I pushed fluids into Carlos, as well as antibiotics. Later he would be too weak to fight the incoming infections from all the dirt and grime and evil pushed into his body before they had a chance to really grip him.
“The fucking Dutch,” Jefe told me at one point, “can’t identify targets, and won’t go below their ceiling.” Ah, I thought. So that’s why we don’t have air support.
Carlos seemed certain he was going to die. He’d alternate between joking and telling me things to tell his ex-wife, who’d left him after he cheated on her with a stripper in Fayetteville. I pumped him full of painkillers, kept him talking. Even if he survived the Golden Hour, I knew something he’d soon learn—that you never fully shake the finger of death once you’d been injured like this. Survivors age faster—two to four times as fast, though the doctors don’t quite know why. The diseases of old age—coronary artery disease, chronic kidney disease, hypertension, diabetes—strike earlier. It’s like the body knows it wasn’t meant to live. But there we were, Ocho and I working with his blood drying on our clothes, pushing life as he lay helpless to stop us, the two of us conspiring against his body’s right to die.
We put him in the CASEVAC, unsure if he’d survive. It wouldn’t be until the fight was over that we’d receive definitive word that he’d made it, or at least made it through the worst. And the fight continued for two more days, with a body count somewhere around four hundred Taliban killed by the end.
• • •
After the fighting, the people started filtering back to their towns, and I watched them, wondering what they were wondering. If they were asking themselves who they lost, how many of their brothers, or fathers, or sons were simply never coming home again. Diego pointed to a little boy holding hands with his littler brother. The boy had a mop of black hair, messy, like old pictures of the Beatles.
“In a couple of years,” he said, “you think we’ll come back and kill him?”
I scowled and Diego laughed.
“You know what’s crazy,” he said. “Between 2001 and now, life expectancy in Afghanistan has gone up.”
I didn’t respond.
“I know,” he said. “From fifty-five years to fifty-seven. That’s how fucked up this country is. This war has actually been good for their health.”
“Ah,” I said. I wasn’t interested in playing Diego’s games.
Diego looked back out at the people. “You know what? This isn’t war. It’s chemotherapy.”
I treated my own wounds, small burns and little bits of frag that had ripped little tears across my neck, face, and right arm. All would mostly heal, with minor scars. Nothing like Carlos.
There are two ways to think about severe wounds. One is the very smallness and weakness of the human body, pathetic even compared to other animals, and so easy to break beyond repair, so easy even with the most basic of tools, a rock is enough, and then to think of it in the midst of the sorts of things that happen in war, not just explosions sending earth and brick blossoming but weapons that work by strange inversions of pressure, collapse buildings from the inside, or concentrate force in small spaces that liquify metal and send it shooting out through the air. The penetration of the human body is so easy it almost seems beside the point—such tools should be used for greater creatures than us. We are weak, we are fragile, and so, perhaps, we are nothing. There is wonder in the world—the unbearable blackness of the sky in Afghanistan, its piercing stars, the vibrations of the guns, soundless light on the horizon, flashes like echoes, a moon rising over sharp blades of mountain while tracers carve lines into the night. But man himself is nothing.
But the other way of thinking is the opposite. That the world itself is what is small. Mountains, stars, horizon, so much accumulation of rocks, dust, and an expanse of empty air. Meaningless without someone there to see it. I was once shot in the shoulder. The world around me wobbled and vibrated and collapsed to nothing in the midst of the pain. I applied my mind to the pain, oriented myself, returned the world to its proper place around me. I thought of my brothers, who I was currently failing by no longer being in the fight, by being injured, perhaps badly enough I would need their help leaving this place, under fire, when they had enough to carry without me. I thought of my wife and daughter. And then I looked at my arm, flopped to the side, immobile, mere matter. A thing. Meaningless. And I applied my mind again to the pain, and a finger wiggled, dead flesh suddenly live. There was a miracle there, in the difference between the two.
• • •
I didn’t write to Natalia about Carlos. I thought about it constantly, but putting it into a letter was too much. Putting things like that into words means facing them head-on, which you shouldn’t do mid-deployment. But the more I thought it, and about Natalia, and why I wasn’t telling her, the more I started wondering about what Natalia wasn’t telling me. Military wives tell each other not to tell their overseas soldier the hard truths, and since soldiers tell each other not to tell their wives the hard truths, intimacy withers on deployments.
I can pinpoint the moment I was certain I loved Natalia. We’d just started dating. I was a year back from my first Afghanistan deployment, with Ranger Battalion. It’d been something of a letdown and I was puzzling over whether I should get out, go back to school, or try out for selection in SF,
