by Amber Burns
To all of us this meant nothing good, it meant he had something worse than running in mind, we all stopped in our tracks and turned as one man to face him.
“Drop and give me a hundred!”
There were no groans or complaints, just a smooth and uniform movement as we spread out and fell to the hard baked tar, into push-up position. It became easy once you picked an item of complete non-importance to focus on, and today that was a speck of quarts stone right in my line of sight. It sparkled in the afternoon sun every time I lowered my nose toward it, and that’s what got me through those push-ups.
This PT, the physical training they put us through every day, was meant to keep us sane, the army didn’t want us sitting idle in the heat and thinking about our families, because then they’d have depressed men with guns. Not the best of situations. So in between missions, we trained, we sat in classes, and we worked on vehicles that weren’t broken. It was a fucking pain in the ass.
The call to go into Kabul on an extraction mission came the next day, and prep was the same as for any other, I’d been here for so long the place almost felt like home. This was my second tour and so far nothing bad had gone down. The last one was pretty uneventful too. It was a week before I was heading home anyway, holiday time again to go and spend some time in a civilized place. I missed Galveston, and the peace of being on my boat.
“Right boys, I want this quick, clean and efficient. There’s nothing complicated here, we have a suspect in that building,” The Major tapped a point on the map colored in different shades of green, orange and red. “And you need to retrieve him, and bring him out.”
He clicked a button bringing up infrared imaging.
“We have been monitoring the building all day, and enemy activity is minimal. There are civilians in neighboring buildings, so keep fire power to a minimum, and engage only if engaged first. Understood?” He looked at them pointedly. “You’ll go in light and fast, nothing jingles, and nothing shines. Your transport will wait two blocks away in the safe-zone. The operation goes down at four am tomorrow, now go grab some chow and get some shut eye.”
Everybody dispersed to their bunks, quiet and mentally preparing, I suppose each of us had our own way of doing that. I sat down on the edge of my cot and started taking my rifle apart to clean, the M4 had been given to me, as to every soldier when I joined the army, and I knew it like a lover. I placed the components on my blankets beside me and polished each piece with black hard shoe polish, leaving the weapon dull-black and un-shiny. It made it difficult to spot at night because light didn’t reflect off the metal surfaces.
I did the same thing with my helmet and the lace pieces on my boots. Everything had to be dull. We wouldn’t have big packs on this one, so I stuffed a set of hard rations (I always carried these because I couldn’t stand the sight of starving children) into my tactical belt along with spare ammo and a few grenades and flash-bangs, and when everything was ready, placed it next to my boots and rifle, and headed to the mess tent.
“Deverroux! Yo! You gonna come join us over here?” Maxwell called me over to the rowdy bunch of guys playing cards and listening to rap music while they ate the burgers we were given for dinner.
They fed us well, at least I think we ate well when I heard the tales from the Russian and South African guys. We got good old American basics, good home cooking, and on a few occasions, like this, burgers with French fries.
“Maxwell, what’ you up to?” I questioned, my mouth half stuffed with ground meat and bun.
“I’m kicking Andrews and Brigg’s asses at poker while I get my last supper.” He made a biblical praying gesture with his hands together and crossed himself, right, Catholic.
“Don’t say shit like that.”
I couldn’t help the seriousness in my tone, I hated that these guys could joke so easily about dying on a daily basis, especially now, when myself and Maxwell were due to go home so soon. We’d been friends since high school, gotten through basics, done some stuff state-side, and gone on our first tours together. We’d managed to stick together all the way somehow. He laughed.
“Dude, I’m walking dead here already, how else do you think I manage to get through this shit? The fucking training, the fucking desert, the fucking crapping in a bucket because we have no fucking toilets, the fucking lack of fucking!”
Now everybody in the circle burst out laughing, I couldn’t help it, I burst into a fit of chuckles too. That was so true, no women here.
I ignored their crap-talking and finished my food, and by eight I was lying in my bunk with my eyes closed thinking of home, more specifically of my boat, I didn’t really have anything else. I know the guys wouldn’t be in Galveston, but we’d visit each other, keep in touch maybe. Then again, isn’t that what you tell yourself at the end of high-school too? It never happened though.
***
“Clear left doorway?”
Briggs’ voice in my com-set was audible only to me, and I responded with an “affirmative.”
There were just the four of us, fast, light and quick as the Major had said. The transport was now behind us, and the locals were only just beginning to stir in their doorways, I passed a young woman and hushed her with a finger over my lips. These people were familiar with us by now, and I think a few of them knew we didn’t want to hurt them, and that we only took aim for the bad guys. She nodded at me and disappeared back into the darkness of her mudbrick house.
“You’ve reached the target building Team Falcon, turn right into the next doorway,” Base spoke in our ears this time, we were named Team Falcon and they were Eagle, tacky but necessary.
No need to give an enemy the chance to get information on us that could harm us or families back home.
“Be advised, target for extraction is in a room near the back of the building, as reported by our intel late yesterday.”
“Thank you Eagle, entering target building.”
As I turned through the doorway, I was faced with a ten year-old boy, well, he could have been no more than ten. His face was a mask of panic, and he held a rifle that was about as big as he was, an AK47 I think.
“Hang back guys, we got a kid with a gun!” I said into my mike, but Maxwell had just stepped into view next to me.
He took a deep breath, and as he lifted his hand to signal the rest of the guys to stay back, the kid opened fire, catching him full in the neck and chest. I didn’t have time to think, I shot him. I took aim and shot the kid in the head.
“Falcon, what the hell is going on there? Why have shots been fired?” Base screamed over the comms.
Briggs and Andrews entered the room, rushed to Maxwell and absolute chaos erupted,
“Maxwell’s down, he got taken out by a kid with an AK, we are getting out of here, fuck this extraction, I don’t know what else is in this dark shit hole!”
It was my voice, but I didn’t feel like I was the one speaking.
We got out of the building, and ran back to the vehicles with Maxwell dragged limply behind us in our arms. The guys driving took one look at him and opened the back doors of the Humvee.
“He’s gone Michel,” Andrews said, trying to take him from my arms.
“No!” I cried. “He can’t be, he isn’t!”
Everything fades a bit at this point, but somehow we all got back to base, and I’ll never forget sitting in the back of that vehicle with my hand on Max’s chest, not actually hearing anybody speak. I don’t know when the moment dawned on me that I couldn’t feel his heart beating or breath coming from his body, or when exactly I looked down and saw half his face was blown away, but it did at some point.
I staggered from the Humvee when it pulled to a stop, and two steps away from it I spilled my guts on the tar, burger from the night before, coffee from an hour ago, all of it. Surprising how quickly everything had gone to shit really. The first person that came striding toward me when I straightened and wiped my mouth was Major Springer.
“I need to debrief the three o
f you Deverroux, mess tent at nine, go clean yourself up.”
I simply nodded and walked off to the dorm-tents. I needed a shower, I needed to wash all Maxwell’s blood off of me.
The three of us stood to attention in front of the Major, when he took a deep breath, sat back against a table and crossed his arms.
“At ease gentlemen. Now… What in the shit-fuck-storms-sakes happened to a simple extraction mission? Explain yourselves.”
Andrews and Briggs both looked at me to start.
“Sir, everything seemed fine, but there was a kid, a kid with an AK in the passage we needed to pass through to get to the back of the house where the extraction target was. Maxwell didn’t wait for my warning, or he didn’t hear me, and the kid got startled when Maxwell, he lifted his arm to warn Briggs and Andrews to keep back. Then he shot, the shots caught Maxwell in the neck and head, and then I took the kid out before he could shoot anyone else. That’s the sum total of it Sir.”
The major sat motionless and silent. Not knowing what else to do I continued to ramble.
“We decided to run for it, because I didn’t know what kind of attention that noise would have attracted.”
I stopped. Something happened to me then and I couldn’t breathe, my heart pounded so hard I swore it was going to jump right out of my chest.
“I killed a kid Sir, a ten year-old boy.”
I sat down on my ass before I knew what was happening and started hyperventilating.
“I killed a kid, I killed a kid Sir…”
2
I know they sent me to a shrink, and when I couldn’t talk to her about what exactly had happened, there were murmurs of ‘PTSD’ and I know I spent a lot of time rocking back and forth repeating those words, “I killed a kid,” through a haze of medication. But I do remember clearly getting on a plane to come home, and I very much remember the smell of the fresh air as I stepped off the plane at Scholes International airport in Galveston, Texas.
Once you get home after seeing some of the things you see in a place like Kabul, even on the outskirts, or when you’re driving through outlying areas, it’s hard to look at things the same in a civilized country. I’d love to say you become numb to the shit around you… But I didn’t, I saw everything so much more clearly, and I felt everything more deeply, I had nightmares, I saw Maxwell everywhere, and the kid I killed haunted me like a shadow, in my nightmares and in my peripheral vision. I wanted to die, until one day when I found something that dulled the pain.
I was sitting in a bar two blocks down the road from the marina, beer in hand and staring out at the sea, over the harbor and straight to where my boat, the Mary Jane was docked. My staring out to sea was interrupted when a shady looking character parked himself next to me and I just about leapt out of my skin.
“Hey, sorry fella. Seen you here a while, on holiday?” He asked, staring me up and down.
I suppose I looked like shit, I wore faded fatigues and a black vest, and though my body hadn’t completely gone to waste, I had grown a bit of a paunch that was visible as I sat there with my legs up on the rail. I showered, but I hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. The stranger kept staring, and I felt my temper dissipating.
“Listen man, I ain’t here to bother no one, what are you looking for?”
I tried to be polite, but I don’t think I succeeded. He smiled, and I should have known it was the smile of a shark right then.
“My name is Allen, and I kind of, well you could say I look after the needs of a couple of the locals, especially the guys who come back from the Afghan land… With the shakes, and the nightmares, and the tempers...” He waited, and saw what he wanted obviously, “I can get you those meds the psych’s stop wantin’ to write prescriptions for after you leave hospital. I have friends in the right places, I see you, and I can hook you up with the stuff to make all of that go away.”
It took me a lot of thinking, because I knew I was stepping onto a road that was dark, and usually went only one way… Bad. But I was tired of the faces, and I was tired of the cold sweats every night when I woke up screaming. I bought a bottle of thirty Xanax tablets from Allen that day, and when I got back to my boat that evening I took my first one.
Addiction apparently doesn’t sneak up on some people, it shakes your hand, greets you, and makes its home in your life, like an old friend. That’s what Xanax did to me. For the first time since I’d walked away from that building in Kabul, I felt no stress, no anxiety and no pain. I slept like a teenager that night, an absolutely dreamless sleep, but when I woke up I found that I needed to take another one to manage the shakes that had come back, and man oh man, did it combine nicely with a glass of scotch…
One every four hours or so turned into one every two hours, and so it progressed. It was not instant, nor was it a slow process, but soon I was finding Allen to get my supply on a weekly, then daily basis. I was out of it most days, sitting at that bar and staring at the sea, which was calm now that it was out of storm season. It was this state of mind I was in when I walked into “Ink Your Skin” on a Thursday afternoon. It was a bad day and I was thinking of Maxwell something fierce.
The girl behind that counter couldn’t have been more than twenty five years old, but I’ll never forget her words, or her calm demeanor.
“Good afternoon, what can I help you with?”
She smiled up at me, her dark red hair in pigtails. I tried to talk but my first attempt failed. She passed me a Kleenex, and only then did I notice the wetness on my face.
“Thanks, sorry.”
She walked out from behind the counter, and disappeared for what seemed like ten minutes, coming back with two steaming mugs of coffee.
“Here you go, looks like you’re having a rough day,” she said kindly.
I just nodded, still wiping at my face.
“I want to get something in memory of a friend who I lost in Afghanistan a few weeks ago,” I blurted out. “He was a high-school friend, we were on two tours together, and I watched him die.”
She walked over to her counter and came back with a sketch-pad and pencil.
“Tell me a bit about him?”
I started rambling about Maxwell.
“His name was Trent Maxwell, his family owned a Horse Ranch outside Odessa, and he loved it, spent every moment he could with those animals. We used to spend our summers out there together in High school, working the ranch. He gave his life for this country, he was only twenty seven.”
I drank my coffee and sat back, still in the happy numb haze of the drug, and when she showed me her drawing, I smiled.
“I love it.”
Two horses ran side by side, in astonishing detail, across a field where the flag blew in the breeze on a pole off in the distance. There were two figures in shadow leaning against the fence post underneath it, and at the bottom was written the date I’d given her as his date of death along with the words, ‘Never Forgotten’ in a soft cursive script.
She nodded.
“I’m glad, you give me time to draw out the stencil for this, and come in tomorrow. Now I know you are taking something, can you tell me what it is so that I know if you’ll bleed excessively?” She asked this last part softly and with compassion in her voice as she placed a delicate hand over mine.
“I take Xanax, for the shakes and some PTSD issues I have.”
She nodded, “That’s okay then. My name is Kate, by the way.”
I frowned, “I’m sorry I’ve been rude Kate, I’m Michel.”
After seeing Kate at the tattoo studio and deciding to get the memorial tattoo, I went back to the boat and vanished into oblivion, lying on the deck while the sun set overhead with a beer in one hand. The gentle rocking of the water lulled me into a semi-comatose state of relaxation. Before I knew it I was walking back into the tattoo studio the next day. Kate had a bed ready, sterile and prepped, and all the instruments of the trade laid out. It was not my first tattoo, but it was the biggest, and when she rubbed the stencil onto my back
, it took up the whole space, from shoulder to shoulder, and down to my waistband.
“You ready for a good few hours of pain Michel?” She asked, grinning like a little she-demon.
I took a deep breath and stuck my face down in the hole provided.
“Do your worst pretty lady.”
The pain was therapeutic, eight and a half hours of catharsis. The endorphin high was almost too much, and my Xanax need only kicked in once I got back to the boat again. It felt like I was in a state of shock from the prolonged pain.
The healing process over the next few days was a bitch. The location of my ink meant there was dry and scabby skin I couldn’t reach to rub cream onto. It sucked being alone. I ran into Kate again two weeks later, and she invited me back to her studio for coffee. We had coffee, and then she asked to inspect her handiwork. Once my shirt was off, she trailed her fingers tenderly over the shapes of the horses, rubbing in a soothing ointment.
