Reader's Digest Soldier Stories

by Reader's Digest

  At Combat Outpost Tynes, a former school, Santos’s legacy was immediately apparent. When the platoon had moved into the compound in December 2009, soldiers slept in the few small classrooms, or outside, until Santos coordinated a construction project. The platoon then extended the structure and built small rooms for each soldier. During the slow, hard work of building up the rooms and the outpost’s outer defenses, Santos had been beside his men, filling sandbags and lugging materials. “He was always hands-on with us,” Staff Sgt. Edward Rosa, the platoon’s senior squad leader, told me. “He was always out there with us working. He did everything with us. He was about the guys.” He organized movie nights with a wide-screen television powered by a gun truck’s battery. And at Christmas, after Kristen and the platoon’s family support group sent stockings from Fort Bragg, he played Santa at the outpost. He made each man sit on his lap before he’d give him a stocking.

  Santos was born in Germany to an Army family and bounced around bases as he grew up. He enlisted in 1996 and trained as a mechanic in an aviation unit at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where he met Kristen, who was also in the Army. But he soon switched to the infantry, where he excelled. I served with him at Fort Drum, New York, for three years, and he impressed me as the most knowledgeable but laid-back soldier I knew. He could answer any question on tactics, weapon systems, or Army regulations, but he was also quick with wisecracks and constantly concerned about his men. The soldiers at Combat Outpost Tynes told me the same. He played video games with them, gave professional guidance, and counseled them on problems at home. And he often made jokes when his men faced danger, to put them at ease and remind them that good could be found even during dark and fearful times.

  “I heard stories about how tight people get when they deploy, but I never knew it could be like this,” said Spc. Clayton “Doc” Taylor, the platoon’s medic. “I called him Dad.” So did many of his men. Sgt. Adam Lachance had never had a male friend like Santos. They had planned a couples trip to Las Vegas, and Santos and Kristen would visit Lachance and his wife in New Hampshire. Lachance had even turned down a promotion to staff sergeant in February because it would mean switching platoons and leaving Santos.

  • • •

  Each platoon is led by an officer, a first or second lieutenant. The platoon sergeant serves as his right-hand man in administration and logistics. That means Santos could have stayed behind at the outpost while his men patrolled. But he was always with them, as he was on the morning of March 22, in the front passenger seat of a hulking, mine-resistant truck, driving down a dirt road alongside a vineyard, just about to cross that small bridge.

  Three miles away, Staff Sgt. Edwardo Loredo heard the call crackle over the radio as he led a foot patrol through the farmland south of the outpost. “Our guys just hit an I.E.D.,” he said. Sound takes about 15 seconds to travel that far, so another moment passed before they heard the blast. Even at that distance, it rumbled through their chests. The bomb had been huge. The radio crackled again: “Four responsive. One unresponsive.” Loredo’s patrol ran toward the sound of the explosion.

  Weighed down by 50 pounds of body armor, ammunition, water, radios, and weapons, they ran through farmland that may have been mined. Panting and sweating, leg muscles and lungs on fire, they arrived just as the medevac helicopter lifted off in a wave of dust that blocked out the sun. A tan armored truck lay on its side, the bottom scorched and the rear tires blown away, next to a deep crater in the dirt road. Sgt. Dale Knollinger, still out of breath, approached Sgt. Gregory Maher, who had been in the four-vehicle patrol.

  “He’s gone,” Maher said.

  “Who’s gone?” Knollinger asked.

  “Sergeant Santos.”

  Knollinger stood in the road and cried.

  • • •

  For a week afterward, Combat Outpost Tynes was quiet. “There was just silence for a while,” Knollinger said. “There wasn’t joking around like there was before.” Soldiers talked to each other in quiet voices or kept to themselves. Santos’s men felt adrift without him. “They lost their rudder,” said Cpt. Jimmy Razuri, the commander of Charlie Company at the time.

  Lachance had planned to bring Santos a McDonald’s double cheeseburger from Kuwait on the way back from his two weeks of leave. Instead, while he sat in the Atlanta airport, his wife called with the news. Back at the outpost, he found soldiers in Santos’s room packing everything to be sent home to Kristen. “I didn’t know what to do with myself for a while,” he said. He slept in silence. No more late night or early morning knocks on his wall from the adjacent room, Santos summoning him to hang out. He hadn’t minded coming back to Afghanistan from leave, knowing he’d see Santos.

  Now what? Lachance thought.

  On his first patrol after his friend’s death, Lachance reached into a pouch on his body armor and pulled out a handful of Jolly Rancher candy, the small pile speckled with green apple candies. His breath caught. He always carried Jolly Ranchers on patrol, and Santos took all the green ones, every time. “Why can’t you just take a few?” Lachance would ask him. And Santos would just laugh.

  Lachance stuffed the green candy back in the pouch. “I wouldn’t touch them,” he told me.

  Several weeks before, Lachance, a self-trained tattoo artist, had given Santos a tattoo. The words snaked around his right arm: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Beneath them, the date: 22 November, 2009, when Private First Class Tynes and another soldier in Charlie Company, Sgt. James Nolen, died. After Santos’s death, ten platoon members asked Lachance for the same tattoo. One now wears the quote on his thigh, another on his bicep, another on his ribs, all followed by 22 March, 2010, and C.M.S., Santos’s initials.

  The platoon said goodbye to Santos at a memorial service at Combat Outpost Tynes several days after his death. His men filed up to the helmet resting atop a rifle propped between a pair of combat boots. They saluted and knelt and said silent prayers. And while they kept patrolling, they were rattled by the death. “If it happened to him, it could happen to any of us,” said Staff Sgt. Edward Rosa, the platoon’s senior squad leader. “That was the beginning of the craziness in the Arghandab for us.”

  In the coming weeks and months, the platoon was shot at and blown up repeatedly, sometimes several times a day. Spc. Brendan Neenan died June 7 in a blast that wounded four other soldiers. A buried bomb killed Loredo on June 24, and another bomb hit Spc. Christopher Moon on July 6. He died a week later at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Of the 42 platoon members, six were killed during the deployment and 14 injured, a casualty rate of nearly 50 percent, high even for frontline troops working in the country’s most dangerous areas. By mid-July, the height of fighting season, many in the platoon were convinced their fate would be the same. But Moon’s death was the last, and by mid-August, Santos’s men had started boarding planes for home.

  • • •

  On September 11, 2010, I grilled chicken wings with Doc Taylor under a gray sky at a park on Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Country music blared from the open doors of his white Chevy pickup truck. Taylor’s wife inflated a plastic palm tree as Kristen Santos opened a box of plastic Hawaiian leis. She and Santos had planned to throw a luau for the guys after the deployment. She figured he would have wanted her to follow through, and soldiers could share memories with her and the widows of Nolen and Loredo.

  On a picnic table in an open-air pavilion, Kristen arranged framed photographs of the platoon’s six dead soldiers on small stands and placed a yellow rose and a shot of Jack Daniel’s in front of each. She held the large picture of Santos, standing against a gray concrete wall in Afghanistan, his rifle propped up beside him. “I miss him so much,” she told me, and kissed the photo. “It still doesn’t feel real.”

  Such distance from the battlefields where their loved ones died leaves many family members without a sense of closure. Kristen said it was difficult for Cameron to accept that his dad was gone. He had been
away a lot. He’d been deployed over Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas. Now, the only difference was Cameron had been told that his dad would never be coming home. Kristen understood. She had last seen her husband on Thanksgiving Day, 2009, when they chatted by video for a few minutes during a rare moment of Internet access. She still couldn’t quite believe she’d never see his face again. She welcomed his soldiers home when they stepped off the plane, hoping for some feeling of finality, which eluded her. “I went to all the flights just to prove to myself he wasn’t coming home.”

  Soldiers wearing Hawaiian shirts arrived with wives, girlfriends and children, plates of food, and cases of beer. The pavilion filled up and Captain Razuri stood in front of the memorial table. “Nine years ago today, you know what happened,” he told the group. “It’s why we’re still doing what we’re doing today, and why these guys behind me aren’t with us.”

  Later Kristen sat with a half dozen soldiers and looked through pictures from the deployment, many of which she hadn’t seen. Santos walking through villages, filling sandbags at COP Tynes, drinking tea with the Afghan police, handing out stockings for Christmas. Kristen laughed and reached toward the laptop computer screen, as though to touch him. And then the pictures changed, from shots of a grinning Santos to soldiers standing on a dirt road, next to a truck flipped on its side, scorched by flame, two wheels blown off. The laughter stopped, and Knollinger and Rosa traded nervous glances with other soldiers. “I need to see this,” Kristen told them. She leaned closer to the screen and stared at the pictures. “Is that the truck? I need to see where it happened. I need this.”

  • • •

  Kristen and the soldiers told stories about Santos and, one by one, his men sat for a few moments and wrote on the big framed picture she had brought. By day’s end, the border around the photo was crowded with messages to their fallen leader.

  I want you to know you changed my life and I love you for that. The world will never be the same without you. But I will be the man I told you I would. I love you, Dad. Till we meet again.

  Doc Taylor

  Dad, I can’t even describe what it was like to work for you. I learned so much and matured because of you. You were awesome to work for and truly a great friend. I love you and think about you every day. Miss you.

  Sgt. Dale Knollinger

  You were the quiet professional. Thank you so much for your guidance. You have no idea how much you are missed. Goodbye, Brother.

  Sgt. Brian Flannery

  I’ve never been closer to another man. You were a great friend. Until we meet again, you will be thought of every day.

  Sgt. Adam Lachance

  That night, after Kristen packed up the leftovers and pulled down the decorations, she and Cameron returned to their small brick house on Fort Bragg, crowded with pictures of her husband. Cameron retreated to his bedroom to play video games, as he had often done with his father and now did alone. Beside him on the bed lay the framed picture, adorned with the memories of the men his father left behind.

  Miracle Mission

  BY ANTHONY FLACCO

  From Tiny Dancer

  The green beret was on routine patrol in a busy marketplace in Kandahar when he spotted a man walking with a girl about nine years old. His daughter, probably, the soldier thought. On this morning in February 2002, in southern Afghanistan, the American might not have given the two of them a second thought. Then the scarf wrapped around the girl’s head slipped off—giving him a glimpse of her hideously scarred face.

  My God, what happened to her? the soldier wondered. Burn wounds covered her face, neck and chest, and she seemed wispy-thin even by the scrawny local standards. About 4 feet tall, she couldn’t have weighed more than 60 pounds, the soldier thought. He’d never seen a child disfigured so.

  Still, even in her condition, the girl was alert and seemed to sense him looking at her. She raised her eyes and stared directly back. Intrigued by her curiosity and defiance, the American approached the man and, speaking the Dari language a little and gesturing, asked him what had happened.

  There’d been a fire at home, months before. The girl had escaped with her life, but now the scarring on her face and neck was threatening her ability to eat and even breathe. Her skin was either raw and fragile, or twisted with ugly welts. She could no longer close her mouth or eyes. The father had brought her to Kandahar, more than 200 miles from their desert home in Farah, to try to find medical help.

  And what was being done for her? asked the soldier.

  “Nothing,” replied her father. The doctors weren’t hopeful, he said.

  Introducing himself as Mohammed Hasan and his daughter as Zubaida, the man said he had eight other children at home. He was a farmer, a peaceful Shiite Muslim, he said. He had sold most of his meager possessions and borrowed money from neighbors to pay for his long trips around the country to try to find help for his daughter. The soldier marveled: In a land that put a notoriously low value on females even in the 21st century, this struggling father had basically ransomed his life to try to help his little girl.

  The American couldn’t just walk off and leave this child to die. If you could look past her scars, he thought—and admittedly that was tough, even for a Green Beret—you could see a spark in her eyes. The soldier told them, “Come with me,” and waved for them to follow.

  • • •

  Alone in her family’s mud hut seven months earlier, it was easy for a girl of nine to lose track of details while preparing a bath—like making sure the pilot light was out before she filled the heater with kerosene. Zubaida, who loved music and dancing, had also neglected to kick her shoes out of the way before she sashayed toward the heater. She tripped and fell hard, just inches from the water heater, dropping the kerosene can.

  A wave of fuel splashed over the heater’s pilot light and directly onto Zubaida. A sheet of fire roared, igniting the fuel and basically turning the girl into a human torch. She screamed while trying to beat out the flames on her hair and skin. When she inhaled, superheated air scorched her throat and lungs. She whirled and flailed, beyond panic.

  Next door at a neighbor’s, Zubaida’s mother, Bador, and her elder sister, Nacima, heard her screaming, and arrived just in time to see Zubaida collapse. “The water, quickly!” Bador screamed.

  They grabbed the tub and dumped it over the girl. That killed the flames, and now her mother and sister could see Zubaida all too clearly. She was a crumpled heap of terror and pain. And unfortunately, she never lost consciousness.

  • • •

  There was no phone in the village, so Daud, Zubaida’s 16-year-old brother, ran to find their father while Bador, Nacima and some neighbors drizzled water over her burned skin. After an hour of complete torture, shock began to settle in, and Zubaida lapsed into uncontrollable shaking.

  The local clinic had no way to treat such extensive burns, and no painkillers, either. After watching his daughter suffer for several days, Zubaida’s father, Mohammed, headed for Herat, the nearest city. While a neighbor drove an old car 120 miles over rutted dirt roads, Mohammed held Zubaida in the backseat as she shrieked. Bador prayed in the front seat. The desperate trip took nearly seven hours.

  At the clinic, Mohammed Hasan pulled out a small bit of currency and pressed it into a doctor’s hands. “Please save my little girl,” he begged him.

  With third-degree burns—and Zubaida was covered with them—the cure, or at least the start of the cure, was almost as painful as the fire. In order to avoid infection, the girl’s charred skin had to be scraped and washed. Without any anesthesia, the doctors in this tiny outpost hospital had to peel away the blistered skin across Zubaida’s neck, throat and arms. It was pure agony for her and everyone around her; afterward, the doctors applied a salve. Then they released her. There was nothing more they could do.

  The lead doctor pulled Hasan aside. “The injuries are not survivable,” he said. “Death will surely come in a week or so. Take her home and pray for the end to co
me quickly.”

  Hasan wouldn’t hear of it. “Pray for her to be spared,” he said.

  And she was. Months passed, and scar tissue continued to grow. It began stretching and pulling on her facial features, giving her the look of a melted wax sculpture. Her left arm, burned more than the right, became stiff. As the scar tissue continued to replace the dead skin, it formed a sort of web, so that her arm fused to her chest. Most people in the developed world, where there is adequate care for burn wounds and nearly everything else, will never see anything like it.

  Now, though, in Kandahar in February 2002, Hasan and Zubaida followed the American soldier as he led them toward a U.S. base.

  • • •

  The Green Beret—as a Special Forces member, he remains nameless—took his charges to the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion. This was irregular, to say the least: It was just about five months since September 11, 2001, and American bombers and cruise missiles were still pounding every mountain and shadow in Afghanistan, hunting for Osama bin Laden. Even here, back of the main battle lines, everyone worried about terrorist infiltration. But the soldier insisted, and a medic agreed to examine Zubaida. Even so, the potential for trouble was enormous.

  By the time the day was over, father and daughter had been guaranteed enough medical help to address Zubaida’s immediate infections. The treatment might require days or even weeks. Cautiously grateful, Hasan took Zubaida off to find lodgings nearby, promising to return shortly after.

  Word of the girl began to spread. State Department officer Michael Gray, age 40 and with boyish good looks, was working for Gen. Tommy Franks, coordinating humanitarian relief into Afghanistan. Once he learned about Zubaida, he went to work weaving a lifeline of security clearances, visas and medical forms to help bring her to the United States for treatment.