by Will Mackin
“I should probably do it,” Hal said.
“I don’t mind,” I said.
I stared into the distance, trying to see what Hal saw.
“I think it’d be better coming from me,” he said.
* * *
—
It used to be we’d do hard knocks on every raid. We’d creep in under the cover of darkness, position ourselves covertly, and hold very still. A nightingale might chirp, a cow might low, then—BAM!—we’d breach the door/hatch/gate, tear through the courtyard/living room/boudoir, and kill whoever needed killing. And if anyone managed to escape, for example, out a back door to run into a wide-open field—tripping over dark furrows, splashing through muddy troughs—I’d call the gunship in from its hiding place in the sky, and it would trip into the field, buzzing, with green light shining out its cockpit windows and blue sparks falling from its engines. Hearing the buzz, the runner would try to pick up the pace only to fall more. I’d mark where he lay in the mud with my laser, drawing green ovals around him as his panic traveled backward through the beam into my hand, up my arm, and into my brain, so I’d feel his hysterical need to get up out of the mud and run. When the runner stood I’d steady the laser between his shoulder blades. The gunship would drop its infrared spotlight—like the magic that turned Cinderella into a princess—on top of the runner, and I’d transmit clearance to fire. Next there’d be a hollow whack, like a suitcase falling onto a baggage carousel, and the shell would appear in the sky, glowing from the friction of aerodynamic drag as it made its slow descent into the field. But those days were over. Higher had decided that the war needed to move in a new direction. After jamming Hank and Q down our throats, they eliminated gunships and hard knocks.
Upon arrival at our first compound, we set up for the callout. The compound’s outer walls formed a square. We lined up along two sides, in a bear-trap formation that hinged on Hal. Hal nodded, and Digger hooked a flash bang over the wall. It landed in the courtyard on the other side with a thump. The fuse cooked for half a second more; then flashes bleached my night vision. Bangs and echoes overlapped. Smoke floated over the wall. Hank raised the bullhorn to his lips to read the statement from memory.
That statement, crafted in English, translated into Pashto, went something like this: “We are coalition forces, committed to the future of Afghanistan. Our presence outside the walls of your domicile, in the middle of the night, should not be construed as a threat to your person, or to the persons you hold dear. Instead, we urge you to look upon this encounter as an opportunity for us to work together, to forge a new bond of cooperation and trust, by which our mutually freedom-loving cultures will prosper.”
Hank’s reading ended with an electric click, followed by silence. No one from inside the compound offered a rebuttal. No babies cried, no donkeys brayed. No faraway dog barked, Fuck off!
Hal kicked down the compound’s steel gate with a clang, and we followed him into the courtyard. We torched a woodpile, fragged a well, then weaved through an open door. We ran from room to room and found the place vacant. During our search for intelligence, Goon discovered a live hen under a pail. Lex salvaged a bundle of copper wire from a compost heap. I lifted a mildewed tarp and uncovered a laboratory-quality balance scale resting on a splitter log.
The scale’s aluminum beam was bright red, its fulcrum made of brass. Starlight pooled in its silver weighing pans. I tapped a finger on one of those pans and the instrument started to seesaw. In its dampening rise and fall I saw the weight of my touch reduced by half, then half again, and so on. Meanwhile, the troop unwound, single file, into the night, folding into that seam that Hal had created. The same seam, I supposed, that he’d created years ago, on our very first mission. Which would explain why it felt so comfortable and safe. It had delivered us this far.
“You coming?” Goon asked. He was standing on the metal gate Hal had kicked down.
I stopped the scale from rocking, and in so doing absorbed the remaining weight of my touch. Stashing the scale in my ruck, I took my place at the end of the patrol.
* * *
—
OUR NEXT COMPOUND was five clicks southwest. Along the way we jumped over a stream like a liquid mirror. We passed a sleeping bull with its eyes squeezed shut and its lower lip hanging down. We crossed soft, dry fields that smelled like medicine. Occasionally, I’d sense the enemy behind me, and, turning around, I wouldn’t see him. But as I searched the empty spaces where I thought he might be, I’d feel the approach of another déjà vu, and I’d try to clear my mind in hopes of inducing its onset. I wanted to know how everything came to be again, and I wanted to see, however briefly, into the future. Each déjà vu’s approach felt like a whirlpool that I might fall into, but then it would recede, and I’d turn to face the patrol, disappointed. We arrived at our destination around zero two, local.
The second compound’s walls were curved. We formed more of a gooseneck than a bear trap around them. Digger had trouble with the pin on the flash bang and wound up tossing it late. It detonated at apogee, lighting our unsuspecting faces.
Q delivered the statement this time, reading off the laminated card that he carried every night, which had delaminated in one corner. At some point water had seeped into that corner, smearing the ink and blurring some of the words. When Q got stuck on those words, Hank would whisper them into Q’s ear. Q’s repetition of Hank’s whispers echoed.
There was no response from inside the walls, again. The compound’s gate was made of tree branches lashed together, like a castaway’s raft. Hal broke right through it, bodily. We followed him into the courtyard, and under the canopy of an enormous willow. We gained entrance to the rooms via a long passageway with wooden doors on either side. I took the last door on the left and entered an empty room with mud walls, a dirt floor, and another wooden door in the far wall. These doors—fixed with knobs, hinges, and striker plates; hung in what smelled like pinewood frames—fit snugly within the adobe walls. Behind that second door was a third room, with a third door.
Each room I entered was a bit darker and colder than the previous room. My goggles fuzzed like bad reception on the TV. Radio static folded over on itself. I kept thinking that I’d discover something in the next room. I tried to keep my mind open to the possibilities. Like that night I’d found a sextant with its scope, mirror, and graduated arc. Or when I’d stumbled upon that tiny quartz elephant. I’d put those things in my pack and forgotten about them, until weeks later when I was digging around for something to eat. I’d pulled the sextant out of my pack and remembered finding it in a place that had smelled like cinnamon. I recalled a young woman weeping the night I’d discovered the elephant. These rooms, however, were odorless and silent. I left the doors open behind me so that when I turned around, the nearest door framed all the others. I thought maybe I’d find whoever was hanging these doors—a mujahedeen carpenter, if you will, planing the frames to fit just right, oiling the hinges to swing freely. He’d work by candlelight, I imagined, or perhaps he was blind and he’d work by feel. The doors were perfectly balanced and weightless. They seemed to go on forever, which I figured was discovery enough.
* * *
—
OUR THIRD AND last compound was three clicks west of the second. We took a meandering path through a sissoo grove to arrive at twilight. The diamond shape of the compound’s outer walls fit nicely inside the bear trap. A crooked archway in the southern wall opened onto a shadowed courtyard. Digger was just about to pull the pin on a flash bang and roll it through that archway when a woman exited, carrying an empty pot.
Hank raised the bullhorn and began reading the statement. The woman startled at the noise, then smiled.
Harek, is that you? she interrupted.
Harek was Hank’s real name. The woman, it turned out, was his aunt. Moles dotted her narrow face, and her teeth were crooked. Shocked by Hank’s battered visage,
she touched the purple lump above his eye. She ran her finger over the pink meat of his split lip, which must’ve stung.
Hank’s aunt invited us into her courtyard, where apple trees bloomed and black ants rooted around in the crabgrass. She kept a pigeon in a cage that hung from the branch of a tree. At first, I thought that pigeon was fake—it stood so still, and its feathers were so smooth. But its eyes followed me around the courtyard from the woodpile to the bikes to the buckets. The way the bird stared at me, I felt the need to confess, though to what, I didn’t know. I supposed I could’ve gone down a list of regrets until I hit upon the one that would’ve made the pigeon look away. Instead, I entered the rooms. In one, two girls slept on the hard dirt floor, their heads touching as if they were Siamese twins. I stayed in that room for a while, listening to the girls breathe, hoping the bird would forget. But as soon as I returned to the courtyard there it was, staring at me with its beady eyes.
* * *
—
WE LEFT HANK’S aunt with aspirin, iodine, and MREs for the girls: Country Captain Chicken, Pound Cake, Sloppy Joe. We wished her peace in her native tongue. From her compound we walked west again, toward the open end of the valley.
The sun had risen over the horizon by then, but the valley remained in shadow. Those shadows appeared striped, like crime scene tape, through night vision. The Kingdom of Sand, off in the distance, shone in golden waves. Putting one foot in front of the other, we searched for a place where the helicopters could pick us up. Meanwhile, Hal radioed dispatch. I listened in on the same frequency. The clerk on the other end told Hal that our signal was “ROD,” which was the last thing we wanted to hear after a long night of traipsing around from dry hole to dry hole. It meant that we weren’t getting picked up any time soon. It meant: Remain Over Day.
* * *
—
WE FOUND A defensible position at the base of the northern mountains, where there was water from a spring and shade from a tall ash tree. The sun rose higher in the sky, shooting flames in all directions. I sat propped against my ruck. My brain felt heavy, my mind cold. I was gazing up at a cloud when the pale sky around it seemed to flash.
Hal whistled and waved me off my redoubt in the shade. I joined him in the sunny valley. He pointed up toward the western end of the valley’s northern mountains, where sunlight fell on a rock formation that resembled dragon’s teeth. There, I saw a clear, bright flash.
“You see that?” Hal asked.
The next flash wavered, like sun off an AK’s curved magazine.
“See what?” I said.
* * *
—
WE JOKED LIKE we used to when Hal would get some batshit idea and I’d try to talk him out of it. I said, “But we’ve got no air, no arty, no QRF,” meaning quick reaction force, to bail us out of a bad situation.
“Your mom’s our QRF,” Hal said.
“But they’ll see us climbing the mountain, and they’ll be ready,” I said.
“Ready,” Hal chuckled while tightening the laces of his boots. He looked over by the spring, where Hank was filling Q’s canteens and Q was dropping iodine into Hank’s.
“They seem to be getting along,” I said.
“What’d you say to them?” Hal asked.
I pushed fresh lithium cells into my holographic sight.
“Nothing,” I said. “I thought you were going to do it.”
“No,” Hal said.
I thought back to that conversation we’d had on our way to the first compound, as we’d crossed that hard stretch of dirt, and I thought maybe I’d gotten it confused with a different conversation, over some other expanse of dirt.
“So you’ll talk to them, then?” Hal asked.
“Sure,” I said.
Hal led the patrol uphill while I remained at the base of the mountain, waiting for Hank and Q. Knowing that we were in for a gunfight, the boys were all smiles. Digger shook my hand. Goon hugged me. Lex kissed me on the forehead, leaving the shit smell of his lips behind. Hank and Q tried to walk right past me without saying boo. I stopped them.
“Whatever happened between you two last night can’t happen again,” I said.
“No,” said Q, shaking his head.
“We have enough trouble as it is without having to babysit,” I said.
“I am sorry. He is sorry,” Hank said.
The purple lump over Hank’s eye rolled to one side.
“Don’t be sorry, just don’t do it again.”
Right after I said that, the pigeon popped its head out from under Q’s chest plate. Its gray feathers were ruffled. Its short beak was wide open in distress.
“Hello,” Q said to the bird.
“You let him steal from your aunt?” I asked Hank.
“Not my aunt. Friend of my aunt,” Hank said.
“Whatever,” I said. “You need to leave it here.”
Q stroked the bird’s head with a finger. He said something in Pashto to Hank.
“So you will leave yours here, too?” Hank asked me.
He meant the red balance scale in my pack.
“That’s different,” I said. “They use scales to make bombs.”
“They use birds to lay eggs. They use eggs to stay alive. Alive, they make bombs,” Hank said.
“Same,” Q said.
“No,” I said. “Leave it.”
Q left the pigeon on a rock, where it preened its feathers back into place and tucked its stubby wings away. I thought it might hop or glide back down into the valley, but it just stayed on the rock, staring at me as I followed the patrol up the mountain—over soft cascades of sand at first, then little red pebbles that zipped and smoked like matchheads under my boots, then flint. The flint clinked and scraped, and the noise hurt my teeth. Little purple flowers grew in the crags. Snow glittered in the shadows. Near the top of the mountain, the ground smoothed out again. Icy patches of dead grass stood in the shadows of sun-warmed boulders. We moved toward the dragon’s teeth like we were back in the States, following a well-worn path to someplace known.
At three hundred meters we shed our packs and drank the last of the water in our canteens. We folded our letters from home along with pictures of our wives, sons, and daughters, and tucked them under rocks so they wouldn’t blow away. From there, we started to leapfrog. Hank and Q leapt with me and Hal. They’d cover us as we advanced, then Hal and I would cover them. We ran into the wind. The sun shone down. Goon, Mooch, Lyle, and the rest leapfrogged on either side of us. To be up and running felt like wearing a suit of bells. Crouching behind a rock, I turned to watch Hank and Q charge past. Hank’s good eye was wide open, while Q appeared to be holding his breath. Seconds later, Hal and I sprinted past them, jingling. Thus we closed on the dragon’s teeth, until we came to a smooth field of slate.
I could see, across the slate, Taliban peeking through gaps in the teeth. The wind delivered their telltale mix of BO and cigarette smoke. We looked to Hal for the signal—after which we’d run across the slate, firing bursts and lobbing frag—but Hal was staring off into the distance again, at that thing that only he could see. Whatever it was seemed to be telling him to hold steady and let the clouds roll by, then, maybe, broker some sort of truce. Shouting into the wind, we could agree to lay down our arms and meet in the middle. The Taliban could share with us whatever sustained them—smoked knees, fermented milk—and we could cook them an MRE lasagna. Then came the sound of boots on slate. I turned to find Hank, running. Then Q. Then we were all up, howling under the blue sky, running toward the dragon’s teeth and whatever lay beyond.
One rainy night, in March 2011, we crossed a muddy field to intercept a group of Taliban who’d come out of the mountains of Pakistan. They were walking west. We were patrolling north to arrive at a point ahead of them, where we’d set up an ambush. The field was actually many fields inundated by sno
wmelt and rain. Piles of rocks, laid by farmers, demarcated the flooded borders. Every so often we’d pass evidence of what had grown in those fields: an island of blighted cornstalks, a soybean shoot—as perfect as a laboratory specimen—floating in a shin-deep lake. Someday, I figured, the sun would come out, the land would dry, and the farmers would be back to restake their claims. That night, however, they’d taken shelter on higher ground, and that entire miserable stretch of Khost was ours.
Electric streaks of rain fell straight down on my night vision. Cold rose from the mud into my bones. It squeezed the warmth out of my heart. My heart became a more sensitive instrument as a result, and I could feel the Taliban out there, lost in the darkness. I could feel them in the distance, losing hope. This was the type of mission that earlier in the war would’ve been fun: us knowing and seeing, them dumb and blind. Hal, walking point, would’ve turned around and smiled, like, Do you believe we’re getting paid for this? And I would’ve shaken my head, like, No. But now Hal hardly turned around. And when he did, it was only to make sure that we were all still behind him, putting one foot in front of the other, bleeding heat, our emerald hearts growing dim.
We made steady progress through the rain until we came to a river. The river looked like a wide section of field that had somehow broken free, that had, for unknown reasons, been set in motion. In fact, the only way to tell river from field was to stare at the river and sense its lugubrious vector. But to stare at the river for too long was to feel as if it were standing still and the field were moving.
Hal called on our best swimmers, Lex and Cooker, to cross first. They removed their helmets and armor. They kept their rifles and pistols. Cooker tied a loop to the end of a hundred feet of rope and clipped the loop to the hard point on Lex’s belt. He hooked himself onto the rope behind Lex, and they set off.