch before the climb up. It was filled with wastewater and goat droppings and mud. He put his nose right down above it, just a hair’s width away from its oily surface, snorting in all those smells. I wrinkled my nose and fought my gag reflex, but I guess for Loki, sniffing a wastewater ditch was like reading a really interesting book filled with information about the whole area — what people ate, what they planted, who they were, and when they’d been there.
All I smelled was goat poop.
And maybe some from humans too.
I pulled Loki along, forcing him to pick up his pace. “Come on, boy,” I urged. I wanted to get away from the gross smell and I wanted to get back to base. I was tired from almost no sleep and a long hike and a hard search, and we still had a long way to go.
Loki looked at me with wide eyes and a look that I can only describe as hang
dog. He was upset I was ruining his good time. I nudged him forward, and he trotted ahead of me with a sigh.
Then he stopped. He sniffed at the air, frozen. I saw his tail tighten, his behavior change, like he’d picked up on a smell he knew. I raised my arm, signaling for the column of marines behind me to stop, just in case.
And that’s when the world around us exploded.
“Contact, contact, contact!” Chang shouted.
I heard a snap as a firefly zipped past my face.
The dirt started dancing at my feet.
“Get down!” Chang pulled me into the waste ditch we’d just crossed over. I skittered down the dirt embankment and sank up to my knees in the foul water, pulling Loki in behind me. More fireflies buzzed overhead.
It took me another fraction of a second to realize they were tracer rounds from our guns returning fire. The “firefly” I’d seen before was an enemy bullet buzzing past my helmet. I was in my first firefight.
Contact.
I pressed Loki against the dirt as I lifted my head to see where the shots were coming from. I was curious. It was a strange emotion to feel, but I’d never been shot at before. Mud kicked up just in front of my face, and I ducked down again.
“They’re shooting at us!” I yelled.
“Duh!” Chang yelled back over the roar of the gunfire. To my other side, Douglass had set the M240 on its tripod in the mud and opened fire. The barrel was smoking, hot brass casings ejecting into the filthy water around us. He had a grin on his face as his shoulder rattled with the force of the gun unloading on fully-automatic.
Chang popped up over the top of the ditch and fired a few rounds from his M16 before ducking back down next to me.
I wanted to get up and fire back, to do something, but I also had to keep Loki safe. He was half in the dirty water and half out, his face pressed down flat on his paws. He was looking up at me, waiting patiently for me to make all the noise and smoky smells stop.
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