“You wouldn’t be interested in the things I can tell you,” Manuela says. “I never went to see a game of buzkashi. I don’t even know if they play it anymore. Now they pack dead goats with TNT, and if you see a carcass on the side of the road you just hope there’s no one hiding behind the hill with a cell phone to set it off as you go by. And the virgin peaks you would have liked to climb might not even exist anymore, because the Americans bombed them to smithereens when they were looking for Bin Laden. And anyway, the mountains are all filled with caves stuffed with PETN and plastic explosives: it wouldn’t take much to blow them sky high. I went there like you’d go on a business trip. For me, Afghanistan was just like any other place. Like Kosovo, Lebanon, Macedonia, one of those countries you only know by name, or because our soldiers are there. But when I signed the rules of engagement, Afghanistan became my reward. It was a promotion, which I didn’t expect to receive so soon, but which I wanted to honor. I knew I was good, but I hadn’t had the opportunity to prove it yet. Not everyone—in fact, almost no one—gets the chance to have the job they want. You can’t imagine how hard I had to work, how much I had to prepare, for my deployment. Being a soldier doesn’t really make sense these days, unless you’re deployed. We don’t have borders to defend anymore, in fact, we live on a continent that has abolished them. What was I going to do in Italy? Stamp leave requests? Train pimple-faced recruits? Collect trash? Guard an embassy, or a monument? A soldier isn’t a garbage collector or a policeman. I wanted to test myself, to grow, as a person and as a soldier. Afghanistan isn’t Kosovo or Albania, it’s high risk. For us, it’s the highest goal we can aspire to. Afghanistan was my opportunity. But it was more than that. I don’t know if you can understand. In the barracks, during training, they explained the purpose of our mission: we were going there for peace-building, to help the weakest, poorest, and most unfortunate people on earth, so they could rediscover their right to live and work. To improve security and guarantee the development of a young nation, a young people; forty-five percent of the population there is under eighteen. In short, we were going to help build the future of the world. I know you don’t believe in these things, you think they’re all fancy words invented by politicians in order to sell a war to a distracted public that doesn’t ever want to get involved in anything.
“But they weren’t just words. There were lots of projects to manage, joint efforts to supervise, schools, hospitals, bridges, and roads to build, soldiers to train, things to teach—justice, the meaning of the word democracy. For me, this is what it means to be Italian, and to be proud. But words, even these words, wear out if you use them too much or too sloppily. After I’d been there awhile, even I realized that; when some staff general on an official visit to the FOB for a day would dish up those words in a little speech, they annoyed, basically offended me, offended us, because inside that base, under that bitter sun, in that burning sand they sounded hollow, like empty rhetoric. No one—not even me—had the right to speak them without violating the memory of those who had died, for or because of those words. So I forgot about them, and if I hear them now, I’m ashamed. And yet it was precisely because of those words that I went to Afghanistan. I had convictions, ideals. I believed in them.”
Manuela stays in room 302 until midnight. She had written something similar in her diary, but she’d never spoken this way to anyone before—and now she feels relieved that she finally has, at the Bellavista, that she’s told these things to Mattia. And she still believes in them. Mattia held her close in his arms, and at a certain point she felt a drop, like burning wax, on her shoulder, and she realized it was a tear. She didn’t ask him why he was crying—if it was out of tenderness or joy, regret about the past or the future, for her words, for her, or for himself. Or for all those things put together. She gets dressed and goes to sleep in her house across the way. “To save your reputation,” Mattia jokes. “Because I’ve only ever slept with my comrades,” Manuela insists. “In an armored vehicle. In the barracks. In the trenches. Out in the open, in the woods or sand. But you’re not one of my comrades. You’re different, and I like that.”
She takes her fifteen drops of BZD, lights one last cigarette in the dark, and watches Mattia smoking on his balcony across the way; they blow kisses on their fingertips, like teenagers. Then she slides under the covers and barely has time to think with amazement that today has been the strangest day of her life, that she has behaved in a way she could never have imagined herself capable of since becoming a sergeant. Frivolous, immoral, deplorable behavior—censure and official reprimand on her record. She’s not unhappy about it, though, her superiors and her men don’t know about it, it’s her secret, not shameful in the least, in fact, it’s joyful, she wouldn’t take any of it back, and she falls asleep, flattened by the soporific. And she doesn’t wake with a start, sweating with the sensation of having had a dream too horrible to be remembered.
11
HOMEWORK
Operation Goat 4’s target—I learned during the morning briefing—was an insurgent responsible for several attacks. The last—a truck bomb driven into a barracks—had resulted in the death of twelve ANA soldiers. His name was Mullah Wallid. The previous regiment had already made three attempts to capture him before winter set in, in analogous operations: Goat 1, Goat 2, and Goat 3. But some infiltrator had always warned him in time, and he always managed to vanish. Like a ghost. Many years earlier, when the Russians fought against the mujahedin, they called them “ghosts” because they never saw them. Like shadows, they would appear suddenly, strike, and vanish. It’s difficult to fight a war against ghosts. But Mullah Wallid wasn’t a ghost. Intelligence had located him, he was hiding in a village in the Gulistan Mountains, about forty kilometers from Bala Bayak. And now the Panthers had to help Afghani security forces flush him out. Shona da shona, shoulder to shoulder.
We assembled in the square of the base, in total darkness. We were given the radio frequency, the abbreviated code for confidential information, and the village code name. We used Italian wines for places. Ninth Company had already done cordon and search at Refosco, Amarone, and Nebbiolo. This time our destination was Negroamaro. Some units were to be transported by helicopter, and would spend the night out in the open, in the mountains. Others would go by land. When Captain Paggiarin read out the assignments, I could barely contain my joy when I realized that Pegasus wasn’t going to be left behind. It meant more to me than praise, than a eulogy, than a medal: the only true prize after weeks of humble and unrewarding work, in which everyone—like assassins lurking in the shadows—was waiting for me to make the slightest error, to give in. My platoon was waiting for my first real test on the ground, too, and I knew it. As we headed for the armored vehicles, Jodice noted sarcastically that he was surprised to see me. He thought I’d be asking for a doctor’s note. Don’t women have a right to three days’ rest when they get their periods? How odd that I hadn’t managed to get my period right before our mission. “I swear I’ll reprimand you this time, Spaniard,” I answered. “You can forget about your leave.”
We proceeded without headlights on a moonless night. As he drove, Zandonà peered through the night scope at the ghostly green outlines of the vehicles in front of us. Jodice was being jerked around in the turret, and was having trouble keeping his balance. Despite the tangle of tightly fastened seat belts strapping me in, I had to hang on to my seat, and with every jolt it felt like they were cutting into my uniform. Puddu was huddled over the radio, murmuring under his breath. He was giving our coordinates, but to me it sounded like a litany. The fifth member of our team was Venier. I chose him because he was the worst gunner in the platoon, and I was hoping my presence would inspire him. Everybody deserves a chance. Assailed by nervous hunger, he nibbled fitfully on an energy bar. His fear had an acrid, sour smell that permeated the tank cabin. We advanced along a rough road that turned into a track, then a path, until eventually even that disappeared into a dry riverbed of white pebbles. The crackle of the radio
was the only proof that all of this was really happening. I could feel my heart pounding against my ribs, and I was afraid the others could hear it, too. I’m ready, I kept repeating to myself, I know what I have to do. I’ve trained five years for a night like this. It’s a great privilege to be here. Try to be worthy, Manuela.
Time became an illusion. My bones hurt from being slammed around, my neck muscles burned from being tensed for so long, and my head ached from peering into the dark with my night vision goggles. The valley finally opened up. For the first time in months I caught sight of rows of trees. Zandonà slowed, braked, then wedged the Lince alongside the others in a defensive semicircle. “Remember, no going rogue,” I said, “just follow orders. Everything will be fine.” When we opened the doors, the smell of grass and humidity assailed us. “Good luck, brothers, an eye on your feather,” Zandonà said. “You, too,” I whispered as I jumped down. Jodice kissed his Padre Pio medallion. “Let’s go,” I said, making my way into the night.
The column of soldiers clambered up the riverbed, the only access to the village, which, in the pitch black, stood out from the rocks only because its shadow was more intense, the houses thicker and darker. The escarpment was steep and my loaded automatic rifle and bulletproof vest weighed me down. The altitude caught at my breath, but I climbed through it. I would have scaled a mountain with my bare hands. Pumped with adrenaline, I gave and received orders with my heart aflutter, as if I were finally on my way to some long-awaited appointment. We ascended in brief spurts, quick and disciplined, a technique inculcated in us since our first days of training. I was supposed to keep the platoon together, but Venier fell behind; he was leaning against the low terracing wall, panting. I went back to get him. “What’s that smell, Sergeant, is it opium?” he whispered, pointing to some plants in the shadows. “Move it, Fox,” I murmured, “don’t get us into any shit. I know you won’t.” Silently, orderly, we fanned out to encircle the village whose code name was Negroamaro and whose real name I’ve now forgotten. A handful of mud houses in a valley in the middle of the mountains on the border of Helmand, which was also the border of the area under Italian control. On the other side of the Khash River were the U.S. Marines.
Helmand rhymes with Hell-land, and it was as feared as Hell itself. Starting with our initial prep training in Italy, it was always described to us as one of the most problematic regions in the entire country because it has the biggest poppy plantations; all Afghan opium has to pass through here on its way to the Pakistani border. A symbolic border really, because the Taliban already controlled the area below Lashkar Gah. When, in 2007, our paratroopers installed themselves in Delaram, aiming to regain control of the valleys leading north, the drug traffickers felt threatened and reacted by attacking. There were some fierce clashes, even a siege. Their COP, or combat outpost, was renamed Fort Apache. Headquarters explained that the rebels were linked to the drug traffickers. In fact, the peasants who cultivated opium were the rebels. During the harvest they’d all be in the countryside with their poppies, but as soon as the work was done they’d pocket the money from the sale of their crop, unearth their AK-47s, and go back to making IEDs and planting them along the roads. The harvest began in mid-April. Which is why Mullah Wallid had to be captured first.
We spread out around the crumbling, cube-shaped houses, which jutted up precariously from the undulating earth like rotten teeth, separated one from the next only by the narrowest of alleyways. They seemed more like heaps of ruins than houses, and the few still standing were deserted. The inhabitants must have fled years ago, and clearly not even the coalition forces’ promise of financial compensation had convinced them to return. In my night vision goggles the landscape looked mysterious, a ghostly twilight: the walls and burned-out cars were black, the soldiers green, like creatures from outer space. The night belongs to us, I kept telling myself, our technological superiority makes us practically invulnerable, darkness is our Achilles’ shield. The hoarfrost crust crumbled beneath my boots. The stench of shit and sheep came from the houses. So they weren’t deserted. It was up to the ANA soldiers to make sure. To open doors, rend the night, violate its secrets. To search every house, one by one, leaving none unchecked. They disappeared down the alleyways, shadows among shadows.
In the silence, the only sounds were the snow creaking under our boots, our labored breath, doors slamming in the distance. Not a single voice. House by house. From the radio came the order to tighten the cordon and take up position one hundred meters farther in, beyond a group of innocuous-looking buildings where ANA hadn’t found any suspicious elements. We advanced silently, like spirits. The doors were all wide open, the wooden frames like white flags in mud walls. I couldn’t help looking. Bare rooms, walls riddled with bullet holes, the smell of feet and sheep fat. A freshly trampled carpet over which a cloud of dust still hung. A pair of shoes on the threshold, but no one inside, as if the owner of house and shoes had fled barefoot through the window. Teenage shepherds gathered around an old man with a white beard, bodies lost in sleep on the bare ground, a curtain drawn, like on a stage, behind which women were probably hiding. We advanced farther. An emaciated invalid stretched out under a prickly blanket, his head on a high pillow, bent to one side, his neck like a thin stalk. Three bearded men drinking tea, barefoot on a dusty carpet, indifferent. Images stolen from the night, from the naked intimacy of poverty-stricken lives. They blur together in my mind—threadbare carpets; small glasses for tea, chipped and opaque; worn-out shoes; slippers; an oil lamp; a Koran.
We halt again and wait, making eye contact with each other while the ANA soldiers continue their search. House by house. We’re looking for a killer. But we can’t arrest him. The rules of engagement forbid it. We’re merely cutting off his escape route, flushing him out so that others can take him. We’re like the dogs in a fox hunt. American helicopters hum behind the mountains, making the ground shake. The radio calls me, it’s Spina. The Afghani commander asked Spina to surround the corner building: there’s something inside, but ANA can’t stop to check it out because they’ve identified the suspects. But Spina can’t move, he’s in position on the other side of the alley. So it’s up to me. I send Puddu ahead, to reassure the Afghani soldier who has stayed to guard the building. He shows him the mud on the threshold: freshly made footsteps I can tell right away weren’t made by army boots. The rickety door is ajar. Cold seeps through the cracks in the walls. Dirt floor, the roof partly caved in. There’s no one there. But the unmistakable odor of agricultural fertilizer stings my nostrils. Fertilizer is what they use to make the explosives with which they blow us up. I’m supposed to radio in my suspicion, request authorization to enter. But what if they don’t give it to me? What if Vinci steals my find and claims it for himself? He hates me and lets it show, even in public. I’m the one here, and I want the credit for me and my men. Four of us enter: the Afghani soldier, Owl, Fox, and Mulan. Crates and sacks, dusty but neatly stacked, as if ready to be loaded and taken away. Transceivers. Detonating fuses. Five petrol drums. Ammunition belts. This hovel is really an arsenal. They left it all behind, they’re still here.
I radioed the captain. His operation code name was Libra. Mine was Ripley. My very hairy deputy’s was King Kong, the bomb disposal unit’s was Hare. Beaming, I informed Libra that there were at least three hundred kilos of ammonium nitrate in there. He told me to wait for Hare.
ANA had reached the far spur of the village. We were behind them, beyond them was only the precipice. There was no way out: our man was trapped. When the ANA soldiers passed us, I heard them praying under their breath. Men and boys, I couldn’t say how old, with baggy uniforms and thin, ancient bulletproof vests. Born to fight and accustomed to war, even though their OMLT trainers said they had trouble understanding that they were supposed to follow orders, trouble believing that discipline was not servility but rather the first duty of free men. Their courage was enviable: they despised death, and we all respected them. If I were fighting to defend my family and
my country, I wouldn’t be afraid to die. And tonight I’m not afraid. Pegasus is my family. Silence covered the village like a lid. There was enough fertilizer piled in that dump to make bombs to kill us all. But now it had been neutralized. I was the smallest cog in the machine, but even I was good for something. I’d made my minuscule contribution to the cause. As the proverb says, if you never stand up, you’ll never know how tall you are. Now I knew.
Limbo Page 20
