Places and Names

by Elliot Ackerman

  Jack has dreams. And one keeps repeating.

  He’s on a raid. It’s dark—the middle of the night. His team of Marines blows an explosive charge through the front door of a compound. He’s with the first group, clearing the structure. Suddenly he’s alone. He enters a room, and there’s a guy with an AK-47 in it. The guy levels his rifle. Jack shoots back, but there’s only a hollow click. He’s out of ammunition. He reaches into his vest to do a speed reload. He goes for a magazine, but he pulls out a ham sandwich instead. He reaches into another magazine pouch. Another ham sandwich.

  “All I’ve got are ham sandwiches,” he said, and we both laughed.

  Then he looked over at me. “I wake up and I’m fucking scared.”

  Neither of us talked for a bit.

  Dreams, an intense weight of sadness—these manifestations of our wartime experience could surely be classified as PTSD, but the more insidious form of PTSD is the purposelessness associated with giving up the war. To be happy one must have a sense of purpose. Let’s take a conventional example: a man works a job, that job supports his family, it allows him to save a bit of money, his family grows, with his savings they go to university, his children have a better life than him. He is valued. He has a purpose. From that purpose he finds happiness. But a young soldier who goes to war has a formative experience that gives him a very different and intense relationship with purpose. Let’s say he’s fighting in a remote valley, at a desert outpost, in an urban hellhole—the details don’t really matter. He’s got a mission, the same as the other soldiers who have become his close friends. This soldier fights for that mission but also to protect these friends. This is a very potent type of purpose. If purpose is the drug that induces happiness, there are few stronger doses than the wartime experience. The soldier leaves home at a young age and begins taking this strongest drug, in effect freebasing the crystal meth of purpose. But eventually the war ends, the soldier returns home. He must reintegrate into society, find his happiness. Find a new purpose. He evaluates his options: a job at Home Depot, going to college, working in real estate. Nothing compares to what he’s just done. He looks around and his world is no longer crystal meth. His world is Coors Light. A certain depression sets in: the knowledge that the rest of his days will be spent sitting on his front porch, sipping Coors Light, watching life pass by. This emotional arc isn’t unique to the veteran: professional athletes, artists with great early success—anyone who’s viewed the peak must reckon with the descent.

  Jack and I continued our run.

  Stopped at a traffic light, we jogged in place. I told him I missed the war.

  He nodded.

  “You know, Ack, the melancholy of it all is that we grew up there.”

  * * *

  I never knew Austin Tice. I’m sure he went to Syria for many reasons. But I imagine he missed the war in the way I do. The way Vince does. I imagine it’s never far from his mind, the way it is with Jack on our runs. The road home from battle has always been fraught. When Odysseus journeyed back from Troy, his men tied him to the mast of his ship when the Sirens tempted him to leave it. The goddess Circe warned Odysseus about these sea nymphs:

  . . . whoever comes their way. Whoever draws too close,

  off guard, and catches the Sirens’ voices in the air—

  no sailing home for him, no wife rising to meet him,

  no happy children beaming up at their father’s face.

  The high, thrilling song of the Sirens will transfix him.

  Odysseus ordered his men to stuff their ears with beeswax as they rowed by. He didn’t, though. He wanted to hear the Sirens. Lashed down, he listened. It wasn’t their honeyed voices or unrivaled beauty that made him strain against the mast. It was what they sang of: war, and man’s glory in war.

  Aside from a brief YouTube video released in September 2012, virtually nothing’s been seen or heard of Austin Tice. Many speculate that the Assad regime is holding him, but who knows. As I drift around southern Turkey and the Syrian border, I sometimes pull up his dormant Twitter feed on my phone, thumbing through Tweets like “@kenentrepreneur No, unless you count Facebook ranting about my time in Iraq/Afghanistan. I’m a total rookie; a law student on summer vacay,” or “FSA company commander: ‘Is that a joke? Of course we don’t care about the Olympics.’”

  It sounds like he was living out a dream: bearing witness to a cause he believed in. A part of me admires him for it, despite where it led.

  Then I’ll scroll to his profile. Beneath “#USMC infantry vet, #Georgetown Law stdnt, freelance #journalist. Currently in #Syria” are these words, written like a prayer:

  Gaze into the abyss,

  the abyss gazes also into you.

  BLACK IN THE RAINBOW, BERGDAHL AND THE WHALE

  ISTANBUL, PAKTIKA, QUANTICO

  Summer, and the LGBT Pride Festival comes to Istanbul, beginning with the fifth annual Trans Pride march along Istiklal Caddesi. How will the spiritual capital of this majority-Muslim country sustain an unabashed expression of nonconventional sexuality, especially one set on its most iconic thoroughfare? The idea of the Istiklal, one of the renowned neoclassical grande rues, bedecked with rainbow flags is allure enough. With the Islamic State advancing to the south toward Baghdad beneath the black banners of martyrdom, this march seems a fine barometer of the political pressures inside the gateway to the Islamic world. Or at least, a counterpoint.

  With an afternoon sitter scheduled for my kids, I hitch the bus from my flat in Bebek, a gentrified neighborhood up the Bosporus, down the seaside highway toward Cihangir District, the heart of the city and the location of the June 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations, a brief, if intense, uncorking of Turkish political dissent partly inspired by the Arab Spring. I’ve planned to meet Vince and Nate, a tall former army officer with bushy red hair who is fresh out of the service and on an extended world tour. Arriving in Taksim Square, I run right into rows of plainclothes policemen. They chatter into their walkie-talkies, ready to deploy. Across the square, the footsteps of casual shoppers echo off the Istiklal’s cobblestones.

  The march will begin at five. At around half past four, I link up with Vince, who has brought his girlfriend, and Nate. Before we can finish our greetings, the sound of whistles and drums picks up from the Istiklal. We head toward its mouth. Instead of being swept up by the protest’s current, we hit a countercurrent composed of hundreds of shoppers pouring out into Taksim Square. Beyond them, I can see an enormous rainbow flag, maybe seventy by ten meters, unfurled in the street. The shoppers hurry from it like they’re in B-roll footage from an old Godzilla film, trying to avoid the march. We draw closer and fall in with the protestors. Activists press pastel green, pink, and red paddles into our hands with slogans like #Transcandir (#Transgender) and Anayasada Cinsiyet Kimliği (Gender Identity Is in the Constitution). Mustachioed Turks in threadbare suit pants and short-sleeve shirts hawk an assortment of whistles for two lira per, taking breaks from their usual commerce of knockoff designer bags and watches. A few minutes before the hour, the marchers lift their flag, taking turns dancing beneath its luminescent shade. A phalanx of Turkish police, plastic riot shields at the ready, batons slung at their sides, fan out behind us.

  When Nate, Vince, and I decided to head down to the Istiklal, my initial concern was that we’d stick out: two former Marines and a soldier at a Turkish transgender pride march. Not so much, as it turns out. Most of the crowd isn’t transgender. This is a march for that community’s rights, but it is really just a march for rights. Clutching a few inches of the silk flag, I glance across to its other side, where a dour Turk in his sixties wears an elegant, trim sports coat and a white straw fedora. He walks steadily, slowly surveying the crowd from behind a pair of dark glasses. He seems to march alone, speaking to no one. I wonder what tethers him to this cause.

  At that point Nate, whom I’ve only just met, leans over and asks me to snap a picture of him
and Vince. “My sister’s transgender,” he says.

  Since Gezi Park, other protests have regularly shut down parts of the city. A few weeks ago I found myself in the center of three widely different demonstrations in a three-day period. The first was a gathering of several hundred supporters of deposed Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi outside the Egyptian consulate in Bebek, where I live. I had heard chanting from my living room window a little before ten p.m. When I went to check things out, I found myself in a sea of Islamists waving yellow flags emblazoned with the black four-finger salute of the Rabaa Massacre, the square where 2,600 Muslim Brotherhood supporters had been beaten and gunned down by security forces the summer before. Feeling a bit uncomfortable, I did the least threatening thing I could: I bought an ice-cream cone from my local concessionaire. The crowd soon spread onto the playground where I take my children after kindergarten. I finished my cone while the protestors standing on the plastic blue slide of the jungle gym chanted, “Allahu Akbar!” The next afternoon, I came home to another cry for activism: Toms Shoes. They were hosting a “Go Shoeless for a Day” rally in the same park. While my kids ate cotton candy and popcorn, a barefooted Turkish soap opera star vaulted onto a hastily erected stage, interrupting the DJ to make a few remarks about how by going without shoes we could all better understand the struggles of the impoverished. The crowd cheered from the playground with just as much enthusiasm as Allahu Akbar. The next morning was May Day. Determined to keep an appointment, I ventured out into the streets. The police had closed nearly every main avenue into the city center. I managed to find what I thought was a clever back route, but got turned around and eventually ended up getting tear-gassed alongside members of the TKP, or the Turkish Communist Party.

  Now, a few weeks later, I catch sight of the red-hammer-and-gear banner of the TKP fluttering among a sea of rainbow flags as we approach the broad wrought iron gates of Galatasaray Lisesi. The police presence thickens. Their armored cars, mounted with water cannons, line the Istiklal, forcing protestors into a choke point. The marchers stop. Excited Turkish youths weave in and out of the crowd, their faces covered with rainbow neckerchiefs in a Billy the Kid bandit style. From the storefronts, onlookers take photos. A woman elbows past me, her face veiled in the niqab. Her husband follows behind, wearing the long, two-fist beard of a Salafist. She pulls an iPad from her Louis Vuitton bag. Raising it up, she takes photos of the drag queens.

  Encountering so many police, the protest organizers who’ve marched at the crowd’s front sit down, blocking the road. Still clutching their rainbow flag, they begin to chant “Everywhere is revolution!” and “The government murders kids!”—a reference to Berkin Elvan, a fifteen-year-old who was killed when police fired a teargas canister that hit him in the head during Gezi. While police look on, a throng of women and transgender women release a shrill bedouin wail, which echoes along the Istiklal. Peeking into the armored trucks, I glimpse the officers sitting up, alert. The protestors glance back, watching them. From the armored turrets, a few water cannons rotate on their swivels, taking aim.

  Gezi’s memory is visceral here: after the government ordered the first protest encampment scuttled, transgender women fought side by side at the barricades among the initial activists. As Vince, Nate, and I watch the water cannons train their barrels on the march’s transgender ringleaders, a British journalist hears us speaking in English. “The toughest men at Gezi,” he informs us, “were the transgender women.”

  After another hour, we decide to grab dinner at a kebab stand off the Istiklal. As we slide out of the protest, it maintains a festive air despite the tension from moments before. It seems good and right to see so many disparate groups coming out to support a single, disenfranchised voice.

  As we turn to go, something catches my eye. In the back of the crowd, mixing with the rainbow flags, and just a little larger, an anarchist flies a black banner.

  * * *

  Living in Istanbul, I am seven hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time, so I often find myself up in the night checking emails that are sent end of day in the United States and reading headlines on my phone. Just past midnight on my June 1, news breaks that the Taliban have released American prisoner of war Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. I skim the story, and then I check my email. There’s a message from Nate: “So, I was in Bowe Bergdahl’s unit when he deserted.”

  I ask if he’s got a minute to talk on the phone.

  There were many stories about how Bowe Bergdahl was captured. In one video released by the Taliban, Bergdahl said he had lagged behind on a patrol and been taken. For years, it stood as a kind of accusation against his comrades: they had left him behind. But on the day Bergdahl disappeared, June 30, 2009, there was in fact no patrol, according to other soldiers who were there. Some of the men in his unit—Second Platoon, Blackfoot Company—still seem unable to forgive him for this fact. On that night, instead of patrolling, they slept in the earthen bunkers of OP Mest, an outpost scraped from a hillside in Afghanistan’s rugged and remote Paktika Province. Life at OP Mest had been miserable: weeklong rotations in the scorching heat, no showers, no food except for MREs.

  The next morning, Sergeant First Class Larry Hein took muster. Then the misery really began. Bergdahl was gone. Most of his equipment—rifle, helmet, body armor—had been left behind. He’d taken his camera, diary, and compass. The platoon fanned out, desperately searching for him. Earlier that morning, he had asked his team leader whether it would cause problems if he left base with his equipment. The team leader told Bergdahl that if he took his rifle or night-vision goggles, it would indeed cause problems. At nine a.m., Hein called over the radio to report a missing soldier. Bergdahl was then classified DUSTWUN—Duty Status: Whereabouts Unknown.

  A little before five p.m. that afternoon, Colonel Michael Howard, the senior officer responsible for Paktika as well as two other eastern provinces, ordered that “all operations will cease until the missing soldier is found. All assets will be focused on the DUSTWUN situation and sustainment operations.” That directive, as powerful as the word of God, changed Blackfoot Company’s war. Recovering Bowe Bergdahl became a central mission.

  That night on the phone, Nate tells me how “a human wave of insurgents” surprised an outpost at Zerok, in eastern Paktika Province, a few days after Bergdahl disappeared. Two Americans from the 3rd Battalion, 509th Infantry, were killed; many more were wounded. The soldiers at Zerok were more vulnerable than they otherwise would have been because there was a reduced complement of drones and intelligence aircraft available. These assets had been diverted to assist in the search for Bergdahl. Beginning that August, Nate noted how the 1st Battalion, 501st Infantry—Bergdahl’s battalion—lost six soldiers in a three-week period. Morris Walker, Clayton Bowen, Kurt Curtiss, Darryn Andrews, Matthew Martinek, Michael Murphrey—each of these fatalities occurred on a mission that was related to, or influenced by, the effort to find Bergdahl.

  In this remote part of an increasingly remote war, suffering and loss, the senselessness of Afghanistan, often played out in Bergdahl’s name. By March 2010, Bergdahl’s infantry battalion had returned home without him. Before they left, the army mandated they sign nondisclosure agreements. Bergdahl’s story wouldn’t be theirs to tell.

  * * *

  I served as a special operations officer in Paktika for a good part of 2010 and 2011, working out of a remote firebase a little more than a mile from the Pakistani border. At night we’d climb on our bunkered roof, a tumbler of scotch or cigar in hand, and watch the drone strikes in South Waziristan. During those days, Bergdahl’s case loomed ever-present in much of our work. Like a chimera, he seemed just out of grasp. The irony that an iconic figure in a war that had largely been deserted by the American people was probably a deserter himself was never lost on us. It seemed just our luck.

  Among sailors, a crew member who brings bad luck is known as a Jonah. It’s a long-held superstition. And like the hapless crew that sailed Jona
h to Tarshish, we found ourselves in a storm. Imaginations ran wild. How did the Taliban in Paktika execute attacks with such unusual precision and lethality? Some hypothesized that Bergdahl had informed them of our tactics. Why did Afghan civilians refuse needed civil aid, becoming hostile? Others believed rumors that Bergdahl had participated in a propaganda campaign against us. None of this could be substantiated, but over there Bergdahl became the idol of discontent for so many. He was the Jonah.

  And this wasn’t only among the rank and file. One of my colleagues, a CIA case officer, had the collateral duty of collecting information on Bergdahl’s whereabouts. For months, his location was known with a high degree of precision. Certain options had been floated as to what a recovery mission might look like. After flying in and out of Kabul for endless rounds of interagency meetings, my colleague grew frustrated by the army’s inaction when provided with information by CIA. Then a senior military officer pulled him aside. “No one’s serious about a rescue mission,” he said. “It’d be too risky. Maybe if Bergdahl had actually been captured they’d do something, but he deserted.”