All the Ways We Kill and Die

by Brian Castner

  And after the debris comes the screaming. There is an audible pause between detonation and the cry of pain. The human body requires some brief but measurable time for the nervous system to send the correct signals from the body to the brain, to inform the cortex that a previously attached arm is now missing, a lung is filling with blood, bowels feel a breath of outside air for the first time.

  Fye had been watching this cloud of dust on television for a decade. On 9/11, the first two clouds were black and filled with jet fuel. The second two clouds were chalk white, glass shards and concrete dust. The cloud in Madrid was fiery, then thick and dark. The same in London. Fye saw videos of the Oklahoma City bombing in EOD school. In a time before ubiquitous cell phone cameras, the clouds he saw at the Murrah Federal Buildings were from secondary fires started later, in the rubble of the structure’s face.

  First there is a cloud and then the debris and then the screaming and then, finally, the charge of responders. The wounded try to crawl out. The firefighters and police and medical workers rush in. Fye had also watched them for a decade, sitting at home on a couch while others ascended World Trade Center steps, pulled children from train wreckage. Despite his years of service, despite deployments to Kuwait and Iraq, Fye felt that he was always an observer. He had taken apart a few IEDs so far in his time in Mushan, but he had never pointed his weapon at the enemy, never done a terrible post-blast while the fires burned, never was the first volunteer to the scene. Not until he entered the Taliban Bazaar in May of 2011, expecting to be disarming bombs under direct fire.

  It was finally his chance to run into the cloud.

  THE CRATER SAID: Five hundred pound bomb. You won’t find any pieces of the men killed here.

  The smaller shot holes said: That aerial bomb’s blast wave was so big, the shock functioned our hair-trigger pressure plates.

  The mounds of fresh dirt said: We still hide death.

  Only a fool walks directly up to that, Fye thought. I need another way around.

  They had left the boy with the two old men, patrolled down the path and to the Taliban Bazaar. After the ODA-directed airstrikes, it was little more than a cluster of low walls, debris, and drainage ditches. Fye stayed along the outer edge, reconned the devastation from afar. There was almost no cover, only hard-packed mud and occasional bushes that obscured their line of sight. Still, he found an area for Dove and Harry to set up, to unload their packs, and build explosive charges and bunker down against the IEDs ahead and the possible ambush behind. He also cleared an area for the rest of the patrol to dig in as they could, to survey the fields for gunmen approaching.

  He couldn’t know that this space would serve as a landing zone for his medevac helicopter in less than an hour. I cleared my own LZ, he would later think. At least I know it’s safe to put the helo down.

  Fye cleared all of this land with an expandable metal detector called a MIMID, a subdued green box that looks like a cross between a musician’s microphone stand and a transforming robotic children’s toy. It folded to a manageable size so he could stuff it in his backpack, but it also unwrapped and telescoped to a sufficient length so he could stand erect, strap it to his arm, and swing the flat oblong head across the dirt and listen for the telltale beeps of metal in soil. And there was a lot of metal, the artifacts of decades of war, plus new frag from the bombs just recently dropped. With a dial he reduced the sensitivity of the detector so it didn’t beep with every sweep, checking this new setting by swiping it over his foot. A beep for the ringlets and cams on his boot. Silence over the earth. Such a delicate balance of complacency and paranoia, finely tuned anew on each mission.

  Once everyone was set, he was finally ready to approach the bazaar alone.

  At an airfield at Kandahar sat thousands of soldiers and airmen and armored trucks and countersniper teams and mortar platoons and computer servers full of IED data and trend software and Fye’s battalion headquarters and four dining halls and the Predators and the attack helicopters who found the bombs. Fye left those behind and moved to Mushan and Robinson, and then left them to drive in his JERRV, full of bomb suits and robots and hundreds of pounds of explosives, to an Afghan checkpoint so he could leave it behind as well. He had put on a rucksack containing as little as possible—“Ounces are pounds,” the men on patrol always say—radio and rope and food and a little water and a couple of blocks of explosives. And now, at the sticking point, he left the pack too, and, armed only with what was strapped to his body and lashed to his hand—his rifle and pistol and nine magazines, helmet and vest, unfolded metal detector—he made one last safety check with Dove and then began sweeping the path that led to the first confirmed IED.

  This clash between EOD and al-Muhandis in Afghanistan was a decade old, but now the odds had tipped. The Engineer could still send his champion into battle, but Fye did not have a surrogate. No, in fact he had become one.

  Fye skirted the main path, looked for a novel track to the known “booms,” as the boy had call them. At the edge of the bazaar, a dry canal bed separated him from the objective, and beside the gully a mud-walled qalat. It rose like a knobby mole off the back of some pocked and pitted giant, a growth in the dirt-scape of the same stuff Fye kicked up with his boots. Fye thought it would provide temporary cover if the ambush hit quickly.

  He moved up to the hut, looked down along the ditch more closely, and spotted a small footbridge surrounded by tall green stalks. The dirt and cement canal was shallow at this point, only three or four feet deep, and the rickety bridge was small, maybe two feet by eight feet. The whole scene was somehow familiar.

  I’ve seen this before, Fye thought. This footbridge. On a previous mission, there had been an IED at one end of it. Plus, this is where the Canadians got hit last time.

  The Canadians drive armored vehicles called Badgers, a tracked tank with a backhoe and a grenade launcher and a bulldozer blade and a machine gun and crane. A pressure plate had blown a track off the Badger and left it for dead, an impressive feat against such a large target.

  This is good, thought Fye. This area may be IED saturated, but it’s been recently swept after the Badger hit. If my mine detector goes off, it’s probably something bad.

  He approached the footbridge, used one arm to brush aside the tall green plants shading it like a grape trellis. Marijuana plants, he could see now, taller than he. In the middle of the bridge was a bag. Hanging out of the bag were two pressure plates and what could only be a fat landmine.

  “Hey, Dove,” Fye called back. “I found a bag left by the guys who got smoked!” He laughed quietly, in spite of himself.

  They would leave their gear on the footbridge, Fye guessed, hide it in the pot plants, take out one IED and go put it in the road, and then retreat to cover before they could be spotted by passing Preds. Except they were spotted, and their spare setups were left behind.

  Fye now left the bag and bridge—too obvious, too suspicious—and outflanked them by crossing the low, dry canal via the embankments, making his way for the first time into the bazaar. Rubble and dry bushes were everywhere. The ground was all compact mud, hardened and untrammeled, an artifact of the rains that come and liquefy the country before the heat and parch return and encrust a shell over the earth. Anything hidden here should be months old, at least, Fye thought. Still, the metal detector silently checked each footfall.

  Fye was approaching a spot along a low mud wall that looked suspicious, still on his way to the first known “boom,” when he heard the sounds of a moped or motorbike and shouts from behind him, maybe shouts in Pashto, maybe between local men and the patrol, or the terp and the locals, and as they got louder and angrier, Fye knew that the “booms” didn’t matter anymore.

  This is it, thought Fye. This is the ambush. The Taliban ride dirt bikes. They’re coming. I need to shoot back. Here we go. This is it this is it this is it.

  The qalat wall and a large pile of dry harvested poppy stalks blocked his way. He couldn’t see. He was a sitting duck. The
shouts got louder. His rifle cinched close, his mine detector in his right hand, Fye scrambled to get a better view.

  As Fye put his foot down, he thought of the ambush about to strike. He thought about the silence from the metal detector. He thought of his bros, Solesbee and Hamski. And in the back of his mind, the tall pot plants, the boy the age of his son running around where he could get hurt, the truly dangerous operations in Indian Country he had to do the next day.

  All of that, yes, but reflecting on it later, Fye realized he wasn’t thinking about the very dirt under his feet, or whether the mud crust where he put his boot down was freshly disturbed. He would never know.

  Fye’s world erupted, and he found himself sitting in a hole.

  “Dove!” he yelled. “Somebody’s been hit!”

  6 ♦ A CHILD’S PRIDE

  ON APRIL 25, FYE PUT a picture of himself on Facebook that he knew would be trouble. He’s standing against a shoulder-high mud wall, dusty multicam uniform with the sleeves rolled up, armored vest dripping ammo and explosives, checkered keffiyeh scarf around his neck, right gloved hand cocked on his rifle, finger outside the guard, no helmet, beard, cool-guy wraparound sunglasses. Several months of time in-country had made him tan and thin, broad-chested, with muscular forearms. He looks off into the distance. In a previous generation, the photo could sell war bonds.

  “I knew I was screwed, as soon as that went up,” Fye told me. “That’s the kind of picture they put on your casket.”

  Thirty-one days later, he was counting the minutes to get to Kandahar.

  FYE WAS ON the ground. His ears rang. Dirt was everywhere. Small fires smoldered about him. His MIMID was still in his hand. If shots were being fired, Fye couldn’t hear them. He couldn’t hear anything.

  Someone’s been hit, Fye thought. But I’m on the ground. That means I got hit.

  “Hey, Dove, dude, I think I got hit!” Fye called out.

  If Dove answered, Fye couldn’t hear. He can’t see me, Fye thought. He probably thinks I’m pink mist. But I’m not. I need to yell, to tell him I’m alive.

  Fye looked down into the crater, saw his left leg tucked under his right, saw odd bumps and projections through the tan uniform. No more looking down. He scanned back to the path he had used and saw Dove start to approach. To bring first aid, Fye realized, to him.

  “No, man, stop!” Fye said, all business. “I got no metal hit. There’s no metal signature. There was a PMN in the bag. I think there are more PMNs out here!”

  The PMN looks like a Tupperware container, complete with molded rubber lid. In the 1950s, the Soviets designed this landmine to produce a specific combination of objective thoughts and adrenaline-fueled feelings in the mind of a NATO battlefield trauma medic. The thought is this: the femoral artery has been cut. The feeling is this: holy fuck, this man is going to bleed out, we all need to do everything possible to evacuate him right now.

  The PMN is large for an antipersonnel mine. It was engineered to remove not just feet but legs as well, to kill not just the shin but also the knee, to bite into the main blood line that runs through the groin, to increase the chance that a young man’s heart might try to fill the Danube via the newly exposed spigot. When this geography proved unlikely, the landmine found new markets and has been scattered from Africa to Southeast Asia, copied by satellite states and knockoff artists, the Bulgarians for use in the Baltics and the Pakistanis for use in Afghanistan.

  This was probably the source of Fye’s PMN. The Pakistanis shaved down the Russian firing pin to make an already hard-to-find landmine even more difficult to locate with a standard metal detector. The PMN was a lump of plastic and cast TNT, but a tiny sliver of essential metal remained to start the detonation, and before he went on that mission, Fye was sure he could find it. He had practiced with a recovered PMN and his MIMID before he left Kandahar. He had done his homework.

  Fye would consider the genealogy of the landmine later. At that moment, Fye simply sat in the crater, devoid of insight, all complicated thought blown away in the blast, ears flattened and bits of homemade explosive gently burning about him. Dove swept the embankment with his own metal detector and rechecked the path down and up the ditch sidewalls and across the baked mud. When Dove finally made it, Fye looked up at his wide-eyed face.

  “Damn, dude. That hurt a hell of a lot more than I thought it would,” Fye said.

  EVERY SOLDIER ON patrol carries two tourniquets. One for themselves and one for their brother. The tourniquets fold up into a rigid and compressed package, a black nylon band of Velcro and lash and a cylinder that feels like a stout pen. They are stuck in gear flaps and against body armor and forgotten until the moment Dove reached for his.

  Dove put the tourniquet on Fye’s right leg because that was the only one that looked injured. An injured leg has bones sticking out. An injured leg is wet and dark and smells of a vital funk. Fye’s right leg matched that description. His left was simply tucked underneath, like Fye was sitting Indian-style at grade school.

  Dove leaned Fye back against the crater in which he was wedged and made him comfortable. Fye still gripped the MIMID but his gloved hand was bleeding freely now, his face was bleeding, his nose and chin, but the metal detector was a twisted wreck, and had clearly caught blast and fragments that could have done far worse damage.

  Dove shifted Fye’s right leg to increase pressure with the tourniquet, moved his left leg out of the way, tried to pull it from underneath but it flopped in a heap.

  At that moment the medic, Pete Hopkins, arrived. He had been in-country less than a month, green as newly mown grass.

  “No one’s holding pressure,” Hopkins said in surprise. He threw open his aid bag, slipped on a condom, and fist-fucked Fye’s left thigh with his gloved hands. He buried his fingers in the wounds and twisted them around until he found the femoral and stopped the worst of the hemorrhage.

  Dove kept twisting his tourniquet and Hopkins held pressure. Someone called about a problem with the medevac and Hopkins held pressure. They pulled new tourniquets from Hopkins’s bag and put one on Fye’s left leg, and a second on his right, and another again on the left, and Hopkins held pressure, and still Fye kept bleeding.

  Now there was a crowd of soldiers around, all working on Fye. They cranked again and again on the tourniquets. They pushed their hands into his legs and needles into his arms.

  They said things, terrible terrible things.

  They said: “Your wife loves you so much.” Though they had never met his wife.

  They said: “Your children will be so proud of you.” They said this so many times Fye nearly asked them to stop.

  They said: “I can’t stop the bleeding.” This was Hopkins. He said it to his squad leader, but when Fye heard it now for the first time, he was truly scared, and wondered if he should look and risk going into shock to see what was about to kill him.

  Fye felt nothing, sensed a flurry of movement below his waist with no nervous system feedback. He stared at the sky, never braved a glance down, as Hopkins and Dove constantly tightened his tourniquets and moved them ever farther up his legs. The farther up they went, the more leg he would lose. Well, plenty is lost already, Fye thought.

  They worked on Fye a long time, and the longer they worked, the more anxious Fye got about the precious minutes slipping away. “I don’t hear the bird,” he said, over and over. They wrote the time of the tourniquet application on the white headband Fye wore under his helmet. Hopkins pushed morphine into his veins.

  And just like that, life wasn’t so bad anymore.

  Hopkins, though, kept checking the sky. It was silent and time had stopped.

  Fye and Hopkins had not met before, and they wouldn’t meet again afterward; waiting for the medevac was the sum of their moments together. They chatted of wives and kids, but soon Fye’s talk started to slide again to darkness.

  Eventually, an eon since Hopkins arrived but only twenty-five minutes after the blast, the hyperactive thump of helo blades cut
ting air slowly emerged in the distance. While it may have been the morphine talking, Fye thought it was the most wonderful sound he had ever heard. They were at the extreme limit of the NATO footprint, and so it was a sixty-kilometer flight to the main hospital at Kandahar. If they moved quickly, Fye would just make it in the magic golden hour.

  Hopkins kept working, but Fye said, “If the bird is here, just get me on it, get me the hell on it.” They brought an expandable litter to the hole in which Fye still lay and loaded him on it. Once he was strapped in place, six soldiers carried Fye to the landing zone. Hopkins cinched down tighter on the tourniquets and wiped off the blood and repacked the wound and applied another layer of QuikClot dressings but dark blood kept flowing and Fye dripped like an unwrung rag all the way down the ditch and back up again and out into the open field where the helo waited.

  As Fye was carried on the litter, he decided that he was finally willing to look below his waist.

  “Dove,” he asked, “where’s my leg? Is it gone?”

  “No, it’s not gone. It’s right there, in the bag,” Dove said, and he pointed to a plastic mound at the end of his left leg. The oversize sandwich bag wasn’t fully sealed because a strip of flesh still linked the lump to his haggard knee, a bone-in steak dangling via fat and gristle.

  My foot is in a bag, Fye thought. It was bare, the boot blown off. They can’t save that, he thought. Yeah, that’s lost, that’s gone.

  They arrived at the LZ, and Dove knelt with Fye as Hopkins gave the medical report to the flight crew. “Hey, Fye, remember that dream I had? Remember that dream I had?” Dove said, and they laughed an impossible laugh.

  With a heft they slid his stretcher into the helo, and Fye’s view changed from open blue sky to enclosed black sheet-metal and rivets. Fye had heard stories about the superstars that work the long-run medevac missions, that pluck wounded soldiers out of hot-zones while under fire, but instead of some Air Force Pararescue cool guys with beards and wrap sunglasses and enormous wristwatches, he got two baby-faced Army Privates First Class that barely acknowledged his presence. Fye was high on morphine and talkative, and they ignored him. Hopkins handed over the IV bags, and they dutifully tossed them on the stretcher before going back to their flight checks. They didn’t take Fye’s vitals. They didn’t finger-fuck his legs. They didn’t speak to him. They didn’t do anything.