All the Ways We Kill and Die

by Brian Castner

  Hailer punched the British rocket’s measurements into the database, and nothing popped up. He tried searching by nomenclature, the thing’s name, stenciled on the launcher. Nothing. He searched for British rockets and found pictures of old blasting machines. AEODPS was newly digitized—it had been available only in microfiche or individual paper records not long before—and so a few of the younger techs, more comfortable with computers and the new system, tried their hand. Still nothing. Months later, Bill would learn that the only way to find the thin publication in the database was to already know the number under which it was filed.

  He emailed his bosses at headquarters but got no answer. He emailed the EOD technical development center outside of Washington, DC, the publishers of AEODPS, for more detail. They confirmed they knew the rocket existed, but provided little additional help. So Bill and his team made a disposal plan on their own.

  The morning of the job, Bill stayed back at the base to pull standby, and Matt Schwartz and three other members of the EOD team arrived at the Salem munitions storage area before dawn. They loaded C-4 and det cord and time fuze and pull-ring detonators and the British anti-tank rockets onto two trailers towed behind their two unarmored Humvees. Then they drove out to the demolitions range, a featureless expanse of fine sand desert even emptier and lonelier than that upon which Salem was built.

  The war was causing a global shortage of explosives, and ground combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan were the first priority to receive meager shipments, either newly manufactured C-4 or old satchel charges deposited in obscure stateside depots during the Vietnam War. They had some C-4, but Bill was concerned they didn’t have enough, so the night before they all discussed whether they should gently remove each warhead and solid propellant motor from the launcher before detonation. The rockets could then be packed together more tightly, requiring fewer additional blocks of plastic explosive. Bill didn’t like the idea; he was afraid removing the rocket could ignite the motor. Other members of the team thought it necessary. By the end of the talk, each side thought they had convinced the other.

  As the oppressive early-spring sun climbed off the horizon, Schwartz and his teammates got to work. Half the team still thought they were removing the rockets from the launchers, and before anyone could stop them, slipped one out slick as could be. The process worked so unexpectedly well that they decided to download the rest. They passed each rocket slowly down into the hole, a pit explosively dug by a decade’s worth of disposals. Once every rocket was in a dense line, a strip of C-4 was run across the stack. Finally, each tube was discarded into the back of an awaiting empty trailer, tossed aside as harmless scrap.

  Matt stood in the back of that last trailer, snatching empty tubes and pitching them in a pile as fast as he could. Lunchtime temperatures were already typically well over one hundred degrees. His eagerness to be done and out of the heat made him and his team blasé and careless, but why be careful with trash that presented no hazard? They would not have tossed those tubes so recklessly if they had known they were being reckless, if they had known that cleverly concealed in a strip of black plastic on the underside of each launch tube was a gun barrel and magazine of high-power 9mm tracer rounds. They were throwing and kicking a pile of rifles with their hammers cocked. But Matt knew none of this until one fired and a clap of thunder struck the trailer.

  In 2016, one can read the Wikipedia article on the same rocket launcher to learn of the concealed 9mm tracer rounds.

  But in 2004, the first person on the Kuwaiti disposal range to learn of them was Matt Schwartz, when through random happenstance and nothing else, the projectile entered the top of his tan boot, burned through fiber and muscle, and burst in a bloody mess out of the bottom of his foot.

  THE MILITARY WIFE fears the surprise knock on the front door as she would a viper in the cradle. Jenny has heard that knock twice. The first time it was me at the door.

  Staff Sergeant Brown and I had not put on our dress uniforms before visiting Jenny Schwartz. We didn’t want to scare her. Starched coats and a chest of medals says death. Rumpled camouflage says luck and life. Matt would be fine. He would recover and serve out the rest of his tour in Kuwait, be back running on his rebuilt foot in a few short months—but appear in the wrong uniform and there would be no time to explain that. The sight of us in blue would be a stronger message than any verbal reassurances we could give later, too late to prevent the anxiety and dizziness a vomit-inducing uniform brings.

  “I haven’t met Jenny, have I? It is Jenny, right?” I said to Brown as we parked and got out of the truck, smoothed our front pockets and adjusted our hats, walked the short walk from driveway to front door. I had been put in charge of the unit at Cannon only a couple of months prior, and I was already doing a casualty notification about a man I barely knew.

  “Yes, it is Jenny, and you might have been introduced to her last year at the base Labor Day picnic,” answered Brown.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I know her very well, it’ll be fine.”

  Brown knocked, I adjusted my uniform, my hands shook, a baby cried inside, a young woman in blue jeans with an infant on her hip opened the door, and I started speaking before I lost my nerve.

  “Jenny? My name is Captain Castner. I’m your husband’s commander here. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but …”

  She cut me off.

  “Oh, I already know. Matt called this morning. He’s fine. He’s an idiot, but he’s fine. Told me he’s saving that stupid boot as a souvenir. That’s the thing he’s most worried about. Come on in and have some iced tea.”

  We did go in, sat on couch, I held the baby, Brown and Jenny chatted like old friends, I looked in that little girl’s eyes and knew her daddy was fine and that in no time he would come home and that the war would be over soon and so everything would be all right.

  BUT THE WAR didn’t end. It was evolving, metastasizing even as I knocked on Jenny’s door.

  Behind that door, Jenny struggled to create a normal life for herself and her girls, always conscious that financially she was better off than she would have been had she stayed in Traverse City. Financially and every other way too. Leaving Michigan had propelled her to adulthood. She had completed massage therapy school in Florida, and after they moved she got a part-time job at the gym on base. Jenny made friends with my wife and others, all of them with young children and separated from extended family in that remote corner of America’s high plains.

  Cannon Air Force Base in Clovis, New Mexico, was their first real assignment, and Matt and Jenny would be stuck there for six years. Clovis is ten miles from the Texas border and four hours from anywhere you might want to be, a town so small and landlocked that when a local Walmart finally opened—the next closest was over one hundred miles away—it caused a sensation. The land there is utterly flat; stand on a tuna can, the joke goes, and you can see the back of your own head. Such a flatness yields no natural creeks, and so the water pools on the ground the few times a year it rains. It is a land of slaughterhouses and dairy farms and the smothering flocks of brown-headed cowbirds they attract. It is a place where the only thing in abundance is space, enough space for cowboys and cattle drives and alien abduction tales, enough space and privacy for miles of concrete runway and parking ramp and fighter planes. Out there range was both for grazing and bombing; Matt Schwartz worked for the latter.

  A camaraderie develops among those who undertake cooperative hostile labors, who trust others with the safety of their life and limb as a regular part of their day. Firefighters and police, roustabouts and ranch hands, grunts and EOD technicians each have their culture-specific élan that springs from the nature of their work. But the poor wives of these men develop their own sisterhood, an abandoned cohort worthy of Milton: “They also serve, who only stand and wait.”

  The brotherhood of EOD is not all men, and the sisterhood of spouses is not all women, but the ratios are stark, thirty and forty to one, and gender roles perpe
tuate out of sheer practicality. From all over the country, such similar stories: married young, children young, off the traditional college track. They had all joined a peacetime military and saw their plans derailed by 9/11. Add an assignment to a lonely austere speck on a map, and the in-group effect is only magnified. Clovis sat on the prairie of the Llano Estacado, which as far as they could tell was Spanish for Flat Shitty Place, and there were only two ways to make the best of it: drinking and making babies.

  “Most people don’t join the military because they have a great life growing up,” Jenny would observe, looking around her living room of early twenty-something couples bingeing on canned beer and plastic jugs of vodka. The assignment in New Mexico was full of such fests, families in base housing taking turns hosting so they could put their young children to bed and not drive home drunk. Such excessive partying bonded not just the EOD brothers before war, but—in a modern egalitarian spirit that has dispelled any potential stigma—their wives as sisters as well. None of their husbands told the whole story about Iraq or Afghanistan, so the wives would compare notes and find truth in the mosaic. The pile of empty bottles at the end of the night proved they knew what was coming. As her girls got older, Jenny gradually left that scene behind, but it had done its job.

  It was in those years that my wife and Jenny grew close. Jessie connected with her like no one else we had met in my military service. They were the same age, same fit build and sandy-blonde hair, both from little towns in Michigan. Their names were so close they often answered for each other. The three Schwartz girls were nearly the same age as three of our boys, regular playmates when we were all stationed together in New Mexico and at reunions afterward. Jessie and my boys went to the Schwartz’s house nearly every night for dinner while I was deployed in Iraq in 2005. We tried to return the favor when Matt was gone, but once we moved to separate parts of the country, occasional trips to visit had to suffice. Jenny and Jessie did drift apart, would go months without talking, but then would be attached on the phone for hours when one needed the other.

  We got more of those phone calls when Matt was deployed, and his tour to Kuwait would be his last rearguard assignment. He had four more trips in him, two to Iraq and two to Afghanistan, and they would grow progressively more dangerous. In Iraq, he was in some of the worst neighborhoods the country had to offer, ugly towns north of Baghdad during the height of the Surge. His last tour was with the Marine Corps at Camp Leatherneck in Helmand, the bloodiest province in Afghanistan by a two-to-one margin.

  He could see the trend, noted the danger increasing on each of his deployments, but still he went back. Why?

  The earnest patriot, looking for a story of love and brotherhood and the triumph of the human spirit, will be disappointed by the answer. Matt and his family needed the money. He needed the reenlistment bonus; if he timed it right, and signed the contract while overseas, the six-figure check would be tax-free. Three girls to raise, a Great Recession on, no college degree between him and Jenny. He looked for jobs: the Secret Service, the ATF, working construction for his brother in Michigan. Nothing panned out, and so he signed up for another hitch. His modest upbringing had taught him the value of the steady paycheck and the full retirement to follow.

  After his reenlistment, Matt tried to mitigate his combat exposure and failed. After the New Mexico fighter base known for its high-tempo deployment rate, Matt requested an assignment at a career-freezing backwater. He got F. E. Warren Air Force Base, a forgotten outpost on the Wyoming prairie, the home of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles with nuclear warheads. Training to disassemble nukes is tedious and unpopular work, but Matt took it anyway, since it meant no more trips to Iraq or Afghanistan. Soon after he arrived, the Air Force changed its policy. There were too few EOD technicians military-wide, too many deployment slots in theater to be filled; missile bases like F. E. Warren could no longer shelter its support personnel.

  Matt was headed back to combat, where there are no bills and paychecks don’t matter.

  Matt was caught in a certain generational band, a group of EOD technicians who enlisted in the few years before 9/11 and saw the worst of each stage in the war. He was still young during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, when the danger was statistically more modest. He rose in rank and took on increasing responsibilities just as the IED threat spiked and the EOD technician’s job evolved; not only were there more and deadlier hidden devices, but the EOD team leader’s job required more personal exposure to them. If Matt had been younger, he would have had fewer years in the trenches. If he was older, he would have been promoted into leadership and administrative positions that required fewer route clearance missions and no more long walks in the bomb suit. Instead, he was stuck in the middle, counting the years to retirement. Only seven more, the day he died.

  The simple mathematical odds were stacked up against him. One trip to Qatar, one trip to Kuwait, two to Iraq, now two to Afghanistan. Matt was sober enough to recognize the winning streak and know he should cut it off while he was ahead, but it’s hard to step back from the table when you are betting for rent money.

  Matt acted like a dead man walking as his deployment approached. Seven EOD techs died in the three months just prior to his tour, and Matt surely saw the post-blast investigation reports on each. He knew what was coming, and his family felt the vibe and internalized it. There was no way to jinx a sixth post-9/11 deployment, so they did things they never did before, said things they never said before. Matt had gotten shot and lived; his luck had run out a long time ago.

  Jenny had consciously avoided getting family photos on any particular schedule—before deployments or after, on holidays or summer vacations—and it had developed into a superstition. But they broke that rule before this last tour, all sitting for one formal portrait. Emily, their middle daughter, seven years old, declared that that it was nice to get “one last family picture.”

  Messages came in from around the country. Bill Hailer felt compelled to contact Matt when he found an old photo of their EOD unit at Cannon and got a chill. In the picture, three men kneel in front of the main group, Matt with two others who had already died in combat. The photo seemed like a warning. Bill was long retired from the military but still felt responsible for getting Matt hurt on the range at Salem. His last words to his old teammate were: “Stay safe.”

  The grandmother who raised Matt called often in those months, but surprisingly, his grandfather did as well. Jenny wasn’t sure the man even knew how to use a telephone; she had never seen him dial one. He called Matt to say good-bye and that he loved him.

  Matt’s biological father, unreliable for large portions of Matt’s life, insisted on visiting the family in Wyoming, insisted on traveling to Florida to see his son in predeployment training.

  “They aren’t on vacation down there,” Jenny told him on the phone in exasperation. “This isn’t a party. He doesn’t have time to see you.”

  “I promised my son we would have a drink before he shipped off to war, and goddamn it, we will!” he said.

  “Do not contact him. Do not go down there. He is in training to go to Afghanistan. He cannot see you,” she said, and he listened, but as she was saying it, she realized that she was the one to make sure Matt’s father would never have the chance to say good-bye.

  Matt and Jenny and the girls packed into the trailer and went camping on one last family vacation, and they called it that. They all felt what was coming, but even as the family violated every superstition, did the last of everything, Matt’s coldness and emotional distance was implacable. He didn’t laugh. He was never goofy anymore. He came home from work every day, drank a bottle of wine in front of the television, and went to bed. He and Jenny fought constantly. She cried and begged, “When is the old you coming back?” Her goober was gone.

  The gears of the military machine ground on, without consideration for intuitions or unease. The draft military of World War II and Korea and Vietnam was young and often unattached. The moder
n all-volunteer military is professional, full of career officers and sergeants, and so we deploy more and more mothers and fathers, fewer and fewer single men. The average age of a US soldier killed in Vietnam was twenty-three. The average in Iraq and Afghanistan was twenty-six.

  The final jinx was Jenny’s last visit with Matt. “These weird premonitions are too much,” she said. It all felt like Fate or God’s will or both. So though she had never done it before, she left the three girls with family and flew to San Antonio where Matt, having finished his final training cycle in Florida, was awaiting his flight to Afghanistan. They spent his last few days in the United States together, in a suburban motel room.

  Jenny was miserable, but Matt said she just had to deal with it, she just had to suck it up and she did, Jenny dealt with it, she dealt with it all, until the end of December of 2011, after Christmas, when Matt mounted up for a route clearance mission out of Camp Leatherneck and east and north across Helmand Province. Their job was to drive the highways, attract attention, get shot at, clear IEDs, and close with and defeat any resistance they encountered.

  Before Matt left on the mission, he sent that last email to Jenny, the email she had been replaying in her head for the long week of near-silence that followed. This is what it said: