“Keep packing until it’s full,” I said. “Then hold down three minutes.”
There were no bullets in the air. No shooting. I started making my way to Ocho, who’d done too good a job warning people away from himself, too good a job telling everyone he’s got it, so he was still in self-care, and with every inch I approached it became rapidly apparent I’d made the wrong choice because it wasn’t legs versus chest, like I’d thought, it was legs and arm and maybe more versus chest.
His legs were rags, with torn flesh and bone sticking out oddly, calf muscles flopped to the side and covered in sand, looking like breaded chicken cutlets waiting to be thrown on the skillet. The feet no longer attached, muscle and flesh torn off the bone, the signature of blast injuries, whose shrapnel takes the hard bone and whose blast energy takes the soft tissue, the muscles, skin, veins, and arteries pulling up off the remaining bone like the peel off a banana.
Ocho’s right hand was split down the middle, as if someone had driven a hatchet between his middle and ring fingers. There were chunks missing out of the meat of the forearm, exposing the large bones there.
I lifted my head, ready to call for Diego and Jeff to clear a path for Ocho to be dragged out, but saw it was already being done. I turned the tourniquet on his right arm and Ocho’s bellow was weaker, by far, than the other two I’d heard. I asked about his pain. I squeezed fluids into my friend, resuscitation fluids and analgesia. And Ocho told me, “If you save my life, I’m gonna be so proud of you.”
I reached to Ocho’s leg and moved aside his dick to place another tourniquet up higher than the one he’d administered himself.
“Now I’ve got to live,” he said. “I’m not gonna die when you’re the last person to touch my junk.”
When we put Ocho in the stretcher, he screamed in pain, which is normal, more or less, so I didn’t realize what had really happened until he shifted, reached over the side of the stretcher, and grabbed his right foot. I’d assumed it had been completely severed, since the foot had been snapped off at the bone, but there was a thick flap of calf muscle still attached, and we were dragging it through the dust, sending pain screaming into his brain. Ocho pulled the foot into the stretcher and clutched it to his stomach, cradling it like a baby with his one good arm, his eyes closed. That’s the image I had of him as they put him into the helicopter.
• • •
By the end of our deployment to Afghanistan, the 1st Battalion of the 7th Special Forces Group had killed over 3,400 enemy, most of them in a territory that is now, eight years later, still Taliban controlled. Our particular team had sustained no KIA. Which meant, from the perspective of the American public, that it’d been cost-free.
Since we were now just scraps, the team couldn’t be kept together, but I’d return to Shah Wali Kot on later deployments. We’d fight another major battle there a few years later. For all I know, we’ll fight another major battle there a year from now, or five years from now. Those little kids hustling from the valley, hand in hand with their sisters, escaping the bombardment—they keep getting older.
Azad Khan died in 2010. I was with him at the time, and he said his last words to me. “Sir,” he said, bleeding from more wounds than I could ever hope to pack, “I need more hand grenades.” When I came back from that deployment, I told Ocho and he laughed and said, “That motherfucker, that lucky motherfucker. Goddamn. He was a fucking motherfucker, wasn’t he? A fucking warrior, wasn’t he? Goddamn. I wish I could die with some badass shit like that.” Ocho still holds out the hope that prosthetics will improve to the point where he can go back to war as some kind of Robocop-style super-soldier with bionic limbs. It doesn’t matter if it takes them years to get to that kind of technology, he tells me. Whenever they figure it out, Afghanistan will be waiting, that land he thinks of less as a country than an arena, a stadium for men like him and Azad to do what they were meant to do.
I couldn’t have articulated it then but that deployment was the beginning of the dead certainty that I preferred boring Colombia to exciting Afghanistan. I preferred strategy over tactics, progress over bloodshed, winning wars slowly over the thrilling and immediate victories of combat without purpose. When I got back I asked Natalia if she wanted another child, and she said yes.
8
JUAN PABLO 1987–2005
When I was a boy I felt the presence of God. This was, of course, a matter of design. My father sent me to a retreat run by the Jesuits, who are good at that sort of thing. Before my daughter, and before my career in the military, and the hopes for the future they would bring, this would be my first failed love.
They took about twenty of us up to a little place in the mountains. We each had a monastic cell with a tiny window where, for the first few days, we spent our time in almost perfect solitude.
There were prayers and specific passages of Scripture to read. There was a little journal where we reflected on our spiritual progression, such as it was. In the beginning, we were called to bring our sins to the front of our mind, spurring our guilt. Then, we were to calm ourselves by meditation on God’s incomprehensible mercy.
