All the Ways We Kill and Die

by Brian Castner

  Hopkins’s worst day came in the front half of his tour, during his company’s assault on Perotsi. It took an entire day of fighting to get into the city. First platoon and ANCOP went ahead, and the sappers fired MICLICs, the giant landmine–breaching rockets, down the streets, each dirt road detonating linearly to clear the hidden IEDs. Hopkins was with the company headquarters in reserve, but then the medic assigned to first platoon got hit himself. By the time Hopkins got to him, soldiers had already placed tourniquets, so Hopkins packaged him for medevac and bandaged the head of the Afghan cop who was next to him, and suddenly he was the medic for first platoon.

  The sappers kept firing the MICLICs, and Hopkins and the rest of the platoon crept forward behind them, taking ground as it was pulverized. MICLICs look like a long rope, of the type you had to climb in gym class, except with C-4 at every knot. They were designed to clear Soviet minefields and usually the massive charges obliterate everything in their path. But then, unexpectedly, they saw the pad of a pressure plate revealed in the road nearby. It was a piece of an IED, and as the road thundered and the ANCOP bunkered down, the platoon sergeant pointed to the pressure plate, called to a specialist and machine gunner to run to get it. The clear sky rained dirt on their heads, and the platoon inched forward under the fire of the sappers, and they knew that the pressure plate was evidence, that this is what was different about the Surge, that JIEDDO said to win the war they needed to move Left of Boom, and the specialist and gunner broke off and ran to get the pressure plate, and they retrieved it and had it in their hands and on their way back to the line the specialist stepped on another and blew their world to shreds.

  The specialist died quick. When they die, they die fast. They don’t talk. Their brains can’t run the program. The mechanical pumps the red on the ground, but the computer crashes and the microchip memory fades like a dimming LED. The specialist was dead and quiet.

  But the machine gunner talked him through every moment. The bomb took his two legs and an arm and threw him clear, and as Hopkins worked on him, it was all business. After Fye, Hopkins had changed the type of tourniquets he carried. The new model, with the metal friction adapters and windlasses and locking screws, looked fancy but they never stopped Fye’s bleeding. So now Hopkins ratcheted on six of the older but tested conventional type. The gunner was in shock and had morphine onboard, but he was present like a Buddhist monk. He talked about the bomb. He talked about drinking Jack Daniel’s and eating a steak dinner. He talked about the bird. Just like Fye had.

  Of all the ways to die, this is the worst, Hopkins decided. To be rational and coherent. To understand. To know you are dying and talk through it and see the black corners creep in as the blood leaks out. To know every second what’s happening and be powerless to stop it.

  But Hopkins also knew that if they were talking, there was still hope. The quiet ones died. The gunner was all business. There was still a chance he might make it. And he did. Hopkins sealed him up tight and he made it. Triple amp, one of the 629 soldiers who lost at least one limb in the Surge.

  Hopkins didn’t know about the Engineer, didn’t know where the bombs came from, only knew that the soldiers went in on foot and came out on stretchers, that he cranked tourniquets and packed holes and waited for the QuikClot chemical reaction to burn and bind while the rescue helicopters ran the circuit. Soon after that day, the company commander said that, despite the Surge guidance, they were done with foot patrols. They all remounted their Strykers, and the casualty ratio improved immediately.

  Hopkins also didn’t know the numbers, that in Afghanistan eight guys are supposed to make it for every one that dies. On his worst day, did he only manage three to one? The first platoon medic and the Afghan cop and the machine gunner against the specialist who died quick? No, the number crunchers wouldn’t even cede him that. The Afghans don’t count. Only two to one for the record books.

  After they had all got back in their armored trucks, Hopkins’s company had another day, a bloody day throughout the province. Sixteen medevacs later, they almost made the average, fourteen hurt and two killed. Then they had another day, and another day, and another day, and enough other days that the medal he got at the end of his tour said he did over a hundred traumas. He has no idea who did the counting.

  If you were an Afghan, it was easy to die in your own country: infection, gunshots, malnutrition, stabbings, detonations. But if you were an American soldier, it got harder and harder to die every day.

  Eight to one. But that one.

  It had never been so hard for an American to die in honest-to-goodness, help-me-sweet-Jesus combat. But Matt Schwartz had. He was one of the quiet ones. He died midsentence.

  JENNY SCHWARTZ KEEPS the autopsy report in a manila envelope on the top of her coffee table with the TV remote and her daughters’ homework. The report is a thick sheaf of white printer paper densely packed with strings of medical terms. Jenny was enrolled in the local community college and had recently taken gross anatomy, but that only decoded half of the words. So my wife, Jessie, the former emergency room nurse, helped her through the hematomas and edemas and contusions and cardiovascular failures.

  The autopsy said Matt died from a herniated brain. The volume inside of the main cavity of the skull is fixed and packed with three substances: brain, cerebral spinal fluid, and blood. When Matt’s skull hit the ceiling of his armored truck, it caused a flooding hemorrhage, and as his brain bled it filled the cavity. Via simple physics, the constant pressure of the fluid pushed his cerebellum and brain stem down and out of the bottom of his cranium like a half-shit turd. Brain death is immediate.

  The autopsy said Matt died from overwhelming blast injury to his lungs. The armor of his truck failed, and the main blast vented immediately to Matt’s left. The compression wave travels through the body with a tremendous shearing force, and each air sack in Matt’s lungs, each delicate structure evolved to transfer oxygen to blood, burst from the shock. Matt bled out from the inside and drowned.

  The autopsy said Matt died from a cut spinal cord. The impact of his head on the steel truck ceiling broke his top two cervical vertebra, the atlas and axis, C1 and C2. An injury so high, where brain stem becomes cord, causes immediate paralysis. His brain stopped telling his lungs to breathe. But his brain was already herniated, and his lungs a red rag.

  The autopsy said Matt died from generalized trauma throughout his body. He wasn’t wearing his seat belt and combat harness, perhaps because they had just remounted after clearing an IED, perhaps because he hated it and had nightmares and didn’t want to get trapped in a burning truck. Whatever the reason, the collision of his body on the ceiling broke half his ribs, fractured his pelvis, and disconnected his internal organs from one another. In 2004, in Kuwait, a bullet shot through Matt’s foot. In 2012, every one of the bones in both of his feet were liquefied, and bags of mush filled his boots.

  Matt died four times.

  It has never been so hard to die in a war, and Matt died four times. At least he didn’t know he was dying, but he died four times. He had boots, so I finally had one answer from the funeral: the casket was full, and we put all of him in the ground. Of all the ways to die, thank God it was such a good death and at least he didn’t die in a fire, but he died four times. He died midsentence, but he also may have died before the truck hit the ground.

  “They told me it bent the JERRV,” Jenny said to me.

  “What?”

  “The JERRV. Their big truck. The truck you guys always tell me is so tough nothing can hurt it. Yeah, the blast from the detonation bent it. Broke the truck’s spine. That’s what they told me.”

  Big enough to break the truck’s spine. This is the work of the Engineer, and it would be my first piece of forensic evidence.

  IN THOSE DAYS I spent with the Fye family, Dan rubbed his right leg incessantly. He absentmindedly scratched it with the nails on his right hand. He would lean forward to knead the shin with both thumbs. He pushed on the skin that grew up ar
ound each structural pin of the frame, swamp moss enveloping a tree trunk. He would tug and pull and rub, seem satisfied, lean back, and then, before he was even settled, be forward again, poking.

  “Does it itch?” I asked. “I can only imagine.”

  “No, I rub it because I can’t feel it. Right here”—he pointed to one spot, smooth skin and fine leg hair—“I can feel. But most of it, no.”

  There is a lump of scar tissue protruding from the top of his calf like a softball in a tube sock; he constantly rubs it to break it up. The alligator pattern dominating the front of the leg is the skin graft, the large swath that came off his ass. The injuries on his lower back, back of his legs and torso, blobs of scar tissue where chunks of dirt and plastic entered and exited, don’t itch so much. But he says the scars on his lower left ass-cheek feel like they are liquid-filled.

  And this is all on the parts of him that survived.

  “Actually, I should let this air out. It can smell,” he said, and took the latex sock off his nubbin. He’d had the covering on all day, so it had been sweating on itself, vaginating, stinking like an unwashed crotch.

  But the nubbin was fully healed compared to his right leg, and it was finally getting rid of the Taylor Spatial Frame that dominated his thoughts.

  “I won’t have the frame holding me back anymore. I pray that the leg isn’t in bad shape,” he said, as though the leg were not his, as if it were not attached and lying in front of him to be examined. Fye talked of his right leg like a car that he had dropped off at the auto mechanic, and he was ignorant and helpless until the repair bill arrived.

  But then he added, to reassure himself and me, “I have faith. I really think it’s going to turn out okay.”

  Near the end of my visit, I came into the living room to see Fye and his young children all watching the movie How to Train Your Dragon. It was at the very end, and the main character, who had lost a leg in battle, was getting it replaced with a specialized, yet still medieval, prosthetic.

  Fye didn’t wear his own prosthetic very often, but he had plans to get his motorcycle retrofitted with buttons on the handlebars and a special brace for the foot pedals. In the movie, the main character had a similar set-up for his dragon’s harness. It was clear that the movie was on fairly constant rotation in the Fye home, and so I had to ask the obvious question.

  “Your kids are young,” I said to him, “do they make the association here, between the movie and you?”

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “They love it.” And then, switching genres in a moment:

  “They call this my robot leg,” he said, pointing to the metal prosthetic propped near him. “I’m robot Daddy.”

  I thought of all of our Talons and Packbots back in Iraq, covered in martial arts posters and porn stars. The robot has a name again.

  “What was the worst part of all this?” I asked Fye.

  “Watching guys come in after you and leave before you, already walking on their new legs,” he said. “I’m still in the hospital, and I haven’t really walked yet, but after only a month or two, they’re already running around.”

  “How does that happen?” I asked.

  “Well, if they’re a double, they have two new prosthetic legs, and it’s easier. Nicole and I talk about it. Is it worth it to keep the leg? Maybe we should just cut it off, so I can walk again.”

  I had never considered this before. From the moment Fye stepped on the PMN, every medical professional—Pete Hopkins, the emergency room staff in Kandahar, his surgeon, all the unnamed nurses and anesthesiologists and physical therapists—had been trying to save as much of him as possible. When you’ve lost so much, why wish to have lost more? When is the flesh no longer preferable, the robotics superior?

  Fye had already taught me about the foot-patrol war in Afghanistan, and I had more questions, about the kind of device that got him, and whether the Engineer was personally involved, but I was so amazed and surprised by this idea I couldn’t help asking:

  “Can you even do that? Cut off your own leg?”

  “Oh, sure. You should talk to Chris Frost. He cut his leg off. Never been happier.”

  8 ♦ BREACHED HULLS

  THE LORD’S SLEDGEHAMMER HIT THE bottom of their tin can and the bell rang so loudly the world went silent. Dust leapt from every surface and for a moment hung suspended in the air. The tin can started to rotate. Wilson tumbled down into Frost’s lap, and then the side wall of the can rose to meet them and Frost’s back and head were slammed into the plating as Wilson’s shoulder drove into Frost’s gut.

  Frost lay stunned on his back. Wilson was on top of him and not moving. It stank like acrid cordite and black powder. Sunlight streamed in through the back hatch, and every tumbling dust mote twinkled.

  That was big, Frost thought. That was real big. Bigger than the others, a few 130s maybe. Artillery rounds. Yeah, a big one that they were saving.

  Frost checked himself. Nothing hurt. Wilson was lying across his legs and hadn’t even groaned yet.

  He felt movement to his left, and saw the lieutenant and driver scramble out of the gunner’s hatch. The gunner was already gone. They must not have been able to open the armored door from the inside, Frost thought. Too heavy. We’re laying on our side. On our side, and Wilson isn’t moving.

  Now figures to his right, casting shadows from the hatchway. Anxious, purposeful movement, and groans and whimpers and shouts and a scream and now blood all over the exit. The heavy figures pulled the top half of Haunert out. Frost could see Max yell, and his legs were gone and the figures yanked him clear too.

  Silence inside the can.

  Frost patted himself down. Wilson still hadn’t moved. His rifle was at his shoulder and the stock and ACOG optical sight were covered with blood. He reached up and felt his split chin, felt a little higher and found a softness about his right eye. If he pushed on the outer orbital, the bone sunk in. He stopped pushing.

  More silence in the can, a greatly muffled shouting outside the back hatch. Wilson was getting heavy.

  He’s sleeping, Frost thought. Lazy, malingering son of a bitch.

  “Come on, wake the hell up and get off of me,” he may have mumbled, may have shouted, but either way, he barely heard his own words.

  Frost lay like that—on his back, face covered in blood, Wilson in his lap, wedged against his seat—for an eternity before he saw it. There, just out of reach, dangling above him, hanging by a single nylon strap, was a two-hundred-pound steel tow bar. The pig normally would have been stowed under the bench seat, a small bit of cord barely keeping it from shifting during normal driving. Now the cab was on its side, the seat was broken away, its former occupant Wilson was pinning him, and the massive rod hung six feet over his head.

  Frost started to squirm but found he couldn’t move. He yelled and pushed. The steel bar loomed. Wilson lay there. Desperate, Frost took off his helmet and threw it out the back of the truck, and the Tow Bar of Damocles stared down at him.

  A moment, then shouts from outside. “Hey, there are still guys in there!”

  One of the Navy EOD techs stuck his head in and saw Wilson and Frost and yelled for the medic and his other teammate. They grabbed Wilson by the strap on the back of his body armor and hauled him out the back hatch.

  Good, thought Frost, now I can get out. I’ll just slide myself out. Now I can move because Wilson is finally off of me.

  He tried to move, but a bandolier of linked 7.62mm ammo hung in his way. He pushed the belt and the butt of the M240B to the side, and then he tried to move again, but his feet stayed where they were. He tried again to pull himself along the side wall, but once more his feet stayed.

  Suddenly, arms grabbed him about the armpits and started to pull him backward toward the hatch. For one sickening moment his feet did not move with him; they just lay there, in a pile, until, eventually, they too followed, bouncing along the steel flooring like a soup can on a string. Frost tried to stop his rescuers, tell them what was wrong, but he coul
dn’t get the words out and then he was out of the vehicle and in the sunshine and his feet flopped out of the door all by themselves, up over the lip of the armor and into the dust of the unpaved road.

  He felt it now. Out of the truck, out from under the tow bar, now he was wide awake, and he knew exactly what was wrong. His feet hurt like he had stuck them in a wood chipper, and they would not stop hurting for years. Somehow, though, he wasn’t bleeding too badly. He realized the swelling in the lower limbs, his body’s natural response to trauma, must be constricting the blood vessels.

  We’re built well, he managed to think, somewhat resilient, if you look at us like machines.

  Frost took his first look around. He saw medics and the Navy EOD guys working on Max and Haunert. He saw a hole under his truck and the second axle gone and the V-hull twisted and tossed aside. He couldn’t see the Army EOD Battalion Commander, the lieutenant colonel who at the last minute had tagged along on the ride. Frost had given up his normal seat for the boss, and there, at the rear of the column, idled his regular truck, undamaged.

  Four guys on litters lay in a line waiting for the bird. His four guys? They lost four? No, that’s not right. It must be four guys from another truck, maybe from the route clearance convoy that had already been hit, the one they were responding to. Soldiers were everywhere, watching a sector from a canal bank, marking the LZ for the helo, talking on the radio, starting IVs.