Bring Out the Dog

by Will Mackin

  It was two and a half hours back to our compound in Virginia, which would’ve put us there around ten. Normally, at that hour, the parking lot would be empty. But it would be even more so at this time of year, under holiday routine, with both the SCIF and the armory closed. The only car that would be in the lot, then, was Jimmy’s jet-black 1972 Lincoln Continental—with its fastback, vinyl roof, and 460 V-8; with its peekaboo headlights and hood ornament like the crosshairs off a Soviet anti-aircraft gun. Jimmy had no wife, no kids, and no life outside our covert band of hooligans. Some said Jimmy owned a mansion out in Hilltop, with teakwood floors, granite countertops, and an infinity pool; but for all practical purposes, Jimmy lived on the compound, in a tin shack behind the dive locker, behind the paraloft, and behind the kill house where we practiced our assaults. I’d find Jimmy in that shack, on the couch, possibly hammered, watching TV.

  Jimmy loved this twenty-four-hour network that showed nothing but soaps, which, personally, I couldn’t abide. Watching the same two impossibly attractive people face off in the same dimly lit, overdecorated rooms, in order to hash out the same old ridiculous problems, day after day, seemed to me a waste of time. Honestly, I equated such behavior with weakness. But that was hard to reconcile in Jimmy’s case.

  The Battle of Koshwan Ghar had taken place at the top of an eleven-thousand-foot mountain, in two feet of snow, back when the war was young. A drone had recorded the action via its infrared camera, and I’d watched the playback many times over the years, either as part of the viewing audience during the official commemoration on the anniversary of the battle, or alone at my desk on any given morning.

  Hot is black in the video, and Jimmy’s thermal signature is the blackest thing onscreen. Blacker than the exposed slabs of granite that had spent all day absorbing the sun’s rays. Blacker than the muzzle flash of the Taliban’s PKM. And blacker than Jimmy’s pinned-down troopmates. Jimmy maneuvers under fire to take cover behind a petrified mulberry tree whose trunk immediately bursts into splinters. From there, Jimmy sprints toward the PKM itself, taking three spectacular strides before he gets hit in the leg, rolls in the snow, pops up, then proceeds to give the Taliban the good news. That was Jimmy’s term for it, anyway, repurposed from the gospel. I didn’t know if I’d ever find redemption, but watching that video of Jimmy on Koshwan Ghar seemed pretty damn close. And rewatching it every so often was my version of going to church.

  Highway 264 ended at a T-intersection with a blinking yellow light. I took a right, rolled downhill into Manns Harbor, then across a low, concrete bridge with rhythmic tar seams. The water on either side churned like Hokusai’s The Great Wave, with peaks rising over the bridge and halfway up the lampposts. Reed slept up front and Moby snored in back as we rolled off the bridge onto Bodie Island, where I took a left at a four-way intersection with a dark traffic light. The road would carry us north past Kill Devil Hills and the Wright Brothers’ monument, past the home of Grave Digger, the famous monster truck, and into Virginia. My plan was to drop Moby off at his shithole in Pungo, and Reed at his apartment in Princess Anne, before driving to the compound at Dam Neck. I’d park next to Jimmy’s magnificent Lincoln, then walk in the rain past the paraloft and the kill house to the dive locker. Golden light would shine out the seams of Jimmy’s tin shack, nestled in the sand dunes.

  Driving north through sea spray, past boarded-up strip malls and wobbly stop signs, I imagined the conversation that would take place between Jimmy and me.

  “Now, who’s this guy?” Jimmy would ask from the couch.

  I’d be standing on the rug by the TV. “Moby,” I’d say. “He’s from Team Four.”

  “And what’s his fuckin’ problem?”

  “He doesn’t have the aptitude to be a JTAC. I’m sure he’ll make a great assaulter, but…”

  “What do you know about being an assaulter?” Jimmy would ask, staring.

  The TV, on mute, would be showing a rerun of One Life to Live. Specifically, that epic scene where Real Bo returns from Parts Unknown to confront Fake Bo.

  “And why can’t Reed deploy?” Jimmy would ask.

  “He’s done, mentally,” I’d say. “Those cluster-bombed kids in Yemen really messed him up.”

  “And you’re still with One Troop?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I could talk to Hal. Bring you over.”

  Hal, the leader of One Troop, was another hero, with another story.

  “I’d rather not get in the middle of that,” I’d say.

  My attention returned to the road. Up ahead, I saw flashing lights. A little closer, cops appeared in shiny raincoats, sparking flares. A giant section of the road had been washed out by the storm. I turned around and went the other way, hoping to find a hotel.

  * * *

  —

  THE UNLIT SIGN out in front of the hotel read, WELCOME MAN WILL NEVER FLY. The parking lot was full of cars. Wind ripped off the ocean, around the building, and stung my face. Inside, the lobby was dark, the front desk vacant. There was no BE BACK SOON sign, no bell to ring.

  “Hello!” I yelled.

  “I’ll go find someone,” Moby said.

  As soon as he was gone, Reed said, “That guy’s a piece of work.”

  “Yup,” I said.

  The two of us dripped on the carpet.

  “I can’t do another deployment, man. I just can’t.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Maybe we can line something up at Dare for next week. Bring in some Strike Eagles from Andrews, some Harriers from Cherry Point. We could get Moby, like, a hundred controls in a day.”

  “It’s worth a try,” I said, knowing full well that nobody was going to sign up for anything this close to Christmas.

  Moby returned, followed by an old man in a tuxedo.

  “This guy’s Amish or something,” Moby said.

  The old man carried a tumbler of what looked like bourbon. He wore a small tux with a crooked bow tie. He smiled at us.

  “You got any rooms?” Reed asked.

  The old man shrugged. “I don’t work here,” he said.

  Moby reached over the front desk and picked up a phone. “Hello?” he said. “Anybody out there?”

  “So,” the old man said. “I hear you’re Marcinko’s boys.”

  Commander Richard Marcinko, U.S. Navy, retired, was the founder of our little top secret unit.

  “What’d you tell him?” Reed asked Moby.

  Behind the front desk now, Moby was flipping light switches, jiggling mice. “I told him the truth. Sue me,” Moby said.

  “My name’s John,” said the man in the tux. “I worked with Dick Marcinko back in sixty-eight, in Laos. He called me in on slopes humping the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and I dropped beehives on them from my F-4.”

  Beehives were, like, poison dart bombs. They were banned by the Geneva Convention.

  I pointed at John’s tux. “What’s the occasion?” I asked.

  “I’m president of the Man Will Never Fly society. All of us are what you’d call pilots, or former pilots. We get together every year, on the anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ imaginary achievement, to celebrate the myth of man-made flight.”

  “But you flew the F-4,” Reed said.

  “That’s what they tell me,” John said.

  “I used to fly Queers,” I said.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” John said.

  A hotel employee appeared, wearing a flowered vest that matched the lobby’s carpet. He was soaked. “We almost have the generator online, sir,” he said to John.

  “Wonderful,” John said. “How much longer?”

  “Just a few minutes.”

  John opened his arms wide and a little booze sloshed out of his glass. The way he closed his eyes and inhaled, I thought he was going to break into song. Instead, he asked, “Wou
ld you gentlemen do me the honor of joining us for dinner?”

  We followed John down an emergency-lit corridor toward the hotel ballroom.

  “What about hot air balloons?” Reed asked.

  “I believe in hot air,” John said.

  “And birds?” Moby asked.

  “Birds are not men.”

  John stopped us before a crack in an accordion partition, on the other side of which was the ballroom. Through the crack I could see candles burning. I could hear voices and laughter.

  “These people you’re about to meet,” John whispered. “They all look fine, but there’s something wrong with them. You could say I was put in charge to keep an eye on things.”

  John opened a wider space in the partition, waving Reed and Moby through. He touched a finger to my chest to stop me from following.

  “How long has it been since your last flight?” John whispered. His breath smelled like fuel.

  “Six years,” I said.

  “Have you had that dream yet where you’ve forgotten how to land?”

  “No,” I said.

  John looked toward the red exit sign at the far end of the hall. “Well, that’ll come,” he said.

  Inside the ballroom, dozens of well-dressed couples sat at however many candlelit tables. Tiny flames turned their faces orange.

  “What’s the good word?” a round-faced man shouted at John.

  “That knucklehead’s an astronaut,” John said to us, and everybody laughed.

  “Who are your friends?” asked a lady in a red dress.

  “Patience,” John said.

  The ocean sprayed against the picture windows that reflected the candlelit ballroom. We followed John to the center of the tables, where he stopped.

  “Comrades,” John said. “I was told, just a few minutes ago, that power would be restored in a few minutes. And…” He snapped his fingers. “Something else…”

  “Your friends!” said the lady in the red dress.

  “Of course,” John said. “How could I forget our honored guests, who believe in flying machines, but we won’t hold that against them.”

  “Bullshit!” the astronaut yelled.

  “Bullshit, indeed,” John said. “But they are otherwise fine, upstanding young men.”

  Waves crashed outside, threatening to shatter the picture windows. Reed, Moby, and I stood with our arms crossed in the dark.

  “You’ll see for yourselves in just a minute,” John said.

  We went through a number of howitzer liaisons before Levi. His predecessors, none of whose names I remember, were able to build artillery plans in support of our night raids. They were skilled enough to communicate these plans to the soldiers who would fire the howitzers. In fact, any one of them would’ve been perfectly fine as a liaison to a normal organization. But ours was not a normal organization. Sometimes what went on gave normal men pause. And if they paused, we’d send them back and demand a replacement. After a few rounds of this, the lieutenant in charge of the howitzer battery said, “Enough.”

  Which was understandable, but not acceptable. So, on our first night without a mission, Hal and I took a walk to the howitzer camp. We set out from the dog cages under a full moon, which seemed to cast X-rays rather than light. Thus, the dogs’ ribs were exposed, as was the darkness below the ice on our steep climb uphill. The steel barrels of the howitzer guns were visible as shadows, and the plywood door of the howitzer camp was illuminated as if it were bone. Hal knocked on the door with an ungloved fist.

  The lieutenant answered. “Hey, guys,” he said.

  Hal pushed past him into the empty room. “Get your men in here,” he said.

  The room filled with soldiers feigning indifference, but every one of them had ideas about the war. The variety of ideas among soldiers developed into a variety of ideas among units, which necessitated an operational priority scheme. As SEAL Team Six, we were at the top of that scheme. Our ideas about the war were the war. Therefore, we could knock on any unit’s door in the middle of the night, assemble the soldiers in a room, and tell them what was what.

  On this night, Hal told them that we needed a goddamn liaison. Then he scanned the room for one. Levi’s height—he was by far the tallest man there—made it easy for Hal to point and say, “How about you?”

  You put a normal man on the spot like that and he’ll get this look. Levi did not get that look. This may have been, at least partly, because Levi was Dutch, born and raised. Why he had joined the United States Army was anyone’s guess.

  “Yes,” Levi answered. “I am available. Howeffer, I have a pregnant wife in Texas, and in two weeks’ time I would like to go there for the burt of my son.”

  Hal, with his scar like a frown even when he was smiling, nodded my way. I nodded back.

  “We can work that out,” Hal said.

  * * *

  —

  LEVI BECAME OUR howitzer liaison. He moved into our compound and had his mail delivered to our tactical operations center. Every now and then, packages would arrive from his mother in Amsterdam. Inside the packages was a variety of Dutch candy.

  Levi opened these packages at his desk. He removed the ouwels and the stroopwafels and kept them for himself, but he always left the Kattekoppen in the box. Apparently, Levi had loved these candies as a kid, and his mother was under the impression that he still loved them. But he didn’t. He set the Kattekoppen on the shelf by the door, where we kept boxes of unwanted food.

  Perhaps “unwanted” is too strong a word. Better to say, maybe, that no one wanted that particular type of food at that particular time. Everyone knew, however, that a time would come, born of boredom, curiosity, or need, when we would want some Carb Boom, squirrel jerky, or a Clue bar. But until that time, the food sat on the shelf. And Kattekoppen sat longer than most.

  American licorice was red or black. It came in ropes or tubes. Kattekoppen were neither black nor red. They were brown cat heads with bewildered faces. They made me think of a bombing attack I’d been involved in, in Helmand, during a previous deployment. We’d dropped a five-hundred-pound laser-guided bomb with a delayed fuse on a group of men standing in a circle in a dusty field. The round hit at the center of the circle and buried itself, by design, before the fuse triggered the explosion. The blast killed the men instantly, crushing their hearts and bursting their lungs, then flung their bodies radially. The dead landed on their backs, and a wave of rock and dirt, loosed by the explosion, sailed over them. The dust, however, floated above.

  As we walked in from our covered positions, the dust descended slowly. By the time we reached the impact site, it had settled evenly on the dead, shrouding their open eyes and filling their open mouths. Those dusty faces, their uniform expressions of astonishment, were what I thought of when I saw Kattekoppen.

  Nevertheless, the day came when I pulled a Kattekoppen out of the bag and held it up.

  “How’s this taste?” I asked Levi.

  “Goot,” he said.

  I popped the cat head into my mouth and chewed, and I found that it did not taste goot. In fact, it tasted like ammonia. I ran outside and spat the chewed-up bits on the snow, but the bad taste remained. Thinking that snow might help, I ate some. When that failed, I chewed on some pine needles. But nothing worked.

  Others who tried Kattekoppen didn’t even make it outside. They simply spat their vociferous and obscene rejections right into the trash can next to Levi’s desk. If these rebukes of his childhood favorite bothered Levi, he never let on. He just sat in his little chair, which was actually a normal chair dwarfed by his abnormal size, and, with his wee M16 by his side, he drew circles.

  In a perfect world, there would be no circles. There would be two points, launch and impact, and between them a flawless arc. But in reality, our maps were best guesses, the winds erratic, and every howitzer barrel id
iosyncratically bent. Not to mention the imperfect men who operated the howitzers—those who lifted the shells into the breech, who loaded the charges, who programmed the fuses. These men were exhausted, lonesome, and fallible.

  Levi’s circles were graphic depictions of possible error. They described—given the dry weight of a shell and the power of its propellant charge—where the howitzer rounds might fall. He drew them around our most likely targets, and since everything was always subject to change, he did so in grease pencil on a laminated map. Every circle contained a potential target, along with a subset of Afghanistan proper, its wild dogs, hobbled goats, ruined castles, and winter stars.

  Before a mission, I’d study Levi’s map. I’d follow the chain of circles along our patrol route. Within those circles, I’d trace the map’s contour lines, to understand the rise and fall of the terrain. Thus I’d know fingers from draws, hills from craters. I could picture an attack in each place, the flashes of light, the rising columns of dust. Similarly, I’d study the stamps on the packages sent by Levi’s mother.

  These stamps paid tribute to the painter Brueghel. Each stamp focused on a particular detail within a particular painting. For example, the image on the stamp featuring Hunters in the Snow was of the hunters and their dogs returning from the hunt. Staggering through knee-deep drifts, they crested a hill that overlooked their tiny village.

  Returning from our manhunts through the snowy mountains west of Logar, I felt the weariness of Brueghel’s hunters. Cresting the hill that overlooked our frozen outpost, I saw their village. And, within its fortified boundaries, I watched men go about their daily tasks as if unaware of any higher purpose.