Best American Magazine Writing 2013

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  Sanderson gets to his feet. His legs are trembling, but they hold him. He can hear sirens approaching. Sure, now the cops come. Now that it’s all over.

  Sanderson puts an arm around his father’s shoulders. “You all right, Pop?”

  “That man was beating on you,” Pop says matter-of-factly. “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know.” Tears are coursing down Sanderson’s cheeks. He wipes them away.

  Tat Man falls to his knees. He has stopped coughing. Now he’s making a low growling sound. Most people hang back, but a couple of brave souls go to him, wanting to help.

  “Did we eat yet, Reggie?”

  “Yeah, Pop, we did. And I’m Dougie.”

  “Reggie’s dead.”

  “Yeah, Pop.”

  “That man was beating on you.” Now his father also starts to cry. His face twists into the face of a child, one who is horribly tired and needs to go to bed. “I’ve got a headache. Let’s blow this pop stand. I want to lie down.”

  “We have to wait for the cops.”

  “Why? What cops? Who is that guy?”

  Sanderson smells shit. His father has just dropped a load.

  “Let’s get you in the car, Pop.”

  His father lets Sanderson lead him around the Subaru’s crumpled snout.

  He helps the eighty-three-year-old Caped Crusader into the car and closes the door to keep the cool in. The first city police car is pulling up. The sixty-one-year-old Boy Wonder, hands pressed to his aching side, shuffles back to the driver’s side to wait.

  Byliner

  FINALIST—FEATURE WRITING INCORPORATING PROFILE WRITING

  Byliner is a new kind of magazine—literally unbound—that publishes individual pieces of long-form journalism as apps. Some of these stories have been published elsewhere, but many have been commissioned by the editors for purchase on digital newsstands or by subscription. What makes Byliner a magazine is the vision of the editors, whose passion for storytelling is shared by a community of like-minded readers. Since leaving the U.S. Army in 2005—he served two tours of duty as an infantryman in Iraq—Brian Mockenhaupt has written widely about soldiers both at war and at home. The story of three Americans in Afghanistan, “The Living and the Dead” offers readers what the National Magazine Award judges described as “an unforgettable sense of the reality of modern combat.”

  Brian Mockenhaupt

  The Living and the Dead

  Dedicated to the men of Patrol Base Dakota and their families

  1. The Last Step

  Tom Whorl decided at twelve years old, the night he met his father’s two friends at the Super Bowl party. They matched his physical conception—thick arms, straight backs, high-and-tight haircuts shaved short on the sides and just a little longer on top—but it was how they carried themselves that fascinated him: direct in speech but respectful, with a confidence that suggested they knew something about themselves and the world that many others did not. Leaving the party, Tom told his father he would join the Marine Corps.

  He considered nothing else, and five years later he hustled off a bus in the early-morning darkness at Parris Island, South Carolina, and ran toward dozens of perfectly spaced pairs of yellow footprints painted on pavement, four abreast. He placed his feet on two footprints and willed himself to stillness as his heart hammered and men scrambled around him. Easy as that, the drill instructors had put their new recruits into neat rank and file. The recruits would soon do this on their own, moving in unison, as one organism.

  Tom traded first person for the third. I and me and my vanished, replaced with this recruit, as in “Sir! This recruit does not know the answer, sir!” He picked that up quickly; those who slipped had the lesson reinforced with exercises in the sandpit that left them with trembling limbs and heaving lungs. The individual did not matter, except as an essential part of the whole. He was nothing on his own, and he knew nothing, until the Marine Corps taught him the proper way. To speak. To walk. To shower. To dress. To eat.

  The specialized training came later, at the School of Infantry, where he learned the finer skills of the trade. But for thirteen weeks on Parris Island he learned how to be responsible for himself, and responsible for others. He could be punished for another recruit’s actions, and others could suffer for his mistakes. If sweat trickled into his eye, he let it burn rather than wipe it away and risk a drill instructor punishing the group for his lack of discipline. He learned to fear, above all else, letting down his fellow recruits. Others depended on him to do a job, and someday men would depend on him to lead them. His fellow Marines, once they had all earned the title of Marine, would trust their lives to him, and he would trust his to them, and they would sacrifice without hesitation. If the man to his front fell, he would step into the void.

  Of course, the Marine Corps could teach recruits how to behave in war, how to push aside fear and charge through an open field as bullets kicked up spouts of dirt at their feet. But the Corps couldn’t tell them what war would do to them. Tom and his men would learn those lessons on their own, far from Parris Island.

  In a few months the room would be a clay oven, holding the day’s heat deep into the night, and he would wake each morning lathered in sweat. But with the Afghan winter still pushing temperatures below freezing, Tom watched his breath roll out in a hazy plume when he woke. He squirmed out of his sleeping bag, swung his legs off the cot, and slipped his feet into his boots. He lit a Marlboro and worked his mind through the day ahead, patrolling the surrounding fields and villages, infested with buried bombs and Taliban fighters.

  As the sergeant in charge of First Squad, Third Platoon, Fox Company, Second Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, he oversaw three four-man fire teams, the basic building blocks of a Marine infantry unit. His days had a simple rhythm: Wake up, patrol, come home, start over. Every day, he and his men pushed out on foot into the farmland around the patrol base, and every day the Taliban shot at them, sometimes just a few hastily fired rounds, but oftentimes accurate and sustained gunfire. The Marines shot back, and sometimes they saw fighters fall, but they never found bodies, only blood trails. The Taliban were good about taking their injured and dead with them, same as the Americans.

  Thousands of Marines and Afghan soldiers had invaded the longtime Taliban stronghold of Marjah, in Helmand Province, a year earlier, in 2010, and driven out the insurgents. But progress was still tenuous, and success there was critical to any sort of lasting calm in southern Afghanistan. Third Platoon was a small piece of a security ring around Marjah, keeping the Taliban under pressure on the outskirts so a local government could take root and spread, with schools and markets and Afghan security forces capable of defending their own people.

  The platoon had been split in two for the deployment, with the lieutenant and two more squads a kilometer to the east at Patrol Base Beatley. Tom’s squad, the platoon sergeant, a medic, and five Afghan soldiers lived at Patrol Base Dakota, an abandoned farmer’s compound with eight-foot mud walls, a foot thick, around a courtyard roughly one hundred feet square. The Marines lived in a row of small rooms along the northern wall that they had crowded with cots. From guard towers in each corner, outfitted with machine guns and bulletproof glass, they kept watch over fields and tree lines. Like cavalry troops in an Old West fort, they were surrounded on all sides by the enemy, and fought off attacks when they left the marginal safety of their outpost, while trying to win over an always wary and often hostile population.

  The compound had been named for Corporal Dakota Huse, a nineteen-year-old Marine killed by a buried bomb during a foot patrol four months earlier. The Taliban had regularly attacked the building’s previous tenants, from Second Battalion, Ninth Marines, with fighters creeping so close they chucked grenades over the walls and once snatched a machine gun from one of the guard posts. The Taliban kept its interest in Dakota after Tom’s unit replaced them in January 2011, regularly shooting at the patrol base and lobbing a few rockets. From inside the compound, the Marines could h
ear the sharp rattle of machine-gun fire and the enormous whoomp of improvised explosive devices in the surrounding countryside, triggered by civilians, distant Marine patrols from other bases, or Taliban blowing themselves up while trying to build or plant bombs.

  “Three IEDs have gone off in the last 24 hours,” Tom scribbled in a six-by-nine-inch spiral notebook, the journal he kept to document his platoon’s fight for northern Marjah. On the first page he had left instructions for the Marines who might one day have the grim duty of sorting through his gear: “This is to be returned to my wife, should that time come.”

  A few feet away, on a canvas cot set against the opposite wall, the platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant James Malachowski, still lay cocooned in his sleeping bag, a fleece cap pulled over his eyes. He was “Staff Sergeant” to his subordinates, Jimmy to his friends. Tom was both, and called him Jimmy in private but never in front of other Marines.

  Their narrow, dirt-floored room doubled as Dakota’s Combat Operations Center, the COC, which was really just a computer and two radios resting on a piece of plywood at the room’s far end, everything coated in a layer of dirt as fine as talcum powder. A Marine sat there day and night, monitoring the radios and the computer’s secret instant-messaging system, ready to report emergencies or relay communications from higher command.

  Tom and Jimmy had given the room a few minimal decorations. An American flag hung on the wall above Tom’s cot, and another above Jimmy’s, alongside a black Jolly Roger—a Christmas present from Jimmy’s mother, a former Marine herself, which became the platoon’s flag. Jimmy’s family also sent some of his favorites for relaxation: herbal tea and slender Bad Boy cigars, made in Maryland not far from his home in Westminster, outside Baltimore. He listened to classical music, and though Tom initially scoffed at that, he quickly found he enjoyed it. After watching movies on Jimmy’s laptop at night—usually something light, like Office Space or Old School—they’d fall asleep to Bach or Brahms or, many nights, Samuel Barber’s mournful Adagio for Strings, known to them from the Vietnam War movie Platoon.

  At quick glance, they seemed two very different sorts of Marines. Tom wore his dark brown hair cut close on the sides and back, but the top flopped nearly to his eyes, far from the typical high-and-tight cut. But that was Tom, more interested in actions than appearance after a dozen years in the Marine Corps. Jimmy, though four years younger, at twenty-five, was already balding, and he kept his head shaved. And while Tom was wiry, with a welterweight’s build, Jimmy was six feet and two hundred pounds of dense muscle, narrow waist, and massive chest.

  But they shared a similar leadership style, very aggressive in combat, always pushing toward the enemy, and Tom respected Jimmy deeply for his devotion to and concern for his men, qualities he counted as crucial in a good leader. Like Tom, Jimmy didn’t often raise his voice. His men knew what he expected of them and knew he put their welfare first, without any blind deference to rank. As the Marines had prepared for the deployment back at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, the officer in charge of the platoon told the men not to worry, that everything would be okay. Jimmy knew better: he’d already served two violent tours in Iraq and had seen several friends die. He pulled the lieutenant aside afterwards. “Don’t tell them that,” he said. “We are not all coming back. We will take catastrophic injuries and we will have KIAs. Don’t tell them that, because it’s not true.”

  He and Tom had met briefly four years earlier at Parris Island, where they worked as marksmanship instructors for new recruits. Friendship came later, after Jimmy arrived at Lejeune as the new platoon sergeant, a few months before the deployment. They had both grown up in Maryland—Jimmy in the north, in the wooded hills of Westminster, in Carroll County, and Tom in the south, in St. Mary’s County, on Chesapeake Bay. They talked about eating blue crabs down at the beach and argued over football—Tom for the Redskins, Jimmy for the Ravens. In those early conversations they learned that their families, generations deep in Maryland, had fought on opposite sides in the Civil War—Jimmy’s for the Union, Tom’s for the Confederacy. What that must have been like, they mused, their own state torn in two.

  As a boy, Tom had visited the Gettysburg and Antietam battlefields with his father, and since then he had consumed books about the Civil War. He brought two with him to Afghanistan: Robert E. Lee on Leadership, by H. W. Crocker, and Pickett’s Charge—The Last Attack at Gettysburg, by Earl J. Hess. He’d filled the Lee book with scraps of paper, on which he’d scrawled notes. Awesome traits—tell them to my leaders: Know the ground; do your reconnaissance; be indefatigable; learn from your superiors; leadership is legitimatized by success under fire; leadership requires moral responsibility.

  He read the Pickett book, heavy with raw accounts of battle, as a counterweight, to remind him that those theories of leadership played out with consequence. The scale of that destruction was remarkable, with hundreds of men killed in minutes, whole platoons and companies wiped out. For the foot soldier, war hadn’t much changed. War was still miserable, the rain and the cold, the heat and the fear. Soldiers at Gettysburg watched cannonballs cut their friends in half; in Afghanistan, improvised explosive devices did the same gruesome work. Shrapnel still sounded the same whizzing an inch past the face, which brought the same euphoric relief of death cheated. The cries of the wounded and dying still sounded the same, too.

  As the day’s patrol snaked out of Dakota, through a gap in the triple stack of concertina that surrounded the compound, Tom imagined Pickett’s men lined up shoulder to shoulder, ready to march toward likely death, resigned to the unknown of the next few minutes. He and his men knew some of that trepidation, waiting for the first bullet to crack overhead, heralding the start of an ambush or the sickening, deafening thunderclap of a buried bomb exploding under the patrol.

  The Marines searched a few of the area’s many abandoned compounds, for weapons and bomb-making materials, and chatted with the locals they passed. Most of these conversations followed a timeworn script: Tom asked if they knew anything about Taliban activity in the area; they said no. Some were no doubt Taliban sympathizers, or Taliban themselves. But many felt trapped in a vicious brawl. If they sided with one, they’d make an enemy of the other. Locals regularly found letters taped to their homes with terse warnings: “If you help the Americans, we’ll kill you and burn your house.”

  Still, some must have figured the Marines had a chance of winning, or they’d simply grown weary of wondering whether they’d blow up while walking to their fields, like the farmer who told Tom, between nervous glances, about two bombs buried along a canal.

  “So tomorrow we will be going IED hunting,” Tom wrote in his journal that night. “I hate doing it, but it must be done. FML.” Fuck my life.

  To defeat the bombs, the Marines needed to disable the bomb-making network. This meant detaining or killing the men who transported the materials, assembled the bombs, and detonated them—rarely the same person—and searching buildings and fields for stashes of explosives, detonators, battery packs, and the low-tech electronics used for radio-controlled blasts. But if the bomb was already planted, a critical part of the fight had been lost. The best the Marines could do was find and disable the bomb before it found them.

  At least two men in every patrol carried an electronic jammer, worn as a backpack, that blocked radio signals sent from the triggerman to the bomb. Another two men carried metal detectors, which they swept before them as they walked. The detectors emitted a tone that started low as they neared a metal object and rose to a high-pitched whine for larger objects and metal closer to the surface.

  The Marines also had Holly, a yellow Labrador retriever trained to sniff out several types of explosives. Lance Corporal Matthew Westbrook, Holly’s handler, would walk with her near the front of the patrol and send her to investigate suspicious areas or possible choke points, such as a road passing between two walled compounds. If she smelled explosives, she’d lie down next to the suspected bomb.

  Finally,
the Marines themselves became expert at spotting telltale signs: a slightly discolored patch of ground in the road or a thin layer of dirt sprinkled over a wire.

  But each of these methods had serious flaws. The jammers only thwarted radio-controlled bombs and were useless against pressure plates or bombs detonated by wires, which sometimes ran hundreds of yards from a bomb to the triggerman’s location. Set a metal detector’s sensitivity too low and it could miss a bomb; set it too high and the men might move a hundred feet in an hour, investigating every tiny metal scrap. Holly could hunt explosives for only an hour or less before she became distracted, and as temperatures rose she would spend more time jumping into the cool canal water than sniffing out bombs. And while the Marines were good at spotting the out-of-place, no one was good enough to see everything, and a few minutes of hard rain could hide the signs completely.

  On patrol, they often tried to walk in one another’s footsteps. No sense taking chances with an untested patch of ground. But that didn’t always work, either. Stories abounded of bombs exploding under the very spot where another Marine had just stood or stepped. Maybe he wasn’t heavy enough, or hadn’t compressed the pressure plate just right. Lucky for that first man; not so for the next.

  As the Marines had prepared to leap six feet across a canal during a patrol west of Dakota in mid-February, Corporal Ian Muller, Tom’s first team leader, spotted a tiny patch of yellow on the opposite embankment, next to a footbridge. Tom stepped into the canal and gently brushed away the dirt, revealing a piece of balsa wood wrapped in yellow tape. A pressure plate. Step on it and two metal contacts meet, sending electricity from a battery pack into a pressure cooker buried in the embankment, the same sort used in a kitchen, but this one packed with ten pounds of ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder, more than enough to blow a man in half. The Taliban knew the Marines would stay off the footbridge, so they put the pressure plate several feet away, at a likely crossing point.