Finding Sgt. Kent

by Raymond Hutson

  It would require a platoon, maybe an entire company, to do this mission justice.

  I drank one of the water bottles while I sat, pack under my arm, wondering what kind of impact it might have on Cheryl if I didn’t come back, slipped over an edge, or got eaten; how unfair to put that burden on her and how fucking arrogant to announce I was going to kill a cat, just march on up here by myself, when every operation I’d been on in the last eight years was really a choreographed effort of several hundred people. What the fuck was I thinking? That I could find the cat, paint him with a laser and radio some Apache pilot the position?

  The sun got hotter and the song played on in my head.

  –––

  Just after sunset I spotted motion on the crest of a smooth rock face about 600 yards away, a dun speck bobbing, swaying in the fading light. I sat and raised the rifle, sling triangle-tight against my elbow, elbow on knee, peered through the scope and eased off the safety. It was a cat, maybe the cat, walking leisurely, tail swinging side to side, narrow hips left to right, across the vertical axis. Too narrow. I couldn’t take a shot; a fifty-fifty chance I’d miss. I gently rotated the zoom, all the way up to 9x, but it was still too narrow. The wind was in my face and the cat hadn’t smelled me.

  It turned sideways and stood for a moment, holding something in its mouth, something it had killed. I let out some of my breath, held, set the crosshairs on the shoulder and squeezed. The recoil rocked me, but a second later the cat went airborne, the object in its mouth flung free, and it was gone. I worked the bolt, chambered another round and stood. My ears rang; I hadn’t thought to put on the protectors. No sign of the cat, the flash of my muzzle still a blue image central in my vision. I moved quickly, crouched instinctively for return fire, and searched the horizon for some irregularity. I crossed one large crag, leapt a small fissure, crossed another, each mass of stone pitched, leaning into the surface, ankles turned to stay upright, deaf to the sound of my own footsteps. The sky grew impermeable, colors fading, night falling fast. In another hundred feet stood a clump of pines, dwarfed and twisted horizontal by the wind. I side-stepped between them, needles across my eyes. Granite crumbled beneath my weight, and I very nearly went over a ledge, fifty or sixty feet down. I backed up, seized a pine branch, clicked on my flashlight and looked around. About fifteen feet from a drop-off on two sides, I’d hiked to the corner of a plateau and would need to backtrack an unknown distance to the east to get across—if I could cross at all. It was just too dark without night vision. And it occurred to me: The cat has night vision.

  The pines rose in a tangle against the darkening sky, one of them splitting its branches like an upturned hand to the heavens. I climbed up into the palm of that hand, swung my pack under my head, and watched the stars appear slowly through the stratosphere.

  I ate a salted nut roll and drank but tried to leave at least half of the Camelbak for the sunrise. It wouldn’t take long to find the cat’s body, just had to be able to see where I was going. I pulled the last sandwich out of my pocket and ate half, and thought of Cheryl preparing it the previous morning, her touch when she gave it to me.

  The wind died, and after many changes of position I fell asleep. Shortly after midnight I opened my eyes and the sky had clouded over, the moon obscured by a high ceiling, my hand barely visible. The rocks below, where they dropped off, moved. Something dark grew larger, rising over the edge of the stone, serpentine and silent. I reached for the rifle and it was gone, left by the base of the tree maybe. How stupid was that? And then it moved into a shaft of light, the moon returned, and it was the cat, beneath my tree, carrying something in its mouth. It looked up and dropped the object, which hit the ground dully and rolled. Marsden’s head. The cat leapt up the trunk.

  I gasped and jolted, wide awake, rifle barrel cold and wet in my hands. I sat shivering, gulping air until my pulse slowed. Thousands of stars filled the sky, limpid crystals silent, low, almost within reach, the Big Dipper high in the west. Beneath it, at the horizon, a smudge of yellow light that I imagined was Harbour Ranch. The damp had penetrated every seam of my clothing, my skin, every bone. I drew the blanket tighter and repositioned myself, looked down at the ground for Marsden’s head, but of course it wasn’t there.

  Marsden was a funny-looking kid, expression always a bit surprised, more so as he lay dying. We teased him because he read the Koran out loud to us sometimes, trying to figure it out. We’d tell him he was only interested in the seventy-two virgins, ’cause he sure as hell wasn’t gettin’ any in this life, with a face like his. But he wasn’t an ugly guy, really. We just liked to keep the joke going. I’ve decided it isn’t the features that make a person shine but what lights up inside them. Just about everybody has a little light if you know them well enough.

  I spent the spring of 2006 in the Korangal Valley, my third tour, stop-lossed and ready to get out, living with the constant awareness that if I got scared, really scared, the enemy would see it and I would die there. Most Taliban weren’t known for their sharpshooting, but they had damn good snipers there, trained in Iran, with Dragunovs and PSLs, and it seemed logical that one day my head would burst, hit by a Russian round from a half mile away. Or, maybe like some stupid tragedy, hit my spine, and I’d spend the rest of my shitty life in a wheelchair, somebody else wiping my ass and cleaning the sores. I’d just made E-8, master sergeant. Certainly couldn’t look scared to my platoon. And I was scared most of the time, except at night, when the quiet descended and the sky was cold and clear, very much like Montana.

  The Big Dipper was down near the horizon in the south, barely ever climbed above the tallest peaks, like a flag over a distant home, where you really wanted to be. I pulled night security a lot, just to bask in that little dream. Most of the platoon was new to me those last months and I didn’t try to get close to them, just said what had to be said, avoided eye contact, told myself I was being a better sergeant. The truth was, I didn’t feel like I belonged there anymore.

  Now I was home, and the Dipper overhead seemed just as remote. The night does strange things with time; minutes awake drag by like hours, fall asleep for a moment and hours pass. I wasn’t sure I belonged here either.

  Did my fear of an empty chamber kill Marsden? I was so focused on myself those last few weeks. My duty was to my brothers, my kids, all of them fifteen or sixteen years younger than me except Garcia. I didn’t deserve—had no right—to be part of a family. No fucking right. Hillbilly boy of a white trash woman who drank herself to death.

  I sweated in my coat, pulled the Velcro apart, loosened a button and then another.

  The wind blew steadily, soft through the pines, a gentle hush that any other night might have set me on point because it could cover the stray sound of an approach, a whisper or clatter of a magazine against stone, but on this night it felt good, and I dried off, eventually buttoning up.

  –––

  When I awoke again the sky was lightening, a breeze picking up, fresh pine, bright and clear. Dew dribbled along the stock and barrel of the Winchester and I dried it off. The pack felt wet, as if it had rained.

  I looked down at the ground, thinking I’d see cat prints. The valley was full of light, cool blue sky and wind, birds singing somewhere below. I imagined telling Zilker, like he was sitting next to me, what happened that last day at Kamdesh, and knew I could get it right. I took a drink, dug through the pack, found another nut roll, a thousand other memories returning.

  Blanket rolled and repacked, I ate the last half of a damp sandwich and got underway. The previous day’s climb had beaten up my knee more than I realized, and I hobbled the first hundred feet or so, until I reached a crevasse about fifteen feet deep and too wide to jump. It only got wider to the east, so I lowered myself in half steps, then began the gritty climb up the opposite side, realizing I was vulnerable as hell should the cat still be afoot. My hands slipped, my gloves sliced on the edges, my legs just didn’t lift me like they used to, even without body armor and the gear
I carried in the field. I slid back to the bottom and stood there panting, considered pulling my pack off and flinging it over the top, but it only weighed eight or nine pounds.

  It didn’t make sense that I had become so weak in two years. It didn’t make sense that a couple of drunk twenty-somethings could beat me up. Rescued by a woman, a civilian, for fuck’s sake. Almost killed by an old junky. Time in the hospital, time in rehab, must have taken a toll. I could climb like a spider a few years ago. I hadn’t taken my medication for two nights or that morning, and waves of heat came over me—the tremble, the flinch at the unexpected snap of a twig, the tinge of nausea that came before losing all coordination, swept up in a rain of adrenaline. Possibly useful if a guy wants to run like a gazelle, or fight, but a disaster in the bottom of the hole. No hydrocodone either, but eventually that kind of pain just becomes a part of you—a mean part.

  I threw everything but the rifle over the top, slung the Winchester across my back and jumped, scrambling, spreading my legs to both sides of the crevasse initially, a frantic series of grabs that pulled me, after a minute of terror, up to the level stone, a fistful of scrub in one hand. I crawled a few yards and sat up, panting, holding my knee. White granite spread before me, more or less flat. An irregularity, fur rustling in the breeze, lay forty yards or so distant, near a fine splatter of blood. A dead rabbit. The cat was close. High clouds moved across the sun in an overcast.

  Another hundred yards and the stone rolled off, a smooth contour not visible from the distance, streaks of dried blood running down the polished surface, dropping into a hole about eight feet below. The surface of the hole rolled off again, and below that, less than six feet, a narrow trail. A dry horse turd. The wind picked up, fluttered through my shirt. The sweat evaporated from my neck.

  I stared at the turd for a long time, imagined Cheryl leading a string of ponies with kids, their parents. Clueless city folk. The valley clouded over. What if it rains? I didn’t bring a poncho. Thinking of everything but dropping into that hole. Some CS maybe. A grenade would be perfect. Alas, no grenade. Somebody to watch my six, another to cover the exit, but I was alone, and I really didn’t want to do what I said I was going to do: face an enemy that couldn’t talk or listen, had no sympathy or remorse, wouldn’t reason. What tugged at my gut was not unlike my last nights in Korangal.

  If the cat was there and still a threat, running away wasn’t an option. I was going into its fucking house and it had every right in the world to kill me. I locked a round in the chamber, laid my face against the rock, arms spread, and slid in.

  A narrow gap opened, tight at chest level, wider closer to my knees. Crouched, I saw three spotted kits, fifteen or twenty pounds, retreating from my smell, probably, amid a pile of pine needles, cat crap, shreds of skin and bones, gathered into a nest of sorts. No sign of the big girl, but so much of the den was out of my line of sight I felt certain she rested just around the corner. I stood, holding the rifle in my right hand at arm’s length as I entered, finger gently on the trigger.

  Halfway through the gap, the cat dropped to my left from some point above with a hushed thump and stood looking at me. The space was too narrow to turn, bring the rifle to bear. The cat bared its teeth, my left hand slipped around the Tokarev, thumbed the hammer, the cat leapt and I fired a double-tap blindly. Knocked into the stone, head snapped against the granite, I hit the ground, squirming backward into the den, the gun’s muzzle on point, cat on my chest, my legs. The cat didn’t move, the reverberation in that small space—cat’s cry, pistol shots—a continuous deafening pressure. One of the shots had surely gone stray; the other took a corner of its head off.

  The slide was locked back on the pistol. I hadn’t fired two shots. I’d fired nine.

  I stood. Something nudged my foot. One of the kits worked between my legs and ran to the body, sniffing, puzzled, searching for a nipple. A ragged hole fired from the side pierced the belly, some dried blood. The rifle shot had been low and toward the hindquarters. The blood loss probably weakened her. Two other kits cowered against the stone, looking at me. They’d starve. Or maybe they’d grow up and kill a jogger or two. What age do they start catching little mice and what age was I looking at? I just didn’t know. One of the kits hissed at me, another played with a spent brass from the Tokarev, rolling it around with its paw. Strips of nylon fabric were visible among the detritus. I dropped the magazine from the pistol, slammed another into the butt and racked the action. A few raindrops fell, streaking the wall.

  There had been a house, really just a hut, in a little hamlet north of Kandahar. Late afternoon. We were tired. I covered from the end of the street. Garcia cleared one house, walked out, just said, “Kids.” Got about thirty feet away and a skinny boy, maybe nine or ten, pops him in the back. Single round from an AK. Two smaller kids next to him, all in the doorway. Garcia gasped, screwed his face in a picture of pain, went down. Three or four of our guys, one of them on the 249, instinctively returned fire, five or ten seconds. All three of the kids were cut to pieces, bloody fragments blown back into the shadow like a sack of offal thrown across the stone floor. Garcia started crawling and it turned out his SAPI plate had taken the round, knocked him off his feet, probably broke a couple of ribs. We all felt like shit.

  Neighbor lady, maybe their mom, screaming like a demon, women in black burkas swarming out of everywhere, indignant hatred thick as smoke converging on the patrol, everybody with rifles leveled, backing around Garcia, who sat up and cried. He felt the worst, he explained later after retelling everybody half the night, because he’d cleared the house. It was his fault, he reasoned; he hadn’t found the gun. We all thought, WTF, parents are shits for not teaching them the rules of the game, as if it is some kind of fucking game. The AK was empty. Kid only had one cartridge.

  I stood there looking at those three kittens, Tokarev still in my hand.

  13

  I pushed the cat with my legs initially, then dragged it by the tail to the edge of the den, shoved it onto the trail below and stood looking at it while I caught my breath. The cloud ceiling had fallen almost to eye level. I was close to the Continental Divide, 10,000 feet, I decided, attributing my fatigue to that. I considered cutting off the head of the cat, bringing it back as proof, but it was a bloody mess, and I’d made a little vow to myself about collecting heads earlier that day. Forest department could see it from a helicopter, or ride up that trail, wherever it came from, and retrieve it. A stair-step of rock rose from the den on the far side and I went up, retrieved the rest of my gear and came down, jumping over the cat and wincing downhill. Looking back, the cat could have taken any rider that went past right off their horse, like a customer in a sushi bar.

  I finished the last of my water and slowly traversed the hillside, every joint on my left side feeling like thumbtacks inside, flinching before my foot hit the ground. I sat a few times and my leg would pop when it straightened it out. That was new. I’d make sure I was on a horse if I ever had to come up here again. Raindrops spotted my sleeves, my face, fog rolling up the valley.

  After an hour or so, great boulders of moss-speckled basalt peppered the landscape. I’d probably descended a couple of miles or more north of the point where I went up and was on somebody else’s property. Each step chaffed, a stab, a little pull like pliers in the skin of my calf. On a level rock I sat and pulled my pant leg up to the knee. Something metallic and brilliant sparkled at the apex of the swelling, now pressed tightly beneath a pale tent of dead skin. Brushing across it stung like a hornet.

  I studied it another minute or so, finally placed a thumb on either side and squeezed, a rush of tears following, a spiral of steel rising out of the skin like a worm, an inch long; a few drops of pus and thin blood followed. I rolled the fragment between my fingers. Part of the RPG in Kamdesh.

  “That’s one you missed, Lori.” The pain faded after a few minutes. The rain fell, heavy drops across the broken skin until the red washed away.

  By three, the hillside
leveled off and a few minutes later I was out of the trees and crossing the meadow, haze shrouding the hill, a steady wind out of the west, and nothing hurting enough to make a difference. It struck me then that I was just taking it in, and I’d come into many valleys probably just as beautiful but hadn’t really been seeing them, because I was always looking for what didn’t belong; but in that moment it was clear that everything I saw there belonged there—even me. Confidence in the earth, the air that made waves of the grass, it was all there long before me, millennia, and it would continue in some marvelous balance I could only intrude upon briefly, but I was a part of it for now.

  Garcia wasn’t anymore. I had killed a big cat but only a small part of the continuum, myself even smaller. It was a violation the earth could absorb—infinitesimal, really, balanced against the many men I’d killed, each of them thinking they were the center of a universe when in fact none of us are the center of anything.

  Patrols could last two or three weeks, but now two nights seemed like enough. I opened the bolt of the rifle with my palm over the receiver and thumbed the cartridges out, checked the chamber and closed it again. Bolt handle, receiver, my skin all about the same, wet cold.

  –––

  When I got within a mile of the corral she was riding toward me across the meadow, out of the mist, pony at a trot, hair crushed sheepishly beneath a broad canvas Akubra, rain dripping from the brim, hips fluid with the rise and fall of the horse as if they were one being. She saw me and sped up to a canter, hoof-steps palpable in the earth. A feeling of relief rolls over you when you’re going to be extracted from a mission and you hear the chopper blades or one of your APCs comes rumbling around a corner. I think I felt that with those hoof beats. She circled behind, slipped off the saddle and dropped next to me a moment later, reins in her hands.