All the Ways We Kill and Die

by Brian Castner

  M——took cover behind the hood of a truck, felt his bros next to him reload, saw three muj motherfuckers pop up from behind the wall. Three on one. Oh fuck. He flipped to full-auto, turned up his left elbow, c-grip, pushed down on the upper receiver, stitched half a mag from lower left breadbasket to upper right shoulder, first time I’ve had to do that for real, he thought, three went down, no rounds came in, his bros reloaded, did he even hit anyone?

  He shifted position, saw just an AK pop up over the wall, spray and pray. He could see it coming. One round ricocheted off the hood. Oh shit. A sledgehammer smacked him square in the chest.

  That hurts like a motherfucker!

  The next day his chest would bear a green and purple bruise, the exact outline of his plate. It was a multi-hit plate, really expensive, rated to take six rounds. But for $1,240 a day, why put that to the test? He bought a new one.

  “Were you thinking, if I was still in, I’d be getting a Purple Heart for that?” I asked.

  “Fuck no,” said M——, and then he cocked his head, as if he was examining me in a new light.

  “You still think that stuff matters? All those little ribbons and that bullshit? I don’t see you wearing no uniform right now.”

  The man appeared again from behind the wall, shot all over the damn place, his bros pop-popped, no more spray and pray.

  “We want the men in the houses,” the voice on the radio said again.

  M——and the ex-CAG guy and an ex-DEVGRU guy bounded out of the street and to the closest house. He slid the titanium Punisher mask over his face and whispered, “Moving,” and his bro confirmed “moving” with “Covering,” and the door opened easily and the first room was empty. He slid the mask back up.

  “Moving.” “Covering.” Whisper, whisper. Second room, clear.

  “Moving.” “Covering.” Third room, squirming and wails. He put the thing on the thing. Mothers and children. They left.

  Kids usually mean no booby traps, but they make using grenades tricky.

  Fourth room, a man huddled in a corner.

  “I live here!” he yelled in accented English.

  Like anyone gives a fuck.

  They had all the men flex-cuffed and lined up on the street, separated so they couldn’t collude their stories. Their contracted terp went to each one in turn, whispered in their ears. They all pointed fingers at each other, but everyone pointed at the man who said he only lived in the house.

  I knew it, thought M——. Now we shake him down and work our way up the chain.

  M——walked over to the man. He was quivering. M——called the terp over.

  “Tell him where he’s going and who is going to be asking the questions.”

  The man blanched and shook harder and collapsed in a ball.

  “Where was he going?” I asked.

  “Can’t tell you that,” M——said.

  “Do you at least know who you captured?”

  M——shrugged.

  Everyone benefited when the process was gray. M——didn’t know who made the call on these guys, and it was better that way. They ordered him to go because, as a contractor, he didn’t fall under anyone on the organizational chart. And conversely, if he got snatched, by a cell or foreign government, he couldn’t say who ordered him in. He wanted neither the credit nor the special treatment that came with being knowledgeable or important.

  “I thought about it last night, and I have an answer for you,” M——said to me.

  “All right. Do you know who the Engineer is?” I asked.

  “I don’t, and that’s the issue. Nobody does, across the board. If someone had the answer, we would have won by now. We would have … the Engineer. Maybe it’s a millionaire. Maybe it’s guys like us. I started thinking, I could be that Engineer. It could be somebody like me, like you. Maybe it’s just guys like us on the other side who travel around and consult and get paid. Maybe they get paid in money or women or religion. Extra wives. Little boys. Whatever.”

  M——took a sip of coffee.

  “I’d like to get a hand on him rather than a drone strike on him, to find out,” he said.

  PART V

  THE DEAD REVISITED

  “I swear by Allah your troops can’t go on! Your troops are tired, tired, tired!”

  —Sheikh Khalid Husainan, open letter to President Obama, 2011

  15 ♦ ALL THE WAYS WE LIVE AND DIE

  IT WAS 2012, AND I was a contractor, teaching basic IED circuits to another EOD unit before they left for Afghanistan. Up on the screen at the front of the classroom was the Engineer’s electronics manual. It matched our syllabus almost exactly, and why not? Ohm’s Law is the same for engineers of all nationalities.

  It was getting to be the end of a long week. We had started with voltage and current and resistors and in only a few days made it to silicon-controlled rectifiers and photodiodes. We had made devices—in fact, the Engineer’s same device—that had been seen from Africa to South America to New York and Philadelphia. Throughout the classroom, every flat surface was covered with tiny electronic components and half-built circuits, booby traps that beeped when the lights turned on and off, doors opened and closed, radios were keyed or cell phones called.

  The weekend was approaching, and the student soldiers were laughing and goofing around, as young people do, thinking more about their last party before deployment than antenna theory. So I took a break from lecturing and asked a question, the question I always ask every class I teach.

  “Who’s the youngest guy in the company?”

  Everyone started pointing and yelling, turning around to stare at the baby-faced private slumping in his seat, covering his eyes in embarrassment. He was tall and lanky, a colt who hadn’t grown into his body yet, all elbows and knobby knees and pimply cheeks that rarely, if ever, saw a razor.

  “What’s your name?” I said to him.

  “Andy,” he mumbled.

  “How old are you, Andy?”

  The room started loudly answering for him, but I needn’t have asked. The youngest kid in every class was always someone who enlisted right after high school, got selected for an abbreviated version of M——’s high-speed pipeline, made it straight through EOD training, had arrived at his unit only in the last month or two. Maximum age: nineteen. Andy drooped farther in his chair, letting his brothers answer for him.

  “And where were you on 9/11?” I asked.

  “Aww, come on, don’t make me say,” Andy pleaded. Jeers and catcalls filled the room, snickers about the expected answer.

  “No, tell us. Where were on 9/11?” I said.

  “I was playing Xbox before school,” Andy answered, to laughter. “My mom made me turn it off, and then we watched the news before I got on the bus.”

  “And what grade were you in?”

  “Second.”

  Pete Hopkins, Fye’s medic, was right. So was Vonnegut. Wars are all fought by babies.

  M——WAS DRIVING. I sat up front. Another contractor sat in back. We were just chatting.

  “I heard about a new job,” I said. “A buddy shared it on Facebook. Syria. Four months, a hundred and twenty. Advising. By, with, and through. You know how that goes.” It was the summer of 2013. ISIS had just declared itself but had not yet attacked Fallujah or Mosul in Iraq. The American bombing campaign would not begin for over a year. All we knew of Syria came down like it did in the old days, as classified rumors.

  “Syria is no joke right now,” said M——.

  “I know. No air cover or backup,” I said.

  “You can be straight-up stabbing motherfuckers,” the other contractor said from the backseat. He was new, fresh out of the military.

  “That’s right,” M——said, nodding.

  “You can be cutting motherfuckers’ heads off!” the other guy said. He was thinking of the “unknown Russian soldier” video, I knew. James Foley was already captured, but his murder was still months away. Trust me: don’t Google either video.

  “H
ell, yeah,” M——said. “That’s how it is, you’re out on your own, no one is coming to get you.”

  M——thought a moment and then turned to me.

  “How much did you say it was? Hundred and twenty grand? Fuck, I’ll do that for one twenty. Then fucking sleep on the beach for six months. What’s that dude’s name?”

  TO LOOSEN HIM up at dinner, I ordered alcohol first, hoping he would follow my lead. Hayes, the black hole intel analyst, wasn’t so easily fooled. He was still in his shirt and tie and said no, no drinks, he needed to head back to the office after dinner. Throughout the interview, he was sober and measured and careful, but once I leaned forward and turned off the digital recorder, Hayes, ever the interrogator, immediately asked me the question that had clearly been on his mind all night.

  “So, tell me,” he said, “do we catch the Engineer by the end of your book?”

  He’s the only one who ever asked me that. Sarah Soliman had said the best analysts get obsessed.

  THERE ARE NO windows on a C-5, so Soliman couldn’t see the Afghan countryside flowing past. She couldn’t see the beautiful landscape she had fallen in love with, the green summer of tall cedar trees in Jalalabad, the scattered simple brown shacks. Breadhuts, she called them. Someday, she thought, I’ll buy a qalat in Nangarhar, in those craggy, majestic peaks.

  No view, but she was excited to be on the C-5. She had recognized it as a National Guard bird from home, with a distinctive red stripe on the tail and the name “Martinsburg” with an inset W and V, like the mountain bumps of the state. When she got onboard, she conducted some identity intelligence, pulled out a pen and paper, and showed a note to the armed crew member in the back.

  “Are you all out of West Virginia? I’m from Martinsburg!” she wrote.

  “The actual crew is. I’m fly-away security,” he wrote back.

  Home. It was more and more on her mind. As a contractor, she could leave whenever she wanted. Just put in her two-week notice. This shamed her; her SOCOM teammates couldn’t just up and leave, not the military ones anyway.

  Not that home fit right anymore. Back in DC, a city full of civilian helicopters, her heart would race whenever one would fly over. It was Pavlovian, the check for the go-bag. A moment of panic, she didn’t have it, the loadmaster would be pissed she was holding up the mission. Then a look at her oblivious friends. Why weren’t they grabbing their bags too? Do they even hear the helo? Then the stress would fade, leaving the moment sad and fond. War is a little like summer camp, she thought. A tight community, pledges to stay in touch, and then? She had no unit designation, no annual reunions, no contractor memorial on the National Mall.

  If she left, she could go work in the Syrian refugee camps. Or maybe she could find a stateside biometrics job. It would be different, though. Fingerprinting has become normalized, but it still carries a criminal connotation, and iris scans are new and even scarier. Soldiers always give up everything when then enlist—prints, DNA, stool, everything—but there’s a different expectation. The military buys the body with an option to sell it back, in the same or similar condition if you are lucky. It’s different as a civilian.

  But she would do it. She had been in the J2 job for eight months, and it was time to be done. Time to go home. She had things to do.

  She was going to donate the money, she decided. Take all that dirty contractor money and atone by starting the scholarship at her alma mater, like she had talked about since college. She wouldn’t miss it. It was always about the work and the data anyway, never about the money. Endow it, permanently, so more engineers could study abroad like she did. Morocco had prepared her for Baghdad and Bagram, and there were problems all over the world for engineers to solve. Other students should get the same chance she did. And who knows, maybe a veteran would want it too? See another part of the world, one not full of conflict. One night, when she was in Kandahar, a C-130 landed with a West Virginia tail, and she threw on her muffling headphones and ran out to greet the plane, and a kid from her high school was a crew member. Maybe he would want the scholarship?

  And she was going to do it now, she thought, not wait. No time like the present. Do something in her twenties that normally philanthropists do at the end of their lives. She never felt in danger in Afghanistan, not really, but she read Stars and Stripes, she knew to appreciate even being alive. Some guys have plans to go back to school, and they never get a chance to use their GI Bill. And some go back because their friends can’t. And some children go because their parents can’t. The widow and the orphan and the lost brother. She had seen all the ramp ceremonies. If this C-5 crashed, there would be nothing left behind, but if she donated the money, something would always be there. This scholarship would be her good-bye letter.

  A year later, Sarah Soliman and I were sitting in a DC coffee shop. She had come from the office, was wearing a fashionable skirt and suit jacket, still no contractor uniform, but her striking red hair had been reduced to a bob. She had cut it all off when she had gotten back to the States, donated to make wigs for kids with cancer. And now she was telling me about the scholarship. Maybe it wasn’t all about the data, I thought.

  “So, there’s some carpe diem there?” I asked.

  “You realize at a much younger age than perhaps most people do,” she said. “Life doesn’t always go on.”

  I had to ask and I didn’t know how, so I just did.

  “Do you have any ghosts?”

  Sarah’s eyes filled with tears, and she gave me the quick tiny nod of a little girl.

  “Me too,” I said, and my eyes matched hers.

  GENE RICH POURED himself a cup of coffee in a to-go mug, kissed his wife and kids, straightened his tie, and got in his car for the long commute to his new civilian job.

  It was a big day, a briefing day, not that his company used that word, of course. Maybe they would call it a sales pitch? If so, he was selling an idea, a vision, a way forward.

  These growing pains were difficult, the transition from one pilot flying one Pred to total situational awareness. Convincing the military pilot community might be toughest of all. It was counterintuitive, removing the pilot to make the whole system more human. But it made sense. He had been in ops centers when the Pred feed suddenly pops up. Whoosh, everyone drops what they are doing and looks, like an open window letting in fresh air on a stifling hot day. Gene had seen a theoretical mission directed from an antiseptic headquarters become real when the generals in the ops center could see real people on the ground, real helicopters, real compounds, bad guys getting shot. Some people think drones create warfare without consequences, because it’s a robot driving around shooting things, but they have it all wrong. It’s the opposite. For the generals, drones make the war more human.

  So how to give them an even better picture?

  Many of the developers of the Pred program were traditional aircraft pilots, so the ground control station made sense as an evolution. But what about for the new guys? They’ve never felt the sinking feeling on approach as the buoyant ground effect gives way. They don’t know that in a tiny-winged T-38 you can get yourself in a square corner on final, wing rock and stall and pancake with no fixing it. These ex-pilot engineers want to put all the human cues back in, to give the new guys the experience by simulating wind noises in the GCS. Make it feel more like you are in the aircraft.

  But that’s moving in the wrong direction. The goal shouldn’t be to recreate the flying experience, it should be to automate the whole thing. Consider takeoffs and landings, where most accidents happen. The commercial 757 and 767 can take off and land automatically, but it hardly ever happens. Not unless the weather is 0–0, zero visibility, zero ceiling. Why? Because the human pilot is the backup for the automated system and needs currency, needs practice to keep his or her rating. The computer doesn’t need practice, so the safer system is put aside for humans to hand fly. It makes no sense. The Army’s Gray Eagle, their Predator variant, uses an auto system. No one takes off and lands, and it works
just fine. Yes, there are a few cases where the computer is out of rating and crashes, but over time, you lose fewer aircraft by using the autopilot. Different aircraft, but still fewer.

  This idea should be applied to the whole system. You’ll never make the GCS as real as flying, so don’t even try. Instead, let humans supervise the system and make decisions. Save the person for the higher functions, the problem solving. Let the plane turn right, left, slew the ball.

  Gene imagined a map on a light table, ground teams tracked by sensors, multiple Preds displayed three-dimensionally. Want to know what a certain Predator sees? Flip to it on your flat screen. Want to see what’s on the other side of the building? Flip to a different angle. Need a vehicle tracked? Task a Pred with a point and click, it follows the truck on its own. No more air warden; let the computer deconflict flight paths. The operator, the human, isn’t in one point in space. The human is at every point in space.

  This makes Evil’s situational awareness in the MC-12 look piddly and weak. Evil wouldn’t like hearing that, Gene knew. The two had flown together so long ago, when they were new lieutenants. But technology was passing those guys by, even if they refused to see it.

  There was more. Automate the search too. So many petabytes of video to look at, how to find the right bit? Write a better algorithm to sort through the data feeds, predict where IEDs are, provide a better product to operators on the ground, narrow in on bad-guy behavior only, so we have maximum situational awareness and know whom to target.

  We’ll get there by 2020, Gene thought. It’s just growing pains until then.

  EVIL RENTED THE hangar space at Ferguson Field, a strip of hot asphalt and a row of sheet metal stalls on the west side of Pensacola near Perdido Bay. He had decorated it so it felt like home: a small bar adorned with stolen street and traffic signs, a half-size college beer fridge. On one wall hung a neon light-up emblem of the 2nd Fighter Squadron with their American Beagle badge. The 2nd flew P-39s, P-40s, and P-41 Mustangs over Europe in World II, trained new interceptor pilots during the Cold War, moved to Florida to train the nation’s F-15 pilots for twenty-six years. The unit was shut down in 2010. America is nearly done training F-15 pilots.