But now, as the pasta water began to boil over, Avery reached to turn down the heat and began wondering again about that little piece of paper. Perhaps there was an error in the computer system that had misprinted the date. Or maybe she was forgetting what dates he’d been gone in the first place. Maybe she was going crazy. Or maybe she was just too paranoid for her own good, always looking for evidence that he was like every other guy she’d ever dated. She didn’t want to be distrusting. But then again, some quiet voice in the back of her head that sounded a lot like Hannah wouldn’t shut up about that stupid receipt.
Avery took a seat on her couch, placing her cell phone on the coffee table and holding the bowl of pasta in her hands. For a moment, her body looked at the noodles, covered in butter, and craved meat—it had been nearly a year since she’d eaten beef, simply because Noah had convinced her to be a vegetarian. Now she remembered the look on Dani’s face when Avery had passed on the turkey last Thanksgiving. It wasn’t a look of disapproval. It was a look of confusion.
“Is he treating you well?” Hannah had asked.
In a flash of certainty, Avery set her dinner down and grabbed her cell phone. The phone would likely go straight to Noah’s voicemail like it always did when he was gone. But she couldn’t stand it. She had to ask him. About the receipt. About those fucking foot-long sub sandwiches. Turning the television on mute, she waited, listening to the sound of three distinct rings.
“Hello?”
Avery pulled the phone away from her ear. The voice on the other end of the line wasn’t Noah. It was a woman. Something in the woman’s voice had trembled. Or maybe the cell service had cut out. Avery wasn’t sure. She stared at the phone, verifying that it was Noah’s name on her screen, then placed it back to her ear. Her hands began to sweat.
“Hello?” the woman repeated. “Avery? I know you’re there.”
So this woman knew her name. A long pause passed, while on the silent television screen in the living room, a doctor lifted her bloodied gloves in the air.
“I’m sorry, who is this?” Avery said, her voice angry and defiant.
The woman on the other end of the line sighed. “This is Noah’s fiancée.”
24
November 12, 2006 // Tarin Kot, Afghanistan
Hannah’s platoon swung their arms up and down like they were playing timpani in slow motion, hammering raw wood boards together to create a platform for the GP medium tent that would house the TOC, or tactical operations center. The crevice between Hannah’s thumb and forefinger was red and bleeding. She sucked it, then shook her hand. Sweat spilled over Hannah’s eyebrows and into her eyes. She breathed, tilting her head toward the sky, letting the salt water roll into the hair above her ears.
Had she known what the day would entail, would she have smiled at the sun? Had she known, would she have laughed?
In the eight months since they’d arrived in Afghanistan, Hannah’s platoon had built six infantry outposts like this for incoming troops. From their headquarters in Sharana—where Ebrahim’s family lived—her platoon would convoy out far into the desert into hotly contested areas and get to work building, so that a surge of troops could arrive and retake the territory from the Taliban. Everything they built was temporary. An infantry team would secure the area while Hannah’s platoon built tents, dug trenches, and assembled plumbing for a future bathroom trailer. It took two days to get the first tents erected, so her engineers would have a place to sleep. Then they built a simple sand wall for defense, which took about four days. Then they’d move on to digging trenches for bathroom facilities.
They’d arrived in mid-October. By the time they left a month later, the outpost would be ready to house NATO troops for a short-term deployment, fighting in the hills no more than five minutes from where they stood. Hannah’s soldiers worked round the clock in 120-degree heat, always aware that they were sitting ducks. After three weeks in this remote location, her hands were showing evidence of all her hard work, and her body ached. Dirt caked under her fingernails; calluses formed on her palms. And every morning, she found handfuls of her hair on her pillow—it had started to fall out because of the stress.
Two days ago, her platoon had returned from dropping supplies and soccer balls at a nearby school. Since then, the little boy’s angry face had haunted Hannah’s dreams. But the physical exhaustion helped her sleep at night, even when she knew that Tim had arrived in Kuwait, hundreds of miles away, and was preparing to fight his own war. If she’d been at home, Hannah was certain she wouldn’t have been able to function knowing he was in harm’s way. But if Tim was going to be deployed, at least she was here, distracted by her own mission. It felt good to do work that mattered. And the harder she worked, the faster the time seemed to pass.
It hadn’t crossed Hannah’s mind that she might want time to slow down.
ONCE THE TARIN Kot tactical operations center was up and running, Hannah had spent several hours connecting a secure cable to the post’s sole computer. Technically, the line was only supposed to be used for military communications and since there were so many people around, there wasn’t much privacy. But with the few spare moments Hannah had alone with the only secure Internet connection, she decided to take a risk.
iCasualties.org, a rudely named website, logged all military casualties in both Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. Hannah checked it at least once a week when she was at FOB Sharana. It wasn’t a fancy website. No graphics. No photos. Just a crude table of data. Each row described a tragedy. Every column defined the details. Date, name, rank. Age, cause of death, place of death. Military branch, hometown, unit. The final column listed the soldier or officer’s current duty station. Most newspapers could, from one line of text, write an entire obituary.
Hannah scanned the most recent additions. She looked at the dates first—in October, 107 U.S. soldiers had been killed in Iraq. Thirty-four more had been added to the list since the first of November. After scanning the dates, Hannah skimmed the names for any she recognized. It was a morbid ritual—a sacrament Hannah knew every soldier and officer and wife and mother had completed more than once over the last four years. But by reading the list, searching for names she knew, Hannah inadvertently honored the names she didn’t.
Martinez, Misael, a staff sergeant from North Carolina.
Powell, Kyle W., twenty-one years old.
Hannah had read the names so many times that she’d learned to do it unemotionally. But every now and then, a name would stop her from scrolling, and the weight of anonymous loss would hit her all at once.
Seymour, David S. “Scotty.” Specialist. 24. Hostile—hostile fire—small-arms fire.
Hannah wondered who’d given him the nickname and whether he liked it or hated it, smiled or sulked when guys called him “Scotty.” He and Hannah were the same age. Twenty-four. This year, her birthday had passed without much fanfare. Tim had mailed her a care package, but as of last week, it still hadn’t arrived.
After she scanned iCasualties.org, she opened an e-mail that had arrived from Tim. Two sentences, short and to the point, like all his e-mails. But for some reason, this one left Hannah with a heavy feeling in her chest, like her lungs were filling with water.
Heading out for a ten-day mission. I’ll be in touch when we get back. RILY.
RILY had become their secret code. Their shorthand for all the emotions wrapped up in these months apart. Remember I love you. She remembered. It was forgetting so she could focus on anything other than her fear that was the hard part.
“LIEUTENANT NESMITH!”
Private Murphy called to her from across the build site, holding a two-way radio in his hands. An eighteen-year-old kid from Arkansas with a girlfriend at home and an unhealthy obsession with NASCAR racing, Murphy was a great soldier. Tough as nails, and always the last one to put away his tools. Hannah had grown to respect him.
“Yeah, Murph,” she yelled. “What’s up?”
“They’re saying we’ve got a big one coming.
Twenty miles out.”
“Shit,” Hannah cursed, shocked at the profanity that came out of her own mouth. But there honestly couldn’t have been any worse news. It was sandstorm season in Afghanistan, and though they’d prepared for this possibility, Hannah had never expected it would come so soon. Twenty minutes wasn’t long enough. But it was all she had left.
Looking at the nearly finished construction site, Hannah put her forefinger and thumb in her mouth and whistled hard and loud, gathering the rest of the platoon together.
“Listen,” she ordered, commanding their attention. “We can’t afford to waste a single second. Murph, you and Willis join me and finish platform one. Johnson, Kiggler—stop digging the trench and help finish the plumbing so that’s not ruined by the sand. And then the rest of you, get moving securing the anchors and any other equipment. We’ve got less than half an hour. Any questions?”
Without hesitation, her platoon moved into overdrive. For the next fifteen minutes, Hannah forgot that she was thirsty and hot and tired. She simply pushed through the pain until her heart took over and the sky turned dark. Soon, they were all sitting in the shade of the tent, drenched in sweat, laughing at the feat it had required to finish the work in such a short amount of time. As they chugged water and tried to regain their breath, Hannah spied the rumbling darkness in the distance and felt her eyes narrow.
An ocean wave would terrify an ant. That’s how Hannah felt, standing several thousand yards away from the edge of a sandstorm. Every second the wall grew, massive and brown, with arms and fingers rolling more dust into its belly, stretching wider and higher into the sky. The majesty of it struck Hannah so immediately, she didn’t even have time to register that it was coming right toward them.
Where did it get the energy to move?
Was God himself in the storm?
Tiny particles of sand flew into her hair, her neck, her cheeks, like a thousand shards of glass.
“Get inside,” she ordered. “Everyone get inside.”
The platoon moved underneath the cover of the canvas, zipped closed the door, and checked that all the window panels were securely attached—so they could watch it go by, without the sand destroying every weapon and tool in the tent. If you think you’re important, if you feel that your life matters, all you need to do is spend some time in nature, Hannah thought. Stand before an ocean. Climb a mountain. Stare out over a canyon. Creation—wild and untamed—reminded her of her size in this universe. But feeling small did not send her into despair. She was like a child, trusting her Father when he said the storm would pass.
As the storm rolled over their heads, Private Murphy held a camera up to one of the clear plastic tent windows, recording video. “Holy shit. It’s a fucking monster . . .”
The entire world turned from day to night as the cloud passed over, pummeling the tent with twenty-five-mile-per-hour winds.
“Looks like we might be in Tarin Kot a little bit longer than we thought, Lieutenant Nesmith,” Murphy said.
“It’ll pass,” Hannah answered. “It may take some time. But it’ll pass.”
THE STORM DIDN’T pass.
For twenty-four hours, they were stuck inside that tent, smelling of sweat and dirt. They ate MREs, read books, and slept. They only ventured outside to relieve themselves, and even then, came back in the tent coughing, and covered in dust. Hannah filled her time with paperwork, and stopped every so often to listen to the sound of the wind. The Taliban were unlikely to fire rockets or mortar in the midst of a storm—their equipment was just as susceptible to sand as the U.S. Army’s—but Hannah still felt on edge. She’d rather have heard the constant, sporadic accompaniment of gunshots outside the camp than the sound of the wind swirling around her. Rapid fire, popping in the distance, reassured her. It meant the enemy was being defeated. But in silence like this—quiet like this—there was a real temptation to forget she was in danger. Hannah found herself straining to listen so she wouldn’t be caught off guard if an explosion disrupted her imagined peace. To die in the midst of a firefight or while on convoy was one thing. But what Hannah feared most was death arriving, when it was completely unexpected.
ONCE THE SANDSTORM passed, Hannah’s platoon finished construction. On Wednesday, they began the long, winding convoy back to FOB Sharana, stopping overnight in Kandahar. On Thursday, their six-vehicle convoy bumped along the unpaved roads, churning up dust under their tires. Buckled into the front passenger seat of the second Humvee, Hannah watched the walls of the FOB come into view and breathed a sigh of relief. Their work was done, and the storm had done limited damage. As they passed through the gates, she made a mental list of the things she wanted: a shower and a chance to check her e-mail. She needed to see if she’d received an update from Tim.
Murphy put the Humvee in park. Hannah stepped out.
But as soon as Hannah closed the vehicle’s door, she knew something was wrong. The unit’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Markham, stood a few feet away from the vehicle, looking directly at her, as if he’d been waiting for her to arrive. His eyes spoke of sadness. His shoulders slumped under an invisible weight.
Before he even said a word, Hannah knew what he was going to say. Her jaw went numb. The sky above and the views around her blurred as her eyes focused on only his face.
“Hannah,” he said, using her name and not her rank. “I need you to come with me.”
In his office, he told her to sit, but Hannah refused. It was the first time she’d ever disobeyed a direct order. A blue tissue box sat on the colonel’s desk. The Army chaplain sat in a chair, leaning forward with his hands intertwined. Hannah couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t remember if it was night or day or if it mattered.
For years, she would replay this moment in her mind, wishing to erase it from her life. It was a doorway. And as soon as she walked through it, the door behind her would shut and disappear, closing her off from everything before. Including the girl who could look up at an Afghanistan sky and smile.
Bracing for impact didn’t help at all. Even if every muscle in her body had tightened, there were no muscles strong enough to protect a heart from breaking.
“No,” she said. “Please.”
“I’m so sorry, Hannah,” the colonel said. “I’m so very sorry.”
THE CORPS
The Corps bareheaded, salute it, with eyes up thanking our God
That we of the Corps are treading, where they of the Corps have trod
They are here in ghostly assemblage
The men of the Corps long dead
And our hearts are standing attention
While we wait for their passing tread
We sons of today, we salute you, you sons of an earlier day
We follow close order behind you, where you have pointed the way
The long gray line of us stretches
Through the years of a century told
And the last man feels to his marrow
The grip of your far-off hold
Grip hands with us now, though we see not
Grip hands with us strengthen our hearts
As the long line stiffens and straightens
With the thrill that your presence imparts
Grip hands, though it be from the shadows
While we swear as you did of yore
Or living or dying to honor
The Corps, and the Corps, and the Corps
Beyond
November 2006
25
November 16, 2006 // London, England
The limp was worse than it had ever been.
With every step, a searing knife shot through Dani McNalley’s right side, forcing her to put more weight on her left leg while dragging her right. And yet she moved forward, her feet bobbling over the cobblestones. She had to get back to her apartment, and then she had to go home.
The pregnant sky released its first few drops of rain onto her head. Dani watched them fall and die on the sidewalk. In her haste to leave work, she’
d forgotten her umbrella on the hook by her office door. Paralyzed with indecision, she couldn’t decide whether to go back to the office for the umbrella or keep walking forward toward Notting Hill. People maneuvered around her with their chins down, hands stuffed deep into their pockets, like Dani was a lamppost or trash can—simply an obstacle to avoid. Life was moving on as if nothing had happened. Cars and taxis barreled down the road, kicking up water under their tires. The tube underground rumbled, moving people from one stop to the next. It was hard to believe all this activity. All this life. A couple of toddlers on the other side of the road dressed in yellow raincoats had the audacity to laugh, turning their faces toward the sky to catch the rain on their cheeks.
Dani felt her chest tighten and for a moment, she thought she might lose control right in the middle of the street. Gripping her BlackBerry tight in her hand, Dani looked up to the sky and blinked back the tears in her eyes, swallowing the emotion. She’d done it plenty of times before. At some point, she would need to let her tears flow freely. But now was not the time.
An hour ago, she’d been sitting in a meeting with Laura Klein and the rest of the E & G marketing team discussing their next round of commercial shoots when her phone buzzed on the table. Laura’s eyes had bored into the side of Dani’s face as she reached for the phone. She hadn’t planned on answering it. She thought she would look at the caller ID and send the call straight to voicemail. But the name on the caller ID sent ice into Dani’s veins.
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