Enduring Freedom, page 10
“The sun will be up soon,” Baccam said. “Might as well stay awake for our first dawn in Afghanistan.”
Joe didn’t say anything. He was glad Baccam was here with him. Joe had only been training on one-weekend-per-month drills with Delta Company for about a year. He’d never been to the two-week annual training with them. And a lot of them had served together for years, spent a lot of time laughing over old jokes Joe didn’t understand. Some of them, like Shockley or the arrogant former active-duty Third Squad leader Staff Sergeant Lucas, drove Joe crazy. But Baccam was cool and, like Joe, relatively new to the unit.
“Or maybe you already fell asleep?” Baccam asked him.
Joe laughed a little. “No, I’m awake. Just thinking. This isn’t what I expected war would be like.”
Baccam looked at his watch. “Take it easy, Killer. We’ve only been in-country for about an hour and fifteen minutes. What’d you expect? That they’d drop us right into a firefight when we got here?”
Joe flicked a frayed bit of his weapon’s shoulder strap with his thumb. “No. Just that the perimeter is so far off we can’t even see it. You don’t even get the sense we’re in any danger.”
Baccam leaned back and rested his head against the sandbags stacked behind him. “Every war has its rear area. My dad said the big American bases in Vietnam were totally different than the hot zones out in the bush.”
“You’re Vietnamese?” Joe asked.
“No, I’m American,” Baccam answered.
Joe’s cheeks went hot. “Oh, dude, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
Baccam elbowed him and laughed. “I know what you meant. My family is Tai Dam, an ethnic minority from Southeast Asia living in Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. My family and I came to Iowa from Vietnam in 1980, but I don’t remember that.”
“Well, I’m glad you came,” Joe said.
Baccam smiled. “To Iowa or to Afghanistan?”
“Both.” Joe sighed. “Look at this place. Nothing but dust and scrub brush everywhere.” He pointed to a white building with little towers, the tops of which were painted blue. “A mosque, I guess? All shot up with bullet holes.”
“Yeah, I hear Kandahar was kind of the last stand for the Taliban.”
“My point,” said Joe, “is you figure an American Air Force base housing multimillion-dollar aircraft has to be one of the best, most developed places in Afghanistan. If that’s true. If this is the best of Afghanistan, this country must really be a dump.”
“I don’t know, man,” Baccam said, frowning. “I bet soldiers said the same thing thirty years ago about Vietnam.”
“That was different,” Joe said. He didn’t elaborate. From what Joe had read, Vietnam was a complicated situation. Afghanistan was simple. These people had contributed to the deaths of thousands of innocent American civilians and had to pay for it.
The smell of smoke drifted over them, and the crunch of boots on gravel betrayed the approach of Corporal MacDonald, holding a cheap cigar. “We’re supposed to be one year, boots on the ground. Three hundred sixty-five days to go.”
Joe winced at the thought of that kind of eternity here. He was about to tell Mac not to count down the days, but he’d learned that in the Army telling the guys you didn’t like something was a definite way to make sure they never stopped doing it.
“Aw, come on, Corporal Mac.” Baccam laughed. “You’re gonna re-up. Five thousand dollar reenlistment bonus? Tax-free?”
Joe noticed Mac’s rifle, a thirty-round magazine in the well. Mac caught his eye and blew out a long plume of smoke. “Helmets, rucksacks, and armored vests are waiting for us in the tent. You gotta get yours, put it by your rack. Then you’re supposed to check in with Sergeant Cavanaugh and draw seven fully loaded magazines. One in the rifle, three in each of your ammo pouches on your armor vest.”
“Live rounds?” Joe asked.
Mac flicked ash in his general direction. “No, paintball rounds. Yes, live rounds! What d’ya think this is, a church summer camp picnic?”
Joe stood and shot Baccam a look. “Well, let’s go get some bullets.”
Baccam got up and slapped Joe on the shoulder. “Starting to feel more and more like a war all the time.”
A couple of weeks later Delta Company took their turn in a big half-moon-shaped tent. Joe sat with his squad, sweating in the heat at 0900. They were finally going to learn about their mission.
An Army captain conducted the briefing. “Afghanistan has been plagued by years of war. In 1979 the Soviet Union invaded, killing many innocent Afghans and deploying millions of land mines, making farming and transportation impossible in some areas. After the Soviets were expelled ten years later, a civil war followed, as different Afghan warlords struggled for power. The civil war was ended in the mid-nineties by the Taliban, a brutal militia that practices an extreme form of Islam.
“The Taliban passed a series of oppressive decrees. Punishment for violating any of their laws could be extreme. In Afghanistan’s capital city of Kabul, they would force crowds into an old soccer stadium to watch them stone people, including women, to death for stuff like being accused of adultery. It took us two weeks to wash all the blood from the ground in that stadium.”
“These people are barbarians,” Joe whispered.
The captain continued. “Eventually the Taliban allied themselves with Al-Qaeda, the terrorists responsible for the attacks on America on September 11.”
Joe wiped his sweaty brow, eager to hear about his chance to hit these terrorists back. He was infantry, after all, and a solid shot with his M16 and half a dozen other weapons.
The captain continued. “You’ll help to establish and provide force protection for Provincial Reconstruction Teams, or PRTs. You’ll protect Civil Affairs, or CA, soldiers whose job it is to meet with Afghans to assess how we can help them rebuild their transportation, communication, and educational infrastructure. You’ll work closely with the Afghans. The military believes a prosperous, stable Afghanistan can more effectively resist becoming a stronghold for terrorism again.”
Joe stared in disbelief. This couldn’t be right. Help Afghanistan? That wasn’t what he had signed up for. He was infantry! He didn’t want to help. This was supposed to be payback time. He wanted to fight.
He looked around to see if the others were outraged. A few mumbled with discontent. This was the Army, though. Not a democracy. Orders were orders and nothing could be done to change them.
“It’s a rewarding mission,” said the captain. “I’ve been honored to be part of it for the last year.”
A trickle of sweat ran down into the back of Joe’s pants. He was holding his notebook in case he needed to write down anything important, and flipping through the pages, Joe saw all his attempts at reporting on his war experience so far. What could he report on now? Nobody wanted to read about soldiers who sat around on bases trying to help people who would probably stab them all in the back at their first opportunity anyway. He was supposed to be writing stories about intense combat situations, letting readers know the truth about what was happening in this war. Now his whole deployment was meaningless.
One morning about two weeks later, still living in a giant red-and-white-striped circus tent on Kandahar base, Joe rolled over and ducked further down inside his sleeping bag, hoping to steal a little more sleep. The A10 “Warthog” ground-attack jets had roared at intervals through the night as they took off and landed on the nearby runway. It had quieted a little toward morning, but then the winds picked up, and the tent fabric flapped and fluttered so loud it sounded like a drum.
“Can’t sleep either?” Baccam said quietly from the cot next to Joe’s.
Joe pulled the sleeping bag down off his face. Baccam was already sitting up and shaking his boots to dump out any possible hostile intruders. “Chow?” Joe asked.
Baccam shook his head. “Coffee first.”
There was free coffee in the chow hall, but by now Joe knew Baccam meant he wanted to buy an expensive “frackacheemo” or whatever at the Green Beans coffee shop near the post exchange store. It was a waste of money, but then there was nothing else to spend his pay on.
“If we’re stuck on a humanitarian mission instead of being in a real war,” Joe said to Baccam after they’d shaved, brushed their teeth, and ridden the shuttle bus from the transient tent back to the main section of the base, “let’s spend the rest of the year here.”
“Good morning, ma’am!” they both shouted, saluting a passing lieutenant colonel.
“I’d get bored,” Baccam said. “So would you.”
They were on the boardwalk now, passing the Burger King trailer and the ice cream hut before they joined the long coffee line. “You and your fancy coffee,” Joe said to Baccam. “I hate you. Worse than the Taliban. The Taliban would never make me wait in a long coffee line when there’s already free coffee in the DFAC.”
Baccam laughed. “That free coffee is weak, and the Taliban would just kill you.”
“Yeah,” Joe said. “Put me out of my misery so I didn’t have to wait with you in this overpriced coffee line.”
After chow, Joe and Baccam stopped by the only other place on the base worth visiting, the Morale Wellness and Recreation building. The MWR was a big concrete structure left by the Soviets. One room had computers where people could sign up for fifteen minutes of slow internet. Another room offered phones. Joe preferred the computers. The phones had a delay both ways, making it almost necessary to say “over” to signal when you were done talking so the other person didn’t talk over you. It took some practice.
“I’m gonna call my brother,” Baccam said. “He just got a cellular phone and might still be up.”
Joe waved him off and went the opposite way down the hall. The largest room in the MWR was the movie theater. Soldiers with portable players could borrow DVDs, too.
But as fun as Spider-Man might have been, Joe went to what had become his squad’s quiet hideout on the otherwise big, loud airbase. The library.
Two couches on opposite sides of a coffee table dominated the room’s center. The walls were lined with wooden bookshelves packed primarily with paperbacks.
Sergeant Paulsen had his boots on the table and sipped coffee from a paper cup while reading a book on the transcontinental railroad. Corporal Mac sat next to him.
Sergeant Hart, the A-Team leader, drank his own coffee on the opposite couch next to PFC Zimmerman. Specialist Quinn sat on a chair in the corner.
“Get this,” Hart said. “I overheard someone talking, this one high-speed guy who never shuts up about how he used to be active duty.”
Joe listened while he looked over the books. A “high-speed” soldier usually meant a good soldier who didn’t mess around, but Hart’s sarcasm was obvious.
Hart continued, “He kept saying, ‘We gotta show ’em who’s boss!’ like twenty times.”
“Third Squad’s Staff Sergeant Lucas.” Mac laughed. “‘Show ’em who’s boss’? OK, tough guy.”
Joe ran his finger along the spines of the books. Most were paperback Westerns or romances, but sometimes he could find an interesting biography, history, or novel. You never really knew what you were going to find because if you took out a book at Fort Hood, you could keep it or leave it at the base library wherever you ended up.
“He’s just trying to show off,” said Sergeant Hart.
“Worse than that,” Sergeant Paulsen said. “These guys and their ‘cracking skulls’ mentality won’t help us. We can’t roll through Afghanistan pushing people around, threatening everybody, and treating them like dirt in their own country.”
Joe frowned. This was a war, wasn’t it? These people, or at least those wrapped up in the dominant philosophy of their country, had killed thousands of Americans. They had attacked America. They couldn’t be reasoned with. Joe squeezed the M16 slung at his side.
Mac frowned. “Well, we’re infantry, not diplomats.”
Paulsen laughed. “I’m not saying we should let our guard down. The Taliban are dangerous. But most of the people we’ll encounter are just . . . normal people, some of them grateful we’re fighting the Taliban.”
Zimmerman spoke up. “But if we can’t tell the Taliban from regular Afghan—”
“Exactly, Z!” Joe said a little louder than he’d intended.
“It’s about our own survival,” Paulsen said. “If you want to go home alive, we can’t target all Afghans.”
“Well, obviously, I’m not going to target all of them,” Joe said.
“Wouldn’t even have enough ammo for that,” Specialist Quinn joked. Everybody chuckled.
“If some Afghan guys get up in our face, I’m not going to waste time asking if they’re carrying a Taliban ID card,” Joe said. I shouldn’t have to explain this. We’re Army. We’re the infantry. “It’s just crap we’re on some kind of peace mission. That’s not what I signed up for. We should be out there finding and destroying the Taliban village to village, door to door. Nobody gets in our way.”
“How would you feel if a bunch of foreigners were in your neighborhood pushing your friends around?” Sergeant Paulsen asked. “Threatening your family?”
“I’d kill ’em,” said Specialist Quinn.
“They’re no different,” said Paulsen. “You don’t have to like or respect them, but if we go around trying to”—he made air quotes with his fingers—“‘show ’em who’s boss,’ we’ll push guys to join the Taliban. Or we’ll at least cause some Afghans to not tell us about IEDs they’ve seen the Taliban deploy.”
“Exactly,” said Sergeant Hart. “We have rifles and machine guns. We can call in a freakin’ A10 for close air support. We don’t have to act tough. I swear, some of these guys want to get in a firefight, get people killed, just because they want their Combat Infantry Badge or whatever other ribbons and medals. This isn’t the Boy Scouts.”
Joe wasn’t in this for glory or medals, but he didn’t understand Hart’s contempt for the CIB. They were only given to infantrymen who had actually been in combat. A lifetime award that said, “You were in the real thing.”
Big Specialist Shockley burst in, his face red. “S-Sergeant Paulsen. Sergeant Hart.” He took a deep breath. “Everybody. First Sergeant wants First and Second Squads down in the transient tent yesterday.”
“What’s up?” Sergeant Paulsen asked.
Shockley looked serious. “I think we’re going outside the wire.”
“I said, you’d think maybe the Army could have given us a little more notice before ordering us to move to Farah,” Joe shouted down into the Humvee through the gun turret to Corporal MacDonald in the back seat. Baccam was driving. Sergeant Paulsen rode shotgun, manning the radio. “I mean, we get up, average day in Kandahar—if that’s a real thing—then blammo, we’re rolling out.”
“Oh, young soldier,” Corporal Mac yelled up to him. “You got a lot to learn about the Army. Jerking you around is their favorite activity.”
Joe stood behind the Mk 19 fully automatic grenade- launching machine gun, with the top half of his body protruding through a hole in the roof of the Humvee. Theirs was the trail vehicle. Alpha Team drove the lead Humvee, with their .50-cal. machine gun covering the three o’clock. Second Squad’s two Humvees were ahead of them, covering forward and nine o’clock. Two Toyota Hilux pickups rode with the convoy, one between each squad’s lead and trail Humvees.
When they’d first left the base, Joe had been tense, super alert, carefully watching every car, motorcycle, donkey, and pedestrian in Kandahar, his thumbs never far from the butterfly trigger on the back of his gun. But when they’d finally passed the outer villages into the open empty desert, there wasn’t much to watch out for.
Joe looked around in the blazing hot sun as the Humvee bumped down the busted-up concrete highway. There was nothing out there. It’s like those photos of the surface of Mars. All rocks and dirt. Not even any proper sand dunes. Afghanistan can’t even get a desert right.
They rode like that for four hours, the bright sun baking him in his armor vest and helmet. The convoy rolled past an occasional tiny village made out of mud-brick walls and houses, off in the dirt beside the broken-up old highway. Sometimes semis or shorter shipping trucks passed them heading in the other direction, back toward Kandahar.
And then, off in the distance, materializing through the heat-wave distortion off the highway, there was again a vehicle that had followed them three times before. “He’s back!” Joe shouted down to the others. “That white Toyota station wagon is coming up fast.”
“Roger that,” Sergeant Paulsen called. “I’ll call it in.”
“He’s got to be a Taliban scout,” said Corporal Mac. “He passed us once before. Maybe he looped back around on a side road, or pulled off behind one of these zillion walls the Afghans love so much, and waited for us to pass.”
“Could be an IED trigger man,” Baccam said from the driver’s seat.
“You have a machine gun,” Mac shouted. “Unlock the turret so you can move the gun around. If he comes up close again, aim the thing right at him! If he tries to shoot us, well, you know what to do.”
“I’ll blast that car to shreds,” Joe said.
But this time the white station wagon pulled up to within three car lengths. Joe shouted at them and tried to motion for them to back up. The car stayed right on them, though. Joe was about to start the procedure to chamber a 40-millimeter grenade round, preparing to fire, when the car finally turned off the highway onto a dirt road and vanished among the mud-brick walls of another small village.
An hour later, with no sign of the vehicle stalking them, Mac shouted up to Joe. “Hey, there’s a village up on the right side of the road. Bunch of boys messing around out in front of their wall.” Mac handed up a green tennis ball. “Why don’t you toss that to them, Killer?”
