News From the Red Desert (24 page)

“Your café?”

“The Green Beans beside the flight line.”

“I didn't realize it was yours.”

“Well, I run it. We have chess sets now. We've started a film series.”

“Why?”

“To make life better here for all the lonely people.”

“Why does that matter to you?”

“I'm just trying to do my part.”

“For the mission?”

Rami Issay looked around the spartan office. Flag. Portrait of General Jackson on the wall. Metal bookcase in one corner. Field manuals and boxes of preprinted forms. He felt an enormous sense of fatigue. He felt it rise and then with all his strength, he fought it down. “No sir.”

Horner's eyebrows rose.

“For America.”

“What do you mean?”

“You aren't really trying to win a fight here. You're trying to sell something, right? An idea about how to live. I'm trying to show that idea. As are, perhaps, your television colleagues.”

“Thank you, Mr. Issay. You may go. I'll be in touch.”

T
he platoon walked slowly and carefully. The intel had been unusually specific that day, about the level of threat and its nature. They had seen drone footage of men planting IEDs and of them being summarily dispatched by Hellfire missiles, their colleagues emerging from the ditches moments later to pull the wounded to cover. In the meantime, new digging happened up and down the same road. Surely the insurgents all understood that those new bombs had been seen, too? The order had come down to shut off movement on that road until the engineers cleared it with counter-blasts. It had been closed for two days, but now the road was considered safe.

The question the soldiers had asked themselves as they listened to the intel briefing was why? What made it worth it to the Taliban to lose men to close the road for a couple of days? The intel officer didn't answer immediately. Then he said, “We can't see evidence of large enemy formations moving through the area. As far as we can tell, these were all local actors.”

It hadn't been a wholly satisfactory response. Trying a little harder, he offered, “They are not us. And more to the point, we are not them. We do not feel about this land the way they do. What makes it worth
fighting at all, and taking the wrong end of a 100:1 kill ratio? We're here building schools.” He was twenty-six years old and had a degree in Middle Eastern studies. He had learned Pashto at his fancy college with the intention of coming here. He was an object of mockery among the troops, considered at once too thoughtful and completely out of touch. The sentence he had just uttered did not help him on that score and he was smart enough to know it. “They take their directions from their leaders. And every local commander needs to be seen to be fighting us, as much as they do actually fight us. Not just for their superiors, but for every farmer in the valley who hears the IED go off.”

Fortin indicated that the briefing was over then. And the men stood up. The intel officer gathered his notes up and left. The men lifted their weapons and made their way to the departure point. It was late afternoon.

That was four hours earlier, Deirdre calculated. After her meeting with Lattice, she had had run to catch her helicopter out to the FOB where she met the platoon. She had been looking forward to talking to John Wayne and when she realized a different terp, calling himself Joe, had taken his place, she wondered where he had gone. Normally they kept a terp with one unit, to build trust and cohesion. The new terp would not utter a single word about John Wayne. He had gotten drunk, then, or got in a fight. Or something more serious. When she asked Joe if he'd be back, he told her she'd have to ask someone other than him. Maybe a soldier. That alarmed Deirdre and interested her. Terps love to gossip about each other's petty crimes as much as soldiers do. If it had been a fistfight or drinking, he would tell her.

By now they had covered twelve klicks. They'd walked past one huge crater that the engineers had left. Apparently there were plans to pave the road, with a view to making the business of concealing IEDs more difficult.

“It would cost ten million dollars a mile here,” a master corporal from Manitoba said. “More, if you have to fly in the asphalt.”

“Why would you do that?” a corporal from BC asked.

“ 'Cause the roads are so dangerous.”

“Apparently we don't understand the big picture.”

“Shut the fuck up back there and watch your arc,” Fortin said.

Walking on more quietly now. The eucalyptus trees shone silver in the heat. The soldiers could smell them even more strongly than they could smell themselves.

Fortin watched his men sweating and worried. This was a short day patrol but no one was carrying much less than thirty kilos of gear and ammunition. None of them would complain about the discomfort, but even as the sweat darkened their uniform pants, the backs of their heads moved less and he knew that if he could see their eyes they would be less alert than they had been. He could not make it less hot. Heat is hard.

Up in the mountains, the problem had mostly been keeping everyone warm, which meant keeping them dry, which meant not letting everyone's combats get this soaked with sweat. No one would have to sleep in their clothes this night. They should be back to the base by midnight. It was an unusual luxury to be based so close to KAF, with hot showers and fresh eggs whenever you could get in. An unusual luxury that had only been prompted by the proximity of the enemy to the main base. Which was itself concerning. But still—fresh eggs. Showers.

He rechecked their weapon discipline for the hundredth time. They were good soldiers and they had trained hard. Even the men who had multiple tours in knew better than to think they had it all figured out. And so he needed to bark at no one. They all faced where they were supposed to be facing and held their weapons carefully and did the drill perfectly. Problem was, this wasn't a drill. He would have preferred less precision and just a bit of loose nervous tension. But nervous tension is exhausting. And heat like this anaesthetizes.

His young lieutenant did not understand these nuances. The men were following the SOPs and he was reassured by that order and precision. Until you've seen men shattered in front of you, you find the drills reassuring. Fear submits to familiarity. Death doesn't. Death revels in routine. Every successful ambush depends on it.

As they walked, Deirdre kept at the new terp. He would not say anything more about John Wayne but she found out that he was from a
village to the east. Yes, he spoke Pashto, of course. Yes, he had been a terp for a while. He wasn't sure how long. Time kind of ran together here, had she noticed that?

The first shot threw Sergeant Kyle Wilson on his back. Too loud, too powerful to be anything but a 12.7-mm round. When it roared out at them, the report and the sound of bullet hitting body armour came right on top of one another. There was the briefest instant when the platoon looked at Wilson uncomprehendingly, before going to ground themselves. In that beat, automatic weapons fire lit up from the tree lines along the road on either side: AKs and at least a couple of belt-fed weapons. It wasn't obvious until they hit the ground who had been thrown there and who had thrown themselves. Rivulets of blood ran from arms and legs and heads. Wilson did not move. The lieutenant, ten yards ahead of Fortin, was on the ground, leaking brains from his ear. Fortin began barking. “Robinson! Get that Minimi on that treeline. Bring up the GPMG! Who has an M-50? Vadaboncour, put a rocket over there. Who else has one?!” And then, more clearly but just as urgently, and into the radio: “Niner, this is Red Team Alpha. Contact, wait, out.”

Gunfire erupted from their hastily formed perimeter in an almost continuous roar of automatic rifles and machine guns and rockets. The light machine guns ran their fire expertly, a foot above the dirt at the treeline. Lopez put his M-50 rocket into a likely looking hollow. The saplings on the treeline opposite fell as if scythed. Within a few moments a cloud of fine dust had been thrown up so dense that nothing could be seen beyond the patch of dirt they lay upon. Fortin gestured to stop firing. The cacophony petered out over the following ten seconds. Everyone's ears rang. The air was so still the dust just hung there. When the echoes of the last shots finally faded, all that could be heard was nothing.

Deirdre was on her side, gasping. A bullet had hit her backpack as she had thrown herself down and pierced her water bottle. At first she
thought she was bleeding but then she realized the liquid all over her was too cool to be blood. The dead lieutenant's brains had sprayed out in a plume behind him and she had bloody grey goo on her neck. She lifted herself a little and looked around.

The deep breaths of the wounded men rose up in the stillness. The medA leopard-crawled over to the platoon commander first, and established that he had been head shot and was pulseless. Wordlessly, he made his way up to Wilson, who was coughing red foam and moaning. The medA pulled off his body armour and found the entrance hole under his left armpit. The exit hole took up most of his right armpit. A sucking chest wound, but with not enough chest left to seal. It was amazing he was still breathing. He wouldn't be for long. The medA cut open his sleeve and injected twenty milligrams of morphine into his shoulder. Then he moved on to the next bleeding man, a corporal from Regina, who took an AK round in his lower belly. Feces leaking through a quarter-sized exit wound in his side. Breathing easily. Pulse strong. Not in shock, but pissed off. More morphine. He'd need a laparotomy and a colostomy in KAF, but he looked like he'd be okay. One other man had been shot through the forearm. He cradled it on his chest as he lay on his back. His arm was a mess, dangling from where his elbow had been. Might need an amputation at the elbow—it was hard to say. The surgeons hated amputating anything, and hardly did it anymore, so long as there was something to graft and fixate. There was a bright arterial bleeder in the shattered limb and so the medA put a tourniquet on his upper arm. More morphine. He bent a splint into shape and tied it above and below the wound. He crawled over to the sergeant major. “The lieutenant is dead and Wilson will be soon. The other two will live, I think.”

Fortin nodded. “I'll get a medevac in as soon as it's safe.”

The medA crawled back to the wounded men. Deirdre fished her notebook out of her pocket and began scribbling.

Fortin crept to the position perimeter and lifted his binoculars, looking through the grass. Along the treeline he saw broken saplings and rocket craters but no signs of men. He got on the radio and raised the company commander. The news of the casualties, and especially the loss
of the platoon commander introduced a particular focus to the exchange. Nothing like emotion was betrayed. When Fortin requested air assets, he was told fast air was already en route. They had drone imagery up already, but could not discern whether there were combatants in the treeline. Fast air would settle the matter in a moment.

The pair of A-10s came into view a moment later. He rang off from his company commander. The lead pilot of the A-10s raised him a moment later and he described where the firing positions had been. The A-10s circled around twice and then they approached low and slow, along the treeline. When they were five hundred yards away their 30-mm cannons lit up the road with the shriek.

A 30-mm round is the size of a thick dill pickle, packed with explosive. Individually, their concussions have would have been a little less powerful than that of a grenade. But these cannons fire at a rate of four thousand rounds a minute. The roar stretched into one long, basso profundo note. Four thousand beats a minute. Faster than a hummingbird's heart.

The platoon's fusillade had shredded the saplings at the start of the firefight. Now thigh-sized trees fell stupidly, in all directions, shedding leaves and tendrils of their shattered trunks as they pitched into the dirt. The road was impassable within seconds. The roar of the cannons competed with that of the jet engines; the summation of the two represented more noise than humans could actually hear. The men covered their ears with their hands and felt the dirt under their chests rippling. Deirdre thought that, as painful it was to be in the vicinity of this attack, to have been the object of it must be unthinkable. The combat she had seen in Iraq had been mostly urban where air power was less useful.

It was the least of the differences between the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, she would have conceded, already writing the lede to her piece. Urban, rural. Nationalist, Tribal. Secular, religion-addled. Rocky, sandy. No oil, oil.
And here, we're losing,
she added to herself, really realizing it for the first time. She lifted her hands from her ears as the aircraft finished their run and rose high into the air, the roar of their engines fading as they climbed.

She listened, then, for the sounds of dying men in the broken trees, but all she could hear was her own ears ringing. And the two wounded men near her moaning, and the A-10s, climbing and circling and getting ready to come back again. She hunched down into the dirt and pulled her helmet tightly down, as she covered her ears.