“The police. They’ve stopped the car. They’re talking to her. You never do that. They should have shot her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“If they think a bomb is in the car, everyone needs to get back, and you need to shoot her!”
“Matt, this is America. You can’t just do that!”
“Jenny, I think I know something about this. I think I know what you should do. And I’m telling you, I don’t care where you are, you shoot her in the fucking head!”
Which man lay in this box? The perpetually smiling goober from the memorial photo? Or the other one?
Jenny led her girls back to Aleesha and Amanda and Jessie, the small group of EOD wives waiting for her at the end of the aisle. They hugged her, and like a child she put her head down on Aleesha’s chest.
“Are you okay?” they asked.
“I want to crawl in the casket with him and fall asleep,” she said.
THE MIND IN grief seeks safe harbor in the sure detailed facts of the death. But no longer connected to any official channel or source more reliable than vague DoD press releases and Internet reports, I was adrift and still knew nothing. It was not until the wake, a week after Matt’s death, that I could finally corner a fellow EOD guy and ask some detailed questions, to relieve some of the anxiety of ignorance.
“I don’t have access anymore,” I said. “All I’ve heard is that he was in a convoy. I haven’t seen the report. Have you?”
“Yes, I’ve seen it,” said Pinkham, an old friend from Cannon. “The initial report anyway. He died midsentence.”
“What do you mean?”
“They were mounted, in the JERRV,” said Pinkham. “Blast hit between the driver and team chief up front. Vented through the hull, into the cab. Massive blast over-pressure. Threw the JERRV twenty feet in the air, I heard. So it was big, it was quick. It wasn’t … that. You know, what you worry about. What you think when you hear they were in the truck.”
Yes, I knew what he meant. All of the worst ways to die had been in the front of my thoughts as well. Like the doctor treating their own sick child, too much knowledge and insight can consume. That headache could be meningitis. Lethargy could be leukemia. If it was another child, it would be easy to dismiss. But your own …
Fire is the night terror of every armored vehicle occupant. The JERRV, the massive six-wheeled and V-hulled armored truck used by EOD forces whenever the road allows, used to carry a spare tire up front, bolted in place right behind the team chief’s passenger side door. New trucks from the factory still bear it, but it’s the first thing to come off when the JERRV arrives fresh and clean at your compound’s parking yard. No one ever drives them in combat like that anymore, not since one took a rocket-propelled grenade square on the four-foot-tall tire. The armor absorbed the blast, but the tire burst into flame. It melted through the door seals and rapidly moved inside the truck, spreading through the flammable interior, a wind-whipped desiccated grassland of seat covers and uniform fabrics. The crew fled in time, that time.
But we’ve all done a post-blast where they didn’t. The meat slides off the bone like greasy pork short ribs cooked all day in an Alabama smoker.
In my worst fears, Matt’s truck was hit by a smaller bomb, or one placed less perfectly. It could have caught the fuel tank or ignited the bang stored on the outside of the truck or pushed the hot engine block into the cab. Thrown toward the ceiling or side wall by the blast, striking his head against the armored can, Matt could have been knocked unconscious as the JERRV nosed into a dirt berm. Slumped, crumpled, neck unnaturally overextended as his heavy helmet pulled his head to the side, radio crackling, Are you okay are you okay, as smolders swell to open flame, and red and orange forms flash to life around him.
A minute passes, and nothing.
It would be the coughing that finally rouses him, his lungs filling with the acrid black and green smoke of burning plastic and electronics. Half-blind, his glasses slipping from his nose, not knowing whether to fumble for his harness first or the door. He would have woken up waist deep in the Phlegethon, the river of fire and boiling blood that comes for the violent of this earth. His feet are hot inside his boots. He violently slaps his thighs, momentarily staving off the flames that crept up his pants.
He yells at his driver. He yells at his robot operator. They still slumber.
Matt could have fumbled with the nylon restraining straps on his seat as a face appears in his window. It’s his security. They shout and wave to get him to open the door, shut tight with two heavy metal combat locks, drive bar activated at the top and bottom of the frame by a massive swinging handle. He reaches for it, but misses in a wave. His right arm is pinched against the seat and the truck hull, and his left isn’t responding like it should. He yells at this security. They yell back at him. All is muffled, as the flames intensify and noxious smoke shuts out the light.
Like a hurricane, the rescue MRAP could have arrived. The last truck in the convoy, massive drag chain attached to the front chassis and wrapped up and about the hood and front grille. In a flash that chain is unwound, solid tow hooks attached to the D-ring latches on the outside of the JERRV door. Get out of the way, the platoon sergeant barks, as the driver of that MRAP grinds the transmission into reverse, buries the pedal, and speeds backward to tear that armored cage limb from limb.
And snaps the chain. The combat locks hold. The MRAP bumper bolts hold. The rescue D-rings on the JERRV, proudly spark-welded in place by a veteran craftsman at the factory in South Carolina, doing his part to fight the war and bring our boys home safe, they hold as well. The chain snaps, and the MRAP nearly backs into a ditch, and the fire rages and the platoon sergeant yells to grab the spare out of the back of the command Humvee.
Driven mad from panic and pain and heat and blindness and choking poisonous breaths, Matt could have cursed his God and his ravaged arm that doesn’t have the strength to twist the release on the secure combat lock. Locked in to keep the hostile crowds out. To keep an Afghan mob from pulling open the doors and dragging your body through the streets and hanging you from a bridge. Those heavy locks could have done their job. No one can get in.
His security on the outside can’t hear him screaming, but they can feel the pounding against the door, see his fist beat against the armored glass of the porthole-like window, the hull of the JERRV hot to the touch now as they desperately take a crowbar to the door. The soldiers will work to free him long after the pounding stops and the smoke completely blocks their view inside, long after he stops moving at all, his nose and lips blackened craters, only the metal plates of his body armor recognizable among his gear. When they finally get the door off, the smoke will pour out anew, the soldiers vomiting from the smell as they desperately claw inside and take a hold of the first exposed limb available, in their haste forgetting the manner in which that arm is going to fall in their lap. Short ribs.
This was my nightmare. Matt could have died in a fire. But he didn’t. He died midsentence. I knew that for sure when I finally glimpsed his perfect, pale face propped on a clean, soft pillow, and the tears ran undammed off my cheeks and down the side of the casket and onto the floor. Thank the Lord.
WHEN THE CROWD lined up at the sanctuary door, Jenny put on her face and braced a mask of brave smiles. All night, the stream of mourners never slowed, greeting her, then filing past into the main aisle and reception area and cafeteria space in the basement. There was family, of course, and military friends from previous assignments, local police and firefighters and National Guard, concerned citizens and local politicians. Traverse City is not so large that the native sons it has sacrificed in the post-9/11 wars are anonymous or uncountable; Matt is the fourth of five.
They pity me, Jenny thought. She could see it in their red eyes and stooped shoulders, the tears meant for her and her daughters. They wonder how we’ll make it. They wonder what will happen to our family. Jenny didn’t want to be pitied, but there was no help for it. All she coul
d do was be stronger than them. She decided she wouldn’t cry, not until the show was done, and she and the girls were alone.
Jenny stayed at the wake until the very end. The girls had long since gone back to the hotel, taken by Matt’s brother and her sister-in-law, who had assumed the lion’s share of the babysitting, feeding, bathing, clothing, and entertaining duties as Jenny’s empty body proceeded as required through all expected duties and rituals.
Jenny walked out of the back of the church as the lights were being shut off, her breath momentarily taken away as she stepped into the frigid, snowy darkness of the northern Michigan winter. The door was opened for her by a middle-aged man with a long mustache and riding leathers. His fellow Patriot Guard Riders were each in exactly the spot she had left them hours before. Most held an American flag, a few the black and silhouetted image of the Prisoner of War/Missing in Action memorial. Each stood in a little hole; they had stayed off the shoveled sidewalk to make space for mourners, and so through occasional shuffling and stamping of cold feet, they had packed down a small space in the adjacent knee-high snow. Four hours in the single-digit dark.
“Thank you for coming,” she said to each in turn.
“It is our honor, ma’am,” they replied one by one.
That night her sisterhood of fellow EOD wives stayed with her in her hotel room. Jenny took off her mask and drank as fast as she could until sleep finally took her.
ON THE MORNING of Matt’s funeral, the sky was empty and pale. The snow-producing cloud cover of the last several days was finally gone, and like an insulating blanket suddenly ripped off the bed while you sleep, a shocking cold set in, that particular sharp-eyed cold that assaults the interior of your nose, squeezes your sinuses shut, and makes your head throb as the roof your mouth begins to freeze with each breath.
We all returned to the same church we had left only hours ago. Every pew was full, and the back wall of the church filled with the overflow. Two priests said the funeral Mass, an abundance of clergy in this time of national shortage, an elderly semiretired man and the comparatively younger current pastor of the parish. The older priest had overseen Matt’s conversion to Catholicism, had answered all of his probing and barbed questions as Matt determined if a life in this church was right for him, had married Matt and Jenny in that same church more than a decade before, had baptized their oldest daughter.
Perhaps in times past it was commonplace for priests to bury those they have married. Perhaps priests used to specialize in taking out those they had brought in, when an unkind harvest would shorten the lives of those in the fields. But priests are out of such practice now. They are unused to seeing the full span.
The younger pastor led the service, gently cued those unfamiliar with the rituals and responses, the standing up and sitting down. There is comfort in being told what to say; one’s own words never sound more hollow or insufficient than in requiem. The priest presided with pride and regret and perspective and exhaustion.
“More than any pope or theologian,” he said in the homily, “more than any biblical scholar, more than anyone in this church, Matt knows the Truth of it now.”
Matt knows the truth. Everything for him has been answered, but I still had so many questions, starting with this practical matter: is the bottom half of him in that casket?
I didn’t think about it until I had left the wake the night before. Only the top half of the casket was open. Why was that? Was his bottom half not in there? Pinkham said the JERRV took the blast between the driver and team leader up front. Did it shear Matt in half? If I had thought about it the night before when I last saw him, I would have checked. I would have put my hand in and checked. Is the bottom half of him in the casket? Who could I ask now? Not Jenny, not now, but who else would know? Is the bottom half of him in the casket?
I could think of little else during the service until nearly the end. As he intoned the final prayer, the priest’s stoicism finally cracked, and I heard a catch in his voice. Surrounded by Jenny and the girls, he laid a hand on the draped casket and begged that Matt have angels to lead him and martyrs to welcome him, to Paradise, where Lazarus is poor no more.
Matt and Jenny led the procession out of church, past more Patriot Guard Riders already mounted for the processional convoy from the church to the cemetery. It was a seven-mile drive, and the January sun was too feeble to break the cold, yet still the streets of Traverse City were full of mourners and well-wishers and sign holders, flag wavers, and small children and saluting old men in one unbroken chain the full length of our journey.
This welcome-home parade offered no Manhattan ticker tape, only rest for a servant good and faithful.
The snow was thick and unspoiled at the cemetery, white clumps clinging to the boughs of the encircling pine trees. We parked in a line, tromped a path through the white to a small fabric tent and deep trench it sheltered.
I looked about. All of the gravestones were covered in a blanket of snow. I couldn’t read any of the names.
There were a few chairs in the tent, and Jenny and the girls and Matt’s parents took them. An honor guard carried the casket ahead of us and set it upon the belt and winch suspension system that straddled the hole. The priest continued his prayers, and the honor guard prepared their rifles, and I wondered how much of Matt we were burying, and then the general stepped forward.
Lieutenant General James Kowalski, three stars on his shoulder, shaved gray hair and lips a line. General Kowalski was the commander of all intercontinental ballistic missile and nuke-capable bomber units in the United States Air Force. He started flying B-52s in the Carter administration. He led the sole bomber wing that pounded Baghdad in 2003 and had not done a combat tour in the Middle East since. That wasn’t his fault; it was to him to prepare for another war while burying the casualties of this one.
The honor guard approached with a flag folded into the triangle shape of the hat worn by the soldiers of our country’s first war. The general got on one knee and looked Jenny right in the eye. He spoke under his breath, muffled and intimate despite the mourners crowded all about.
Jenny told me later that she felt bad for him. He was distraught and holding back tears.
“On behalf of the President of the United States,” he said, on the edge of hearing, “the Department of the Air Force, and a grateful nation, we offer this flag for the faithful and dedicated service of Technical Sergeant Matthew Schwartz.”
Jenny took the flag, and she nodded, and the general stood up, and when he stood up we all let out a sigh, all of us shoulder-to-shoulder against the cold, grateful that the worst was finally over. But we were wrong. The general turned sharply to his left, moved one seat down, and prepared to present another flag. Three more, one to each daughter. He abandoned the script, spoke to each of them in turn, said things only they could hear. It was another ten minutes before he finally got off his knees.
A bomber jet roared overhead on cue, they lowered the casket into the ground, we took turns dropping our EOD badges into the awaiting hole. I had nearly forgotten mine, but before I left, I dug in the basement and found the silver badge I had last worn on active duty. I hoped it would be sufficient to lie with Matt for what’s left of eternity.
How much did we just put in the ground?
That was only my first question: Is his bottom half in the casket? By then, I had a hundred more.
WHEN I GOT home, I sat down at my computer, Googled Afghanistan, and pulled up the satellite map. I zoomed in on Camp Leatherneck, Matt’s last home. It sits at the bottom of the loop, just south of the highway ring road that ostensibly connects the country, Kandahar to Kabul to Mazer-e-Sharif to Herat and back. But there was nothing to learn from this wide view. Zoom in once, the runway and living areas just come into focus. Zoom in again and the base disappears completely, a mirage in the desert.
I shifted the satellite image slightly to the east, to Kandahar, and found the airbase on the southeast side of the city. I zoomed in further. First, just s
and and highway and tire-stained runway. Then details emerged, slowly and in blocks, and though there was little to see in the bland square structures, I stared anyway.
Soon a digital artifact revealed itself, a north-south line of clarity that split the airbase. C-130s and Marine Ospreys and Chinook helicopters and fabric shelters appeared in high definition on the west side of the base, yet on the eastern side the blur remained, no matter how I cropped and zoomed. The smudge stifled my attempts to learn more.
In eight years in the military and three tours in the Middle East, I had been to Afghanistan for a total of two days and one night, barely long enough to smell the place. I spent more time flying over the country than awake on the ground, and in my daily journal, I wrote little more than this:
“We are six hours ahead of Zulu. Eastern time is [then another] four hours back, sometimes five. We are further away from England than England is from Michigan. I am literally on the other side of the world from my wife. And I can feel it.”
Disappearing Camp Leatherneck, the smear across Kandahar. Google reinforced that distance, rather than bridge it.
I had been to that blur, though, in 2005. On my sole day in Kandahar, I walked through it when it was still an active construction project: a parking ramp and hangars and taxiway extension for a new unit of Predator drones, now surely hunting along Matt’s last patrol route.
Outside of Kandahar, Google confidently lays out highways that IEDs and mines have long since made impassable, and it misses the donkey paths that actually carry the traffic. From the air, the villages are bichromatic: brown huts and fields, green trees lining the canals. Each farm appears to be the model of orderly symmetry, every row precisely tilled, as if we are looking not from a satellite but through a microscope at a series of ribbed mitochondria.
With my mind’s eye, I followed those dirt roads west, back toward Matt’s final mission, and found the Reg desert and Mushan and Taloqan in the Horn of Panjwe, where Dan Fye lost a leg, and then farther toward Sangin and beyond, where Matt lost it all. Add up the last few years, I knew, and my comrades had left a few dozen arms, legs, hands, and eyes in that stretch of country.
All the Ways We Kill and Die Page 5