A chunk of bone fell into his palm.
He worked his jaw, trying movement he had always taken for granted. His jaw did not seem attached. More blood sputtered out, mixing foam and meat with shards of teeth and bone. Kirby retched. Out dropped a larger chunk. It was a piece of his jaw, holding an intact tooth.
Kirby swore.
The dark puddle expanded beneath him. He knelt and felt an impulse to gather everything solid. This was his face, his mouth, his teeth—all glistening on the roof. He needed these for the doctor. He started pushing it all together, forming a small pile.
A frantic bustle surrounded him. Santos pressed close.
Kirby heard shouted orders, calls for help. Someone was talking about how to get him off the roof. A voice called for litter bearers.
Ordinarily when Marines were wounded, their treatment and evacuation would be Kirby’s job. But Kirby was detached. Details of his own case seemed merely overheard. He was transfixed, busy with other things. He picked through the puddle, collecting the pieces of his mouth. More fell out.
The company commander bounded up to the roof and stood beside him. He asked for all of Kirby’s serialized equipment. Kirby returned to the moment. He was astonished. These were not the words he expected to hear. This is what we talk about when a man gets shot?
He saw it as more fallout from the lost rifle.
He complied. Blood rushing from his face, he handed over his rifle, unfastened his lanyard, and turned over his pistol. He pointed to the pouch, now bloody, that held his night-vision goggles. He was insulted. He had lost nothing and right now did not want to talk about gear. Blood rolled down his chin.
He punched the pile of his own flesh, smashing his fist downward, striking knuckles into blood. A sergeant asked him to calm down.
Kirby took a few breaths, pushed himself away from the pile, stood, and faced the stairs. He started to walk. He met the litter-and-security team coming up with a stretcher. He walked past them under his own power.
Their faces told Kirby what he needed to know.
I look nasty.
This is bad.
People parted as he walked, clearing a path.
He stepped into the company office. A sergeant said a helicopter was on its way. Kirby took a seat on a case of water. He was hot, terribly hot. But it wasn’t a hot day. He thought he was supposed to feel cold as he lost blood. This fevered feeling surprised him. He unzipped the top of his flight suit and tied its sleeves in a knot around his waist. His T-shirt, from neck to navel, was a stripe of blood. Kirby wanted a mirror. He asked for one. No one seemed to understand.
Within minutes a helicopter landed on Chicago. Kirby refused a stretcher. He thought if he lay down he would choke on flaps of meat and blood. That’s not how he wanted to die.
He walked up the aircraft’s tail ramp, sat down, and held on.
A procession of Marines had followed him, and stopped near the helicopter, in silent awe. That man walked out after being shot in the face, Santos thought.
Rushing air blew over Kirby as the aircraft took to flight. It felt good, a relief from the strange fever.
Kirby knew he had little time. The trip to the surgical team at Al Taqaddum Air Base was short, but while en route there was no way to apply a tourniquet, and the bleeding from the tearing was too extensive and too hard to reach to be stemmed with pressure bandages. He needed surgery fast.
A corpsman on board the aircraft stood above him, but the two men could not talk, and Kirby insisted on sitting upright. He’s waiting for me to pass out, Kirby thought.
He held a bandage to his face, feeling the minutes ticking by, evaluating the patient he had become. The fact that nobody would let him see himself told him he looked worse than he guessed. His wounds were still bleeding heavily. The volume stained his chest and lap. He could feel it on him, warm and sticky, down his neck, under his shirt, between his thighs. He looked at his flak jacket. The groin protector—the Kevlar flap that covered his genitals, where he had rested Smith’s head in October—was solid red. Blood filled Kirby’s mouth, demanding his attention, forcing him to breathe through his nose. He could feel himself weakening, his consciousness ebbing, his sense of control fading even as he was carried closer to medical care.
His mind told him that the details added up to one thing: He was soon to die.
This is it, man, he thought. This is it.
He wondered if he could accept this. He was away from Weapons Company, away from friends to whom he was supposed to provide care. None of them would see him. He could let himself be human now, and be weak.
The aircraft cleared the blast walls at Al Taqaddum and set down beside the surgical center. This was where Kirby’s previous patients had gone, one of the entrances to the Anbar Province casualty pipeline. He’d made it this far and knew the routine. The hour ahead would determine whether his next stop was a larger hospital or the morgue. Litter bearers rushed to the aircraft’s tail ramp. Kirby waved them off. He would not lie down. He staggered off the aircraft and faced that look in everyone’s eyes again. People froze at the sight of him. He walked to the litter bearers’ vehicle and saw the crew had come out with a body bag. He sat beside it.
The vehicle lurched into gear and sped to the surgical center’s entrance, where he walked toward the first person he saw. People were scrambling around him.
“No, no, no!” he heard. “Not that way! Go there!” Someone pointed him to a gurney and nurses and doctors eased him down.
His anxiety was rising. He had to let go now and yield control to a surgical team. Their hands were on him.
He was a corpsman. He was trained for this situation, and these people were not doing it how he liked. He tried to speak. Y’all need to calm down a little bit, because you are starting to freak me out.
The words did not form.
The staff cut away his clothes and started an IV.
As if a switch had been tripped, Kirby’s pain began. He was lying on the gurney, sweaty, naked, exposed, in agony. His face felt as if it had been torn open and set afire. Someone said they had to remove his bracelet, a piece of braided parachute cord that he had worn for years. It was an amulet, his good-luck piece.
Kirby signaled that he would do it. But he had lost strength and dexterity. His fingers could not manipulate the loop. The man snipped it off with medical scissors.
Kirby snapped. He rolled toward the man and swung, trying to punch his face. It was pointless. Speed and power had left him, and he sensed himself lurching in a slow-motion roundhouse. He saw the staff close in, felt them holding him down. He pulled his hands back and covered up to defend himself, recoiling into an almost fetal pose. He noticed he was trembling uncontrollably. What the fuck’s going on?
“Hit him!” he heard. “Hit him!”
The world went black.
* * *
I. Al Imran 103: “And hold firmly to the rope of Allah all together and do not become divided. And remember the favor of Allah upon you—when you were enemies and He brought your hearts together and you became, by His favor, brothers. And you were on the edge of a pit of the Fire, and He saved you from it. Thus does Allah make clear to you His verses that you may be guided.” (Sahih International translation)
II. Although ceramic body-armor plates often prevent penetrative injuries from bullets, shrapnel, or other projectiles, survivors can still suffer organ damage or other severe wounds, a phenomenon known as behind-armor-blunt-trauma, or BABT.
III. Arabic-language video of the attack on the tank bore the logo of the Al-Furqan Foundation for Media Production, a propaganda wing of Sunni militants and terrorists in the area. The same organization would later become a primary producer of videos for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. This was consistent with events of which the Marines of Weapons Company were as yet unaware. While Weapons Company was strung along Route Chicago, Al Qaeda in Iraq rebranded itself as the Islamic State of Iraq. The company was among the first American units to engage with th
e Islamic State, in its early form.
With President George W. Bush’s second term ending and the Democratic nominee for president, Barack Obama, campaigning in part on pledges to commit more resources to defeating the Taliban, public attention was turning from Iraq back to Afghanistan. Bloodshed in Iraq was declining, the result of many factors, including the deployment of more American troops (a renewed effort nicknamed the “Surge”), large cash payments to insurgents to cease fighting, and demographic shifts as the country became more segregated between sects. The Pentagon, facing a skeptical public and a Congress that had long called for troop withdrawals, was forming plans to begin bringing home the more than 160,000 troops participating in the surge. The forces in Afghanistan, just over 30,000 troops in all, were much smaller, and faced seemingly intractable rural resistance and terrorists in cities. But resources and attention were shifting. American units were soon to rejoin the war in earnest.
EIGHT
* * *
* * *
“I’LL FLY AWAY”
Chief Warrant Officer Mike Slebodnik and the Air Cavalry in the Eastern Afghan Valleys
“Let’s go back in and see if we can draw fire.”
SEPTEMBER 9, 2008
Forward Operating Base Fenty, Jalalabad, Afghanistan
The joke was working. For days Chief Warrant Officer Sokol Cela was pondering whether he was in trouble. A Kiowa Warrior helicopter pilot, he had been home in the States for two weeks of leave when emails from Michael Slebodnik started landing in his in-box. Slebodnik was one of Cela’s bosses and the senior warrant officer in his air cavalry unit—Charlie Troop, Second Squadron of the Seventeenth Cavalry Regiment. He wanted to know when Cela would be back at Jalalabad Airfield, where both men were nearing the end of a one-year combat tour.
Cela was unnerved. Slebodnik was not one to waste time on unimportant details. Questions formed in his head. Why is Slebodnik asking? What did I do wrong?
The journey from the United States to Jalalabad was at least a five-day trip. It began with commercial bookings out of the States and shifted in the Middle East to flights on military aircraft, hopping from base to base as seats became available on aircraft making runs into Afghanistan. There the returning soldiers fanned out, each shuttling to smaller satellite bases as spare seats opened up. It was an unpredictable means of travel, an ever-changing air traffic lottery dependent upon weather, operational tempo, and luck, even in early September 2008, when the skies over Afghanistan were busier than ever with American helicopters.
As Cela got closer his anxiety grew. Each note from Slebodnik forced him to wonder: What does he want?
Finally Slebodnik told him: A journalist was writing an article about their troop, and Cela had been nominated to be profiled. They needed to get the interview done.
Cela was both relieved and annoyed. He liked Slebodnik. They were friends, and lived in neighboring rooms inside a B-hut, one of the eighteen-by-thirty-six-foot wooden shacks that dotted the base. But Cela was traveling, and tired, and did not want to deal with a reporter. He griped back on email. He just wanted to get back out on missions, he said.
The reply was terse: Well, you don’t have a choice.
Cela had spent a career in the Army and was used to its bullshit. But Slebodnik was not like this. Cela was confused. What’s going on here?
He made his arrangements for the last leg of his trip, not suspecting that his fellow pilots were setting him up.
* * *
American Special Forces and CIA teams had first arrived at the former Soviet air base in Jalalabad in 2001, chasing Osama bin Laden during the opening months of the war. Immediately afterward the Afghan countryside seemed quiet. But as years passed and the Pentagon focused much of its attention on Iraq, the Taliban reorganized and resurfaced, and Afghanistan’s new government and the United States struggled to counter its influence and spread. The Pentagon adjusted troop levels upward, to 25,000 by 2007, and the deserted airfield at Jalalabad resumed a level of activity not seen since Soviet forces had left. Renamed Forward Operating Base FentyI after an infantry officer killed in a CH-47 crash, it became a headquarters and hub for an expanding set of outposts in the mountains. Most of these posts, at the bottom of narrow canyons or built into the sides of steep-walled valleys, were isolated. Many were remote.
Slebodnik and his fellow Kiowa pilots landed in Jalalabad in early 2008 to run reconnaissance missions around the positions and cover patrols and convoys on the ground. They lived on the tarmac in a cluster of B-huts, each with eight single-occupant rooms furnished with a crude bunk and desk. Their rooms amounted to little more than sleeping cubicles with walls that stopped above head height, leaving airspace overhead.
It was here that some of the pilots’ practical jokes originated. Beneath their self-contained exteriors, many had long histories of flying combat missions in Iraq. They could feel taut and be jumpy. Sometimes they tossed laundry over the walls or playfully teased one another. In August, right before Cela departed on leave, he lobbed an empty water bottle over the wall into the room of another pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Jeremy Woehlert.
The bottle landed on Woehlert’s head.
The B-hut filled with Woehlert’s curses, and laughter from everyone else.
The plot to get even began immediately. Woehlert and Slebodnik conspired. Cela likes bottles? We can help him with that. They printed signs and posted them around the base. “RECYCLE,” they said.
CW2 CELA NEEDS EMPTY (CLEAN) WATER BOTTLES . . . HE DID NOT WANT TO SAY WHY, BUT HIS INSTRUCTIONS WERE TO SAVE AS MANY AS POSSIBLE WHILE HE IS ON LEAVE. PLEASE SAVE SOME IN BAGS AND THEN JUST DUMP THEM INTO HIS ROOM. HIS GOAL IS TO HAVE ENOUGH TO FILL HIS ROOM UP PRIOR TO HIS RETURN FROM LEAVE AROUND THE 6TH OF SEPTEMBER.
While Cela relaxed back in the States, soldiers from across Fenty filed to his B-hut with their empties. Some showed up with thirty-gallon garbage bags, stuffed. The plywood door to Cela’s room was padlocked, so the visitors swung their garbage bags over the wall and shook out their contents. Cela’s bed and desk were soon buried. By early September the walls of his room crested with bottles, a cache of trash seven feet deep.
When Cela landed at the airfield on September 9, Slebodnik was standing on the tarmac in a gray T-shirt and black shorts. He had just finished a workout. He didn’t usually meet pilots returning from leave. Cela asked if something was up.
“No, no,” Slebodnik said. “I was just coming back from chow and heard you were coming back.”
At their B-hut, another pilot was in the corridor. “How was leave?” he asked.
“It was good,” Cela said. “Got some recess.”
He tried sliding open his door. A strange weight shifted on the opposite side. A lone bottle fell to his feet with a plunk.
“Shit,” he said, perplexed.
He looked through the crack in the doorway. Before him was a wall of empty bottles, thousands in all, rising over his head.
“Oh, no!” he shouted. “No!”
He looked up, into his friends’ video cameras, fooled.
“You motherfuckers!” he shouted, and pulled back the door. An avalanche of bottles rumbled out.
Charlie Troop was feeling good, and so was Slebodnik. He grinned and waded through the mess. His time was almost up. He was due for his own family leave in a few days, and when he returned, Charlie Troop would have only weeks until the end of its tour. The soldiers would pass duties to fresh pilots and go home. With twenty-two years in the Army, Slebodnik might even retire.
* * *
Charlie Troop was part of the Pentagon’s belated effort to restore momentum to the Afghan war and help the post-Taliban government take control of its own land. Political discussion in the States had shifted with the presidential election campaign, in which Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, was pledging to draw down forces in Iraq, add combat brigades in Afghanistan, and make “the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be.”II The American
military was reorienting, and the political reemphasis was coinciding with the decline of bloodshed in Iraq during 2008. American officials attributed the drop to counterinsurgency tactics and the deployment of more troops, an offensive the Pentagon called the “Surge.” The reasons were more complicated than that, involving shifts where Sunni and Shiite populations chose to live, the sectarian victory of Shiite groups in Baghdad over their Sunni neighbors, an American special operations campaign that killed insurgents in raids, a timely cease-fire declared by a prominent Shiite cleric, and the practice of paying Sunni tribes, including some thick with militants, to align with the government and become the authorities over their own ground.
Whatever the relative weight of each factor, one result was beyond dispute: The pause in Iraq filled some of the American military’s leadership with confidence, no matter the grim situation evident all around. The Pentagon’s Afghan campaign had stalled, the Taliban was reestablished, and large swaths of the country had no government presence at all. The pivot to Afghanistan was nonetheless buoyed by institutional faith. Most of America’s general-officer class had little firsthand experience with small-unit warfare; they had served the early years of their careers after the Vietnam War. But the middle and lower ranks were an experienced force, populated by officers and noncommissioned officers seasoned in Iraq. Technically and tactically tested, with better equipment than the forces of 2001, they formed a class of professional fighters, men and women who had seen years of combat and were volunteering to go back. The Pentagon’s messaging was bold: We’re here now We know what we’re doing. And the Taliban will soon pay. Even the labels suggested an eagerness to meet the Taliban on its turf and roll it up. Charlie Troop flew under the call sign Close Combat, part of an air cavalry task force known as Out Front.
In early 2008, part of the troop settled into Jalalabad. The first Kiowas to deploy to Afghanistan since 2005, they took their place alongside CH-47 utility helicopters, Apache gunships, and Black Hawk troop transport and medevac birds, all under the command of another Kiowa pilot from Pennsylvania, Lieutenant Colonel John Lynch.
The Fighters Page 18