I left Bastion with instructions that I was to be billeted in the Marine “transient quarters”—a couple of air-conditioned tents on the south—or main—side of the airfield. I had been told that there were a handful of 2/7 Marines still at the huge base and that transportation would be waiting for me. It wasn’t.
I remembered the layout of the base and had a pretty good idea how to get to where I was going. So after leaving the plywood building that passed for an airport terminal, I hitched up my pack and started walking. It took about an hour, but I found the place. The tent was tan instead of the usual olive drab green. Unlike those that housed permanent personnel, it was not ringed with four-foot-high sandbags around its perimeter. The sandbags were meant to protect against indirect fire (IDF).
I wasn’t worried about that. I still felt that being hit by IDF at KAF was somewhere below a shark attack in the ocean or a lightning strike on land in terms of probability.
There were only a handful of sleeping Marines present when I walked in. Most of the racks were ordinary cots, but all the way at the end was a bed with a mattress. It even had a folding partition between it and the rest of the tent. It seemed like the closest thing to a private room, so I tossed my pack on it. Then, not wanting to be awakened in the middle of the night by a pissed-off Marine—who may have had a prior claim to it—I woke Sergeant Greg Lunsford, who was sleeping nearby, and asked him if anyone else was using it. He told me it was up for grabs.
I had shed my uniform back at Bastion and was happily wearing sneakers, tan cargo pocket pants, and a tan civilian shirt over my olive drab issue T-shirt. It was “contractor casual” attire. Greg asked me no questions, and I just crashed. Once again I was glad I had my British army sleeping bag—it was air-conditioned cold inside. I had gotten used to the heat, but not to air-conditioned cold.
The next day—setting my own schedule and answering to no one—I strolled over to the base hospital. It was about an hour’s walk, but I didn’t mind. I was well used to walking by this time. I didn’t need to rush off to the latrine during the night, so I slept well. Blood was drawn, tests were run, but I was already beginning to feel better. Not 100 percent, but improved.
Within a couple of days, the doctors at the hospital informed me that they had found nothing that concerned them and concluded that I most probably had gotten sick from the bad food. That, in turn, caused such distress to my stomach that it would take time to heal completely. After getting antibiotics, antacids, and other stomach-soothing medications, I was told to be patient and wait it out.
I determined to wait it out at KAF.
19
Disney World
As had been the case at Bastion, I now regarded KAF as pure paradise. What I had considered austere in the extreme only six months prior was now a veritable Disney World. I regarded my sojourn there as “R&R”—rest and recreation—time. My contract with my “check signers” specified that I was entitled to an expense-paid two-week vacation at the destination of my choice sometime during the deployment. I had no intention of leaving my guys, so I just didn’t take it. In my mind, I was taking it at KAF. KAF still had free popcorn to go with free movies, and it still had the Dutch recreation center and the Boardwalk. I enjoyed every charming moment of it.
There is a custom among Marines that if one had been in a firefight, one was entitled to wear a bracelet made out of braided olive drab green paracord. Paracord is a nylon “shoelace” that is almost as universally useful as duct tape. If one had been hit by an IED it would be black. If one had been through both, the bracelet was woven both olive drab and black. One of the guys had made an olive drab one for me right after the July 2 attack on the FOB, and I have worn mine ever since. Everybody in 1st Platoon rated it, so it was no big deal.
I made friends with Sergeant Greg Lunsford and the handful of other Marines languishing at KAF—the “far rear.” It was clear that, civilian attire notwithstanding, I was a fellow Marine to them.
Greg had the entire Grey’s Anatomy TV series stored on his laptop. He and I and one or two other Marines gathered around at the same time each evening to watch a couple of episodes. It’s amazing how the little things in life can bring such joy when you are deprived of them for so long. It became the highlight of my day. My condition continued to improve, and I was able to enjoy KAF more and more.
In time I took renewed notice of the dining halls. They had seemed cafeteria-like and second-rate when I was last at KAF. The air-conditioning had felt inadequate, and I recall sweating a lot while eating. Like the entire battalion I also had to balance my rifle with my food tray and keep it from banging and crashing around when I sat down to eat. That was all new to me then. Now, sans rifle, in comfortable clothes, totally inured to the heat, the food tasted gourmet great.
Life at KAF was sweet.
—
Marines have a name for rear-echelon troops—they are disdainfully called “pogues.” A pogue today is what a REMF (“rear-echelon motherfucker”) or “Remington raider” (so named after the Remington typewriters they pounded) was during prior conflicts. Since “Hobbits” have become well-known as a result of the popularity of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, “pogues” were also known as “Fobbits”—in reference to those who always stayed far behind the wire at the various large, sprawling FOBs.
One evening at chow, I hadn’t been able to locate any of my new Marine buddies in the heavily populated eating facility. There must have been hundreds of people packed in there. So I sat down next to two civilians with heavy Scottish accents and enjoyed my food. Eavesdropping was out of the question—I couldn’t understand a word they said. Suddenly the IDF sirens sounded. To my utter astonishment, everybody in the place dove under the tables!
Everybody, that is, except my Marine pals. They, and I, were still sitting and eating.
I thought, “Oh, there they are! Great!” I picked up my tray and joined them at their table. We couldn’t get used to the pogue mentality at KAF.
In short order civilian dining hall workers ordered everyone to vacate the facility and take shelter in the bunkers. It was more than an overreaction, I thought—I wondered if a flight of German bombers was on the way. It seemed more in place with London during the Blitz than at KAF. Acting rather too nervously, I believed, people quickly filed out of the building. Not the handful of Marines; they kept eating. When personally asked to leave by a nice civilian woman, they complied. I was enjoying my newfound freedom too much and opted to accept the “risk” of eating dinner. I volunteered to keep the flies off their food until they could return.
Unfortunately—being the only person left in the large dining hall—I was rather conspicuous. Nothing quite unnerves a pogue like someone who doesn’t share their fear. It makes it all seem so unnecessary, I supposed. When personally asked to leave, I did. I apologized to my buddies for being unable to keep their chow “fly free.” I walked outside with a fried chicken leg in my hand. Damn, the food was good!
The same kind of overreacting silliness infected the base during the daytime. I was at my old “office”—the Dutch recreation center—when the sirens went off again. The nice people behind the counter anxiously told me I’d have to leave, as they were closing down and taking shelter. I couldn’t help but wonder how many times the sirens had gone off in the months since I first arrived at KAF. The only time I had even heard a round hit vacant ground was immediately upon arrival—and if anyone had been injured the news would surely have reached me. It would have been a big deal. I just couldn’t understand what everybody was worried about. “Oh, well,” I thought, sighing.
I began the long stroll in what used to be oppressive heat—now just a pleasant, sunny day—back to the Marine transient quarters and the Marines I expected to find there. Every one of the amusing places around the boardwalk was shut down tight. All along the route, every bunker was full of edgy civilians and pogues. They all looked at me as I passed with disbelie
f on their faces. I found it all highly entertaining. I decided they were waiting for me to be struck by lightning.
When I got back to our quarters, Greg and another Marine were sitting on the ground outside in the shade the tent provided. All along the tent row were reinforced concrete bunkers where uneasy pogues were waiting for the all-clear to sound. One civilian actually had his Kevlar helmet on. We found that extremely funny. We imagined the stories he would tell the folks back home about his “dangerous time in Afghanistan.” Greg decided to put it all on video. He conducted a make-believe interview about the “devastating attack” that had just taken place. I pretended I was a reporter for CNN. I think it’s still on YouTube.
Then we decided to make a PowerPoint. We named it “A Fobbit’s Guide to Life at KAF.”
Some of the slides we made up read:
REMEMBER: ALWAYS TAKE COVER WHEN THE IDF SIRENS SOUND!
Even though they NEVER sound until AFTER the IDF is over . . .
YOU WILL FEEL KEWL! You can make believe you really WERE in danger!
And try to elicit sympathy from the folks back home who don’t know any better!
A simulated phone conversation:
“Gosh Honey, I had a CLOSE one today . . .”
You can wear with PRIDE any of the following [T-shirts]:
I am a Taliban Hill fighter
Operation Enduring Freedom, Because Freedom Isn’t Free
Professional Taliban Hunter, Afghanistan
And many, many others!
Send the pictures home!
Those lovable old veterans who stormed ashore at Normandy and Iwo Jima will be dying to buy you a beer!
And next to a picture of a tired, dusty combat Marine from Golestan with his .50-caliber machine gun the last slide read:
Just crop this guy’s face out of the picture and paste yours in!
Those guys at the VFW will be THROWING beers at you!
Chicks will DIG you!
You’ll go home a real KAF WARRIOR!
But it wasn’t all fun and games at KAF. Several 2/7 Marines were killed while I was enjoying myself. One was a man whose body was then due to be shipped home via KAF. A sergeant had been killed in action by an IED. Once at KAF, his body lay in state—in a flag-draped closed coffin inside the post’s nondenominational chapel. The memorial service was held the next day. It was packed. Marines, American, British, and Canadian soldiers—all were fully represented. Not everyone could get inside the chapel. Almost no one—myself included—knew him personally.
A 2/7 Marine gunnery sergeant asked me if I wanted to be part of the Marine’s escort during the Ramp Ceremony that night. That is, if I wanted to be one of the Marines who escorted his body from the vehicle that brought it from the chapel to the airfield and then onto the C-130 that would take it home. He probably asked because I was from the same battalion as the dead Marine. I declined. I wasn’t in uniform. My fellow Marines felt it didn’t matter. But it mattered to me.
So instead I stood silently in the background and marveled at the Marines and soldiers—Americans, Canadians, and Brits who turned out in the middle of the night to pay their last respects to a Marine who was undoubtedly a total stranger to them all. A Canadian sergeant wearing a kilt played “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes. What I beheld is called “The Ramp Ceremony.”
—
One day a new arrival took up residence in our tent. Fresh from the hospital at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul, I met Lance Corporal Jamie Nielsen from Echo Company. He was returning to the company by way of KAF. Blond-haired and with a midwestern accent, he took the cot on the other side of my “private room” partition. I noticed his black and green paracord bracelet right away.
Being older, I had listened to a lot of Marines in the eight months I had been with 2/7. I suppose in a way I was a sort of father figure to many of them. It was just as well; I regarded them all as “sons” and “younger brothers” anyway. Jamie had a story to tell, and I had an ear to listen.
IEDs had been especially problematic in Echo Company. So Jamie was out of his vehicle on August 15 doing what Sergeant Holter and I had done together many times—peering anxiously at the ground, searching for any sign of a disturbance. The baked-hard dirt road couldn’t have held a hidden IED—so Jamie thought. He walked on. The ground exploded beneath him. He had stepped right on one.
It hurled him quite a distance from the blast site. After he woke up, he couldn’t see. He was blind. He felt someone touching him, and he said that “freaked him out.” He began feeling around for his rifle but couldn’t find it. Finally, he got a little of his vision back and realized it was one of his guys. The guy said, “You’re okay. You’ve got all your parts.”
Meanwhile, the corpsman dragged him two hundred meters from where he had landed. All the while Nielsen kept saying, “I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m doing okay.”
In the interim—about forty-five minutes after Jamie got nailed—another lance corporal was seriously wounded by a different IED. They were flown together by chopper from Echo Company’s command post at Sanguin to the British hospital at Bastion. There they cut off all Jamie’s clothes. He reminisced that it felt “funny in a hospital gown.” It was embarrassing to him. He begged for a pair of cammies. Then he walked to a C-130 that took him to Bagram. The other lance corporal was on the same plane, only he was carried aboard on a stretcher. They both talked and joked the whole way.
Jamie remembered walking off the plane and into the hospital. There they “threw him on a gurney and cut his clothes off again.” He kept telling them, “NO! I’ll take them off.” They said “no” and cut them off. He recalled that he had “tons of IVs in him” and that he had multiple surgeries performed on him.
Finally, he was healed well enough to be allowed to walk around Bagram, but not sufficiently to return to our battalion. At one point he was walking around, still suffering from a concussion and groggy from painkillers. He got lost. He had dark glasses on. He guessed that he must have walked past an Army officer. He could barely see and barely hear. What vision he had was blurred. Not recognizing that the man was an officer, Jamie didn’t salute.
Apparently the officer called to him, but Jamie didn’t hear him. That probably pissed the officer off because he grabbed Jamie “forcefully and spun him around.” The officer said, “HEY DEVIL!”
Recounting it all to me, he was still upset.
Jamie finally realized what was going on. So he said, “Pardon, I didn’t hear you. Did you just say ‘Hey devil’? Are you a Marine?”
That—in my former line of work—would have been known as a clue.
The officer replied, “No. I’m Army. But how about ‘sir’?”
Jamie said, “I apologize, sir”—and took off his dark glasses and cover. His face was “all screwed up.” He had bad bruises, gauze patches on one eye—it was black-and-blue all over. He was a real mess to behold.
Jamie continued, “I still can’t see or hear too well, sir.”
The officer—speechless—turned and walked away.
Hearing that, I was certain the man in question was a second lieutenant and probably not from a combat unit. Mistakes will happen. Things aren’t always the way they seem at first. Hell, I had been a second lieutenant at one time myself. But a decent officer would have made things right with an explanation and an offer to help.
I don’t know if Jamie realized I was a former officer. But I believed that it would help him if I explained things a bit. In the eyes of that officer, Jamie was being deliberately insubordinate. Too many Army officers allowed that kind of behavior in my day, and the Army was the worse for it.
I didn’t try to excuse the man—inside, I was livid—but I think seeing things from the officer’s perspective helped Jamie somewhat—particularly the whole “devil” item. Jamie was really upset about being called “devil.” I guessed I would have been
too if I had just had the same close brush with death that he had.
“Devil” is short for “devil dog,” and devil dog is the English equivalent of something the World War I Germans had dubbed Marines: Tufelhunden. I explained to Jamie that the officer probably picked up on what Marines call each other and didn’t mean for it to sound the way it did.
I think that helped him. That was my purpose—but deep inside, I was still furious.
At Bagram, Jamie was self-conscious for a long time about his vision and hearing loss. He didn’t want to be a “fifth wheel,” and he no longer felt like everybody else. But he hung out with Marines who were stationed there, and their genuine friendliness finally got through to him. It put him at his ease. The Marines stationed at Bagram took good care of him until it was time for him to leave. As a former Marine officer I was particularly relieved when Jamie told me that a Marine major had told Jamie that he was proud of him—that Jamie had done a good job.
That was more like it. That major made Jamie feel a lot better.
We talked about the IED and how it was that he remained among the living. When he told me that the road he had been on was only a short distance from the cut-out bank of a dry riverbed, I reasoned it out. The force of an explosion will follow the path of least resistance. When the powder in a rifle cartridge is set off, for example, the result is a small explosion. The path of least resistance is out the barrel. The projectile is forced along on the mini–shock wave, and that—in simple terms—is how a bullet is fired.
The Silence of War Page 26
