by Phil Klay
You don’t live for your teammates. You prepare yourself to die for them. This is a very different thing. So I screwed up my courage. First by talking to God. And I told God that perhaps it was the ugliness in my life that was worth sharing with my wife, and I wrote her.
You know the little fake Christmas tree you and the rest of the wives sent us, with all the ornaments that had pictures of the guy’s kids in them? Ocho and Benjy took all those baby photos out and put in porn, or pictures of Halle Berry or Britney Spears. I didn’t tell you that because I was ashamed, and because I didn’t say anything when they did. Actually, I was relieved when they did it. It’s hard to look at my baby’s face constantly, and then go out on missions. I think something about being a father has changed this job for me.
Here’s a small story. A simple raid from last week, not very serious—we had night vision, they didn’t. They’re shooting blind from inside a building, then we hear a boom and whoosh, and then a rumble and crash. Some muj had fired his RPG from inside the building, not thinking about the backblast. It overpressurized the mud hut and blew out the walls, sending the ceiling crashing down.
Jefe radioed our stats back and we got word that the main assault element was done, the targeted personality KIA on objective, prep for exfil, helos twenty minutes out, so we do a quick SSE on the hut. Four bodies. One was old, or Afghan-old, mid-40s. The other three were also military-age males, though younger, teenagers maybe though it was hard to tell, and one with barely any beard at all, a young teenager, still holding the used RPG tube.
Jefe got mad. Fucking Taliban. Using fucking kids. Later that night, I asked Ocho if he thought we’d ever clear the south of Taliban and he just laughed and laughed and laughed, and I asked what were we doing here, if we weren’t going to clear Helmand, and he was like, What are we doing here? Knock knock.
Who’s there? I said, and he said, 9/11, and I said, 9/11 who? And he put on this angry face, pointed his finger at my chest and shouted, You said you’d never forget!
A pretty good joke, I thought.
Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you all this. I don’t really have any grand moral or lesson. I was so excited when 9/11 happened, in Ranger Battalion, where we all felt like the lucky ones, the ones blessed to be in just the right spot to do exactly what every American wanted, to get some payback, to do something righteous. And I still feel that. There’s some bad, bad people here. But there’s also young kids who join in the fighting because they’re young kids. It pisses me off and also kind of fucks me up a little bit.
Don’t get me wrong. Most days, I love what we’re doing. Mission by mission, this is the best deployment I’ve ever been on. And I saved Carlos’s life. Me. I did that. How could I think I should be anywhere else, doing anything else, than this?
After that, the letters got a lot more real, realer in terms of minor things—“Oh, thank God, I have been waiting and waiting to tell you how much I hate Diego’s wife . . .”—and major, almost too real things—“when I feel like I’m failing as a mother, which is often, sometimes I comfort myself by telling myself it’s not me that’s failing, it’s you, you failing by not being here, by insisting on being in a stupid war nobody cares about at all. Which means I can relax. If Inez grows up fucked up I won’t be the one to blame . . . and then, of course, I feel horribly guilty.” And she told me of the balance of joy and stress that is raising a child, and how my absence had tilted that balance to the almost unbearable, functionally a single mother but with the added fear this life brings, the terror of news reports, casualty rolls, the sight of men in uniform driving down residential neighborhoods sending a chill down the spine. Is it strange to say letters like this made us closer?
* * *
• • •
Before we left, we did have at least one mission that was less pure combat than hearts and minds. It was a VETCAP, a veterinary civic action program, the sort of thing that was far more popular with Afghans than medical engagements, where we went out and cured their illnesses. In the rural region of Afghanistan, human life is cheap. Pain and death, it is understood, are a part of existence, and they follow their own logic. A healthy herd, on the other hand, is pure gold. So Ocho and I were sent out with Diego, Benjy, Jason, and some Canadians to try our veterinary skills on the local herds.
En route, of course, a group of Taliban skirmishers took some shots at us in an untilled field. The fire was unusually intense, and unusually accurate. A bullet nearly grazed my head.
“Diego,” Ocho said. “If I die on this dumbass mission, I want my tombstone to read, Here lies Ocho. He gave his life for goats.”
They must have prepped the area as a battlefield, establishing fire positions and marking the distances against the trees dotting the fields, using them as aiming stakes.
“You know, we may not have much success training Afghans.” Diego smiled at me. “But these Taliban fuckers do seem to be learning. It gives you hope for this country.”
Diego called for air support while we maneuvered the Canadians around, playing a game that’d end up taking an hour or two before the Taliban decided they’d had enough and ghosted away. The main casualties were goats. We pushed on to the village and delivered medicine to the villagers’ sick herds, curing the same kind of animals we’d just slaughtered and feeling a bit, well, sheepish about it. Perhaps just the exhaustion of something so seemingly pointless led us to slip up on the way back, miss the IED. I don’t know.
The explosion that hit Ocho sounded in a pulse, like being inside the heartbeat of an enormous animal, an animal the size of the earth itself, and with a heartbeat loud enough to swallow you whole. It flung Ocho high in the air, thrust me backward, staring at the sky, unfocused, unsure of what I was or where I was or even what I was seeing. Blue patch here, now. Brown patch there. And then, pain. And then, above the pain, a sound. Ocho screaming.
I lifted a hand, bleeding, and held it against the sky. I ordered my fingers to wiggle. All five wiggled back at me. I lifted the other hand. Wiggled. Sat myself up.
There was a crater big enough for a man to stand in and disappear. Against the edges, I could see the outline of other IEDs, undetonated but their positions revealed by the explosion. I heard someone call out a warning. That someone was me.
Ocho was a few feet away from the edge of the crater, the top half of him more or less recognizable, the bottom half smudged. I scanned for other casualties and saw a Canadian guy only six or seven yards away from me, slumped with blood seeping through the body armor, just over his chest. I looked back at Ocho. There was a decision, a decision related to training and not to friendship, love, or camaraderie. Legs or chest?
Ocho was shouting and gradually I understood, he was warning people away from him, warning about movement in general. IEDs all over, any patch of earth. Only one of his arms was moving.
I pulled out my bayonet and pushed it through the dirt in front of me, making my way to the Canadian soldier, away from Ocho, moving at a crawl, digging under the dirt, feeling for the clink of metal, the solidity of a mine.
When I reached the soldier his face was white, his breathing shallow, veins sallow.
“Hey,” I told him as I worked from the side to get his body armor off. “I got you. What’s your name?”
“Jim,” he said.
“Okay, Jim,” I said. “It’s a small entry and exit wound, not so bad. So you know the deal. You survive the next five minutes, and what happens?”
“I live.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ocho applying a tourniquet to his right leg. He roared as he tightened it. I’ll never get used to the screams that come with this job. Everything we do to casualties hurts—from dragging wounded bodies across hard ground to the chest seals to the compressions to the IVs—but the vise-like grip of a tourniquet is in a special class. It’s so painful it can kill, because the pain makes the nervous system demand oxygen, adding
another unfulfillable request to the body’s shrunken, weakened veins. But Ocho is a tough motherfucker, I told myself, and if anyone can self-care a pair of tourniquets without passing out, it’s him.
“Jim,” I said. “Tell me where it hurts.”
I took out the chest adhesive seal, which is the size of a dinner plate, and began peeling the adhesive off with shaky, adrenaline-fueled fingers.
Jim told me it hurt to breathe, it hurt in his chest and his foot, which I could see was twisted under him and attached so it didn’t matter, not so much, but that’s fine.
I applied the seal, which hurt Jim more, but more important than managing pain was stopping the air spilling into the hole in his chest, getting trapped in the chest cavity and squeezing the lung smaller and smaller until suffocation. Blood and oxygen, I thought, and now emotion.
“Do you want fentanyl?” I asked. “For the pain?”
“Fuck. Yeah.” Jim was shivering. Ocho was tying on a second tourniquet and roaring again, the tough bastard. Another Canadian guy who’d been bayoneting his way across the ground reached me, and I set him packing a wound in Jim’s calf, deep but probably not enough to threaten the leg. Laminated gauze with a homeostatic agent to do the clotting Jim could no longer do for himself, while I put in an IV, fluids plus antibiotics.
“Keep packing until it’s full,” I said. “Then hold down three minutes.”
There were no bullets in the air. No shooting. I started making my way to Ocho, who’d done too good a job warning people away from himself, too good a job telling everyone he’s got it, so he was still in self-care, and with every inch I approached it became rapidly apparent I’d made the wrong choice because it wasn’t legs versus chest, like I’d thought, it was legs and arm and maybe more versus chest.
His legs were rags, with torn flesh and bone sticking out oddly, calf muscles flopped to the side and covered in sand, looking like breaded chicken cutlets waiting to be thrown on the skillet. The feet no longer attached, muscle and flesh torn off the bone, the signature of blast injuries, whose shrapnel takes the hard bone and whose blast energy takes the soft tissue, the muscles, skin, veins, and arteries pulling up off the remaining bone like the peel off a banana.
Ocho’s right hand was split down the middle, as if someone had driven a hatchet between his middle and ring fingers. There were chunks missing out of the meat of the forearm, exposing the large bones there.
I lifted my head, ready to call for Diego and Jeff to clear a path for Ocho to be dragged out, but saw it was already being done. I turned the tourniquet on his right arm and Ocho’s bellow was weaker, by far, than the other two I’d heard. I asked about his pain. I squeezed fluids into my friend, resuscitation fluids and analgesia. And Ocho told me, “If you save my life, I’m gonna be so proud of you.”
I reached to Ocho’s leg and moved aside his dick to place another tourniquet up higher than the one he’d administered himself.
“Now I’ve got to live,” he said. “I’m not gonna die when you’re the last person to touch my junk.”
When we put Ocho in the stretcher, he screamed in pain, which is normal, more or less, so I didn’t realize what had really happened until he shifted, reached over the side of the stretcher, and grabbed his right foot. I’d assumed it had been completely severed, since the foot had been snapped off at the bone, but there was a thick flap of calf muscle still attached, and we were dragging it through the dust, sending pain screaming into his brain. Ocho pulled the foot into the stretcher and clutched it to his stomach, cradling it like a baby with his one good arm, his eyes closed. That’s the image I had of him as they put him into the helicopter.
* * *
• • •
By the end of our deployment to Afghanistan, the 1st Battalion of the 7th Special Forces Group had killed over 3,400 enemy, most of them in a territory that is now, eight years later, still Taliban controlled. Our particular team had sustained no KIA. Which meant, from the perspective of the American public, that it’d been cost-free.
Since we were now just scraps, the team couldn’t be kept together, but I’d return to Shah Wali Kot on later deployments. We’d fight another major battle there a few years later. For all I know, we’ll fight another major battle there a year from now, or five years from now. Those little kids hustling from the valley, hand in hand with their sisters, escaping the bombardment—they keep getting older.
Azad Khan died in 2010. I was with him at the time, and he said his last words to me. “Sir,” he said, bleeding from more wounds than I could ever hope to pack, “I need more hand grenades.” When I came back from that deployment, I told Ocho and he laughed and said, “That motherfucker, that lucky motherfucker. Goddamn. He was a fucking motherfucker, wasn’t he? A fucking warrior, wasn’t he? Goddamn. I wish I could die with some badass shit like that.” Ocho still holds out the hope that prosthetics will improve to the point where he can go back to war as some kind of Robocop-style super-soldier with bionic limbs. It doesn’t matter if it takes them years to get to that kind of technology, he tells me. Whenever they figure it out, Afghanistan will be waiting, that land he thinks of less as a country than an arena, a stadium for men like him and Azad to do what they were meant to do.
I couldn’t have articulated it then but that deployment was the beginning of the dead certainty that I preferred boring Colombia to exciting Afghanistan. I preferred strategy over tactics, progress over bloodshed, winning wars slowly over the thrilling and immediate victories of combat without purpose. When I got back I asked Natalia if she wanted another child, and she said yes.
8
JUAN PABLO 1987–2005
When I was a boy I felt the presence of God. This was, of course, a matter of design. My father sent me to a retreat run by the Jesuits, who are good at that sort of thing. Before my daughter, and before my career in the military, and the hopes for the future they would bring, this would be my first failed love.
They took about twenty of us up to a little place in the mountains. We each had a monastic cell with a tiny window where, for the first few days, we spent our time in almost perfect solitude.
There were prayers and specific passages of Scripture to read. There was a little journal where we reflected on our spiritual progression, such as it was. In the beginning, we were called to bring our sins to the front of our mind, spurring our guilt. Then, we were to calm ourselves by meditation on God’s incomprehensible mercy. I remember sitting in my cell, looking up at the small window, at the stone wall with only the most rudimentary of crucifixes, barely more than two twigs strung together. I didn’t have any grave sins to call to mind, what boy of twelve does? But still, I prayed, I searched hard for small slights I’d committed, pulled up scraps of memory that could suffice, and held them out for God to look at. Maybe he’d care about them more than I did.
Things got more interesting when we studied the Passion of Christ. They made it personal, assembling us in groups and urging us to talk about our own sufferings—a task a young man can warm to. The terrible injuries we’d all suffered, or imagined we’d all suffered. Much of what we said was petty, if meaningful to us. And then a boy from a good family, the son of a general, wealthy and handsome, told us that his father regularly beat his mother, and had once thrown him out of a moving car.
“We weren’t going very fast,” he said, his face pale as the words emerged from his mouth, seemingly unwilled.
The Jesuit scholastic running the retreat, only a decade older than us and clearly with little experience in handling these things, looked terrified. These were the kind of secrets that had consequences when shared. This was dangerous. The son of the general lifted his arm.
“I broke my wrist,” he said, fear radiating from him as the words continued to spill out. “I had to get stitches. I still have the scar.” He pulled his sleeve back, displaying a faint, jagged line. He stared at it, we stared at it, then he looked up, his
eyes attempting to make contact with another set of eyes. But after a person has opened himself, simply to look him in the eye is to assume responsibility for his pain, so the rest of us gazed safely at the floor.
After this, there was silence. I looked around. If no one else were to speak, it would be a betrayal. When you share dark secrets, you must be repaid in kind. I searched my memory, but had nothing. My father, whatever his faults, loved my mother passionately, and loved me the same, and would never have done anything like that.
Finally, one of the other boys spoke, and the group seemed to exhale at once. Thanks to God! He began in a tentative, small voice that slowly expanded into a world of pain and loss. The death of his mother to cancer. A worthy offering. Then another boy spoke, and another, depths suddenly opened, the kidnapping of a sister by the guerrilla here, the loss of a cousin to drugs there, and it seemed as though a secret world had been unlocked, a world in which sin and pain were real, and mattered, and infused us with a terrible sense of the true meaning of the world.
We retreated back to our cells, trembling with the weight of what had happened. There was nothing other than my little window and my little cross to focus my mind, to calm the turbulence in my soul. I knew I was supposed to pray to God. No matter the awfulness of what I’d just heard, such prayers had been made by countless Christians suffering worse crises, suffering martyrdom and torture, pains and troubles far larger than our privileged group of children had been able to produce. But I could not pray. I had no words. And then I heard a sound behind me, and saw a large envelope had been pushed underneath the door to my cell. I lifted it, opened the packet, and withdrew a group of letters tied together with twine.