AT THE RETRANS site, a pair of 3rd Platoon trucks monitored the relay. In one, Donnie Carwile kicked back with Sergeant Brandon Vega. In the other, Dudley sat in the TC seat with SPC Trent Crane on the gun, his red crew cut bright behind dark Oakley shades.
Back at Fort Campbell and through the Wardak deployment, Dudley and Crane had grown close. Dudley had come to think of the younger man as a guy he could trust not just with his life, but with his wife—a rare thing among soldiers.
An experienced mechanic, Crane, twenty-two, of Wilmington, Ohio, could repair nearly anything. Once, a Dirty First .50-cal went belly-up. A pin in the gun’s feeder arm—the mechanism that moves the ammo belt through the weapon—broke, causing the gun to jam. The platoon was already down by one heavy weapon and couldn’t afford to wait and see if the sludgy supply system would cough up a spare pin. So Crane and Carlin machined a homemade pin to get the .50-cal working again. The custom part actually improved the gun’s performance, prompting the Special Forces guys to ask Crane and Carlin to make them some pins, too.
Among his platoon brothers, Crane was famous for making some fantastically bad decisions about tattoos. Back in the States, he’d commissioned an artist to ink a Lord of the Rings mural on his back. The artist had barely begun when the shop owner fired her for being a no-talent hack. That left Crane with only an Elven sword tattooed down his spine, and a red Eye of Sauron on his shoulder blade that the entire platoon regularly assured him looked exactly like the world’s angriest vagina.
Inside the truck, Dudley could see into the lower reaches of the gorge. It was Pleasant Valley–ish and picturesque, yet so full of death. It reminded him of those clichéd news reports from home, the ones where onlookers say they never thought so grotesque a murder could happen in their neighborhood.
Home, Dudley thought.
Rachel had given birth to their first child, a boy, just before the deployment. Dudley could have been with them both right now. His official tour of duty would have been up this very month, but the Army “stop-lossed” him—forcibly extended his enlistment in order to staff the war. He probably could have gotten out of it; a lot of guys did. But the truth was, he wanted to return to war. He loved his brand-new son, but he also loved his platoon brothers, and he didn’t want them to face the enemy without him.
Still, Dudley was looking forward to stepping into the role of father when he finally got home. He glanced over at Carwile’s truck in time to see the lieutenant throw his head back and laugh at something Vega said. Carwile had a knack for taking his soldiers’ minds off the brutality of war. Dudley liked to listen to him talk about his daughters.
“Did I ever tell you about the time Reese was playing soccer and scored in the wrong goal?” Carwile had said one day when the two men were checking email in the computer shack on Airborne. Reese was his oldest daughter.
“No,” Dudley said. “What did you do?”
“It was at Fort Benning, her first game. Jen and I were jumping up and down hollering, ‘Go the other way! Go the other way!’ But when she scored, she was so dang happy that we didn’t have the heart to tell her she scored a goal for the other team.”
Dudley laughed. “I can’t wait to go home and be a dad.”
Carwile leaned back and grinned. “It’s the best, man. Nothing better.”
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX According to the local Afghan gossip chain, the missing soldiers were not alive. Carwile relayed the info to Hill.
As it had Hill, it angered Dudley that these soldiers were not only missing but separated. Did they fall back? Did they freak out and run? Throughout both the Wardak and Ramadi deployments, Hulburt had pounded a single message into his soldiers’ heads: “We will never leave each other. Either everyone’s coming home, or nobody is.”
For Dudley, there was a principle at work: He didn’t give a damn what happened, you did not leave your battle buddies. He flashed back to an ambush on Highway 1 when LT Hidalgo’s guys out of Sayed Abad were attacked during a security patrol. First Platoon was QRF, and they sped down Highway 1 to help repel the bad guys.
Assisted by an Afghan crane driver, the Dirty First then recovered an Alpha Dawgs Humvee that was disabled during the firefight. On the way back to base, they were ambushed just south of Maidan Shar. The crane driver panicked and careened off the road into a culvert, where the crane crushed him to death.
After a fierce firefight, Hulburt insisted on retrieving the crane operator and returning his body to his family. He had been an ally, helping the Americans. He deserved that, Hulburt believed.
Extracting the dead crane operator was hideous work. Hulburt had to stomp on his leg and break his femur to pull him free of the wreckage. Meanwhile, the falling crane had powderized the rest of his bones.
It was dark, and they worked by the eerie green light of their NODs. The man’s collapsed skull stretched his features so that his face seemed to be sliding off his head. Handling him was like handling a beanbag. His limbs folded and flopped in unnatural directions as his pulverized bones shooshed inside his skin like sand.
Hulburt and Dudley got the crane driver into a body bag. But as they dragged it up toward the highway, the remains, without benefit of a skeletal frame, rolled themselves into a ball about the size of backpack at the bottom of the bag.
For Dudley, the experience was gorier and more haunting than any of the other bloody messes he’d seen. To get the job done, he dissociated himself, pushing the visual and tactile creep show away from his mind. He knew he would revisit it later, that he was taking out a line of credit on his own soul. He would pay it back another day, with interest.
But at least we didn’t leave him, Dudley thought, comparing the situation to the soldiers now separated and missing across the Tangi. We didn’t leave that guy in the crane, and he wasn’t even an American.
The sun had already dipped below the rim of the Tangi gorge when two trucks from 1st Platoon rolled up to the temporary command post Hill had set up on a low hillside. Hulburt, Carlin, and others piled out. Hill had not wanted to set up in that particular location: The hillside was a local cemetery crowned with a stone crypt. He knew the locals would consider it a desecration for his men to conduct military operations there. But the PMT gun truck had been ambushed in an S curve just below the cemetery. Beyond that, the terrain fell away to irrigated fields, with a series of berms spoking out between raised cultivation rows.
There was no other place to safely overwatch the smoldering Humvee, as well as the soldiers who would have to patrol the lower fields in search of the missing Americans. Reluctantly, Hill had had his driver, Pierce, pull his Humvee up the hill and park it next to the crypt.
Hill’s radio went hot. “Dog 6, this is Blacksheep 6, over.”
“This is Dog 6. Send it, over.”
“I think we’ve got one of the missing guys. It isn’t pretty.”
Hulburt and Carlin put together a small patrol and waded into an apricot orchard to assist men from Blacksheep and the Alpha Dawgs in recovering the body. The patrol walked for twenty minutes. As night fell in full, Carlin switched on his NODs, and tapped the infrared illuminator at intervals, turning the terrain Day-Glo green.
Finally, they caught up to the missing soldier. Carlin saw a man naked except for some tattered ACU scraps that still clung to his skin. His arm lay beside him unattached, the severed end ragged as if the limb had been hacked off. Carlin couldn’t tell whether the soldier had been blown up, burned, tortured, or all three.
An ache crept into his chest. It wasn’t the gore; Hulburt had dragged him along on so many missions that he’d seen a lot by then. This was the ache of anger. That this man, his Army brother, had been left alone in this God-forsaken field.
“Carlin, help me get him in the bag,” Hulburt said.
The scene grew still and quiet. Hulburt unfurled a body bag and laid it flat. The Alpha Dawgs and Blacksheep looked on as Carlin and others lifted in the soldier’s remains. Carlin zipped the bag closed.
“His arm,” someone said in a near whisper. “Don’t forget his arm.”
Carlin picked up the severed limb and laid it on top of the bag. An hour later, the patrol reached the command post, set the bag at Hill’s feet, and unzipped it.
“One of his arms is still missing,” a soldier said. This matched intelligence reports Hill had received earlier in the day that the fingers of an American soldier were being sold at a local bazaar as souvenirs. “And we think his heart is missing. I don’t know… he’s pretty torn up.”
They took his heart as a trophy? Hill thought. Outrage flushed through his veins.
He and the other soldiers stared down at their desecrated countryman. No one spoke. There was nothing that could be said. This soldier had been one of them and that was enough.
Hill processed this atrocity then radioed details to higher via the retrans. The news sliced Dudley like a blade. He had heard plenty of stories. Of the Taliban blowing up children, mutilating women’s genitals, horrible things. He understood that barbaric acts happened in every war, but this was his first encounter and it pissed him off. Dudley thought of the savages who had mutilated that American soldier, and his long, spiritual struggle over his own war ethic ended there and then.
Whatever I am, he thought, I’m not that.
The Tangi MIAs had occurred on the tail of the grueling jingle truck recovery operations on Highway 1, with both those evolutions punctuated by a bout of dysentery that coursed through Hill and his men like a poison river. Now, at the cemetery command post, Hill was exhausted, as were the men in his truck, Pierce, Doyle, and Sammy. Hill drew up a quick guard roster: thirty-minute shifts in a standing position only. He knew that any human being as tired as they were would fall asleep the instant they sat down.
Hill grabbed a poncho liner from his kit, found a stretch of dirt near the crypt, and lay down. It seemed only a minute later that he felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Sir? Captain Hill?”
Hill awoke facedown in the dirt, the poncho liner covering only his lower half.
“Sir?” It was Sammy shaking him gently awake for his guard shift. Normally a CO doesn’t pull guard duty, but Hill knew his men were just as spent as he was.
Hill wiped his hands down his face, scraping away grit. “Hey, bud. Thanks.”
The terp squatted in front of Hill, balancing Doyle’s spare M4 across his thighs. “No problem, sir. Do you want to sleep longer?”
“No, no, I’m good. Thank you. Just give me a minute to change my socks.”
Sammy took a walk around the hilltop as Hill made the switch, and was standing at the hood of the Humvee looking down into the valley when Hill rejoined him. “All right, Sammy, you can go rest a bit,” Hill said. “Use my blanket if you want to.”
“Thank you, sir.” Sammy started away then turned back. “Sir, I am sorry for this.” He tipped his chin toward the horrors in the valley. “This is bad. It is not right that this happens.”
“Thanks, Sammy,” Hill said. “One day… well, maybe soon, you won’t have to deal with all this anymore. I really hope I can get you approved for that visa.”
Sammy smiled, and Hill thought he saw a wistful hope. Visas had probably been promised him before. Hill remembered his two terps in Iraq, Fahmi and Jack. They had been skeptical, but Hill was able to push their visas through, giving their families a go at the American dream. He would make it happen for Sammy, too.