Bring Out the Dog

by Will Mackin

  * * *

  —

  AS THE TIME for Levi’s trip home approached, the howitzer lieutenant correctly predicted that, rather than work anything out, we’d simply take another of his men to cover Levi’s absence. He raised the impending issue with his headquarters. He did so via an email to the command sergeant major, requesting an increase in manpower to cover our requirement for a liaison. The lieutenant forwarded us the sergeant major’s response, in which the sergeant major said that the only fucking way he’d even consider this horseshit request was if we provided him with written justification ASAP.

  The chances of our providing justification, written or otherwise, to anyone, for anything, were zero. So the night before Levi went home, Hal and I paid another visit to the howitzer camp. That night, a blizzard clobbered Logar. I met Hal by the dog cages, as usual. The heavy snowfall had caused us to cancel that night’s mission, and the dogs, who on off nights normally hurled themselves at the chain link, setting off the entire dog population of Logar, were still. Likewise, Hal was not himself. He shivered, and his scar was barely visible. When we reached the door of the howitzer camp, he had to knock twice.

  The lieutenant answered. “Hey, guys. I’m really sorry about all this,” he said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Hal said. He poked his head in and saw a fat kid playing mah-jongg on a computer. “We’ll take him.”

  “Uh, okay,” the lieutenant said. “But the sergeant major’s going to be pissed.”

  “Not my problem,” Hal said.

  Hal returned to the compound to sleep, and I waited outside until the kid pushed through the door with a variety of coffee mugs carabinered to the webbing of his ruck. “Ready!” he announced. And, with his headlamp on its brightest setting, we set off down the steep, icy road.

  Falling snow converged to a vanishing point in the beam of the kid’s headlamp. When he fell behind, I could almost reach out and touch this point. But then he’d trot up alongside me, mugs clattering, and it would recede. On one such occasion, he presented me with a handful of bullets.

  “Can I trade these in for hollow-point?” he asked. “I heard you guys roll with hollow-point. I also heard you guys muj up, in turbans and man jammies and shit, with MP5s tucked up in there. Like, ka-chow! That must be wicked!”

  The kid fell behind, caught his breath, and trotted up beside me again.

  “Can I get an MP5?” he asked.

  I ushered the kid to the TOC and showed him Levi’s computer. After booting up mah-jongg, he was quiet.

  My next task was to put Levi on the rotator at dawn. The rotator was a cargo helicopter that ran a clockwise route around the AOR every morning. From our outpost, it would fly to Bagram, where Levi could catch a transport home. With daybreak less than an hour away, I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat back to watch the drone feed.

  The drone was on the wrong side of the storm that sat over Logar, and its camera, which normally looked down on our targets, was searching a dark wall of cumulonimbus for a hole. Not finding one, it punched into the thick of the storm. For a moment, it seemed like it would be okay; then ice piled onto its wings as if a bricklayer had thrown it on with a trowel, and the drone hurtled toward earth. I wrote down its grid, because if it crashed we’d have to go out and fetch its brain. But as the drone fell into warmer air, the ice peeled away, and when it leveled off, its camera remained facing aft. I watched the drone pull a thread of the storm into clear morning air. By the time I heard the rotator’s approach, the storm had passed.

  Outside, covering everything, was a pristine layer of snow, which dawn had turned pink. I started the pink HiLux. I honked the horn, and it made a pink noise. Levi emerged from his pink tent with his pink ruck. I drove him down a pink road to the pink LZ. The rotator came in sideways, and its thumping rotors kicked up a thick pink cloud. Crouching, Levi and I ran through the cloud to a spot alongside the warm machine. A crewman opened the side door and handed me the mail, which included a package from Levi’s mother. Then Levi hopped aboard and was on his way home.

  The sun rose as I drove back to the TOC, and the whole outpost sparkled at the edge of the war. The stamps on the package from Levi’s mother featured Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. The detail chosen was Icarus drowning. His legs kicked above the surface. The water looked cold and dark. What was not shown in the stamp was how the world went on without him.

  The new liaison was asleep in Levi’s chair when I got back. I opened the package quietly, so as not to wake him. More Kattekoppen. I put it on the shelf with the rest and was about to go to bed when the phones started ringing.

  Two soldiers on their way home from a bazaar south of Kabul had taken a wrong turn. They’d hit a dead end and been ambushed. Bloody drag marks led from the scene, which was littered with M9 and AK brass. Witnesses said that the soldiers had been taken alive, which meant a rescue operation, led by us. We received pictures of the soldiers from a search-and-rescue database. One soldier had a chin and the other did not. The TOC filled with CIA, FBI, and ODA. Then a massive helicopter slung in the missing soldiers’ ruined truck. Its windows had been shot through, and bullet holes riddled the skin. We opened the doors to find the smell of the missing soldiers still inside, along with the stuff they’d bought at the bazaar, intact in a flimsy blue bag.

  The drag marks at the scene led to a tree line. The tree line opened onto a number of compounds, which we raided that night. Those compounds led to other compounds, which we raided the next day. The second set of compounds led to a village, which, overnight, we cleared. That delivered us to a mountain. It took two nights and a day to clear all the caves up one side and down the other. Which led us to another village. And so on.

  Time became lines on a map leading in all directions from Chin and No Chin’s ambush. Space existed only between those lines. We searched for the missing men night and day.

  One night, west of Sangar, as we trudged through snow with the wind in our faces, an air-raid siren blasted, and a small village appeared in an explosion of light. The village, just beyond a tree line, seemed so peaceful as to mock me. Like, what are you afraid of, this stone wall? That donkey cart? Or was it the siren whose noise filled my lungs and poured out my open mouth? I radioed the howitzers for a fire mission.

  “Send it,” they replied.

  I had coordinates for the village, and had I obeyed my instincts I would’ve transmitted them and brought heavy shells whistling down, but the leaves in the trees before me shone like silver dollars in the wind. And kids, awakened by the ruckus, quit their beds to run out under the streetlights. Women chased after those kids, leaving barefoot tracks in the snow. Had the women worn shoes I might’ve thought that the whole thing—village/light/siren—was a trick designed to set us up for an ambush, and I might’ve said “They’re wearing shoes” over the radio, so that future patrols might know what to look for. But the women ran smiling and barefoot after their giggling kids. And men, appearing on their roofs, opened their arms to one another and shouted over the siren’s blare: Isn’t this something!

  This, we later learned, was the unexpected restoration of power after months without—the opposite of a rolling blackout. The resulting commotion continued until one light went out, then another. Until the women had chased the kids inside and the men had waved goodbye. Until all the lights were out. Then someone shut down the air-raid siren, and its blare died to a whistle, and the whistle died to a tumble of bearings. After which all was dark and quiet.

  “Send your fire mission,” the howitzers repeated.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  IF WE’D BEEN asked how long we’d go on searching, our answer would have been: as long as it takes. Think of the families back home. Baby Chin. Mother No Chin. But in truth there were limits, and we had methods for determining them. From the streaks of blood found in the drag marks, we asc
ertained wounds. From the wounds, we developed timelines. And we presented these timelines on a chart, which read from top to bottom, best case to worst. By the time that village lit up beside us, we were at the bottom of the chart. The next night, we started looking for graves.

  There was no time to sleep. My fingernails stopped growing. My beard turned white. Cold felt hot, and hot felt cold. And, soon enough, I began to hallucinate. One night, as we approached a well, I watched Chin jump out and run away, laughing. Another night, I saw No Chin ride bare-ass up a moonbeam.

  Meanwhile, the Mah-Jongg Kid had proved himself worthy by having the howitzers fully prepped for that pop-up non-ambush, and for every close call since. At first, I preferred Levi’s circles to M.J.’s hyperbolas, which opened onto an infinity that no howitzer could possibly reach. But then, as the search for our missing comrades wore on, producing only dry holes and dead ends, the idea of thrusting death somewhere beyond the finite gained a sort of appeal.

  We were down to almost nothing on the unwanted-food shelf. Only Kattekoppen and some kind of macaroni that required assembly were left by the time we found No Chin’s body in a ditch outside Maidan Shar.

  No Chin had a note in his pocket indicating the whereabouts of Chin. We would find Chin, it said, buried under a tree by a wall. We hiked to trees without walls, walls without trees, graveless walls, and treeless graves, until finally, by a process of elimination, we stumbled on the right combination and dug.

  Under a thin layer of dirt was a wooden box. Crammed inside the box was Chin. His last name was embroidered on his uniform, for all to read. But no one read it aloud. Because to do so, it seemed, would’ve reduced the whole thing to a name. As if we wouldn’t have given our lives for a man whom none of us had known. One we hadn’t expected to find alive, yet we’d all hoped to find alive. And we were sorry to see him go.

  Prior to the mission, I’d filled my pockets with Kattekoppen, which came in handy, because Chin had been dead for a while. Long enough to leave him covered with malodorous slime. The smell only got worse as our medics lifted Chin out of the box and slid him into a bag. Lex, Tull, and Hugs gagged. Hal, of all people, let loose a slender arc of bile. But I popped a steady supply of Kattekoppen, which kept the stink at bay.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, when the rotator arrived, we slid Chin in one door and Levi hopped out the other.

  The snow had melted and the sun shone down on a muddy world. It promised to be a bright, warm day. Levi and I got into the HiLux, and on the ride away from the LZ, I congratulated him and asked how it felt to be a father.

  “It is strange,” Levi said. “I have never much worried, but sefferal times a night now I wake up afraid the boy is dead. And I sneak into his room and, like this”—he wet an index finger and held it under his nose—“I check his breeding.”

  “And he’s okay?” I said.

  Levi sat hunched over, with his knees above the dash. “Yes,” he said.

  I looked out the windshield at the war, which, stamp-wise, could’ve been a scene from Brueghel’s Triumph of Death—one that, without a skeleton playing the hurdy-gurdy, or a wagon full of skulls, or a dark iron bell, still raised the question of salvation. At the smoldering trash pit, I turned right, onto the road that ended at the artillery range.

  “We will make a fire mission?” Levi asked.

  “Correct,” I said.

  Excited, Levi got out the big green radio and started messing with freqs. I parked at the edge of the range, where the ashen hulks of what might once have been tanks had been bulldozed into a pile. Presumably, the same dozer that had cleared these wrecks had also scraped the giant concentric rings in the field of mud before us. Way out on top of the bull’s-eye was our target, Chin and No Chin’s truck, right where I’d asked for it to be slung.

  Hal and I had met at the dog cages the night before to discuss the rise of M.J., and whether or not Levi still had a place with us. While the dogs had rolled around, we’d devised this test.

  I sat on the hood of the HiLux as Levi shot a bearing to the target with his compass and gauged the winds by the smoke blowing off the trash pit. Then he called it in, his Dutch accent somehow thicker after two weeks in Texas. But the howitzers’ read-back was good. And, soon enough, iron scratches appeared against the clear blue sky. I followed them to impact, where fountains of mud ascended out of white-hot flashes. The mud fell, the booms rolled by, and I saw that the hits were good: the truck was badly damaged.

  Still, enough of it remained to be hit again, without question. While Levi questioned, the magnetic pole upon which his bearing was anchored drifted ever so slightly; the breeze against which he’d applied his correction stiffened, and the men cradling the heavy shells of his next barrage cursed the unknown reasons for the holdup.

  A fight broke out on the far side of the dining facility, over by the milk. A fridge door slapped shut, followed by sounds of shoving and punches being thrown. Soldiers dodged out of the way before a few brave souls went in to break it up. There were noises of slipped holds and flail, of tables and chairs scraping across the concrete floor. Then Digger’s voice rang out—I’ll kill you!—and for a moment it seemed like this night, a Friday, was about to transcend all its false promises.

  Every Friday was rib night at this DFAC. Soldiers spent all day making the sauce, marinating the ribs, and stoking mesquite embers in split oil drums. They baked a cake the size of a garage door. They decorated the DFAC—a giant white tent—with balloons and streamers. They went to all this trouble, I knew, with good intentions. They wanted us to feel appreciated, and to give us a taste of home. They wanted us to enjoy, at least, the illusion of a party—as if this were a real Friday night, with an actual weekend to follow, and we might find it within ourselves to break a few weekday rules. Fighting, however, was prohibited.

  Tables and chairs were being moved back to where they belonged, and a new line was forming for the milk. Digger walked over to where Hal and I sat, where we always sat, by the Jell-O cart.

  “No one waits their goddamn turn anymore,” Digger said. The collar of his T-shirt appeared to have been balled up and jerked around. Bright red scratches swelled on his neck. His eyes were red and bleary, like he hadn’t slept.

  “You all right?” Hal asked.

  “I’m fine,” Digger said.

  Digger set a partially crushed carton of chocolate milk on the table. He laid down his cardboard tray, scattered with a few ribs he must’ve salvaged off the floor. He sat across from me, and flies settled on his ribs.

  “I can’t eat this,” Digger said.

  I’d tripled up on trays to prevent rib grease from soaking through. I separated the bottom tray and loaded it with half my ribs. Hal gave half his ribs, too. Digger—on the backside of the adrenaline rush that had fueled his fistfight—was staring off into nowhere, so I reached across the table and slid his old tray aside. Flies lifted off those ribs and spun their little orbits. Digger tilted a bit in his seat. As I pushed the new tray in front of him, his mouth dropped open and his eyes closed.

  The DFAC was packed with soldiers who’d spent all day in the summer sun. Their faces were shiny with sweat, their eyes wild with heat exhaustion. Their laughter bounced off the tent’s taut skin, reverberated in its aluminum frame, and rattled the turnbuckles, S-hooks, and galvanized wire that held the whole thing together. Hal dropped one clean bone after another at the center of the table. Flies walked across Digger’s face to drink from the corners of his mouth. He’d been up all night the night before, on that mission out in Wardak, then up all day wrestling demons in the heat. Tired as he was, he’d fought that poor guy over by the milk.

  Digger appeared to skip the early stages of sleep—in which his body would’ve cooled, his heart rate slowed—to plunge directly into REM. His eyes shifted as he began to dream. I watched them draw triangles under their lids
.

  * * *

  —

  AROUND TWO A.M. that morning, during a raid on a compound out in Wardak, Digger had killed three men in a room. They were sleeping in three corners, with an AK-47 resting on the floor in the center of the room, when Digger crept in. The first man in the first corner woke, reached for the AK, and Digger shot him. The next man in the next corner reached, and Digger shot him, too. The third man’s fingers were almost touching the weapon when he died.

  I heard the shots from where I stood, outside the walls of that compound, with Hal. Each shot sounded like when you walk into a dark room, flip a switch, and the filament in the bulb pops. I went into the room after the fact. Seeing the men reaching out for that AK, in death, I figured there had to have been some sort of conversation between them. Like, who would sleep in what corner, and where would they put their only weapon, the muzzle of which had been wrapped in orange wire, in what seemed to me a superstitious way. Like the wire had transformed the AK into a good luck charm, and the men had seen fit to leave it at the center of the room, beyond arm’s length of any one of them, so that the good luck might extend to them equally. Yet they’d all reached for the AK when Digger had snuck into the room.

  We searched the compound and found nothing. We took digital fingerprints of the dead men and beamed them back to Higher, who ran them through the database. Results were inconclusive. From the compound, we walked a mile through tall grass to where the helicopters would pick us up. An owl circled overhead in twilight, until the helicopters dropped out of the sky and scared it away. Digger and I climbed into the same helo and sat across from one another in the cargo bay. Sunrise through the window behind me lit Digger’s stoic face as we flew back to Sharana.

  It was already hot by the time we’d arrived at our outpost on the north end of the runway, where we lived in old shipping containers. Mine smelled as if it had been used to transport pepper. I stood my rifle in a corner and propped my armor against a wall. I closed the shipping container’s heavy metal door and lay down on my cot. I fell into as deep a sleep as the heat of the day would allow. My dream was short-circuiting.