First, a more distant acquaintance changed his Facebook profile photo. His smiling suntanned face became the bomb squad’s ordnance-and-lightning badge with a thick black band across it, the universal symbol for mourning. Someone had died. Then a second friend changed his photo as well. Someone had died recently, or at least, the news was only now getting out.
So I started over, reviewed when everyone in Afghanistan had last checked in. It was an exercise in frustration. For some it had been weeks; when on patrol in the mountains, a civilian Internet connection was hard to find. I checked the updates of those who normally announce bad news, but there was silence from the Chiefs and commanders. As a last resort, I rechecked the wife network, for offers of vague support and prayers. Nothing from Amanda, but her husband was still recovering from his gunshot wound. Nothing from Monica and Aleesha. Jenny had been silent for hours, which was unlike her, and her husband Matt was deployed. Had he called and told her who it was?
Then a new status update popped up. “Fuck you Afghanistan.”
This was from Pinkham, a much closer friend. My chest clenched. A choke collar around my neck tightened.
Then immediately a direct message to me, from one of the few female techs I served with, Angela Olguin: “I assume u r in the know?”
No, I wanted to shout, I was not in the know. The crossover potential between Pinkham and Angela was small. We had all been assigned to the same unit in New Mexico, a small company of sixteen. Who was there? Kermit, already killed in Iraq. Bill Hailer, retired. Dee, retired. Garet, in Japan. Beau, shot and home. Hamski, already killed. Pinkham, Angela. Matthew Schwartz, who was deployed. Wes Leaverton, was he deployed? Laz? I thought he was in Guam. Piontek, no he got out. Burns too. Who else?
I grew agitated and fidgety, broke the Christmas tree spell.
“What is it?” asked Jessica as she sat up, wary, defensive, holding the blanket to her chin.
“We, we lost someone,” I fumbled.
“Please don’t let it be Matt,” my wife pleaded.
Why Matt? Why did she say Matt?
As fast as my fingers and thumbs could work, I messaged back to Angela: “No, fuck, what happened?”
My mind raced. Who was it? Who’s the worst it could be? Imagine him or her, imagine the worst outcome, and then whoever it is will be a relief.
In our job, we knew there would be casualties. Well, not at first, not when Afghanistan started. But eventually we grew to understand that while our vocation had provided a new family of brothers and sisters, it did so on the condition that too often they would die young. We had all by now learned how to lose acquaintances, a guy you had trained with, a guy you met once on a range clearance or Secret Service mission, a guy whose face appeared in every group photo.
But in time most of us developed a list, buried in the subconscious until moments like these. Five or ten names. The guys you can’t lose. The guys that have to make it back. It is a bargain with Satan. If I have to lose brothers, you tell yourself, I can bear it all as long as you spare these few. Matt and Josh and Phillips and don’t make me say them all. Please, just don’t take this small list that I am hiding in a place I am terrified to look.
Why did Jessie say Matt? Why did she have to say his name out loud?
I sat and shook and repeated my names like a mantra, and Jessie clutched the blanket, and I stared at my phone until it rang not ten seconds later. It was Angela.
“Matt died this morning,” she sobbed.
I nodded my head to Jessie. Her face broke into a thousand pieces, and she collapsed on the floor in front of the glowing Christmas tree.
I DIDN’T GET it right away, but it makes sense now when I look back on it. Of course I would do an investigation. The training kicked in, subconsciously. Grief drove me to unusual lengths, but the old instincts informed the process.
I was an Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer, a leader in the military’s bomb squad. We call it a brotherhood, and there are so few of us we’re all connected by only one or two degrees of separation. The brotherhood is a mindset, an affection, a burden, a bond that endures long after the crucible of EOD school and deployments around the world are over. It’s the covenant we keep with those in the ground, our responsibility to those hobbled before their time, the standard by which I secretly measure everyone I meet.
In EOD, our job is to make bombs safe. Sometimes we can disarm the device before it goes off. Too often, though, the bomb works as designed, and we’re left picking up the pieces, human and mechanical, to figure out what happened. Collecting the forensic evidence, recreating the scene, imagining the attacker’s intentions, noting the effect of each munition on the human body. This is all fundamental to how we are trained to think.
There are so many ways to die, and right away, from the first moment, I wanted to know how Matt died, every last detail. It’s a basic human response magnified by my professional calling. It was January of 2012. We thought Iraq was over, but Afghanistan was still bloody, and Matt was just the latest in a terrible string of killed and crippled. Fifteen of my fellow EOD brothers had died in the previous twelve months, a killed-in-action rate of 5 percent, over ten times the average for American soldiers at the time. The year before that had been even worse, and I had lost track of the number of amputees created. For a while there, it seemed like every few days you heard someone lost a leg.
Some of us slip through the war unscathed, and some are lost to it, and some step up to the brink and then are pulled back from the abyss.
War can be random; you can die from bad luck, wrong place at the wrong time. But other times they pick you out of the crowd, and it’s intentional and premeditated. If it weren’t a war, we’d call that murder.
I needed to know which it was. Was Matt unlucky or targeted?
So I did an investigation. In EOD, you always work as a team, and so I started with my teammates. I talked to the maimed, the too often forgotten survivors of both the random and deliberate bombs, and the medics who treated them. I talked to the detectives, the intelligence analysts and interrogators, who work the forensics and build the profile of the bomber. I talked to the hunters and killers who finish the job. I collected evidence from all of them, the same as I would from a blast site. And in the end, I learned that the story of Matt’s death was also the story of the Surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, that both we and the jihadists have fundamentally changed the methods by which we fight, and that Matt was fatally caught up in all of it.
That’s the story I’ll tell here. All the ways we die, and nearly die, and who and how we kill in response.
But first I had to bury the dead.
2 ♦ ROAD TO PERDITION
JENNY SCHWARTZ WISHED SHE WAS wearing a T-shirt that bore the news. That would make life just a little easier, save her the trouble of constant explanation.
If she had a T-shirt, it would be like wearing dark sunglasses and holding a white cane. Some small part of her brain would calm, as everyone around her would instinctively know that beginning yesterday, and for the rest of her life, the context of every future breath had been irreparably altered.
Instead, she felt the need to tell everyone around her, every stranger she met. It was like a mouthful of too-hot coffee. It had to come out.
And so as she sat on that commercial airplane from Cheyenne to Delaware, flying via a hastily arranged ticket that probably cost more money than she made in a month, she couldn’t help herself. She just said it to the man vacuum-sealed into the seat next to her.
He was fat. He spilled over the armrest. He was in his early thirties probably, about her age. He was sweating slightly. He had not stopped talking since they took off. Her eyes may have been red and puffy; was that why he kept going on and on, relieving some perceived social awkwardness? All at once, it was too much. She cut him off.
“I’m sorry, but I just need to tell you this. My husband died yesterday morning in Afghanistan. We’re going to meet his body at the morgue.”
Silence.
And then a flood from the fatty mouth. I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I can’t imagine. I just want to give you a hug. You just look like you need a hug. Do you need anything? Please, can I buy you a drink? Do you need somewhere to stay in Delaware? Here, here is my card. You can call me any time. Just to talk, if you need someone to talk to. You know, for now, just to talk.
Widow, she thought, not for the last time. It would be easier if I just had a T-shirt that said “widow.”
She would tell everyone by the end of the day. The flight attendants. Taxi drivers and waitresses. The clerk at the Fisher House and the maid on the way to her room and the guys at the EOD unit who already knew and her friends who kept calling and texting her phone and filling her Facebook wall with prayers. She would tell all of them the same thing. “I’m sorry. My husband died yesterday.”
But for now, she just sat in her seat on the plane and waited and looked out the window. She had just left a town at war; Cheyenne has two military bases within a mile of city hall. Her destination, Dover, Delaware, was a similar small town with a large base, the debarkation point for thousands of dead. Dover was also at war. But were the lands in between? For years Jenny had felt she was living a separate life, a parallel track from the America that she saw on the news or from her few nonmilitary friends on Facebook. The feeling of isolation was only growing.
Isolation, and anger. She was furious at him, for dying, for leaving her to bury him alone.
Jenny would eventually ask why. After a year or two, she would. It would take time, longer than her friends imagined, but she would. That day, though, and for many long months that followed, asking why didn’t make sense. There was only a how, and on that airplane, the day after he died, this was how.
JENNIFER O’BRIEN AND Matthew Schwartz had grown up together in Traverse City, Michigan. Back then it was a poor and shrinking cluster of houses on a frozen lake, not the beach town and artist retreat it is today, and they were two kids largely left to make their own way. Jenny’s parents had died in a car accident on Christmas Eve when she was very young, and so her much older sister had raised her. Matt’s mother and father had divorced, and were only occasionally part of his life as a child. Not abandoned, not estranged, but also not consistently present. Day-to-day he was raised by his grandparents, a chore they embraced. His grandmother always called Matthew by his full name, because it means “Gift of God.”
Jenny and Matt met in a local grocery store where they both worked, she fifteen, he a year older. His hair was long and he partied too much, but he was goofy, “a giant goober” she would call him, and she liked that. Neither was dedicated to school. No family member or guidance counselor intervened. Neither thought about where they were headed. Both college and career remained unconsidered paths. After high school, Matt worked as the night security guard at the local Sara Lee factory. Jenny got a job at the front desk of the Grand Traverse Resort. She sat and answered phones and watched the massage therapists make more money. I could do that, she thought. But she didn’t. Matt took a couple of classes to get his private pilot’s license, but quickly ran out of money. Aimless and unsatisfied, Matt and Jenny broke up, and as he was now free of his primary Traverse City attachment, Matt enlisted in the military in late 1999 for reasons common to countless numbers of young men before him: the simple need to leave.
When Matt returned for a brief visit later that year, Jenny didn’t recognize him. The boy who left for Air Force Basic Training had come home for Christmas a man. He was now stationed in Fort Walton Beach, training to become a bomb technician at the EOD school at Eglin Air Force Base. He was already a generation removed from the Sara Lee factory and the grocery store, doing things no one in Traverse City did. He didn’t ask her to follow him to Florida, not really. It was understood; this was her chance to escape rural Michigan.
You better treat her right, her older brother told Matt, and that was that.
There was a massage therapy school in Fort Walton Beach. It was six months long, the same length of time as the remainder of Matt’s training. It seemed like a sign that things were possible in other places that were not possible at home. That it would all work out.
She left Traverse City for good. She joined him on the road to a marriage, to three children, to an Air Force career. It was 2000, the new year had come without a computer crash, the world was at peace, the Clinton boom showed little sign of stopping, and they were moving to sunny Florida.
MATTHEW SCHWARTZ WAS shot on his second combat tour and died on his sixth, and that story, like so many others, begins on September 11, 2001.
On that morning, Jenny was in bed with a toddler and Matt was at the Cannon Air Force Base gym, doing physical training before dawn. It is still hot that time of year on the utterly flat prairie of eastern New Mexico, and so his unit woke early to build their sweat in the cool mornings, avoiding the acrid breeze off the feedlots brought on by the afternoon heat. Never a runner, Matt usually got in a lift and then hit the basketball court, where most days they played a quick pickup game in which elbows were freely thrown and fouls rarely called. Matt wasn’t much of a shot, but his deceptive height and growing bulk frustrated driving point guards.
The morning of 9/11 was like any other morning until the towers fell, and then Matt asked the same question a million other military souls asked: “Where we will go, and how soon?” No one knew the answer, just as they didn’t yet know that the real question was, “How long will we be there?”
Matt had finally graduated from EOD school only eight months prior, and as the youngest and least experienced member of his unit, his answer to “where” was not Afghanistan but the presidential ranch in nearby Crawford, Texas. He spent the weeks before Christmas assigned to the Secret Service, searching visitors’ bags and vehicles while F-16s from Cannon patrolled overhead. Two weeks later, he was off to Camp Snoopy, the American outpost at the international airport in Doha, Qatar, one of the rapidly expanding bases strategically sandwiched between Saddam and the Taliban. Matt spent the first half of 2002 watching cargo come in for the war in Iraq and special operations wide-bodies go out for missions in the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan. He never got any closer to the real fight than the humid flight line, and then he went home.
His second tour came a year and a half later, to Kuwait. Ali al Salem Airbase is a rocky speck in the emptiness that forms several natural borders in that part of the world, past the western outskirts of Kuwait City but off the main roads that lead to Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Salem was a radar station and sleepy C-130 hub during the long decade of Operation Southern Watch—the United States’ name for the mission to ensure Saddam Hussein didn’t kill the Marsh Arabs and other Shiites near the river deltas of the Tigris and Euphrates—but it expanded quickly to support the invasion north. The bermed border was only forty miles away.
By the time he arrived, though, major operations were already winding down. The worst Matt would have anticipated from such a posting were occasional trips into the desert to dispose of old unexploded ordnance, a daily drudgery of flight line standby, and sleepless nights listening to sortie takeoffs. It was early 2004, before the four contractors were hung from a bridge in Fallujah, and throughout the military the sense still pervaded that Iraq would be done as quickly as Afghanistan, and you had better act fast if you wanted to see any action. Stuck at Salem, Matt could only hope that he’d be called north to augment a unit doing real work.
But the call never came, and Matt watched the Iraq War on cable news. Salem was emptying; coalition countries that had partnered with the United States in the invasion, including the British, were packing up to go home. But shipping munitions is a costly and hazardous process, and once delivered it is usually best to leave them wherever they are. When the main UK forces left Salem, several bunkers worth of ordnance stayed behind.
Bill Hailer was the chief of the Air Force EOD unit at Salem, and thus tasked with cleaning up every other country’s munitions mess, and when he wandered into the Br
itish bunker he discovered a puzzle that did not please him at all. Bill was a craggy ranch hand with a graying fifties flattop and wind-pitted face. He had grown up in southeastern New Mexico, near Cannon, where he was stationed with Matt. He was a master sergeant nearing his twenty-year retirement mark, and in those twenty years Bill had been just about everywhere an EOD technician could deploy, including Kandahar in Afghanistan immediately after the initial October 2001 invasion. Bill preferred straightforward missions and cut-and-dry procedures, and before the improvised device war in Iraq he found it in a professional lifetime of working with military ordnance, using established techniques and explicit safety precautions. But this bunker was different and presented a problem: it was full of rockets he did not recognize.
The Brits had beat feet out of town so quickly they barely had time to leave Bill a metaphorical note: “Gotta go—please blow these up for us. Brilliant! Cheers!” The few ammo troops left behind were clueless. Bill had expected 1,000-kilogram aircraft bombs, No 1 Mk 1 dispenser cans, something of an aerial nature to match the forces that had been stationed at Salem. Instead, he found infantry weapons: a few dozen stacks of wooden shipping crates cradling shoulder-launched rockets. Bill inspected further.
They almost looked like American Light Anti-Tank Weapons (LAWs). They were the right basic cylindrical shape, the right length, a door on each end of the tube. But the trigger assembly was bulky and a little odd, a foreign lever-actuated system. And they were too big around; American LAWs are only 66mm in diameter, and these were much bigger. Probably even bigger than the US Army’s 84mm AT-4. And newer looking than both of those systems for sure. Bill took a picture of an open crate using a bulky digital camera containing a 3.5-inch floppy disk and went back to the shop to investigate the cipher he had inherited.
He searched for the rockets in a computer program called AEODPS (pronounced “AID-ops”), the master database of all munitions known to the US intelligence services. Like a Christmas catalog of Civil War cannonballs and Russian surface-to-air missiles, it is an international arms dealer’s wet dream. It is also the bible for bomb techs, and trusted as if God bequeathed a million specific commandments. AEODPS delineates each piece of ordnance in excruciating detail: sizes and weights, key markings for identification, the firing mechanism with blown-out diagrams as you would find in a grease-stained car repair manual, historical use by countries and organizations, and, of most concern, detailed instructions for disarming the fuze, disposing of the explosives completely, and staying alive while doing so. Collectively, it is every EOD trade secret in one place, and thus classified and highly controlled, one of the more closely overseen sets of documents in the US military.
All the Ways We Kill and Die Page 2