Howard, twenty-four, was a snowboard and motorcycle enthusiast from Washington State. He’d joined the Army in 2002 and had served another tour in Iraq. He had a wife named Amber and two sons named Caleb and Ryan. He was mathematically gifted and hoped to become a mechanical engineer after the Army.
Later, I was informed that Howard died of a sucking chest wound. Jimenez told me that after he exited the ditch, he knelt next to Howard and the medic and tried to ask Howard a question. Howard tried to respond to Jimenez, but no words came out of his mouth, only blood.
The medic managed to open Howard’s flak vest and unzip the blouse of his Army Combat Uniform. The only thing standing between the medic and Howard’s skin was a tan T-shirt. “I need a scissors. I need a scissors. I need a scissors,” the medic said.
I was acting, still, a player in a video game. “Who has a scissors?” I yelled to everyone in earshot. Specialist Tanya Vitacolonna, our only female gunner, was standing in the turret of her Humvee. She swiveled to face me.
“I have scissors, ma’am,” she said, reaching down to unclip them from her flak vest. She threw them to the medic and he started cutting off Howard’s T-shirt.
That’s when I thought: What the fuck are you doing? You’re the fucking convoy commander. Your job is to be on the radio. I ran back to my vehicle. Along the way, I surveyed the perimeter. I noted that there were holes in it. I ran up to one of my convoy’s Humvees. The gunner was still inside as ordered. “Move your vehicle over there and man the area between those two trees,” I said, pointing. I ran up to a second vehicle and a third vehicle and told the gunners inside where to move and what their field of fire should be.
Again, I’m not sure how much time had elapsed since the explosion. Looking back, I’m sure that it was no more than five to ten minutes, but at the time that was difficult to gauge. I thought that maybe someone had remotely detonated an improvised explosive device or that a soldier from Support Platoon had stepped on a pressure-triggered mine. I still hadn’t figured out that the foot I’d encountered was the foot of a suicide bomber.
I don’t know personal details about the man who killed our soldiers: his name, how old he was, where he lived, who his parents were, or what he did for a living. All I know is that he strapped on a suicide bomb vest and convinced two local girls to accompany him to the bridge site. He walked behind them, hunched over, trying to conceal himself.
In their sworn statements, several members of Support Platoon noted that they saw the girls standing beneath some trees. The soldiers didn’t think that was unusual; many children came to observe construction, bringing along animals and infant siblings. But that day, the area was noticeably devoid of children. Besides the two girls, no one had come to watch, and the soldiers did not see the man behind them.
But the girls suspected something, or maybe the suicide bomber gave them a warning. Either way, they suddenly ran, shrieking, into a scrubby field that, moments later, we would use as a landing zone for a medical evacuation helicopter.
In his sworn statement, Sergeant Chris Taylor wrote that he saw the two girls running into the field, and a man behind them, that he hadn’t noticed before, clearing the trees and entering the job site. It happened quickly. Sergeant Taylor raised his weapon, but before he could shoot he was knocked over by the blast.
After ensuring that the perimeter was secure, I threw open the door of my Humvee and grabbed the hand microphone. “Roughneck TOC, Roughneck TOC, this is Roughneck 3–6, over.” The company communications guy, Specialist James Bartron, responded.
“Roughneck 3–6, Roughneck 3–6, this is Roughneck TOC, over.”
“Roughneck TOC, we have two casualties at the bridge site.”
I could hear rustling in the background. I expected to hear the commander’s voice, but it was the voice of Lieutenant Grayson Pranin. I told Pranin the names of the two dead soldiers, one of whom was his platoon sergeant. I told him that Howard was possibly dead, too.
“What is the status of the rest of the platoon?” Pranin wanted to know.
I couldn’t tell him. I’d only encountered the bodies of Herrera, Clark, and Howard. I hadn’t seen anyone else. “I’ll find out,” I said.
I grabbed the notebook from my assault pack and ran back to the bridge. Staff Sergeant Jimenez was establishing a casualty collection point in an open field near the bridge. Soldiers from my convoy were transporting injured members of Support Platoon to the casualty collection point on stretchers or by fireman’s carry. Some of the injured were able to walk on their own. “Sergeant Howard just died,” someone informed me.
Every time I encountered an injured soldier, I wrote his name in my notebook and jotted notes next to it. After collecting data, I returned to the radio. “There are twelve injured,” I told Pranin. I told him their names and type of injury. I told him everything I knew.
“We’ve called in a helicopter,” Pranin said. He told me the estimated time of arrival. Then he asked me to switch to the helicopter’s radio frequency and give the soldiers on board a better description of what I was seeing.
After I spoke to the soldiers on the helicopter, I stepped away from the radio. One of my soldiers approached and handed me a purple smoke grenade. I carried it to Staff Sergeant Jimenez at the casualty collection point.
On the way to Jimenez, I passed the lieutenant from Arkansas. He was sitting cross-legged in the dirt, talking with someone on a radio. I’m not sure when he’d arrived. I also noticed that First Sergeant Meyer had shown up. First Sergeant Meyer stood solemnly over Sergeant First Class Herrera’s body, mouthing the words to a prayer and rendering a salute. The men had grown up together in the Army and had met one another as young privates.
Someone in the Tactical Operations Center told me that after I radioed in about the two casualties, the commander had dropped to his knees and began moaning. First Sergeant Meyer had run past the commander and outside, grabbed the nearest soldier and told him, “Take me to the bridge.”
The soldier and First Sergeant Meyer threw on their flak vests, jumped into the nearest Humvee, and raced downhill without the commander. They wound their way through the village, sped across the barren field, roared over the dry streambed, and reached the bridge site. This makes me believe that only a few minutes elapsed between the explosion and the time the helicopter arrived. However, it still felt like hours.
I reached Staff Sergeant Jimenez. He was standing at the casualty collection point surrounded by the injured. The bodies of Herrera, Clark, and Howard were nearby. Jimenez’s combat boots were covered in blood. I handed him the purple smoke grenade. “The helicopter will be here in a few minutes,” I told him. “They told me there are going to be two: one for the injured and one for the dead.”
“OK,” Jimenez said. He took the smoke grenade from my hands. I watched him pull the pin. Purple smoke swirled up and over the tree line, alerting the helicopter of our location.
Seven or eight minutes after Staff Sergeant Jimenez pulled the pin on the purple smoke grenade, the first helicopter arrived, picked up the injured soldiers, and took them to a hospital at Kandahar Airfield. Two or three minutes later, the second helicopter picked up Howard, Herrera, and Clark.
The helicopters lifted off with a roar of their blades, creating a cloud of dust. And then it was just members of my convoy, First Sergeant Meyer, the lieutenant from Arkansas, and the soldiers from Support Platoon who weren’t dead or injured.
First Sergeant Meyer gathered the soldiers who were not manning the perimeter around him. He was a grizzled man who harkened from a generation where women were a rarity in the armed forces and noncommissioned officers could physically abuse a private for not complying with orders. Some soldiers in 585th Engineer Company found him intimidating, unflinching, and archaic, but none of that seemed to matter now, in an open field by a bridge in eastern Afghanistan.
“You all did the best you could,” First Sergeant Meyer told us. “Now it’s time to go back to the COP. Everyone get inside
your vehicles. I’ll bring up the rear.”
We got back into our vehicles. I got on the radio and told the gunners to stay low in their turrets. We’d barely crossed the dry streambed when someone I didn’t recognize came on the radio. “Roughneck 3–6, Roughneck 3–6, this is Crazyhorse 18, over.”
“Crazyhorse 18, Crazyhorse 18, this is Roughneck 3–6, over.”
“Roughneck 3–6, would you like us to shadow your convoy, over?”
I turned to my driver for help. Sergeant Moreno was in his early thirties and had deployed multiple times.
“Who’s Crazyhorse 18?” I asked him. “And why are they shadowing us?”
“It’s an Apache helicopter,” Sergeant Moreno said. “They want to know if we want them to pull security for us while we convoy up the hill.”
The AH-64 Apache is an attack helicopter with a nose-mounted sensor for target acquisition and night vision systems. It’s armed with an M230 chain gun carried beneath the aircraft’s forward fuselage. It has four weapons systems, typically a mixture of AGM-114 Hellfire missiles and Hydra 70 rocket pods. I got back on the radio.
“Crazyhorse 18, this is Roughneck 3–6. That’s an affirmative. Please shadow us until we reach our COP.”
We headed uphill slowly, dismally, while the Apache helicopter hovered overhead, silhouetted against the mid-morning sun.
After their memorial ceremony, I kept on waiting to feel something, some validation that I was not a sociopath. It’s been seven years, and I still haven’t felt anything. And, in the first five years after the incident, I only told their story four times.
The first time I told their story was in a sworn statement on the day it happened.
The second time was in an e-mail to my father. It was a few days after the incident. I wasn’t sure if he’d already heard the news through the Family Readiness Group, but I wanted him to hear it from me, also. In the future, when I was depressed, my father would sometimes mention their story and ask me if I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and I would tell him “No” or “Nothing’s changed.”
The third time was to Michael Oktavec in Bagram, Afghanistan. It was October 2007 and Michael was a man I’d loved a little at West Point. I hadn’t seen Michael since our graduation, and while I told Michael their story, I floated outside of myself, remembering a time at West Point when I’d sprained my ankle. Michael had told me to stay put that day, and he’d returned with ice cubes wrapped in paper napkins from the mess hall. And I recalled the feel of those napkins when they were applied to the place where it hurt.
The fourth time I told their story was to my sister in Old Town, San Diego. It was March 2008 and we were drinking tequila at El Agave on San Diego Avenue, and I only told her because I was drunk. I was so drunk I barely remember her reaction. After El Agave, the two of us walked to our car, rolled open the windows, and sprawled across the seats. And we slept until we were sober.
Sometimes, I tell myself that my feelings are simply dormant. They’ll surface when I’m thirty-seven or fifty-two or eighty-six. They’ll surface, and they’ll debilitate me, but it will be okay, because then at least I’ll know I’m not defective.
Other times, I resign myself to the idea that they don’t exist. Because I remember moments before I went to Afghanistan when I felt no emotion, or was unable to express the emotion I felt.
Maybe it’s genetic; even from a young age, I was less emotionally expressive than my sisters. The human narrative inherent in playing house and dolls bored me. I preferred riding my bike and climbing trees.
Maybe it’s environmental. I come from a family of seven. It was imperative to differentiate myself, to have an identity. My identity was the Tough One and I demonstrated it repeatedly, like the time in elementary school when my younger sister and I crashed our bikes. My abrasion was large and littered with gravel. Hers was only a scratch. I still recall her sitting in the bathtub, screaming, as my mother ran the faucet. My leg hurt, but I told myself I wouldn’t cry. I had to be the Tough One. So I didn’t.
And I won’t.
Emotions aside, the incident did leave me with a strong conviction. Afterward, I told my dad that I didn’t believe in freak accidents anymore. “When it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go,” I told him.
I came to this conviction after analyzing every moment between the explosion and when the helicopter arrived.
Even though there was chaos at the job site, I had also detected a strange calm. I had the distinct impression that the dead were looking down at us, calmly surveying the scene, and that they were enlightened.
They were not like us anymore, who, at the time, were caught up in the moment and seeing everything in tunnel vision. They could see the big picture about everything—about racism, sexism, classism, war, and all the other issues affecting society. Everything they had been ignorant about was clear. Death did not equate to hell and punishment. Rather, it was an experience of love, forgiveness, and enlightenment.
After detecting this strange calm at the job site, I realized I wasn’t scared to die anymore, because nothing about the experience seemed terrible to me. Though I wasn’t scared to die, I wanted to believe that death was not in my near future, for I felt that I still had things to accomplish: words to write, issues to be an activist about, and children to raise. But I understood that Herrera, Howard, and Clark must have felt that they still had things left to accomplish, too. For this reason, I came to believe that whether or not I lived was not my prerogative, but the prerogative of something bigger than me. My time to die would come when my purpose had been served, whether or not I knew it had been served.
Thus my conviction: there are no freak accidents.
I’m sure that most would argue that this conviction was the stress response of a young lieutenant. A young lieutenant trying to make sense of the horror she saw in Afghanistan and not wanting to comprehend that this horror could just as easily have befallen her. I’ve analyzed the merits of my conviction and I understand that my reasons for believing it are based on my feelings, intuition, and personal experience rather than scientific evidence.
Scientific evidence notwithstanding, I still hold the conviction today.
Teresa Fazio
(1980–)
U.S. Marine Corps
Teresa Fazio, a Marine Corps lieutenant from 2002 to 2006, deployed once to Iraq. Her writing has been published in the New York Times, Task and Purpose, Vassar Quarterly, Penthouse, and Consequence Magazine. Her awards include Consequence Magazine’s 2015 Fiction Prize and Words After War’s 2015 Submission Contest, and her manuscript Unbecoming was a finalist in the 2015 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Contest. She was in residency at Yaddo in spring 2015 and is a current MFA student in the Bennington Writing Seminars. She works in technology commercialization and splits her time between Boston and New York. The following is an original essay submitted for inclusion in this collection.
Brothers
Camp Taqaddum, Iraq, 2004
July Fourth weekend, after the Iraqis assumed their own government, everything went to shit. The heat topped 130. Mortars sliced sky, and explosions dug out buried cable. Then our giant switchboard went tits-up. Half my responsibility was that giant switchboard; the other half was repairing the fiber optic network that kept getting cut. Forget any holiday fireworks; I wanted to go home.
We were soft, according to Marine standards. We had flush toilets in trailers on this base; there were even showers. Fourth of July, we could even take two near-beers from the chow hall, though they were no replacement for a real buzz, which I wanted badly. While Marines fought and died outside the wire, my platoon only had to get the connectivity situation straightened out—and even that, as their platoon commander, I was fucking up.
My staff sergeant wanted the cables run one way. My operations officer, who supervised us both, wanted something different. Both were older than me, and opinionated. Instead of brokering real peace between them, I told them both yes to please them. Unt
il my lack of decisiveness, my eagerness to please, squeezed me out of decision making altogether. They wound up arguing with each other; nothing I said pacified them.
I was not particularly assertive, a twenty-three-year-old devil pup nine years before Lean In. I stepped out of network-planning conflicts and accommodated the wishes of other officers around me, “going along to get along.” They’d been at this war thing longer than I had. The approval I enjoyed for “being a good listener,” plus the ease of not having to think too hard, was addictive. I consciously traded what little power I had in order to seem more likable. Of this I felt ashamed, but it made my life easier.
I masked my shame with furious overwork. Workaholism was part of my armor; the reaction came up with a metallic shink, like my brothers’ comic-book superheroes, or the football helmets we’d donned at the Basic School before battering each other with pugil sticks. The tactic won me increased approval. When something exploded, we kept our heads down, counted each other quick. If nothing exploded, we just worked harder ’til something did. My little legs churned as I trotted across our gravel compound, giving the company commander our reports. I could be a cartoon scampering across a lunchbox; I looked like Harry Potter in camo.
Fixing our broken gear took two full days that early July. Hashimoto, my sole switchboard tech, tried not to drip sweat into the fragile electronic cards he soldered together. In the maintenance bay, more Marines spliced fiber optic cable cut by mortars. The staff sergeant and I swigged near-beers on the steps of a trailer, waiting for a borrowed forklift that arrived at two in the morning. We jury-rigged everything: the switchboard, the sand-clogged generators, the broken air conditioners. Eventually the Marines got the telephone and data networks back up.
We all needed a break from the stress of decisions and electrons and photons that refused to go through. So, in true Marine fashion, we held classes in beating the crap out of each other. Martial arts helped the troops’ scores for promotion. And stuck on a base, unable to shoot back against mortars, we needed to do something warlike in order to feel like real Marines.
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