Brown had the company radio. He knelt down next to Gutierrez, feeling like a kid making a confession as the corporal called in.
Neither Gimme—Private James Reston—nor Jobbers—Private Dante Wood—said anything to Brown when they saw him. In their eyes, Brown had screwed up big time. Not only had he failed to see the Taliban soldiers as they walked past him, but he’d then alerted them to the fact that the Americans were nearby. Brown knew what they were thinking: if he was going to miss seeing them, he could have at least waited until they cleared the curve where Gimme was; at that point, both could easily have been killed or, better, taken prisoner. There was also the fact that the two might very well have been scouts for a larger unit, following behind.
Standing up was dumb, but it could easily have happened to anyone; it was impossible to be GI Joe Perfect in the Afghan hills, especially at the tail end of a long, mostly boring operation. But Brown had already developed a reputation as a screwup. Everything he did was viewed through that prism.
Corporal Gutierrez didn’t say much of anything about it. He never did.
“Floater’ll pick us up in four hours up the road,” he told the others, referring to the helicopter that had dropped them off two nights before. “Let’s get up there.”
• • •
There were some snickers back at the camp. Brown pretended not to hear. When that didn’t work, he pretended he didn’t care. But each glance, each whisper out of earshot, killed him inside.
Being a screwup was new to him. He’d been a good soldier—a great soldier—from the day he’d reported to basic training. Brown had aced every class he’d been in. He’d scored a perfect 100 in every section of the APFT, the Army’s physical fitness test. He had a nine-minute time in the two-mile run, a phenomenal showing even if he hadn’t been six foot four and pushing 180. In his brief career prior to Afghanistan he’d received glowing reviews and the highest possible ratings from everyone in a position to pass judgment on him, formally and informally. He was, on paper, a perfect soldier.
But in the field he just seemed to fall apart. It was always something different. One day he couldn’t focus. Another day his finger froze when he needed to pull the trigger. His eyes went fuzzy. He found it hard to breathe. He dropped stuff he needed to carry. A thousand little things multiplied into an avalanche of trouble.
Brown didn’t want to feel sorry for himself, but he did. A couple of times he tried talking about what was going on with Corporal Gutierrez. Gutierrez was old for a corporal—he’d enlisted when he was nearly twenty-eight—and by reputation was the best fire-team leader in the company. He tried to be encouraging—Brown could see him straining sometimes to find kind words—but that just made it all harder to accept.
Brown finished eating and headed out of the mess. He figured he’d catch up on his sleep. Corporal Gutierrez was just coming in to get something to eat. Brown felt as if he should say something, but didn’t have any words. Gutierrez nodded at him as he passed by, his face calm and stoic. Brown could tell that he meant it to be reassuring, but it only made him feel worse. For the first time since he was maybe seven or eight, he could feel tears starting to well behind his eyes.
I’m not a screwup, he thought to himself as he trudged back to his barracks, but the fact that he had to say it argued directly against its truthfulness.
He bit his lip, trying to pull himself together. Mostly, he was just tired, he thought; a tired guy feeling sorry for himself. If he could get some sleep—real, uninterrupted sleep, days, not hours—he’d be better, back on top.
He’d be lucky to get a few hours of sleep, let alone days, but the idea that it was all he needed gave him a little hope. He was feeling somewhat better when he sat down on his bunk and started to pull off his boots. It wasn’t until then that he noticed the package.
“Gotta be a mistake,” he muttered to himself—nobody sent him packages. But the name was the biggest thing on the label: PVT. MICHAEL C. BROWN. It even had the C for Constantopoulos, his father’s best friend’s name when he was born, a name he’d never used.
The package had come through an APO box service that the company commander had set up. It was wrapped extra tight in tape, and Brownie had to use his combat knife to get it open. He couldn’t imagine who would have sent it. He was even more surprised when he tore open the yellow mailing envelope it was packed in and discovered a small iPod Shuffle, complete with earphones and a USB charger.
“Who the hell sent this?” he said aloud, holding the player up. “Jeez.”
There was no return address on the padded envelope; Brown figured that it had probably been inspected somewhere and the original envelope had been battered and then replaced. The only paperwork related to the service company, not the sender.
Suspicious, he flicked the little switch at the side. The light came on green. It was fully charged.
Brown stuck the earphones in, then pressed the button. “Looks That Kill,” by Motley Crüe, blasted into his eardrums.
Brown had never been much for heavy metal or hard rock, especially older groups and songs. But he liked the beat, and the edge. Megadeth’s “Sleepwalker” played next. Brown was hooked.
Three days later, the company was assigned to backstop a task force operation on the border. The helicopters picked them up at 0200, the big rotors clubbing the dark sky. Brown had his iPod with him, but he kept it in his pocket through the flight, staring at the floor of the chopper as it skipped over the mountainous terrain. There was no moon that night, and when the team landed, Brown thought he’d been deposited in a mine shaft. Even the night scope on his rifle seemed to have trouble with the dark, as if the mountains were sucking in every bit of energy around them.
The team moved along a narrow trail built along the steep edge of the mountain cliffs. Brown walked behind Corporal Gutierrez, struggling at times to keep up, even though Gutierrez was nearly a foot shorter than he was.
“We’ll have some breakfast,” said the corporal after they’d been walking for nearly three hours.
They sat down in the rocks. Jobbers and Gimme joked about some girl they’d seen on the Internet who posted pictures of herself half nude. She had to weigh two hundred pounds, and she called her blog “Notes from the Nude Porker.”
When Brown laughed, the other soldiers didn’t seem to notice. He took the hint that they didn’t really want him in the conversation, and got out his iPod.
Gutierrez reached over and stopped him.
“Just make sure you can hear what’s going on, right?” said Gutierrez.
“Yes, Corporal, I will.”
“Good.”
When the sun rose they were working their way across a scramble of rocks that had taken out nearly two hundred yards of the road. Gimme said it had to have been done by B-52s, claiming the big planes had dropped tons of ordnance here during the early stages of the war.
Brown was too busy trying to keep his balance to figure out if that was true or not. He went down to all fours, but the rocks shifted so badly that he felt as if he were swimming. By the time he reached solid ground, he was soaked with so much sweat that he wouldn’t have been surprised if it had gone all the way through his body armor.
The iPod had turned off. He reached down and clicked on the button as he straightened himself out. A new song came on, something he didn’t remember hearing.
It was a punk-rock tune, something similar to what The Clash had played during the late seventies and early eighties, though the band wasn’t The Clash. He reached into his pocket and put his thumb and forefinger on the player’s anodized aluminum shell, as if touching the device might explain who was singing.
When he looked up, he saw two figures moving across the rocks in the distance, trying to hide in the shadows.
“I got two men across from me, on the side of the valley,” he said over the team radio. He raised his rifle. Then, realizing he hadn’t been spotted, he flattened himself against the ground, watching the men walk cautiously across
the slope. Both had AK-47s; one had an RPG slung across his back.
The RPG—rocket-propelled grenade—left no doubt that these were Taliban soldiers.
Gutierrez tried to maneuver the team into position to capture the two guerrillas, but they spotted Gimme as he started down the slope. The Taliban guerrillas weren’t nearly as brave as those the team had seen the other day—rather than fighting, they started to run back in the direction they had come. Gutierrez jumped up and shouted at them to stop and drop their weapons, first in Pashto and then Arabic. But seeing him blocking their way, they squared to fire. Jobbers cut both of them down.
The intelligence that had led to the sweep proved to be a bust, and the fire team’s encounter turned out to be the only one of the whole operation. The dead men didn’t have any papers and were poorly equipped, but one of the intelligence officers had made a fuss, praising the team for locating the enemy in the jumbled terrain.
Brown felt good about it. For the first time, he hadn’t been a screwup on patrol. Gimme and Jobbers didn’t ride him at dinner, and the next morning after PT, Corporal Gutierrez told him he’d done well.
“That’s the sort of attention you have to give,” Gutierrez told him. “Keep at it.”
It wasn’t much of a compliment, maybe, but Brown felt like he’d just won a Bronze Star. It seemed to him that his luck had changed for the better; he’d gotten the iPod, and now he’d stopped being a total screwup.
He still wasn’t sure where the iPod had come from. His mom knew nothing about it. His best theory was that it had come from his half brother Stephen, whom he very rarely saw. He’d lost Stephen’s e-mail address, so he had no way to thank him. Several times he thought he might try to find it by contacting someone else in the family, but either he got interrupted or just became shy, somehow unable to actually reach out.
A few days later, their platoon was assigned as part of a sweep through the hills to the south, traveling along a dirt trail that passed for a road here. Brown and the rest of the fire team secured the road leading into a small village as the company CO and two battalion officers met with the village “mayor.” The word aggrandized both his title and the settlement—there were only seventeen houses in the entire town, and the man they met with was simply the oldest resident. While they were Pashtun, the villagers seemed to have almost no connection with any of the other people in the province, regarding even their nearest neighbors with some distrust. The Americans, in their eyes, could just as well have stepped off a flying saucer.
Brown knew nothing of the subtleties the officers had to deal with as they tried to establish a connection with the village. His job was to provide protection, and if it wasn’t an easy job in the Afghan badlands, it was at least easy to summarize: watch everything, check everyone, trust no one.
The afternoon passed quietly. There was no traffic on the road, and the only person who came close enough to stop was a boy around ten years old, carrying clay bricks he’d gathered from the ruins of a building about a mile and a half away. The bricks were a daub brown, each about eight inches long and three high—heavy for a child, Brown thought, especially a skinny one. But the kid didn’t seem to think he was doing anything out of the ordinary. He smiled when they stopped him, let them see everything he had in the bucket, and gratefully took a candy bar as a reward.
They were about halfway back to camp when the first shot rang out, a sniper’s bullet that dinged off the Hummer at the lead of the column. In less than a minute, the Americans were involved in a full-blown firefight with half-a-dozen Taliban fighters. Helicopter gunships and reinforcements were routed to assist as the unit maneuvered to pin down the would-be ambushers and capture them in their own trap. Brown and the rest of the fire team were sent eastward, part of the anvil that the commander hoped to smash the rebels against. They dismounted from their Humvee a few hundred yards from a narrow pass through the far side of the hill, squeezing up into the rocks.
Brown flattened himself against the side of the hill, worming into the loose rocks. The trail that led down from the western side of the hill was only fifty yards away. His breaths were hard and close together; he tried to slow his heart, knowing he had to relax if he was going to be any good.
The gunfire on the other side of the hill had sputtered out. The helicopters were circling the area in ever-widening circles, a sign that the rebels had somehow managed to slip away.
Suddenly Brown heard an odd sound behind him. He turned quickly, not knowing what to expect. There was nothing there. He turned back, spooked, off-balance.
Then he realized that it was music from the iPod headphones, which were dangling from his collar. He’d left the player on as he scrambled from the Humvee.
He reached down to turn the music off, feeling for the player clipped to the side of his pocket while keeping his eyes on the trail. He couldn’t find it. Finally, he had to look down.
A new song came on, different from the Megadeth tune that had just been playing. It had a rockabilly beat, 1950s’ revival style. Brown held his thumb over the arrow button, listening for a few bars.
A low mumble behind the slope brought his attention back to the trail.
Quickly, he got his hand back on his M4. Seconds later, one of the rebels appeared, trudging down the hill. He had his AK in his hands. Blood dripped down his arm from a wound near the top of his shoulder, and he moved drunkenly, exhausted by the battle and the blood he’d lost.
Brown glanced to his left. A few yards farther uphill, Corporal Gutierrez had his hand up, indicating that he should wait to fire. There were more men coming.
He aimed his gun and squeezed the breath from his lungs gently, trying not to make a sound. Three more Taliban soldiers appeared, two carrying the third between them.
“Darawem!” yelled Gutierrez, ordering them to stop in Pashto. He jumped up. Brown did so too, pointing his gun at the man who had come down ahead of the others.
“Stop! Stop!” yelled Gutierrez, using phrases he’d memorized. “Give up! You are my prisoners!”
The two soldiers with their wounded comrade took a few steps backward, then dropped the man and began retreating up the hill. Corporal Gutierrez fired two short bursts. His bullets struck both men in the back, but neither went down.
The man opposite Brown hesitated. A million thoughts and emotions flew through Brown’s head—panic, fear, hate, confidence, anger, all speeding through in an adrenaline-filled rush. They went so quickly that they were impossible to separate or distinguish.
If the Taliban soldier had raised his rifle even an inch, Brown would have fired—he was ready, his finger heavy on the trigger. But the man dropped his gun.
Brown took a slow step forward. He tried desperately to remember the Pashto words he’d been taught to use to accept a surrender, but they wouldn’t come.
“Up,” he said in English. “Hands up. Up!”
The command was obvious enough. The rebel raised his arms.
Gimme ran out from behind the boulders farther down on the trail. Brown kept his gun aimed point-blank at the enemy’s chest.
“Good, good, good!” yelled Gimme. Then he switched to Pashto, telling the rebel to get down on the ground, away from his gun. The man started to kneel, then collapsed.
“Watch him,” said Gimme, running past to cover Corporal Gutierrez and Jobbers, who’d gone after the other two Taliban.
Brown went over and kicked the rifle away. His heart pounded wildly. A rush of sweat poured through him, making him feel as if he were swimming.
He saw something moving on the trail out of the corner of his eye. The wounded man who’d been carried down the slope rolled over and started to rise. He had a grenade in his hand.
“Down! Down!” Brown yelled. But rather than take his own advice, he fired his M4, emptying the magazine into the man. Then he threw himself onto the rebel who had just surrendered.
The grenade exploded in the Taliban soldier’s hands. Brown felt a rush of hot air, incredibly hot air.
He couldn’t hear.
Brown pushed up, expecting to find that he was wounded, or maybe dead, that this was what it felt like to die. But as he got to his knees he realized that he was alive, and unwounded, covered with dust but fully intact. The rebel had fallen on his own grenade, crumpling under the weight of Brown’s bullets.
Gutierrez and the others ran down to him a few seconds later. The other two rebels had collapsed farther up the trail, mortally wounded.
“Brownie, you okay?” asked Gutierrez.
Brown held his hand to his ear. He could hear some of the words, but not very clearly.
“I—I kind of blew out my ears,” he said.
“Shit, man, you did good,” said Jobbers, pounding him on the shoulder.
“You’re really turning yourself around, soldier,” the company commander told Brown after they returned. “Good work.”
“Sir. Thank you, sir.”
Brown stood ramrod at attention, then saluted. He felt his cheeks buzzing red with embarrassment. The CO returned his salute, smiled just a bit, then walked away.
Jobbers and Gimme were nearby, snickering.
“Sir. Thank you, sir,” mocked Gimme.
“You turned yourself around,” said Jobbers, deepening his voice to mimic the CO’s.
“Sir. Thank you, sir,” said Gimme, raising his voice to a falsetto.
“Come on,” said Brown. “Cut it out.”
“You turned yourself around.” Jobbers stretched out the words. “Now you ain’t Taliban bait anymore.”
Brown laughed. Had they made fun of him a week before, he would have felt like retreating to his bunk. But now he didn’t care. If anything, their mocking meant he had turned himself around. He wasn’t a screwup any more.
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