News From the Red Desert (9 page)
Read News From the Red Desert Online
Authors: Kevin Patterson
Horner parked his truck in the lot a few hundred yards from the barracks. When Robinson emerged, Horner was waiting near the door. “Better than a tent, isn't it?”
“When did these go up?”
“Three years ago, I think. There were here when I got here.”
“When I was last here, everyone was under canvas.”
“But you were used to it.”
Nodding. “On my walk I slept under the sky, most of the time.” The two men headed for Horner's truck.
“Does it still seem real to you that you did itâwalked across this country?”
“It often doesn't.”
“What do you remember the best?”
“How shockingly cold it gets on a clear night in winter.”
“I can't imagine.”
“You could, though. Go out on patrol with the guys.”
“I was just thinking I should, actually. Anything you want to know about this reception we're going to?”
“Who's coming?”
“Mostly senior field officers. Majors to full colonels. The generals usually keep out of these things. Undefined terrain and all that. There will be a couple of CIA guys there.”
“No doubt they'll stick out.”
“They usually do. Though they rarely say much.”
“Will there be Special Forces or Joint Special Operations Command there?”
“I don't know. Depends on how busy they are. They don't RSVP.”
As they neared the truck, the sirens sounded and they exchanged a look, Horner inexplicably grinning and Robinson puzzled by Horner's reaction. The major ran then, waving Robinson to follow him. They got to the blast shelter just as the first rocket struck. A hundred and three millimetres in diameter: you wouldn't think it would pack so much explosive. But the report left their ears ringing and they both felt the concussion deep in their chests.
Horner was not used to the rockets yet. Every few days there was an attack. Every few weeks someone was hurt, though no one had been killed by one since he had arrived. He was telling this to Robinson when he noticed how amused the Brit was by it all. By him. He realized he was talking too fast. He sounded scared andâworseâdelighted. He stopped talking. The all clear siren rang. They stepped out from under the blast shelter and headed back to Horner's truck. When they got to it they noticed that the tires were all flat, and then they saw the crater in the ground beside the driver's door. They both shrugged, then turned to walk to the meeting room. Each of them waited for the other to mention how close they had come. But neither did.
The session with the battalion commanders went well. Robinson knew how to work a room. As funny looking as he was, the camera loved him. The military photographers were all over him. The way he handled the colonels was masterful. He announced that his hope for the meeting was to hear from them, what they, the local experts, were experiencing on the ground.
A French colonel, first regiment, Foreign Legion, raised a hand, then asked, “Your walking journey was magnificent but foolish, in the best sense of both these words. Surely it is our foolishness that yields the
most insight, no?” They all chewed on that for a moment, trying to figure out how drunk the colonel was. And then Robinson asked him if he thought the farmers he patrolled among considered him the problem or the solution.
The legionnaire shrugged. “He considers me another man with a gun. If I'm not looking at him he doesn't even see me.” The journalists in the room wrote that down.
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TRANSCRIPT SE
1034
TJ
359Recorded Nov 13 2004; Transcribed August 12 2007 by request of JAG for investigation Ref# 2007-7-21-56789345DAnakopoulus
SUBJECT A | Hey, I was hoping you'd call. |
SUBJECT B | How are things? |
SUBJECT A | Great, thanks. Jose just got back from science camp. That was a good idea, thanks. He loved it. |
SUBJECT B | What was the best part for him? |
SUBJECT A | I think he liked the rocketry a lot. He keeps asking me if you have anything to do with drones over there. |
SUBJECT B | I probably shouldn't talk about that. I heard if you use certain words on these lines they alert computers to record the conversation. But the answer is, not really. |
SUBJECT A | It's great watching him really get into something. He's talking now about studying engineering. After all my endless math homework lectures last winter. |
SUBJECT B | It's like with my guys. Truth is, you can't really make anyone do anything. All you can do is make it easy to do the things that they also want to do. |
SUBJECT A | That doesn't sound very soldier-like, Mr. Military Man. |
SUBJECT B | There's a lot of theatre in soldiering. It serves a purpose. Then there's the non-theatre part of it. |
SUBJECT A | Like in banking. |
SUBJECT B | And how are the interest rates? |
SUBJECT A | Variable. [laughing] |
SUBJECT B | At some point we'll get tired of that joke. |
SUBJECT A | Jose used it at science camp, he says. |
SUBJECT B | Has he been listening in on our phone calls? |
SUBJECT A | No. He heard us make that joke a hundred times. |
SUBJECT B | Good, because that would be alarming. |
SUBJECT A | Oh my God, could you imagine? |
SUBJECT B | I would be mortified. |
SUBJECT A | There's no chance this is being listened to, is there? |
SUBJECT B | I don't think they have the manpower to listen in on all the calls from the base to America that are going on right now. |
SUBJECT A | Course, I did use the word “drone.” |
SUBJECT B | And you just did it, again. |
SUBJECT A | Drone, drone, drone. |
SUBJECT B | Asking for trouble, missy. |
SUBJECT A | Are youâ¦flirting with me? |
SUBJECT B | Maybe. So what did you do while Jose was away at science camp? |
SUBJECT A | Wellâ¦if you must know, I had a date. |
SUBJECT B | With the bookstore guy? |
SUBJECT A | Leonard. Yes. |
SUBJECT B | What did you do? |
SUBJECT A | Went for dinner. At that Greek place on Third Avenue. |
SUBJECT B | Was it good? |
SUBJECT A | It was. I had swordfish. It was amazing, actually. |
SUBJECT B | Did you drink retsina? |
SUBJECT A | It did not seem necessary to remind myself how foul that stuff is. |
SUBJECT B | And what else? |
SUBJECT A | What else, as in, what else did I eat? |
SUBJECT B | Or whatever. |
SUBJECT A | [laughing] I had fun, he was interesting to talk to. I have my reading list now for the next three years. Then he drove me home. |
SUBJECT B | And that was it? |
SUBJECT A | Well, he came in for a glass of wine. Then he went home after about a half-hour. We were both tired. We had worked that day. |
SUBJECT B | Ah. |
SUBJECT A | If you must know, there was some kissing. |
SUBJECT B | Is he a good kisser? |
SUBJECT A | Pretty good. Not as good as you. You're also more interesting to talk to by a wide margin. |
SUBJECT B | Why? |
SUBJECT A | Well, you do go out into the world and do things. He, wellâhe reads about things. |
SUBJECT B | I meant about the kissing. |
SUBJECT A | [laughing] Oh, of course. Well, he's altogether too tentative, for one thing. |
SUBJECT B | I'm taking notes. “Don't be tentative.” |
SUBJECT A | Take this note: “Be |
SUBJECT B | [laughing] Hey, I gotta go. |
SUBJECT A | Okay. Hey, I love you. |
SUBJECT B | I love you, too, sweetie. |
[ | |
SUBJECT A | Come home soon, okay? |
Green Beans Café
Deirdre O'Malley
A paper letter from Peter, forwarded from Baghdad to the press officer here in Kandahar. It was a surprise it got to me and it was a surprise to hear from him.
It's been six years since the start of all this. I came home that day and told Peter that I had been approved to go to Afghanistan. He hardly looked up from the magazine he was reading. He told me I was too excited about it, for the wrong reasons. That pissed me off and I hit back. He'd pretended he was just worried about my safety, but that was not what he had meant and I called him on it. He ended up walking out of our apartment and by the time he got back that night I was packed and gone.
I slept at the airport and flew to Washington the next morning. Shitty way to end things, thoughâhe was a sweet man. From his letter, it sounds like he still is. He said he saw one of the last pieces I filed from Baghdad before coming back here and said he wanted to write to me to congratulate me. It isn't the whole truth. He doesn't say it in so many words, I know he wishes he wasn't still stuck covering the metro beat for the
Plain Dealer.
Which anyone can understand. But it wasn't me that rejected his application for a pool position.
Imagine being a journalist these last five years and not being able to get over here. How could you go to work every morning, knowing you'd be writing about zoning bylaw debates when the colleague who had been in the cubicle beside yours was now a war correspondent?
I dated a succession of soft men in college and after. I thought I loved some of them. I thought I loved Peter. When we were both working for the
Plain Dealer
he was helping edit the comment page. I'd envied him the wider importance of his stories. Then the press pools were being formed and I had a shot and I took it. I don't miss that old life. I don't even miss him. That sounds severe, but the world was always harsher than we were pretending. You face it, you get into the middle of it and you understand what you are capable of. It's pretty exhilarating. Which is why the young guys all around me who put down their bongs and put on uniforms have done so well. Hard things reveal your strength. Peter's strength is buried under all that equivocation and reasonableness. I wish he had gotten a spot, too. It would have been interesting to see him lose twenty pounds, get some lines on his sweet face.
The sirens sound, but before anyone can move I hear the boom. Where was that? I look around the coffee shop and people have stood upâin Baghdad, that rocket wouldn't have been noticed. You want to know the difference between this place and that? There it is: here there are 103-mm rockets, one at a time, whereas there it's mortars, twenty at a time and with way more precision. Two hundred people a day killed, twenty of them our guys. The numbers here are a hundredth of that. Baghdad was hell. This is Minneapolis.
Though I heard about another green-on-blue shooting today, an Afghan national taking out Americans in Bagram. That's a difference between Afghanistan and Iraq that makes you worry about Afghanistan. This is the third this month. Afghan soldier, police officer, interpreter, loses it and picks up a rifle and runs amok. Shoots up a mess tent or something. Some of them look planned and maybe are the work of Taliban plants. The others just look like someone going postal. Someone's pride is offended. Someone's PTSD gets clicked to “high.” The central story of Afghanistan, supposedly, is that the Afghan people
want us here. It's hard to know how true that is, but every time one of the best employed and privileged Afghans decides to commit suicide-by-massacre, it looks a little more false. I need to do a story on that. Maybe not right awayâI'd rather not alienate the Public Relations officers just yet. But in a couple of months.
So what do I write back to Peter? That I miss him and still think fondly of him and hope that we can always be friends? Or that he needs to quit his job right now, ditch his wine collection and get scared for a change? Poor guy. He could be me. Was me, until all this horror. And the most horrible part of all is that I wouldn't change a thing. How do I say that to a smart and gentle man who thinks the life change he needs is to start watching his carbs?
I slept beside him for two years. Slept, day and night. At my desk, at the gym, and underneath him. Then woke up.
It's the evil truth about wars: they're not all bad for everyone.
Fazil Palwasha
I think that most of the non-Americans don't know what exactly they are doing here. This place is American, the money is American. And it is American contractors who serve the food in the dining halls and fix the electricity and give haircuts and all that. Screaming Eagle Way intersects with Freedom Boulevard and everyone drives on the right.
It's maybe why the non-Americans come to the coffee shop so much. Which is not to say that there are not many very large and loud Americans here all the time, nor is it to say there is any doubt about who runs this place. But on the base, this is the place where it is not all the time always America.
We can live in Dar al-Islam even though Dar al-harb is everywhere around us. A house of peace can stand even within a larger house of war. We can keep the faith. Say our prayers. Fast when we must. Be as pure as we can be.
Major Dan Horner
I'm surprised no one has done a story about the baristas here. I might suggest it. I read all the stories written back home about how our mission here is hopeless, that this culture is too alien to western sensibilities to ever really be understood and will always remain hostile to our values and aid. I know that those pieces could not have been written here at Green Beans by people drinking macchiatos prepared by men who two years ago had never met a westerner. Jobs are the best anti-extremist measure ever invented. Better than a Hellfire. And cheaper. Plus you get a steaming cup of espresso rather than a smoking hole. That would be a good line. I should suggest it. Like, in a roundabout way.
I could put them on to this man. I don't know his name but he has a reliable efficiency about him that I admire. And his English is excellent. I've seen him reprimanding his co-workers at times for dogging it. In contrast, his boss, that Issay fellow, seems only reluctantly in charge. That's often the way things go, though. Battalion and ship XOs are reliably ferocious, because they want a command. Their bosses get to be beloved because someone else is being ferocious. Oh, the more I think about it, the more I like the idea. Could even be a
New Yorker
piece, or a
NYT Magazine
profile. Get all psychological. Is C.J. Chivers on the base these days? I should get hold of him, and suggest it.
Rami Issay
I am not a stupid man. I understand what Fazil and Amr think of me. I can discern contempt. There is the crew boss, who everyone admires, and there is the man the crew boss reports to. It is this way with construction workers, too. Everyone makes fun of the architect. Crazy ideas about what will look good and what won't and what is feasible to build. But imagine a city built with no architects. All would be functional tedium.
Our world is saved from tedium by whimsy, but the whimsical are usually punished. Look around this place: what do you see? Gunships lifting up in great cylinders of dust, conscripted Jordanian boys so lonely they cannot bear it, hardly a shred of greenery anywhere, and rockets coming in like shooting stars. Dying boys being pulled off the flight line and taken to the hospital, not a glass of beer to be found anywhere, and hardly any women, no music, no babies. This, we are constantly told, is an operational base. By operational, they mean industrial efficiencies. No pleasure, no ornament, and no resting, except to prepare for more fighting. You will see corporations behave like this when they are under the direction of especially severe accountants. But accountants are motivated by net profit/loss figures and austerity is a means, not an end.
These people here are uninterested in genuine economiesâthey fly their
fuel
out to the FOBs by helicopter at the cost of three hundred dollars a litreâI read it in the
New York Times
on the personal computer. Austerity for them is merely a posture they adopt to shore up their own anxieties about their level of ferociousness. The Pashtun, genuinely ferocious, are austere, and they are the ones who are winning this war.
The Americans decided to take down, therefore, the fast food trailers on the boardwalk, and permit no one any beer. If they become more Pashtun, they hope, they will be more likely to win. In Pakistan, we understand the Pashtun better than that. They are barbarians, and will fight barbarically to keep ferengheeâanyone but themâout of their valleys. They fear the larger world, which is what makes them fight so hard for their highlands, but that is also why they have no interest in the lowlands. To them, the lowland people are unholy and strange. The Pashtun have no envy. That's the key to understanding themâit's what limits them and what makes them unconquerable. The rest of us are slaves to our needs. Take me. Without restless ambition I would never be here. Would never have built and lost my business, would not be trying to start over by running this café. Would have remained on my father's farm and hurried to plant my winter wheat every autumn, before the rains came. And then sat back and watched as it and my children grew. It would have been a very different life, but not a worse one, maybe. Fifty
years old and managing a coffee shop for the Americans in Kandahar for two hundred US dollars a week. It would not have been a worse life than this one.
Look at that sky. It's going to rain any second. If it is heavy the helicopters will not fly and then the flight crews will come to the café to wait out the weather window. We will need more pastries.
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FIVE THINGS TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT WARTIME EMBEDS
Deirdre O'Malley
(BuzzFeed Listicle, July 3, 2007)
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1.
  Journalists do not stop being journalists just because we travel and eat with soldiers. The press travels with President Bush, too, and eats the Air Force One food, such as it is. Clearly, that does not stop them from criticizing him.
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2.
  The alternative to having journalists report these wars as embeds would be minimal reporting at all. No foreigner can travel long in Southern or Eastern Afghanistan now, or in Anbar, without being kidnapped or murdered. This would leave all the reporting in the hands of uniformed military-affiliated war correspondents, as it was in previous conflicts.
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3.
  Understanding the war from the perspective of our soldiers does not distort journalists' depiction of it, it makes available the most important point of view. These are our soldiers, after all, and they die and suffer in our name.
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4.
  The soldiers are quite direct about their attitudes to embeds. They wish we weren't with them. They don't see us as their advocates. They see us as snitches and snoops. Oddly, it's only the critics, completely removed from the battlefield, who view us as cheerleaders for the war and for the military.
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5.
  Bodies dominate any field of view that contains them. Reporting a battle after the fact inevitably lends a certain sombre, grief-stricken tone. There is another truth available to the embed at the instant of combat: the fear and the excitement and the courage and camaraderie of the moment, which is at least as important to understand. Battlefields are not crime scenes. Covering them as if they were is misleading. And a betrayal of the young people who just fought on them. Battlefields are sites of contest, more like football fields than held-up banks: places where victory and heroism are acted outâand defeat and injury sufferedâall as a function of the luck and effort and courage at work on them.