“That’s some horseshit right there,” Tanya muttered.
“Our COP was about three clicks from the nearest village. The rumor I heard, from the platoon we replaced, was that some of the locals figured them for Russians when they made first contact. That’s how freakin’ remote it was. These people were like two wars behind.”
“This was when?” A small notebook and pen had appeared in Father Ace’s hands.
“When I got injured? That was March of oh-ten. We’d been at Hila since—let’s see, I think it was October. That was the COP, the name of the combat outpost—Hila. Before that we were down at FOB Barmal, right on the Paki border. Hila…it had its own kind of suck, for sure, but it was a whole lot quieter than Barmal. Anytime you went outside the wire there, someone was gonna be shooting at you. Something was gonna blow up. You went out in full pucker mode every time, you know what I’m saying? Hila…” Here Cameron paused, lowering his eyes. “Hila was different.”
During the silence that followed Cameron took two deep and over-attentive drags from his cigarette as a pensive expression softened his face, compelling the priest to ask, after a while, “Different how?”
“Hila?” Cameron blinked his eyes rapidly. “Man, it was—well, it was cold up there, Jesus was it cold. I’d never felt cold like that in my life. You’re bunking in a mud hut, it’s ten below…you walk outside to pee, feels like your damn face is gonna break.”
Sensing something other than thermostat memories was what’d distracted Cameron, Father Ace gently pressed him: “What else was different?”
“Well, the patrols was totally different—we was on foot,” Cameron said, but from the way his voice and expression had resolidified the priest gathered that this also wasn’t the difference he’d intimated. “The terrain up there, it’s way too rough and rocky for nothing else. We couldn’t do mounted patrols like we did at Barmal, with the Strykers. So about every three days, each squad’d go on a little hike.”
“What were those like?”
“A lot of it was pretty routine. We’d keep changing it up but there was kind of a circuit we’d do. Visit a village, talk with the elders, bargain for some intel. Try to find out where the bad guys was holed up, what they were planning. Do some fingerprinting, retinal scans, hand out some soccer balls to the kids. Hang outside while the lieutenant drank tea with the elders. These villages up there—they were really small, sometimes just like ten or eleven families living on the side of some cliff, these little houses kinda stacked up on top of one another. Some of them were shady, but they weren’t nothing like the villages in Barmal. Down there they hated us. Hell, even the kids hated us. I gave some candy to this little girl one time and like all of a sudden these boys chased her down and just started beating the shit outta her. Like, preschoolers, man. Blood coming out of her nose. And these little suckers tried whaling on me when I went to break it up, serious. You’d try to help these people out but they didn’t want it. You’d airlift a bridge in there for them and the next day, hell, they’d burn it down.”
“What about the day you were injured?”
“That was a weird one, actually.” Cameron stopped to light another cigarette with the tip of the one he’d just exhausted. Tanya, the priest noticed, had abandoned the effort with her phone; she was staring spellbound at her brother through the tobacco haze encircling his head. “So, this guy had shown up at the COP the day before. A local national—dude had one eye, just like Mullah Omar. Said he wanted to turn informant and could guide us to some weapons caches hidden up in some caves. We was still a month out from fighting season but the spooks had been picking up radio chatter about us—”
“I’m sorry—spooks?”
“The guys in Prophet Section, yeah, they listen in on enemy radio transmissions. I wasn’t privy to any of this but I heard there’d been chatter about hitting our COP come spring. So it made sense they’d be stockpiling mortar tubes and stuff. Lieutenant Cantwell, though, he wasn’t buying the local dude at all. His Spidey sense was going haywire. We all saw that. But our CO ordered him to take a recon team on patrol to see what the dude was selling.”
“And you were on this team,” the priest said.
“Yessir I was. It was a night patrol. We—”
Tanya asked, “How come at night?” This detail, like many others she’d just heard, was new to her. She hadn’t known even this prologue to her brother’s story before—just the random puzzle pieces he’d divulged over the last four years—and would afterward wonder if the presence of a priest was what’d filled in those blanks or if this was a side effect of his recovery—if along with his legs perhaps his memory had been restored.
Cameron’s answer, the priest noted, was directed his way: “The lieutenant, he was like dead-certain this was a trap. But with a night patrol, see, you’ve got the tech advantage. Night vision goggles and all that. Problem was, though, Gollum didn’t have night vision.” Noting Father Ace’s confusion, he explained: “That’s what we started calling the local national—Gollum, you know, from the Lord of the Rings movies? The little slimy dude. Led them hobbit guys right into that giant spider-monster thing. Our Gollum, man, he couldn’t see worth a damn. Felt like we were stopping every hundred feet for him to get his bearings. That was freaking the hell out of the lieutenant because you don’t ever want to stay put too long when you’re on patrol. Might’ve been on account of the dude being one-eyed, I don’t know. Our ANAs didn’t have night vision either but they were hacking it fine.”
Father Ace asked, “What is an ANA?”
“Afghan National Army. We always did joint patrols at Hila—usually six of them, nine of us. We didn’t have nine that night, though, because one of our guys was sick and another one—man, I don’t know what the issue with Tugboat was, but he stayed back inside the wire. You know, it’s kind of weird—the lieutenant, he was all pinged out, but the rest of us, I don’t know, we was all pretty chill. Like I said, after all the shit we’d been through at Barmal…Hila had been quiet, you know? I mean, winter’s always quieter in Afghanistan, but this…we’d taken some harassment fire, we’d found some IED materials in this shady-ass little village…but the only casualty we’d had was back in November when a sniper popped Beano in the foot and—I don’t know how to say this—that was almost funny. He got his pinky toe shot off. We’re down on the dirt looking for it later and he’s like, ‘Fuck it’—sorry—he’s like, ‘Fuck it, what do I even need it for?’ And we’re laughing because nobody’s got a good answer to that.”
Cameron’s chuckle met the disturbed expressions of his listeners and evaporated.
“If I’m being honest,” he went on, leaning forward, “I think a lot of us were itching for a fight. We’d lost four guys in our last month at Barmal so we still had a score to settle, you know?”
He picked up the can of Bud Light but, finding it empty, half-crushed it before plumping it back onto the table. “Sis, you mind grabbing me a thermo?”
Lifting herself from the cushions Tanya mumbled, “Baby can walk again, but not to get his own beer.” She mumbled this to no one in particular—if Cameron registered the comment, he didn’t show it—and in a tone the priest couldn’t quite identify: neither sharp nor blunted, as though she’d swished a butter knife in her brother’s general vicinity. It left the priest feeling awkward, though, and half-speaking for Cameron he told her, “You’re very kind.”
From the kitchen doorway Tanya asked Father Ace if he also wanted something to drink.
“Tea, if you have it.”
“Like, sweet tea?”
“Hot tea.”
“Naw, we don’t got that. Coke or Gatorade is all. The red kind. ’Less you want a beer.”
“A Coke sounds delicious,” Father Ace said, watching Cameron stubbing his cigarette into the ashtray with a degree of force and concentration that seemed disproportionate to the task. Despite the way he�
��d earlier disregarded his sister, he seemed to be pausing his story until she came back. The priest took this moment to compliment a poster tacked to the wall by the kitchen entrance. Above the word RISE was a photograph of an infantryman atop a rocky peak, silhouetted against a purple-streaked sunrise; below was printed, “…FOR THE RIGHTEOUS FALLS SEVEN TIMES AND RISES AGAIN. PROVERBS 24:16 ESV.”
Cameron turned to squint at it. “Yeah, someone at the VA gave me that.”
When Tanya returned, Cameron and Father Ace took simultaneous swigs from their cans, though Cameron’s lasted significantly longer—long enough for the priest to remark, in a tone less opaque than Tanya’s had been, “It is rather early.”
Cameron nodded and pursed his lips. “It’s hot.”
“This is true,” the priest conceded, though Cameron’s justification was a stretch. The cold air from the A/C vent was at that moment scooting billows of cigarette smoke along the faintly yellowed ceiling. “Please, if you will continue.”
“Well, there ain’t that much more to tell, really,” Cameron said. “Gollum, man, he kept getting turned around. We’d head up some trail but then he’d decide it was the wrong trail and we’d head back down. Must’ve happened four or five times. Then we come to this village and dude’s like, ‘Yes, we’re very close now,’ but that village—we all knew that village, we’d been there before, which meant Gollum knew the village for sure, and would’ve known how to get there—it was all getting way, way too shady. At this point—”
A ringtone came bursting from Tanya’s phone—Kelly Clarkson shrieking the chorus to “Why You Wanna Bring Me Down”—causing her to jump as though bee-stung. She glared at its screen as a tinny guitar riff buffeted the room. “Who do we know with a three-one-oh area code?”
“Search me,” Cameron said, clearly annoyed by the interruption. “Bet if you answered it they might tell you.”
The twinge of another sort of sting, a deeper one, appeared on her face. “Sorry,” she said, silencing the phone and laying it facedown on the table.
“You were in the village,” Father Ace prompted.
“Yeah, okay. It’s about oh-five-hundred at this point. We’d been out six hours. I remember walking through that village with this nasty sense, feeling like if something’s coming, this has to be where. Waiting for the trip wire. Waiting for the boom. Waiting—waiting to get some, you know what I’m saying? To get mashing on that trigger. That’s what it’s like sometimes—you don’t want it, but at the same time you want it bad.” Cameron’s voice shifted into another gear: lower, slower. “It was totally silent up there. No dogs, nothing. Just that burning cedar smell from their fires—smells like you’re walking through a cigar box. And all those stars up there. First time I saw stars like that, I about fell out.”
Slowly, in pained anticipation, Father Ace tilted forward, flattening his hands together between his knees in the bunched drapes of his cassock. “So this was the place,” he said quietly, “where the bomb…”
Cameron shook his head no. “Once we got through to the other side of that village, though, the lieutenant—he was freakin’ done, man. His Spidey sense was short-circuiting. He got up in Gollum’s face and just ripped him a new one. Even put his nine-mill to the guy’s forehead. I probably shouldn’t say that part. But it was tense, you know?”
Cameron paused for a swig of beer and to light yet another cigarette. “The guy peed hisself. Gollum did.”
Father Ace tilted farther toward his knees, his eyes drifting downward. Cameron caught a flicker of something in the priest’s expression that he registered as fear or possibly disappointment, as though the story he was telling wasn’t quite the one the priest had wanted to hear.
“That’s usually a good sign,” Cameron said. “When they pee themselves. The Talibs, they never do that. I don’t really know what all went down. Most of what I heard was the terp whispering like crazy, trying to keep the lid on it. Gollum, after a while he was just kind of whimpering, moaning and shit. The one thing I do know—the lieutenant broke up the squad after that. He orders our staff sergeant to stay back with me and a couple of ANAs to conduct overwatch in case an ambush really was coming. So we’re tail-end Charlie. The rest of the squad starts heading back up and then—and then, yeah, we follow a ways behind.”
The way Cameron ended this, with a slight lilt on the final phrase, sounded a strange note of finality, as though nothing more was forthcoming. The priest watched Cameron’s gaze wandering about the room as smoke came leaking from his nostrils and parted lips.
“What happened next?” Father Ace said at last.
“I don’t know,” said Cameron, stricken with a sudden vagueness. He was looking straight ahead, addressing the flat-screen. “We hiked awhile. I don’t know how long. Then after a while the ANAs, they just sat down.”
Tanya said, “What do you mean, they sat down?”
“Just what I said, they sat down. One of them said they was tired.” An edge of aggravation had replaced the smoky vagueness. Was Tanya the cause for this? the priest wondered, now wholly perplexed by their dynamic. As his eyes darted between them Father Ace noticed a vein on Cameron’s neck that was pulsing with such vehemence as to evoke a guinea worm wriggling beneath the skin. “It happened sometimes, I don’t know. Afghan Good Enough, that’s what we’d say. They plopped themselves down on some rocks and pulled out some hash to smoke like they was out back the Waffle House taking a fucking break from washing dishes.” Cameron released a long breath as he rubbed his forehead; the priest could tell this was growing harder for him. “Sergeant Lockwood, he radios ahead to the lieutenant, lets him know the situation we got. The ANAs ain’t budging. Lieutenant tells him they’re probably turning around anyway, on account of the time—the idea is get back in the wire before daybreak. So he tells us to take a knee and wait.”
Silence.
“And then?” the priest had to ask.
Cameron sighed. “And then boom.”
The priest waited. “Boom?”
“That’s how it happens. Just…boom.”
“The sergeant…”
“Yessir, he stepped on it. I was a little ways off from him.”
No one spoke for a while. When the priest looked up he saw that Tanya’s hand was now on her brother’s shoulder. With her other hand she was daubing an eye.
“I was out cold for a while,” Cameron finally continued. “When I come to, it’s like—concussion waves, I guess. My eyes’d sort of focus, then they wouldn’t. There was stuff in them. I’d make out what people were saying, then I couldn’t. I remember—I remember asking about Damarkus—about Sergeant Lockwood. How he was.”
“He was killed,” the priest assumed.
“Nossir, he made it. I don’t know how.”
“Praise be to God.”
“Amen, Father. Amen to that.”
“And the Afghan Army men?”
Cameron frowned, studying his cigarette. “They wasn’t in the blast zone. We’d moved…I don’t know, Sergeant Lockwood wanted to check out the ridge or something. I don’t remember why.”
Only later, after the Vatican investigator would go burrowing into this point, would Father Ace deem it noteworthy. Only in retrospect would he conclude—as he did six months later, in the final report he submitted to the archbishop—that on this minor detail the subject seemed “elusive.” For now, though, as the priest watched Tanya rest her head against her brother’s shoulder and stretch her left arm across his chest, as if to demonstrate the way she would’ve shielded him then, and would shield him now and evermore, Father Ace was gripped by a warm pity that felt baked into his very bones. He felt the urge to reach out and touch Cameron, to make palpable the emotion he was feeling, but Tanya was shielding him from this, too, so instead the priest prayed, in silence at first until the prayer spilled into a whisper and then into a full-throated supplication for God�
��s continued mercy that he found himself delivering the way he used to pray, un-microphoned, back in his church in Nigeria, amid the squalling infants and the exalting grunts and hollers of his parishioners. But neither Cameron nor Tanya echoed his gasp of an amen. It was as though he wasn’t there.
What Cameron said next, however, did strike the priest as noteworthy—strange, even. Tanya retracted her arm so that her brother could reach his Bud Light on the table, and after he’d taken a sip he shook himself, not unlike a wet dog, and rearranged himself so that he was sitting rigid and straight-backed on the edge of the couch cushion. Father Ace was unsure to whom Cameron was speaking, whether to him or to Tanya, or possibly to himself, when he said: “A lot of things happened to me in Afghanistan. Getting paralyzed, that was just one of them.”
The priest took a moment to analyze this. Accustomed to confessions, he jumped to a conclusion. Softly, he said, “You had to kill.”
Cameron nodded, but airily.
The priest failed to recognize that he’d swung and missed. “So your lieutenant was correct,” he said, in an oblique attempt to wrest more from Cameron than this nod. “The man you called Gollum had led you into a trap.”
“Naw, that’s the weird part,” Cameron said, more brightly now. “It was a freakin’ Soviet land mine. I didn’t know that till later—no one did. Everyone figured it for an IED. We knew there were mines in that district, or might be. But most of the time those old mines don’t detonate. It’s pretty fucked up, when you think about it. (Sorry.) I’m over there fighting the Taliban and it’s the Russians that got me. And got me, like, thirty years later. I mean, the Soviet Union—I don’t even think that was still around when I was born. It’s like one of my Brooke doctors said, he told me, ‘You’re a casualty of a war you weren’t even fighting.’ ” He took a scowling drag from his cigarette. “I don’t know what happened to Gollum. I wouldn’t have wanted to be him when that mine blew. Not that I wanted to be me when that mine blew.”
Anatomy of a Miracle Page 13
