by Craig Grossi
Dedication
For a brief time in my life I walked among giants.
This book is dedicated to those I walked alongside—
to those who made it back and to those who did not.
My story is not a profession of glory or grandeur;
it is about how one person came to realize that it is not what
happens to us but how we react that matters.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
CHAPTER 1: Can’t Help but Wonder
CHAPTER 2: Looks Like a Fred
CHAPTER 3: School’s Out
CHAPTER 4: Sergeant Fred
CHAPTER 5: The Delta Blues
CHAPTER 6: The Green Zone
CHAPTER 7: To the Canyon
CHAPTER 8: Extract
CHAPTER 9: California
CHAPTER 10: Leatherneck
CHAPTER 11: Wilderness
CHAPTER 12: Boom
CHAPTER 13: The Redwoods
CHAPTER 14: The Mud Fields
CHAPTER 15: Disservice
CHAPTER 16: Homecoming
CHAPTER 17: The Uncertain Path
For Memorial
Acknowledgments
Photo Section
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Some names and identifying details of people in this book have been changed in order to protect their privacy, but their awesome actions and stories are real.
CHAPTER 1
Can’t Help but Wonder
Summer in North Carolina is the kind of hot you can taste. The air is so humid, it gets caught in your throat, thick like smoke.
Thankfully, with the windows down in the Land Cruiser, I could feel the air beginning to cool, slowly at first, then all at once. I leaned toward the open window, my left arm resting on the doorframe and my right hand on the wheel. The green-blue Smoky Mountains rose up ahead of us and on either side. I took a deep breath and smiled.
In the passenger seat beside me, Josh fiddled with the music till he landed on Johnny Cash. Like the A/C, the radio didn’t work, but we’d duct-taped a little Bluetooth speaker to the dash, and it did the trick. Cash sang out the lyrics to “Can’t Help but Wonder Where I’m Bound,” and we sang along, too, lowering our voices till we broke out laughing.
From the back, Fred popped up his head between us. His mouth was open in a slight pant, and it made him look like he was smiling. “You like the music, buddy?” I asked, and Josh turned to give him a scratch behind his floppy white ear. Fred let out a long, dramatic yawn, complete with a little whine, then curled up again on his nest of blankets and pillows. He had the best seat in the house.
It was the summer of 2015 and we were driving toward the afternoon sun, headed across the country on what we guessed would be a five-week road trip. Our plan, if you could call it one, was loose: drive west till we met the ocean, then north till we hit Seattle, then back east till we were home again. Josh had lobbied for his role as copilot on the trip: “You’ll get twice as far for half the cost,” he’d insisted. It was an easy decision to bring him. I knew if I went out on the road alone, I’d end up in uselessly challenging situations, pushing myself, the truck, and Fred too hard. Josh, a buddy of mine from Georgetown, was a voice of reason. And, like me, he had been to Afghanistan and back, but neither of us had seen much of our own country.
So we packed up my truck with camping gear—tents, sleeping mats, charcoal, a Ka-Bar knife, plus a football, a Frisbee, and two mountain bikes on the roof rack—and hit the road. The bikes were both mine; I was hoping Josh would be able to bike with me, but I hadn’t asked yet. In 2009, Josh lost his leg in Afghanistan when the Stryker his team was driving—an eight-wheeled armored infantry vehicle—struck an IED. The blast destroyed the vehicle and took Josh’s right leg from just above the knee down.
He had a pretty badass prosthetic now, complete with a robotic knee, but he hadn’t really had the opportunity to put it to the test yet. Recovering from an injury like that isn’t exactly a cakewalk, no pun intended. Josh’s recovery had entailed a long series of surgeries (the latest just a few months before) on his “good leg,” which had also been seriously injured in the blast. Even though he’d graduated from Georgetown the year before our trip, the operations had kept him from getting a job, essentially putting his life on hold. When I’d spotted him at our favorite pub in D.C. a few weeks earlier, he’d looked pretty rough. Josh was a lot taller than me, but he looked as if he’d shrunk. That night, we hastily put the plan together. Within a week, we were off.
It was good timing for me, too. I was still in school full-time at Georgetown but decided to take the summer off. I guess you could say I wanted to soak up my last college summer before graduating and getting back to the grind. A year earlier, I’d bought my dream car—a 1988 Toyota Land Cruiser—after spotting her in a mechanic’s lot by my apartment, still wearing her original royal blue paint. Like a lovesick teenager, I kept my eye on the truck for weeks. I was broke, and I didn’t even know if it was for sale or not. But when I woke up one morning to find a deposit from the VA in my bank account—a year’s worth of disability back pay that suddenly came through—I knew it was time to find out. That same afternoon, I drove her off the lot. Fred assumed his position in the passenger seat, his front paws on the armrest and his head out the window. He stuck his snout high in the air like he always did, as if proud of his new wheels. Ever since, I’d been dreaming of taking him across the country in that truck.
“We’re gonna bushwhack,” I’d told Josh as we planned our trip. I didn’t want to stick to the well-worn trails; we were going to make our own.
“I’ve got a three-day limit, man,” Josh had said, pointing to his knee. “That’s the lifespan of the battery in this thing.” Once it died, he’d be down to one leg, and we’d be screwed.
Josh was twenty-nine years old, a few years younger than me, and from Minnesota. He had an easygoing personality and got along with everyone. But I knew that, like me, Josh wanted to push limits. Before his injury, he’d been in peak physical condition. He was a tall guy—about six foot one—with a lean, athletic build. He could bench two hundred pounds and hike for ten miles with an eighty-pound ruck on his back, no problem. After the IED, all that changed. He had to relearn how to do everything with one leg. Our trip would be his first chance to really see what he could do.
We began to descend into a valley. The road twisted through the mountains, lined on either side by tall, sheltering trees. Their leaves danced in the wake of the Land Cruiser as we whizzed by. From outside, a powerful roar swelled up, like a train pulling into a station. Josh turned down the music so we could hear. As we sank deeper into the valley, we realized it was the sound of a river below. We looked for a place to pull over so we could walk down and get a closer look.
That’s what we wanted: the chance to see something new, to encounter the unexpected, to have each day start with that anticipation of the unknown. It’d been four years since I left the Marine Corps. My time in the marines had been a series of ups and downs, but I always felt that what I was doing was relevant. After I got out, I got a desk job where it felt irrelevant whether I even showed up or not. I wasn’t challenged. I wasn’t really myself. So I went back to school, just to check a box; I thought if I got my degree, then I could go back to work and get a better job. Move up. Find a challenge. But the more time I spent away from that job, the more I realized I didn’t want to go back. What I was going to do instead, I didn’t know. When things get easy for me, I get uncomfortable. I was always that way growing up, but after my deployment, that feeling only got stronger.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’
t searching for the life I led in Afghanistan by coming on this trip. That might sound crazy, but it’s real. Every vet I know at one point or another longs for the day-to-day urgency and uncertainty of life in a combat zone. When you don’t know what the day’s going to bring, when your only goal is to keep yourself and your buddies alive, everything is stunningly simple. Once you get a taste of that, a lot of things you do at home just don’t feel the same.
Some people are haunted by what they did and what they saw in Afghanistan. I’m no exception. Some things you can’t forget. But some things you don’t want to forget, either, like the memory of your friends who didn’t come back. The ones you saw die. The way I was starting to see it, maybe refusing to live my life like a vegetable behind a desk was one way to honor that memory—to honor them. Or maybe it was just my way of coping. Maybe on the road I could find out.
Josh spotted a turnoff and I pulled over. As the truck rolled to a stop, Fred picked his head up. He looked at me, asking a question with a twitch of his eyebrows. “You stay here, Freddy,” I said. Josh and I got out and found a steep set of stairs going down. We took our time, step by step. At the bottom, the river was beautiful. We watched the white water clamor over rocks and boulders, creating a continuous sound of churning thunder. We stood on the edge for a few minutes and cooled down in the mist.
Having gotten our fill of misty air and river sounds, Josh and I made our way back up the steps. As we neared the road, I stopped in my tracks. There was Fred, standing at the top of the stairs. He must’ve jumped right out the car window.
“Fred!” I shouted in that low, you’re-in-deep-shit voice of a dog owner. “What are you doing?” He sunk his head low and scurried toward Josh. He’d never gotten himself out of the truck like that before. It rattled me. What if a car had been coming by when he was standing in the road? I knew what he really wanted, though: to be with us. Fred had a way of keeping his eye on me—and watching out for me. The three of us were a pack now, from here to California and back.
“C’mon, buddy,” I said, more softly. I gently pulled Fred to me by the loose scruff around his neck and kissed him on the forehead. “I’m not gonna leave you.”
I opened the car door and Fred leapt up onto his seat, then Josh and I climbed in. I turned the key, and Johnny Cash came crooning through the little speaker. We pulled onto the winding road and continued on our way. It was just the beginning.
CHAPTER 2
Looks Like a Fred
“You guys are gonna be standing in your own piss for a few days.” That was an analyst’s warning to us about Sangin, Afghanistan. In other words, once we landed, we’d be too busy fighting the Taliban to stop for a bathroom break. He was right.
We inserted by helicopter. The guys didn’t talk much on the way out. The inside of a CH-53 is like a leaky washing machine—hollow and noisy—so you can’t exactly hold a conversation. Instead we sat there, shoulder to shoulder in the dark, waiting. I tried not to think much about what the analyst said. It was better not to have expectations. I wanted to go in with an open mind. Ready.
I felt the engine shift as we started to descend. It was almost midnight. That’s when it was safest for the helicopters—and us. I looked down, checked my gear one last time, and turned on my night vision goggles. Goggles isn’t really the word; the night vision we used was actually a big monocle. You bring it down from your helmet and position it in front of one eye so you have one eye in the night vision and one in the dark. It’s disorienting at first. I was so green on my first mission, I couldn’t figure out how to work it. The marines around me all pulled theirs down, turned them on, and I sat there fiddling with mine right up until the landing. Even then I couldn’t figure it out, so I gave up and didn’t use the goggles at all that night. Maybe they thought I was tough for that, or maybe stupid.
My job was in human intelligence—I was an intelligence collector—so my role in the field was to learn as much as I could about the Taliban from villagers. And if we got hold of a Taliban fighter, I was the only one in the unit who could detain and interrogate him. My first mission, just before this one, had been to Trek Nawa, a town on the outskirts of Marjah. There, I’d earned my Combat Action Ribbon, even detained and questioned a Taliban member. Still, what was true in Trek Nawa wouldn’t necessarily be true in Sangin. The way we got briefed on it, we knew it was going to be a different fight.
The guys I was heading out with were RECON marines. If my expertise was in communication, theirs was in combat. They were the real deal—an elite force of special ops guys who were tough and experienced. They were like professional athletes, and smart, too. I didn’t want them to think I was a soup sandwich, some nerd from intel who wouldn’t bring any value to their mission. Before my deployment, I’d trained my ass off, doing two-a-days at the gym. To earn the trust of my teammates, I knew I would need to demonstrate not just that I was physically able to keep up on long nighttime patrols and in gunfights, but also that I brought something to the battlefield that they couldn’t provide for themselves.
It was time to touch down. We sat silently in the helicopter, the green glow from our night vision illuminating our faces. We were getting dropped a couple of miles from a compound that had been scouted out by drone in advance. We’d go in and make it our base, spending the rest of the night filling sandbags and preparing for the attack that would likely come at sunup.
In the previous mission, we had a British royal marine with us called Jack. Good guy. He was supposed to come to Sangin with us, but he bowed out. “I’m not going back there,” he’d said. He’d been a couple years earlier, when the British had the task of securing it. “It’s the kind of place where you turn a corner and there’s two Taliban guys standing there. One’s got an RPG and the other’s got a machine gun, and they’re just waiting to light you up,” he said. “Place is bonkers.”
Sangin had that reputation. The Taliban were bolder there because it was an important location for poppy farming, and the opium trade was a big way the Taliban financed themselves. Plus, coalition forces hadn’t committed enough troops there recently, so the Taliban had total control and complete freedom of movement. We were walking onto their turf. We expected them to have a lot of fighters and a lot of firepower. Nothing was off the table: recoilless rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, rockets, mortars, DShK machine guns. When the Taliban controlled an area like this, they also had power over the families in the villages, who had no choice. At the most basic level, that meant the Taliban took what they wanted from whomever they wanted, shutting down the local economy. These villages were extremely poor, so the Taliban were often the only ones who owned anything of much material value, from sneakers to cell phones to the little motorcycles they drove around in. When they needed food, they’d show up at markets and bakeries and take whatever they wanted. If a motorcycle broke down, they’d find the only mechanic in town and take the parts or make him fix their bikes at gunpoint. They ruined weddings, breaking instruments and punishing guests for dancing. They recruited—or just took—young boys.
With a thud, the helicopter set itself down in a cloud of dust, and we stepped out into the night, rifles up. The desert earth was firm under my boots, and a thin layer of silky dust washed over everything like water. I tried not to cough. The rotors whipped up a heavy haze of dirt and lifted back into the sky. There’s nothing like the feeling of that hum disappearing into the distance. When it’s just you and the guys on the ground, with no machine to protect you or whisk you away, it gets real.
We got moving, single file to avoid IEDs. There was only the sound of our boots scuffing against the dirt and our rucksacks shifting on our backs. With very little light pollution, Afghanistan is supposed to be ideal for stargazing. But I swear the dust in Sangin never fell from the air. Overhead was only a dark, obscured sky, like a smudged impressionist painting.
We walked two, three miles, over rolling hills, heading west. All told, there were three platoons of marines, plus “attachments” like
me and the EOD (explosive ordinance disposal) team, as well as members of the Afghan National Army. In total, there were about sixty of us. Our gear and rucksacks were heavy—seventy pounds or more—but this was what we’d trained to do. After a while my heart rate steadied. My body began to get used to the idea of where we were.
When we came up to the compound, we could see waiting in the doorway an elderly man who must have heard us coming. We only ever established a base in a compound that was already occupied—one that had “a pattern of life.” If folks were already living there and hadn’t been blown up, that was as good a sign as any that the place wasn’t riddled with IEDs.
Ali, the interpreter on the mission, and I walked up to talk to him. Ali had been on the previous mission with me, and we’d gotten close. He was from Afghanistan but had moved to the U.S. years before. Now, he’d returned to help his homeland, and to make a decent living for his wife and newborn kid back in Arizona.
“Arizona, really?” I used to tease him. “You moved from one desert to another.”
“My new desert has air-conditioning, my friend,” Ali would say, smiling. Ali loved air-conditioning.
We both stepped up and shook the man’s hand. This was the part where I had to explain who we were and that we were here to help—and that we would need the man and his family to move to another compound. Compounds in Sangin ranged in size; most included one or more freestanding structures that served different purposes, like for storing rice or to be used as living quarters. Around the perimeter of the buildings were tall mud walls, and extended families shared the space inside, sometimes along with their livestock. Some compounds stood on their own while others shared a perimeter wall with a neighboring compound. Often in Sangin, the families we encountered were nomadic, moving from compound to compound to work as sharecroppers. In this case, the elderly man told us he and his family hadn’t been there very long, and he kindly agreed to relocate. He opened the small metal door of the compound to us, and we filed in. Some of us got to work fortifying the walls and rooftops, while others helped the man and his family move a few hundred yards away to a neighboring compound.
