by Phil Klay
Not much later, around ten, we hear a third explosion.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” says Bob.
“That was big,” Omar says. “Far away, but big.”
There’s a moment of silence. We’re tired. We’re all tired.
“Didn’t NDS pick up a couple of Daesh recruiters yesterday?” Denise says quietly.
“The Islamic State?” says Bob. “Nah . . . I don’t think so. You don’t go from base-level recruiting to three linked attacks in a day.”
I call the military press office and they’re in the dark about the blast as well. “We’re not giving out any information at this time,” says Staff Sergeant Johnathon Burgett, in a lovely, honey-dipped Tennessee accent. But Aasif gets a source telling us there’s been a big blast at the gate of Camp Integrity. Everybody turns to me.
“Integrity is run by Blackwater, right?” asks Bob.
“They call themselves Academi now,” I say.
“Whatever,” says Bob. “You’ve fucked half the mercenaries in Kabul, you’ve got to have a source.”
The room goes quiet. Nobody likes that I’ve dated contractors. Two, to be specific, though one was more serious and the other was more casual fucking. It’s none of their business, none of anybody’s business, but it got around. Even military folks tend to hold mercenaries in contempt. And then Bob realizes before I do that maybe some ex of mine is dead, killed in the explosion.
“I’m sure all the Blackwater guys are fine,” he says.
“They subcontract the outer ring of security to Afghans,” I say.
Bob looks disappointed. “Of course they do,” he says. “Those fucking cockroaches. With their fucking high-speed gear and their cool-guy shades and their wizard beards. So how much are they getting paid to have Afghans take the risks for them?”
“At least it’s not civilians,” Denise says.
“You know they finally sentenced the Blackwater guys in the Nisour Square massacre. Life for Slatten. The other guys got, I think, thirty years . . .”
I ignore them, mostly. But it occurs to me that I could dial Diego’s phone number. At least, the number I think is still his, if he’s still in country, or in Kabul. More likely, he’s out doing counternarcotics work in God knows where. Or on one of his R&Rs in the backwoods of Chile, drinking maté and pretending not to be out of his goddamn mind. “I’m not a normal person anymore, Liz,” he told me once. “And I don’t want to be.”
I pull out my phone. We hadn’t closed things off in any real way, we just slowly stopped talking. He was always off in a different country anyway, doing work he claimed was “like James Bond, but boring.” When I’m reporting on something like this, something that matters, it makes it easier if I can become nothing more than a pane of glass, the medium through which people can look out the windows of their normal lives and see what’s happening over here. Diego complicates things, raises up emotional turbulence, changes the weights and measures of what I think is important and worth telling. But if he’s in country, he’ll know something.
I dial his number. The phone rings and rings, but he doesn’t answer, and I’m not sure if I’m disappointed, or happy, or worried. I end up heading to Integrity on the back of Omar’s motorcycle, cold wind whipping my head scarf as we head out to the base. Camp Integrity. Sometimes I’m not sure if the U.S. government is just trolling us when they name these things. What else would you name a giant 435,600-square-foot compound run by the most notorious mercenary outfit of the modern wars? Blackwater, Xe, Paravant, Academi. They secured a $750-million contract in 2012 for “information” related to the counterdrug effort in Afghanistan, and they’ve been running Integrity ever since.
When we were dating, I once asked Diego how the drug effort was going. He pulled out an iPad and showed me a graph tracking opium production against the price of wheat over the past ten years. When the price of wheat was high, opium production went down. When the price of wheat was low, opium production went up. Along the graph were little markers indicating various points at which the U.S. launched multibillion-dollar counternarcotics efforts. They didn’t seem to have had the slightest effect on overall production.
“So what’s the point of what you do?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “We affect things on the margins. What kind of narcissistic asshole would think he could do more than that? But, hey, there are lives in those margins.”
I rolled my eyes.
“You ever known a heroin addict?” he asked. “I mean, you ever seen it?”
“Sure.”
“The shit is evil, Liz. Pure evil, no lie.”
“And Blackwater pays well,” I said.
“It’s Academi now,” he said, and sighed. “Nobody ever asks a homicide detective if they’re going to end murder. The question isn’t whether we can win. It’s whether it’ll be worse if we stop fighting.”
Afghan police stop us as we approach the blast site. There are a couple of NDS pickup trucks, two unmarked white vans, an MRAP in overwatch, a lot of people standing around with guns, a few interested onlookers. Inside the ring of police I can make out some damaged blast walls, but can’t actually see much else.
“No good shot,” Omar says. “But . . . I can work magic.”
He gets off the bike and starts walking the perimeter. I head into the crowd and ask people what happened. A couple of people give me the same story—one big boom, then some smaller booms, maybe grenades, and small arms fire. An assault, not just a suicide bombing.
“Dead bodies?” I ask.
Heads nod yes. I’m exhausted, and though this should be exciting, I don’t care. Three bombings in one day. Does it mean anything? Yes, no, who knows? I call Diego again. This time he picks up.
“What do you expect me to tell you, Liz?” he answers, sounding frustrated and hostile.
“That you’re okay,” I say.
“Oh,” he says softly. “I’m okay.”
Around me, the crowd is thinning. There’s little more to see here. Little point, even, to having come. Omar will get decent shots but nothing to beat his work from the earlier bombings. Those are the photos that will run.
“Well then,” he says. He sounds tired, or sad. There’s something there. “Thanks for thinking of me.”
“Diego . . .”
“What, you want a quote?”
I sigh. “I could do it off the record . . .”
“How’s this?” I hear him shuffling through papers. “Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash.”
“Lovely.”
“It’s Marcus Aurelius. Seriously.”
“He doesn’t really qualify as news.”
Suddenly I’m angry.
“You know what, Diego? Fuck you. Would you feel this way if it wasn’t just Afghans who were killed? If it were one of you?”
Omar sees me and approaches. He can see I’m upset. He raises the camera and snaps a photo. I draw my breath in sharply. Later, I’ll ask him to delete the photo. I’m here to observe, not to be observed.
“Look . . .” I say.
“We lost one too, Liz. Not Academi. U.S. military.”
“Oh.”
Omar puts the camera up to take another shot of me and I give him the finger. He smiles and snaps the shot.
“Did you know him?”
“He was Seventh Group.”
“Oh.” Diego’s old unit.
“You know you can’t print anything until . . .”
“I know.”
“I was with him in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he says. “We went way back.”
“Oh,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah,” he says. “A good guy. Great soldier. I think he’d have thought it was okay, going out like this. In combat, you know?” He didn’t sound sure.
There’s more to be done, but Bob texts me, he wants us back at the office. Bob’s got better contacts in the military anyway, so I figure, let him work it. On the way back, I look at the windshield stickers of the cars we pass. “Fighter Car. If You Follow Me Will Be Die.” “You Are My Heart Always.” One has an insignia of the presidential palace, and former president Hamid Karzai. Another, the face of the mujahideen Ahmad Shah Massoud. And then a Toyota Camry with “I Hate Girls.”
The next day, we find out the name of the 7th Group soldier—Master Sergeant Benjamin Kwon, “Benjy” to his friends. We don’t get the names of the eight Afghan armed guards who also died, not that there’d be much point in hunting the names down. UNAMA claims zero civilian casualties for that attack, though they put the days’ total at 368—52 killed and 316 injured, with 43 of the dead and 312 of the injured civilians. Diego doesn’t pick up the phone when I call him to get more detail. The Taliban claims the police academy attack and the Camp Integrity attack, but not the first bomb. Bob takes this to mean it was an accidental early detonation, a bomb headed for somewhere else, aimed to ruin other lives.
The day after, while we’re still scrambling, there’s a fourth bomb, this one at the entrance to the airport, killing and injuring twenty-one people, though by this point the numbers have blurred to just numbers. As I finish typing up the latest death toll it occurs to me that I’d been pumping out articles on how violent Kabul has become, this city that I’ve always told my family is safe, that I’ve told them is the one place in Afghanistan they don’t need to worry about me, and that if they’re following the news at all they’re probably freaking out.
So I call my mom. And my mom is concerned for me, and worried for me, like she always is, but it’s pretty obvious she has no idea that Kabul has been exploding. She goes on about how Uncle Carey’s mind is a touch battier than it always was, and they’re thinking about moving him in with my sister so that Linda can help look after him. And when I tell her about the bombings she just says, “That’s why I don’t like you over there, Lisette. All those bombs.” And when I get angry and tell her this is different, this is new, that hundreds of people have been killed or injured in the past three days alone and that doesn’t happen here, she tells me as soothingly as she can, “I know, my love, it’s terrible.” Because to her, to my mom, a woman who follows the news, who is smart, who is interested in foreign policy, who has a fucking daughter living in Kabul, this is certainly terrible but also just what happens over there. It’s not a surprise. And I realize that no matter how jaded I’ve become, I’ll never be as jaded as the average American.
“I don’t think you know what it feels like to have a child in a war zone,” she tells me. “To be a parent is to always have . . .”
“. . . a piece of your heart,” I say. “I know, Mom.”
“A piece of your heart,” she says, “traveling around outside your body.”
And I’m ashamed, talking to my mother, though I’m not sure why, just that I feel foolish, and that I also have the absurd desire to crawl into my mother’s lap, my very petite sixty-seven-year-old mother’s lap, though at the same time I’m so angry, or maybe just feeling betrayed, and if I showed up at her house tomorrow I know I’d sit in stony silence while she made me tea and talked about how America is falling apart and it’s mostly George Soros’s fault. But then she asks me what she always asks me: “When are you coming home?” And I surprise myself with what I realize is an honest answer.
“Soon.”
5
ABEL 1999–2001
Just before he handed me the gun, Osmin spoke of revenge, but that desire was down at the bottom of a well, under the water, so that all I could see when I searched for the feeling was my own reflection. Words like Mother, and Father, they, too, were under the water, and to even try to think them made my chest constrict. Easier to forget those words, which meant nothing. I was a newborn child. Peeing myself at night, like a child. Blinking in confusion at the light every morning, like a child. Helpless, like a child. But when I held the gun, I did not feel like a child. I felt like I had achieved something. I even thought that, if I died, just holding it meant I already knew what I needed to know.
“When you are young,” Osmin laughed, seeing me changed by the gun, “you want the strong.” I believed him.
Those early days are all broken memories. After Osmin saved me I had thought he would keep me with him, like a pet. Instead he left me by the side of the road, vomiting blood. I remember rolling onto my back, coughing and gurgling, the trees above stabbing the sky. Later, I remember going to church and hearing the names of the dead, fourteen names, including the four names I was most afraid to hear. Then my animal days began. I remember hunger, and stealing food in Cunaviche. I remember being beaten and fighting back like a wild dog. I remember the twins, Rafael and Norbey, who ruled the wild boys who lived on the street. Then I remember the army soldiers coming to Cunaviche, after which the paras moved back to the other side of the river and we didn’t see guerrilla anymore. It was months before I saw Osmin again, walking through the town with a fat young girl on his arm. When he left Cunaviche, I followed him and he let me.
“I remember you,” he said.
He told me he could give me the revenge I wanted, and also good pay, but I would have to prove myself. I had spoken to him of neither revenge nor pay, but I nodded as if he had offered me everything I could desire. Then he took me on the back of his moto to a bar by the river. Outside, the honest faces were playing cinco huecos, laughing and smiling with their other friends, rifles slung across their bags. One of the honest faces—Iván, I would later learn—took the ball and threw it at the head of another, who ducked, and the ball went into the river and floated away. They laughed, and Iván took his rifle up to his shoulder. “Think I can hit it?” he said, aiming at the ball.
I didn’t want to go closer, but Osmin’s face became stern, and the same instinct that brought food to my mouth urged me forward. I knew showing fear would be dangerous. And Osmin laughed and said, “You remember Iván and Nicolás?”
He told them that I wanted to prove I was tough enough to join, and then asked me, “Which one? Iván? Or Nicolás?”
Iván had pimples across his face, and I wondered if I could pop them with my fists. Nicolás’s beard was coming in and it made him look tougher. “Iván,” I said. When he was in the dust, I looked down and saw blood on my knuckles. There was pain in the air around us. Some of it belonged to me, some of it belonged to him. I reached to Iván, and offered him my hand, and he took it, and stood up, and then Osmin offered me the gun.
“I’ll give you what you want,” he said. And he did.
* * *
• • •
We never saw the guerrilla. Once, we shot at trees, and trees shot at us. At the time I wondered about tall, thin Alfredo and short, ugly Matías, and the guerrilleros who took them. Was Alfredo still always sick? Was Matías still kind? Was he still short? Did they take part in the massacre? It didn’t matter, I thought. They were nothing to me.
Mostly we worked in the towns along the river, keeping order and delivering justice. We’d set up roadblocks to control who was coming in and out. When people tried to steal from the paisas, we would chase them off their land. Make sure their drug laboratories were safe and their shipments went through. If a town had a problem with delinquents, we would come and help with a cleansing. One time a woman came to us with bandages on her ears. Thieves had torn her earrings right off, skin attached, and when the police caught the thieves they threatened her if she made a formal denunciation. We went to the house of the mother of one of the thieves, waited until her son arrived, and Iván shot him, leaving a big red spot on his chest as he gasped out his life. The police waved to us as we left.
Another time a mayor told us about a butcher in his town who had been beating his wife. He was an older man, gray haired, older than my father
, with a big red nose, big thighs, and a skinny chest, ugly like an insect is ugly. We went to his shop and held his arms and Osmin punched him five times in the face. Then we threw him to the floor and kicked him.
Osmin told us, “If a man has to beat his wife, it is because he is so weak that he can’t make her fear him.”
Osmin wasn’t married, but he was twenty-two years old and had almost that number of girlfriends, so I thought he must know something about women. As we were leaving, the man’s wife came down to tend to her husband’s wounds. She was short and fat and ugly, like her husband, and I felt like she should thank us somehow. I imagined making love to her. But she tended to her husband’s wounds without looking at us. We walked away.
* * *
• • •
I met Jefferson Paúl López Quesada soon after. He arrived with his men, paracos who had trained at Acuarela, who handled weapons with care, moved in formation, and wore crisp uniforms that contrasted sharply with our ratty T-shirts and Osmin’s bright-colored shorts. They came in pickup trucks, not on motos, and we all knew in advance to speak respectfully and carefully. Jefferson, Osmin told us, ran all the towns around La Vigia, the big town to the south. He gave orders to all the little gangs like ours, and managed all the money from the vaccine that people paid us to keep them safe.
Even before we saw him in person, I knew who he was. Seeing him in person, surrounded by his stone-faced paracos, was like standing before the burning bush.