Wynne's War Read online

  He and Wheels didn’t get a full night’s sleep until they started Mountain Phase in the hills of Dahlonega, Georgia. Still hungry, still exhausted. Learning knots and belays and fundamentals of climbing. The two recruits shared a pup tent, and one night between four-hour patrols, Russell had just closed his eyes to slip below consciousness when he heard Wheels’s voice at his feet.

  He didn’t bother to open his eyes or raise up on his elbows. “What was that?” he asked.

  “Why’d you do this?” Wheels asked.

  “Do what?”

  “This course,” said Wheels. “The army. Why didn’t you stay on your ranch?”

  Russell lay there several moments and then he did open his eyes. Dim light through the thin fabric of the tent. The soft patter of drizzle. He could see his breath fogging from the cold.

  He said it had felt like his only move.

  “What,” said Wheels, “—because of your granddad?”

  “Yeah,” Russell told him. He listened to the rain against the canvas a few feet from his head.

  Then he said, “Wait. What do you mean?”

  “He passed away, you said. You enlisted right after.”

  “Right,” Russell said.

  “What were you thinking, I meant?”

  Russell mumbled. Something incoherent. He was hoping his friend would just let it lie.

  A few quiet minutes passed.

  Then Wheels said, “Was it because he’d been a Ranger?”

  Russell cleared his throat. He’d never thought about it quite that way. He didn’t exactly know.

  Wheels said, “Your dad was a Ranger, too, right? Vietnam?”

  “Vietnam,” Russell said. “He’d started off in the LRRPs. Then they folded those recon units into the Regiment. Not sure: ’seventy-two, ’seventy-three. I think that’s how it was.”

  “Your granddad,” said Wheels. “—this was your dad’s dad?”

  “No,” said Russell, “my mother’s.”

  “Still,” said Wheels. “It’s tradition. It’s family.”

  Russell lay thinking about that. It was family. It was family for certain. Except now his family was all but gone: his grandparents, his father. His mother was a prescription-pill addict, and Russell hadn’t seen her since his father was killed more than sixteen years before. He thought that if he made it through Ranger School he’d earn a new family. One that could never leave.

  “I guess,” said Wheels, “considering your history, doesn’t sound like you had a lot of choice.”

  Russell told him no.

  He didn’t guess that he did.

  It turned colder in the mountains and the skies clouded, and early one morning as he was trotting Fella along one of the dirt trails that wound into the hills behind camp, he felt something brush against his cheek and then moisture, glanced up, and saw it had begun to snow—small flakes hardly distinguishable in this light, gliding mutely in the windless dawn. Russell reined to a stop and sat the horse, watching the white flecks descend like ash and melt instantly against the earth. He’d not seen snow in nearly seven years, or not up close he hadn’t, and he’d forgotten how it quieted everything and closed you in. He put his horse forward, and the animal took several pensive steps. He gave the horse her head, and she blew and carried him up the trail.

  By afternoon patches of white had begun to accumulate, and by evening there was a thin blanket all across the ground. It brought the soldiers out of their huts, and they stood there, staring up at the sky. They performed stand-to in the hushed blue light, and just before dark there was a whistling sound from the ridgeline and then the dry, flat pop of a rocket detonating, a brief moment’s silence, and then an echo through the valley, a long series of ghost explosions back along the hills. Russell looked over at Wheels, and both of them took off up the trail at a sprint. Billings had taken two of the other men out to rendezvous with the captain—or that was the plan as Russell understood it—and there was no one to stop the two Rangers and no one to caution them back. The snow along the hillside was ankle deep in places, and their breath fogged before them in the dusk.

  The sky had all but cleared when they reached the hilltop fortress, and another rocket struck and blew a cloud of white against the stars. Russell leaned over and palmed his knees, struggling to get his breath, and he glanced beside him and Wheels was doing the same. They watched the soldiers scurry about the firebase, and they watched a third rocket scream in and disappear into a snow-covered embankment. They started for the medical tent, but before they reached it, they heard a woman’s voice calling their names. Russell turned and saw a hand beckoning them to the mouth of a bunker about fifteen meters away. They went along a series of sandstone steps, ducked under a plywood lintel, and climbed down into the earth. Sara was crouched there along with several soldiers and the other woman on her surgical team, the woman’s face lit from below by the green glow stick she held.

  Another rocket struck, this one closer, and Russell felt the ground shudder beneath his boots and something sprinkled onto the back of his neck. When he glanced over, Wheels was squatting against the wall of the bunker with both palms to his ears, his chin tucked and his elbows pressed together in front of his face.

  Russell and Sara stared down at him. He looked like a child hiding in a closet.

  Wheels looked up at them.

  “We came to save you,” he said.

  The rockets started to fall again at daybreak. Russell awoke just before dawn in the bunker where he’d first been quartered, took his pants from the head of the cot, slipped them on, and fastened the belt, a few extra inches of slack in it—the work and stress and diet. He slid his sidearm into his thigh holster and took up his carbine. Then the familiar shriek of a mortar came from outside the bunker, followed by a low concussion that shook the cinder-block walls and sprinkled grains of sand from the ceiling. Instinct sent Russell to the floor, and he rose wiping at his eyes and checking himself for wounds.

  It had taken a while, but the hostiles had finally found positions from which they could range in their mortars, their rockets, and Russell emerged from his bunker into a bedlam of scrambling soldiers and smoke. He followed three men down an earthen trench toward the command bunker, which he saw, once he came onto the packed ground at the center of camp, lay in a smoldering rubble of sandbags and concrete and aluminum sheeting. A young soldier sat in the snow with his rifle across his lap like a child’s toy, head shaved, eyes wet, saying, “You got no idea. You got no idea.” There were men already searching the debris for survivors, and Russell fell in and began to heft bits of broken rock toward a pile that was forming several yards from where the bunker had stood. They’d just uncovered the first body when a man in his observation post called “Incoming!” and they dove behind what cover they could find and waited for oblivion.

  He spent the rest of the day digging through rubble or taking shelter in the nearest bunker while the rockets pounded. The men called for air support, and in half an hour two Apache gunships appeared over a spur to the north, strafed the valley below, emptied their munitions, and returned to base. All was quiet for several hours. They unearthed three dead soldiers from beneath the ruins of the command bunker and conveyed their bodies to the medical tent. Late afternoon, the rockets returned.

  He sat with Sara in the bunker that evening. The rockets would strike and the ground would tremble and bits of earth dislodged and fell.

  “How long you think they’ll keep this up?” Sara asked.

  “I don’t know,” Russell told her. “I reckon until someone goes out there and stops them.”

  “Who’d do that?”

  Russell had been staring through a crack in the plywood. He turned and regarded her for a second.

  She shook her head. “Why’d I even ask?”

  Russell smiled. Even with a grime-streaked face and a sweatshirt she’d likely been wearing for seventy-two hours, she was still very pretty.

  “Can’t they call in choppers or something?”<
br />
  “They already called in the choppers or something. They’re dug in like ticks. As soon as they hear our air, they slip off the back side of that ridge, wait until we’ve murdered half a dozen monkeys, then come out when the coast is clear and get right back to it.”

  Sara was sitting on the ground with her legs pulled to her chest and her arms wrapped around her shins. She rested her chin on her knees.

  “Frustrating,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Russell said.

  A few minutes passed. A mortar struck and there was a burst of machine-gun fire from one of the emplacements. Sara looked at him.

  “You were in Iraq before this?”

  “Yeah,” said Russell. “Mosul.”

  “Did the insurgents do this there?”

  “Not really,” Russell told her. “I was chopped to a task force. They had a platoon of us Rangers and a couple Special Forces teams. There was a company from the 101st, and we maybe had about a dozen or so commandos on loan from the Brits.”

  “What did they have you doing?”

  “Doing how?”

  “Your job,” said Sara. “Were you training horses?”

  “No,” Russell told her. “I was part of a QRF. Me and another—”

  “What’s a QRF?”

  “Quick Reaction Force. If a coalition element in our area got in trouble, we’d hop on board a Black Hawk and go play cavalry.”

  “Did you like it?”

  Russell considered the question. He hadn’t thought of liking it or not. He told her you were always waiting for something to happen. You were never the happening itself.

  They were shelled the next morning and every morning after for the following week. Russell would wake in the half-light and find Sara curled on one of the bunks, a tuft of dark hair poking out from beneath the sleeping bag, her small, slender form under the olive fabric, rising and falling. After several nights of playing cards with the Rangers, Sara sought refuge here with them.

  When he awoke on the fourth day of the shelling, the first thing he heard was the noise of a distant helicopter, and the second thing was the low rumbling of Wheels’s voice. He smelled cigarette smoke and coffee.

  Wheels said, “That’s the real reason we’re here.”

  “In this outpost?” Sara asked.

  “In Afghanistan,” Wheels said. “People say ‘natural resources,’ but they don’t know what they’re really saying. It’s natural resources, all right. It’s gold.”

  Russell lay there. Gold, he thought. A few months ago it had been lithium. He flexed his calf beneath the blanket, considering whether he should tell Wheels to knock it the hell off, but then decided to hear him out.

  “So Alexander . . . ,” Wheels said.

  “Right,” said Sara.

  “When he conquers Bactria—”

  “Where’s Bactria?”

  “North,” said Wheels. “It’s up in the north. Anyway, he comes in, conquers Bactria, marries one of the princesses or whatever they called them, and then all the gold and gems he’d been winning in his battles, he stows them in the treasury there and then ups and dies.”

  “I thought he died in Babylon.”

  “He did die in Babylon,” Wheels told her. “Just let me finish.”

  “Sorry,” Sara said.

  “So all this gold and treasure gets buried for a couple thousand years, and then they start digging it up in the seventies—”

  “Nineteen-seventies?”

  “Let me finish,” Wheels said. “Start digging all this treasure up, this Russian archeologist or whatever, and then Russia invades in ’seventy-nine, and the gold goes into the vault in Kabul. You could go see it there in Kabul, but they won’t let you, of course. Anyway, there’s that gold—the Kabul gold—but there’s all this other gold from these graves that the Taliban dug up, how come them to be able to afford their weapons in the first place.”

  “I thought they did it with drug money,” said Sara. “Opium.”

  “They did do it with drug money,” said Wheels. “Drug money and Bin Laden money and gold from the tombs they pillaged. And don’t think for a second we don’t want in on that action, cause since when have you ever known Americans not to be interested in gold?”

  There were a few moments of silence. Russell wanted to look over, but he managed to keep himself from it.

  “That wasn’t a reticular question,” said Wheels.

  “Sorry,” said Sara. “I wasn’t sure you were finished.”

  “I’m finished,” Wheels said, and he had just said it when the thin whistle of a rocket screamed over camp and then a sharp crack from the valley on the other side of the range.

  Russell raised up on the cot and rubbed his eyes. He looked over at Wheels and Sara where they sat at the card table, Sara with one leg pulled to her chest and her arms around the shin, chin upon her knee.

  “Morning,” Wheels said.

  Russell and Sara met for lunch in the mess tent when the all clear had sounded, and they met again for supper that evening. They talked about the outpost and where they were from, and they talked about how they’d ended up in the mountains of a country they’d not even known had existed before the Towers fell.

  Sara was at the end of her second tour. She’d done her first a few years prior, serving as medic aboard a C-130 and working the overflight from Riyadh to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. The post didn’t suit her. Or she didn’t think so at the time. She got out after her rotation was up, went back to Nevada, and started nursing school. She used the pay she’d saved up during her deployment to put a down payment on a two-bedroom house, and she set about starting an average middle-class life, working as a med tech in the laboratory of a small hospital and taking classes in the evenings.

  It was all she’d dreamed of during her deployment, and in six months depression had closed around her throat. The words in her textbooks swam, and doctors prescribed sleeping pills and anxiety medication, bottles of alprazolam, which she chose one night to empty into her mouth and choke down with half a bottle of Chardonnay.

  They were seated on a wall of sandbags beside the compound’s entrance, sharing a can of soda. She stared off toward the mountains.

  “Xanax won’t kill you,” she said.

  Russell coughed into a fist.

  “Maybe that was too much,” she said.

  “No,” he told her, “I just . . .” He made an ambiguous gesture and trailed off into silence.

  “Did you go to therapy?” he said after a few moments.

  “No therapy,” she said. “I mean, they put me in therapy. Or the nuthouse, actually. Two weeks.”

  Russell shook his head.

  “It’s where I belonged at the time,” she said, shrugging. “I got lucky it didn’t end up affecting my reenlistment. My aunt works in the county clerk’s office, and she was able to keep a couple things under wraps. Otherwise, I’d never have gotten back in.”

  “You’re the first medic I ever met who was happy about getting another deployment.”

  “Well,” said Sara, “they don’t have the same advantages as me.”

  “Such as what?”

  “Being crazy.”

  “You ain’t any crazier than me,” Russell said.

  “No?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Swallowing a bottle of Xanax?”

  “People do stuff like that,” said Russell.

  “They do,” she agreed.

  “Well,” he said, “you don’t seem crazy to me.”

  “I don’t?”

  “You’re helping a lot of people.”

  “You haven’t considered they might go together?”

  Russell looked at her. “You think you have to be crazy to want to help people?”

  “No,” she told him. “But you probably have to be a little crazy to do it in a war zone.”

  Russell shrugged. “Someone needs to.”

  “I agree,” she said. “Someone does. It just so happens those
someones tend to be nuts.”

  They talked longer and decided to walk back to the surgical tent so Sara could fetch her jacket, when a commotion came from outside the walls. They looked down from their perch into a swarm of bodies, men shoving each other and shouting and a blur of robes and pakol caps and the intermingled legs of Americans in fatigues. Russell watched a few moments and then looked at Sara.

  “I think they got somebody,” she said.

  So they did. There were a dozen Afghan militiamen who worked out of the firebase as translators and guides, and they had in their possession a very thin man dressed in a soiled linen shirt that went just past his knees, sandals, a suede leather vest. He had a burlap sack secured over his head and tied with a length of rope, and his hands were bound with what to Russell looked like wire. The Afghans were leading him toward the center of camp on a paracord leash that had been wrapped around the man’s waist. Every so often one of them would reach out and slap the base of his skull. They brought him to a pile of dirty snow and pushed him to his knees. One of the men stepped up and pulled the sack from his head, and the prisoner knelt very still, studying the ground.

  Russell watched. The Afghans seemed to be arguing some point of custom or law. Russell saw that they were divided in their opinions, and he wished he spoke Dari or Pashto, whichever was being used. The American soldiers kept their distance, seeming reluctant to intervene or uncertain of exactly how.

  There was a private standing beside the gate. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen and looked even younger than that. Russell called to him and asked what was going on.

  “It’s one of the enemy spotters,” said the young private, “for the mortars that’ve been hitting us.”

  Russell nodded. The Afghans continued arguing. They gestured at the kneeling man and they gestured at the sky—either at their ultimate destination or perhaps the cobalt expanse through which the mortars had fallen. Then an elder among the men stepped forward and lifted a hand and all went instantly quiet, and he regarded them with an almost clerical calm. He spoke very softly, and his listeners’ brows furrowed with concentration, and some began nodding. He touched their prisoner gently on the shoulder. He pointed at the earth on which they stood. Then he raised an enormous knife in his fist. Russell didn’t see anyone pass it to him, and he didn’t see the man draw it from anywhere about his person. His hand had been empty and then it wasn’t. The blade was a machete of strange manufacture, its edge curving obscenely outward, and the elder took one step forward and, with a single, practiced stroke, severed the prisoner’s head cleanly from his body. Russell felt something buzz across his skin, and he watched in amazement as the man’s skull went tumbling among the rocks. The headless torso pitched sideways and began to geyser blood onto the snow, and the elder, his robes freckled with the spray, passed his blade to a subordinate and stepped clear. One of the Afghans gave a shrill cry, and the cry was echoed by the others. The Americans had begun to stagger backward, and one young soldier turned and fled down the path toward his bunker.