Best American Magazine Writing 2013

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  Solomon shuttled constantly between the battalion’s three main outposts and eleven small patrol bases and had already been to Dakota a few times, to give services and hang out with the Marines. He liked to stay for a day or two and tag along on a foot patrol, so they’d know he didn’t think his life more valuable than theirs. He could step on a bomb just as easily as them.

  He would lounge on a cot in the shade of a camo net reading on his Kindle: Treasure Island, or Plato’s Republic, maybe Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. At night he’d climb into the guard towers, smoke his pipe, and chat with Marines as they scanned the fields and tree lines. He’d talk about religion if they asked, but usually they didn’t, so he’d just bullshit with them, or ask about their families. Often he just sat in silence, but that still had purpose. A ministry of presence, he called it.

  Tom liked Solomon. He’d been around chaplains who didn’t seem to truly care about Marines. They just wanted to talk about Jesus, or thought their job was giving sermons from the safety of well-protected bases. But Solomon tried to understand the Marines, and what the killing and death and fear could do to them.

  On his first visit to Dakota, while talking to Tom in his room, Solomon had noticed a few words written in black marker over the doorway, lyrics from a favorite song by Rise Against, just below Tom’s rifle, which rested on two nails: WE DON’T LIVE. WE JUST SURVIVE.

  What’s that all about? Solomon asked.

  “Well, we’re alive, but we’re not really living here,” Tom had said. “We just survive to go home and tell people how it was.”

  Solomon considered that, offered a thoughtful sigh, and nodded.

  Now, with the Marines still in a fog from Jimmy’s death, Solomon stayed in the background and waited for them to come to him. He didn’t sweep in to ask them how they were feeling, to offer prayers for their dead friend and tell them to trust in God. That wasn’t his style.

  “The last thing a Marine needs to hear is this is all part of God’s plan,” he says. “I don’t think God wanted Jimmy Malachowski to die. I don’t think he wanted Ian Muller to die. I just reject that out of hand. I don’t want any part of a God that’s like that.”

  But the Marines didn’t ask much about God anyway. “Most of the conversations center around the randomness of why one person dies and another doesn’t,” Solomon says. “Why one person becomes a double amputee and another doesn’t. ‘Normally I’m the third person in line on patrol; I wasn’t today, and the third person got blown up; I didn’t. I’m a bad person.’ Or ‘I walked over that spot three times. Why didn’t it happen to me?’ There’s no answer. I can’t make sense of that.”

  Some told him they couldn’t sleep, or that they had nightmares. Others said they had bursts of rage they didn’t understand. “Good,” Solomon told them. “You’re normal. If you were totally cool with everything you saw and did, if it didn’t bother you at all, then you’d be messed up.”

  “War is chaos and pain and destruction at its best,” he said. “We’re not supposed to see people with their legs blown off, or thrown fifty meters into the air by an IED. We’re not supposed to see that, and it leaves a mark.”

  All of the Marines at Dakota bore those scars. But Solomon reserved a special worry for the leaders, like Tom, who had succeeded in the Marine Corps because they had taken very good care of their men, which often meant they hadn’t taken care of themselves.

  Tom and the Dakota Marines saw Solomon again on March 27, a week after Jimmy died. They geared up that morning and walked the thousand yards to Patrol Base Beatley, a routine but dangerous movement. Imagine that, they told one another, we die walking to a memorial service. They were told to wear clean uniforms, though none of them had seen a washing machine in weeks. But this service wasn’t just for them. A convoy of armored trucks would deliver the Fox Company chain of command, several higher-ups from Battalion, Solomon, and even a general.

  The Marines crisscrossed the patrol base, picking up scraps of litter, then rehearsed the movements and the order of speakers, culminating with a full practice run. They couldn’t quite believe it, practicing how to mourn their friends, but they knew the Corps left little to chance. “You do the whole thing once,” First Sergeant Breland told them, “so you won’t get choked up when you do the real thing.”

  Wind tore through the base and brought a sandstorm that blotted the sun behind a brown veil and grounded helicopter flights, which meant the Marines would have no air support if they made contact on the way home from Beatley.

  The men formed up in neat rows, and Solomon nearly had to shout to be heard above the wind. “It is difficult to see meaning and purpose in the events of the last two weeks,” he said. “Indeed to ascribe too much meaning would be to dishonor the dead and their memory. To make sense out of chaos is not our task.”

  Remember your friends, he said, and live your lives to honor them.

  The Marines chose Ryan to speak about Ian, and Tom about Jimmy. They told of how dutiful the two men were, how selfless, how funny, and of all they had learned from them about being good Marines, and good men.

  “Amazing Grace” and taps played over a loudspeaker, a squad from First Platoon fired three rifle volleys, and then the Marines from Dakota geared up and walked home, down the same road, past the very spot where the Taliban had tried to blow them up earlier that month.

  They returned to the war, but Tom took a breather. His commanders ordered it, and while Tom would never have admitted that he felt nearer the edge, with the ground crumbling beneath him, he welcomed the respite.

  The past decade of war had retaught the Marines a lesson learned in every bloody conflict: a person can experience only so much horror before the mind’s ability to cope and carry on wavers, and a moment of distraction or hesitation on the battlefield can be disastrous. A short break from combat can have powerful restorative effects, so after the memorial, Tom’s commanders sent him to Camp Leatherneck, the Marines’ main camp in Helmand Province, where he could enjoy a few days without gunfire or explosions, the nauseating gamble of walking down bomb-sown roads, or the helplessness of watching another friend die. Captain Sacchetti also contacted Nina’s commanders, who gave her several days off to spend with her husband. Tom hadn’t seen her since his first few days in Afghanistan, before he’d been dispatched to Dakota.

  They stayed in a giant air-conditioned and mostly empty tent filled with bunk beds, used as temporary housing for Marines passing through Leatherneck. They hung sheets in a back corner for a little privacy, once again able to take refuge in the other’s physical presence, and for several hours Tom told her about what had happened to Ian and Jimmy. But mostly they lay on the bed and spoke sweetly to each other and remembered the world beyond Afghanistan, and Tom felt some of the tension slip free.

  Leatherneck was safe. Marines walked around free of helmets and body armor. They could watch movies at the morale building, exercise in gyms better equipped than some American fitness centers, and eat their fill in chow halls with plenty of choices and decent food. Tom stuffed himself, and after dinner every night he ate mint chocolate chip ice cream.

  Walking to the chow hall one afternoon, he and Nina watched a Marine stumble and fall while trying to hop across a shallow ditch, and they both doubled over laughing. It wasn’t just that Tom’s men could leap across six-foot-wide canals wearing full combat gear. This was just how they were together: giggling at the inappropriate, just as they might when walking hand in hand around the mall in Jacksonville.

  Nina saw something else, though, as they walked around Leatherneck. Even when they were immersed in conversation, Tom never stopped scanning the area around him, his eyes fixing on people, vehicles, bits of trash. As Nina stepped over a scrap of yellow caution tape, she didn’t give it a thought. But she watched Tom take a step and stop, his foot hovering over the tape. The hypervigilance was back.

  After his first deployment, Tom could name the perfume his wife wore on a given day, not by the scent but be
cause he noticed which bottle’s position had subtly changed on the bathroom vanity. He did the same with cars throughout the neighborhood. The gray van five doors down is parked on the other side of the street, facing south, same as last Thursday. He didn’t consciously search for the differences; he just couldn’t help but spot the out-of-place. After weeks of this, Nina took him into the bathroom, where she had rearranged the perfume bottles. “Now which one, Tom?” she said. “You have to stop noticing everything. You just have to shut your brain down and stop being aware of things you don’t need to be aware of.”

  With the deaths of Ian and Jimmy stuck in his head, she wondered how much worse his readjustment would be this time.

  They hung out for an afternoon with Jesse, who’d also been given a break from Dakota, and who was so happy to see Tom that tears slipped from his eyes. They stopped by the hospital to visit Corporal Ramos, who’d been shot in the shoulder a few days after Tom left. Out in northern Marjah, far from the insulation of Leatherneck, the war was alive, with points, edges, and texture. It was time for Tom to return and take over his dead friend’s job as platoon sergeant, responsible for the welfare of nearly four dozen Marines at Patrol Bases Dakota and Beatley.

  In early May, Tom sent a patrol over to Beatley to pick up the satellite phone, and for the next couple of days he watched his men pace the courtyard at Dakota or sit in the dark, invisible but for the glow of a cigarette cherry, and talk to parents and wives, girlfriends and kids. Some hadn’t spoken to their families in several weeks. Tom could chat with Nina over the military’s secret e-mail network, a luxury his guys didn’t have, but he missed his boys. Once the other Marines had taken their turns, Tom called Nina’s parents in Tennessee, and Andrew and Lee told him how they’d been swimming every day in the backyard pool, and played soccer and baseball.

  “Dad,” Andrew said, “are you done killing bad guys yet so you can come home?”

  “Almost,” Tom told him. “Almost.”

  With the western sky smeared pink behind silhouetted palm trees and stars rising in the east, Battalion called down with intel gleaned from two high-level detainees: a half-dozen Taliban commanders and scores of fighters had moved into Marjah and northern Marjah with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Tom strode through Dakota in his green shorts, shirtless after a sunset workout, sucked on a Marlboro, and refined his battle plan. He ordered another machine gun to one guard post and an extra grenade launcher to another. Marines stretched more concertina wire in the street, and Tom gave his men a rundown of the destruction-on-call: 60-millimeter mortars from Patrol Base Beatley and, from the larger bases, heavy mortars, HIMARS and Excalibur rockets, Cobra helicopter gunships, and F-18 jet fighters. Tom’s voice left no question: If the Taliban attacked, those who lived would retreat with their dead. The Marines trusted him; they believed him. And after so many nauseating steps, waiting to be blown in half, the notion of repelling a frontal assault on their patrol base cheered them.

  “I’m getting pumped up, man, like right before a football game,” a Marine said from the gathering darkness.

  “Fuck it, man,” another said. “Let ’em come.”

  But the Taliban did not come, which was common. The intel from detainees and informants was often unreliable or exaggerated. Instead, the Marines continued the slow, frustrating, dangerous grind of counterinsurgency. Tom pushed patrols into the surrounding countryside and villages twice a day, to search compounds and talk to locals. This exposed his men to bullets and bombs, but the harder he pushed, Tom reasoned, and the more aggressive an image he projected, the safer his men would be. “This is our area of operations,” he told his men, “not the Taliban’s.”

  Under a searing sun, the Marines waded through fields waist-high with poppies, and the fat bulbs atop each plant oozed tar-like goo that stained their uniforms with black streaks. Around them, workers scraped the bulbs and collected the resin, which would be refined into heroin. The Marines knew they would likely be fighting some of these men in the future. Laborers from Pakistan and elsewhere in Afghanistan brought in for the harvest might stick around to take a few shots at Marines, augmenting the ranks of hard-core Taliban, flush with fresh cash to finance their operations. But for now, Tom and his men enjoyed a bizarre truce, a welcome lull.

  “We’ll see you in a couple weeks,” Tom told the laborers as he passed.

  The patrol stopped in a village near Dakota, and, in a building empty save for a few dusty mats and cushions, Tom sat with Hajji Zaire. He controlled water in the village, a position of relative power, and had been kidnapped twice in recent weeks by the Taliban. Out in the fields, Tom was an infantryman; at the moment he was a salesman. The village still hadn’t elected an elder to serve on the local district council; no one wanted the job—they were convinced they’d be killed by the Taliban.

  “We can’t help you if you don’t have an elder,” Tom said. “I can’t dig you a well, build you a school, or improve your road.”

  He offered Zaire a cigarette, and the two men smoked.

  “Many times the government has promised to help us, but they don’t,” Zaire told him, dancing around Tom’s request. “The people in this village are honest and hardworking. They just want peace. They’re tired of war.”

  Tom knew Zaire’s position was difficult. Like many Afghans in the area, he seemed most interested in being left alone, farming and raising a family without the daily threat of traumatic death, and avoiding the ire of either the Taliban or the Marines.

  “You have to understand the people,” Tom said after he and his men left the village. “You don’t have to like them, but you have to understand them.”

  The Marines pushed north, through fields not far from where Ian had landed after the bomb blast, then cut west into Five Points, the site of so many firefights, but quiet now. After Jimmy died, the ISCI picked a different patrol base, an empty house just across the street from the mosque with more rooms and better views of the surrounding area.

  Inside the compound, Tom took off his helmet and pulled a long draw of water from his CamelBak. Sweat matted his hair, and his cheeks flushed pink from the hump through the fields. He inspected the fighters’ machine guns and deemed them cleaner and better maintained than some Marines’ weapons. They asked Tom for sandbags to reinforce their guard posts, belts of machine gun ammunition, and bottles of water.

  Working logistics for the ISCI was a hassle, but these were his proxies, and if they fought the Taliban, his Marines wouldn’t have to. Indeed, the turning point for the Marines at Dakota and across northern Marjah had been the day these men raised the Afghan flag over the abandoned compound. Hajji Gul Mala had cried when he saw Jimmy torn up by the bomb, and was so angered by the attack that he resolved that his men would never leave the Five Points village or let the Taliban return. Days after the bomb attack, Gul Mala opened a school just down the road for girls and boys, and in coming weeks he would help open three more. More important, he met with other elders and power brokers in surrounding areas and convinced them to work with the Marines and to encourage young men to join the new security force. Within three months of Jimmy’s death, more than two dozen local police stations like the one in Five Points would be established, pushing the Taliban into retreat. But the ISCI at Five Points had another problem, bigger than resupply: the homeowner wanted to move back in, which was actually a good sign: locals felt safe enough to return to the village. But they needed a new patrol base.

  “Where do you want to go?” Tom asked.

  A militiaman gestured across the street, to the building beyond the mosque.

  “Where Staff Sergeant was blown up?” Disbelief and anger tinged Tom’s voice, then gave way to resignation.

  “We’ll sweep it for you, but this is the last time,” he said. “You’ll have to have your guys guard it until you move in, because we’re not coming back to sweep it again.”

  And so, for the second time, Tom took his Marines to clear the compound. They zigzagged back an
d forth, sweeping mine detectors before them. Tick tock. The courtyard had sprouted knee-high weeds in the weeks since the Marines had last been there, but the Afghan flag still flew from the skinny flagpole on the roof.

  Tom kicked a piece of trash, then squatted and carefully brushed his gloved hand across a darkened swath of dirt. Nothing. He walked deeper into the courtyard, along the northern wall, then stopped, eyes fixed on the ground. He did not speak or move. He held his rifle absently at his side and stared at the shallow crater, the once loose dirt beaten flat by rain and hardened by sun. The hole seemed so small for the damage it had done. Birds flitted through the compound, a breeze swayed the little Afghan flag, and the mine detectors whined and chirped. Tom stared at the hole, and his heart drummed faster.

  “We’re good, Sergeant Whorl,” Ryan called out.

  Just like last time, the sweep had turned up nothing suspicious.

  “Okay,” Tom said. “Let’s go.”

  The patrol snaked back to Dakota through the poppy fields, past the men who might soon trade their sickles for rifles, maybe the same men who would detonate an enormous bomb under the truck behind Tom’s during a vehicle convoy from Dakota to Beatley, when Tom would again feel the sledgehammer blast wave as a giant fountain of dirt shot into the air. Fearing he’d just lost five men, he’d run to the truck, stuck in a deep crater, and find them bleeding, with battered brains and broken backs, but alive. He would dream about that moment often once he had returned to America—running up to the truck, smoking in the blast crater—but in the dream his men weren’t just injured. They were dead, in pieces.

  That was all to come. For now, he and his men walked home, sweat-soaked and tired and forever anxious. On the front of his body armor, clipped to an ammunition pouch, Tom wore a white button labeled FUN METER, with a black needle that could be moved between blue, yellow, and red: minimum fun, medium fun, maximum fun. His dad had sent it to him in a care package. If Tom was in a good mood, he’d slide the needle down into the blue; such was his sense of humor. Now the needle surged into the red: maximum fun.