All the Ways We Kill and Die

by Brian Castner

  The obligation of competence provides purpose and drives action. When eight billion people would be more at risk, how do you not get in the truck and go to work?

  Which is why, the more I thought about it, the more Matt Schwartz’s death seemed such an anomaly.

  All we knew so far was that Matt died in a truck, the biggest, meanest truck we had. It was a shock, so anachronistically out of step. It had been years since a group of EOD techs had died like this, because the Afghan Surge had changed the war so drastically. Why not tell me Matt and Bell and Seidler fell on Hamburger Hill? That their ship sank after a kamikaze attack? Were overcome by the Spanish flu of 1918?

  Yes, in that truck, Matt died midsentence. But I bet he never felt safer than the moment before the detonation.

  I knew nothing else about how Matt died, but the one detail we did have nagged at me like the itch of a mending leg inside an old-fashioned plaster cast, inaccessible and ever more insistent.

  There was more to this story. I was sure of it.

  IN MY TIME in Iraq, I never caught the Engineer. More than that, I didn’t know anyone else who did, either.

  So before I got serious about this inquiry, I had to ask myself again, and not for the last time: Am I sure the Engineer even really exists?

  This man. Not the gunman, not the emplacer, not the mixer, not the spotter. No videos of him. No statements issued. Slipping unseen from Afghanistan to Iraq and back, the lone educated scientist, everywhere and nowhere. Is he just a bogeyman? An unsolvable koan, or the center of an infinite series of Russian nesting dolls? Does there even have to be a prime mover, or could IED knowledge simply coalesce organically as the inevitable sum of enough authorless Internet sites? This isn’t Oz: there doesn’t have to be a wizard behind the curtain. In the real world, there can simply be another curtain.

  The farsighted Isaac Asimov considered this question in his mirrored way in 1962, in a short story titled “The Machine That Won the War.” Earth has just survived a long interstellar war with Deneb, all thanks to the Multivac, the great computer. The Multivac guided all battle decisions, all troop movements, all crop production and resource management. Data was fed into the machine, a program churned, and a decision was made. But in the glow of victory, three key men admit to one another that it is all sham. The data collector never trusted field reports and altered the input numbers. The programmer didn’t have reliable parts, and the Multivac had not processed information correctly in years. And the supreme leader ignored the report outputs and made his decisions with the flip of a coin.

  The Machine was really a coin flip. What is the Engineer?

  I have come to believe that the Engineer is both a battlefield phenomenon and a very few flesh-and-blood individuals, probably less than a dozen, though I doubt anyone knows for sure. He is the aspirational target for a generation of special ops intel analysts and a specific man responsible for the device that killed Matt. As a member of a very, very small club, he’s a solo artist within any particular region or organization, like an apex predator that hunts a vast range alone. Anyone who interacts with him—from jihadists allies to American counterterrorism forces—would call him “the Engineer.” They would likely only ever know a single one.

  When al-Muhandis appears in print, it is solitary, accidental, and fleeting. Abu Ahmed Rahman al-Muhajir (“the Foreigner”), the Al Qaeda builder of the bombs that hit the US embassies in Africa in 1998, is offhandedly mentioned only a handful of times in The Black Banners, former FBI agent Ali Soufan’s definitive 562-page brick of a book about the days after 9/11. Early in The Outpost, Jake Tapper refers to a Nuristani bomb builder (even called an engineer by local tribesmen) twice in passing before moving on. The 2004 Duelfer Report on Weapons of Mass Destruction briefly mentions the Al Ghafiqi Project of the Iraqi Intelligence Services, a directorate attempting to build James Bond–esque assassination IEDs in “books, briefcases, belts, vests, thermoses, car seats, floor mats, and facial tissue boxes,” but it does not name a single design engineer. Gopal mentions the Engineer only once: when the local Taliban commander wishes more advanced bombs, his superior called contacts in Al Qaeda, and “arranged for a visitor from Pakistan, a bespectacled, clean-shaven Arab in his twenties.”

  The most thorough description of the Engineer in recent publications may be found in Voices from Iraq, a compendium of firsthand accounts compiled by Mark Kukis in a Studs Terkel–style. In the book an Iraqi academic, using the non-kunya alias Omar Yousef Hussein, describes the process of joining the resistance in Baghdad in 2003. His cell wants to build an IED, but despite the fact that they had money and weapons and vehicles and the support of Iraqi generals, they don’t know how.

  “None of us had experience in explosives,” he says. “So we had to be taught how to make the device. There was an Egyptian from Al Qaeda who showed us how. He had come from Afghanistan, through Pakistan and Iran to Iraq. From our group we dedicated an engineer who took lessons from this Egyptian.”

  An Al Qaeda explosives expert, a traveling contractor, already in Baghdad in 2003.

  Omar Yousef Hussein continues to describe how this Egyptian taught them, how he planted a seed so they could make future bombs of the same style on their own, how he left so they could prepare the bomb using a hand drill to bore through the steel of an old artillery shell and insert old Iraqi blasting caps, how they carried it out of the mosque and planted it on the road and a Humvee came by and they detonated it and every American who left the scene did so on a stretcher.

  So, no, the bomb that killed Matt Schwartz did not spontaneously appear because of an accumulation of information on the Internet. There had to be a man, like the Egyptian Al Qaeda mujahid, who taught someone to build that device. The hit man pulls the trigger, but someone has to design the gun.

  THE WEEK AFTER the funeral, I stood at the stove making dinner, adding chunks of whitefish to a tomato and vegetable soup. Jessie walked up the adjacent basement stairs, a hamper full of clean laundry on her hip. My back was turned, so I only felt her enter the room, didn’t see her red eyes, swollen from crying. She paused before she spoke.

  “Thank you for not dying in Iraq,” she said quietly.

  I turned. “I’m glad I didn’t die too,” I said. “I don’t know why I didn’t.”

  “All the important people we knew in our twenties,” she said, “the ones we spent the most time with, stationed in all those little towns in the middle of nowhere, all those people are dead now. Our friends are dead.”

  But that’s not true. They’re not all dead. Some survived.

  The Afghan Surge was often deadly, but it was also dismembering. It sent too many of our friends home alive, but as a portion of their former selves. Mourn the dead, but don’t forget those, who but for the grace of God …

  When a bomb detonates in the midst of your EOD team, you do three things. You tend the wounded immediately, rescue and assess and transport. Then, when everyone is patched up, you collect the forensic evidence from the scene. Finally, using the three-ring oil spot theory, the intelligence apparatus figures out who did it, in order to hunt him down and kill him.

  There was only so much I could learn about the Engineer from reading books, so the next day I started on step one and booked a plane ticket to see Dan Fye. Months before he had left a leg in Doab, just down the road from Matt Schwartz’s last patrol. Fye had survived. He could teach me more about this Afghan War I had never fought, and he was intimate with the Engineer in a timely and personal way.

  Matt Schwartz was dead and so was his whole team. I wanted to know if it was bad luck or if they were targeted, and late at night I lay in bed and asked Matt but he never answered.

  So I sought out the wounded. I needed to talk to someone who had looked the Engineer’s latest champion in the eye and lived.

  PART II

  TEND THE WOUNDED

  “I wonder if a soldier ever does mend a bullet hole in his coat?”

  —Clara Barton

  5 �
� ONE HOUR TO KANDAHAR

  DAN FYE HAS A BODY part that I don’t have. You probably don’t have one either. It’s called a nubbin. It itches and grows hair in weird places. It has muscles that sometimes flex but usually lay limp. It points and twirls and gets tired by the end of the day.

  Dan’s body part that you don’t have has a biological process that you don’t endure. The skin on his nubbin folds and puckers and sweats, creating boring abscesses that tunnel beneath fatty flaps and stink. Vagination, he calls it, as he rubs yeast infection cream around the worst areas. The bones inside his nubbin continue to grow, sharp prongs pushing up through the skin from underneath. Heterotropic Ossification, HO, he calls this process, and when the ache finally intensifies to a stabbing peak, surgery is required to put the bones back in check.

  The nubbin wears a sock most days, but it comes out to play when Dan’s children are insistent enough. One of the skin folds looks like a jack-o-lantern’s grin, and the kids laugh as Dan and his nubbin make funny faces. They dress it up and put oversize sunglasses on it and take pictures and post them on Facebook. This is the only way I knew the nubbin. I had not seen it in person when I rang the front doorbell of Dan’s brick ranch-style house in the rolling highlands outside of San Antonio.

  Dan answered the door himself and gave me a hug. I hugged him back and rubbed his stubbly head and told him that he looked great because he did. His smile was wide and his eyes were sharp. I expected more drug-induced haze and was grateful not to find it. He invited me inside but didn’t offer to get me anything to drink, and I didn’t ask. We headed back to the living room, and Dan and his nubbin eased into a wide, soft recliner where they obviously spend a large part of their day. The chair was surrounded by water bottles and pill bottles and children’s milk bottles, and three giggling girls ran around and in between my legs as I made my way to the couch. Dan reached out with two meaty hands and used the armrests to shift his weight in the chair again, flopping the nubbin over one padded side.

  We settled in then for a long talk, the kind of talk that long-separated brothers have. I didn’t stare at the nubbin, but I didn’t have to, to wonder, to mourn, to thank what may reside above.

  How unpredictable the ties that bind. Neither Dan nor I nor Matt disarm bombs anymore, yet the shared identity remains. Dan and I had been stationed together once, but that was five years ago and our paths had diverged. He and Matt had moved on to the war in Afghanistan, the place about which I needed to learn so much more.

  “Tell me a story, Fye,” I asked. “What happened to you?”

  Dan scratched at his nubbin and I leaned back in the couch, and though neither of us recall the specifics of the past as well as we’d like, we found that one memory would stir another, and a long-forgotten name on his lips prompted a story from mine, and my tour in Saudi Arabia rekindled his, and his helicopter-borne tale transported me to my own, and in this way we discovered that we remembered enough, so that bit by bit and moment by moment and shot by shot we took account of all that had happened since we were last together.

  The Engineer had taken Dan’s left leg and given him a nubbin instead, and among brothers, such a story inevitably begins with the last deployment.

  WHEN DAN FYE arrived at the dirt-walled outpost in Mushan, a mealy apple hanging from the last twig on the longest branch in the canopy of that country’s stunted tree, he knew he had finally entered combat. It was April of 2011, and in the meat of the Surge NATO was still expanding into new territory; Fye’s team was establishing a permanent EOD team presence at Mushan for the first time. He arrived in a JERRV, the same kind of truck in which Matt died, and it was stuffed with every tool of the trade, every battery and robot and block of C-4 he might need for months. This was the last stop on the train, and Fye might not be resupplied for some time; he wasn’t going to take any chances on his first real trip to Indian Country.

  Mushan lies at the tip of the Horn of Panjwe, a curving and narrowing wedge of land that thrusts between the forks of the Dori and Arghandab Rivers like the business end of a charging rhino. It was the farthest edge of continuous American occupation from the main hub in Kandahar, a full day’s worth of driving down cratered dirt roads. Beyond this last outpost lay only the empty Reg desert and the sparse highways where Matt would die seven months later.

  Dan Fye had waited for years to arrive at this desolate end of the long road. On 9/11, Fye was already married and had a job with his father as a mechanic’s apprentice at a machine shop in a suburb east of Oakland, California. He listened to Howard Stern on the radio on the drive to work and thought the idea of planes hitting the towers was the most disturbing joke he had ever heard. Later that week, he lost his job when the plant shut down his division. Then his wife, Nicole, told him she thought she was pregnant. Fye had previously considered joining the military, but these events, combined with 9/11, looked like all but a sign. He tried to enlist immediately, but the recruiter told him he was too fat, so he lost eighty pounds before Christmas and was a muscled six-foot-two, two-oh-five at basic training in March of 2002.

  But until he went to Mushan, Fye had spent his military career playing the final garbage-time minutes of meaningless football games. When Iraq was busy, he fought boredom guarding the barracks at Eskan Village, outside Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. When Iraq was winding down, he did hoax calls in Kirkuk and sat bored at Tallil Air Base, a sleepy outpost south of Baghdad. And once he finally made it to Afghanistan at the height of the Surge, his explosives had been gathering dust rather than creating it while he was stuck guarding the airfield at Kandahar during a particularly quiet lull.

  But now Fye had finally left behind the big base routine and was at Mushan, in the heart of the suck, just as harvest season was ending and fighting season was about to begin, his first taste of real combat in a ten-year military career.

  He would never fire his weapon. He was bleeding out in the back of a helicopter a month later, clinging to one thought and one thought only, running in a continuous Times Square news ticker across the front of his oxygen-starved brain:

  One hour. If I can get back to Kandahar in one hour, I’ll live. One hour, and I’ll live. That’s what they say. You’ll make it if you can get back to the hospital in one hour. Jesus Jesus Jesus, my Lord and Savior, please get me back in one hour.

  “YOU WANT TO know how this happened?” asked Fye, and pointed to his nubbin.

  I nodded.

  “It actually starts on the twenty-sixth. Because, um, we got the call …” Fye said, and trailed off.

  “We were told we could go on that mission. Because, um, actually, it starts earlier than that. But what happened is, um, um …” Fye tried again, and lost his train of thought again, and looked down, rubbing, rubbing, rubbing his single shin, searching for words, as if they might be hidden in the scarred folds of his remaining hamburger leg.

  “They had intel of guys planting IEDs in a place called the Taliban Bazaar, out by Doab, on the Horn of Panjwe. They saw the guys putting them in. A Pred or a helicopter or something. And that’s why we went. They saw the IEDs and knew they were there.” Fye got it out in a rush, and the rest of the story followed.

  It’s that chess match. And the Engineer goes first.

  DO YOU HAVE the required materials? the Engineer may have asked.

  Yes, agha sahib, the young man said. My cousin drives a … a …—here he spread his arms and formed a large boxy shape with his hands before giving up and retreating briefly to Pashto—laarey at the kuffar base in Kandahar. He brought what you asked for.

  His Arabic was barely passable, ignorant of any word that wasn’t found in the Holy Book. But he was somewhat reliable otherwise, and opened a rice bag full of nails and wooden planks broken off shipping pallets.

  Good. I will only be here the day, so we will work quickly, al-Muhandis may have said, and then he began unpacking long spools of wire and worn pliers and a shabby box of Chinese batteries out of a saddlebag and placed them on the table in front of him. A hu
ddle of bare-cheeked mujahideen gathered around him as he spread out his tools and props. They were more fascinated than wary, a dangerous proportion.

  Sunlight streamed in the open windows and onto the pale walls and brightly colored rugs that were dotted about the floor like a huge ifranjiah game board. The dry breeze blew in, and the heat was not yet oppressive. A suitable place to teach; the cameras on America’s drones could not yet see through walls, he surmised.

  In the back of the room near the door, a young boy and two older men waited tentatively. The boy was curious, clearly, but the two old men chewed on the tar of the poppy and cast scowls.

  Salaam, he said to them. Thank you for your shelter and hospitality, baba.

  They said nothing, wisely, and turned and left and moved into the courtyard to tend their chickens as their own similarly ignorant grandfathers had.

  He turned to the only youth of the group who spoke Arabic.

  You will translate for me. Slowly, and every word just as I say it. I will teach you to make these, he said, and held up a device made of two bits of lumber and crisscrossed wires, complete except for the final explosive primer.

  You lay these in the road for the large and heavy armored laareys, he said. And I will teach you to use others to attack the kuffar who come on foot.

  Now he carefully pulled from his bag a small, round container, plastic and rubber with a hole in the side. Even these simple mujahid knew it was a landmine, but how to arm it? And how best to use it? How to combine it with the pieces they built themselves? He showed them how to screw in the fuze housing, release the locking collar with the detent pin. The youth struggled with the technical nomenclature, but the demonstration was clear enough.