Missionaries

by Phil Klay

  Combat is not like people think. It’s much slower, more deliberate. I didn’t understand that at first, not even after the first couple times in combat, back when I was with Ranger Battalion in Afghanistan. The adrenaline, the confusion, the newness of it all made it seem like a wild chaotic ride. I did not know what was going on, all I knew was my blood pounding through my veins, and the knowledge of death being present, and then, slowly, the knowledge that I was okay with that. I think if there was a time I could have done something really worthy of a medal for valor it would have been then, before Natalia, before I started valuing my life and my future over the experiences of the moment. I would have rushed out stupidly under fire then.

  Now I know too much. Not just that I have a wife and child at home, who depend on me and love me, but also, I know the battlefield in a different way. Every movie, every video game, is about the hero rushing forward, killing the enemy, saving the day. The lone, individual hero.

  On an actual battlefield, victories generally don’t come from one man killing a dramatic number of enemy. Killing doesn’t always mean strategic or even tactical success, as anybody who has studied Vietnam or Algeria or the Philippines or any goddamn war in history can tell you. What you want is not corpses but dominance over the battlefield. In that regard, combat is less like Call of Duty and more like chess. Jefe was moving us pieces into position.

  Rounds from the U-shaped building were spitting up bits of dust into the air. Diego crept the truck forward, cresting the berm just enough so that Carlos, in the turret on the 50 cal, could fire back, sending heavy rounds exploding through the walls.

  I ran toward a group of ANA, grabbed one of their PKMs, crawled uphill, found a spot with just the right angle on the building, and set it in its bipod. Think a bishop, pinning a piece so it can’t move without risk. I fired a burst, showing the Afghan behind me where to shoot. “In an arc,” I shouted, stupidly in English, and then motioned to him how I needed it.

  As we fired, another ODA team set up in the defilade. I looked up at the building. Painted on the side was a message: “This school was donated to the people of Afghanistan by UNICEF.”

  The assault force stormed forward under the roar of machine-gun fire. Dust rose from the hard-packed ground behind them, and the bullets crackling through the air burrowed through the dust, carving whisps in the air. Something about the sight made everything seem like it was happening at a quarter speed, and it was beautiful.

  One Afghan went down, then got up and hopped forward. Spurts of blood came from one leg. Arterial, potentially deadly. An Afghan medic pulled him to a depression and began treating the wound. They were learning.

  “Raven thirty, this is Raven thirty-one, where the fuck is our air support,” Jefe was screaming over the radio.

  Up ahead was an explosion. I saw an Afghan soldier screaming, his legs a mess. At the medics course they say you’ve got to let the wounded come to you. An SF trained medic is too valuable to risk. But I took an ANA truck to him and applied a tourniquet. The straps clamped down, viselike, on his arteries, crushing them shut, and he screamed. Up ahead, I saw an Afghan soldier scrambling up the hill, firing from the shoulder, careful, intermittent shots, professional. He threw a hand grenade and crested.

  I hauled my Afghan back to the CCP, where Ocho was grinning madly among the wounded, blood spatter all over his sleeves. I got in to help while Carlos up in the gun truck defended our position, firing away as return fire came in from irrigation ditches, grape huts, and compounds up on the hills.

  Jefe pointed to a compound where I could see Taliban flitting through the windows. It offered solid lines of fire to split our force. He grabbed me and Diego and some Afghans, leaving Carlos and Benjy to defend Ocho and the wounded. We were the support fire team, we only had machine guns, which aren’t exactly ideal for room clearing.

  “Hamla!” Jefe shouted to the ANA.

  We sprinted forward. The Taliban in the hills opened up.

  “Za! Za! Za!” Jefe was shouting. We reached the entrance and Jefe set up two Afghan machine gunners to fire back at the positions in the hills. Azad Khan pulled the pin off a hand grenade, tossed it in, and rolled back away from the entrance. The building vibrated with the boom, and a machine gunner stepped into the entryway and fired his PKM down the hall, shooting from the hip.

  Jefe pushed the PKM gunner inside, and while he fired down the hallway we cleared the rooms. From a window I saw an RPG fly toward Carlos in the gun truck. Carlos shifted fire and reduced a grape hut to rubble. We moved to another building, cleared it, then cleared another and another. As we moved forward, the gun truck moved forward, too. Then there was an enormous flash. Jefe looked at me and I looked back at the gun truck.

  The bomb had exploded underneath one of the back wheels, setting off the gas tank and the jerrycans of fuel. Flames arced up toward the sky as the truck jumped, equipment flying everywhere, and Carlos, in the turret, launched straight up. His arms spread out, hands clutching empty air, as his body twisted. Then he fell back down, landing on the front of the truck. I was too far away to hear anything, and even if I’d been close, the machine-gun fire would have covered over the sound, but in my memory of it I always hear the thud.

  I ran across the field, the machine-gun fire around me not quite registering, reached the truck, and hauled Carlos, heavy with all his gear, to the ground. His uniform was on fire and I burned myself trying to smother the flames. Rounds started cooking off in the burning truck. Inside were more than twenty thousand 7.62 rounds, ten thousand 5.56 rounds, as well as rockets, mortars, recoilless rifle rounds, and grenades, all of which would soon be exploding.

  I grabbed Carlos around the underarms and started hauling him to an irrigation ditch about ten meters away from the truck, just by the side of a marijuana field. As I pulled, an explosion in the truck sprayed us with hot frag. I kept pulling. My lungs burned, and my blistered hands screamed at me. Machine-gun fire raked the open spaces around us. We reached the ditch and collapsed in, but it was barely eighteen inches deep.

  “FUCK!” I screamed, then rolled over to assess Carlos, who looked up at me calmly, not in shock.

  “Benjy,” he said.

  I looked back to the truck, ablaze. Behind it, just up the hill, a dark figure. The explosion must have blown Benjy through the driver’s door and into the hill, saving his life. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jefe sprinting his way toward Benjy. He moved fast for an old man.

  “Leaking from the hip, bro,” Carlos told me.

  A piece of frag had punched through his hips, shredding his stomach and intestines, spraying splinters of hip bone throughout the abdomen. Clearly the major injury. I scanned the rest of the body. One leg, shredded, bent horribly, bleeding profusely. Due for an amputation at some point, if he survived. I quickly applied a tourniquet, easy. He had burns to his face, hands, unimportant. The patient—not Carlos, but the patient—had sustained a hell of a blow. In an hour or so, systemic inflammatory response would hit. The bowel and abdominal wall would swell, oxygenation would drop, and the patient would need massive fluid resuscitation and possibly inotropic support. He was in the Golden Hour, and I started packing the hip and abdomen, trying to keep the organs sterile and on the inside, trying to give him the best chance of surviving those sixty minutes.

  Packing from without is creating a sandwich, I could hear the instructors at Special Forces Medical Training Center telling me, packing from within is filling a cavity. Two layers of pads on either side of the liver, supported by the abdominal wall and the diaphragm. My heartbeat had kicked into fifth gear but my movements were controlled, or something beyond control, past clenched-fist bare-knuckled will and toward a natural set of movements flowing from the training, bypassing language and thought as my chattering brain whined on, reciting injuries and treatment options, but the voice increasingly distant as my hands worked.

  “Are you in pain?” I asked
.

  “Yes,” he said. “Hip, stomach. Jesus. Leg. Right leg. Face.”

  His beard was smoking. So was mine.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “I got you.”

  You have to ask about the pain. Carlos’s pain—when talking to him about his pain he was Carlos again, not the patient—it would be the life kind of pain, the kind that from this point would ebb and flow but never quiet. Asking about pain at the site of injury is a way of treating that chronic pain. They’re not sure how it works, other than that it does. Perhaps since pain is emotion plus sensation, reflecting care and concern and the promise of help to the patient somehow changes the equation. So we ask about the pain, and so I asked about the pain, and Carlos tried to tough it out.

  “Stop the bleeding first,” he said. I guess he thought I was going to bust out the drugs.

  I grinned at him. “I don’t tell you how to do your job.”

  I moved from the liver to the right gutter. Packed it. I shifted, put my left hand above the spleen, pulled it toward me, packed above the spleen, moved to the left gutter, then the pelvis. Noted accumulation of blood from a mesenteric bleeder. I stopped that with a finger. Then I used a clamp. I didn’t like the blood flow. I pulled the stomach down, pushed two fingers past it, slippery, rubbery, until I could feel the aorta. It pulsed under my fingers. This is life, I thought. I looked at Carlos’s face, which was pale, serene. I compressed the aorta manually.

  Jefe arrived at the ditch with Benjy, who saw how shallow it was.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” There was a stench of vomit. He’d probably puked over himself from breathing in the toxic smoke of the truck.

  Taliban were shooting at us directly now, bullets slicing through the marijuana over our heads.

  “If I get shot in the ass . . .” Jefe said as he pulled off Benjy’s body armor, checking him head to toe.

  “Benjy’s fine,” I said. “Carlos is in the Golden Hour.”

  “CASEVAC is twenty minutes out,” Jefe said.

  Huge explosions roared in the hills. The Canadian Leopards opening fire. Azad Khan appeared at my side with a stretcher. I could have kissed the ugly bastard. We got Carlos on the stretcher, started moving. Jefe helped Benjy to his feet and then, when Benjy collapsed, carried him. Behind us, the truck continued to burn. Ahead of us, the CCP, littered with needle cases, discarded bandage wrappers, tubing, shed straps of clothing, and in the midst of the chaos, covered in blood, Ocho.

  I pushed fluids into Carlos, as well as antibiotics. Later he would be too weak to fight the incoming infections from all the dirt and grime and evil pushed into his body before they had a chance to really grip him.

  “The fucking Dutch,” Jefe told me at one point, “can’t identify targets, and won’t go below their ceiling.” Ah, I thought. So that’s why we don’t have air support.

  Carlos seemed certain he was going to die. He’d alternate between joking and telling me things to tell his ex-wife, who’d left him after he cheated on her with a stripper in Fayetteville. I pumped him full of painkillers, kept him talking. Even if he survived the Golden Hour, I knew something he’d soon learn—that you never fully shake the finger of death once you’d been injured like this. Survivors age faster—two to four times as fast, though the doctors don’t quite know why. The diseases of old age—coronary artery disease, chronic kidney disease, hypertension, diabetes—strike earlier. It’s like the body knows it wasn’t meant to live. But there we were, Ocho and I working with his blood drying on our clothes, pushing life as he lay helpless to stop us, the two of us conspiring against his body’s right to die.

  We put him in the CASEVAC, unsure if he’d survive. It wouldn’t be until the fight was over that we’d receive definitive word that he’d made it, or at least made it through the worst. And the fight continued for two more days, with a body count somewhere around four hundred Taliban killed by the end.

  * * *

  • • •

  After the fighting, the people started filtering back to their towns, and I watched them, wondering what they were wondering. If they were asking themselves who they lost, how many of their brothers, or fathers, or sons were simply never coming home again. Diego pointed to a little boy holding hands with his littler brother. The boy had a mop of black hair, messy, like old pictures of the Beatles.

  “In a couple of years,” he said, “you think we’ll come back and kill him?”

  I scowled and Diego laughed.

  “You know what’s crazy,” he said. “Between 2001 and now, life expectancy in Afghanistan has gone up.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “I know,” he said. “From fifty-five years to fifty-seven. That’s how fucked up this country is. This war has actually been good for their health.”

  “Ah,” I said. I wasn’t interested in playing Diego’s games.

  Diego looked back out at the people. “You know what? This isn’t war. It’s chemotherapy.”

  I treated my own wounds, small burns and little bits of frag that had ripped little tears across my neck, face, and right arm. All would mostly heal, with minor scars. Nothing like Carlos.

  There are two ways to think about severe wounds. One is the very smallness and weakness of the human body, pathetic even compared to other animals, and so easy to break beyond repair, so easy even with the most basic of tools, a rock is enough, and then to think of it in the midst of the sorts of things that happen in war, not just explosions sending earth and brick blossoming but weapons that work by strange inversions of pressure, collapse buildings from the inside, or concentrate force in small spaces that liquify metal and send it shooting out through the air. The penetration of the human body is so easy it almost seems beside the point—such tools should be used for greater creatures than us. We are weak, we are fragile, and so, perhaps, we are nothing. There is wonder in the world—the unbearable blackness of the sky in Afghanistan, its piercing stars, the vibrations of the guns, soundless light on the horizon, flashes like echoes, a moon rising over sharp blades of mountain while tracers carve lines into the night. But man himself is nothing.

  But the other way of thinking is the opposite. That the world itself is what is small. Mountains, stars, horizon, so much accumulation of rocks, dust, and an expanse of empty air. Meaningless without someone there to see it. I was once shot in the shoulder. The world around me wobbled and vibrated and collapsed to nothing in the midst of the pain. I applied my mind to the pain, oriented myself, returned the world to its proper place around me. I thought of my brothers, who I was currently failing by no longer being in the fight, by being injured, perhaps badly enough I would need their help leaving this place, under fire, when they had enough to carry without me. I thought of my wife and daughter. And then I looked at my arm, flopped to the side, immobile, mere matter. A thing. Meaningless. And I applied my mind again to the pain, and a finger wiggled, dead flesh suddenly live. There was a miracle there, in the difference between the two.

  * * *

  • • •

  I didn’t write to Natalia about Carlos. I thought about it constantly, but putting it into a letter was too much. Putting things like that into words means facing them head-on, which you shouldn’t do mid-deployment. But the more I thought it, and about Natalia, and why I wasn’t telling her, the more I started wondering about what Natalia wasn’t telling me. Military wives tell each other not to tell their overseas soldier the hard truths, and since soldiers tell each other not to tell their wives the hard truths, intimacy withers on deployments.

  I can pinpoint the moment I was certain I loved Natalia. We’d just started dating. I was a year back from my first Afghanistan deployment, with Ranger Battalion. It’d been something of a letdown and I was puzzling over whether I should get out, go back to school, or try out for selection in SF, go to the next tier, where maybe I’d find where I belonged. Natalia, ever certain of where she belonged, was plug
ging away at her certification as a CPA. The relationship had escalated fast—we were already friends for years, we’d shared some serious things with each other before even getting romantic, so the whole thing felt fast-tracked, maybe even destined if either of us were romantic enough to believe in destiny—and I’d spent the whole weekend with her, Wake Forest being not the most terrible of drives from Fayetteville. We were just hanging out on Natalia’s bed, goofing around. I was playing with her hair. “I’m making you beautiful,” I said, as I pulled thick curls over her face, or bunched them up on top of her head. And she was laughing and taking photos of me as I did this, and then taking photos of both of us, her hand stretched out so the camera would maybe get both of us in the shot, though when we developed the film it was just the craziest of angles, my head cut in two or just the top of her hair sticking out everywhere like crazy. And I suddenly had this premonition—the thought of us in middle age, laughing like this. And then later, old age. The two of us like my grandparents, who toward the end had been in a room together at a hospital, where they’d reach out from their separate hospital beds and hold hands briefly each night before they went to sleep, a ritual that kept them alive until, of course, it didn’t. And in the midst of that goofing around with Natalia I felt the most profound sense of sadness at the thought of my own death coming toward me, because I knew that would be the end of times with her. When I drove home that night, I drove the speed limit, my life suddenly more valuable to me because of her.