The snow made it difficult for Cameron and Damarkus to hide signs of their passage in and out of the Bronya, though because their route was always from the side of the junkyard facing the ANA huts, anyone who noticed would deduce the Afghans were using it for whatever Afghans used things for. This wasn’t an unfair deduction, as the two of them were startled to learn one night: They lifted open the hatch to reveal a young Afghan soldier inside smoking hash. Caught by surprise, he blurted out a tench cloud, Cameron and Damarkus recoiling from the Cheech-and-Chong fumes that came billowing out. The Afghan cleared out in no hurry, stashing his homemade water-bottle bong under the steering wheel, and not just because he was stoned. With flamboyant gesturing of his arms he made to usher them inside, like a bellhop guiding honeymooners into their suite, his toothy leer signaling a trade of one secret for another.
“We can’t do this no more,” Damarkus told Cameron, not for the first time. But the gravitational pull was too great. The fresh reek of hash hung inside the Bronya like an exotic emotion, something else new to feel. Damarkus watched himself disappear into the hatch as through a distant camera lens, realizing, from that indefinite aerie, that he was sacrificing everything for this, that he was scratching out his own eyes so as not to glimpse the future, just as stupid and reckless as Cameron had been up in that exposed gun turret with bullets glancing off his helmet. He didn’t know how, he didn’t know when, but he was going to die from this. But he watched himself close the hatch behind him, he watched himself not care.
As for Cameron, the effects of that carbonated Chinese wine seemed yet to have ebbed, as though that half a bottle had rendered him permanently drunk and beyond all caring: Wherever Damarkus’s hands were touching him was truth and wherever they weren’t was a lie that he could no longer bear living.
* * *
On the morning of March 8, 2010, at oh nine hundred hours, Captain Gary Lindholm called Lockwood into the command center and shut the door behind them. Damarkus was hoping this was about the coming spring fighting season, some kind of squad-assessment rap, but the otherwise deserted room and the captain’s noncommittal tone and averted eyes were signaling otherwise. Damarkus took a breath and flexed his fingers, steadying himself. Maps and memoranda were tacked to the plywood walls; fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered overhead; a radio squawked in the corner; and Damarkus took a seat, as directed, on a bench facing the captain’s crowded plywood desk.
Lindholm was the same age as Lockwood but the similarities ended there. Two years earlier he’d graduated from West Point, but he didn’t advertise it and rarely even acted like it. He led like a sponge, constantly seeking affirmation from his junior officers and NCOs as though consensus, not leadership, was what they’d taught him won wars back at West Point. He was also, to Damarkus’s ear, too quick to remind everyone that this was his first deployment; maybe he was trying to project some humility, which was fine, hoo-ah for that, but the residual impression was of a commander salting excuses, advancing himself a defense against future bungles. That said, Lindholm was also quick—the higher brass would surely say too quick—to call in air support and indirects and reinforcements whenever Bravo Company was taking serious fire, to feed his men the maximum weaponry available then ask for more on top. He didn’t fight lean, unlike other commanders Damarkus had served under who seemed capable of factoring in the $115,000 cost of a Hellfire missile while units were pinned down and bleeding—and this quality was cause for affection from Damarkus and most everyone else.
Lindholm began in a casual key, like he always did. The captain talked to everybody as though they were guests on his talk show. The question itself, however, wasn’t casual at all—not to Damarkus: “You ever been inside that old Soviet ATC?”
“The Bronya?” He tried answering breezily, matching the captain’s tone, as if the question were whether he’d ever seen the Grand Canyon or used a set of chopsticks. “Yessir I have.”
Lindholm was staring at him with his elbows on his desk, wheezing through his nostrils. The captain wasn’t actually fat but came across that way, with big squarish cheeks like Wonder Bread slices and a chin that appeared eager for the company of more chins. His eyes looked like they hadn’t yet decided what color to be. Normally they were gentle eyes, belonging more to a chaplain than a company commander, but right now they weren’t gentle.
“What for?” Lindholm asked.
“Curiosity,” answered Lockwood, thinking: Here it comes. Here’s how I die. Take away the ban on gays in the military and Damarkus was still sitting deep in court-martial territory for carrying on an intimate relationship with a subordinate. Except, no, you couldn’t take that away, because one charge had to be proven and the other just had to be decreed. All Damarkus had to do was smell gay. “Propensity or intent”: Those were the words in the statute, those were the words they could hang him from. Another fear suddenly pierced him: Was Lieutenant Cantwell interrogating Cameron now? Exactly how much shit was hitting this fan? They’d gone over it all together, he and Cameron, during one of Damarkus’s fits of what he’d hoped was paranoia: what to say, what not to. Captain Lindholm was blinking his eyes at him, cueing him to say something more. Damarkus fumbled out, “It’s kind of interesting up in there.”
“Interesting how?”
“Like an old Corvette’d be, I guess. Like, you know…like an antique. A classic car.”
“A Corvette.” Lindholm let this sit on his desk for a while, sizing it up like a profundity. “You into cars?”
“Little bit I am, yessir. I like wrenching on them some.” Damarkus thinking, please don’t ask me about my ride at home, don’t make me admit a Subaru. “My grandad taught me how.”
“Your grandad,” the captain echoed, like here was an intriguing new wrinkle, as if Chief might be worth getting on the horn. “You been in that ATC”—Damarkus could see him tripping over something in his mind—“what’d you say it was called?”
“It’s called a Bronya, sir.”
“Brone-yah,” the captain practiced, leaning forward with his lips circled like he was blowing out birthday candles. “Brone-yah. You been in it more than once?”
“More than once? Yessir.”
“By yourself?”
“By myself?” Damarkus didn’t know why he was repeating the captain’s questions except to stall the inevitable. He felt like a beetle trapped in a chicken coop, getting scratched, pecked, scratched again: death coming slow but death surely coming. “Nossir, the times I’ve been in there it’s been with another soldier.”
“Different ones, or the same?”
“The same, sir.”
Lindholm narrowed his eyes, drilling him again. “ANA?”
Damarkus’s forehead squashed into a frown: Where’d that come from? “Nossir,” he said, honest confusion muddying his face, “one of ours.”
“And who’s that?”
“Harris, PFC One,” he said, Cameron’s name feeling like a full confession rolling off his lips.
“Harris.” Lindholm ingested the name without betraying any prior knowledge; Damarkus searched his face for a reaction but saw nothing. “He into cars too?”
It wasn’t clear if he meant this sarcastically. Every word the captain said came out in identically uninflected pellets that took meaningful shape several beats later, like Sea-Monkeys in spoken form. Damarkus chose to ignore the question. “He’s the one showed it to me, sir.”
“What’s he find interesting about it?” Fluttering his eyes, still the genial talk show host.
“Same things as me, I reckon. But you’d have to ask him that, sir.”
Lindholm didn’t seem to appreciate this redirect, grunting then pretending to study some paperwork on his desk, which Damarkus, quick-peeking, could see was an unrelated flow chart. When the captain raised his face again his expression was softer, doughier, his eyes less angry than mildly agonized.
“This is your fourth deployment, sergeant,” he announced.
“Yessir it is.”
“That’s a lot of deployments.”
Here, Damarkus knew, was the oddly placed fulcrum in the room, the source of its delicate imbalance. Lindholm had his captain’s bars but the sergeant had the combat stripes. And while no one faulted the captain, and no one thought a lack of seasoning had anything to do with it, Bravo Company had lost two men and watched seven head home wounded during its first three months under Lindholm’s virgin command. Damarkus had seen other officers rattled by less. They start fearing they’re test takers, not combat leaders. They start deferring to whoever’s got the most scars, mistaking experience for wisdom. “Deploying is what I trained for, sir,” Damarkus said.
“But four?” Lindholm was trying to lead him somewhere. He clasped his hands together as though to pray. “Four’s gotta take a toll, huh?”
What was the toll in Lindholm’s head, Damarkus wondered: Loneliness? Horniness? “I like serving my country, sir,” he replied, a blue steel rod in his voice. “It’s what I live for.”
Lindholm’s clasped hands jerked forward, something blatantly prickling him: impatience with Damarkus’s boilerplate response, perhaps, or a challenge to throw in his own steel rod. “Then you understand the incredibly high standards NCOs have to meet out here,” he said, in a barked recital, “to ensure a positive impact on discipline, authority, morale, and the command’s ability to accomplish the mission.”
“Yessir I do. Absolutely.”
Lindholm gave him a sharp and unexpectedly conclusive nod. The two of them could’ve been reading aloud from an Army manual but the captain seemed strangely satisfied with the exchange, lifting his elbows off the desk to slump back into his chair. He let some air through his nostrils and picked at a loose layer of plywood at the corner of his desk. Damarkus sat watching him, thinking: Get it out, dammit, just fire that gun you got aimed at me. But the voice that emerged from the captain, seeming to slip from the side of his mouth, was dreamy, scatty, solicitous, a therapist’s voice. “It’s tough being out here in the middle of nowhere, isn’t it?”
Impatiently, Damarkus said, “Not sure I follow, sir.”
The captain shrugged, smirked. “Shoveling snow for the local nationals. You know.”
Once again Damarkus felt the tug of an invisible leash. “It’s been a pretty quiet winter, sir, if that’s what you mean. But quiet’s got its own challenges. And we all know it’s fixing to end.”
“Right,” the captain said, like he’d heard the same rumor, his voice trailing off. Then he bolted himself upright, sighed, and bent sideways to pull something from a bag beside his desk. “Sergeant Lockwood,” he said, without looking at him, his eyes fixed on whatever he was hiding in his lap, “you feel like telling me what the fuck this is?”
What popped onto the desk was a gnarly old twelve-ounce plastic water bottle that looked plucked from a forgotten recycling bin. Except it wasn’t just a water bottle: The inside was smeared with a greasy gray film and there was a hole carved into its bottom, roughly the diameter of a cigarette. Damarkus’s eyes went in and out of focus until, with a start, he recognized it: the Afghan soldier’s water bong, the thing he’d used to smoke hash inside the Bronya. The one he’d ditched beneath the dash.
“Looks to be a water bottle, sir,” he answered—too flippantly, for sure, but his mind was cartwheeling: Was he being questioned on suspicions of drug use? Or was drug use part of a larger pile that the captain was now starting to slowly peel away, in the same cruel way he was flaking the plywood from his desk? He was wishing Lindholm had introduced the bottle by saying, “Let’s get to the point here,” or, “Let me tell you why I called you in here this morning”—some kind of prompt that this was it, that he had just a single gun pointed Damarkus’s way.
“Well, it was a water bottle, yeah,” Lindholm said, with an unspoken duh. He unscrewed the cap to take a sniff then offered one to Damarkus, who didn’t know how to acknowledge the stench: as familiar or unfamiliar, as innocent or guilty. He nodded ambiguously.
“We found this in the Bronya,” Lindholm said, still getting the hang of the word. “You and Harris, what—you guys got a little hookah lounge going in there?”
“Negative, sir. Hundred percent.”
The captain grunted, more of an oink. “You feel like telling me who does?”
“I don’t want to point fingers, sir, but I don’t think it’s any secret that some of the ANAs have, uh…”
“Certain habits? Yeah, it’s no secret.” The captain rubbed the bottle as though to conjure from it a hashish genie that could clear everything up. Then he brought both hands to his face, his fingers splayed, and massaged a look of distress onto it. “You got anything you need to tell me, sergeant?”
About what, Damarkus was thinking: about that stenchy little bottle, or about the rest you ain’t asked me about yet. “If what you’re asking, sir, is whether that belongs to me, or whether I’ve smoked or been around someone smoking something illegal, the answer’s no.” He pounded it one more time: “The answer’s no.”
Damarkus had no clue whether the captain returning the bottle to the bag beside his desk was a good sign or a bad one: the end of this story or merely the transition to chapter two. Everything was up to Lindholm, he knew. The captain had a fondness for overwhelming force and, in this case, had the MPs at his disposal, the Uniform Code of Justice, fatal slips of paperwork. If he wanted to be a brick, rather than a sponge, it was nothing for him to crush Damarkus. But Damarkus also knew the ranks were thin, with his squad particularly shorthanded; getting more bodies in here before the Taliban launched its spring offensive wasn’t likely to happen.
“You and Harris,” the captain was saying, almost singing it, tracing a line across his desk with a fingertip, “just hanging out in the old Corvette.”
“Ain’t nothing more than that, sir,” Damarkus said, a rising pitch in his voice. “We just kinda checked it out a few times, got to talking about what-all the Soviets had to fight with and some of the things we’re doing different…”
“Well, it’s padlocked now,” the captain said, part of Damarkus wishing it always had been, another part of him feeling gaffed through the heart.
“Seems like a prudent action, sir,” Damarkus said, jerking his chin toward the clouded water bottle now stashed behind the captain’s desk. “Considering.”
Lindholm let another sigh out of his nose. “You know I’ve got to ask you to pee in a cup,” he said.
“Sir,” Damarkus said, “I’d be grateful for the opportunity to clear any doubts.”
“Yeah,” the captain said, stretching the word too much for Damarkus’s comfort, as if two more seconds of yeah would complete a bridge to other doubts, suspicions harder to express for a Minnesota Lutheran like Lindholm. The captain scribbled onto a piece of paper and handed it across the desk. “You’re headed to the med tent directly from here, understand? Give them that.”
Instantly sensing an opening, Damarkus stood up in one fast fluid motion, thinking: Don’t ask me to sit back down. The captain looked slightly but not disagreeably surprised, like the guest on his show was vacating the chair before the commercial break kicked in, before the host was out of questions.
Which he wasn’t. He was eyeing Damarkus head to toe, squinting at him like he was drawing a picture of him in his mind but not getting the lines quite right. “You married, sergeant?” he asked, but the genial tone was frayed now, a spear tip poking through.
“Married?” There he went again, echoing the question. “Nossir, not at this time, I am not.”
“How come?”
“Four deployments haven’t helped on that front, sir.”
“I’ll bet.” Lindholm softened now, beaten back by Damarkus’s grizzle. He tossed a life ring, asking, “Girlfriend, then?”
“If I say more than one,” Damarkus said, the answer an old one, the roguish grin practiced, “can I trust you to keep it to yourself?”
The captain guffawed, enjoying this, his laughter untightening the room. But Damarkus felt himself more rigidly tensed than ever, so immobilized that he felt incapable even of blinking. The natural response, he knew, was to inquire why the captain was asking. But he knew why the captain was asking.
“The reason I ask,” Lindholm said, taking care of it for him, “is you and Harris, you know…you guys playing peekaboo in that Bronya.”
“Sir—” Damarkus began, not knowing what was coming next from his mouth and thankful for the captain cutting him off.
“Besides the fraternization, you know,” Lindholm went on, swirling his head around as though to loosen his neck muscles, “people get funny ideas.”
Damarkus sighed in an appalled sort of way, hoping that sent the right signal, whatever the right signal might be. “Yessir, I understand.”
“Last thing you want out here is funny ideas,” Lindholm said, letting it hang in the air.
Damarkus tried imagining what one of his fellow NCOs would say to this but everything he cued up felt like crotch-grab overcompensation, a pledge of allegiance to vaginas. What came out was merely, “Yessir, agreed,” Damarkus cringing inside because it felt insufficient or, worse, like tacit confirmation of the allegation tucked inside Lindholm’s questions. He feared the captain and possibly the entire valley could hear the clanging of his heart.
Lindholm opened his mouth to speak but, with a sharp little flurry of his head, stifled whatever he’d intended to say. Then, as though reading from a prepared script, or from a West Point class handout, he said, “You’re a squad leader, sergeant.” His posture matched his tone: stiff-backed, squared-off. “I’ll ask you to keep that fact front and center in your mind with every action you take whether inside or outside the wire. And to consider the impressions your actions could have on the men you’re leading. That clear?”
Anatomy of a Miracle Page 36