Beyond the Point

by Claire Gibson

  She kept his letters in her pillowcase until the stack became too thick. By the time her unit took their first convoy away from FOB Sharana to build an outpost for a crew of NATO troops, the collection was three inches tall. She wrapped the letters with a spare shoestring and locked it in the trunk at the foot of her cot. When they returned a week later, she riffled through them again, laughing at the little drawings he’d put in the margins. The most recent one featured a sketch of Hannah and Tim on opposite sides of the world, arms wrapping around the globe like Stretch Armstrong, reaching across the oceans. He’d never been much of an artist.

  It’s only 15 months, she told herself. That’s nothing.

  Once at West Point, Hannah’s computer had crashed, destroying a sixteen-page term paper in the process. Tim had shown up at her room with a carafe of coffee and a calculator.

  “Look,” he’d said, crunching the numbers of her GPA. “You can literally turn in nothing, and you’ll be okay.” She was crying. The numbers hadn’t convinced her that the world wasn’t ending. He’d put his hands around her face, wiped her tears with his thumbs, and then kissed her softly on the mouth.

  “I dare you to believe me.”

  After that, Hannah had spent the entire night drinking coffee and listening to Tim tell stories instead of rewriting her paper. It was a risk, and not once during the night had she felt comfortable taking it. But in the end, he’d been right. She’d turned in five pages of nonsense—something she’d written quickly the following morning. And even though she received an F, the world didn’t end. Her GPA only changed by a tenth of a point. She believed he was right about this deployment, too, that spending all this time apart would be worth it in the end. Like one failed paper didn’t impact her GPA, one year apart wouldn’t change the totality of their relationship together.

  It was just fifteen months. Basically, a year.

  A year is nothing in light of a life.

  “HE SAYS A U.S. mortar round landed on his land, killing his prized cow.”

  An interpreter spoke quickly in Pashto to a dark-skinned Afghan man, the plaintiff, who spat back something angry and defiant, pointing once again at the photo on the table in front of them.

  Three months into her deployment, Hannah had been called into a JAG meeting. The translator, Amjad Ebrahim, was something of a minor celebrity around FOB Sharana. When their unit had first arrived, the translator had collected a few dollars from every officer and showed up the next day with a freshly slain lamb. Skinned, bled, and roasted over a fire, the lamb accompanied an assortment of sauces, spices, tandoori bread, yogurt sauce, chopped mint, preserved lemon, falafel, rice, and steamed greens. It was still the best meal Hannah had ever had—and that included all the meals Wendy Bennett had made at her home at West Point.

  Twenty-seven, with a wife and three children at home, Ebrahim had long hair that curled slightly under his ears, dark eyebrows, and a ready smile that defied his circumstances. Every day, he wore a uniform that matched Hannah’s, only his had a patch on the left that read “U.S. Interpreter” where hers said “U.S. Army.”

  But today, Ebrahim’s face was all business. The man across from him wore a white shalwar kameez, frayed and dirtied on the edges from his long trek into the Army compound.

  “Does he have documentation?” the JAG officer asked. “A receipt? Any kind of evidence?”

  The interpreter repeated the question in Pashto, and the offended Afghan man answered vehemently in the affirmative, pushing his photo and a piece of paper across the table. The paper was covered in writing, but Hannah couldn’t help but think the ink looked fresh. She’d only been asked to attend this meeting because the finance officer attached to their unit was down with some kind of stomach bug, but she suddenly felt way out of her league. The room felt tense, like the man was about to explode with rage.

  “He says it’s a receipt,” said Ebrahim.

  “What does it say?” the JAG officer asked. “Is it a receipt?”

  Shrugging his shoulders, Ebrahim continued, “It says he purchased the cow this year for two hundred U.S. dollars.”

  Without thinking, Hannah laughed out loud, forcing the JAG officer to scowl. She felt mortified at her accidental lapse in decorum, but there was no way this man had paid that much money for a cow. For many Afghans, two hundred U.S. dollars was enough to feed a family for a year! She looked at Ebrahim for some sign of recognition. Some mutual understanding that they were being swindled.

  “Pay him,” the JAG officer instructed Hannah after looking over the paper. Then, looking at Ebrahim, he said, “Thank him for coming. Tell him we hope this makes up for his loss.”

  A bead of sweat ran down Hannah’s temple as she passed an orange envelope of cash to the man across from her. He accepted the envelope haltingly, as if a woman’s hands had soiled the funds. When he pulled the cash from the envelope, he began to argue with the translator again. Ebrahim shouted in return, his face reddening, as if he were scolding a child. Hannah noticed he pointed toward the door, but the Afghan man refused to leave.

  “What’s he saying?” Hannah asked.

  “He says without the cow, they’ve missed out on income,” Ebrahim answered, exasperated. “He demands another two hundred dollars.”

  Wide-eyed, Hannah turned to the JAG officer, stunned. Surely the U.S. Army wouldn’t be extorted by a petty thief. He probably didn’t even own a cow in the first place! And even if he had, $400 amounted to a half year’s salary in Afghanistan. Would the JAG officer really enable this man to quit his day job? Military Intelligence was clear on what unemployed men spent their days doing—and it wasn’t milking cows. It was fighting alongside the Taliban.

  “Do it,” the JAG officer ordered.

  And Hannah followed orders, sliding another $200 across the table. But this time she didn’t laugh.

  “BAD DAY?”

  Hannah looked up from her plate of gray meatloaf topped with red sauce to see Private Murphy staring at her. He kept shoveling food into his mouth, but she knew from the tone of his voice that he actually cared. He tapped his fork on the table and went back to his plate, stacked high with mystery meat.

  “Suit yourself. But it’s got to go somewhere, ma’am.”

  Pushing her food around her plate, she realized her eyes must have looked as heavy on the outside as they felt in her head.

  “We paid a local guy four hundred dollars today for a cow that probably never existed.”

  Private Murphy grunted.

  “I feel like I’m just wasting my time here,” Hannah said.

  “You could always come to the clinic,” he said. “We could use an extra set of hands.”

  The week before, at the exact same table, Private Murphy had told Hannah about the medical center outside of FOB Sharana. The battalion that had lived at the FOB the year before had set up an old containerized housing unit, or CHU, a few hundred yards beyond the base to act as an emergency room for locals. Afghans traveled, sometimes for days, to get there. The rectangular clinic was outfitted with medical equipment—old stretchers, IVs, first aid gauze, and a dwindling stash of Medihoney, a medical-grade honey product for the management of wounds and burns. They weren’t doctors, but with the training they’d received in the military, they knew more than most. The battalion commander, Colonel Markham, allowed them to go out on Saturdays between building assignments.

  “So you treat mostly burns?” Hannah said.

  “Yeah. I guess it’s common here for parents to burn their children as a punishment,” Private Murphy said with cold indifference. “Last week, a father brought in his seven-year-old son. He’d disobeyed somehow, and as punishment, he’d dipped his son’s arm in kerosene and then lit a match.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “It’s pretty messed up. But they won’t take the children to an Afghan hospital.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one, the closest hospital is in Kabul. It would take about a week to get there. Plus, Afghan doctors wou
ld amputate. We’re not equipped to do all that. So we do the best we can. Try to save the limbs. The parents like that.”

  “I want to go,” Hannah said.

  “No you don’t. It ain’t pretty.”

  Hannah stared him down until he relented.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY, Hannah woke at 0530, slung her weapon over her shoulder, and slipped out of her room into the rising sun. Colonel Markham, Private Murphy, and three other soldiers waited at the FOB gate, and once Hannah had joined them, Markham waved to the soldier on guard. A heavy concrete door clicked loudly and swung open, then closed behind them.

  The scene from beyond the wall unfolded before Hannah, shocking her with its beauty. The rising sun cast an eerie red light across the desert. Heat waves swirled through the air like the ones she used to stare at when her father grilled steaks on the back deck, only this was natural heat—terrifying, since it was still so early in the morning. She could hear the short, fast pop-pop-pop of magazine fire in the distance, and as they crested a small sand hill, the makeshift CHU she’d been told about came into view, next to an open-air wooden structure, built as a waiting room for patients. Under the structure, a crowd of families waited in utter silence as the medical team arrived.

  Mothers wearing hijabs fanned their children, who’d been carried on quilts or doors. Red and burgundy burns slashed and splotched the children’s faces, arms, and legs. Some of the burns oozed, others bled. Dark skin flapped in charred masses and fresh white splotches of exposed epidermis screamed with pain, though the children refused to cry. Fathers stood, stoic and dark eyed, watching as Colonel Markham passed the patients, evaluating each case by sight. He didn’t waste any time choosing the most severe cases. It’s triage, Hannah realized. Worst cases first.

  “One,” Markham said, and pointed to a child stretched out on a quilt. “Two.” He pointed to another child, on the opposite side of the shelter. “Three . . .”

  Hannah, breathless and sick to her stomach, waited for him to finish creating an impromptu appointment list.

  “Just like every other day, don’t go crowding the gate,” he said. “We will get to everyone eventually.”

  Once they were inside the CHU, Markham closed the door behind them. The structure was long and thin, with three stretchers for patients lined up diagonally down the middle of the trailer. Shelves on every wall held equipment: thermometers, Medihoney, steroids, bandages. Two rotary fans and a small AC unit churned stale air. A radio filled the room with the sounds of old Beatles songs. As Hannah moved about the room, trying to find the right place to stand, Private Murphy and the rest of the soldiers took off their uniform overcoats.

  “Lieutenant Nesmith,” Murphy said, “time to scrub in.”

  Hannah mimicked Murphy’s every move: she secured her M16 in a locker, removed her helmet and Kevlar, hung up her jacket, rolled up the sleeves of her tan T-shirt. Standing next to Murphy at the center of the CHU, they both snapped a pair of purple rubber gloves over their hands.

  “This is the real fight. A chance to show mercy,” Markham said as he propped the door open with a rock. “Number one!”

  Two soldiers at the entrance waved metal detector wands over the patient, who was covered by a white blanket, then checked the patient’s parents as well. And before Hannah could prepare, Markham had directed the patient’s parents to stand in the back corner and began to slowly lift the quilt off the small body underneath.

  A young girl lay naked, shaking, watching as her skin peeled back off her arms, stomach, legs, and feet, still attached to the blanket. Without thinking, Hannah squatted down beside the patient, stroking her dark black hair. The child opened and closed her eyes with pain, the sounds of her small cries drowned out by the music coming from the radio.

  “Shh . . . shh . . . ,” Hannah said, holding all of her emotion in her belly. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

  The girls’ father looked on, blank and expressionless, as his daughter’s skin peeled off like brown paper, attached to the fibers of the blanket. Hannah found herself praying. Please, God, save this child.

  Private Murphy started in, cutting dead skin away from the girl’s body with a pair of sterilized scissors.

  “If you leave it, infections will set in,” he said. “She needs an IV. Morphine. Nesmith. Can you do it?”

  Hannah suddenly remembered the training she’d done at Buckner, when she’d shoved a needle into Avery’s arm.

  “It’s been a long time,” she answered.

  “It’s okay. Just do what I say.”

  Following his instructions, Hannah placed a long needle through a vein in the young girl’s forearm, trying carefully not to cause more pain. And as she did, Hannah did everything she could to keep herself from crying.

  LATER THAT EVENING, as the sun was setting, Hannah sat in her room stewing. She had propped her bed on stilts in order to fit a trunk underneath, and had built a set of bookshelves so she could have a place for books—most of which had been chosen by Tim. As little as he’d liked to complete assigned reading in college, he was a voracious reader now. He said books tasted better when you were hungry for them. At the moment, she was one hundred pages into East of Eden. And he was right. She couldn’t get enough of Steinbeck’s words. The more she consumed, the more she desired.

  On her desk, a stack of supply requisition forms waited for her signature, necessary for the upcoming site build her platoon was scheduled to complete. But she didn’t feel like reading or doing paperwork. She didn’t feel like doing anything.

  She was still trying to understand what she’d witnessed that morning at the burn unit. It seemed utterly evil, what those parents had done to their children, but culturally speaking, it was completely acceptable—around here, it was discipline. Sitting in her CHU, Hannah remembered Colonel Bennett’s philosophy class her plebe year, and the conversation he’d led about justice. Was it injustice, what these people were doing? Or was it cultural difference? Was it up for debate, or was there truth, with a capital T? Did God care about those children? Did he see?

  Shaking the thought from her mind, she changed into a pair of black shorts and a gray T-shirt, and pulled her hair into a ponytail. Being in an engineering platoon had its perks—one of which was that they could build just about anything if they had the right materials.

  A week earlier, she’d joined a group of soldiers in building a makeshift basketball court on the tarmac. Since then, they had an unspoken standing pickup game every night at seven P.M. Even the translator, Ebrahim, had started playing, though admittedly, he wasn’t very good. Hannah always picked him for her team, just as a show of good faith.

  When she arrived at the court, the interpreter was already there, stretching. He wore a pair of white Air Jordans that Private Murphy had given him.

  “Hydration is the key to longevity,” he said philosophically. He offered Hannah a plastic water bottle and she took it.

  “I swear, Ebrahim, your English is better than mine,” Hannah said, taking a sip of the cold water.

  In the months since she’d arrived at FOB Sharana, he’d become the closest thing Hannah had to a friend. His English was impeccable, his sense of humor approachable, and his addiction to outdated American romantic comedies common knowledge. He’d told Hannah that he’d learned most of his English by watching Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding. He would often stop and shout “Kimmi!” for no reason, as though he had Tourette’s syndrome. It always made Hannah laugh.

  “Hey, can I ask you something?” she said.

  He nodded. “Shoot.” He put his hands up. “Don’t shoot!” They laughed at his silly joke, and then he said, “Of course. Ask me anything.”

  “The other day. That guy with the cow. What are the chances he was telling the truth?”

  After a pause, Ebrahim shrugged. “Who’s to say?”

  Shaking her head, Hannah sat on the tarmac to tighten her shoelaces. “How can yo
u be so calm about it?” she asked. “Doesn’t that kind of thing keep you up at night?”

  “I don’t lose sleep over things I can’t control.”

  Hannah focused on the sky while her mind reeled. Her interpreter worked with her nearly every day, having conversations, not offended that her hair was uncovered or that she spoke to him without first being addressed. But she was well aware that his wife at home wasn’t allowed to speak out of turn, or leave the house without his permission.

  “For the life of me I don’t understand,” Hannah said, finally letting her arms drop to her sides.

  “Don’t understand what?”

  “With any other woman, you wouldn’t dare sit and have a conversation like this. Out in the open.”

  “No.”

  “So what’s the difference?”

  “You’re American.”

  Hannah sighed. “But what about your wife? Your daughter? Don’t you want them to have an education? Don’t you want them to have opportunities?”

  “And what has your education gotten you? A trip to a war zone?” Ebrahim laughed, still trying to keep the tone light. “I imagine your father wishes you were at home.”

  Hannah raised her eyebrows. He had a point.

  “Sometimes I just wonder if being here is really going to make any difference,” she said. “It just seems impossible.”

  Ebrahim let Hannah’s question linger between them. Then he cleared his throat.

  “When I was a boy, my father would get up every morning and call around to his brothers, to see who was still alive after the bombing through the night.

  “The bombing was constant. After the Russians left, this area was controlled by warlords that constantly fought for territory. Then the Taliban came in and kicked out all of the warlords. And the rules they put in place—they were crazy, sure. It seemed a small price to pay for safety. To sleep and know that you would wake up in the morning.