Great, he thought. I got two PFC robots! Our porn star and martial arts EOD ’bots have more personality. This is the worst medevac I’ve ever seen.
The engine of the helicopter started to roar, the fuselage began to shake as the pilots got ready to launch, and Fye’s mind already started to drift, the oxygen slowly draining. Hopkins finished up his report to the PFCs and patted Fye on the arm. He barely noticed.
Logic and reason had fled, and so, despite his primary concerns just before detonation, in that moment, as the bird was about to take off, Fye never asked himself this basic question: how was the helo able to land in the middle of a firefight? Where was the ambush? How come they weren’t getting shot at?
The answer was that there had been no Taliban ambush. The patrol was just shouting at some local guy on a motorbike.
“DID IT HURT?” I asked Fye from the safety of his couch. I had to ask. I couldn’t believe that he hadn’t mentioned it, other than his offhand joke to Dove. How was it that he hadn’t focused solely on the pain?
“It hurt,” he said, “but it wasn’t screaming hurt. It was dull. It was a dull ache and throbbing. The thirst was worse. You aren’t supposed to give water to a trauma victim. I could have drank three gallons of water just sitting in that hole.”
“Didn’t you pass out at some point?”
“It’s not like surgery in a hospital, where you kinda go in and out,” Fye said. “I was awake the whole time, from when I got hit all the way to the hospital where they put me out.”
“So what were you thinking?”
“Ninety-nine percent live if they make it to KAF, just get to KAF.”
Fye paused and considered.
“I was so blessed that day,” he started, and then trailed off.
He clearly wanted to say more, but he had a look on his face like every thought was present but a bit out of order. He rubbed his knobby leg, and when he finally started again, he pulled water from a very deep well.
“The only reason I think it’s kinda hard to remember exactly now is because, it’s such a traumatic event my mind is trying to get rid of it, but I don’t want it to. I don’t ever want to forget it. It’s one of those events in your life that makes me who I am. I don’t want to forget it. I’m not ashamed of anything I did on it. I’m proud of it. I know I cried out to God on it.”
FYE SPUN IN a morphine dream of swirling and vibrating wind. The rotor wash pummeled him with engine exhaust. The robots never spoke. The overhead view never changed, but the narcotics kept him company in his time machine of delirium. He wasn’t counting minutes anymore. He was just surviving an endless now.
Fye had always liked watching the medevac Blackhawk helicopters practicing their dust-off procedures near an open plain near his base. In the Horn of Panjwe, DUSTOFF—the code name for aerial medevac for decades—was literally a dustup, the rotor blades turning daytime into orange twilight. Now Fye was the beneficiary of those practice runs, screaming across the brick-red Reg Desert bisected by green river valleys full of pomegranate groves and grapevines and poppy fields.
Poppies, pink poppies. Attractive to the eye and soothing to the smell. Poppies, poppies will put Fye to sleep. Sleep.
But Fye couldn’t sleep. The robots ignored him, the landscape rolled, Fye endured.
You’re out of the woods, you’re out of the dark, you’re out of the night.
No, not yet he wasn’t. He fell further into his narcotic stupor. On his farewell tour across Afghanistan, Fye stared like a junkie at a gun-metal ceiling.
The NATO Role 3 hospital at the Kandahar Airfield is no Korea-era, tent-bound MASH unit. The plywood floors and ratty fabric-framed structures of the early Afghan war were long gone, and in their place stood a brick bunker surrounded by concrete blast walls. Once inside, though, the setting could be confused for a slightly skewed version of a medical center in Des Moines, Iowa. The floors were made of some blue plasticized substance impervious to fluids. There were white sectioned drop ceilings and pale Sheetrock walls. The staff wore camo scrubs, but the monitors and surgical equipment were the most modern available anywhere in the world.
Fye noticed none of this, of course. Fye dreamed a morphine dream.
Until a woman snapped him out of it. I must have landed, he realized. She was at his bedside, as his cart was wheeled into the emergency room. He never got her name, never heard if she was a doctor or nurse or medic, but she smiled at him said, “You’re going to be okay,” and a wave of peace rolled over him.
The relief was temporary. A much rougher voice suddenly said, “Okay, dude, this is going to be uncomfortable.”
Through the haze, Fye managed to think, What could be more uncomfortable than getting your leg blown off? before the doc, without further preface or preparation, flipped him over and stuck a finger up his ass.
“You could have at least bought me dinner first!” shouted Fye at the doctor, who laughed at his morphine joke as he checked for internal bleeding. The latexed digit he pulled out was full of shit, not blood. Good news.
The anesthesiologist arrived and pushed more meds. Fye slipped from a chatty, carefree reality to full hallucination, started fighting the staff as sense and meaning slipped away. The drug cocktail was transcendent, moved him body and soul into another world. The MRI machine became a Portal from the video-game of the same name, and Fye screamed that he didn’t want to be sucked into another dimension, that he wasn’t a puzzle-solving white rat that would dance for some machine’s amusement. The Portal players on the medical staff chuckled, the rest were just confused. The doc hit him with another roofie, and Fye’s fight was over.
When Fye awoke—hours later, days later, no counting minutes in a morphine dream—his ears were ringing, his body throbbed, his stomach was empty, but his mind, for a minute, was clear. Clear long enough to embed this picture on his brain: his left leg gone below the knee. Blessedly below the knee. His right leg was bandaged but present, even his foot, somehow his foot. Surrounding his right lower leg was a shrink-wrap clear plastic bag and a mechanical apparatus. Two steel pins the size of his thumb pierced the meaty mush near the top of his shin, two more were inserted above his ankle. They were linked by two rings and a long rod. Fye wouldn’t find out what those rings and pins were until later. All he knew now was that they itched, already. They itched and itched, and then he realized he could feel the itching.
I’m alive, he thought.
The picture that was taken soon after the incident shows Fye with an ear-to-ear, shit-eating grin. He is in a sterile hospital, an array of medical equipment behind him, and clearly high as a kite. He is giving two thumbs up, exposing his hands. The right is bandaged—the blast shot a piece of his foot through the meaty palm and flayed it open to the tendons—and on his left index finger sits a blood/oxygen monitor. He is aping for the camera, and on either side of him, replacing the PFC robots, are two of his EOD brothers. They look almost as happy as him.
And why not? That same day they had put Hamski and Solesbee on a C-130. A ramp ceremony, as Jenny Schwartz would learn the term six months later. They had stood in the sun in formation and saluted as the honor guard carried the two flag-draped coffins across the tarmac and into the waiting shade of the cargo plane’s interior. Hamski and Solesbee were headed for the morgue in Delaware, to their awaiting families, to funerals in Ottumwa, Iowa, and Arlington, Virginia, to rest.
As soon as he was stable, Fye was sent to the major theater hospital at Bagram, where he had another surgery and a general gave him a Purple Heart. Then to Landstuhl, Germany, for another round of treatments. Those days are a blur, except for this: at each stop his EOD bros would visit him at his bedside.
Fye was no longer capable of counting the minutes; that task had been taken up by his wife, Nicole. The proof-of-life picture had been sent to her long before the rest of us saw it. She had gotten the knock, had seen the sea of blue hats, had heard the news, but with that picture she could be sure, absolutely sure, that her husband was stil
l alive and would soon be home.
NICOLE FYE IS a shy woman. Her hair and makeup are always just so, in an I-want-to-make-a-good-impression sort of way. Her first instinct is to look away when addressed. She is generous and courteous and in constant motion at your peripheral vision, doing an art project with a young daughter, helping the eldest son with homework, teaching and dressing and cleaning and baking cookies for an after-dinner treat. All out of sight, while her husband and I talked about the war in the living room.
The house was new. The city was new. The nubbin was new. All of these facts were related; the family’s home was Seattle, where they had been stationed at McChord Air Force Base, but Dan’s long-term treatment would be in San Antonio. And so they moved, for an amount of time still to be determined.
Nicole stayed some distance away at first, but as Dan got to talking of the doctors and hospitals, as her part of the story approached, her orbits shrank, she drifted closer with each pass, and eventually she sat on the couch a polite distance away to hear what she had doubtlessly already heard dozens of time.
“She got the knock on the door. She’s been through that. Do you understand what that means?” Dan pleaded with me. But how can I ever understand? The war will never take my spouse, right? In the beginning, after 9/11, wasn’t that the point of the war, that it take us soldiers instead of our wives and kids at home? It was hard to tell anymore.
“I can never do that to Nicole again,” Dan said. “Even if I could go back, I can’t do that to her again.”
“What were you thinking when you got the news?” I asked Nicole. “Did you have any idea this was coming?”
Nicole sat up and turned to me. This bashful woman, who had spent the rest of the day demurring, now looked me directly in the eye, and her gaze never wavered.
“I believe in the LORD. And I believe He prepares you for these things.”
7 ♦ THE ROBOT HAS A NAME
NICOLE FYE MADE A VIDEO of Dan’s homecoming with the camera on her phone and posted it to Facebook soon after. In the video, Nicole drives her family’s SUV to the airfield to meet Dan’s plane. She is chatty, giddy even. She whoops and celebrates with her children. Her smile fills the cab of the truck.
As the clip continues, Nicole drives across the small taxiway, nearly up to the plane itself, hopping out with her children to lead them in a fit of exaggerated waving. Dan was flown to San Antonio in a special aircraft, a Learjet converted for medical use. It is a tiny thing, and when the side hatch opens, Dan fills the interior, bandaged legs awkwardly stuck in front of him. Dan waves to his wife and children. They hoot and holler and wave back. The relief is palpable, and joy exudes from each digital frame.
The Nicole and Dan Fye that sat with me in their San Antonio living room nine months later bore little resemblance to their not-too-distant selves. Nicole was tired from caring for four small children, from being separated from an extended family, and from holding everything together while her husband recovered. Her smile had waned in proportion to the exhaustion that followed that happy reunion.
Fye too had changed. The beard was gone. The head of dark hair had been shaved clean. Thin and tough Fye was replaced by a balloon-animal version of himself, a round head twisted on a round chest and belly, round arms, round thighs. For months, Fye had been sitting in the same reclining easy chair, flopping his nubbin over the same armrest, and it was taking a toll.
FYE FLEW FROM Germany to Walter Reed in Washington, but he didn’t stay there long. Almost immediately, he was transferred to Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC, pronounced “Bam-see”) in San Antonio. Fye was gaining more lucidity, and on the flight across country the mid-America summer humidity drove him to distraction as the sweat dripped from his head and stung his wounds. He sweated like … like what? A camel in the jungle? A whore in church? A snake’s ass in a wagon rut? After two decades of deployments to the Middle East, soldiers have invented many colorful analogies for relative heat, and my favorite has always been “hotter than two rats fucking in a wool sock.”
Immediately after Nicole and his children met him on the airfield in Texas, he was rushed into surgery again. The doctors made a number of final fixes to Fye’s battered body. They repackaged his nubbin, scraped off some sharp bits of bone and folded good hairy skin over the end. They checked smaller holes in his upper thighs, ass, and lower back; small pieces of plastic and metal had shot through him but missed major nerves or blood vessels. They peeled off the soaked bandage on his right hand and discovered that no one had examined it since it was wrapped up in Kandahar. The wound—the skin and muscle were missing down to the extensor indicis tendons—was still full of the Reg Desert’s rust-colored sand, made muddy from blood and lymphatic fluid. As they scrubbed and cleaned and rebandaged, small bits of Afghanistan fell on the Texas operating room floor.
Every one of those fixes was minor compared to their prime installation. The day Fye landed in San Antonio, the orthopedic surgeons made a philosophical decision: they would try to save his right leg. To do it, they installed a Taylor Spatial Frame, the upgraded version of the ring-and-pin device Fye discovered encircling his leg upon waking up in Afghanistan.
Orthopedics is a dimensional discipline, more like carpentry than pop-a-pill medicine. It involves pins and screws, saws and hammers, sanding of rough surfaces. The orthopedic surgeon walks into a house where the structural members are rotting and determines how to reframe it from inside, except with this twist: the wooden two-by-fours are still alive and keep growing.
When a bone breaks, the body starts creating soft tissues immediately in the affected area. Gradually, over time, those tissues mineralize, forming a new solid piece that connects the two fragments. But this works best when the two bone pieces are flush against each other. Fye’s right tibia wasn’t so much broken as shattered. Soft bone tissues won’t reconnect fragments stretched over far distances, and the chasms between Fye’s potentially healthy bone segments were too large for the body to fill correctly. So to recreate Fye’s tibia, the small part of it that remained would need to be broken and then stretched. As it regrew, as it expanded from the freshly broken end, it would eventually be close enough to bond with the small portions reaching from Fye’s ankle.
This was the purpose of the Taylor Spatial Frame installed around Fye’s right leg. The frame evolved from the torture devices of the Spanish Inquisition, kin to the head box of rats or a metal chair put over a fire. It stretches your leg like the rack, except internally, and over the course of months. The calibration knobs on the pins could be subtly adjusted each day via a computerized algorithm, to slowly spread the bone fragments apart. Open the gap too quickly, and only fibrous scar tissues fill the abhorred vacuum. Open the gap too slowly, and the bone solidifies and needs to be rebroken. To be his old height, Fye needed to regrow 12.7 centimeters of bone. On average, surgeons typically attempt to grow back only 5.6 centimeters.
There is a certain mad horror in seeing your skin grow up and around metal pegs erupting from your body, stretchy hairy cuticles that must occasionally be pushed back in place. But there are also a number of medical complications to the frame’s use, including pin tract infection that causes general patient sepsis. A pile of pamphlets teaches one how to spot it: pus, dense or discolored drainages, red, inflamed skin (more inflamed than normal? What is normal anymore?), loose pins, and pain. Always more pain, so how to tell the difference?
Fortunately, the staff at BAMC had significant experience with the Taylor Spatial Frame by the time Fye landed there. The changing Afghan War had made them very skilled at the game of lost and salvaged limbs.
In mid-2011, BAMC was surviving a statistical bubble, and the medical staff could tell something was wrong. Emergency room nurses the world over joke that waiting rooms fill during full moons, but BAMC’s lunar event was going on eighteen months. Surgeons were so inundated with patients that they researched the trend and published their results in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery. They discovered that
in only two years, the rate of amputations as a percentage of war injuries had quadrupled, and that the rate at which the average soldier was losing a limb had leapt 700 percent.
That the exponential rise in amputations would correspond exactly with the Afghan Surge was no accident. When a soldier leaves his armored truck behind, it is easier to access remote villages, collect evidence and intelligence, interact with the locals. It is also easier to lose a leg.
Compared to Iraq, the average American soldier in Afghanistan had roughly double the chance of losing a limb. By January of 2013, 696 arms and legs had been blown off in Afghanistan. Only sixty-seven were lost between 9/11 and the end of 2008; the rest, 629 of them, came in the four years that followed. German researchers found that the amputation rate had grown to double that of Vietnam.
At the height of the fighting seasons in the Surge years of 2010 and 2011, an amputee was created, on average, every twenty-four hours.
Better to count amputations than the dead, and in previous wars many of these soldiers would never have seen BAMC. As helicopter medevacs became speedier and more reliable, as armor reduced the severity of injuries, as access to quality battlefield medical care increased, so did the survival rates of the injured. The wounded to killed ratio in World War II was 2.1. It climbed to 2.7 in Korea and 3.3 in Vietnam. But then the revolution in medical technology and individual body armor pushed it to an astounding 8.1 in Afghanistan and 9.1 in Iraq. To put it another way, if our soldiers were killed in action in the same ratios in the Iraq War as they were in World War II, our country would be mourning over 14,000 dead instead of 4,500.
All the Ways We Kill and Die Page 11
