“You’ll get used to this place in a few days,” Sergeant Duncan had told him. “Then one day your name comes up on the bulletin board and you’re on that big silver bird headed toward the Promised Land.”
Curtis wanted to believe him.
They were to travel due east to Kunduz, to a small settlement where the local well was supposed to be polluted. Moffett, Marian, an Afghani interpreter, and a medic rode with two would-be badasses from an airborne unit. They started at first light and pushed across the rugged terrain as fast as the cumbersome armored vehicle would go. By nine they were in what they thought would be the area and stopped on a small hill to check the maps.
The attackers, rising up from the nooks and crannies of the hills, were incredibly young.
“Back off! Back off!” The badass screamed as he sent a volley of automatic fire into the first of the masked figures.
Curtis felt himself lifting his M-16, felt its kick in his arms, felt the panic in his chest, and realized he wasn’t aiming at anything. He was just shooting, just spewing death where it might land.
They backed down the hill, the automatic weapons firing in staccato bursts at the dark figures popping up like play targets along the hillside.
Now they were racing away. Now the firing stopped.
One of the badasses was cursing up a blue streak.
“They only got one of us, but we busted their rag-head asses!”
The one of us was Moffett. Curtis hadn’t seen him hit, or heard him cry out. But there he was, curled in his seat, an ugly red stain covering the right side of his body.
There were things that Curtis knew. He knew the wrist position of a jumper from the three-point line. He knew the New York City transit system, where to switch from the A train to the 3 to get to a party scene in Brooklyn, but he didn’t know death.
Moffett was about to fall to the floor of the vehicle. Curtis pulled him up and across his lap. He put his hand on his neck, feeling for a pulse. There was none.
He wanted to cry. He wanted to push Moffett’s body away, to make it not happen, to make it not the guy he had drunk beers with at Fort Eustis and not the guy he had talked about world affairs with as they both dreamed about the end of the war and being alive.
They returned to the base and were debriefed by soldiers whose job it was to construct After Operations Reports. Curtis knew they would pretty it up, estimating how many of the insurgents had been killed, making heroes of the survivors. He’d seen it all before. He went to his bunk, lay down, and closed his eyes, telling himself that he wouldn’t think about Moffett’s death anymore, that he wouldn’t relive his moments with him. He would shut out the war forever.
But then the girl, sitting on the edge of his bed, brought herself and the war back into his mind.
“I’m so afraid,” she said.
“We’re all afraid,” Curtis said. There, he had said the words. “Things like this happen.”
“Would it be terrible for you if we slept together tonight?” she asked.
He didn’t want to sleep with her. He wanted to sleep alone with his being scared and his trembling and his cursing the world that he was in this miserable country in this miserable war and in any miserable country and in any miserable war when God should have known better.
“Yeah. Okay.” His words.
He tried to forget about them but she came to his bunk and sat on the edge and held his hand in hers. Her eyes were tearful and she apologized for being so afraid, so needy.
“One of the reasons I joined the army,” she said, “was that I didn’t want to be abused anymore. I didn’t want to be pushed around or told what I had to do or be used because I was a girl. Can you dig that?”
“No, not really,” he answered.
“That’s okay, too,” she said. “But right now I need to be with somebody strong, somebody I think is going to understand where I’m coming from. I don’t want to push up on you, but I need to be with somebody tonight. It’s still okay with you?”
“Yeah.”
An old blues tune rambled through his head. “I Needs to Be Be’d With.” He thought Quincy Jones had recorded it. He wasn’t sure, but he was sure that he wasn’t somebody strong, or understanding where she was coming from.
They slept together. Their lean bodies curled in a tight knot, dark against dark, flesh against flesh, their bodies alive in the pitch-black night.
“We can win all the battles and still lose the war.” The young major’s fatigues were crisp, spotless. “What the enemy wants us to do—and don’t be fooled into thinking otherwise—is to kick ass and leave a bunch of dead A-rab bodies lying around the villages so we look like the bad guys.”
They had brought in two more squads of Special Forces troops to protect the CAs. It was just supposed to be a show of force, but a glance at the cocky, strutting guys showed that what they wanted to do was to throw their weight around.
When the major war had ended, when the Taliban had first been declared defeated and gone from Afghanistan, it had been a tug-of-war between the Civilian Affairs personnel, new on the scene, and what the CAs called the shooters. The CAs were trying, cautiously, to make friends with the locals while the shooters were more confident in their scopes, the body armor that made them look like some kind of giant insects, and the stubborn belief that they were immortal. They believed those bits of war and the headlines that said that the conflict was over, that it had all changed to a mopping-up operation and the education of the native populace. But as the victory wore on, as the need for the zippered body bags continued, it seemed more like a tug-of-war within each individual soldier and little to do with the Afghanis. It had become simply a matter of whether one had a better chance of staying alive by killing the natives or being friendly with them.
With the latest deaths the plan was to step up CA operations with the various groups in the area, especially concentrating on one particular warlord that army intelligence was trying to cultivate. The very fact that they were dealing with a warlord brought about a gut feeling of wrongness, but it was explained that dealing with outlaws, even with evil people, demonstrated the new army’s flexibility.
Two CAs had been killed prior to Curtis’s arrival and now Moffett. The Afghani’s death wasn’t mentioned. The mood in the camp had changed. Everyone was edgy. Tempers flared more quickly, there were more long letters to wherever home was, a few of the men prayed more. In the evenings the television sets were always tuned to the newscasts, looking for some indication that the final conquest had been complete and they would be withdrawing soon. Curtis was jumpy, too, but Marian had positively freaked.
All of the bravado, the easy chatter that had seemed so much a part of her, had disappeared. Now the smiles were forced. She hovered about him, touched him whenever she could, rubbing against him almost like a cat needing affection. She didn’t come to his bed at nights and he was glad. He didn’t want to be that close to anyone in this place.
She was still beautiful, always able to exude charm across the spaces between them. He liked looking at her, liked the way she moved, suggesting strength beneath the loose-fitting camouflage suit and high boots. She was also an invitation for him to come out of himself, to open up in a way that would allow her to come into his private world. To look for safety there.
Openness was not something Curtis was good at. Not during the war or at any time. He knew, knew because she pushed it into his face, knew because she rubbed it into his chest, that he was running from the idea of vulnerability and running from Marian.
Perhaps if the enemy had been clearer, if it had come with white and gleaming horns protruding from a mass of dark hair, or if its eyes had gleamed like neon blood in the brightness of day, if it had howled at night so that he could follow the sound and know its form, things would have been easier for Curtis. He could have, perhaps, mustered up the courage and faced whatever death or injury he was threatened with. But that was not the face of the enemy. There were no horns, no red eyes shin
ing from an evil scowl, no howl echoing from the silver desert moon.
The enemy was barefoot children playing in the wreckage of a Humvee still smelling of the corpses of its human cargo. The enemy was brown old men who had never seen America, who had never owned an atlas to find New York on a map, who had merely stumbled from the wars of their Old Testament lives into the wars of another time. What Curtis wanted to do, what he desperately wanted to do, was to shut it all away. Push away the morality, push away the fear, push everything away except the thought of going home.
Marian kept finding him. Kept probing into the uncertain edges of his consciousness.
Today she asked if he needed orange juice. “It’ll help you to grow up into a real strong boy!” she said, the smile sliding through his cool. She was looking good in a white T-shirt over khaki shorts.
“How did you come to think the army was cool?” she asked him.
“Didn’t like the scenes I was dealing with,” he said, looking away for the moment, ignoring his breathing faster because she was so close to him. “Guess that fits everybody who’s regular army. I thought I could make up some scenes of my own and just stick myself in them. I did okay for a while.”
“Yeah, me too,” she said. “But Afghanistan ain’t for a while. It’s for the tour.”
“We’ll get though it,” he said, surprising himself in admitting that getting through it was the only thing on his mind. Marian nodded silently. There wasn’t a need for a lot of words.
The next assignment outside of the Mazar camp was to take bags of seed to a region near Baghlan.
“The local farmers know what to do with the seed, so all you need to do is to give it to them, sit around for a few hours and puff on their hookahs or whatever they call them, and get on back to base” was the informal order of the day. “It’s a hundred and forty miles out, which should take three, maybe four hours, depending on the terrain you run into. Then it’s four, maybe five hours back because you don’t want to take the same route. You spend three hours with the locals. That’s three hours minimum, and you get a full day’s work for a full day’s pay. Any questions?”
Curtis thought about Moffett. His grandfather had been a farmer and Moffett knew about things like the quality of soil.
“The earth’s too poor over here,” he had said. “You can’t grow anything. All they do here is bury the seeds and hope for the best.”
The three Humvees pulled out on an overcast day but Curtis knew it wouldn’t rain. The first one carried three CAs; one of them was Marian, along with the two-man crew. It was loaded with seed, food rations, and chocolate for the kids. The second was loaded with seed and fertilizer. Curtis was in the third with the crew and two Special Ops, including a skinny kid on the mounted squad gun.
They pulled out slowly, maneuvering their way through the concrete barriers that stopped easy passage through the base and that would have been used for shields in case they were attacked. They got the all clear from the southern gate detail and the first Humvee picked up speed as they hit the open road.
The distances between sites were hard to judge along the barren, empty roads. There were more changes of color in the northern part of the country, patches of green here and there, promising more than they delivered. Sometimes an old mosque, beautifully decorated, would rise majestically above the desert’s constant dust swirls. Curtis found himself looking up at the sky a lot, glad to see something other than the brown of sand and stone.
Occasionally they would pass a group of houses, some as high as three stories, all still pockmarked from past wars. The Humvee crews spaced themselves precisely at six vehicle lengths, tightening up somewhat on curves and regaining their intervals on any straight road. There was chatter back and forth between the vehicles, and Curtis heard somebody talking about spending less time in the village. That was fine with him.
They were supposed to meet a group of farmers at an old marketplace. The market itself consisted of seven squat buildings, one with a Coca-Cola sign over Arabic writing. The men were sitting on makeshift chairs in a semicircle. There were two mules to carry off the bags of seed and an old converted vehicle that could have been a bus in its better days.
A group of children, bare-legged and ragged, stopped their games around an old well, undoubtedly dry, and waved. Curtis saw Marian waving toward the children. She was one of the first out of the trucks and was soon among the kids with a box full of goodies.
The men were the same as usual, bad teeth, signs of old wounds, one with a stump where his right leg should have been. They brought out papers to show.
“I think they’re trying to show us where their farms are,” one of the CAs said. “We’re not taking this stuff to their farms so just let them unload it here.”
The Americans looked over the papers, had one of the men make his mark on the requisition sheet, and indicated that they could start unloading the Humvees. Curtis resisted the urge to go over to the children and took a bag of fertilizer from the truck and cut it open so that the Afghani men could see the difference between that and the seeds. Several of them nodded and began talking among themselves.
The first shot hit the side of one of the trucks.
“We’re fired on! We’re fired on!” a sergeant screamed. “Mount up! Mount up!”
The men instinctively brought their rifles up and turned toward the buildings. Another shot whined past Curtis and one of the Special Ops opened up. He was shooting away from the village and Curtis turned and saw two dark heads in the distance. For a moment he tensed, then remembered to bring his rifle up to a sweep position as the men returned fire. There were cries behind him and he turned to see that two of the farmers had been shot. A woman, her black dress flapping as she ran, came screaming from the building toward the fallen men.
A shot, perhaps meant to be a warning, cut her legs from under her and she fell forward, sliding in the dirt.
Curtis looked for Marian and saw her disappear into a building with two of the children. He couldn’t tell if she had been pulled in or if she was taking cover.
“Mount up! Mount up!” came the order.
The Humvee’s machine gun was firing along a straight line some fifty yards away. All of the farmers were down, some with their hands over their heads in surrender, some wounded and twisting in pain.
The first Humvee was already pulling off. Curtis swung onto the second one and looked back for Marian. He didn’t see her. The Humvee started a tight turn.
Curtis leaped off, stumbling forward for several steps as he tried to regain his balance.
“Get on the truck!” a voice barked.
Curtis raced toward the building he had seen Marian go into. The earth kicked up near his feet as shells hit the hard dirt. The outside of the building was bathed in sunlight, leaving the open door a patch of blackness. He jumped in, screaming as he did, trying to drown out the sound of his own fear, covering the desperation he felt. Something moved. He jumped to one side, tripping over something on the floor. He looked down. Marian!
He fired at whatever had moved and heard a grunt and a cry and a clattering of tin utensils as the dark figure turned into a human form. For a split second it had eyes and a mouth gaped open in agony. Then it was gone into the shadows.
He grabbed Marian’s collar and pulled her toward the door with one hand, waving the M-16 with the other as he made his way backward out of the door into the sunlight.
“Stay down!” There was another soldier at his side. The Humvee had pulled up near the building and was hitting it with some heavy fire.
Curtis half-pushed, half-lifted Marian’s still form toward the Humvee and she was pulled in. He jumped on, and a moment later the vehicle lurched forward and was speeding down the road.
Someone had taken Marian’s helmet off and was pouring water on her face. At first she was still, then gasping for air.
“Call for Medivac! She’s wounded!”
“Where are we?”
“Thirty-five clicks—I d
on’t know—let them find us!”
“Mason! Good looking out, man. I didn’t know she was missing! I didn’t catch it!”
By the time the Medivac chopper located them they were only a mile from the base and they had decided that Marian’s wound—she had been shot through her boot in the back of her leg—was more painful than serious. They drove her the rest of the way into the base.
It was late the next day before he went to the medical ward to see her. It had been twenty-four hours of reliving the events. Feeling the panic all over again, seeing the face of the person he had shot, undoubtedly killed, when he had burst into the building. He had thought of what he would say to Marian or, more clearly, what she would say to him. Would she tell him that she had run into the building? That they were protecting her there?
“Hi, how you doing?” she asked when he stopped near her bunk.
“I’m okay,” he said. “How are you doing?”
She moved the cover off her leg. It was bandaged from the knee halfway toward the ankle. “What do they say? The best wounds are the ones you live to talk about?”
“Something like that.”
“Thanks for getting me out—they told me everything.” She was crying.
“You really all right?”
“Sit down,” she said.
Curtis sat down on the bed, watching Marian wince as she moved her leg to give him room. She took his hand and began to kiss it, to rub it against her cheek, even to wipe the tears away from her eyes.
“I don’t know exactly what happened back there,” he said.
“War happened,” she said. “But we’re not fighting now.”
He leaned over and kissed her forehead, and then her lips. He felt her arms around his neck and felt her clinging to him. There were the tears, and the holding, and the feeling that he would never be strong enough to escape her arms, never strong enough to keep his heart away from her.
Later, he knew, there might come a time to talk about what had happened. They might talk, one day, of what the locals had been thinking, or even whoever it was who had fired at them. There might never be a complete understanding of what they had shared in those frantic moments, or what they had given up of themselves. Or what they had found.