News From the Red Desert (7 page)

He stuck the drive in again and scrolled more methodically through the images. There were photos of uniformed Americans and Poles and
Brits and Australians looking sunburnt and euphoric. There were pictures of children in the street and of women in the market. Some of these were beautiful. But most of the photos were of bodies. Sometimes they were powerful enough to possess a sort of anti-beauty. There was a short video of a Bradley Armoured Fighting Vehicle running over a ditch with enemy in it. Parts flying back. All you could hear was the racket of the armoured fighting vehicle. There was a helmet cam video of one of Saddam's palaces being looted. Another helmet cam video of a firefight in Tikrit. And a series of videos taken off the gunsights of Apache helicopters and A-10s. This stuff was never intended to get out to the public. Not by the people who made these images, nor by the soldiers who traded them. He fell back on his cot, nauseous and dizzy. He laid an arm over his eyes. He could not believe he had just done that.

The next morning, Anakopoulus sat on the edge of his cot in his office and pushed his hands into his face like it was putty. The base was stirring. His posting to the dropbox hung in his thoughts with ill-shaped and shadowed self-contempt.

There was a knock.

“Yeah?”

“You okay in there, Master Sergeant?”

“Yeah.”

Robertson stuck his head in the door. “Base Supp O called a minute ago. On his way over.”

“ 'Kay.”

“Be here in fifteen.”

“ 'Kay.” He stood and dressed. It was six-thirty. The current base supply officer was the twelfth he had worked with since 2002. By now, the person everyone was terrified of was usually Anakopoulus. Today he was the one who was scared. He stood up and started to shave. He cut himself twice.

I
n March 2005, the former private from Bar Harbor was told by his platoon commander that soon he would be a sergeant. He had been in Baghdad continuously for two years and no one had more combat experience than he did, between Iraq and Afghanistan. Anyway, they needed more NCOs with field experience. Promotions come fast in war. All you had to do was not get in obvious trouble. Not get caught letting your guys do crazy shit, not shoot your mouth off to some reporter or another.

Which is why the sergeant from Boise learned on the same day as the same platoon commander that he would be commissioned and that his transfer to intelligence had been approved. It meant leaving the Special Forces, which bothered him. He would be promoted to captain, in recognition of his experience as an NCO. The platoon commander, a captain himself, told him this as if it was the biggest gift imaginable. But leaving the Special Forces pained the sergeant from Boise so deeply that he hardly knew whether to be happy or not. He had decided to apply for the commission because he wanted more thoughtful work and because he was tired of killing. That distaste had not yet been discerned by his comrades and so there was still time to act. Another six months or a year, though,
and it would be too late. He would be rotated home and given a dead-end desk job. Recruiter, maybe. So it was time to make a move.

The captain from Utah who had been with them at Taliban's Last Stand was now a major. He was sitting in an office not far from them, and had just learned that he would become a lieutenant colonel. He had been surprised by the news, and spun his pencil around his finger, thinking.

In peacetime, a promotion was a life-changing event. You called your wife immediately and you could expect to buy many rounds of drinks at the mess. Promotions came twice a decade, at best, and often they did not come at all. Perfectly competent and ambitious officers retired as majors at fifty-five. But demonstrated ability in battle propelled anyone to the top of all the lists. Lieutenant colonel. He would get his own battalion. More time over here. His wife would pretend to be pleased, for him. He would call her. In a minute.

Green Beans café, KAF

Rashid Siddiqui

I met the manager, Rami Issay, when I arrived here after a four-day bus ride from Islamabad. He was excited about just having bought a chess set for his establishment. He said that it was so that he could improve the atmosphere. “What is wanted here on Kandahar Airfield is a proper café—not some industrial-scale coffee-dispensing
depot,
” he declared.

“In a proper café, people linger. They do not buy their cappuccino hurriedly, and run away back to work, before anyone sees them idling.
Idling
is what a café is all about. Or else coffee would just come as a pill of some sort. And anyway, idlers,” his voice dropped conspiratorially, “need the cover of other idlers.”

Rami Issay was a jowly jolly little man from Karachi. He told me, his new employee, that he'd lived in Leeds for a dozen years before having to return to Pakistan. There he built and then spectacularly exploded a computer sales mini-empire in the middle of the longest economic expansion Southeastern Pakistan had ever known. If perhaps he were one ten-thousandth as perceptive as he clearly imagines himself to be, he would not now be a migrant worker and bankrupt employed by the Kellogg Brown and Root corporation to run one of their Starbucks-in-camo Green Beans coffee shops on bloody Kandahar Airfield in what
amounts to a large shed. Indeed I soon found out his own expertise was in idling, and in this matter, he knew of what he spoke.

When I signed up I was not told where precisely I would be working, only that it was a distant but faithful place. The commitment was for one year, and I was also told it would be difficult and expensive to return early. Everyone knew what was meant by these phrases, though when I signed the document, I briefly entertained the notion that I would be going to one of the Gulf States. I also received an advance, representing a substantial fraction of the total remuneration.

For my fellow passengers on the bus out of the country, the advance and the distance was life-changing. This much was apparent from their demeanour and our silence as we wheezed our way through the mountains. Our minder had our ID; our direct interaction with the police at the checkpoints was limited. Hardly a meaningful sentence was uttered until we were ushered out of the bus into the bright sunlight of Kandahar. And there in front of us were our employers, bellowing our names and waving ID tags and passes. Rami Issay had brought a placard, I guess to spare himself the indignity of raising his voice. It had just one name on it, mine: “Mr. Rashid Siddiqui.” If he had tried such a tactic in my place of origin, he would have been trampled to death by like-named respondents.

But I should not be so unkind. If the events of my life had proceeded differently, I would be an engineer by now, and treating men such as him badly. We all have our circumstances and my task is to accommodate myself to my own.

When I approached him, he grinned widely and bowed. Peace was upon us both, and he took me through the process of getting through the camp gate. His combination of imperiousness and ebullience seemed to work well with the soldiers and soon enough, within a few hours, and after a body search of unprecedented thoroughness, we were through. From my first view of the ferenghee soldiers up close, my impression was that they were quite uncomfortably warm. They were English, that day—their uniforms said Royal Air Force regiment—and as pink in the face as pomegranates. They carried their odd, short English assault rifles slung over their shoulders. It was the first time I had seen those
strange little weapons; in this part of the world, the AK-47 is the way people kill one another. How anyone shoots accurately with those British rifles is beyond me. One hears them called them “bullpups” and the word sounded appropriately silly to me. I couldn't help smiling at them as these thoughts ran through my mind. But Rami Issay shot me a look and I sobered and glanced down. I thought then about a thousand Pashtun shredded by these toys and the tiny vicious bullets they spit out. I sobered further.

The base at Kandahar Air Field looked like the disaster relief camps they set up after earthquakes. Apart from a few shattered Soviet-era shacks, everything was prefabricated aluminum or canvas. Hardly a structure was more than a couple of years old. Whole building complexes were put together out of shipping containers. Every object not mounted upon an axle was surrounded by blast barriers: ten-foot high fences of sandbags, wire mesh and concrete. The colour was mono-chromatically dun: dun uniforms, dun dirt, dun sandbags. It was early spring and, presumably, about as verdant as things got. By mid-July even the greens of the few eucalyptus trees lost whatever undertones of colour they had possessed and everything was as desiccated as glassblowers' sand. They call this part of the world the Red Desert and perhaps it is, for a few weeks before and after the vernal equinox. But otherwise it is the colour of fly ash.

Colourlessness in other contexts connotes lifelessness, but so far as humans went, there was nothing lifeless about the airfield. Twelve thousand people worked here—soldiers, mercenaries, maintenance men, cooks, launderers, construction workers. The hurly-burly never stopped. Trucks and combat vehicles were always rumbling around, Chinook helicopters lifting off, Antonov heavy-lift air freighters roaring up, up, up and away, and small packs of tired men, walking together and talking: off-duty soldiers from Jordan, Romania, Holland, England, Estonia, France, Canada and twenty other places—including the Great Satan—together with the local and Pakistani and Bangladeshi workers. Always there were some of us kicking at the dust and whinging about women and money. There were two things to do in KAF—work and complain.

Once I was admitted into the camp, my new boss conducted me to his café. It was truly a small place, only fifteen tables and eighty square metres, including the public area and the back, which is where I was to sleep at night, along with the rest of the staff, among bags of coffee beans and crates of non-dairy creamers. Dividing the space was a narrow counter of espresso machines, overtaxed refrigerators and questionable pastries. The punctured building they call Taliban's Last Stand was on one side of us and the hospital on the other. Behind was the flight line; we could almost always hear the steady whine of jet engines.

Rami Issay showed me the hook where I could hang my bedding during the day and then gave me a quick lesson on the operation of the espresso machine. He forgot to tell me about steaming clear the nozzle. My co-workers watched him with skeptical sparkles in their eyes as he clumsily tightened and untightened the knobs of the gleaming stainless steel product of Puglia-by-way-of-Taiwan. He would have introduced me to them if he could have remembered all their names, but he spared us all that embarrassment by announcing that he would just let everyone get to know one another, he said, “without undue formality.” Then he wandered off vaguely in the direction of the boardwalk.

None of the others would speak Pashto or even Urdu with me at first; every time I tried they shifted into English. I was puzzled by this but, later, as I understood the psychology of KAF better, I learned to share their caution. They had heard that I had studied in America from Rami Issay, I think. He felt a kinship with me, he said, because we both know the size of the world. And after the planes had hit the towers, the world had tossed us both back on our cancelled-visa asses to a country we had never wanted to see again.

Fazil was the head baristo, as he termed himself; he had a wife and two sons in Peshawar. He had been here nearly continuously since the shop was opened in 2003. Then, he'd handled the place by himself most of the time. The preparation for the invasion of Iraq had seen the numbers of soldiers in Kandahar drawn down, and for months he had expected his position to be eliminated. Within six months of Baghdad falling, the idea of IEDs was evangelized and bombs started exploding everywhere
around Kandahar. Since then he and his wife have slept easily every night, he said, knowing his job is secure. Both his boys are in a good school and they will become engineers, he thinks. His wife has paid off all the debts that drove him to Kandahar in the first place and soon they will purchase a modest home with an electric washing machine.

The next man to introduce himself was Fazil's friend, the one-eyed Amr Chalabi. Men in groups instinctively establish a hierarchy of who could, if it came to it, beat whom to death and Amr, tall and powerfully muscled, occupied the apex of our list. He had worked at the café nearly as long as Fazil, but he maintained an entirely different posture. Where Fazil was solicitous and engaging, Amr preferred rarely to speak, and then only to Fazil or the boy, Mohammed. Amr did his work quickly and helpfully—he was the first up every morning, washed, shaved and sweeping away the previous night's insect accumulations while the rest of us were still blinking at the bare bulb overtop us. When he worked the counter he usually operated the espresso machine, nodding as the orders were called to him and handing the paper cups of milk foam and coffee out with precision. He was the oldest, too, perhaps forty years, maybe forty-five. I have never learned whether or not he has a family or children. I did know that he had terrible insomnia, and that when he lifted his patch, his left eye looked like it was filled with cotton. Sometimes, in the sleeping area at night, one caught sight of him lifting the patch as he lay on his back, staring at the ceiling and waiting for morning.

Mohammed was scarcely eighteen, and by scarcely, I mean thirteen at the outside. He must have claimed to be older in order to be hired, and while he attempted to sustain the fiction, he shaved once a week and then only for the ritual of it. If he possessed any hair but the shock of blackness rising straight up from his scalp, none of us had ever seen it. Fazil would not allow him off the coffee shop premises after dark. I dismissed the boy as an ignorant villager. Everything about him suggested dullness: his accent, his relentless piety, his inability to look anyone in the eye or say the first thing about politics, or anything else.

My first night there, they told me they had been waiting for me for months, as if it were somehow my fault I had not been hired earlier or
had my papers processed more quickly. They gave me to understand that I would be starting with a debt owed to them, which would require paying off. My detested predecessor, a Bangladeshi named Hamid, had developed tuberculosis four months earlier, and was immediately loaded into a truck headed for the border. Since then, the population of the camp and the workload had increased steadily. Rami Issay had told them I was supposed to have arrived every day for the last three months. And now there were the Gurkhas and the Australians and the American Marines landing here and the English Marines too. Some days the queue wound out around the coffee shop all the way to the massage parlour. I was pleased to be here, I said. I would change my mind soon enough, Fazil said, though without much conviction. We all laughed harshly.

Fazil was the one who taught me how to use the espresso machine. Mohammed swept out the place, as he would twenty more times that day. Amr carried more bags of coffee beans from the back. Rami Issay returned to the café and sat in a chair and read a copy of the
Harvard Business Review
he had found somewhere. The pilots began coming in about then, looking for their cappuccinos. Rami watched to see if any of them would notice what he was reading. None of them did. He did not betray any disappointment. The pilots, headshorn and enormous in their green flight suits, stood around the entrance together and laughed like great braying camels and enjoyed being themselves, so muscular and so erect. Rami Issay just sat there, out of the pilots' way, and looked out a window toward Ghar Killay, the mountains silver peaked and jagged in the distance. The air above them shimmered in the midafternoon heat. Then someone else walked in and he rose, grinning, to greet them.

Master Sergeant Demetrios Anakopoulus

Five years on this base and the one place I'm still not used to is this coffee shop. First year here, we were on hard rations most of the time—foil bags of ravioli and omelets and beef stew, and coffee that came out of
green metal urns and no one would even have admitted knowing how to spell cappuccino, let alone drink one three times a day. Now my guys run over here after every meal and bring back trays of foamy cups. At first I never came here. It seemed too fancy for an operational base in a combat zone. Then I did and it turned out that it's the one place on the base where people give one another a bit of space. So I spend quite a bit of time here. The only place I can be alone. Which is sort of the point to my being here, as far as I can tell.

I do find it a treat. Today, more than a treat.
Select all.
How could I have been so stupid?

First thing, I guess, is to act normal. Hope the site doesn't post anything. Resist the temptation to write and ask them not to. Just disappear. No more contact. They'll probably want to confirm things. If they can't, they probably won't use the photos.

The thing is to not lose my shit.

That Asian woman—the masseuse—has been staring at me too long for months now. Settle down. She doesn't know anything. She stares because she wants you to know she isn't afraid of you. Which is worth knowing. So thank you, Asian woman. Who gave me a great massage last year when I hurt my back. But likely doesn't remember. Which is fine by me.

Mohammed Hashto

The Americans don't look normal. No one else is as big as them. The Dutch are tall, too. All these foreigners are tall. Not the Gurkhas, not the Jordanians, so much. But the Americans' arms are the size of normal people's legs and their chests like sacks of grain. They talk big, they stand big. Who would ever want to fight them?

I was afraid of them at first. I thought they would yell at me. Then I realized that that wasn't going to happen. The soldiers in the Tribal Areas, they notice you. They think about whether you have some money
they can get out of you, or whether you're going to shoot them in the back after they walk by you. They look you in the eyes and watch for fear, and if they don't see it, they pay attention. The big men here don't care whether you're afraid of them, and don't look at you long enough to tell whether or not you are. They just want their coffee. Which is how Fazil prefers it. But someone like Amr is used to being noticed. Me, I don't care whether I'm noticed or not.