The Road Ahead

by Adrian Bonenberger

  As soon as the helicopters touched down in Ghazni, I noticed a difference: it was hotter than Ghormah. The daytime highs topped out at one hundred and fifteen degrees Fahrenheit. There were even fewer trees than in our area. No shade. Rolling hills. Distant mountains. Soil that looked like orange talc. Like southern New Mexico, except for the all the turbans and camels, and the blowing dust that’s probably full of depleted uranium and hepatitis.

  It was supposed to last twenty-four hours. We were out there for ten days. We walked from Adam Kalay to Shin Ghar village. We searched all the houses in both. We popped open dozens of footlockers. They were glittery tin chests with glossy red paint and acid-trip designs made out of hologram stickers. We saw every color and pattern of fake mink blanket in existence. We saw wormy, disease-infested farm animals. We saw hundreds of white Toyota Corolla station wagons that looked like they’d seen action in demolition derbies. We didn’t find anything. Every time we cleared an objective, I asked for the helicopters to bring us back to FOB Ghormah. Nothing. No air available. We desperately needed water. Battalion managed to deliver a pallet of water bottles near a village called Kharbin. We searched the houses there too. Ellis wasn’t around. In the open fields on the far side of Kharbin a guy rode up on a massive white horse and told us that we should leave. He looked like an Afghan Don Quixote.

  The villages were warrens of mud huts and animal pens. The people had Dark Ages illnesses and disfigurations, and they spoke a Pashto that was almost incomprehensible to our interpreter, Sharif, who really sucked at Pashto, anyway. He was some kid from Kabul who wanted to make the big bucks, and here he was in the middle of hell’s countryside. The villagers showed us a woman whose right eye was full of maggots. She was still alive, her eyeball eaten away, and the maggots writhed and squirmed in the socket.

  We moved toward Yusuf Kalay. It was another village where battalion thought we might find Ellis. There was nothing. We walked at night, trying our damnedest to avoid having soldiers get overheated, forcing down water. It felt like a dry sauna with no exit. One hundred plus degrees every day, and we walked around in suits of armor. Each day was a new objective without resupply. I’m surprised none of my soldiers keeled over. It was probably just the fear of having to stay there that kept them from giving up.

  Every single one of us stank. Every single one of us had our uniform pant legs rip, so by the end we all had our dicks hanging out. The uniforms are lowest-bidder pieces of trash, and the crotch seams blow out whenever you kneel down. Our clothes were in rags. Our hands were crackling black and our skin looked like sandpaper. Our gloves had ripped to pieces. Every bit of cut-rate military equipment was falling apart. Our uniforms took on the same color as our dehydrated piss, like a burnt sienna crayon. We conducted a traffic checkpoint outside of Yusuf Kalay and didn’t catch anyone. People gave us excuses or tried to avoid us. Cars screeched to a halt, turned around, and went the other way. The children were terrified. The men made energetic gestures. We looked like monsters. We smelled like monster shit. You can imagine how weirded-out the Afghans were.

  We left Yusuf Kalay by helicopter, but only to move further south, back into Ghormah district. We then flew to Dila district and did the same thing. We went to Haji Ahmanullah Kalay and searched all the houses. Nothing. Angry stares. Hateful elders. Scared kids. Excited kids. Animal shit, straw, mud bricks, gaping holes in the ground with water pumps and pipes inside the yards of Afghan compounds strewn with antique, old-timey farm instruments from the 1800s. Not a living plant in sight. Not a tree or a bush—just dirt. Long rifles. Lee-Enfields. Winchester 1895s. Martini-Henrys. Mosin Nagants. Jezails, even. Ancient jewelry. Little girls in sparkling, rhinestone-studded dresses running away from us at breakneck speed. Little boys in filthy robes running toward us asking for pens or candy. Old men in turbans, shouts in Pashto, fear, sweat, the smell of our own asses. Babies with deformities. Babies with burned feet. Anguished Afghan parents opening a diaper to show us that their little boy’s penis has no hole, expecting that we can somehow fix it, as if the task organization of every US Army infantry platoon just happened to include a resident pediatric surgeon. Misery. A soldier sprained his ankle. A soldier cut his hand while opening a ration. It got infected, turned green-and-white colored, and swelled up. Blood dried on shredded, dirty uniforms, with mud caking where the blood soaked in. Running out of baby wipes, running out of toilet paper, shitting in an open field, shitting atop rocky hills, under outcroppings, in gullies, in abandoned houses, next to culverts, next to burned cars. Flies everywhere. Flies on our hands, on our faces, on our food. Mud-brick castles that Afghans call qalats. Qalats with towers. Qalats with towers of which one has a hole in its upstairs floor and below it is all the collected, assembled human shit from a family of forty-five people living in the compound and using the toilet on a regular basis. Offers of tea. Declined offers of tea resulting in tea nonetheless. Contempt from the elders. Denial from the elders. Nothing of value. A waste of our time.

  We walked from Yusuf Kalay to another village called Nur Mohammad Khel. This time, the insurgents ambushed us. It happened in the early morning. One of my soldiers saw them before they fired. He called out, “Hey, eleven o’clock—what the fuck is that?” We all looked. In the distance: some men with a recoilless rifle. We all saw the puff of smoke from the tube when it fired, but we never heard the report. The first rounds hit within a hundred meters of us, and it knocked everyone to the ground. A thud punched the air out of my lungs. There was heat from the blast. There was dust. All the debris that the explosion kicked into the air stung my face when it hit. My ears started ringing, and everything sounded as if someone was pressing a pair of earmuffs against my head. We all screamed, “Contact front! Contact front!” We could barely see them through the dust cloud. They shot again. The next round was behind us, but only about fifty meters. We started engaging with the two-forty, just laying down heat on them, but they were probably six hundred to eight hundred meters away—just out of range. We couldn’t see if we were hitting them or just making them laugh. I called up that we were in contact and needed air support. Nothing available. We ran to a nearby gulley—what the Afghans called a wadi—where we would be able to get a little bit of cover and concealment from them. They could see for hundreds of meters, and of course our stone-grey camouflage stood out against the orange desert like rainbow-colored hot air balloons. The next round landed right where we had been before. We didn’t have much time.

  From the inside of the wadi, I watched them through binoculars. They had an SPG-9 recoilless gun on a tripod set up maybe fifty meters from a qalat. They stood behind a collapsed adobe wall only about two or three feet high, like a sand castle half devoured by the ocean. They were out in the open, four of them, watching for us and aiming the barrel our way.

  We couldn’t range them with machine guns. If we shot, we simply gave ourselves away because of noise and tracer rounds. If we left the wadi, we stood even more exposed. If we ran up the treeless hills, we would exhaust ourselves getting there in the heat, fully vulnerable. We were too heavy and too armored to get away from them, and we couldn’t sneak out and break contact. There was no artillery support. There were no drones. There was nothing to hide behind, and nowhere to go.

  The only reason nobody died was a shit-hot mortarman, Private First Class Fenty, a twenty-year-old kid from Anderson, Indiana. He wasn’t even a mortarman by training, but we’d taught him how to use the 60mm mortar in handheld mode. Thank God we decided to carry mortars on that mission. We had a total of twenty-eight rounds.

  Fenty ran up to the edge of the wadi with the mortar tube. We consolidated ammo for him—a bunch of frenzied, dirty hands shucking mortar rounds out of their black paperboard packaging and laying them in the dirt at his feet. We were caked with muddy paste, our perspiration mixing with the dirt on our faces. Fenty popped his head up, looked one last time, and then aimed the tube. He said, “Drop the round!” One of my soldiers dropped the mortar down the tube. He held a second
and then pulled the trigger. It fired. I watched.

  We waited. Seconds passed. Then, impact. The round exploded in a flash and a split-second later we heard the report. He was really close—maybe ten meters ahead of them. The Taliban were down on the ground, trying to take cover. They were clowning around in the open, and now they were the ones exposed. One of them ran behind the qalat wall. The other three got up and tried to fire the recoilless gun at us. It was a matter of who shot first. Call it an Afghan standoff.

  “Fenty, drop it like ten meters!” I said. “Ten meters and then fire for effect!”

  He made his correction. He fired once. I looked through the binos. It nailed them. They splayed out on the ground, and within a few seconds the dust cleared enough that I could see blood spurting out of the leg of one of them as he rolled around clutching the wound. Big goopy jets of blood.

  “Fire for effect, Fenty!” I said, “Fire for effect!”

  One after another, the soldiers dropped rounds down the tube and he fired them, his hands still in the same place, the tube held the same direction as before. One, then another, then another, and the rounds kept hitting them, like right on top of them, like boom. Another round. Boom. Another round. Boom. The one behind the wall ran to help his friends, who were by this point seriously messed up. We shot more rounds. The last guy fell over. The contact stopped. My guys cheered like we were Super Bowl champions. Absolute tearful elation. It’s a high that doesn’t exist outside of combat. Christ, I can hardly describe it now.

  I called higher on the satellite radio and told them our story. I called up our map grid and the general location of the contact, and the fact that we killed four Taliban. They wanted a battle damage assessment. BDA. We received orders to go talk to the villagers and confirm that we killed the insurgents.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, sir,” Sergeant Kossick said to me. “They want us to go talk to them now?”

  “Yeah, roger,” I said. “They’re insane.”

  “Sir, let me talk to them,” Sergeant Kossick said. He took the hand mic and asked for Destroyer Seven. The battalion command sergeant major. Maybe a fellow non-commissioned officer could talk some sense into the guy. Sergeant Kossick repeated the transmission a few times. No response. He looked at me like he needed to piss but couldn’t find a toilet. Finally, a warbled voice came through, a voice with all the clarity of a skipping CD player.

  “This is Destroyer Seven, go ahead,” it said.

  “Destroyer Seven, this is Charlie Three-Seven,” Sergeant Kossick said. “Just want to confirm what we’re hearing from the battalion TOC, over.”

  “Roger, go ahead, over,” the command sergeant major said.

  “Yeah, roger, we just got in a firefight and killed some AAF with mortars,” Sergeant Kossick said. “We don’t have any CAS or any kind of air support. If we get ambushed, we’re going to be hosed—and we already know they’re hostile, over.”

  “Roger, Charlie Three-Seven,” the voice said, its pitch alternating between human and chipmunk speeds. “Conduct BDA on that village, over.”

  “Destroyer Seven, this is Charlie Three-Seven, this is not a good idea, over,” Sergeant Kossick said, trying one last time. All radio discipline went out the window.

  “All right, Charlie Three-Seven, if it’s too hard to lead your goddamn men, then you stay put and let me fly out there and play platoon sergeant for you,” the voice said. “Conduct BDA on the village. Be a fucking NCO or I’ll find one to replace you. Destroyer Seven out.”

  I could see the looks of panic and disgust in the eyes of my soldiers when I told them what was next. Sergeant Kossick looked nauseated. It was embarrassing enough for him without the fact that we could still get ambushed and killed. My interpreter was exhausted and scared. My guys’ hearts were still pumping the animal panic blood that only comes when death is a very real possibility. Clearly, this would be the perfect time to conduct international diplomacy.

  We moved in bounds. The qalats looked normal-sized until we got close, and then I started to realize that they were massive. Each wall was at least a hundred and fifty meters long. There must have been entire cities inside the gates. They might as well have had moats and drawbridges, with Afghan Rapunzels hiding in the towers.

  We kept walking. It had only been thirty or forty-five minutes since the firefight. We saw divots and indentations in the dirt from where our rounds had impacted, and a purple blood spot. Their blood made me happy. It was the biggest thrill to know we had killed them first. The people in the town had since moved the bodies and all of their leftover equipment.

  On the far side of the qalat stood an open field with a village well. It was the same well we see everywhere in-country: cast in shoddy concrete, falling to pieces, a fake brick pattern scraped onto it and a plaque on top reading “A Gift of the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, 2002.” Or 1992. Or 2052. Who cares. There was an adjacent graveyard. The town was having a funeral.

  The men of the town were covering the bodies of the guys we’d killed with rocks and strips of cloth. The sun had already begun to dip, and their religious custom dictated that they had to bury the bodies before dark. It didn’t take long for them to notice we were there. We kept walking toward them with our weapons pointed down, as if to make the automatic weapons seem kinder. And we were covered in dirt, had huge beards, everyone smelling like a dog’s ass. Dicks flapping in the wind under ripped pant-legs. You could see the outrage ripple through the crowd. We walked right up on their party.

  There were about fifty villagers, and they all wore either sequined hats or turbans. There were no women or girls present. Some of the boys held the burial rocks in their hands like they were ready to throw them at us. I could sense fury in the crowd. The oldest man was probably fifty, but he looked eighty. He had a long white beard, a yellow turban, sharp eyes, and old 1970s Robert Mugabe glasses. His nose was huge, comically oversized. At first glance you’d have thought that he was wearing a nose-and-mustache disguise.

  “Sir,” my interpreter said, “I don’t want to talk to these people.”

  “I don’t either, Sharif,” I said. “We’ll make it quick.” He nodded.

  “Salaam alaikum,” Sharif said. The oldest man returned the greeting.

  “Look,” I said to my interpreter, whose Pashto got worse when he got stressed out, “I need you to be mean. Like, talk like a bad person to these people. Say what I say just like I’m saying it.”

  “Okay, okay, sir,” he said.

  I walked closest to the crowd. I took my helmet and sunglasses off. My face probably looked grotesque—it was half-sunburned, half-pasty, and just filthy all over. I didn’t recognize myself when I looked in the mirror after it was all done. The counter-insurgency classes always said that you had to take your headgear off and expose yourself to the people. It was so that they would trust you and want to be your friend. They’d be susceptible to your influence.

  “I’m the commander of all of these American soldiers,” I said. “My name is Lieutenant Longo.”

  Sharif translated.

  “We’re here looking for an American soldier that the Taliban captured. Have any of you seen him?” I waited for the translation. No response.

  “I’ll say it again, have any of you seen an American soldier who’s the prisoner of the Taliban? His name is Private Ellis.”

  The elder spoke softly in Pashto.

  “Sir,” Sharif said, “he says that there are no Taliban in his village. They never come.”

  “I didn’t think so,” I said. “Those guys were just shooting off fireworks, right?”

  Sharif looked at me with a dazed expression. “I don’t understand, sir,” he said.

  “Never mind, man,” I said. “Just ask him why those guys were shooting at us.”

  There was more chatter in Pashto.

  “He says that they weren’t shooting at you,” Sharif said. “He said that this village is attacked by robbers, and so when they think we robbers, they start
shooting.”

  “Oh, so this was just a big misunderstanding?” I asked, letting myself get angry. “None of you have anything against the government, right? Ask him that, Sharif.” There was more chatter.

  “Sir, he says that they support the government. He says that they do not understand why you are killing innocent people. He says you are welcome in this village.”

  “Well, shit,” I said. “I sure appreciate it. Hey, no harm, no foul, right? But, no need to make tea or have us sit down. We’re just looking. We don’t want anything to do with you fucking people or your village.” I paused. Sharif talked Pashto. I kept hearing him say dee wayee che, which I recognized as “He says that.” Sharif was pointing the finger too. It was the only time that I wished I spoke Pashto. I don’t want to study that language, that trash, but I wanted to be certain that every word I spoke was just as brutal and dirty and hostile as I intended.

  “Sir, he says that these men are poor and that their children will now be starving,” Sharif said. “He says, ‘Americans must pay. They kill these men for no reason. They are innocent people.’”

  And that was when I lost it.

  “Listen to me, you fucking hajj!” I said, my finger right in the old man’s face, the crowd now attentive to me alone. “Those are not innocent people. Your friends tried to kill us. You’re a liar. Every last one of you shit-smelling garbage people is a liar. You tried to shoot us. But guess what? We’re better shots. And in a few days your friends are going to be full of worms. Bugs are going to eat their eyes and guts out. That’s their fault. That’s your fault.”