by Aaron Gwyn
Bixby stood there a moment. His lips tightened and he looked out toward the corral. “I’m not a planner,” he said.
“Roger that. I’m not asking for logistics. It’s just like I told the lieutenant—” He paused, fumbling for the name.
“Billings,” said the medic.
“Billings,” Russell said. “I’d be able to do a lot better job of training these guys if I knew anything about what I was training them to do. I mean, I know they’ll be riding. I know they’ll be up in these hills. But where they’ll be riding and for how long and anything else you can tell me—”
“Corporal,” said Bixby, “I’m just here to kiss it and make it better. Anything else, you’re going to have to ask the captain.”
“I asked the captain,” said Russell. “Didn’t make any more progress than I’m making now.”
“Well,” said Bixby, “there you go.”
The mission was covert. That much was clear. If the medic wouldn’t talk about it and the lieutenant wouldn’t talk about it and the captain wouldn’t talk about it, they were doing all of this off the books. The army had a term for everything, and the term for this was deniable operations. Which basically meant there’d be no medevac for the Green Berets if they took casualties—and no artillery or air support. If they were captured, their government wouldn’t claim them. No cavalry would come to get them out. About as close to a suicide mission as you could get. He didn’t envy them. Not even a little.
Wynne supervised for several days, coming out in the evenings to stand at the corral. Then Russell woke the next week and discovered that the captain had taken half the team and gone out on recon, back into the hills. Left behind were Pike and Billings and Ox, Sergeant First Class Hallum, and Staff Sergeant Perkins, the ODA’s junior engineer. Russell didn’t worry about it anymore—which team members were in camp and which were out with Wynne. He concentrated on his work with the horses. Getting them soft and supple. Getting them to accept saddle leather and the touch of human hands.
Sara would come down in the evening and watch quietly as he worked, leaning against the corral with her arms crossed one over the other and her chin atop them. Watching the horses. Watching Russell work the horses. Whenever he led the Akhal-Teke into the pen, she’d lean forward and her eyes would go big and bright. He’d glance over and see her sitting on the edge of the fence, and he knew if he hadn’t been there to caution her back, she would’ve tried to approach the animal and touch it.
Lying on his thin cot in the minutes before he descended into sleep, Russell thought about her and the captain and the way the stallion seemed to draw something out in them. Or drew something out in Sara. With Wynne the process was inverted. Reversed. He seemed to siphon the creature’s wildness and rage. He seemed somehow to drain it. And without a doubt it was rage that Russell felt down in the animal’s bones—rage and madness. Seated on its back, he could feel that constant chaotic simmer. It could erupt at any moment into outright bedlam. How you could take that out of the horse was beyond Russell entirely. The most he could manage was to channel it. As always, his grandfather’s words circled inside him—Make the wrong thing difficult and the right thing release.
But Sara was herself pulled along by the stallion’s manic electricity, something essential drawn out of her as she watched Russell steer the horse around the pen. He could see it on her face, the attraction of it. Wildness was a quality Russell had been taught to govern. You didn’t run toward it and you didn’t dare to flee. You tried to take hold of it—firmly, respectfully. You tried to steer it toward order. And what you couldn’t govern, you tried to identify before it broke you to pieces. There was a wildness in the world that couldn’t be governed at all.
His grandfather taught him that like knew like. And a lesser wildness would always be drawn to a greater. Which meant, thought Russell, turning toward sleep, that Sara moved toward the stallion’s wildness and the stallion toward that of Wynne. Like recognizing likeness, lesser flowing into greater. Where Russell fit into all of this, he hadn’t yet decided.
Mornings, he would rise before dawn, lace his boots by feel, and navigate out to the corral by flashlight. Hamid, the Afghan groom, would always be waiting. The man didn’t speak a word of English, but he and Russell had already established an intricate series of gestures that allowed all the communication they required. He was a short man with sunken cheeks and few teeth left in his mouth, and Russell liked him immensely. He had his prayer beads constantly in hand and never seemed to sleep. He was with the animals when Russell walked out to the stables in the morning, and he was with them when Russell curried Fella and retired to his quarters at night.
They squatted across from each another one afternoon in the cool stable, looking out at the November day, heat shimmer on the bare dirt of the corral, the shoulder of the mountain just beyond. Russell’s clothes were drenched with sweat and coated with a fine layer of talc. He’d stripped off his jacket and laid it on a hay bale and opened a pack of beef jerky he’d taken from the camp’s mess. He chewed in silence, staring at the dirt between his knees, and then he looked up at the groom and offered him the plastic bag.
Hamid regarded Russell’s gift with curiosity. He took it in hand and removed a strip of dried meat. He raised it to his nose and sniffed and then put it in his mouth. Russell realized that the man wouldn’t be able to tear the beef with his gums, but it didn’t matter, because a grimace stretched across his face and he handed back the bag of jerky and then the strip of meat he’d sampled. He shook his head and presented his wrinkled palms, pressing them forward as though he were pushing something across the ground.
“You don’t like it?” Russell asked.
Hamid made the pushing gesture. He shook his head.
Russell smiled. He selected another strip of jerky from the bag and took a bite.
He spent his mornings and evenings at the stables, working the horses, packing and ponying, teaching the Green Berets in camp to saddle and ride, how to keep their horses’ heads up, keep the animals soft, the proper way of tailing them up an incline. Of the men on Wynne’s team, only four had ever ridden, and only one of these had ridden enough to be considered anything but a novice. Most of the men he’d met in Special Forces were southerners, many from Tennessee and the Carolinas, but several of these soldiers had scarcely been in the woods before joining the army, and large animals such as horses seemed to unsettle them. The first thing Russell had to teach was how to approach a horse, to let it see you, smell you, let your idea become the horse’s. He’d fallen back on those words of his grandfather’s so often they’d become a kind of mantra.
His grandfather was on his mind as he moved softly around the stable, righting pieces of tack hanging from galvanized nails. Outside, the autumn morning was growing warm. Fella walked in from the corral and rested her head against the rail.
“Hello there,” Russell said.
The horse walked along the length of fence. Russell watched her sleek brown form. The gloss of her hide, her brown eyes flashing. He went over and leaned against the rail and crossed his arms atop it.
“Oats?” he said. “You want oats or carrots?”
The horse worked her mouth, the muscles along her jawline quivering. Russell thought she was coming along. He was making a nice horse out of her. Another of his grandfather’s sayings: Making a nice horse. As though the real horse, the horse you want, is down inside the animal, obscured by hair and bad habits.
His grandfather had a number of these proverbs: Taking the fear out of the horse. Riding from the hind-end forward, not front-end back. He used to tell Russell constantly, “If you can’t do it slow, how are you going to do it fast?” His grandfather knew horses, and Russell had inherited his knowledge, along with the old man’s height and his oil black hair. He believed he’d come into his grandfather’s knack for soldiering, though this was never something the man had encouraged.
Russell’s early years were all barnyards and livestock arenas. He imagined
a career as a trainer, working competition horses. His grandfather had broken just about every type of horse—the broncs and buckers, the just plain crazy. You didn’t turn your back on such animals. You were better off not to mess with them at all.
In 2000, when they celebrated his grandfather’s eightieth birthday, the old man had shown no signs of slowing down. He didn’t seem to need to. Other than arthritis in his wrists and ankles, he was in excellent health and sharp as he’d ever been. He could lift a fifty-pound dumbbell from the ground with one hand and then straight up above his head. Seated beside his grandfather at the VA hall for the party, Russell studied the man’s forearms, burned brown and corded with muscle. His eyes bright blue. Animated. He wouldn’t have guessed that in another year he’d be dead.
It was hard on Russell in the months after. His grandmother had passed during the winter of ’97 after a brief fight with bone cancer, and he was alone now in a ranch house in the middle of 640 acres. His aunt Teresa insisted Russell move into town with them, but Russell wouldn’t. The city of Cleveland, Oklahoma, had a population of just over three thousand, but he couldn’t get to sleep in town. He needed the baffle of oak trees, thick stands of them blocking out the faint noise from the highway half a mile away. Oil trucks and cattle trucks and the occasional semi. Late at night, the carnival of coyotes as they crossed the south pasture, their barks like the laughter of children. He’d lie in bed listening to the chirp of crickets and the steady moan of bullfrogs. The stables were on the other side of the house, and he could hear, from time to time, the whinny of horses—his grandfather’s horse, Sugar. She was a painted mare with white stockings and a splotch of white coming down her nose. Russell couldn’t look at her without his chest going tight, so he tried not to look.
He began his senior year of high school, cumbersome as a saddle, came home every afternoon to scatter fresh hay and pour sweet feed into the horses’ trough, then drove to his aunt’s house for supper. She’d try to get him to take covered dishes. She’d try to get him to spend the night. One Friday evening when he walked in the front door, he saw that she’d already made the living room couch up into a bed—sheets and pillows and a blanket folded over one arm. She told him he was staying over and that they’d stay up late watching movies, and she wouldn’t take no for an answer. Then she had him take off his boots, which she promptly confiscated and didn’t return until the next morning. They’d been shined with great care, and she brought them in and put them on the carpet next to his feet, then sat down beside him on the sofa, placed a hand to his cheek, and began to weep. She was his mother’s sister, and he knew she loved him intensely, and if she could have taken him as her own son, she would’ve. She and her husband didn’t have any children—whether by choice or chance, Russell never knew—and with him, her maternal instincts welled up from some deep reservoir of feeling and need.
Winter came, and with it a dampening of Russell’s thoughts, everything inside him muffled, gradually going mute. He felt as though his life were happening underwater. He’d walk about the house, toward the kitchen to heat his aunt’s meals in the microwave, down the hallway to his grandfather’s room. Now was the time for mourning. Now was his turn to be visited by ghosts.
It wasn’t just the loss of his grandfather. It was and it wasn’t. The old man’s death made him feel the loss of his grandmother, and, strangely, for the first time, his father, as though his grandfather’s passing was the gateway to an even greater sorrow. Russell stood there in front of the antique mahogany dresser, opening drawers, closing drawers, going through his grandfather’s things. Treasures wrapped in yellowed newspaper. Belt buckles embedded with turquoise. Another adorned with a silver dollar. Cufflinks he was certain the man had never worn, and everywhere the small blocks of cedar that the old man believed kept out bugs.
In a velvet-lined box, Russell found the Bronze Star Medal and its accompanying ribbon, his grandfather’s two Purple Hearts, his combat infantryman and Expert Rifleman badges, the latter in sterling silver and tarnished almost black. Lastly, he pulled out the diamond-shaped patch of the man’s old battalion, RANGERS in gold lettering against a bright blue field. He took these decorations to the bed and arranged them there on the quilt, an intricate counterpane made by his grandmother and her sewing circle before he was ever born. He lifted the Ranger patch to his nose, but there was no smell other than cedar. No sea salt of Normandy or sweat of combat or the metallic scent of blood. He slipped the belt buckle into his pocket.
That spring, he began selling their livestock, cattle by weight —sixty-three cents a pound—and the horses one by one. Without his grandfather, he couldn’t care for them, couldn’t really afford to feed them. Other than this ranch and the animals, they had almost nothing in the bank. For years they’d lived off Social Security and his grandfather’s pension and what the old man had been able to make at the stockyard and state fairs. Stable fees, stud fees, riding lessons, and roping. Russell sold the last of the beef cattle—his grandfather had bought a herd of Black Angus eighteen months before his death—and had five horses left by the end of April: his horse, his grandfather’s, his aunt’s, and two ponies they’d traded for and didn’t know what to do with. He graduated the first week of May and was offered $500 for both ponies and $750 for the ponies with saddles and tack. He accepted the man’s money but didn’t help him load, and he didn’t wave as the man pulled away with the trailer, the heads of the ponies receding as the buyer rounded the driveway’s bend.
The summer of 2002 was hot and very dry. Grass fires on the roadsides and a drought on the prairies that burned everything to dust. Russell spent his time riding the pastures and old cattle trails leading through the stands of blackjack and pine. Birds called to him from the branches. Squirrels ran the length of tree limbs and then sat with tails twitching. Russell spoke to Duncan and told him what was happening—to his prospects, his resolve. He told the horse whatever the case, he’d be all right. He’d be ridden and cared for and curried. The animal’s neck dipped slightly with each step, a flip of the ears when flies landed, a shake of the head as they buzzed about.
August 2, the day after his grandfather’s birthday and twenty days before his own, Russell went down to the local army recruiter’s—a sparsely decorated office in downtown Cleveland that used to be a western apparel shop—signed an Option 40 contract, took the physical that Friday, and the next week was on a bus bound for Fayetteville, North Carolina. His aunt wept and shook her head and told him how proud she was, then asked if there was any way he could back out.
Fort Bragg in August. Still ninety degrees at sundown. Rain in the early afternoon, and then the sun back out by evening and a steam rising in thin wisps from the pavement and grass. Russell in the sandpit drilling combatives, hand to hand with Wheels. Their drill instructor said that watching the man sprint was like seeing a cartoon animal with legs pinwheeling, going nowhere fast. Therefore, “Wheels.” Russell had liked him instantly, his thick drawl and good-natured grin. He was the son of a highway patrolman and said he’d be better qualified for his father’s profession if he had a few combat tours in the Middle East.
“Once you been shot at with automatic weapons,” said Wheels, “ain’t nothing going to faze you. How’s anybody going to compete with that?”
Russell nodded. The man had a point of some kind.
They completed Basic Combat Training October 11 and then were shipped out for Advanced Individual Training, both to Infantry School, both to Fort Benning. Another six weeks of southern humidity, the leaves just beginning to turn and the slightest chill to the air when they rolled out of their bunks at 0430 for PT, standing in formation in front of their platoon barracks wearing gray T-shirts and black shorts and tennis shoes. The sergeant ran them through a circuit of pushups and sit-ups and jumping jacks and burpees, then fell in alongside them as they began their four-mile run, calling out the lines of a running cadence and then pausing for the recruits to parrot his words in response.
Men c
omplained about the robotic nature of these activities, but for the first time since enlisting, Russell knew he’d made the correct decision. Running the stretch of blacktop with his shirt soaked and his lungs burning, heart huge inside his chest, the cadence in his ears like the very first song.
Russell completed Airborne School February 2003 and went to the four-week Ranger Indoctrination Program, the sole purpose of which was to weed out as many of its recruits as possible. The first days at Cole Range in the Georgia woodlands caused up to 40 percent of the trainees in Russell’s class to voluntarily withdraw. You get cold enough, tired enough, hungry enough, wet enough—none of this seems like a good idea. It seems like the torture it actually is. All you have to do is tell one of the cadre members that you want to Victor-Whiskey and you’re given a hot meal and a shower. Then they put you on a truck the next morning and send you back to your parent unit to spend the rest of your days in shame.
Russell wasn’t about to do that. He’d come too far to withdraw, and he realized that this level of suffering cleared his thoughts and emptied him of emotion. After thirty-six hours without sleep and one twenty-one-hundred-calorie MRE, he entered a strangely euphoric state where there was only cold mud and the ruck straps cutting into his shoulders, the falling rain, the weight of his weapon. Something inside him seemed to switch on—he hadn’t known it was there—and as he watched his fellow students fall away, the thing burned brighter. By the time he entered Ranger School, he felt as though he’d shed his skin to find some stronger, stranger hide beneath.
Ranger School was hell in three phases, sixty days and a wake-up’s worth of being starved and wet and frozen. Navigating obstacles. Solo night navigations through dense pine forests with a small map, a ninety-pound ruck, and a dim flashlight you could only use when you stopped to take a reading. Cadre members catch you using it while walking, they immediately remove you from the course. Cadre members catch you using an actual road or path, they remove you. Cadre members out there in the bush with night-vision and thermal-imaging monoculars, no hiding.
