Anatomy of a Miracle

by Jonathan Miles

  Cameron finds this more troubling than heartening to hear. What it suggests to him is that, with a dash more courage and faith in his teammates, he could’ve kept playing football and perhaps gone on to a very different life—perhaps college instead of the Army, and onto wherever college leads. But what troubles him also is that he just doesn’t buy it—not the generous hindsight from Davis and Necaise, not even the part about Landry staying silent. Landry had the drop on him, and ten years later showed no reluctance to shouting it on camera in a crowded barroom. Why would he have kept it to himself back then—unless, per Davis’s theory, Cameron essentially punched his mouth closed? “If he sensed some kind of chill, like he’s saying,” Davis says of Cameron, “it’s because his mama’d just got killed and then he’d gone and beat the shit out of our centerfielder and nobody knew why. I don’t think anyone knew what to say to him. We just put our heads down and focused on playing ball.”

  The only person in whom Cameron confided was Jim Yarbrough, his mother’s boyfriend. Jim was guiding him through the youth-court briars and wasn’t accepting Cameron’s vague explanation about being drunk and overreacting to a comment he couldn’t even remember. Cameron had always liked Jim—the best thing you could hope for in life, he remembers thinking, was for someone to look at you the way his mom looked at Jim—but their shared grief had endowed them with a thicker and more enduring bond, mutual scar tissue. It’d been Jim holding Cameron’s arm at Debbie’s graveside service, who’d steadied him as he tottered and swayed. And Cameron trusted Jim. Maybe it was Jim’s professional-grade poker face, but he struck Cameron as someone skilled in keeping secrets. So he let it all come flowing—Christy morphing into Chris, everything—and watched as Jim nodded along, unfazed, his eyebrows rising at Landry’s actions but never Cameron’s. It was far from the first thing he brought up, but at some point Jim asked, “So, you like guys?”

  “I don’t know what I like,” Cameron said.

  Jim twirled a pencil between his fingers. “It’ll probably make life easier for you if you figure that out, don’t you think?”

  “What if I do?” Cameron pleaded. “Like guys, I mean?”

  “Then I reckon you decide to go with that and call it a day,” he said, tapping the eraser end of the pencil on the table twice as though brokering a very straightforward deal between Cameron and his sexuality. “A leopard’s got spots,” he went on. “Now, he can pretend he don’t, and hide up in a tree or out in some high grass somewhere, but he ain’t gonna live very well or very long that way. And he’s still gonna have those spots.”

  Cameron tried absorbing this advice, which sounded wise to him at the time, but, wise or not, what Jim gave him was ultimately just a metaphor. Cameron wasn’t a leopard. He was a sixteen-year-old kid who was desperately hoping that his variety of spots, like a fawn’s, might fade with time—that his attraction to males was something he might outgrow or possibly will into oblivion.

  Hurricane Katrina came whirling in the next summer, and when it was over Cameron’s exterior and interior landscapes seemed to him bleakly aligned: smashed, scoured, waterlogged, every familiar signpost washed straight out to sea. Driving down the beach, when U.S. 90 reopened, he sometimes found it impossible to orient himself; it was all just drifted sand and naked slabs and, as the dozers moved in, identical debris mounds. A few homes set back from the beach remained standing but hollowed-out, like locust skins. All the talk elsewhere was of New Orleans, but that was because New Orleans had villains for its story—governmental malfeasance, racist urban engineering—while Mississippi had only wind and water, elements unimpeachable, the shapeless consequence of what insurance adjusters marked down as an act of God. Hearing people talk about a “new normal” on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, though, Cameron found a sneer curling his lip: He’d never known there was an old normal.

  What the new normal meant, for Cameron, was a hard and dirty existence. He hammered. He sawed. He nailed. He screwed. He drilled. He ascended ladders under the murderous sun with bundles of roofing shingles doubled up on his right shoulder, pack-muling close to his own weight in sticky asphalt mats. He wrested sheets of plywood into place and affixed them with a compressor-powered nail gun, the gun thwacking then hissing, droplets of Cameron’s sweat soaking into the parched layers of pine. He ripped into mildewed wall studs with a reciprocating saw, relishing the lurching violence of the blade, the way its machine-gun jactitation got disseminated through his body. A scraggly flaxen beard took shape on his face, a pioneer’s beard, sparse and unkempt, and his skin turned the brown of a paper shopping bag. He was eighteen then nineteen, and no longer spurred by a yearning for love; into the vacated zone once filled by that yearning came a great flume of lust. At the top of the ladder he would pitch himself forward to slap the shingle bundles onto the tarpaper and then pause to take in the tableau before him, stingingly erotic, his shirtless Mexican co-workers like glistened dancers moving on a hot black stage. Sometimes they would notice him staring and mock him in Spanish and he would tell them to shut up, that he was just tired. But below the roofline his body was anything but tired, it was alive with something that refused to be stifled, that held his dreams hostage at night, and that sometimes felt driven by little more than dark mischief, dragging bait before him that he felt incapable of resisting despite the glint of a hook. His new normal wasn’t normal, just as the old normal hadn’t been.

  He remembers the first time the military came into his head as an option. He was working in Gulfport, framing out a commercial addition on a building overseen by a giant billboard. It was an Army recruiting sign, five soldiers inviting onlookers to become one of them. The billboard’s cast was as diverse as an old Benetton ad—two white guys, an Asian, a black guy, a Hispanic-looking woman—yet in their matching dress uniforms Cameron noted a sameness that reminded him, soothingly and appealingly, of football, and caused him to wonder if an Army uniform could make him feel the way his football uniform had: apart from himself, folded into something larger, unidentifiable as anything other than a man assigned with a particular task, be it pulling passes from the air in a cheer-thundered stadium or defending whatever his country wanted defended.

  Peering up at that billboard, one hand raised in an inadvertent salute meant to shield his eyes from the sun, Cameron wasn’t thinking about combat, about killing or being killed, as he wasn’t thinking about mortar shells and roadside bombs or the conical, copper-jacketed bullets that an AK-47 can spew ten per second, as he wasn’t thinking about blood and fear and sorrow and pain and the raw white winters of the Hindu Kush, and as he most definitely wasn’t thinking, not even maybe, about falling in love.

  nineteen

  When Staff Sergeant Damarkus Lockwood touched down at the landing zone at Forward Operating Base Barmal, on August 6, 2009, the sleeve of his dress blues already bore six gold combat stripes. At twenty-six years old, Lockwood had served a previous tour in Afghanistan as well as two in Iraq, having been part of the invading force into Iraq in 2003. Before that, on the morning of September 11, 2001, he’d been a freshman at what was then called Mars Hill College, near Asheville, North Carolina, and a third-string back on the school’s Division II football team; but soon thereafter, by his own electing, he was neither a student nor an athlete but an enlistee in the United States Army. His rarely glimpsed father had fought in the first Gulf War, and the grandfather who raised him, whom he’s always called Chief, served two combat tours in Vietnam before becoming a zealous amateur historian of the U.S. military’s frontier wars with the Cherokee. If there was anything consistent in his DNA, Lockwood gathered, it was fighting prowess, something his steady, seven-year rise through the ranks seemed to affirm. He was career-track by this point, a lifer in the pipeline, and though he was still years shy of his first gray hair, Lockwood possessed that alertly grizzled bearing that comes from being shot at numerous times: He looked like a man vulnerable to few if any kind of surprises.

 
A lieutenant stood waiting for him at the landing pad, and immediately after Lockwood finished scurrying with his ruck down the Chinook’s ramp the helicopter rose and banked, its rotor wash spewing a blinding billow of dust that hung suspended in the thin breezeless air for what seemed an impossibly long time, refusing to drift or, like the war itself, to settle. The lieutenant materialized out of the brown cloud to welcome Lockwood, leading him through the FOB’s rear gate and talking fast all the while: the squad leader he was replacing, Hooper, everyone called him Hooptie, heck of a soldier, bought it in an IED attack on a Stryker convoy, wish they’d redesign those flat bottoms, makes them deathtraps, but Hooptie, jeez, he had twin baby girls back home, they were all he ever talked about, everyone’s just sick about it, in fact nobody’s gotten around to packing up his personal effects, partly because we’ve been taking indirect just about every day, the whole valley’s been hot for weeks on account of the election coming, all these fresh fighters coming across the border under a new commander, this Chechen, they call him Cha, that means the bear…

  Lockwood stopped.

  “Oh, sorry,” the lieutenant said, circling back. “Everyone says I talk faster than God made ears to hear.” He followed Lockwood’s gaze to where a shirtless soldier was tending a pit of burning trash, strange-colored flames licking upward, a great palpitating blob of oily black smoke kneading itself above the pyre. “We got a new incinerator but the thing only works half the time,” the lieutenant explained, “and no matter what we say the ANAs still dump everything into the pit anyway.”

  But Lockwood wasn’t looking at the fire, not really. There should have been nothing about a soldier burning refuse and raw sewage to catch his attention—but something did. It was close to one hundred degrees that afternoon, a marshy heat that wasn’t sparing the high altitudes, but the soldier was leaning on a shovel directly beside the sprawling pit, a khaki bandanna masking the bottom half of his face bandit-style, his long and corded torso slick with sooted sweat, and he appeared less to be monitoring the fire than waiting for something to appear from it, a junior wizard seeking to conjure something from its fetid embers. “That’s one of your guys, actually,” the lieutenant said, trying to hustle Lockwood along. “PFC One, name’s Harris. Kid’s a piece of jerky.”

  Lockwood frowned. “Jerky?”

  “Yeah, you know,” the lieutenant said, miming a strugglesome bite. “He’s a tough one. You’re lucky.”

  * * *

  If Staff Sergeant Lockwood and the other men of the Second Battalion, Forty-fourth Infantry Regiment’s Bravo Company felt lucky that month, it was in the way a fish feels water: not as a blessing or an advantage but as a necessary element that, once removed, meant a swift and gasping death. Their mission, christened “Safe Passage,” was part of a larger operation to secure polling stations and the routes thereto in advance of the August 20 presidential elections. What this entailed, for Bravo Company, was stanching the flow of Taliban and Taliban-affiliated insurgents that were stealing across the border from Pakistan to disrupt the voting and further destabilize the province. In practice that meant clearing and patrolling the narrow unpaved road that parallels the Weca Sega River, which they called Route Falcon, and trying to root out any insurgents hiding in the gaunt, medieval-looking villages along the river: Nkhal, Shadikhan Kala, Godikhel, Masheray, Shukikhel, and various smaller others that no one had ever thought to name. Basically, it meant going out every day and kicking hornet nests.

  In the two weeks between Lockwood’s arrival and the national elections, Bravo Company reported thirty-four troops-in-contact incidents, more than two a day. A few of these were brief firefights; many others were shaggier, more sustained skirmishes, with the company coming under fire from mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and Soviet-designed KPV heavy machine guns; some involved IED blasts, reminiscent of the attack at a Route Falcon chokepoint that had killed Lockwood’s predecessor; one was the August 12 episode during which Private First Class Cameron Harris had back-rolled a jingle truck off a cliff into the Weca Sega and, to Lockwood’s thinking, almost single-handedly extracted Second Platoon from a direly indefensible position; and one involved a ten-hour siege and counteroffensive in the village of Tor Kalay, right after which Cameron again proved his grit—or maybe just his volatility.

  Tor Kalay was known to be a Taliban stronghold, but for the soldiers of the Two-Forty-Four, having landed in Afghanistan only a month earlier, their August 17 visit was their first. The seventy-five-man Romanian force that the Two-Forty-Four replaced, at ten times its size, had left them radio transcripts and written briefings, but all in Romanian; and on joint reconnaissance missions, during the handover, they admitted to hardly ever leaving Route Falcon—a policy they recommended highly to their American replacements.

  Led by a contingent of Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police, Second Platoon entered the village, which sits a kilometer below and west of Route Falcon in a lush riverside maze of pomegranate and quince orchards, in four Stryker vehicles. Out of one came First Lieutenant Shaw Cantwell, the fast talker, whose father and grandfather (Lockwood hadn’t been surprised to learn) were farm auctioneers back in Kentucky. Cantwell’s overworked interpreter, a young Afghan named Shpoon, directed a teenaged boy to fetch the village elder. From inside one of the Strykers, watching through its open rear hatch, Lockwood noticed the boy was wearing sneakers, not sandals—a reliable Taliban indicator. He poked his head out to survey the village. Not a single child was dawdling outside, another bad omen. “Be ready,” he warned his squad.

  The elder came out stroking and smoothing his henna-dyed, carrot-colored beard as though preparing himself for a portrait. Tor Kalay was an important polling site, Cantwell explained to him (via Shpoon), and the Americans were visiting today in support of the ANA’s efforts to ensure that the Taliban wouldn’t disrupt the coming vote.

  “The Taliban, bwah.” The elder flashed a three-toothed grin and disdainfully threw out a hand. His wrinkle-scored face appeared carved from wood, like a storefront Indian’s. “We chased them out with shovels.”

  “Shovels?” the lieutenant tried clarifying.

  Just then a rifle shot rang out, from over where the ANAs were stationed atop a nearby hill.

  “Ask him what the hell that was,” the lieutenant told Shpoon.

  “He say,” Shpoon translated, fearfully, watching the elder suppress a low and melancholy chuckle, “that he hopes you have good shovels.”

  The ensuing battle lasted, almost without pause, until nightfall. The first group of enemy fighters was positioned in an oxbow wadi, on the north edge of the village, and aimed their initial fire—a salvo of gunfire and RPGs and mortars—on the ANAs and ANP, quickly killing one and injuring two. By the time Second Platoon got a sergeant and a medic to them, the Afghans had already burned through their ammo and were hightailing it to their pickup trucks.

  It was a classic Whac-A-Mole fight. For every enemy position the platoon wiped out, another one appeared. The Taliban had done a remarkable job keeping their plans secret; nothing in the chatter had suggested an assault on this scale, not with this much reinforcement and tactical rigor. After a while the Talibs were able to advance on three fronts, drawing so near to the Strykers that soldiers were hurling hand grenades from the hatches. Though Lieutenant Cantwell had a mortar Stryker with him, he couldn’t get clearance to use it: The firing coordinates skirted too close to civilian structures, from inside of which the platoon’s members sometimes heard people cheering. And Charlie Company—similarly pinned across the Weca Sega near Sawdal Malkshay Kot, about thirty-five clicks downriver—had air support all tied up. The Strykers went lurching from point to point, bursting forward then reversing, hounded by close-range machine-gun fire and by RPGs that went streaking over, alongside, and occasionally off them. (Lockwood and Cameron’s vehicle would return to the FOB with an RPG’s tail fin embedded in it.)

  The advanta
ge tilted their way after a sky-parade of air support finally showed up, two Kiowa Warrior helicopters strafing the orchards as well as a bunker that Cantwell suspected was a command center, then an A-10 Warthog trailing behind to pancake the bunker with a five-hundred-pound bomb. “How about those shovels, huh? What do we think about those shovels?” the lieutenant shouted, everyone within earshot besides Shpoon thinking he’d lost his mind. With the arrival of Third Platoon, the company’s Quick Response Force, the counteroffensive began—the soldiers fanning out into the hills and orchards on foot.

  It was Cameron’s squad, led by Lockwood, that captured a mud farmhouse north of the village that turned out to be a Taliban medic station, having followed a blood trail the way bow hunters track deer. Inside the hut they found six wounded fighters in varying states of consciousness lying on woolen blankets in a dank, windowless, blood-splashed room, their attending medic on his knees in the center with his hands raised, his long white tunic stained like a supermarket butcher’s. His kit was meager: IV tubing and fluids, gauze, burn dressing, morphine, a tin bowl filled with cloudy pink water. The gravest of the wounded, Lockwood saw, must’ve survived the bunker bombing. His right arm and leg were missing but he wasn’t bleeding out, probably because the same fiery blast that blew the limbs off had also cauterized the wounds. Most of his clothing had burned off but charred tatters were fused to what was left of his skin, which was the crispy, wobbly black of a marshmallow suspended too long above a campfire. Lockwood ordered that the medic and all the wounded be zip-tied (“not that one,” he had to clarify to a baffled private, an open tie in his hands, standing over the dismembered fighter) and radioed for medical assistance for enemy personnel. Outside, he found a wooden farm wagon piled with three warm corpses and a stray severed forearm, and, nearby, sheltered between the hut and a high stone wall, Cameron doubled over vomiting. Lockwood’s first impulse, his sergeant’s default, was to chide him: Keep your insides inside, Private, and let’s be ready to move out. Instead, without a word, he crouched beside him and passed him a water bottle, listening to Cameron swish and spit while he squinted at a Blackhawk helicopter hovering over the distant village dropping body bags filled with ammo and water and medical supplies, a bird shitting mercy.