News From the Red Desert (3 page)

This would probably be his last deployment. By the usual rules, it would have gone to someone more junior than him. But these were not usual times. Still, it was kind of great, seeing what the machine was
capable of when it got wound up. When it stopped being just a hypothesis. His satphone rang. No one else he knew of had their own satphone except the commander. It rang again.

“Sergeant Major Anakopoulus!” he barked, expecting it to be the waste-of-rations major who thought he had some sort of charge over him.

“Demetrios?”

“Susie?”

“I'm sorry for calling your satphone.”

“That's okay. Is anything wrong?”

“No. I just hadn't heard from you and I was looking at the calendar and wondering—do you think we should still plan on going to Puerto Rico next Christmas?”

“That can wait. We'll do it when I get home.”

“Okay. It's just that the fares go up the later you book the tickets.”

“I know.”

“I'm really missing you already.”

“I can't talk too long here, Susie. I'm in the middle of something.”

“I know. I just wanted to know what to do about the tickets.”

“How's the kid?”

“He's great. I'll let you go now. I know these calls are expensive.”

“I'll call you as soon as things settle down here.”

“Sure.”

“Bye.”

“Demetrios?”

“Yeah, Susie?”

“Be safe, okay?”

“You bet.”

“Are you drinking?”

“Of course not. Are you?”

“No!”

“Okay.”

Anakopoulus hung up and put his satphone back in his pocket and surveyed his maze of pallets. He really needed to get some rain cover built for them.

The skinny Brit with the dog approached and said, “Hello.”

“Hello, sir.”

“Looks like you have about a thousand balls in the air here.”

“It's all under control, sir. A challenge, but challenges are what we do.”

“Indeed.”

“Anything I can do for you?”

Before Robinson could answer, Deirdre O'Malley joined them. Anakopoulus had been briefed about her, too. “Ma'am, I'm afraid you can't be here. This is a controlled area.”

“Oh, I'm so sorry, Warrant Officer—I'm still getting my bearings. Can you point me toward the admin office? I can't get my email to work.”

“It's just around back of the hangars over there, ma'am. And it's Master Sergeant.”

“I can show you,” the Brit said.

“Would you? I'd be grateful.”

Anakopoulus watched them walk away. He shook his head. No matter what kind of VIP that man was, he was still a moron.

And then the real killers were on the Herc, strapped in like so much equipment. Soon they were airborne with all of Afghanistan spread below. They flew north for a time and then they flew west to Ramstein AFB in Germany. Most of the men, from long habit, went to sleep. The sergeant from Boise could see out a small scratched window if he craned his neck. Through it, he traced the valleys they had fought through, one after the other. Detail flooded back to him. The audio came in snatches, but the video was uninterrupted and perfectly sharp. Every ridge he had flanked, every man he had shot and had seen fall, illumination flares lighting up startled, sleepy, Taliban sentries, a moment later pierced by tracer fire. He could describe days-long stretches of some of that time down to the minute. There was so little summary in his memory, just
all that living, crammed in as tight as it could fit. The valleys below him looked like textured paint. Grey stucco. Like his stepfather's house. Sour cigarette smoke and quiet. As opposed to that RPG hitting the other side of the rock he was lying behind. His friend catching a 12.7-mm round in the chest and exploding in front of them. Seeing the sun coming up over the Arghandab from the back of a Chinook, the morning after they took Spin Boldak. None of this would submit to condensation. It would equally defy categorization and understanding. And so endure. Like a pebble in a shoe.

H
e had lied to Susie for weeks after he got his notice of deployment, claiming he had heard nothing. There was a reason, more than the simple craven wish to avoid upsetting her. He would be gone soon enough, so why make her unhappy before he had to? He knew she would find this very difficult. They had both gotten their one-year chips just the summer before. She wanted him close to her. For her sake, he thought. But he was wrong about that.

She knew. Twenty thousand soldiers were posted to the base they lived near and every ATM lineup featured military spouses who talked to one another. Anyway, there was the news. After the towers came down, they all expected to be spending time overseas. And mostly, they would be. She knew that every other healthy soldier had been notified when he could expect to go. Why hadn't he? Was there something about his health he hadn't told her?

When he did tell her, it was after she had put her son to bed, and they were sitting in the lawn chairs in her backyard. The sun was almost down and it was quickly growing cool. He said he did not know how long the deployment would be for. And he told her he had found out only today.

He could tell she knew he knew more. She looked away. She looked back at him. She tried to speak but her throat closed up. He tried, too, but he couldn't make sounds. They just sat there, listening to the bugs.

Kandahar Airfield, April 2007

O
f course they did not recognize one another. After five years, they'd hardly have been recognizable to their close friends back home, if they'd still had any. Anyway, even if they had remembered meeting, it probably wouldn't have helped. Deirdre O'Malley would still be the fucking embed who lost her fucking
body armour
somehow and came to Master Sergeant Anakopoulus's warehouse demanding a replacement from him an hour before she was supposed to head outside the wire.

“I didn't lose it. It was with my kit, but none of it arrived from Baghdad.” Of course she dropped the “Baghdad” in there just as soon as she could. Her gold-rimmed aviators stayed on her face, even inside. “The fighting was heavy when I left and the airfield was mortared. Maybe that's why.” She paused. The supply clerk looked at her for a long moment and chewed on a toothpick, then he called Anakopoulus out of his office to see what he would say.

Anakopoulus had been listening to the exchange between O'Malley and his clerk through his open office door, and had been getting angrier by the second. He was entirely uninterested in the posturings of this woman, who must have been in high school when he first set up the KAF supply depot. By now he had seen everything, or everything that
mattered: the quiet two years that followed Taliban's Last Stand, the slow-to-boil insurgency that began after the fall of Baghdad, and the Iraqization of the country underway now. He had seen journalists come through here in a steady stream, incontinent with excitement over being part of the mission. The supply techs saw everyone in their first intoxicating hours on the base and learned to recognize the giddiness of civilians encountering war for the first time. In an environment with limited distractions, one took one's fun where it was found.

The veteran journalists travelled lighter and were usually more careful with the tone they used with clerks and techs. They clung to their sunglasses like Homeland Security agents and they walked faster, looked at less and saw more. They'd picked up some phrases in Pashto and Dari. They were dirtier. Anakopoulus was able to date the embeds like a curator looking at a pot. He figured this one had been among soldiers for a two or three years. But there was an uneasiness folded into her assertiveness that suggested KAF did not quite feel like home to her yet. In a few months, after she had been through the supply warehouses a few times, she would present herself with genial weariness, a much more effective strategy.

“You're responsible for your own kit, ma'am,” Anakopoulus said with the obdurate detachment of irritated clerks anywhere.

“I didn't lose my kit. I put it on the runway beside the Herc and it didn't come off.”

“Maybe take that up with the Air Force.”

“I have to go on patrol in an hour.”

That was a mistake and he saw that she knew it as soon as the words came out of her mouth. Journalists loved to affiliate themselves with soldiers, but nothing earned the soldiers' disdain more quickly than that presumption of equivalency.
She
was not going on patrol.

“Maybe ask at the press tent. I could give you directions,” he said.

She did not reply. They looked at one another levelly.

She knew these first few encounters would influence the way she was seen for the rest of the time she was on base. She could not lose this, not
this badly. Looking Anakopoulus in the eye, she picked up her cell phone. She dialled a number. “Major Horner? Deirdre O'Malley. Yes, I got in this morning. I need some help. My kit didn't arrive with me and that patrol you set up leaves soon. I need some body armour. I'm here at the supply depot, talking to…” She looked pointedly at Anakopoulus's name tag. “…Master Sergeant Anakopoulus, and he doesn't have anything for me. Sure, one second.” She offered the cell to Anakopoulus.

“Master Sergeant Anakopoulus.”

“Yessir.”

“No, that won't be necessary, sir.”

“Yessir.”

He handed the phone back to O'Malley. He nodded to the clerk and strode into his office. He slammed the door so loudly everyone in the cavernous warehouse looked up.

The clerk walked into the warehouse to get the journalist her body armour.

Ten minutes later, she emerged into the sun, blinking even behind her sunglasses. So she'd established that she wouldn't be fucked with. That was good, she thought. The master sergeant would pout for a few days and then forget about her. Surely.

Four hours later, 3 platoon, Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry stopped to rest in the shade beside a wadi in the Arghandab Valley. Deirdre leaned against a boulder. She was just getting to know, and to be known by, these men, so she kept her mouth shut.

“All morning long, Taliban on every hill, watching us. But no ROE criteria and so we all just look at each other.” This was Sergeant Kyle Wilson, twenty-seven-year-old section commander, pretending to be talking to himself or possibly his section, but speaking loudly enough to easily be heard by his fuckwit platoon commander. The platoon warrant
officer, Richard Fortin, forty years old, sinewy and irritated, spun his head and glared at Wilson. That was ill-disciplined and disrespectful. They'd be having a one-way conversation about that later.

“Until we're out of sight, and then the fucking cell phones come out,” Private Casey Tilmouth, one of Wilson's section, said.

“Shut the fuck up, Tilmouth,” Wilson said, having caught Fortin's searing look.

They chewed on beef jerky and drank water. “Can we smoke, Sergeant?” a twenty-year-old from Lethbridge asked.

“No, you can't. You said you quit.” Wilson bit into his jerky, not waiting for or much interested in a reply.

Deirdre listened, but not too obviously. She wondered for the
n
th time why men didn't become adults until their thirties, when women were full grown by the time they finished college. She used to think the men she knew were made children by sports and gaming and especially by accommodating girlfriends and mothers, but these men were undoted upon and the same delayed final maturation was evident. Compare the twenty-year-old from Lethbridge to Wilson and Fortin. The twenty-year-old had grace and physical power, but in his understanding of the world it was as if he were the son and grandson of the other two.

She was sympathetic to Wilson's frustration about the ROEs. He just said what they were all thinking. In Iraq, before the insurgency came to a rolling boil, the American and British soldiers at all levels constantly used to protest the over-restrictive rules of engagement. Then carnage came and the rules generated less discussion. But as much sympathy as she had for him, her advice would be that he'd want to think twice about challenging Warrant Officer Fortin again. Fortin was formidable. You could tell. She could tell.

It's all so tricky, living in someone else's house, being privy to their drama, when your job is to report on it. You start taking notes on Wilson and Fortin and no one ever talks to you again. But pretending you don't hear stuff would just be bullshitting them. Which would also distance you from them, and when you're sleeping among them, and walking these routes and getting shot at together—well, you don't want distance
from these people. You want to immerse yourself. Which is the whole point. To know what this feels like, from the perspective of the soldiers.

She also found it more complicated because these were not Americans, exactly. The spots with American patrols had all been allotted months before she was hurriedly transferred here to replace her predecessor, and this was what had been available. Which was okay with her. She had spent time with UK troops in Iraq and had admired them. She had thought that the Canadians might be a little more like the Brits she'd met but soon realized it was the Americans they self-consciously modelled themselves after. They carried the same rifles, wore the same body armour, and the officers attended the American war colleges and the junior officers even spoke in the same drawled rhythms. But they weren't Americans and she wasn't Canadian. Which was part of why they wanted her to admire them. That made her cautious. The first thing anyone from the US Army's Tenth Mountain Division ever said to a journalist was: “We'd just as soon you weren't here. Don't get in the way.”

The interpreter, who'd asked her to call him John Wayne, exchanged a glance with Deirdre. They were both interlopers. They wore different-coloured helmets than the soldiers and they carried no weapons. The body armour that she had been given that morning was military-style camo pattern, rather than the pale blue variety civilians normally wore. It made it look like she was posing as something she wasn't, which called attention to her, and she didn't like that. It gave the soldiers a reason to be suspicious of her. Like they were suspicious of the terp.

The first few embeds she had done in Iraq, she had practised her Arabic with the terps and tried to get a sense of their view of that war. That had offended the soldiers and they had punished the terps in small and important ways thereafter. She learned to be careful. One woman among forty lonely men in their twenties—she could have no favourites. Within a week of meeting her, three of them would think they were in love with her. They would probably be restrained about it, but that did not make it not a problem. She was not sure if it would be easier or harder if she knew who the three were. Probably harder. Still—no special friendships.

The platoon had arrived in Afghanistan two months earlier. After two weeks of acclimatization, they had headed off to their forward operating base. For the last several weeks they had been walking these river valleys and climbing these hills. They were all interested in what Deirdre O'Malley had seen in Iraq. Compared to that, this was still suspected to be a make-believe war. Every few days they heard AK fire, generally too carelessly aimed and too far away to be more than potentially dangerous. Bullets fell short, flew overhead or sometimes among them. It was surprising enough whenever a metal coffee cup suddenly rang out and was sent spinning, or a camelpack geysered, that they found it infuriating. When it was worse than that, when someone's body armour suddenly threw them on the ground, their rage was hyperbolic.