on the Army truck, yelling to the soldiers to open up.
“At least give me some water for those poor bastards!” I shouted.
A sheepish medic got out of the truck with several bottles of water and his medpack and ran over to the ditch. I knelt there, looking at the mud bloodstained from the kid, right beside the truck door.
I banged on the steel door again. It opened a crack.
“Fuck you!” I shouted at the captain inside.
I had placed a firecracker up my ass. I figured the shocked captain would light the fuse as soon as we got back to Monti. Don’t ask me why I did it.
By now, Kerr was directing rockets from the Kiowas to provide aiming points for an F-15 and was gleefully bombing the slopes. But we had to unsnarl the traffic mess to get the Army convoy—and my newest buddy, the captain—out of there. Capt. Bryant was yelling at the Afghan drivers to get back in whatever trucks would move. They were looking at him as if he were crazy. Bryant then came up with a brilliant idea.
“Hey, Meyer,” he yelled, “get behind the wheel of that big truck, drive it to the edge of the river, and hop out! When they see that, they’ll move the others.”
I liked Paco Bryant, but there was no way in hell that was happening.
“No, I’m not doing that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ll drown.”
“Okay, put a rock on the gas pedal and hop out.”
“No. How about
He thought for a moment.
“You got a point,” he said. “Get one of those drivers to do it.”
I crawled over to a driver and threatened him with my rifle, pointing at the truck. We were still taking some light incoming. He just gestured for me to shoot him, as he preferred that to drowning. I laughed and he smiled back.
So we waited until a big wrecker arrived from Monti that quickly shoved aside the smoking wrecks. That still left a U.S. MRAP stuck in a ditch. Devine and I watched as a soldier hopped down from the wrecker and casually attached chains to the MRAP. We both liked this soldier, a hard worker who grumbled about how roughly grunts treated his beloved trucks.
“Better stay under cover, bro,” Devine said.
Instead, the mechanic, with no armor, stood on the road and slowly lit a cigarette.
“No biggie, Sergeant, I got this.”
Cigarette dangling from his lip, he signaled to the wrecker with both hands. Mr. Cool from a Camel ad. Very smooth, very much in charge—and very exposed.
“I’m hit! I’m hit!”
Mr. Cool was down. We rushed him into the ditch and cut open his right trouser. He’d been drilled through the thigh. The bullet had passed through like a sizzling branding iron.
“Son of a bitch!” he screamed. “Son of a bitch!”
Understandable statement. The pain truly burned and Mr. Cool was definitely hurting. The bullet, though, had missed the femoral artery. A quick tourniquet, a fifteen-minute ride, and he’d be tucked inside clean white sheets, soon on his way to Germany and strawberry ice cream.
At the moment, though, he didn’t see the upside. Instead, he was screaming, convinced he was dying. Gunny Devine started to giggle, and I broke out in short snorts. Kerr ran over, took one look at the wound, and hooted.
We weren’t heartless. If he had been dying, we would have promised him he was going to live.
As the traffic jam was sorted out, Col. Yoo and I walked back to our Humvee. The dead kid lay on the hood and rather than ride to base with a corpse between us, we wedged the body in the trunk.
Sometimes you laugh, and sometimes you want to cry.
The captain in charge of the logistics convoy did not press charges, although she may have suggested I was too high-strung. The psychologists were keeping an eye on me, calling me in for chats that went round and round.
The weeks crept by. Every now and then, an enemy sniper climbed a few thousand feet above our camp and fired a few rounds. The odds were way low that anyone would be hit, and the camp commander didn’t want to place sentries on top of the hill, requiring a three-hour hump each way. A few bullets were like a few falling stars you couldn’t do anything about.
Those shots bothered me more than the others. They taunted me. I was sitting in my hooch in October when a high-velocity bullet cracked past the open door. There were shouts in Pashto and the scuffling of running feet. A machine gun in a sentry post fired a short return burst. Then a second bullet snapped by.
I didn’t think consciously about it. I just ran outside and hopped in the turret behind a .50-cal. Bokis got behind the wheel and skidded around a corner to give me a clear line of sight. When the sniper took a third shot, I roughly knew his location—a rocky knob about eight hundred meters away. I returned fire, walking a red arc of tracers up to the knob. The sniper stopped shooting, probably hunkered down.
The whole deal pissed me off, being cooped up behind the wire, playing defense and buying time. For what?
A few days later, a farmer showed up on base to complain that bullets had struck his chicken coop. The date matched when I had fired the .50-cal. The farmer claimed he lost five hens.
The civil affairs officer gave him two hundred dollars—forty dollars for each scrawny chicken. The sniper on the farm tries to kill us, and we pay extortion?
Before dropping a shell down a mortar tube, the gunner levels the bubbles on his sight. If he loses the bubbles, then the tube is pointed at a crazy angle. Forty dollars for a chicken? The figure went around and around in my head. After Ganjigal, I was losing the bubble.
Chapter 16
CHEERLEADERS
Standard procedure after an engagement: investigators gather sworn statements. The defeat at Ganjigal generated a lot of paperwork. I wrote a few paragraphs, as did the others. Sgt. Maj. Jimmy Carabello, the top enlisted man in Battalion 1-32, took a personal interest in the battle and reviewed the statements.
I didn’t care what happened one way or the other, as long as I stayed far out of his way. Carabello reigned supreme on Joyce. Every soldier in the battalion had a Carabello story. He meted out punishments like ordering a soldier to write a two-thousand-word essay on “Why I should not roll my eyes when my sergeant tells me to do something.”
He built a hooch with a veranda where he smoked his cigars in the evening, watching basketball games on the court he’d built a few feet away. He thought the soldiers spent too much time by themselves on their iPods, so he insisted every unit on base field a team.
That wasn’t enough. He wanted his soldiers to see real, beautiful cheerleaders. He contacted the USO agent for the cheerleaders for the New England Patriots, who were on tour in the rear. Somehow he persuaded the agent to book an afternoon tea at Joyce with his soldiers. The event went smoothly until a warning via radio intercept. Carabello and the soldiers waved good-bye to the cheerleaders half an hour before rockets slammed into Joyce.
When the sergeant major put his mind to something, you couldn’t deflect him. Somehow, after reading the investigation statements, he decided to assemble packets recommending Will Swenson and me for the Medal of Honor. My packet was sent up the Marine channel and Swenson’s up the Army channel. I didn’t care and neither did Swenson. We were both getting out of the military and we were both furious about Ganjigal.
