All the Ways We Kill and Die

by Brian Castner

  “I’d rather be an amputee than a cripple,” he decided.

  So he cut off the leg. Now he’s got a bike-riding prosthesis, and a special mountaineering prosthesis, and a special ice-climbing prosthesis with a line of crampon spikes that bite harder than anything you can strap to your boots. Several years after the World TEAM Sports ride, Jukes would go on to climb 20,075-foot Lobuche in Nepal’s Himalaya with a team of wounded veterans, a tale told in Outside magazine and the documentary High Ground.

  Should he be an amputee or a cripple? Frost looked at his legs. The prosthetic side was strong and tight and sore from success. The painful crippled thing on the other side was just in the way.

  Cathy and Frost got married in August of 2010. In October he requested that his left leg be removed. By then he had endured over forty surgeries, and he knew that his good leg was the steel one.

  There are two times, he realized, when it’s easy to cut off a leg: right after the detonation, and after you’ve tried everything else.

  ON HIS COMPUTER, Chris Frost keeps a series of photos of the crew of his armored truck. Their interpreter, Max, lost both legs and moved back to Jordan. His lieutenant, the platoon leader in the front seat, made captain and got selected for Special Forces. Corporal Kody Wilson was his roommate at the hospital. Private Branden Haunert, a kid from Cincinnati who had been in the Army less than a year, died before the helo landed.

  He died quick, but unfortunately not as quick as Matt Schwartz.

  Frost had photos of his wrecked truck too. It was a Caiman, a relative of the JERRV and very similar in design and capabilities; the back passenger compartment and hatch looked nearly identical. In Frost’s digital photo, the effects of the blast were plain, one axle gone and the drivetrain exposed, fiberglass hood blown off, the interior decking broken loose from the floor joists. The device that destroyed his truck must have been large, hidden, center of the road, the product of years of armor-defeating intelligent design and development. I had not yet seen post-blast photos of Matt’s truck, but from the little evidence I had—massive explosion, bent frame—the damage to his JERRV was surely comparable, if not worse. This was my next step, tracking the forensics that would tie Matt’s IED to the Engineer.

  Next to Frost’s computer sat a series of complicated electronic clocks and weather stations that use old Soviet nixie tubes, a steampunkesque analog display that glows like a branding iron. Frost is a gear guy and a tinkerer, and he builds the contraptions in his spare time. Which is why I found it odd that his bionic leg was tossed in a corner of a spare bedroom, forgotten under a pile of knives and helmets and other accumulated military gear. He keeps the drop holsters and body armor just in case. He keeps the bionic leg because, well, he’s not sure.

  “Everybody has several legs,” he said, “but there are only two that I really wear.”

  He has a set of ergonomic flexible arcs for running, but he has only worn them three or four times. His second set, his favorites, are even simpler: custom-molded carbon fiber encasements for each stump, a single metal shaft, a foot with natural flex. The legs are reliable and elegant, few parts to lose or break. The toes roll and the heel is shaped so there is a spring to his step. He buys the coolest most uncomfortable shoes available now, he said, purely for looks.

  His gait is distinctive and a bit unnatural, but fluid and fast; with his pants on, it would be hard for a stranger to identify what was slightly off.

  “Have you ever walked in ski boots?” he said. “It’s like that.”

  “Walking in ski boots drives me nuts,” I said.

  “Unless you have no other option. And if you skied every day, you’d get used to it. See?”

  And he put up his arms, flashed a set of jazz hands, and danced the Charleston right there in the kitchen.

  I asked to see the bionic leg, and it took him a while to find it in the back of the closet under the stacks of cardboard boxes and black trunks. He found only one, and when he pulled it out, he made a show of blowing the dust off before handing it to me.

  It looked like a movie prop. The outer encasement was shaped like the curved steel calf of a body builder. If the designers were going more for Robocop than mannequin, they achieved their goal. In the back of the lower leg, however, was an exposed green circuit board containing three microprocessors and a battery pack. The components were all choked with the grime usually found caked between the buttons of your computer keyboard. Just below the circuit boards, in the heel, was an electronically controlled actuator, meant to replace the Achilles and calf muscle. It reduces the effort needed to walk by pushing you along, but it also consumes a lot of power.

  Frost checked the batteries, found they weren’t charged, and apologized that he couldn’t demonstrate how the leg worked. It would take a long time to get the legs functional again, and in fact, it was the batteries that convinced Frost to stop wearing them in the first place; a software upgrade reduced their usable life from four hours to two. The whole contraption was just past prototype. It didn’t even have a cover to keep rain away from the electronics.

  “Heavy fog is probably not good for it,” Frost remarked drily.

  “Are you frustrated that the development of arms has proceeded much faster than legs?” I asked. Every week the news reported on another robotic arm breakthrough, one that had five independent movements, then eight, all operated via electronic sensors stuck on the body. The holy grail for the industry was an implantable version that was connected directly to the nerves in the shoulder.

  Frost shrugged.

  “No. I don’t need to pick things up with my toes.”

  And then Cathy walked in, home from an evening cooking class, and Frost met her with a kiss. They are certified foster-boarders for abandoned pets, and their current guests, two puppies and a kitten, all jumped up to receive attention. Cathy was pregnant and hugely so, and they talked about her latest ultrasound and what vegetables she chopped in class that night. She had beat every cancer survival rate projection, and Frost was beaming.

  “Top three decisions I’ve made in life,” he said, “volunteering for EOD, cutting off the leg, and saying yes when a pretty girl asked if I wanted to be rolled up the hill.”

  “You both won the jackpot,” I offered to him.

  “You’re right,” he said. “What do you call the guy with no legs?”

  I thought it was a joke I had heard before, and I considered every variation and answer I knew, about Bob and Art and Phil and Matt, but none of them fit.

  “I don’t know. What do you call a guy with no legs?” I asked.

  “Lucky,” he said.

  PART III

  COLLECT THE EVIDENCE

  “And when he came unto Lehi, the Philistines shouted against him: and the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him, and the cords that were upon his arms became as flax that was burnt with fire, and his bands loosed from off his hands.

  “And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand, and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith.

  “And Samson said,

  “With the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jaw of an ass have I slain a thousand men.”

  —Judges 15:14–16

  9 ♦ BRAVE NEW WAR

  IT IS A GREAT UNREPORTED irony that a force central to fighting the “Global War on Terrorism” was nearly decimated on the very morning the conflict began.

  On September 11, 2001, hundreds of military EOD technicians were in downtown Manhattan, traveling via subway and taxi to the World Trade Center even before the planes struck the towers. The United Nations General Assembly was scheduled to open in two days, and the Secret Service was holding an initial planning meeting in Tower 7.

  The once-a-year General Assembly is a massive gathering of presidents and diplomats, and it has always required extensive security. Quietly, and in civilian clothes, technical aspects of that security have long been provided by military EOD and K9 dog handlers. On the morning of 9/11, nearly 10 percent
of the total active duty EOD force of all four services was scheduled to be at Ground Zero soon after the first tower was hit. Most never arrived at the meeting, and not a soul was lost, though the first medal for heroism earned by an EOD tech in these wars was won by Navy Petty Officer James Prewitt that morning, for rendering first aid to victims below WTC 2 even before the towers collapsed.

  Chris Frost was not in New York City on 9/11. Several of his teammates were scheduled to work at the UN, but Frost himself was seventy miles south, at Fort Dix, New Jersey, sitting in a classroom and listening to a lecture titled “Emerging Threats of Global Terrorism.” The class focused on the Red Brigade in Italy and the failed Millennium Bombing and the USS Cole, and when another instructor walked in and said the towers had been hit, Frost thought it was a dramatization. Instead, the course was canceled, and Frost and his fellow students received new orders. By that afternoon his class was sequestered, given vaccines, and put in Humvees to drive one hundred miles south to spend the next week and a half processing the remains from the Pentagon at the Air Force Morgue at Dover, Delaware.

  The mortuary facility consisted of two main sections: a plush carpeted front filled with chapels and coffee cups, and a refrigerated back made up entirely of concrete floors and stainless steel. The day after Frost’s arrival, a large briefing was held to explain the mortuary process to the many new faces that had arrived overnight to work this sudden surge. Frost was surprised how huge the undertaking was, in terms of both physical infrastructure and manpower. At that briefing were many “touchy feelies,” as Frost thought of them, critical stress debriefers and psychologists and the like. But after the first day, he never saw them. The cold of the working section of the mortuary pushed out anyone not immediately processing remains. They fled up front, where the press briefings were held, and VIPs and dignitaries could visit, and free food from local restaurants piled up. If you worked in the back in scrubs or coveralls, you were not welcome up front. Frost didn’t get any free food.

  By the time Jenny Schwartz arrived to meet Matt eleven years later, that morgue had long since been torn down. A new mortuary building was constructed in 2003, the old one worn out from decades of use. In the new building, the front area is even larger, but Jenny never saw it or got free food either. She wasn’t allowed in to see Matt after the dignified transfer outside on the tarmac.

  The transfers from the Pentagon were a little different. The remains flew in body bags via helicopter directly to Dover. The workers unloaded the bags, put them on a truck, drove them to a separate facility, placed the remains in metal transfer cases, loaded them back on the truck, drove them to the flight line, placed them in the back of a static aircraft, draped flags over them, and only then an honor guard conducted a ramp ceremony to carry them inside the morgue.

  Familiarity, Frost thought. They’re doing what they practiced, that last part anyway.

  Once inside the morgue, the first stop for the transfer cases—that is, for the 189 Pentagon dead and Matt Schwartz and the thousands who made the trip in between—is a large X-ray machine operated by an EOD tech. He or she is searching for anything hazardous that might harm a worker further down the assembly line. This initial step is a by-product of the First Gulf War, when workers discovered far too late that the first casualty they processed had a small but dangerous artillery round still lodged in the body, the delicate fuzing exposed, the striker primed and still ready to fire. Now the aluminum coffin is loaded inside an airport baggage screener, and two X-rays are taken.

  Frost had some small background in the overall process. He was a biochemistry major in college, and his advisor was a forensic entomologist, so at least he had heard the technical terms used by the criminal experts at the mortuary. Two of those professionals sat with him as he worked the X-ray machine: on his right an FBI stenographer, and on his left Dr. Doug Owsley, a forensic anthropologist and current division head of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Owsley had been the prime expert witness for a number of high-profile trials, from Jeffrey Dahmer to Waco.

  The dead arrived in fits and starts, a swell very early in the morning and then occasional spurts the rest of the day. The first two men Frost processed were two Navy kids, twenty-one-year-old Matt Flocco and twenty-six-year-old Ed Earhart. They had probably died of smoke inhalation, Frost thought. Their uniforms were crisp and their name tags were easy to read. It would get worse after that, the bodies deteriorating in condition as the week went on. The fires at the Pentagon raged for days, and depending on when they were loaded, the remains were either crisp or waterlogged. For years afterward Frost avoided BBQs and lighter fluid and cooked meat.

  Frost doesn’t think about those days very often, but when he does it’s no longer about the smell. It’s about Flocco and Earhart. He doesn’t remember them because they were first. He remembers them because they looked like they were asleep.

  Frost worked fourteen hours a day for ten days, and then he went home because the Pentagon was done providing dead. He found nothing explosive. He did find many magnetic signatures, and just like those discovered by Dan Fye’s handheld mine detector years later, each one required a search. One such investigation led to the presumptive identification of Lieutenant General Timothy Maude, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for personnel. Maude was a Vietnam veteran, the highest-ranking officer to die at the Pentagon on 9/11 and the highest-ranking officer to die from enemy action in fifty-six years. Frost identified him only because the three metal stars on his uniform gleamed brightly in the X-ray.

  The mortuary would ultimately identify 179 of the 189 men, women, and children who died at the Pentagon. The remains of five of the victims were never found. Another five sets of remains could not be identified and are presumed to be those of the five hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77.

  Frost didn’t know it at the time, of course, but seven years later he would still be examining the evidence of war, picking through body parts until he provided some of his own.

  “WHAT WAS THE worst part, about getting blown up?” I asked.

  “That stupid tow bar, having it hang over my head,” Chris Frost said, without a moment’s hesitation.

  He and I sat in his living room, going over the official evidence photos of his wrecked truck, and he pointed to where the tow bar would have been.

  “I was looking up at this thing,” he said, “and it’s like something out of a movie, like Saw or some other really bad horror movie. And it’s held by one strap, lowest bidder or some best value contract. It was absolutely the worst. Worse than getting blown up, it was worse than walking down on IEDs, it was worse than getting shot at, it was worse than all that.”

  Frost is an active typer and clicker, and soon he had shifted to photos of the rest of his tour, then videos of detonations, then the Great Mosque of Samarra that lay near his last base in Iraq. With its great twisting ramp, the mosque resembles Brueghel’s Tower of Babel, though the country in which it sat often seemed more like a scene of hell, as painted by him or his mentor Bosch. A million tortures, a million ways to kill and die.

  Samarra led to maps of Highway One, maps of Iraq, maps of Afghanistan, maps of Washington, where he and Cathy lived. While still on active duty but a full-time patient, Frost had parlayed his EOD experience into an internship at the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA. That temporary internship led to a permanent position once he was discharged, working on a branch of communications secret enough that he provided only the vaguest details.

  Such hesitancy did not apply to Google Earth, however. Kandahar Air Field and Camp Bastion may have been concealed, but Frost happily pointed out every obvious DIA and CIA building in northern Virginia, in ugly strip malls and office parks and neighborhoods, making a lie of the satellite image again.

  “What were you doing over there, when you lost your legs?” I asked.

  “Weapons Intel,” Frost said, almost offhandedly.

  I was startled. Weapons Intel. Frost had been on the i
nside of the big secret intel machine, or as close as an EOD guy could get in the conventional military. In that veiled hierarchy, the first person to look at all of the evidence and try to make sense of it in sum, the Bruegel of the system, was a guy like Frost.

  FORWARD OPERATING BASE Brassfield-Mora was a plowshare beaten into a sword, a massive complex of old grain storage silos commandeered into the main hub for the US Army in Samarra. The FOB was named for two Army Specialists, Artimus Brassfield of Flint, Michigan, and Jose Mora of Los Angeles County, California, who died within a day of each other in October of 2003. Mora was killed during a mortar attack on the base; Brassfield similarly, but while playing basketball. Back then we were just hunkered down, waiting for the war to end. When Frost arrived in December of 2007, it was under very different circumstances, as part of the main thrust of the Iraq Surge.

  Samarra continued to resemble the Wild West long after other provinces had been pacified via their respective Sunni Awakenings or sectarian settlements. It would be easy to get caught up in that, Frost thought: Shoot first, blow up every slightly out-of-place car, death before dismount. But he prided himself on staying above it all, staying analytical even when his knotted gut said otherwise, taking no undue risks. Plus, he was there to change the culture in some way, to start a hunt for the Engineer that had been haphazard, to put it generously, until then.

  The US Army is responsible for conducting technical intelligence on ground ordnance, and in 2003 they had one active duty battalion dedicated to the task. By 2004 those forces were burned out, and so the Army began rotating through backup plans, burning out their reservists in 2005 and volunteers in 2006. Those volunteers came from a variety of backgrounds: military police, administration, chemical corps. They received a crash course in evidence collection and intelligence analysis, and the quality of the work they did was spotty, ranging from exceptional to dangerous. In 2007, the Pentagon temporarily gave the Weapons Intelligence Team (or WIT, as it was known by then) mission to the Air Force, tasking them to provide over twenty teams to the Army and Marine Corps, one per brigade and expeditionary force. Similar, though not completely analogous, teams would appear in Afghanistan a year later.