The Last Hour

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Can you tell me what it contained?”

  “A letter. And a thumb drive.”

  “I see. And what did the thumb drive contain?”

  “Photographs. Of ... of a dead boy. Documents. Emails.”

  “Sergeant Sherman, can you tell me, for the record and in your own words, exactly what the report was about?”

  I looked up and met Major Smalls’ eyes. I didn’t know if I could trust her. I didn’t know where this was going to lead. But I knew it was time to talk.

  Good one, man (Ray)

  “Kowalski, what’s up with the ribbon?” Roberts grinned when he asked the question.

  Kowalski grimaced, and his face contorted into a vicious look, the kind that made me want to cover my nads and make sure I was wearing body armor. He stood up, his bulk seeming to fill the room, and said, “Don’t fuck with me, Roberts.”

  The effect was spoiled, just a little, because Kowalski had a pink ribbon with small white hearts tied in a bow on his web gear. I had to admit, it was a little odd.

  Roberts spread his arms wide. “Just curious, man.”

  “My daughter asked me to wear it. So I’m wearing it. And if you say shit, I’ll pound you into the dust. Just so we’re clear.”

  Roberts nodded. “Whatever works for you. I get it.”

  Jesus, whatever. After five months out in the boonies, all of us had picked up some weird habits.

  “All right guys, get it together, we’ve got three minutes to be out there. Dylan, say goodbye to your sweetheart, you can call her later.”

  I threw my Kevlar on, buckled my web gear and threw my pack over my shoulder, as Dylan said, “Gotta go, Alex, we’ll be back in a couple days.”

  “Love you,” I heard her say through the tinny speakers.

  He leaned over and kissed the computer, whispered, “Love you, too,” and then he closed it. I shook my head and chuckled.

  “Worst thing they ever did was give us internet access out here,” Kowalski said. “When I was in Iraq the first time around we had to wait six weeks before we called home. Now you talk to your girl every damn day.”

  Dylan buckled his helmet. “Not enough,” he said.

  “Let’s move, gentlemen,” I said. The three of them followed me out of the crappy little room into the freezing cold outside. The rest of the platoon was gathering, and a few moments later we were in a loose semi-circle around Sergeant First Class Colton and Lieutenant Eggers. Sergeant Hicks stood opposite me in the semi-circle, with his fire team arrayed around him. Hicks was maybe ten years older than me. Blonde, pale skin with an Irish face, Hicks was a native of the Virginia tidewater area and had served multiple combat tours. He didn’t hide his disdain for the fact that a college kid with less than two years in the Army was a fire team leader. I didn’t let it get to me. My guys trusted me; that was what mattered.

  The forward operating base was nestled on the side of a mountain two hours north of Fayzabad in Badakhshan province, which is at the freaking end of the earth, on the northern edge of Afghanistan. We had two battalions of infantry stationed here, something close to 1,200 men and a few women spread across half a dozen forward operating bases ringing Fayzabad, the provincial capitol. We’d been holed up in the base for more than a week. Heavy snowfall had made it impossible to navigate even in the Humvees. Now, it was almost blinding white across the valley, and an ice-cold wind cut right through my gear.

  The Lieutenant called out, “Listen up! Our objective today is Dega Payan. You guys know the village. We’re going out there at the request of the Provincial council because an avalanche has apparently buried half the village. Our mission is to help locate people, and to get anyone who needs medical care to the Air Force—they’ll be picking them up in choppers.”

  As he spoke, he spread a map on the ground where we could all see it, indicating the landing zone for the Air Force, as well as the area where they believed the avalanche had covered homes.

  ‘Homes’ was a relative term. Dega Payan was a tiny little village at the end of a long road that had only been opened the year before. No electricity, a one-room school, no health clinic. We’d gone there once or twice a month since arriving in Afghanistan, usually taking along an extra medic or two. The people were friendly, relatively pro-western. Lots of kids. At the news that an avalanche had buried part of the village, I felt a chill.

  When the Lieutenant was finished with his briefing, Sergeant Colton said, “Men, I know this is a humanitarian mission. But you go out locked and loaded and ready to fight. Protect each other. Stay safe. Clear?”

  Most of the guys shouted, “Oooh rah!”

  “Load up,” Colton said.

  As we moved toward the Humvees, Staff Sergeant Martin, our squad leader, approached. Our platoon sergeant, Colton, was right behind him. “Sherman,” he called out.

  A florid faced man who constantly fought weight problems, Martin had been a mentor and was becoming a friend. He and Colton both had served two tours in Iraq together and one in Afghanistan before this deployment.

  I stopped and faced them.

  “Do me a favor,” Colton said. “Keep an eye on Roberts, all right. He got some bad news from home.”

  “What’s going on, Sarge?”

  Martin looked around to make sure we weren’t overheard, then said, “Sick kid. His son’s in the hospital.”

  I grimaced. Roberts had already climbed in one of the Humvees with Paris.

  “He didn’t say anything,” I said.

  “Yeah, I don’t expect him to,” Martin replied.

  Colton added, “We got a Red Cross message this morning. We’re standing by. If it gets worse, we may end up sending him home for a while. I just want to make sure he’s steady, all right? You don’t need to say anything to him ... just keep an eye out, make sure he’s not distracted.”

  I nodded.

  “All right, let’s move out. And Sherman? You’ve been doing a great job. Keep it up.”

  “Thanks, Sarge.”

  We split up, and I climbed in the Humvee next to Kowalski. I appreciated the reassurance. I’d been promoted to Sergeant just a few weeks before, and became a fire team leader at the same time. I hadn’t been in the Army long, and sometimes I didn’t feel up to the responsibility.

  Normally we rode four to a vehicle, but ever since second platoon lost three Humvees in a firefight and got stranded as a result, we’d been taking an extra set of wheels on every patrol. So, for this patrol, my fire team was split in two vehicles, Roberts and Dylan in one and me and Kowalski in the other.

  A few minutes later we were on our way, the oversized tires crunching in the snow. Dega Payan was a three-hour drive under normal conditions. In this, it was going to take all day.

  “Hey Sarge?”

  “Yeah,” I said. It always unnerved me when Kowalski called me Sergeant or Sarge. When we met, I’d been a PFC out of basic training, and he’d been a grizzled staff sergeant with ten years under his belt. A DUI back at Fort Drum had seen him busted back to Private.

  “Do me a favor,” he said. “I can’t ask the other guys, bunch of fucking numbskulls. I need to send a pic home of me wearing this ribbon for my little girl. Can you take a shot for me?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I replied. He reached in his pocket and passed over a small digital camera. I leaned back against the door, trying to get a decent shot. He kept driving but had a fierce grin on his face. Kowalski was a real dick sometimes. But he loved his little girl.

  I took half a dozen pictures, just in case they came out blurry.

  “There you go, man.”

  “Thanks.”

  “How’s she doing?” I asked.

  “Alicia? Just great. My mom sent me an email yesterday with pictures from her birthday party.”

  “Did she get everything she wanted?”

  Kowalski grinned. “Yeah. You should have seen the pics, man. Best birthday ever.” After he said that, his face screwed up, unhappy. “Wis
h I could have been there.”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking out the window at the white mountains in the distance. Say what you will about Afghanistan, it’s a breathtaking country. But it wasn’t New York.

  “Any luck with her mom?”

  “Fucking bitch,” he muttered. I guess that answered that. Nasty divorce. For whatever reason—I had no idea what—Kowalski had gotten custody of their daughter.

  We were quiet the rest of the drive. Kowalski wasn’t much of a talker anyway, and I was watching outside, an activity that served dual purposes: it was heartbreakingly beautiful out there, and I needed to keep an eye out for bad guys.

  It took almost seven hours to get there. Seven cold, lonely hours. We traded off driving, and after the second switch, sometime during the fourth hour, Kowalski started a running monologue about life in the Army, his three previous deployments (twice before in Afghanistan, once in Iraq), his ex-wife, who he once loved but now hated, and his observations about the soldiers in our company, which ranged from racist to hero-worship, depending on the object. I kept half an ear tuned, but Kowalski wasn’t really talking to me ... he was talking just to keep occupied.

  It was three in the afternoon when we finally rolled into Dega Payan. It’s a shitty little village up in the mountains, and until recently was completely cut off from the rest of the province. No electricity, no jobs, nothing. The biggest employers in the area were the opium smugglers and poppy growers.

  The first thing we saw rolling into the village was the burned out girls’ school: one of two that had been firebombed late last year. The building looked forlorn, abandoned. Near the road, a line of woods stretched. Not enough to count as a forest, but enough to hide a sniper. A line of small dun-colored walled compounds comprised the village, maybe a few dozen dwellings in all, spread over a half-mile stretch. Smoke rose from holes in the roofs of a few, but the eastern edge of the village was ominous, a dozen or more houses nearly completely covered in snow, rock and ice which had slid down the mountainside.

  I swallowed when I saw it, my stomach tensing. By this time, the other two squads, 18 men in all, had already peeled off, surrounding the village to provide security. Staff Sergeant Martin’s squad, including my own fire team, continued to the center of the village, where we dismounted. The moment I stepped out of the Humvee, I felt the snow through my trousers above my boots.

  Lieutenant Eggers and Staff Sergeant Martin were already standing at the lead vehicle with Jamshed, our translator. “Stay here,” I said to the others, and then I slogged through the snow to the command group, getting there at the same time as Sergeant Hicks.

  An elderly man stood shivering in the cold, speaking to Jamshed. Jamshed (I didn’t know his last name) wore the uniform of an Afghani policeman, and gesticulated wildly as he spoke with the old man. Finally, he turned to Eggers and said, “Lieutenant, he says only the worst wounded leave. But there may be survivors in the houses, a family was pulled out alive about an hour ago.”

  Eggers eyed the houses buried under the snow. “All right. Martin, get your squad moving. We’ll work west to east. Just go right over the walls and shovel out near high windows. We need to get those people out of there if we can.”

  “Roger,” Martin said. Then he turned and shouted, “Third squad, form up! Bring your entrenching tools!”

  The guys ran over, breaking out folding shovels as they approached. After a few moments of discussion, we moved toward the first house. Eggers left to go check out the positions of the rest of the platoon, and Sergeant Colton soon joined us.

  Our goal wasn’t to completely uncover the house; it was simply to gain access to a door, a window, or any opening we could fit through. No one had to be asked to dig; we knew how urgent it was. Not to mention, it was cold as hell out there, and the movement helped. Every once in a while I stopped, peeled off my gloves and scarf, and chafed my ears and nose, trying to warm them up.

  You don’t make it through any length of military career without doing a lot of digging. It just comes with the territory. Sand bags. Slit trenches. Foxholes. Digging is part of military life. But this was different. I could feel the tension, and see it on the frozen faces of the men. All of us had been in this village, several times. We’d all seen the kids running around, the families. We didn’t have any idea how many, if any, had survived. And that gave us an urgency to dig as quickly as we possibly could.

  “I got a door!” Paris shouted just a few minutes after we started at the first house. I looked. He had dug down to what appeared to be the top of a doorframe. I don’t know whether the place had a door in the first place, or if the snow had knocked it in, but there was certainly nothing there now, just an opening, with the barest corner clear of snow.

  “Kowalski, Roberts,” I called, and pointed to Paris. The three of us moved over there and shoveled frantically, quickly widening the opening. Of the four of us, Paris was the smallest. The second we had enough snow cleared for him to fit in the opening, I said, “Paris ... go. Check it out.”

  He nodded, then set down his entrenching tool and removed his web gear, unslinging his rifle and passing it to me. Then, feet first, he wriggled his way through the opening with nothing more than a flashlight.

  We fell silent, no movement, no digging. I could hear the other fire team at the next house over, digging through the snow. A faint wind blew in from the east. Paris slid down the mound of snow into the house.

  He should have taken his rifle, I thought. I felt tension in my gut. The silence was unnerving. More footsteps, then a gasp and a muttered curse. I swallowed. What the hell was he doing in there? What was taking so long?

  I saw Sergeant Colton looking my way. I waved him down, and he waded through the snow toward me.

  “What you got?” he asked, quietly. For some reason, all of us felt the need to nearly whisper.

  I gestured. “Paris is checking it out.”

  We watched, and then I called out, “Paris? You good?”

  He coughed. And then he spoke, and his voice cracked midway through the sentence. “On my way out.”

  Thirty seconds later I heard scrabbling from inside, boots in the snow, as Paris made his way out. Then I saw a hand coming through the small opening. Colton and I reached forward and pulled, sliding Dylan right through the opening. He took a second to catch his breath, and then stood.

  I’ll never forget the look in his eyes when he stood and faced us. He opened his mouth to speak and then closed it. His jaw was working, and he swallowed. His eyes looked hollow, haunted. And then he said, “Kids. A family. Six of them.”

  And then he walked away from us, ten feet, then twenty, and stood there; his back to us, shoulders shaking.

  I’ve always been taught when a guy breaks down like that, you give him space. Give him space to pull himself back together before he has to face anything else. But Colton ... he was different. He was like a good dad. He walked over to Paris and put a hand on his shoulder. I couldn’t hear what he said to him. Roberts and Kowalski watched, and I did too, and finally I said to the two of them, “Come on. Move on to the next house.”

  And so we moved on, and a few minutes later, Paris rejoined us. I didn’t want to think about what he’d seen in there. A whole family frozen to death. Kids, he said.

  The next house went pretty much the same, except that digging went quicker, because we had rhythm now. But when we got the opening wide enough to go in through a window, at least wide enough for Paris, I didn’t tell them to stop. I could go in the next one, or Kowalski. I didn’t want to see that look in Paris’s eyes again.

  But he said, “Stop. It’s big enough, I can get in.”

  Crap. I nodded, and we stopped digging, and then Paris was scrambling to wriggle into the window. As soon as he was in, we started shoveling the snow again. I wanted him to be able to come out quick if he needed to.

  Then I heard his voice. “Aw, fuck!” I could hear despair in his voice. More footsteps. But then, sudden shouts. “Sherman! I need help
! I got a survivor, a little girl!”

  And then we were digging again, furiously, until there was room for Roberts and me and then Kowalski to slide in the window and down to the floor.

  And then I understood. I understood that hollow look in Dylan’s face. Because inside, the first thing I saw, the bright sunlight shining through right onto them, was a woman, dead, still holding her dead baby at her chest. They were huddled together with two other children and a man.

  But it was in the cupboard where Dylan had made his find. Shivering violently, pale, the tip of her nose blackened by frostbite, a little girl. Nine years old, maybe. Maybe after her parents died, maybe before, she had closed herself in there with heavy blankets. Inside the enclosed space, she’d somehow managed to survive.

  “Son of a bitch,” Kowalski muttered. “We gotta get her out of here.”

  “Careful,” Paris said. “I don’t even understand why she’s alive when….”

  Kowalski kneeled down in front of the girl. She was still huddled in the back corner of the cupboard, her eyes wide, unblinking.

  “Come on, girl,” he said. He gave her a sad looking smile, probably the first smile I’d ever seen on Kowalski’s face. “Let’s get you warm, okay?”

  I don’t think she understood the words. But she understood the tone. He gestured for her to come to him, and she ran and threw her tiny little arms around his neck.

  I blinked, hard, and cleared my throat. “Kowalski ... get her to a Humvee, get it running, get her warmed up. Roberts, go find the medics.”

  So the three of us helped Kowalski out with the little girl, then Roberts left right behind him. I looked at Paris and said, “Good one, man. You saved that little girl.”

  His eyes darted to the rest of her family, all dead, then said, “Thanks.”

  We didn’t find any more survivors in the houses. In all, thirty-four villagers, nineteen of them children, froze to death.