These Heroic, Happy Dead

by Luke Mogelson

  The following afternoon, the CO received confirmation that the soonest the Afghan Air Force could make available a chopper for Dahana was in four days.

  —

  Before us, a Polish unit had the district. When we’d reached the outpost we’d found them in a state of siege. Karzowsky, Boyle, and I arrived with the advance party, a month ahead of the rest of the company, in the dead of winter. As our helo approached the HLZ, a chaotic gaggle of Poles came scrambling down the hill, slipping and sliding in the snow, inexplicably eager to help us with our gear. Later, we learned that the Wojsko Polskie awarded its soldiers additional hazardous-duty pay each time they ventured beyond the wire, and that the landing zone, though safely ensconced behind double-stacked bastions, technically qualified as such.

  The kapitan, unkempt and possibly hungover, assured Karzowsky and Boyle that his men had been conducting presence patrols every day since day one. But when we met with the Afghans, Mustafa told us this was false, no Pole had set foot outside the base in months. Despite his effusion—he’d been stuck on that outpost with the indolent and under-resourced Wojsko for nearly a year, and he spoke now with the fluent urgency of someone who could finally be heard: how many more Americans were coming? what kinds of weapons were they bringing? would Dahana at last get the armored vehicles it needed? bomb technicians? air?—what I remember best about that initial conversation is that for most of it, as he talked and I translated, Mustafa never looked at me. Not until Karzowsky and Boyle stood to leave did the lieutenant abruptly turn and say, “And you? Where are you from?”

  I hesitated. “I was born in Kabul.”

  “When did you leave?”

  “When I was three.”

  Mustafa nodded as if that explained it. “Why did you come back?” he asked.

  I was about to say, Because this is my country or Because this is my homeland—something like that. I was trying to decide what phrasing might be most appropriate when a rough voice behind me remarked, “What he means is, How much are they paying you?”

  I turned and discovered several Afghan soldiers crowded in the doorway. They were grinning in an amused way; I realized they’d been there the entire time. In the middle of them stood the pock-faced sergeant. “Well?” he said. “How much did they have to give you to get you to come back?”

  Mustafa rose and offered his hand to Boyle and Karzowsky. “The Americans are here now,” he told the sergeant. “Maybe things will be different.”

  —

  For a while, anyway, things were. When the rest of the company joined us, the CO promptly established an operations tempo that afforded Mustafa and his men ample opportunity to exercise the violence—and then some—so long frustrated by the risk-averse kapitan. Back then, before the wall went up, I visited often with the lieutenant. He was friendlier than the enlisted soldiers, most of whom withheld from me the camaraderie they shared with one another as well as the deference they showed the Americans. Also, Mustafa and I soon discovered that we had something in common. Both of our fathers had been killed by the Communists.

  Mustafa’s father had lost his right leg to a mine while fighting Soviet forces in Parwan. When Mustafa was a boy, the flesh over his father’s stump suppurated and became infected; he subsequently died of sepsis. Around the same time, my father, a professor at Kabul University, was arrested and sent to Pul-e-Charkhi Prison. We don’t know how he died. Probably, he was tortured first. In those days, electrocution was popular, and ultimately, one imagines, he was made to lie facedown, shot in the back of the head, and buried in a mass grave.

  My family fled to America shortly after. Mustafa’s, of course, stayed. Mustafa’s mother kept her dead husband’s prosthesis in their house, propped upright against a wall, surrounded by candles, photographs, and fake flowers. Growing up, Mustafa told me, he regularly measured his own limb against it. When he judged that they were equal, he joined the army.

  —

  The Poles had been receiving diesel via C-130. It had made you feel just how far away you were: those black barrels floating down, hitting the snow, sinking from view—their diaphanous, billowing chutes collapsing over them, enormous jellyfish landing on an ocean floor. The CO put an end to the airdrops, arranging instead for helicopters to sling in rubber bladders, suspended from metal cables, directly onto the HLZ. It was a regrettable coincidence that one such fuel delivery had been scheduled for the day after Rahim died; it was a potential provocation that a mail drop also had.

  When that second bird touched down, its thumping blades raised a moon-dust pall so thick and high it erased the sun. Crewmen in flight suits and white-skull face masks passed USPS boxes to a line of happy soldiers. After the bird was gone the rotor wash, like a foul miasma, persisted in the air; our ears kept ringing with its metal din.

  “You think they noticed?” Boyle said.

  One of the boxes, as usual, was for me. Inside was a pair of Gortex socks, some DVDs, and a bar of chocolate that had melted and congealed. A note, in English, asked when I would be coming home.

  —

  For the next three days, the CO banned visits to the Afghans. “Dudes are understandably emotional,” he explained after Boyle and Karzowsky briefed him on the pock-faced sergeant. “And we’re too close to home to let something retarded happen.”

  The night before the Afghan chopper arrived, I slipped out of my hooch, stole lightly past the tactical-operations center, and picked my way through the dark to the door in the wall. I entered the code. I stepped through.

  The platoon was eating dinner, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the concrete floor around a rectangular cut of patterned nylon. Mustafa greeted me and made a space. One of the younger soldiers flung over a disk of day-old naan, and another pushed in my direction the communal dishes of brown rice, potatoes, and diced okra cooked in oil. I gave Mustafa the chocolate and the socks.

  “From America?” he said with interest or irony, I could not tell which. He unwrapped the foil and passed the chocolate to the soldier beside him, who broke off a piece and passed it to the soldier beside him. The socks Mustafa tossed to the pock-faced sergeant. The sergeant immediately stripped off his green Army-issue pair, which were full of holes, and put on the Gortex ones. He extended a foot and wiggled his toes. He seemed satisfied, and when he opened his mouth to speak I almost believed that he would thank me.

  “This is what your helicopters brought?” he said. “Chocolate and socks?”

  After dinner, Mustafa walked me into the hall, and then down the hall into the hot night. I thought he would accompany me to the door, but instead he said, “Come,” and headed off across the lot. I followed him to the Hiluxes.

  “We kept him inside until he started to stink,” Mustafa said, reaching into a truck bed and unzipping the bag our medics had given him.

  Rahim had begun to bloat and putrefy. His eyes bulged cartoonishly, his open mouth was filled with gray, swollen tongue. I had to pull my shirt above my nose.

  Mustafa seemed unbothered by the smell. He held the bag open for a long time. Longer than was necessary.

  —

  Soon after that we went home. The company returned together to their base, and I returned, alone, to my apartment. All of my aunts and uncles wanted to know about Kabul. Was it true about the traffic? The Western-style restaurants? The compounds and the blast wall? When I told them that I hadn’t been to Kabul, they became confused and asked, “Where were you, then?” When I told them about Dahana, they became more confused and asked, “Why?”

  About a month after we got back I received an email from Major Karzowsky—an invitation to an awards ceremony at the company’s home station. I packed a suitcase and booked a few nights in a motel room just outside the base. I was very pleased that the major had thought of me; I’d been growing anxious to spend some time with my old friends.

  It was a four-hour drive through fragrant sunshine, wooded hills. The base had the pristine, landscaped feel of a college campus. Following a Xeroxed copy of a h
and-drawn map, I arrived at a large white tent erected in a blooming flower garden. The unit was already in formation, the soldiers kitted out in creased slacks, gold-buttoned jackets, and black berets. I had difficulty recognizing some of them. Their faces were free of moon dust and fear.

  I took a seat among the other civilians, the proud wives and parents, and we watched as the ribbons and the medals were bestowed. When it came time to honor the men who had died in Dahana, the CO gave a speech. He looked so much the hero in that getup, it was like he’d never had a choice. He talked about sacrifice, and soon after that it was over. People were getting up, hugging one another, leaving.

  I looked around with a feeling of panic and was relieved to spot Major Karzowsky coming my way. He seemed surprised to see me.

  “You actually came,” he said.

  “Of course. Where’s Boyle?”

  “Boyle?” Karzowsky glanced at a woman standing near us, rooting in her bag for Kleenex. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

  We followed a footpath that paralleled a newly asphalted road through sprawling lawns. Karzowsky explained that Sergeant Boyle had been demoted because of an “altercation” with his wife; the MPs had had to get involved. Then he’d gone and volunteered to fill a slot in a deploying unit—most likely, he was back over there by now.

  Karzowsky told me about his new desk job and how much he missed being out with the grunts. I told him about the car I’d bought. Tractor mowers turned slow, broad circles, and the air was heady with cut grass. When, finally, I asked whether he had any news from Dahana, about Mustafa and the platoon, Karzowsky shook his head.

  “Mustafa…” he said as if it were all so long ago only the name survived. “Remember how much he loved that hat I got him?”

  “So you haven’t heard anything?” I said.

  Karzowsky winced, pained or annoyed, as if his knees were acting up again. I tasted bile in my mouth. I waited for the major to tell me what had happened. I waited and waited and then, as I waited, I realized I didn’t need to be told.

  On our way back, a squad of fresh recruits came jogging up the way. Their heads were just shaved, cheeks flushed, and their sergeant ran alongside them, calling out a cadence that they echoed in unison, with gusto. Before Karzowsky and I reached the tent full of decorated veterans and their loved ones, I had time for one more realization. I realized I’d been a fool to pack that suitcase and book that motel room. There wasn’t going to be any big reunion.

  I was living in the armory on Lexington Avenue. First Sergeant Diaz had given me the keys. I slept on a cot in the medical-supply closet. “Two weeks, max,” I’d told Diaz. But as the months went by, I kept postponing a reunion with my wife. I was comfortable where I was. The armory took up an entire city block. There were secret passageways, subterranean firing ranges, a gym with an elliptical. At night, if drunk, I connected to a bag of saline. I always woke up hydrated. I never had a hangover.

  It was peacetime, more or less. It was for us, the New York national guard, at least. Between drills, I worked as a paramedic for a hospital in Queens. My partner on the ambulance, Karen, had applied to the police academy. She wanted to be a detective. This, for me, was troublesome: as a rule, from every residence we visited, I took stuff. Not valuable stuff. Small stuff. A spoon, say, or a refrigerator magnet. I’d never been caught. Still, ever since she sat for the civil-service exam, Karen had been acting leery. Once, while checking for prescriptions in a diabetic man’s bathroom, I came across a plastic hand mirror, pink with black polka dots. I was about to shove it down my pants when I glimpsed Karen in its glass. (I brought it to my face, scrutinizing nose hairs.)

  Often, when I got back to midtown, Diaz would still be there. Most nights, I’d find him in his office, updating his conspiracy blog. “Take a look at this, Papadopoulos,” he’d say, turning his laptop around to show me a 3-D engineering schematic of Two World Trade Center, mid-collapse, with complex mathematical equations and swooping arrows indicating various structural details. “Huh,” I’d say. Then we’d head to a bar on Third Avenue. Diaz, in his uniform, with his limp, almost always met a woman. The limp was gold. As the woman watched Diaz hobble back to us with drinks, sloshing gin and tonic on the floor, I’d say, “Fucking Iraq.” She’d seldom ask me to elaborate. If she did, I wouldn’t tell her how, as a squad leader, Diaz contracted a bacterial infection while masturbating in a Port-a-John; how the infection spread up his urethra, into his testicles; how that made him lurch, causing a herniated disk, which resulted in sciatica.

  Instead, I’d say, “We lost a lot of good men over there.” Which happened to be true.

  If it had been up to Diaz, he’d have let me move my flat screen and futon into the supply closet. The problem was the new CO. After shepherding the unit through 9/11, Baghdad, and Afghanistan, our old CO, Captain Harris, had recently been promoted to brigade staff, in Syracuse. His replacement, Captain Finkbiner, was a former marine determined to show us guardsmen how a real infantry company did things. Finkbiner had the kind of face a shaved head did not flatter; the effect was less soldier, more chemo. Shortly after he assumed command, he summoned me to his office, and I had the momentary notion—seeing him there in Captain Harris’s chair, behind Captain Harris’s desk, wearing Captain Harris’s rank—that he was a terminal case whose Make-a-Wish had been to be Captain Harris.

  “Papadopoulos,” he said. “What is that?”

  “My name,” I said.

  “Cute,” Finkbiner said. “So now I know who the joker is. The jackass. The clown.”

  There were no pictures of Mrs. Finkbiner on the desk, no baby Finkbiners. The sole decoration was a large mammalian jawbone, like a boomerang with teeth. I barely glanced at it. With a weary sigh, as if under pressure to share a story he’d rather have kept private, Finkbiner said, “All right, Jesus, OK,” and proceeded to explain that on his last tour in Helmand Province he’d been leading a patrol when a camel walked out from the trees. Twisting its neck, the animal regarded the marines. Then it turned and sauntered toward them. It was about halfway to Finkbiner when, boom, no more camel.

  “Understand, clown?”

  I smiled politely. In fact, I hadn’t really been listening. My own thoughts wanted attending. Just what was the age limit for those wishes, anyway? Were there people out there, afflicted people, who’d missed the cutoff by a week? A day?

  It was something someone should look into.

  —

  There was an old Polish lady, Mrs. Olenski, who called 911 every Wednesday. She usually called during Tour Two, my and Karen’s shift. I looked forward to Wednesdays: first, because Mrs. Olenski always offered me oatmeal-raisin cookies; second, because she was extremely rude to Karen. The ritual started when her husband died. They’d been married for more than fifty years, no children. After Mr. Olenski went, the empty, silent apartment began to harrow Mrs. Olenski. Only the television helped. She left it on 24/7, full volume; it made no difference what channel or program. It made no difference because Mrs. Olenski hated television. The advertisements, the laughter—ridiculous. Every time we showed up, she switched it off, massaged her temples with her knotty finger bones, and muttered, “Thank God.” Then, as soon as we were out the door, on it went again.

  Her standard complaint was chest pain. I’d sit her on the gray suede couch, pull up the ottoman, and go through the motions: take her pulse and blood pressure, conduct a thorough medical history, provide oxygen. Meanwhile, Karen would stand off to the side, refusing to assist. Her feeling was that Mrs. Olenski abused the system, exploited city resources, and that I, by humoring her and eating her cookies, was complicit. Alive to Karen’s judgment, Mrs. Olenski directed all her old-lady kindnesses to me, sometimes ignoring Karen altogether, other times behaving toward her with overt hostility. Once, while Velcroing the BP cuff around her arm (on that arm, you had to use the pediatric cuff), I noticed her finger writing something on the couch cushion, smoothing down the nap. For a moment, I thought that she’d suffered a str
oke and wanted to convey the fact to me. I checked her face for droop. When I looked back at the message, it read “whor.”

  Later, in the bus, Karen said, “You think you’re being a good person, but you’re not. What you’re being is afraid. You’re afraid that’s you.”

  She was in the driver’s seat, one hand draped on the wheel, the other gloved by a bag of jalapeño Combos. Someday, she was going to make a fine detective.

  “You should lay off the Combos,” I said.

  “Don’t cut my leathers,” Karen said.

  Don’t cut my leathers. Years before, we’d responded to a motor-vehicle accident on the BQE. Law enforcement had cordoned off a lane. A snaking peel of tread led to a motorcycle wedged beneath the guardrail. A man writhed in a slick of blood. Somehow he’d managed to slide, rather than tumble, over the asphalt. Both buttocks were gone. While Karen prepped the stretcher and applied the collar, I got out my trauma shears. Until then, the guy had been only semiconscious, murmuring, in a daze, “My ass, man, my fucking ass.” Soon as I squeezed the scissors, though, he started, looked back at me, and said it.

  “Don’t cut my leathers.”

  After that, all the paramedics on Tour Two, and most of the nurses in the ER, adopted the phrase. Its meaning was elastic. I often invoked it when the supervisor made us pull a double. Other instances included the time we had to extricate an unresponsive three-hundred-pounder from his bathtub, then found the elevator broken; when a girl who’d stuck a Beretta in her mouth and pulled the trigger, her tongue stud having deflected the bullet straight down through the bottom of her chin, asked us were we angels; and when Karen, after a gas explosion at a textile factory, snuck up behind me, whispered in my ear, “I’m keeping an eye on you,” and, actually, had an eye on me, on my shoulder, the nerve dangling like spaghetti. Some occasions, I didn’t say it but I thought it. Take, for example, the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund requesting documentation of my alleged pulmonary disease, my wife suggesting I have a think about our marriage, or Finkbiner inviting me, with great ceremony, to touch his lucky camel jaw. Take me recalling all the homes I’d visited, the misery inside them, the knickknacks I’d lifted.