waiting to hit the right note. A tuning fork, humming
like instinct
in the back of my brain. I watch the boy
pick his way through the graves,
his days tied to a bomber’s suicide like a timer
though neither of us can know it. It’s already started to count back.
Like a leaf in the heat, like a bird in between blinks,
I keep still, listening for that tuning fork
its low note of caution, telling me
when time is up.
The Morning Commute
Driving through Kandahar City. Morning. 0730.
We’ve come straight from the airfield
and I’m holding a coffee, fresh
from the boardwalk.
There are goats to steer around.
A man stares.
Ah, says Christian. The morning commute.
I look down at my cup,
feeling ridiculously at ease.
Maybe I should get rid of this, I say,
taking another sip.
There are more goats. And two women in burqas,
hustling along. I catch the worry in the brown
flash of their heels like a sideways glance,
like maybe the rumours are true
and we’re all rape-hungry Americans.
Why, asks Christian.
He drives carefully around them and waves – Ladies.
Even at this slow crawl we raise
dust clouds in our wake.
I don’t know, I say, shrugging.
Because we’re at war? It feels unprofessional.
Christian shrugs back.
So we hit an IED, he says.
The worst that happens
is you spill your coffee.
The White School House
This is what I learn from John in the ops room
on the morning of my day off – that dismounted patrols,
attempting to clear Taliban from among the rock walls
and grapevines west of Kandahar City, have been ambushed
near a school house.
The Taliban take three lives. Then they take one more
when an RPG slams into the side of an armoured carrier
on its way to the fight.
Later that day I learn that they are now in the midst
of falling back. Us – not them. It’s surreal
to be told of this. Taliban in their flip flops
causing our 21st century war machines
to run backwards. Back across the river,
is how John puts it, pushing pins into a map
somewhere south of Arghandab – To get us
the fuck out of there.
Firefight
Attacks in the background,
beyond the outskirts of the city
become part of the nightly clutter of noise.
Inside the muffled tapping
of donkey hooves headed home, or boys
shouting, running their kites,
are the undertones of violence –
the tock tock of a Kandahar City police patrol
being ambushed on the road.
Consistent or sporadic, the sound of gunfire
varies but is constant –
a sound that instinct recognizes.
It filters into the subconscious
for later reference,
when we head out the gate.
Working for the Coalition
The Afghan cooks arrive at camp before dawn
so they don’t get their heads cut off after work.
That can happen if they’re not careful.
Last year an interpreter went missing from the airfield.
He was nabbed and taken away, hands holding him by the hair,
his heels left to kick, dragging in the dirt,
his throat slit.
The Taliban filmed it.
You can buy those DVDs in the city markets.
Powerful stuff, intimidation.
At the camp gate I watch as the cooks come shuffling in
one by one, laughing, arms raised.
They arrive in secret, filter in through the alleys.
Start peeling potatoes early.
You don’t ask them where they live
or how big their families are or if the money’s worth the risk.
You learn the odd word and point to what you want.
Sometimes they look confused. Mostly they grin,
sizing up our tattoos.
It’s amazing the things you don’t stay amazed at. Afghan cooks
risk losing their heads to make rice with lamb and eggplant, something
none of us even like.
The Wrong Crowd
Before you were used as a Taliban sentry in these hills,
before you were a bone, blown apart
and lodged in the rock of this cave,
before the geckos found you and made nests of your skull,
you were not necessarily against the West.
Maybe you just fell into step with the wrong crowd, got recruited
from a refugee camp on the border, somehow hoping to be reborn
or maybe just make a buck. After all, the Madrassas
can only take so many
and your mother had other children to feed. You used to be
one of those
typical kids from the camp, wearing a donated sweater
with a leaf pattern
and too-short sleeves. Constantly wiping your nose on them. Kind
until you learned not to be.
Maybe I’m naive. Maybe I want you to be something more
than what people say you are – an opium-smoking
religious faggot. A product of the buggery
you must have asked for
in order to keep watch from this rock face. Not much liked,
but still used all the time, you took the grunting of old men
behind a pigeon-laced wall at noon.
At night your Taliban brothers would have made supper,
laughing at the fact that they wouldn’t be the first ones found
if the Americans stormed this place. It would be you –
up on the rock cliff, struggling to take a shit –
your eyes wet with yawning, your lungs remembering
what it was to run through camp with a plastic bag kite
in boots too big for your feet, the taste of smoke
from your mother’s cooking fires and all the things
you had to eat – before the bad choices –
naan bread with rice and chicken,
sometimes saffron.
Once you had a soccer ball.
And a name –
Abdul-Hanaan, slave
of the merciful.
Repatriation and a Rainstorm
Shot down over the northern edge of Kandahar, he is repatriated
back to Ontario on a day of thunderstorms. Air smelling of rain
and weedy-bottomed lakes. The pressure of clouds
like a steep descent.
Onlookers line the streets, waiting in the wind for his plane to land
in two-star Trenton, the leaves of each tree
turning inside out.
As the crowd stands hushed, looking
for that grey fin of plane to appear,
his family files out onto the tarmac, holding on to their hats,
each other
as though they are old.
I recall that photo of him, the one that gets taken
before you go overseas – the same day you get all your needles
and anti-malarial pills.
He was one of the few to have smiled.
You never think it’s going to be you.
Helicopter Crash
Crumpled, dusty, whirling into the camp wall,
a helicopter folds, burning like a metal deck of cards,
melting the seatbelts.
No way to get them out, the pilot and door gunner.
Inside the operations centre the order gets given –
start making the calls back home.
The officer in charge swallows hard, nods.
Poised on the last step of the stairs
he feels his own bones on fire,
thinks of his boys, eleven and thirteen, says –
It would be quick though.
It would be quick.
But I can tell from his face –
how he sees those flames
like a tableau, those hands
in a cockpit spasming for air –
that he’s not sure.
The General’s Briefing
The briefing room smells like a cottage
closed up in the dead of summer
or a second-hand shop in July.
We are sticking to our chairs, Sean and I,
listening to a fan that makes noise, but moves no air.
We have a few minutes to wait.
The General is at a ramp ceremony –
an American this time, and one of Hannah’s friends.
Died in her arms in Pashmul.
She told me this on the boardwalk at KAF,
out front of the Tim Horton’s trailer
and I said that I was sorry for her loss. Us Canadians
were holding steady at twenty-three. I wondered
what number it was for them. A shitty thing
to keep track of, even worse to lose it.
The door to the briefing room opens, closes. A thousand times
I twist the cap on a water bottle warm as a beach.
We go over our notes.
Outside the plane takes off and I start to feel sad.
Then the General brushes in and it’s all business.
He takes his seat, apologizing
for being late.
Casting the Net
Dirty, fecal, filled with old fruit skins and farts,
the canal breaks the city in half, one side full of bad guys –
quiet, watchful, arms clasped behind their backs
(no booms there – they don’t shit in their backyard)
and the other side, full of merchants, the maybe not-so-bad guys
where the booms go off instead, amid spice carts
and propane stands,
schoolgirls and us.
We’re getting ready to roll into this mess, paused, idling at the gate.
Inside our truck I turn my head against the heavy stink of air
trying to avoid that shit taste it leaves on the tongue.
A pair of leather gloves is broiling on the dashboard.
The burning outline of a sun, reflected on the ground
in puddles full of algae scum.
The radio crackles with reports of troops in contact, under fire
somewhere southwest of the city, where last night I watched
bonfires on the hill and wondered what they meant. Guessing
gets old when nothing in this desert is news. I ache to discern
something concrete, something definitive that I can use
to turn the tide of this thing.
Listening to troops locked in a firefight, the driver
looks out over the canal, the endless sprawl
of clay-coloured compounds.
He eyeballs an old Afghan man who is eyeballing us.
Says he wishes we had found a more reliable way
to tell the bad from the not-so bad,
the everyday man from the Taliban –
none of this one-by-one shit.
I imagine looking down on the city. I envision it
like a picture from the top. Us in the middle
spreading out our nets, draining these compounds like a sea
until all that’s left are Taliban, conveniently marked, caught
flopping on the bottom. The shock of air
hitting their gills like a jackboot.
When the gate goes up it yanks my thoughts
back into the truck. We roll out
past the old Afghan man – older than dirt the driver says
and we laugh, scanning the streets for suicide bombers –
that stillness,
that telltale lingering, those quiet signs of hate
like ripples in the water – bottom feeders
humping the muck for their dinner, hiding
deep among the everyday weeds.
Shades of Grey
Spores of metal are in this Afghan man like a blood smell,
his hand stump wrapped in gauze, his lower legs full of pins.
He keeps his face turned to the hospital wall
and I see his throat work hard at swallowing –
a dry well.
I hear he got injured when his plough struck a mine.
But the medics on call say – Don’t let him suck you in.
We see this all the time. He’s no farmer.
The man moves a blanket with his stump.
Runs his tongue around the metal
anaesthetic taste of his mouth.
He moans that he wants to be released.
Says, please – he has a family to care for
and his plough is what hit the mine.
But the medic, familiar with wounds, is unconvinced
and thinks he knows how most of this man’s hand has gone –
on a night with no moon, in hushed and hurried digging, emplacing
roadside bombs.
Incoming
A few of us stand outside in the compound, a moment spent
in quiet camaraderie, looking up, losing thought,
the fat moon a full cow bawling in the sky –
then something goes whizzing by
in the dark overhead, uncategorized.
I know what it is. Not fast enough though.
A high, falling whistle fills the night eye and my brain
is stuck open like the aperture of a pinhole camera
capturing each upside-down frame
a split second before impact, instinct
screaming at us to move, like bull riders
storing curse words in the mouth for later,
too late to be of use.
We are halfway to our rooms
when a dark, hurtling star drives us all to ground,
fumbling for sudden cover, the giant bang of its boom
leaving us open-mouthed in the dust.
Soft Things
Escaping the confines of the office, Todd takes a smoke break
out back where some Afghan workers are digging a ditch.
They squat behind their shovels and shade their eyes,
sucking on their scarves to keep moisture in their mouths.
Yesterday we lost two more guys to an IED –
not the fault of Afghans in general, but these ones
keep their distance, knowing we’re angry enough
to blame them anyway.
Plus it’
s hot. And we’re all getting on each other’s nerves.
When Todd returns he lets the screen door bang behind him.
It’s the third time that day and Sean sighs, rolling his eyes.
Todd announces that he’s seen a kitten outside – an event –
because things here don’t thrive.
My roommate runs, clapping her hands for something soft.
She can’t wait to hold it. Her mouth is an Ohhhhh.
All week she has been alone in her head, tossing at night,
nervous and afraid to dream. Afraid the next IED
will be hers.
She hurries outside and the screen door slams.
Don’t forget your purse, Todd jokes.
I watch his shoulders go up and down.
There is a pause in the sound of shovels
ringing against the rocks in the dirt
as the Afghans stop to watch.
Todd says, laughing –
Guess I should have told her it was dead.
Through the screen door I see
her hands fall, her face
go the colour of Vanilla Bean body cream.
An Awning of Birds
Waiting for a convoy to come in,
an Afghan policeman with his AK slung,
hot hush of slippers on his feet, beckons me
to where guards gather for yogurt
in the garden beneath a tree, alive
with little brown sparrows, an awning of birds.
He wants to show me their latest prize –
a car his men have just towed in, a white Saracha,
bullet-holed, its windows broken,
the driver side door streaked with blood.
Air fresheners from Iran hang, slowly
turning above the dash.
This bomber they shot – before he went off.
I wish I could ask how they knew
to be so sure – if it was just luck or something else,
something in the way he moved behind the wheel
that lacked peace. The forehead sweat, the glimpse
of gritted teeth.
Across the city an echo reverberates in the air
like the rumbling of an earthquake, dispelling
the men from their afternoon shade. Disturbed,
Masham Means Evening Page 2
