“Hmmm . . .” he said. “This is better. This is so much better.”
It was a deceptively good beginning to the deployment.
• • •
“I like it here,” I wrote Natalia. “I like the mission. We rarely see the enemy, mostly it’s calling in air strikes on piles of rocks. But there’s something unbelievably fulfilling about being in a place where you can count on getting into gunfights.”
We mostly relied on letters. “I want to hear your voice,” Natalia told me before I went out, “but I’m not gonna make it if you’re calling me every day and telling me everything.” I was relieved to hear her say it. One of the many ways my wife is wiser than me.
We ended up working out a deal where each of us would try to tell the real stuff in letters. That way we wouldn’t be putting the other person in the position of having to respond to whatever intense shit we were going through, whether it was our daughter or money or combat, in real time. And it meant I didn’t have to switch from war to Bragg in the space of a minute. On the phone, it’s so easy to lie, especially about things that have just happened, things you haven’t figured out in your own head yet, so you just gloss over them, or tell half-truths, or worse than half-truths, you tell the SITREP version of events, the who did what where and when without the emotions, the list of events recited and dumped on your wife’s lap without context or meaning because the whole thing doesn’t quite make sense to you yet either, like how funny it was after you crawled through a sewer ditch with the rest of your team and you shot one muj and Carlos shot the other and they fell in just the perfect way, Muj One shot through the pelvis, abdomen, and heart so shit and blood pooled together, and Muj Two spun around by the bullet before face-planting into his friend’s blown-away and undoubtedly now dickless crotch, the two of them dead but Muj One with this expression of total shock and pain almost indistinguishable from extreme pleasure, so it really did look like he was receiving a blow job from his friend and it was too funny, really. Not in the moment, because fighting at close range you don’t know if you’re going to die and it’s scary as shit, but afterward, in that next moment when you know you’re alive and you know you’re going to stay that way and so is the rest of your team, you look over and see Muj One and Muj Two and it’s so fucking funny. I mean it almost disturbed me how funny I found it, how the memory made me smile and would come to me unbidden and how that’s not really the kind of guy I am but there it is, we all laughed about it, we laughed about so many things. Our job is too serious to take seriously, so we laughed about a lot of things that weren’t funny at all, or wouldn’t have been so funny if they hadn’t also been so terrifying, and here was this pure joke displayed before us, so great that Carlos tried to take a picture before Jefe, ever professional, stopped him.
How to tell that on a phone? Instead, I wrote letters, each word deliberate, though at first I wrote almost nothing of missions. My early letters avoided all that, papered over war, and instead talked about our girl, about what she meant to me, and what it meant being a father and being away from her. Without regular access to the phone, I felt what older generations of warriors must have felt when they wrote home, a sense of separation and of precariousness, of the need to communicate something such that the time here, whatever happens, will be anchored and preserved among those I love. And by writing about my girl and not about war, I was bringing my girl here, letting my wife know, and maybe someday Inez as well, that she was with me, she was essential to me, that even here the most important thing in the world was that I was her father. Which was mostly true.
In return, Natalia sent me more packets of photos like she’d done when I was in Colombia. First came less than a month in. My little lady dressed in a polka dot dress, with lacy frills. With a bow tie. Her fat, happy face smiling up into the camera. Adorable, you understand, a happy sight to see. Something to miss, not just the little girl but also the lost time. Unlike the memory of those dead muj, the photos rarely made me smile.
“The sad thing about what we do,” Jefe told me one night as we smoked cigars, dropping the same tired wisdom I’d heard from other team guys but hadn’t expected from Jefe, “is that we go home to our wife and kids and know that we can never really explain this to them, what it’s like to do this job. That they’ll never understand.”
I didn’t like what he said, but I kept my silence. I knew I was just supposed to nod, as if it were something profound. Was it true? Would my daughter ever understand me? Would Natalia? I’d always thought she knew me better than I knew myself. She sees things so clearly, and has a hardheaded way of cutting through the bullshit team guys like to tell themselves. It would later occur to me that if our wives never came to understand us, it wouldn’t be because they couldn’t, but because we would never tell them.
• • •
The largest operation of the deployment was Operation Adalat, where we threw the Special Forces rule book out the window. The plan was to pin a bunch of Taliban in the Shah Wali Kot valley, head in with a column of Canadian armor (seriously), and
