• • •
Before we left, we did have at least one mission that was less pure combat than hearts and minds. It was a VETCAP, a veterinary civic action program, the sort of thing that was far more popular with Afghans than medical engagements, where we went out and cured their illnesses. In the rural region of Afghanistan, human life is cheap. Pain and death, it is understood, are a part of existence, and they follow their own logic. A healthy herd, on the other hand, is pure gold. So Ocho and I were sent out with Diego, Benjy, Jason, and some Canadians to try our veterinary skills on the local herds.
En route, of course, a group of Taliban skirmishers took some shots at us in an untilled field. The fire was unusually intense, and unusually accurate. A bullet nearly grazed my head.
“Diego,” Ocho said. “If I die on this dumbass mission, I want my tombstone to read, Here lies Ocho. He gave his life for goats.”
They must have prepped the area as a battlefield, establishing fire positions and marking the distances against the trees dotting the fields, using them as aiming stakes.
“You know, we may not have much success training Afghans.” Diego smiled at me. “But these Taliban fuckers do seem to be learning. It gives you hope for this country.”
Diego called for air support while we maneuvered the Canadians around, playing a game that’d end up taking an hour or two before the Taliban decided they’d had enough and ghosted away. The main casualties were goats. We pushed on to the village and delivered medicine to the villagers’ sick herds, curing the same kind of animals we’d just slaughtered and feeling a bit, well, sheepish about it. Perhaps just the exhaustion of something so seemingly pointless led us to slip up on the way back, miss the IED. I don’t know.
The explosion that hit Ocho sounded in a pulse, like being inside the heartbeat of an enormous animal, an animal the size of the earth itself, and with a heartbeat loud enough to swallow you whole. It flung Ocho high in the air, thrust me backward, staring at the sky, unfocused, unsure of what I was or where I was or even what I was seeing. Blue patch here, now. Brown patch there. And then, pain. And then, above the pain, a sound. Ocho screaming.
I lifted a hand, bleeding, and held it against the sky. I ordered my fingers to wiggle. All five wiggled back at me. I lifted the other hand. Wiggled. Sat myself up.
There was a crater big enough for a man to stand in and disappear. Against the edges, I could see the outline of other IEDs, undetonated but their positions revealed by the explosion. I heard someone call out a warning. That someone was me.
Ocho was a few feet away from the edge of the crater, the top half of him more or less recognizable, the bottom half smudged. I scanned for other casualties and saw a Canadian guy only six or seven yards away from me, slumped with blood seeping through the body armor, just over his chest. I looked back at Ocho. There was a decision, a decision related to training and not to friendship, love, or camaraderie. Legs or chest?
Ocho was shouting and gradually I understood, he was warning people away from him, warning about movement in general. IEDs all over, any patch of earth. Only one of his arms was moving.
I pulled out my bayonet and pushed it through the dirt in front of me, making my way to the Canadian soldier, away from Ocho, moving at a crawl, digging under the dirt, feeling for the clink of metal, the solidity of a mine.
When I reached the soldier his face was white, his breathing shallow, veins sallow.
“Hey,” I told him as I worked from the side to get his body armor off. “I got you. What’s your name?”
“Jim,” he said.
“Okay, Jim,” I said. “It’s a small entry and exit wound, not so bad. So you know the deal. You survive the next five minutes, and what happens?”
“I live.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ocho applying a tourniquet to his right leg. He roared as he tightened it. I’ll never get used to the screams that come with this job. Everything we do to casualties hurts—from dragging wounded bodies across hard ground to the chest seals to the compressions to the IVs—but the vise-like grip of a tourniquet is in a special class. It’s so painful it can kill, because the pain makes the nervous system demand oxygen, adding another unfulfillable request to the body’s shrunken, weakened veins. But Ocho is a tough motherfucker, I told myself, and if anyone can self-care a pair of tourniquets without passing out, it’s him.
“Jim,” I said. “Tell me where it hurts.”
I took out the chest adhesive seal, which is the size of a dinner plate, and began peeling the adhesive off with shaky, adrenaline-fueled fingers.
Jim told me it hurt to breathe, it hurt in his chest and his foot, which I could see was twisted under him and attached so it didn’t matter, not so much, but that’s fine.
I applied the seal, which hurt Jim more, but more important than managing pain was stopping the air spilling into the hole in his chest, getting trapped in the chest cavity and squeezing the lung smaller and smaller until suffocation. Blood and oxygen, I thought, and now emotion.
“Do you want fentanyl?” I asked. “For the pain?”
“Fuck. Yeah.” Jim was shivering. Ocho was tying on a second tourniquet and roaring again, the tough bastard. Another Canadian guy who’d been bayoneting his way across the ground reached me, and I set
