For Your Tomorrow

by Melanie Murray

  At 3:00, the eighteen-vehicle convoy moves out into the pre-dawn darkness and rumbles along the desert track without headlights. Drivers navigate through their night-vision goggles. Intelligence reports warn that the Taliban has put more than eighteen IEDs in the area, so they’re taking a route they normally don’t travel. It’s slow going along Lake Effect Road as thick ground fog obscures the rutted trail.

  They reach the outskirts of Nakhonay; infantry soldiers and snipers sneak around to the north end to block an escape route. Engineers and LAVs set up another cut-off on the east side. Then the convoy thunders down the main road towards the village, raising whirlwinds of powdery dust. Tanks, with mine-clearing rollers and ploughs, lead the way. Jeff listens through his crackling headset, ready to call in “danger close” fire support.

  A pale sun burns through the fog at 5:30. The armoured vehicles form a leaguer—a circular defensive position with LAV guns facing outward—where a crew will stay behind to operate the radios and weapons systems, and monitor movement in the surrounding mountains. The soldiers dismount, prepare their backpacks and set out on patrol. They troop through the narrow laneways, the village as eerily still as a ghost town, skirt the perimeters of the two walled-in compounds and tromp through the stubbly fields. Patrolling with Captain Matt Dawe, Sergeant Sean Connors and their Afghan interpreter, Jeff feels eyes tracking them. Two radios strapped to his back, he picks up chatter through his headset: “Taliban are in the area, watching our every move—stay alert.”

  They come upon some villagers and stop to study them. How would they even recognize a Talib if they met one? Black beards, dark turbans, baggy brown kameez—they just blend in with the locals. Captain Dawe questions them about Taliban hideouts, caches of weapons and bomb-making supplies. The men shrug their shoulders, plead ignorance. But their shifty eyes belie their words. “Yeah, right,” Captain Dawe glares at them. “Another fucking wild-goose chase for the elusive Taliban.”

  They plod on into the pitiless heat of the morning. Traversing an open field, they assess the ground before every footfall. Packed soil is okay. Loosened dirt is suspect. They’re halted by a wadi, a gully almost two metres wide rushing with runoff from the Arghandab River. A dog is barking somewhere close by. “How do we get across this?” Sergeant Connors asks, as they stare into the muddy water. “I wonder how deep it is.”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” Jeff says, taking a few steps back. He makes a running leap and lands in the middle of the stream. After trudging for two tense hours in the sun—twenty-five kilograms of equipment strapped to his back, twenty kilos of armour encasing his sweating body—this is as good as it gets. He whoops and splashes as the waist-high water swirls around him.

  When the major dispatches the order to head back to the vehicles, the mid-morning sun is scorching. There was no kicking down doors and ransacking houses to uncover a bomb-making lab. They are more concerned with showing respect for the villagers and trying to gain their trust. Soldiers strip off their gear, guzzle water from canteens and load up. Jeff’s crew and LAV are a couple of kilometres outside the village, so he’ll catch a ride back with Matt Dawe. He radios up to Steve at their operating post atop Salavat Ghar. “Just mounting up,” he says. “See you guys back at camp.” He’s about to step into the RG when he hears a commotion around the LAV behind him. Jason is barking one-word commands and gesticulating, trying to round up some Afghan soldiers and steer them into the vehicle. “Master Corporal Francis,” Jeff shouts, “having fun?”

  Jason turns around to see his cousin’s face lit up with laughter. “There’s never a damn’terp around when you need one,” Jason calls back, rolling his eyes.

  Jeff flashes him a wide smile and disappears into the RG. He pulls the door tight and nods to the men inside the dark steel box. He buckles the seat belt across his torso, settles back against the hard plastic seat and looks around. The windows are nice, and it’s the safest vehicle we’ve got. But it just doesn’t have that secure homey feel of Lucky 13.

  VII. ASCENSION

  It ended with the linnet, with the birds of turquoise color, birds the color

  of wild sunflowers, red and blue birds

  It ended with the birds of yellow feathers in a riot of bright gold

  Circling till the fire had died out

  Circling while his heart rose through the sky

  It ended with his heart transformed into a star

  It ended with the morning star with dawn and evening

  It ended with his journey to Death’s kingdom with seven days of darkness

  With his body changed to light

  A star that burns forever in that sky

  Jerome Rothenberg, “The Flight of Quetzalcoatl”

  BY 10:30 IN THE MORNING of July 4, it is already heating up to another sizzling day at the Kandahar Airfield. Captain Scott Lang is strolling down the boardwalk on his way to work at Canadian Military Headquarters when he meets a colleague from his regiment. “There’s just been another bomb go off,” he tells Scott. “We’ve lost one of our artillery call signs—G 1-3.”

  G 1-3? That’s Jeff. “Lost?” Scott asks. “You mean killed?”

  “Yeah—six soldiers dead.”

  Scott has seen his friend but a few times in the past five months. Jeff was constantly in the field. The last time was on Canada Day—three days ago. They had a beer together, and he noticed the Lucky 13 tattoo on Jeff’s forearm. The last time. The words sear into his mind. Impossible. Jeff’s face appears before him—his shy smile, his open infectious laugh. A montage of memories replays in an instant: seeing Jeff cold, wet and miserable during basic training; seeing him hot, sweaty and exhausted in officers’ training; seeing him pushed to his limits in pre-deployment exercises. Seeing Jeff at his worst meant seeing him at his best. I never saw him defeated by anything.

  And in that gut-churning moment, Scott knows what he must do to honour his comrade, what he needs to do to repay his debt of friendship. He marches over to the National Command Element building, headquarters for the Canadian contingent in Afghanistan. He asks to speak with the casualty administrator, the officer who coordinates all aspects of a fallen soldier’s return and repatriation. “Sir, I request permission to serve as escort for Captain Francis,” Scott says, blinking his eyes quickly to keep the tears down. “I believe I am the best person to carry out this duty, sir.” He explains their intersecting career paths, their common circle of acquaintances, their friendship. “The love the soldiers felt for Jeff as a leader and a friend was universal,” Scott says, his mouth completely dry as he tries to swallow. “It would be an honour and privilege for me to escort Captain Francis back home.”

  The evening of July 5, a pale yellow moon rises above spotlit Canadian flags drooping half-mast in the warm windless air. Standing at attention on the Kandahar Airfield, Captain Scott Lang feels the day’s heat still radiating off the pavement. Six LAVs trundle across the square; six red-and-white-draped caskets protrude from their open hatches. The vehicles come to a stop. Each casket is eased out by eight soldiers in tan camouflage uniforms and sandy combat boots. They hoist the coffins up onto their shoulders and carry them, slowly, along the yellow line of the tarmac between fourteen rows of troops. A soldier bearing a beret in his open hands follows each one. The bagpipes wail into the darkness:

  Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound

  That saved a wretch like me

  Scott, as escort, steps in behind the red-and-blue flag of the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery to accompany Jeff’s carrying party: three members of his Lucky 13 team, three Sperwan Ghar bunkmates and his two cousins. Their ears brushing the casket; their ashen faces contorted with the burden they shoulder—the body of their comrade, friend and cousin. When all the boots are still, only the flags move slightly in the skittish breeze that has picked up. Row upon row of soldiers stand, heads bowed, berets held over their hearts. In this prolonged pause, the only sound is of muffled sobbing; Scott feels time stop. The world shuts down.
Nothing else matters.

  “The light that brings life to the world,” the padre says, “will never allow the powers of darkness to overcome the light of Canadians like these.” He touches on each soldier’s life, conjures up their faces, their voices, their strong active bodies—now so silent and still. “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” he intones, “I shall fear no evil.”

  The commanding officer calls for the final homage: “Task Force Afghanistan, to your fallen comrades, salute.” Thousands of hands dart to thousands of foreheads. A quick formal gesture, Scott thinks, but so leaden with finality. He joins Jeff’s carrying party as they approach the greenish-grey Hercules C-130 aircraft—“CANADA” emblazoned on its side. It rests with its cargo ramp down like some great winged beast waiting to receive the fallen warriors into its dark belly. The men carry the silver caskets into the cavity—massive Canadian flags shrouding its walls—and encircle them. They gaze at their comrades’ berets lying on top. Internally, they say their farewells.

  The Hercules lifts off from the desert, its nose, windowed eyes and finned tail pointing up into the star-studded sky. The warriors ascend, beginning their return—like the mythic Hercules, himself, carried up in Zeus’s four-horsed chariot to dwell with the empyreal gods amid the shining stars.

  Scott Lang glances over at the two escort officers facing him across the cramped aisle. Only nineteen and twenty-one years old, they sit stiffly in the red webbed seats. Eyes downcast, they appear as numb as he feels. Ears plugged to mitigate the clamour of the Herc’s engines, they delve within themselves, engulfed by the duty they have only just begun: bringing their dead friend home to his family and conducting him to his final resting place.

  The Hercules touches down at Camp Mirage, and a ramp ceremony again honours the six soldiers as their caskets are borne inside the airport. Scott and his fellow escort officers follow every step, ensuring the coffins are safely secured for the night. Early the next morning, they oversee the ceremonial reloading of the caskets aboard a Canadian Forces Airbus for the flight to Germany. At Ramstein Air Base, ramp rituals again pay tribute to the soldiers as their coffins are carried off the aircraft and laded again the next day. As Scott shadows every movement of Jeff’s casket in the four sombre services, he’s unfailingly brought to tears by the great respect and dignity accorded his comrades.

  The metal-grey Airbus sinks through cotton puffs of clouds, beginning its descent onto Canadian soil. Captain Scott Lang shifts in his narrow seat and steels himself for the repatriation ceremony that’s about to unfold at CFB Trenton, Ontario. Wives, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters and brothers await their loved one’s return.

  VIII. TEARS

  For all the history of grief

  An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

  Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica”

  JULY 6. The early morning fog at Eastern Passage lies thick and heavy, merging land, sea and sky into one impenetrable haze. Gerry, a friend of our family since high school, arrives with Tim Hortons coffee and muffins, a big pot of chili he made last night and crusty whole wheat buns. He’s also brought the morning newspapers. Marion and Russ didn’t allow Jeff’s name to be released to the media until late yesterday, so their son’s photo and story are front and centre in the provincial and national papers. “It’s a good picture of him, Marion,” Gerry says, holding up the front page of The Globe and Mail.

  Her smiling freckle-faced son in his helmet and tan uniform looks straight into her eyes. “Oh, my beautiful boy!” she cries and collapses onto the sofa. His boyish face, his name, his death—on the front page of the national newspaper. How can this be possible? She shakes her head, unable to absorb any of it. I sit down and put my arms around her. “When I heard the door open this morning and a man’s voice, I thought it was Jeff … I thought Gerry was Jeff,” she says, shaking her head, bewildered. “I thought Jeff had come home.” All I can do is rock her back and forth in my arms—as she cries.

  Home they brought her warrior dead …

  “She must weep or she will die.”

  So much weeping. “Where can all the water come from?” Marion asks. Streams of salty tears fill the living room; seep outside onto the deck, cascade down the stairs, flow across the road and into the ocean. The high tide rises above the rocky bank, threatening to wash away the houses along Shore Road.

  Isis searched the Nile for the body of her murdered husband-brother Osiris. When she found his coffin, she threw herself upon it and flooded it with her tears. Thus, the Nile rises and overflows its banks every summer.

  And so the gloomy skies open and torrential rains flood the highway as we drive to the Halifax airport. I’m following behind Marion and Russ’s green Mazda van. The military is flying them, along with Mica and Aaron, up to Toronto for the repatriation ceremony at CFB Trenton. My son Gabriel and I are picking up his older brother, Damian, who’s flying in from Vancouver. The wipers swoosh frantically on high speed, but we still can’t see through the water pouring down the windshield. Like many other cars on tourist-packed Highway 102, I pull over until visibility improves. His seat in the reclining position, thirteen-year-old Gabriel is curled towards the door, hoodie over his head, earbuds plugged in. He’s dealing with death’s blow for the first time—witnessing his distraught aunt and uncle, hearing their anguished weeping. His green and golden realm of summer holidays has vanished: he, Russ and Jeff playing navy seals with their Super Soakers in Grand Lake. Up until now, war has been a video game—Call of Duty.

  Damian emerges into the airport reception area, and I cry with relief and gratitude—guilty gratitude. Twenty-four years old, he’s a young man like Jeff in so many ways: a first-born son who has also inherited his grandfather Clifford’s reticent personality, gentle demeanour and trademark dimpled chin. Six foot two, like Jeff, he also thrives on intellectual challenges, as he begins his master’s degree at UBC this fall. It’s been a few years since Damian has seen his cousin Jeff; their summer vacations at the cottage just didn’t coincide.

  We hurtle down the highway en route to Malagash on Nova Scotia’s north coast. To have both my sons safely stowed beside me in our rental car seems as much as I could ask for. “Whenever you say goodbye to someone,” Damian says, gazing out the window, “you should remember that it could be the last time you’ll ever see them.”

  The pelting rain changes to showery mists when we turn off at the Folly Lake exit and wind through the green hills of the Wentworth Valley. We stop to buy groceries, and I’m exiting the store when my eye catches the newspaper rack, the Halifax Chronicle Herald on top. Jeff stares at me from the front page:

  ONE OF SIX SOLDIERS KILLED IN BOMBING WAS OURS

  Our family decided to avoid all the media coverage; it was just too painful. But I can’t resist picking up the paper and reading about my nephew—his life, and his violent death. Some details are inaccurate—his age, where he grew up—and upsetting: “An unidentified source said Capt. Francis wasn’t supposed to be in the vehicle when it went on patrol but offered to help out when a sixth person was needed.” Can this be true? Shoppers bustle around me with their carts, oblivious to this rent in the universe and the dazed woman, wiping away her trickling tears.

  Amidst the corpses of her murdered children, Niobe slowly turned to stone—an immense grey rock, weeping an eternal stream of maternal grief.

  Sunlight is shafting through the clouds when we reach the crest of MacLean’s hill. Yellow-brown hayfields roll down to an indigo sea. I feel a visceral thrumming in my heart—the landscape of home. On the North Shore Road, across from the Union Hall where my parents met, we pass the house where I lived my first four years. The faded-red house of memory transformed to white vinyl siding and black shutters. Just down the hill, beyond the brook we were forbidden to play in, my McGrath grandparents’ house still stands, but with a disorienting facelift as well. White siding covers the pale yellow shingles and green trim of the house that exists more powerfully in my
memory. At the end of the lane, a swing hangs from the same branch of the silver maple where our swing once hung. We turn at the carved wooden sign—McGrath Lane—and drive down the rutted lane, through the woods, to our place on the shore.

  When my mother, her sister and two brothers inherited my grandparents’ property, they divided the waterfront into four cottage lots. They have expansive views of the Northumberland Strait, the warmest salt water north of the Carolinas. My aunt and uncles built their cottages here some twenty years ago. But my mother’s land remained overgrown with alders, scruffy spruce and saltwater maples. She was proud, though, to leave the only property she had ever owned—her most valued possession—to her four grandchildren: Jeff, Mica, Damian and Gabriel. When packing up her belongings after her death, we found a picture we’d never seen, tucked away in the back of a cupboard—a framed print of a brown A-frame chalet surrounded by trees. On the back, written in her familiar script:

  My little A-Shaped Dream House

  I would like to have someday

  at my shore lot in Malagash.

  May 29th, 1987

  This picture now hangs in the travel trailer I parked on her land a few years after her death. Its wide front window faces eastward down the Strait so that the rising sun streams through, summoning me to the day. Every summer I return here with my sons to be nurtured by the sea and by land that remembers me. And every summer, Marion and I take a few more steps towards realizing our mother’s dream, to build a place that’s rooted in the soil from which we grew—for our children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.… The building site is prepared, waiting for the cottage that we planned to have constructed this summer. But now, all has changed … changed utterly.