5

HOMEWORK

Lance Sergeant Spina was my deputy. Short and squat as a cork, balding, Ray-Bans even after sunset, a voice like a crow. Several years older than me, he made a show of being both protective and deferential. I was grateful but also wary, because I suspected that he really wanted to undermine my authority. The soldiers really respected him, they’d done other tours of duty together. I was just beginning to sort out the Panthers of the Ninth. Only a quarter considered themselves true Alpini—those actually born in the region of the regiment. They called the others—terroni from the south who’d enlisted to make a living—mercenaries, and not always jokingly. And they made fun of me because I was born on the coast and was like a fish out of water among mountain infantrymen. I wore the brown feather in my cap just like they did, but I would have to eat a lot of sand and snow in order to consider myself one of them. During training, in Italy, everything went fine. But I knew I’d have to start all over again once we were in country. My first words, my first orders, would prove decisive. If I made a mistake, I’d never be able to make up for my initial error, even if I did my best later on. Most of the guys in my platoon were veterans, professionals. Some already had wrinkles and a touch of gray hair. These men grew old before becoming career soldiers or being promoted to sergeant, and very few got even that far, so I could understand their frustration at seeing the gold stripes on my shoulders.

I don’t remember all of them. I’ve already forgotten the names and faces of some, and others I get mixed up. The only thing that sticks in my mind about Abbate was his dysentery, which debilitated him to the point that he couldn’t leave the base. He was so ashamed. All I remember about Curcio, Montano, and Zanchi is how competent they were, they knew what to do even before receiving orders. About Fontana and Pedone, their incredible aim: they were my best shooters. Giovinazzo, his burbly laughter and kindness. They called him the Good Egg. Morucci, the awful, incredibly vulgar jokes that never got so much as a smile out of me. But the other Pegasus guys, good or bad, friends or enemies, became a part of my life. Puddu was my team’s radio operator, but I never knew his real name. Everyone called him Owl because he played chess against the computer at night. The riflemen Rizzo and Venier—known as the Cat and the Fox—I pegged right away as two slackers. Whenever they had a free moment, they’d lie down and start tanning: “We’re at over three thousand feet,” Rizzo would say jubilantly, “the sun really cooks here, it’s like being in the mountains.” Had it been up to me, I never would have let them deploy. But supposedly we were short of men, so they took whoever signed up. Pieri, a machine gunner with a sculpted physique, reminded me of the Belvedere Torso at the Vatican, but the others called him Michelin Man because he was so pumped. He’d knock himself out in the gym tent, really went crazy with the chin-ups—he could do twenty in a row without breaking a sweat. He was first-rate and I made him my squad leader.

Zandonà was the youngest of our platoon, of the entire company. Small, super thin, rust-colored hair that formed a crest like a hoopoe bird’s, freckles, and a smooth face. The northerners called him “Boy,” the southerners “O Bebè,” everybody else “Baby.” I rebaptized him “Nail” and in the end it stuck. He photographed everything, like a Japanese tourist in Rome: he wanted to get into PI—public information—so he documented our every move. He never spoke, not even a mute says less. He was twenty, but looked even younger. The platoon chose him as their mascot, but the company targeted him right away as the preferred butt of their jokes. They picked on him, teased him. In the space of three days they pinched his toilet paper, requisitioned his sunscreen, and shat in his helmet. At the end of our Christmas lunch, they made him stand up and sing “Jingle Bells.” Zandonà could carry a tune, so he pulled it off. The fact that he was a driver made me think he was an ignoramus who’d only finished junior high. They had no imagination at Army General Staff. Those with hotel management degrees were assigned to the mess, those with high school diplomas to headquarters, junior high graduates were all shooters or drivers.

Jodice was big, strong, and swarthy. He had bushy sideburns and a mane of curly hair. A gladiator tattooed on his right biceps, and a woman’s name, Imma, on the left. He complained that the phone card he bought didn’t work, that cell phones were blocked at the FOB, and that they were allowed only one hour of free Internet a day—but there weren’t enough computer stations, headsets, or webcams, so the guys fought over them, which bred discontent. “A soldier comes all this way to hell and gone, he deserves a little respect,” he would protest. An arrogant and self-centered braggart, he always did the talking, and he knew everything, not even an old general was as wise. His name was Diego, but everyone called him the Spaniard, like the gladiator tattooed on his arm. Spina had warned me that he was the alpha male of our platoon. Even though he wasn’t older or higher ranking, he had a powerful charisma. The others followed his lead. What was right for him was right for everyone. I told Spina I wasn’t interested in ethology, I preferred psychology. Spina said that soldiers are just like a pack of jackals, lions, or wolves, and I’d do well to remember that. I reminded him the soldiers of the Ninth Company were called Panthers, and panthers don’t hunt in packs.

But I should have listened to him. Spina soon let me know that Jodice was determined to make the guys aware that this was his fifth tour of duty, and his second in the Stan, whereas Sergeant Paris had only been in Kosovo, and the riskiest mission she’d had to perform there was to escort an Orthodox patriarch through the beautiful green countryside and a sleepy city full of shops to church. That he’d grown up on the street, in a place where they’d had to establish a curfew and where people gunned one another down in video arcades, and he’d seen plenty of people shot and killed, while she was born in a beach town where not a damn thing ever happens, and had never even seen blood. That at age fifteen he was already making criminals respect the law, while she, with that schoolgirl face, wouldn’t even know how to get kindergartners to obey her. That he was a corporal and she a sergeant, but that he had bigger balls than all the students at Viterbo put together. That my rank was higher, but that experience is the only rank that really matters, and so by that logic Sergeant Paris was worth zero point one, and he’d shit on my gold stripes. Right from the start, during those months of consolidated training at Belluno, I’d marked him as someone who would make life difficult for me. I tried to keep him at a safe distance.

The third day, Jodice showed up for evening roll call blatantly listening to his iPod and crooning none too softly. I knew perfectly well that he was trying to provoke me, but I didn’t feel like yelling at him, calling him out for insubordination, or confining him right away to the barracks for five days. I simply held out my hand and made him give me his earbuds. “Do you like Gigi D’Alessio, Sergeantess?” he asked me as he handed them over. “Sergeant,” I corrected him. If he thought he’d get a hysterical reaction, he was mistaken: I smiled. I wanted to assert myself mildly. “And anyway, no. I prefer Gory Blister. I’m okay with Krysantemia, Delirium Tremens, or Katatonia, but the rest is sweet candy pop for little girls.” Pegasus exchanged astonished looks. They’d never imagined a woman could withstand the reverberant rape of death metal.

I don’t look for conflicts; I usually avoid them. Maybe because I’m a woman, and because I can’t stand a frontal attack. I’ve always preferred strategy. My technique is siege. Attrition. Infiltration behind enemy lines. But this time I couldn’t wait. Alpha male or not, he had publicly shown me a lack of respect. I knew how to retreat to defend myself, but I also had to show him I knew how to advance to check him. I’m not rigid, but I am firm. Flexible but not weak. But this thing was just between me and Jodice. I never would have humiliated him in front of the others. So when he came down from his watch in the tower, at five in the morning, exhausted and numb with cold, I summoned him. “Your sideburns are too long, Jodice,” I noted. “Regulations don’t allow it. Shorten them, shave them, whatever, but I don’t want to see them again.” Jodice protested. He said that no one gave a fuck about regulations around here. That we were in the fucking Afghan desert, not the June 2 parade on the Fori Imperiali. “You look like a hobo, or a terrorist,” I insisted. “The regulations impose decorum. Get rid of them.” “You don’t give a shit about my sideburns, Sergeant, you want to emasculate me,” Jodice said, staring me insolently in the face. “Get rid of them.” I kept smiling, unflappable. When a superior tells you something, you have to do it. Period. Jodice shaved his sideburns.

*   *   *

Our turn finally came, and Pegasus was allowed to leave the base. In a darkness already giving way to milky dawn, the soldiers loaded crates of ammunition, readied the flares, and took their places in the Linces, crossing themselves beforehand. I was team leader for Lambda team, with Zandonà. It was my duty to be in the vehicle with the youngest driver. And to convey calm and confidence to my team. The soldiers get nervous if they sense their leader is nervous. “So, Sergeant, why do you think we Italians head out so early?” Jodice asked. “Because we have a long way to go,” I answered, without even turning around. The thing with the sideburns had remained between us, but Jodice had pumped himself up with negative energy. In other circumstances, had we faced a real war, I think I would have been in danger. But I wanted to show him I wasn’t afraid of his arrogance, so I put him on my team. Art of command, or something like that. “Because we’re the biggest losers,” he sneered. “Those crafty Afghanis wait till the sun’s already high before they head out. The first to take a road left unguarded during the night is the first to be blown up.” “You didn’t listen to the briefing, Jodice,” I silenced him. “Bombs here are all remote controlled. If they want to get you, they’ll get you.”

Zandonà activated the mine lock on the doors. I buckled my seat belts. “Initiating movement, over,” Zandonà said. Then he put the armored vehicle in gear and drove through the gates of the base. I hoped he really was as skilled and experienced as the captain had assured me, but his freckles and beardless chin didn’t exactly inspire confidence. It wasn’t easy to drive that six-ton beast down streets pocked with bombs and tank tracks, control it crossing fords, and keep it from getting stuck in the sand. The thing that would have upset me most was to be injured in a road accident, in Afghanistan. That would have been ridiculous. But it could always happen.

So here we are, a column of armored vehicles one behind the other, going ten kilometers an hour on a track riddled with craters, passing burned-out vehicles and mud villages dotted with pestilent human excrement and animal carcasses in various stages of decay, and crisscrossed by people pushing carts piled high with jerry cans of water, children prodding goats, old people riding even older donkeys, or in decrepit, unrecognizable cars, the doors a different color than the body, jam-packed, people crammed even in the trunk, and vehicles with the steering wheel on the right instead of the left, driven by hostile-looking men in turbans with no respect for the rules of the road. The villages we drove through without stopping had no electricity or running water. Nothing but rubble everywhere, ruins, and absolute, radical poverty. The farther we got from the base, the rarer the signs of reconstruction became, until finally they ceased entirely. “The magnitude of this disaster is unimaginable,” I confessed at mess that night to First Lieutenant Russo. “It’ll take a hundred years at least to get this country back on its feet.” “Things are improving,” he assured me. Russo was in charge of the CIMIC cell. An optimist, a humanist, and an anthropologist, he had faith in progress. No obstacle seemed insurmountable to him. “The first time I came here, in 2003,” he said, “there wasn’t even an airport in Kabul anymore. The terminal had been destroyed—by the Russians, I think. Burned to the ground. The only thing that had survived the bombs was a billboard that said ‘GOOD FLIGHT.’ That paradoxical slogan expressed the desire to soar again. To fly. We have to make this country fly.” “That’s why we’re here,” I replied.

But the idea of spending one hundred and eighty days in that desolate, alien landscape, as if on another planet, filled me with anxiety. I couldn’t wait to make contact with the locals. The ANA soldiers, the ANP officers, the interpreters and truck drivers aside, I hadn’t seen a single Afghani in two weeks. The forays outside Sollum—whether to patrol the territory or simply to escort convoys of trucks filled with fertilizer or saffron bulbs—turned out to be much more stressful than I could have imagined. The invisibility of the threat made it absolute, almost metaphysical. We had orders not to stop. We’d get off the paved road as soon as we could. It was a new road, surrounded by an almost surreal emptiness, but it was too exposed: we called it the Road to Hell. We’d head down poorly marked paths that petered out in yellow stubble, climb steep hills and cross riverbeds that were now merely muddy brooks slithering among the rocks, only to pick the road back up a few miles later, and then leave it again, entangling ourselves in laborious, exhausting itineraries. It’s called randomized activity: we followed different, unpredictable routes so as not to give the enemy any point of reference. In the evenings, we would spend hours in the shed that served as the operations room, planning itineraries. I had studied topography and cartography at Viterbo. It was one of the most dreaded exams. A third of the students failed, and since we had only two chances to pass it or be expelled, we studied like mad, even at night. I adored maps and charts, and by then I could read them like musical scores. I’d been practicing patrol activities, orienteering, and ground movements since my first year. I’d demonstrated a real spatial sense—I’d call it an instinct even—though Afghanistan was nothing like any of the places in Italy where I’d been dropped in order to test my capabilities. Afghanistan was an inhospitable labyrinth of sand and stones.

Captain Paggiarin listened patiently to my ideas, but he never accepted my suggestions. Still, I felt up to taking on that responsibility. I wouldn’t have had my men take the wrong road, we wouldn’t have ended up off the map. “Tell me the truth,” I said to my counterpart Vinci, the Cerberus platoon leader, after swallowing the umpteenth “we’ll see.” “Are we supposed to plan itineraries so as to avoid running into any and all problems, or to reach our objective?” Sometimes, in the evening, I would fantasize about drawing insurgent fire, only to repel it, earning the attention of the captain and RC West. The incident might even make the papers, and we’d be awarded the merit cross. I longed for that stupid cross as much as I’d longed for command of a platoon. I beat back those fantasies as if they were some grave offense. I had to detach myself from my own self, from my interests and passions: I hadn’t come here for personal satisfaction. I had to forget Manuela and become my rank. “To minimize the risks,” Vinci said, a cunning smile fluttering across his lips. “We have six months to reach our objective.”

D+15, one hundred and sixty-five days to go. We crossed the province of Farah, sealed in our Lince as if in a submarine, until we came upon a broken-down medical truck and had to stop. Aragorn, the code name for our onboard radio, ordered us not to get out of our armored vehicles, because an IED had been found in that village three days earlier, and it could be a trap. We sat there for roughly half an hour, doors locked, while the onboard computer connected to the cameras on the unmanned Predator aircraft that escorted us from the sky beamed back images of the village and surrounding hills to the small screen inside our vehicle: a cemetery of sand, not even the air was stirring. “When I was in Bosnia I got stuck in the mountains once,” Jodice started in. His voice came from the turret. “There wasn’t a damn thing there, only some cows. So I head out on foot to a mosque, it’s open. I stick my head inside, and there’s this old guy.” “That’s enough, Jodice,” I commanded, “concentrate.” The video cameras hadn’t picked up any hostile movement, and the truck radiator needed water. CIMIC was bringing medicine to a village not far from there: their first village medical outreach mission had been set for that day, they wanted to go, the village elders were waiting for them, it was important not to let them down like this, right from the start—we were new, we had to earn their trust, otherwise the regiment would lose face.

I received orders via radio to get out so as to coordinate operations and repair the breakdown. I explained that Sergeant Serra and Zara, the bomb dog, weren’t with us; they’d stayed back at the FOB. The dog had worms and was really sick. They were waiting for a helicopter transfer to the veterinary hospital in Farah. We still hadn’t received a substitute dog. They authorized me to repair the breakdown. The gunners at the head of the column had verified that everything was under control. “Roger, received, here I go.” “Don’t be nervous,” Jodice joked. “It’s no great loss if you get blown up, noncommissioned officers are useless ballast, a corporal can handle just about everything.” “Don’t kid yourself, you’re going to have to put up with me till the end,” I answered. “Be careful, eyes on your feather,” Zandonà whispered. I was happy that he’d used that Alpino expression with me. “You, too,” I said as I got out. “Eyes open and asses tight.”

Hindered by ten kilos of weapons, bulletproof vest, and helmet, I made my way toward the truck. I sensed a slight movement. Reaction time, a fraction of a second: I brought my rifle to firing position. But what appeared from behind the wall was only a group of children. Covered in dust, barefoot, filthy. Some blond, others with dark Tibetan hair. I looked at them, surprised but happy. And they looked at me. The littlest, probably five or so, stared at me as if I were from Mars. The older ones made a gesture that seemed decidedly obscene, but which I preferred not to decipher just then. They shouted something at me. I felt a pain in my calf. Then I realized they were throwing stones at me. That evening, when I took off my socks, I had a bruise the size of an apple.