The Shadow Patrol

a cramped hold stinking of fear-sweat, cut off from the world except for a little screen that ran black-and-white video from the camera on the hull. Once the back ramp closed, the guys inside couldn’t do anything but wait. Not for nothing did soldiers call the Strykers Kevlar coffins.

Some guys slept during rides. Not Fowler. Inevitably, he caught himself thinking of the idiotic cartoon Smurfs. In almost every episode, the Smurfs, those miserable blue nitwits, wound up on the run from the evil wizard and his cat. Along the way, they whined constantly to Papa Smurf: “How much farther, Papa Smurf?” “Not far now.” A few seconds later: “How about now? Much farther now, Papa Smurf?” “No, not too much.” And then: “What about now? Is it much—” Until finally Papa Smurf, that old coot, lost his temper and yelled, “Yes, it is!” It was, too. Much farther. But in the end the Smurfs got where they were go-ing. No cartoon IEDs ever blew their cartoon asses to cartoon heaven. Fowler figured that was why he found them comforting.

Today at least they were on a hard-packed road, only a few big rocks to bounce them around. Even so, the convoy never got out of second gear. Outside of Highway 1, travel on Afghan roads was excruciatingly slow. The lead Stryker was equipped with the equivalent of a minesweeping snowplow, a steel harness that pushed thick concrete wheels. The harness was attached to the Stryker’s front end, so the wheels rolled about a dozen feet ahead of the truck. They were supposed to set off bombs before the Stryker reached them.

But the wheels worked only on “pressure-plate” mines, those that had a simple fuse set off by the weight of a vehicle. Lately, the Taliban were using more “command-detonated” mines, which exploded when an insurgent set them off. So the driver of the lead Stryker stopped whenever he saw freshly dug dirt patches or suspicious pieces of roadside trash. The delays lasted anywhere from minutes to hours, if a mine was found. Meanwhile, the Strykers in the rest of the convoy idled. How much farther now?

TWO HOURS AFTER LEAVING Forward Operating Base Jackson, the convoy reached Hamza Ali. On the monitor inside Fowler’s truck, low brick buildings replaced empty fields. “Dismount in two,” Sergeant First Class Nick Rodriguez, the platoon’s senior enlisted man, said.

Sergeant Coleman Young — one of the lucky guys, the ones who slept — grinned at Fowler. Young was squat and muscular and as close to a friend as Fowler had in the platoon. “Been watching that screen for us? Worst TV in the world. You know watching it makes no difference as to whether we hit a bomb. You do know that, right?”

“You missed out today.” Fowler didn’t mind the ribbing. Not from Young.

“Yeah?”

“Two crazy Afghan chicks getting it on. Behind the burqa, you know.” Behind the burqa had become a catchphrase for 3rd Platoon. It meant everything and nothing.

The Stryker stopped. “Ramp down in fifteen,” Rodriguez said. “Blue”—American soldiers—“left and right, so keep those safeties on.”

Fowler made sure his Kevlar vest was tight and checked his rifle. He stretched his legs and wiggled his toes inside his boots three times, right, left, right, his end-of-ride ritual. The Stryker’s back ramp cranked down, kicking up gray-brown dust. One by one the men stepped out. “Back to reality,” Young said.

“This is reality?”

“I hope not.”

The school was newly built, two stories with real windows and a chimney pumping a stream of black smoke into the sky. “Hamza Ali Primary and Secondary School,” a sign read in English. “Funded by United States Agency for International Development.”

“Your tax dollars at work,” Fowler said.

“Not my tax dollars. Fowler, even you must know you pay no taxes as a member of the military serving in a war zone. You keep all twenty-five grand this year.”

“Plus all the chow I can eat.”

“Lucky you.”

“Heads up,” Rodriguez shouted to the platoon. “Let’s go!”

Rodriguez directed eight guys to stand sentry. The rest followed him and Lieutenant Tyler Weston, the platoon commander, to a dirt field behind the school. The low sun stuck in their eyes and turned them into teardrop shadows.

Weston had taken off his Kevlar and was wearing only his uniform. Soldiers called the practice bucking. Officers bucked at these events to prove that they trusted their Afghan hosts. Fowler thought bucking was idiotic. But then, he wasn’t an officer, or much of a soldier either. He’d realized after a few weeks that he didn’t belong in the Army. He got rattled too easily. He wasn’t a coward, not exactly. He went outside the wire like everybody else. But he was scared a lot. The fear slowed him down. And being slow was dangerous. The guys who separated themselves from their fear, who moved fast and sure, those were the guys everybody leaned on. Fowler didn’t like Rodriguez, the platoon’s senior enlisted man. But he knew Rodriguez was a better soldier than he’d ever be. The Army had trained Fowler how to move, handle a radio, strip a rifle, but all the training in the world couldn’t strip the fear from his heart.

So Fowler thought, and not for the first time, as an Afghan man stepped forward and shouted, “Welcome, soldiers! Welcome, America!” He went on in Pashtun for a couple minutes, baka-baka- baka. The platoon didn’t have an interpreter along, so none of the soldiers knew what he was saying, but the Afghans seemed to like the speech. When he was finished, Weston and Rodriguez stepped forward, holding a black bag. Weston opened it, tossed out a half dozen soccer balls.

“The United States is pleased to present this gift to the schoolchildren of Hamza Ali,” Weston said. He chipped one of the balls toward the school’s back wall. Two boys took off after it.

“How is this nonsense winning a war for us,” Young said under his breath to Fowler. “Giving them soccer balls? While they kill us with IEDs. Killing me softly.” These last three words delivered falsetto.

“With his song.”

“Cracker boy knows the Fugees.”

“Cracker boy, that’s a compliment, ’cause I can roll.”

“Tell yourself that.”

“You think you’re cool because you know the Fugees, Coleman? Everybody knows the Fugees. My grandma knows the Fugees and she’s been dead five years.”

“I am the stupidest black man in the world, coming over here to fight this war. My uncle got two fingers blown off in Vietnam but at least he got drafted. What’s my excuse?”

Fowler was spared from answering when two men and a boy stepped out of the school’s back door. One man had thick black hair and wore a powder blue warm-up suit. The other carried a canvas bag and a sledgehammer. The boy was shirtless and wore nylon pants, canary yellow emblazoned with white racing stripes.

“A sledgehammer,” Young said. “Stupid Afghan Tricks. Oh, yes.”

Without warning, the boy sprinted toward them and launched himself into a cartwheel and then three backflips. The man in the tracksuit followed with flips of his own. He finished beside the boy, picked him up, casually threw him in the air. The boy landed cat-quick and danced in a low furious whirl, kicking out his legs, the fabric of his yellow pants catching the sun. When the boy finished, the man raised his hands and said, in English, “Please welcome to Parwan”—he tapped his chest—“and Khost.” He pointed to the boy. “Famous father-and-son acrobat. Please like show.”

“How about some applause,” Sergeant Rodriguez said. The soldiers clapped as Parwan unzipped his jacket, revealing a tight black T-shirt. Afghan men insisted on modesty for women but showed off their own bodies at any provocation, Fowler had noticed.

When the applause ended, the man and the boy walked to opposite sides of the field. They turned and faced each other like cowboys about to duel. Then they sprinted at each other. Just before they were about to collide, Parwan ducked low and his son jumped. He flipped over his father’s head and landed and spread his arms wide like an Olympic gymnast. Pure energy. Even Young clapped, though as a rule he was impossible to impress.

Parwan and Khost bowed to the crowd. The second man stepped forward and spun the sledgehammer over his head, an Afghan Thor. The hammer was handmade and brutal, a dull silver log flecked with red spots that hinted