Best American Magazine Writing 2013

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  A local elder had to vouch for them, to help ensure the Taliban didn’t infiltrate the force, and they were paid $150 a month. But they were motivated by more than salary. The Afghan army was plagued with apathy and poor discipline. Dakota had one excellent Afghan soldier, a few mediocre soldiers, and another who smoked marijuana all day and was too out of shape to move quickly under fire—a decent representation of the wider Afghan army. For the ISCI, though, the fight was personal. They and their families had suffered under or been hassled by the Taliban, and with the Taliban gone, they might get a sliver when the power was redistributed.

  The Marines, Afghan soldiers, a few Afghan National Police, and ten ISCI left Dakota, with the militiamen in the lead. The patrol, three dozen people altogether, stretched out in a 150-meter column and pushed through the fields toward Five Points, where the sweep would start, then up Route Animal and into Cocheran Village, with the militiamen pointing out Taliban hideouts and questioning locals. Jimmy walked in the middle of the patrol, the best position from which to direct a fight. For a young Marine leader like him, this was a heady moment, moving into contested territory with a long column of heavily armed men. Counterinsurgency could often be frustrating, full of handshakes, meetings, and mild cajoling. But sometimes counterinsurgency also meant doing the traditional and straightforward work of a Marine infantryman: closing with and destroying the enemy.

  As the patrol neared Five Points, a half-dozen Taliban fighters opened fire on them from Cocheran Village. Bullets threw up splashes of dirt in the fields like fat raindrops falling in puddles.

  Before Jimmy could shout an order, the ISCI ran into the gunfire, up Route Animal toward Cocheran, where Tom saw a half-dozen muzzle flashes twinkling on rooftops and in tree lines. The Taliban fired shoulder-launched rocket-propelled grenades at them, and the militiamen returned fire with their own RPGs.

  More gunmen fired at the patrol from the mosque and a house directly to the west. Tom and his Marines started an assault on Five Points, and Jimmy radioed up to Battalion, reporting the patrol in heavy contact from two directions and maneuvering on the enemy.

  A Marine patrol under fire in Afghanistan may feel isolated, faces buried in the dirt as rounds snap inches overhead. But they’re far from alone. A radio call can bring helicopter gunships, fighter jets, and even bombers, cruising at twenty thousand feet.

  As the firefight unfolded below, an unmanned aerial vehicle, a drone, slid into the airspace several miles above and peered down with its powerful cameras. In a darkened room more than 8,000 miles away, behind a doorway marked secret, at an Air Force base somewhere in America, a pilot and a sensor operator sat in tan leather chairs with hands on joysticks and watched the battle move across a chessboard of poppy fields and farmhouses, crisscrossed by dirt roads and canals. They saw muzzle flashes everywhere, from figures lying in the middle of fields, running down roads, crouched behind mud walls, and sprawled on rooft ops, and the telltale gray puffs and smoke trails of RPGs.

  The ISCI pushed into Cocheran and the drone crew watched the Taliban withdraw, into fields to the north and east. The enemy fighters moved like Marines. One group bounded back to the protection of a canal or a wall and provided cover fire for the second group. The drone’s pilot and sensor operator could kill them with a Hellfire missile, but discerning friend from foe was tricky at that altitude. They knew the basic layout of the battlefield but needed to confirm the location of all the friendlies, and the ISCI didn’t have radios. They’d moved up so far and so fast that the Marines didn’t know their exact locations relative to the Taliban, and they couldn’t risk a missile strike killing their most effective allies.

  With Corporal Justin Ramos on his heels, Jimmy ran up Route Animal, dipping behind buildings to dodge gunfire. This was elemental infantry movement. Find cover. Return fire. Sprint to the next covered position. Over and over. Faces flushed, thighs burning, and breath ragged, they reached the ISCI at the southern edge of Cocheran Village and called up the coordinates. At the drone’s control station in America, the sensor operator shined an infrared laser on a group of gunmen firing at Jimmy, Ramos, and the ISCI. The pilot squeezed a trigger, and a Hellfire was released from the drone’s wing and streaked toward earth at nearly a thousand miles per hour, following the laser beacon.

  The drone captured the aftermath with its thermal camera, which shows warmer objects in black and cooler in white. The boiling cloud of flame and smoke cleared to reveal a man lying crumpled in the field. Two men ran toward him, and each grabbed him by a wrist. They dragged him toward a tree line, and he trailed a foot-wide ribbon of black. He had been cut in half at the waist, the rest of him scattered across the field.

  Shortly after the Marines returned from the patrol, a water bottle was thrown over the concertina wire along the road outside the patrol base, a predetermined signal that their neighbor, Dr. Bahki, wanted to speak with them. He made house calls throughout the area—to militants and civilians alike, the Marines surmised—and was well respected. They didn’t know why he gave them tips, but the tips were always accurate. “They tried to kill you two times last night,” he had told them a few days earlier, after they’d walked to and returned from Beatley. “They kept pressing the button, but the bomb wouldn’t explode.” They didn’t tell him it was the electronic jammer; no need for his Taliban friends to know that. But the next day they found a battery near the road, and a fresh hole where the bomb had been removed.

  If Bahki wanted to talk, it was probably important. Tom and Jimmy grabbed their rifles and walked over to his house.

  “You killed Makeem today,” he told them.

  This cheered them. They already knew the name, from other informants: Makeem had built the bomb that killed Ian, and paid the triggerman who detonated it under him.

  But Makeem hadn’t made just the bomb in the culvert.

  Tom had hit a wall with his workouts. Even though Dakota’s outdoor gym had just two proper weights—a pair of thirty-five-pound dumbbells—it had everything else in improvised form: dip bars, bench press, squat rack, even a pulley system rigged from sandbags and parachute cord for working triceps and lats. But Tom wasn’t getting any stronger or bigger from the daily workouts.

  Jimmy could help with this. By far the strongest, fittest Marine at Dakota, if not all of Fox Company, he’d thrown the platoon into stunned silence the first time he took off his uniform blouse and they saw his biceps, which measured seventeen inches around in high school and had only grown bigger. As they stood under a noon sun outside the mosque at Five Points, he told Tom about a weightlifting program he’d read about the night before, in a fitness magazine his mom had sent. When they returned to Dakota later that afternoon, they’d start the new workout together.

  But first, just a few feet from them, perhaps the most important moment in northern Marjah’s recent history was under way.

  Every time the Marines neared this area, they were attacked by Taliban, who held sway over local residents less through allegiance than fear of reprisal. This was about to change. Hajji Gul Mala, a local power broker, had committed to keeping a permanent presence of his militiamen in Five Points.

  Jimmy and Tom had nurtured this relationship with Gul Mala through many meetings, and they understood one another to be trustworthy. Now Lieutenant Colonel Harrill, several Marines from the battalion staff, and Gul Mala gathered with about twenty local elders and villagers near the mosque and told them over chai and a spread of food that the new security force would make the area safe and allow the villagers to stand up to the Taliban.

  Gul Mala, now in his fifties, had fought the Russians with the mujahideen as a young man. But as he gained power in northern Marjah in the years afterwards, he turned against some of his former comrades, a philosophical and pragmatic shift. He owned many of the market stalls at a bazaar in northern Marjah, and as the Taliban tightened their hold on the area, they demanded taxes from Gul Mala and the shop owners, enforced with beatings. But while Gul Mala had both business
and political interests to protect, he also wanted more personal and religious freedom than the Taliban espoused. One of his mentors was a Sufimystic who had traveled extensively through India and offered Gul Mala—the name means “beautiful flower”—a broader perspective than the extreme interpretation of Sunni Islam the Taliban embraced.

  Gul Mala wanted both boys and girls to be educated, and he helped build the first school in northern Marjah after the Taliban destroyed the others. When the Marines asked for his help with security, Gul Mala’s six bodyguards became northern Marjah’s first ISCI, and he recruited more young men from the area. He would soon have seventy ISCI under him, his own private army.

  “What compound do you want to occupy?” Harrill asked Gul Mala.

  They had enough to choose from. Much of the area had been abandoned because of the fighting and Taliban threats.

  “Right here,” Gul Mala said, and pointed toward the building next door, just south of the mosque, empty since before Tom’s unit arrived in January. The Taliban used it as a firing point, which meant it possibly had buried bombs or booby traps, a deterrent should the Marines ever try to storm it during a firefight.

  Tom took Fazenbaker and Matt Westbrook to sweep the compound, half as long as Dakota and half as wide, surrounded by mud walls eight feet high and eighteen inches thick, with several small, simple rooms along the back, western wall. Holly led them through the doorway at the northeast corner. Tom and Fazenbaker worked across the weed-covered courtyard with mine detectors, the same type Ian had been using when he died. Tick tock. They swept in rows, back and forth, until they covered all the ground. They checked out the empty rooms in back, then swept everything again. Matt worked Holly through the rooms and around the courtyard. Nothing in her behavior betrayed danger.

  “Building clear, building clear,” Tom called to Jimmy over the radio.

  Jimmy passed word to Lieutenant Colonel Harrill, who filed into the compound with Gul Mala, Sergeant Major Mathern, and Captain Sacchetti. Together these men represented perhaps the best chance for calm in northern Marjah. Jimmy and a couple of Marines from the colonel’s security detail stepped in behind them.

  Outside, Ryan Moore called Tom to the northwest corner of the building, where William Saunders had spotted a man a couple hundred yards away who seemed to be watching them. Probably just a curious farmer, Tom told him. Saunders kept watch over him and the distant tree lines through his rifle scope, and Tom and Ryan stepped back into the shade, next to Matt, just on the other side of the wall from where Jimmy stood. Tom leaned against the wall. The flag raising and meeting with Gul Mala might take another five minutes or an hour, and military service had honed their ability to wait. Smoke a cigarette, bitch about the heat, kick a toe in the dust. When it was time to move, they’d be told.

  Harrill, Sacchetti, and Gul Mala stood in a cluster in the courtyard and watched Gul Mala’s men scramble onto the rooftop and raise a small Afghan flag on a makeshift flagpole made from a skinny tree stripped of branches. Mathern stood five feet away, closer to the flag. Jimmy stood five feet from them on the other side, near the northern wall.

  Surely they shifted their weight as they stood there, maybe took a few absentminded steps. And then, a last step. A boot pressed down with just enough pressure, in just the wrong spot, on two strips of balsa wood buried just under the surface, separated by two slender carbon rods, taken from D-cell batteries, that were invisible to metal detectors. That pressure squeezed together two thin metal contacts and made the circuit whole. Electricity raced from the battery pack, buried maybe two feet deep—beyond notice of the metal detectors—up a wispy wire, through the pressure plate, and down to a blasting cap in a plastic jug packed with ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder.

  The cap exploded, just a little pop, but enough to produce a detonation wave that collided with the ammonium nitrate and put the already unstable chemical under extreme pressure. Once the explosives reached a critical density, the molecules broke apart, starting a chain reaction that transformed the ten pounds of ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder into sixteen hundred liters of gas in a sliver of a second. All that gas needed somewhere to go. The explosion pushed a supersonic shock wave through the dirt and rock and into the compound.

  Of the three blasts Matt had been next to, this one hurt the most, even with the thick mud wall separating him from the bomb. “Like you’re walking across the street and a fucking truck hits you,” he says.

  Tom stumbled a few feet, his mind already grasping. Maybe someone had accidentally dropped a grenade, or the rocket launcher Jimmy had slung across his back had somehow detonated. No. Even in those first fragments of seconds, his rattled brain knew that couldn’t be. This was a bomb, the same sickening sound as the blast that killed Ian, and every other bomb he’d heard. But how? They hadn’t received a single hit from the two detectors or the bomb-sniffing dog.

  As he ran back to the entryway on the northeast corner, he called up a medevac request. With an explosion that big and so many people nearby, someone would be hit. The local power broker and every important Marine in the area were inside that compound. Tom worked over the possibilities. Just about his whole chain of command could be dead.

  He rounded the corner as Mathern led Harrill, Gul Mala, and Sacchetti through the doorway. Harrill and Gul Mala staggered, dazed and bleeding from their faces, necks, and backs. Sacchetti clutched his left arm, where shrapnel had ripped through his triceps.

  From farther in the compound, he heard Jimmy calling for him.

  “Whorl!” His voice sounded hoarse and strained.

  “Whorl … Whorl!”

  Smoke and dirt hung in the air, and Tom sucked in the pungent scent of detonated ammonium nitrate. Marines shouted—maybe inside the compound, maybe outside, but forever away. Tom heard nothing, saw nothing but Jimmy.

  He lay on his back, a few feet from the wall, and writhed in the sunbaked dirt near a shallow crater, his left arm extended, hand grasping at the air. Red blooms spread across his pants. The blast had torn him nearly in half at the waist.

  Tom knelt beside him and grabbed Jimmy’s left hand with his hands. The grip was still strong.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Tom said. “We already have the birds spun up.”

  Jesse and the Navy corpsman from the colonel’s security detail dropped to their knees beside Tom and Jimmy, pulled thick bandages from their aid bag, and packed them against Jimmy’s thighs and pelvis to stanch the bleeding. Tourniquets, the usual lifesaver after a Marine steps on a buried bomb, were useless. Jimmy’s wounds were so high on his legs, they couldn’t use the nylon straps to cinch off the femoral arteries near the crotch.

  “I’ll be right back,” Tom said. Jimmy stared at him and nodded.

  Be calm, Tom told himself. Be calm. Be calm. Be calm. This could get so much worse if he lost his shit, and he knew everyone was looking to him to make fast, sound decisions. He left the compound to check on the other casualties and establish a landing zone for the medevac in an empty field just across the street. Ryan and Ramos swept the field for explosives, and Tom pushed more Marines to the far perimeter for security.

  He returned to Jimmy, knelt, and took his hand again. “I’ve already taken care of everything, everything’s going to be okay,” he said, and he knew it wouldn’t. He unsnapped Jimmy’s chinstrap and eased the helmet from his head. The color had leached from his face as his blood drained into the dirt and his body redirected the remaining blood to his main organs, a last attempt to keep the whole system from failing. He spit up bile. His eyes, alert and searching for the first few minutes, lost focus. “I’ll be right back,” Tom said again. “I have to go see where your helicopter is.”

  Standing outside, he heard Jesse call out: “Starting CPR.”

  The Marines lifted Jimmy onto a portable stretcher and carried him to the field’s edge, where they listened for a drumming on the horizon, the first sounds of the medevac helicopter. Sergeant Major Mathern crouched over him, one hand st
acked atop the other, and pumped his palm against Jimmy’s chest, doing for him what his heart could not.

  The helicopter landed in a swirl of dust, and left with Jimmy, Sacchetti, and a wounded Marine from Harrill’s security detail. Harrill and Gul Mala, though wounded, would walk with the patrol back to Dakota. They didn’t want the Taliban to know they’d nearly killed the two most important men in the area.

  As the sound of the helicopter faded, Jesse wandered over to the mosque and sat down.

  “Doc Deller, are you okay?” Mathern asked him.

  Jesse stared at him, as though he couldn’t understand the question, then he wandered off, down Five Points Road, toward Dakota.

  “Doc is done,” Mathern told Tom, and on Jesse’s face Tom saw what he himself felt: horror and heartbreak, guilt and anguish.

  The Marines walked home and were greeted with the sight of Ian’s memorial in Dakota’s courtyard. Within minutes they had erected another beside it. Boots. Rifle. Helmet. Dog tags.

  Nina once again heard the radio transmission that a medevac helicopter was bringing in an angel from Tom’s unit. She called a friend, heard the name, then sent Tom another e-mail, telling him she already knew and asking if he was okay. But he wouldn’t see it yet, because there was still work to be done. Nine days after they had sorted Ian’s gear, Tom and his men did it again for Jimmy.

  That night, Tom lay down and stared at the empty cot across the dirt-floored room, where his friend had slept that morning. With Jimmy gone but his presence still there, the room felt haunted. A boyish fear crept through Tom, and he was afraid to sleep.

  4. Maximum Fun

  The next day, a convoy rolled into Dakota and delivered Navy Lieutenant Commander Nathan Solomon, the battalion’s chaplain, a forty-two-year-old Southern Baptist with red hair, a warm Tennessee accent, and an earnestness that could put a man at ease.