“An hour ago on Route Sixteen?” The man shook his head. “Wasn’t us.”
Steve shrugged. “Says he saw it.”
The man turned to my father. “Get a plate number?”
My father had that look on his face. I knew that anything could happen. He said, “My son loved that dog.”
Steve didn’t seem to hear. He was preoccupied with the backhoe, which had just dropped its last bucket of gravel into the hauler. He signaled to the driver, who put the hauler in gear and began the steep climb up out of the quarry.
The man in the blue hardhat said, “Let’s say you’re right. You’re not. But let’s just say. What do you want? What did you come here hoping to get?”
My father started to say something but stopped. The two men waited. Even Steve seemed interested now. It was an interesting question.
I was sure that my father would berate or threaten them, spit at them, hit them, murder them. Any of that would have surprised me less than what he did do, which was mutter something I couldn’t hear and get back in the truck.
George’s was the only hardware store in town. We had to drive all the way to Sacramento to buy a shovel.
—
This all happened in the summer of 2001. I saw my father one more time, and then I never saw him again. It was December, a few weeks after he’d re-enlisted. I’d had a feeling he was going to do it. He was still living up there in the orchard country, but to no purpose. He was unemployed; he’d defaulted on his mortgage; my mother had forbidden future visits. On the phone he often sounded drunk.
That changed after the attack. The attack revitalized my father. As soon as it looked like there would be a war, war was all he talked about.
“Comes a point you can’t keep pretending the world isn’t what it is,” he told me on the phone. “Sure, maybe Linda can, Hank can. But some of us know better. Some of us don’t have that luxury.”
We met at a Denny’s, near the onramp to the freeway. My mother and Hank Rubin waited in the Jeep. (“We’ll be right here, if you need us,” Hank said.) My hand had healed. When I spread it on the counter to show him the scar, my father made as if to touch it. Then he stopped himself, smiled, and began talking excitedly about Fort Bragg. That was the base in North Carolina he was bound for, the same one he’d been stationed at when he deployed for Desert Storm. I listened with amazement. It was true: my father was going back. Not just back to Bragg and the army and the war, but back to the life he had lived before he met my mother, and before I was born.
He propped his elbows on the counter and held his sandwich in front of him. “I’m gonna take you somewhere when you come visit me,” he said. “A restaurant. You go in there and it’s Joes wall to wall, not a civilian in the place. They got a dish there. This dish is the best dish you’ve ever tasted.”
“What is it?”
“The cook’s been making it his whole life. His father made it before him—his father before him.”
“What is it?”
“First and only time I’ve gone into a kitchen to pay my compliments. I was just a private, fresh out of basic. ‘Keith, I would like to shake your hand.’ That’s what I said when I went into the kitchen. ‘Keith, I would like to shake your hand.’ ”
“Who’s Keith?”
“I thought it was the cook. That’s what the place is called—Keith’s.” My father took a bite of sandwich, chewed, swallowed. He sipped his Coke. “Of course, Keith was the grandfather, the original cook. This cook’s name was Clyde. Keith’s grandson.”
“So what’s this dish?”
“Good old Clyde,” my father said.
I swiveled on my stool to face him.
He smiled. “Sea bass,” he said.
“Sea bass.”
“You just wait,” my father said.
The new guidance was: no more air.
No more planes or helos. No more drones. No more Hellfire missiles, Hydra rockets, chain guns. No more evacs. No more rescue.
I was interpreting for Major Karzowsky and Sergeant First Class Boyle, who sat on the barracks floor across from Lieutenant Mustafa. The platters of rice and stewed goat had been cleared away; one of Mustafa’s boys had brought in a plastic tray with a thermos, glasses, individually wrapped caramels, and a box of sugar cubes. The glasses, like everything else in Dahana, were glazed with an opaque film—what the Americans called “moon dust.” Mustafa rinsed them by swishing a finger of hot tea in one, pouring it to the next. Meanwhile, Karzowsky and Boyle admired the artificial flower arrangement that sat on the metal filing cabinet beside Mustafa’s cot. The filing cabinet was a holdover from when the barracks was not yet a barracks, from when the war had not yet reached Dahana. Mustafa had tipped it onto its side to serve as a kind of low-slung buffet. The flowers he had confiscated on patrol. Every plastic petal was a different color; at the end of each plastic filament an LED light pulsed.
“Do they want sugar?” Mustafa asked.
“Do you want sugar?” I asked.
Boyle took a cube and popped it in his mouth. He sipped his tea. That was how the sergeant ate: inserting one item at a time—a bit of mashed potatoes, say, and then, separately, a bit of gravy—rather than mix them on his plate. About this, Boyle was fastidious. The comingling of foods repulsed him.
After a polite attempt to sit cross-legged, Major Karzowsky had reclined on an elbow, feet out. He regarded his stiff, rheumatic legs the same way he regarded all disappointing things: as if they were his problem, not his fault.
“He doesn’t look too concerned,” Karzowsky said. “It were me, I’d be concerned.”
Mustafa had produced a wrinkled pack of cigarettes, removed one, twisted off its filter, and drawn it across his tongue. He held the cigarette vertically, like a rose.
“That’s his way,” Boyle observed.
“What do you want me to tell them?” I asked Mustafa.
The lieutenant unplugged the flowers. Then he extinguished his cigarette, careful to preserve the unsmoked remainder, which he returned to the pack.
“Tell them their tea is getting cold.”
—
Once, early in the deployment, back when the Americans and Afghans were still conducting joint patrols, we came under attack from a lone compound in a field. The Americans called for air; presently, two Kiowas appeared. The show was brief and loud and bright. Each missile sounded like a jet plane taking off. When we went to view the damage we found that the walls of the compound enclosed a small pomegranate orchard. Several of the trees were on fire. A motorcycle leaned on its kickstand beside a stack of poppy stalks. Chickens ran amok. There were two cows, and the front legs of one were a gruesome combination of mangled and gone; it was lowing insanely, using its hindquarters to push its face across the dirt. The other cow, or calf really, was still tethered by its rear ankle to an iron stake. The calf jerked against that tether with such adrenalized power it looked certain that something—the tether, stake, or ankle—would have to break.
I noticed, in the orchard, some of the Americans assembled by a tree. As I approached I heard laughter. The man sat in the leaves, his back against the trunk. A scrap of shrapnel had hit him in the brow. The crown of his skull had been sliced off. A flat surface remained that resembled one of those anatomical models showing a cross section of brain. The reason the soldiers were laughing was that someone had stuck a lit cigarette in his mouth, adding to the impression that, minus his exposed cerebrum, the man was just a man.
It looked funny, and I admit I laughed as well. I was still laughing when I realized that Lieutenant Mustafa had joined us. He stared right at me until I literally hung my head. Then he walked up to the dead farmer or Talib, plucked the cigarette from his lips, and ground it under his boot.
Thereafter, whenever Mustafa smoked in front of me—prolonging the elaborate ceremony: twisting away the filter, drawing the cigarette across his tongue, and holding it between us, vertically, like a rose—I understood that it was meant as a reminder, a rebuk
e.
—
A few nights after our meeting with Mustafa, Karzowsky suggested that I return to the Afghan barracks alone, to try to get a read on their morale. The sun was low. From the foot of the rise the company occupied, the country extended like an alien plateau. I walked down the hill, past the motor pool and HLZ, to the long wall of HESCO draped with concertina wire. The wall divided the outpost into roughly equal halves; the halves were linked by a heavy metal door; the door had a keypad with a preprogrammed code. All of this had been installed midway through our tour, during a nationwide rash of American fatalities at the hands of local forces. The guidance had come down, followed by the engineers, bulldozers, and backhoes.
I entered the code. Across the barren lot scorched by old burn piles, the barracks were still dark; the Afghans had not yet started up their generator. From the countless discussions about fuel that I had translated, I knew that Mustafa, ever since the Americans had cut him off, had been limiting his men to an hour of electricity each night.
The platoon garrisoned in an old USAID building constructed during the early, optimistic years to accommodate district-level bureaucrats. There was even a plaque, weathered and nearly illegible, something about “democracy…sustainability.” The bureaucrats had never made it to Dahana, and now sandbags filled the windows, divots from high-caliber projectiles pocked the walls, the tables had been turned into beds, the chairs, desks, and bookcases used as kindling. At the entrance to the office in which the soldiers slept a door hung slantwise from a single twisted hinge. Black combat boots, stuffed with dirty socks, lined the hall.
In the center of the room a kerosene lantern sat on a stack of ammo boxes, hissing light. Rifles hung on slings from protruding rebar. The platoon was crowded on a plastic mat. Some were standing and others kneeling and others bowing. The soldiers with caps had turned them backwards. I recognized the orange-and-white one, with the Longhorns logo, that Karzowsky had brought back for Mustafa from his leave in Texas. The cuffs of Mustafa’s fatigues were rolled above his ankles, and his bare feet glistened with the well water that he’d used for his ablutions.
I watched them for a while. Then I snuck back to my side of the base.
—
That night in the D-FAC—a polymer shelter ventilated by gigantic fans, with neon lights and zippered exits, like the decontamination tent at the site of a biochem catastrophe—the CO demanded an accounting. It was Friday, lobster day, and yet each recessed division of Sergeant Boyle’s tray contained a wet heap of peas.
“Peas,” the CO said.
Boyle shrugged, and Karzowsky explained on his behalf that the sergeant found unpalatable the notion of seafood in a desert.
“Unpalatable,” said the CO. “The notion.” He wagged his head. “Fucking Boyle.”
“What I tell him,” Karzowsky said, “is a lobster has as much business here as the rest of us.” The major gestured toward a private sitting at a nearby table. “He’s Puerto Rican.”
“Dominican, sir,” the private said.
“He ask you?” Boyle said.
“No, Sergeant.”
The CO was twisting a paper napkin around his fingers, one at a time, like he was getting off a ring from each. He frowned at me. “Muslims,” he said. “They eat lobster?”
“Roo’s no Muslim,” Boyle said.
“You’re thinking pigs,” I said.
“Imagine?” said Boyle. “I’d sooner give up fucking.” The moment he made the claim, he seemed to doubt it. “Now, hold on,” he said. “That includes bacon—no bacon, either, right?”
“Got your turkey bacon,” Karzowsky said.
“Imagine?” said Boyle.
“OK,” said the CO, “so lobster they eat.”
“I would,” Boyle said. “I’d give up fucking.”
“Be honest, now,” said Karzowsky.
“I think I am,” Boyle said. “Jesus, I am.”
“Pork over porking?” the CO said. “That’s what you’re trying to tell us here?”
Boyle rubbed his temples, mulling. “We’re talking I’m still married?”
The private at the other table smiled.
“Something funny?” Boyle said.
“No, Sergeant.”
“Puerto Rico’s laughing at my wife.”
“If you’re not Muslim,” the CO asked me, “what are you?”
“Confused,” Boyle said.
“Leave Roo alone,” said Karzowsky.
“But your parents,” the CO said, “they’re Muslim?”
“They were,” I said.
—
Months ago, we’d discovered a large shed in the back of someone’s house, the door chained and padlocked. We were sure it was a cache. But inside, instead of HME or Dragunovs, we found an antique dentist’s chair, wood-framed, with velvet upholstery and a porcelain cuspidor. Shelves held pill bottles whose labels were too faded to read, dusty instruments, and several glass jars containing organic specimens of ambiguous provenance suspended in formaldehyde. Arrayed on a workbench were rusty scalpels and forceps, unsheathed hypodermic needles the size of bellows and turkey basters. Old blood on it all.
After facilitating an interrogation of the property owner—a “doctor,” he explained, whose training had consisted of a month-long veterinary course in Pakistan some decades ago—I passed by the shed a second time and glimpsed something odd. A soldier, one of ours, was sitting in the chair. I knew him. He was a recovering crank addict from Georgia, Alabama, or somewhere, and he suffered from such horrific meth-mouth it looked as if he’d downed a shot of nitric acid and chased it with a pint of ink: all that remained were black nubs and splintery fangs clinging like a cancer to his gray, corroded gums. This soldier—I forget his name—was famous in the unit. He’d enlisted for the dental plan, so that he could get a set of teeth.
I stood there in the doorway watching him—he gripped the armrests of the chair, as if braced against the vision of his orthodontic future—and I was overcome with envy. Here was another one who knew what he was fighting for.
—
The morning after our discussion in the D-FAC, Boyle woke me just past sunup, banging on the door of my plywood hooch. I followed him to the tactical-operations center, a former clinic or courthouse that now housed a bank of monitors, like the flat-screen section in a Best Buy, displaying infrared surveillance feed from the tower, blimp, and drone. The CO, still wearing his workout gear—sneakers and a T-shirt tucked into aggressively short black trunks—was pouring coffee from an electric percolator into an insulated mug. “Get Mustafa on the radio, Roo,” he told me, lifting his foot onto the seat of a pleather office chair, a kind of lunge position that hitched his shorts even farther up the thigh.
I glanced around for Major Karzowsky and found him leaning against the wall, a tumorlike chaw bulging in his cheek and in his fist a plastic water bottle half-filled with honey-colored froth.
“Platoon’s gone,” Karzowsky explained.
“Gone?” I said.
“Not fucking here,” the CO said.
When I got hold of the lieutenant I could hear the rocks under his boots, the equipment on his ammo vest clanging as he walked.
“Where are you?” I said.
“On patrol,” Mustafa said.
“Where?” I said.
For several seconds, there was static. Then Mustafa said, “We’re busy, Roohullah,” and did not answer the radio again.
—
It was about an hour later that they were ambushed. We could hear it from the outpost: faint reports from one of the insurgent-held villages to the east. Small arms at first—then rockets, machine guns, a recoilless rifle, and mortars. Eventually, out came the Dushka. When Major Karzowsky recognized its murderous kaboom, he squeezed his spitter bottle, making sharp crackling noises not unlike the distant gunfire.
“Guess they found what they were looking for,” Sergeant Boyle said.
They did not return to base until sometime after dusk. They used
their own entry-control point and went directly to their barracks. By the time Karzowsky, Boyle, and I got over there, most of the platoon was gathered at the well. A bearded soldier with a checkered scarf hauled a rope. At its end was a rubber bucket. The soldier used the bucket to fill several plastic watering cans. His comrades held aloft the cans, shut their eyes, and tipped the water straight onto their faces. They all stopped what they were doing to watch us cross the lot.
We found Mustafa with his NCOs, in the dim sun, amid a fleet of decommissioned Hiluxes. They formed a tight circle between the trucks. As we drew near, two of the sergeants moved aside to let us see. The dead man lay atop an improvised litter, tree branches run through the sleeves of uniform tops. His gut was an open cavity of gleaming pulp. I recognized him as a young private named Rahim.
Mustafa did not acknowledge us. Instead it was one of the sergeants who addressed me. “He has to go to Gardez,” he said. “From Gardez, Headquarters will take him to his family in Jalalabad. Can a helicopter come tomorrow?”
The sergeant was an older, pock-faced mujahid.
I looked to Mustafa.
“Translate!” the sergeant said.
After I had interpreted the request, Karzowsky removed his ballistic sunglasses and clipped them on his collar. In this circumstance, he said, and in accordance with the previously elucidated guidance, the Afghans would likely be asked to bring their own assets to bear. Mustafa would need to submit an application for a helo evac to Brigade; Brigade would be required to obtain approval from Corps; Corps would have to contact the Ministry of Defense. Just articulating the process seemed to weary the major.
“This will take days,” the pock-faced sergeant said.
“Why is he talking?” Boyle said.
“He should be buried soon,” I said. I added, “It’s a Muslim thing.”
Karzowsky sighed. “Tell them we will relay those concerns.”
“It’s not up to them,” I told Mustafa.
The sergeant was about to protest, but Mustafa restrained him by reaching out and taking his hand. As usual, Karzowsky and Boyle shifted uncomfortably; I too was unsettled. Why, instead of reproaching this man, his subordinate, was Mustafa placating him? Only later, in my hooch, did I realize that it must not have been easy for the lieutenant: persuading his men to follow him, without Americans or air, to that village in the east. No doubt the NCOs had opposed it. How had Mustafa prevailed on them? What had he said that night that I spied on the platoon praying together in their barracks? Whatever it was—whatever authority Mustafa had invoked or promises he might have made or point he’d been trying to prove—all of that was over now, as over as the disemboweled Rahim.
These Heroic, Happy Dead Page 4
