by. His parents were both at work and the house was locked so he got a ladder out of the garage, put it to a second-story window, and climbed in. After a while he got bored sitting home alone so he went out and knocked at the house of a Vietnam vet who lived next door. The vet understood without having to ask and pulled some whiskey out of the cabinet and they spent the rest of the afternoon drinking. When Pemble’s parents finally came home he was asleep on their couch, filthy and exhausted and drunk.
Everyone reacts differently to going home. The first time Hijar sat down to a hot meal he burst into tears. Cortez didn’t know whether he should act like a man or a boy when he saw his mom at the airport, but it didn’t matter because it was his brother-in-law who picked him up and they just went out and got drunk. Jones thought the rattling of the pipes when he ran the water sounded just like the .50 and stood there listening to it for so long that his wife finally asked what was wrong. Everyone jerked at loud noises and dreamed about combat, and everyone worried about their brothers back in the Korengal. It was the kind of combat where one man could make all the difference, but you couldn’t be that man if you were home partying with your friends.
And then there were the questions. Moreno went home to Beeville, Texas, and got into a conversation with a stranger who finally asked what he’d wanted to ask all along, which was whether Moreno had killed anyone. Moreno just looked at him. “Keep in mind I’ve never met this guy,” Moreno said. “I’m like, ‘Yo, we don’t like talking about that.’ And he was like, ‘If I killed someone I’d let you know.’ His eyes were rolling toward the back of his head and this and that and I was like, ‘Dude, it’s different when you see your best friend laying there dead. You think you’re a badass until you’ve seen a fallen soldier laying there not breathing anymore and then it’s a different fucking story.’”
Moreno thought of leave primarily as eighteen days when he didn’t have to worry about getting shot. He was one of those rare things, a good soldier who didn’t like combat, and as far as he was concerned if they never got into another firefight it was fine with him. Once we got hit pretty hard and an RPG came in and exploded against the sandbags right next to where Moreno was standing. There were only a few weeks to go in the deployment and Moreno dropped into a hole and came back up shaking his head in disgust. Meanwhile Steiner was running around with a big grin on his face. “It’s like crack,” he yelled, “you can’t get a better high.” I asked him how he was ever going to go back to civilian life.
He shook his head. “I have no idea.”
8
THE MISSION EVERYONE’S BEEN GETTING NERVOUS about is Karingal. They’ve never gone there without getting shot at and the fact that there hasn’t been a TIC in weeks only means the enemy has saved up plenty of ammo. Karingal is only a few clicks south of Loy Kalay but the approach is wide open to enemy positions on 1705 and the inhabitants are hard-core Taliban — the guys say they can tell by the looks in their eyes. The town’s only saving grace is that there’s supposed to be one very beautiful girl there, Moreno caught a glimpse of her once (right before they got lit up from the south). Otherwise all the hot girls are in Upper Obenau.
Patrols never leave at the same time or follow the same routes, and the mission to Karingal is set for midafternoon with the sun just starting to throw cold blue shadows across the valley. We leave the wire through the southern gate and contour across the draw, moving quickly through the open spots and only stopping behind trees so the patrol is harder to spot. You never walk up on the man in front of you because clusters get targeted, and you never speak over a whisper. If you step carelessly and knock stones down the slope, heads turn and men stare. We cross over the high road and continue southward into a pretty little valley above a creek slotted deeply into a draw. The creek comes down from the high peaks muttering between boulders and over rock shelves and we have to walk way up the valley before we can cross over and double back on the other side. Snow is lying deep in the northern exposures and melting busily on the south-facing slopes as if winter weren’t happening there, and if you stopped to feel the sun on your face, you could imagine the war wasn’t either.
We exit the draw somewhere north of Karingal and move quickly down the road, boots crunching double- time in the snow and the men silent and tense. The sounds of village life rise to meet us, children shouting and the cry of a baby and once in a while a rooster or the patient agonies of livestock. We’re moving on the village single file as fast as we can and sweating heavily in our body armor, trying to get close before the local men can get up to their fighting positions. Gillespie pauses briefly before turning the ridgeline outside town and we start down the last stretch with 1705 looming above us like the hull of a huge gray battleship. No cover except six inches of frozen mud if you squeezed yourself down into the tire ruts in the road.
The village has gone silent now except for one dog, then another furiously baying our arrival. We clamber down the final slope into town to find every door closed and every window shuttered tight. I follow O’Byrne to the edge of the village and he takes up a position behind some trees and watches the ridgeline to our south. That’s where it will come from if it comes at all. A family is clustered on the back porch of a house, children crying and a woman trying to pull everyone indoors. A chicken wanders through it all pecking the ground. A mortar booms in the distance, something must be going on up-valley. O’Byrne spots an old man moving fast through the lower village hoping we won’t see him and O’Byrne shouts and the old man looks up and nods and starts making his way toward us. He’s using an ax as a walking stick and moves impossibly fast up the steep slopes. He must be at least sixty, and moments after O’Byrne calls to him he’s standing before us not even breathing hard. An Afghan soldier relieves him of his ax. Through an interpreter the man says he’s visiting from Yaka Chine because his son has a wounded leg. Gillespie tells him to take us there and we start off through the village doing our best to keep up with him.
The son is about ten and faces us bravely while Doc Old peels the bandage off his leg. Old has written “I’ll fuck your face” in Magic Marker on the front of his ammo rack, but whatever that means, it doesn’t seem to impede his concern for the boy. He’s been shot in the shin but the wound is months old and has turned gelatinous and brown. I can see the white of his shinbone and a small hole in front where a bullet went in. “Looks like one of ours,” Old says, meaning the hole is so small it’s probably from an American M4. AK rounds are a lot bigger and do considerably more damage. The father claims the boy got his wound by falling down, but that’s clearly absurd and the boy looks like he’d rather lose his leg than stand here any longer with these soldiers gathered around him. Doc Old kneels in front of him to put on a new bandage and when he’s done he looks up and says he should get it checked out at the KOP. To me it looks like he’s going to lose his leg at the knee. The old man glances around apologetically and shakes his head.
“All we’re going to do is help his son,” Gillespie tells the translator. “He needs to tell me a good reason why he shouldn’t go back to the KOP.”
The translator asks the man a long question and gets a long answer back. “He is tired right now and this is the praying time.”
“How long does it take to pray?” Gillespie says. “Because if he needs to pray he can pray right now. It’s just the right thing for us to do. I mean just ’cause you’re tired… it’s your
In retrospect the old man’s reluctance made perfect sense — he knew what was going to happen and didn’t want to be around us when it did — but eventually Gillespie convinces him to come with us. The old man ducks into his house and comes out with a blanket and knots it over his shoulders and puts his son inside it. He falls in line and we leave the village like we came in, fast and single file, and the first burst of AK comes before the men have even gotten to the road. I’m walking behind Gillespie in the gray-dark and I hear him say, “Fuck,” and we flatten ourselves against a stone wall. There are three or four detonations and I can feel the bottom drop out of my stomach, this is my first contact since getting blown up and somehow all the fight’s gone out of me, I have no interest in any of this. I crouch against the wall and watch the men I’m with try to figure out what to do.
“Anyone got contact with Two-One, over?” Gillespie says into his radio. “Two-One” means First Squad — Sergeant Mac’s men. They’re at the top of the village covering our movement.
“Two-One, Two-One, just call,” someone repeats.
“Fuck,” Gillespie says for the second time and starts moving toward the top of the town. Stichter starts calling mortars down on Kilo Echo 2205, one of the preset targets on a ridgeline to our south, and we churn through town at a dead run, the SAW gunners gasping under their loads. Halfway up the hill Pemble reports he’s established communication with Two-One and that the detonations were outgoing 203 rounds: everything’s fine. Later we find out that a bullet splintered some wood just above O’Byrne’s head, but that’s nothing new, and we form up outside the village and move out along the road we came in on.
