15 ♦ ALL THE WAYS WE LIVE AND DIE

IT WAS 2012, AND I was a contractor, teaching basic IED circuits to another EOD unit before they left for Afghanistan. Up on the screen at the front of the classroom was the Engineer’s electronics manual. It matched our syllabus almost exactly, and why not? Ohm’s Law is the same for engineers of all nationalities.

It was getting to be the end of a long week. We had started with voltage and current and resistors and in only a few days made it to silicon-controlled rectifiers and photodiodes. We had made devices—in fact, the Engineer’s same device—that had been seen from Africa to South America to New York and Philadelphia. Throughout the classroom, every flat surface was covered with tiny electronic components and half-built circuits, booby traps that beeped when the lights turned on and off, doors opened and closed, radios were keyed or cell phones called.

The weekend was approaching, and the student soldiers were laughing and goofing around, as young people do, thinking more about their last party before deployment than antenna theory. So I took a break from lecturing and asked a question, the question I always ask every class I teach.

“Who’s the youngest guy in the company?”

Everyone started pointing and yelling, turning around to stare at the baby-faced private slumping in his seat, covering his eyes in embarrassment. He was tall and lanky, a colt who hadn’t grown into his body yet, all elbows and knobby knees and pimply cheeks that rarely, if ever, saw a razor.

“What’s your name?” I said to him.

“Andy,” he mumbled.

“How old are you, Andy?”

The room started loudly answering for him, but I needn’t have asked. The youngest kid in every class was always someone who enlisted right after high school, got selected for an abbreviated version of M——’s high-speed pipeline, made it straight through EOD training, had arrived at his unit only in the last month or two. Maximum age: nineteen. Andy drooped farther in his chair, letting his brothers answer for him.

“And where were you on 9/11?” I asked.

“Aww, come on, don’t make me say,” Andy pleaded. Jeers and catcalls filled the room, snickers about the expected answer.

“No, tell us. Where were on 9/11?” I said.

“I was playing Xbox before school,” Andy answered, to laughter. “My mom made me turn it off, and then we watched the news before I got on the bus.”

“And what grade were you in?”

“Second.”

Pete Hopkins, Fye’s medic, was right. So was Vonnegut. Wars are all fought by babies.

M——WAS DRIVING. I sat up front. Another contractor sat in back. We were just chatting.

“I heard about a new job,” I said. “A buddy shared it on Facebook. Syria. Four months, a hundred and twenty. Advising. By, with, and through. You know how that goes.” It was the summer of 2013. ISIS had just declared itself but had not yet attacked Fallujah or Mosul in Iraq. The American bombing campaign would not begin for over a year. All we knew of Syria came down like it did in the old days, as classified rumors.

“Syria is no joke right now,” said M——.

“I know. No air cover or backup,” I said.

“You can be straight-up stabbing motherfuckers,” the other contractor said from the backseat. He was new, fresh out of the military.

“That’s right,” M——said, nodding.

“You can be cutting motherfuckers’ heads off!” the other guy said. He was thinking of the “unknown Russian soldier” video, I knew. James Foley was already captured, but his murder was still months away. Trust me: don’t Google either video.

“Hell, yeah,” M——said. “That’s how it is, you’re out on your own, no one is coming to get you.”

M——thought a moment and then turned to me.

“How much did you say it was? Hundred and twenty grand? Fuck, I’ll do that for one twenty. Then fucking sleep on the beach for six months. What’s that dude’s name?”

TO LOOSEN HIM up at dinner, I ordered alcohol first, hoping he would follow my lead. Hayes, the black hole intel analyst, wasn’t so easily fooled. He was still in his shirt and tie and said no, no drinks, he needed to head back to the office after dinner. Throughout the interview, he was sober and measured and careful, but once I leaned forward and turned off the digital recorder, Hayes, ever the interrogator, immediately asked me the question that had clearly been on his mind all night.

“So, tell me,” he said, “do we catch the Engineer by the end of your book?”

He’s the only one who ever asked me that. Sarah Soliman had said the best analysts get obsessed.

THERE ARE NO windows on a C-5, so Soliman couldn’t see the Afghan countryside flowing past. She couldn’t see the beautiful landscape she had fallen in love with, the green summer of tall cedar trees in Jalalabad, the scattered simple brown shacks. Breadhuts, she called them. Someday, she thought, I’ll buy a qalat in Nangarhar, in those craggy, majestic peaks.

No view, but she was excited to be on the C-5. She had recognized it as a National Guard bird from home, with a distinctive red stripe on the tail and the name “Martinsburg” with an inset W and V, like the mountain bumps of the state. When she got onboard, she conducted some identity intelligence, pulled out a pen and paper, and showed a note to the armed crew member in the back.

“Are you all out of West Virginia? I’m from Martinsburg!” she wrote.

“The actual crew is. I’m fly-away security,” he wrote back.

Home. It was more and more on her mind. As a contractor, she could leave whenever she wanted. Just put in her two-week notice. This shamed her; her SOCOM teammates couldn’t just up and leave, not the military ones anyway.

Not that home fit right anymore. Back in DC, a city full of civilian helicopters, her heart would race whenever one would fly over. It was Pavlovian, the check for the go-bag. A moment of panic, she didn’t have it, the loadmaster would be pissed she was holding up the mission. Then a look at her oblivious friends. Why weren’t they grabbing their bags too? Do they even hear the helo? Then the stress would fade, leaving the moment sad and fond. War is a little like summer camp, she thought. A tight community, pledges to stay in touch, and then? She had no unit designation, no annual reunions, no contractor memorial on the National Mall.

If she left, she could go work in the Syrian refugee camps. Or maybe she could find a stateside biometrics job. It would be different, though. Fingerprinting has become normalized, but it still carries a criminal connotation, and iris scans are new and even scarier. Soldiers always give up everything when then enlist—prints, DNA, stool, everything—but there’s a different expectation. The military buys the body with an option to sell it back, in the same or similar condition if you are lucky. It’s different as a civilian.

But she would do it. She had been in the J2 job for eight months, and it was time to be done. Time to go home. She had things to do.

She was going to donate the money, she decided. Take all that dirty contractor money and atone by starting the scholarship at her alma mater, like she had talked about since college. She wouldn’t miss it. It was always about the work and the data anyway, never about the money. Endow it, permanently, so more engineers could study abroad like she did. Morocco had prepared her for Baghdad and Bagram, and there were problems all over the world for engineers to solve. Other students should get the same chance she did. And who knows, maybe a veteran would want it too? See another part of the world, one not full of conflict. One night, when she was in Kandahar, a C-130 landed with a West Virginia tail, and she threw on her muffling headphones and ran out to greet the plane, and a kid from her high school was a crew member. Maybe he would want the scholarship?

And she was going to do it now, she thought, not wait. No time like the present. Do something in her twenties that normally philanthropists do at the end of their lives. She never felt in danger in Afghanistan, not really, but she read Stars and Stripes, she knew to appreciate even being alive. Some guys have plans to go back to school, and they never get a chance to use their GI Bill. And some go back because their friends can’t. And some children go because their parents can’t. The widow and the orphan and the lost brother. She had seen all the ramp ceremonies. If this C-5 crashed, there would be nothing left behind, but if she donated the money, something would always be there. This scholarship would be her good-bye letter.

A year later, Sarah Soliman and I were sitting in a DC coffee shop. She had come from the office, was wearing a fashionable skirt and suit jacket, still no contractor uniform, but her striking red hair had been reduced to a bob. She had cut it all off when she had gotten back to the States, donated to make wigs for kids with cancer. And now she was telling me about the scholarship. Maybe it wasn’t all about the data, I thought.

“So, there’s some carpe diem there?” I asked.

“You realize at a much younger age than perhaps most people do,” she said. “Life doesn’t always go on.”

I had to ask and I didn’t know how, so I just did.

“Do you have any ghosts?”

Sarah’s eyes filled with tears, and she gave me the quick tiny nod of a little girl.

“Me too,” I said, and my eyes matched hers.

GENE RICH POURED himself a cup of coffee in a to-go mug, kissed his wife and kids, straightened his tie, and got in his car for the long commute to his new civilian job.

It was a big day, a briefing day, not that his company used that word, of course. Maybe they would call it a sales pitch? If so, he was selling an idea, a vision, a way forward.

These growing pains were difficult, the transition from one pilot flying one Pred to total situational awareness. Convincing the military pilot community might be toughest of all. It was counterintuitive, removing the pilot to make the whole system more human. But it made sense. He had been in ops centers when the Pred feed suddenly pops up. Whoosh, everyone drops what they are doing and looks, like an open window letting in fresh air on a stifling hot day. Gene had seen a theoretical mission directed from an antiseptic headquarters become real when the generals in the ops center could see real people on the ground, real helicopters, real compounds, bad guys getting shot. Some people think drones create warfare without consequences, because it’s a robot driving around shooting things, but they have it all wrong. It’s the opposite. For the generals, drones make the war more human.

So how to give them an even better picture?

Many of the developers of the Pred program were traditional aircraft pilots, so the ground control station made sense as an evolution. But what about for the new guys? They’ve never felt the sinking feeling on approach as the buoyant ground effect gives way. They don’t know that in a tiny-winged T-38 you can get yourself in a square corner on final, wing rock and stall and pancake with no fixing it. These ex-pilot engineers want to put all the human cues back in, to give the new guys the experience by simulating wind noises in the GCS. Make it feel more like you are in the aircraft.

But that’s moving in the wrong direction. The goal shouldn’t be to recreate the flying experience, it should be to automate the whole thing. Consider takeoffs and landings, where most accidents happen. The commercial 757 and 767 can take off and land automatically, but it hardly ever happens. Not unless the weather is 0–0, zero visibility, zero ceiling. Why? Because the human pilot is the backup for the automated system and needs currency, needs practice to keep his or her rating. The computer doesn’t need practice, so the safer system is put aside for humans to hand fly. It makes no sense. The Army’s Gray Eagle, their Predator variant, uses an auto system. No one takes off and lands, and it works just fine. Yes, there are a few cases where the computer is out of rating and crashes, but over time, you lose fewer aircraft by using the autopilot. Different aircraft, but still fewer.

This idea should be applied to the whole system. You’ll never make the GCS as real as flying, so don’t even try. Instead, let humans supervise the system and make decisions. Save the person for the higher functions, the problem solving. Let the plane turn right, left, slew the ball.

Gene imagined a map on a light table, ground teams tracked by sensors, multiple Preds displayed three-dimensionally. Want to know what a certain Predator sees? Flip to it on your flat screen. Want to see what’s on the other side of the building? Flip to a different angle. Need a vehicle tracked? Task a Pred with a point and click, it follows the truck on its own. No more air warden; let the computer deconflict flight paths. The operator, the human, isn’t in one point in space. The human is at every point in space.

This makes Evil’s situational awareness in the MC-12 look piddly and weak. Evil wouldn’t like hearing that, Gene knew. The two had flown together so long ago, when they were new lieutenants. But technology was passing those guys by, even if they refused to see it.

There was more. Automate the search too. So many petabytes of video to look at, how to find the right bit? Write a better algorithm to sort through the data feeds, predict where IEDs are, provide a better product to operators on the ground, narrow in on bad-guy behavior only, so we have maximum situational awareness and know whom to target.

We’ll get there by 2020, Gene thought. It’s just growing pains until then.

EVIL RENTED THE hangar space at Ferguson Field, a strip of hot asphalt and a row of sheet metal stalls on the west side of Pensacola near Perdido Bay. He had decorated it so it felt like home: a small bar adorned with stolen street and traffic signs, a half-size college beer fridge. On one wall hung a neon light-up emblem of the 2nd Fighter Squadron with their American Beagle badge. The 2nd flew P-39s, P-40s, and P-41 Mustangs over Europe in World II, trained new interceptor pilots during the Cold War, moved to Florida to train the nation’s F-15 pilots for twenty-six years. The unit was shut down in 2010. America is nearly done training F-15 pilots.

Most of Evil’s decorations were small, almost comically undersized in the large space. But the hangar was the perfect size for its two main occupants: an airplane and a something else.

The airplane was Evil’s. He owned it fair and square, without even a loan to pay down, paid for out of his own pocket with saved-up deployment cash. It was an experimental Glasair IFT. In the world of general aviation—those aircraft that are neither commercial nor military—the “experimental” designation indicates that the plane had been built from a kit at home rather than by a manufacturer in a factory. Evil didn’t build his own plane, though; he bought it complete and certified.

The Glasair IFT is airshow small, a modern tummy-rumbling throwback for those with only Boeing 737 eyes. A single prop on the nose turns under the direction of 160 horses, a small automobile engine. The wings are attached to the underside of the narrow fuselage, and to climb into the cockpit one must walk up specific reinforced sections that are labeled Step Here. Step other places, and you are liable to put a foot through the skin and into a fuel bladder. Evil’s Glasair was painted in American stripes: blue about the cockpit, a layer of white the length of the body, red wings and undercarriage. A fiberglass flag.

The other occupant of the hangar, that something else, was the very idea of the plane, and it took up nearly as much space as the aircraft itself. A breezy and easy confidence filled the space, a casual defiance of human physics, a perpetual attitude drawn from the earliest days of aviation, when experimental aircraft were just that.

When I walked into the hangar on that warm morning, it seemed to me more likely that a fabric-skinned De Havilland Tiger Moth should emerge, or that we should load up bags of airmail, or prepare to map some unexplored Arabian desert. I thought Evil might toss me a scarf and a leather helmet and goggles to wear for our flight, totems from a more trusting time when all would have intuitively understood this truism: the only people who fly airplanes are those that love it and are passionate for an elevated freedom above all else.

I opened the wide hangar doors via a clattering chain as Evil removed the wooden chocks from the plane’s wheels and tossed them in the rear of the open cockpit. We were nearly ready to fly together for the first time.

We pushed the plane out onto the well-trimmed infield grass, and Evil started to prep the engine. Calling the Glasair IFT a two-seater strains the definition. Evil sat on the left, to be closer to the modern electronics mounted on the dash. I sat on the right. Shoulder to shoulder, wall to wall, the stick rose from between our knees, and Evil shifted the right side of his torso in front of mine for an easier grip.

“Comfy, huh?” Evil said with a smile. Ten pounds of potatoes, five-pound bag.

We put on our headphones, and Evil flipped on the motor using an ignition switch and a push/pull throttle with a novelty-size black knob. As cool as starting your car, the engine buzzed to life. In a plane so small, I felt the engine as much as I heard it through the thick earmuffs, a vibration in my seat that made me burp. We kept the dual-gullwing hatches of the cockpit open as we taxied over the grass, my right arm and elbow hanging outside over the lip like I was on a Sunday drive out in the country. Maybe Evil was; he flew this plane nearly every day.

At the end of the runway, we latched the doors shut and Evil asked over his microphone whether I was ready to go. His voice was clipped and static. I gave him a thumbs-up. Evil flipped through the dials on the avionics and radioed the closest air traffic control, and I looked around the cockpit and noticed that at my right shoulder, written in bold black stenciled capitals, was the word EXPERIMENTAL. Beneath was an FAA label warning all potential passengers that the plane they were sitting in was built by an amateur. The moment before takeoff in any sort of plane—wide-body commercial jet or regional puddle-jumper—is all about trust. Whom should I trust now?

Evil pushed the oversize knob, and the quivering plane suddenly jumped down the runway. The sea-level air was fat with moisture, and the little plane was airborne before half the asphalt was gone. A flick of his wrist and Evil raised the nose, the airplane elevating as if lifted by a magician’s hidden string. A crosswind grabbed the tail and immediately yanked hard on our backside, but Evil kept the nose true, and with a buzz we bounced over treetops and turned east in a free pattern of the pilot’s own design.

We flew to Tyndall Air Force Base, following the white sand coast, and I managed to not throw up before we landed. Once on the ground we parked, chocked, and wandered over to the F-15C flight simulator, where Evil offered to dogfight me, pilot versus EOD robot driver. Time compressed, and though he whooped my ass continuously for an hour, it felt like only minutes. By then the light was fading, so we got back his tiny Glassair and took off for home.

In less than a year, Evil would upgrade his plane to a six-seat Bonanza, called the Bro-nanza by his buds, because of the ski trips and bike excursions and tropical island booze-fests he could now swing. But he had room for other cargo as well. He volunteered to transport rescued dogs to new owners, and flew veterans to specialist medical appointments up and down the Eastern Seaboard, especially amputees like Fye and Frost.

“I only really get along with fighter pilots,” Evil had said, by way of explanation. “But as I say, there are a lot of guys who fly fighters that aren’t fighter pilots. And there are a lot of fighter pilots who don’t fly jets. There were a lot of fighter pilots among the sensor operators and the SF guys in those task forces, they just didn’t know it.”

I’m not sure it’s possible for Evil to give a higher compliment.

The flight back to Pensacola was smooth and clear, westward into a sunset over the Gulf. As we flew across a nectarine sky bracketed by thunderheads, I thought of the vicious storms that raked Evil’s MC-12 over Afghanistan, and a conversation we had about the terrible night that followed.

“A couple of weeks after the fucked-up op where the Predator never responded back, I saw that JTAC, the one whose team was pinned down. He traveled all the way from Salerno, and he came to the MC-12 compound looking for me,” Evil had told me.

“What did he say?” I asked. “Did he have an explanation for what happened? Why they were left high and dry?”

“No, he didn’t,” Evil said. “All he did was shake my hand and say thanks for helping him out. He said, ‘We’d still be getting shot at if you hadn’t come. I fucking hate the Pred. It’s never there when you need it.’ So, believe it or not, I try to be diplomatic, and I say, ‘Yeah, but it’s got a nice camera?’ And he says, ‘Fuck that camera. I need guys I can trust. Me and all my guys would be dead if you weren’t up there.’”

Among fighter pilots, praising yourself with another’s words is not a cause for embarrassment; it is a simple statement of fact. Evil went on.

“It was probably the proudest and most humbling moment of my life. But it’s a funny thing. If there hadn’t been a Pred out there, I couldn’t have helped him. But if there was another MC-12, they wouldn’t have needed the help to begin with.”

The government wants safety and efficiency and distance and thus drones, but the warriors just want brotherhood.

JENNY SCHWARTZ LEFT her anatomy class and walked across the small bit of green lawn that serves as the grounds of Laramie County Community College in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The campus consists of a single main building surrounded by open parking lots, asphalt plains that quickly give way to equally empty high grasslands stretching to the south and east. The unremitting wind blew her hair into her mouth and eyes as she made her way to an obscure corner of the campus. Her destination was not her Jeep or a counselor’s office or a class but, most unlikely in this prairie setting, a tree.

They planted the tree for Matt. Well, not really, she thought. They planted it for every soldier who died in the war that was somehow affiliated with the college. But Matt never actually went to school here, so I guess they really planted it for me. I’m the one left in Cheyenne, trying to go back to school to fill the days.

The tree is on the back side of the main building, jammed in a corner up against two walls. No walkway or path leads to it. There is nothing to do once you get there, no bench or picnic table beneath, no one seeks out its shade. She wondered if anyone else ever visited this abandoned tree. It was a stunted thing with no leaves when they planted it. There was a little ceremony, about fifteen people, including the school president. That was nice, I guess, she thought.

Jenny doesn’t go to the back of campus to look at the tree very often. What’s the point? Why bother? It’s nothing but a terrible cliché. What am I supposed to say? What are my kids supposed to say? What does a tree fix?

She started to get angry again and thought, See, this is why I don’t make it a point to see this tree more often. Every time I do, its nothing but rehashing all of the futility and half-measures and misunderstandings and the foolishness of Matt enlisting and following him to Florida in the first place.

In the end, the argument in her head always ended the same way:

I never thought my kids would be able to say that their dad died in the war.

Who says that? It’s such an old-fashioned statement. Dads didn’t die in wars, or, at least they didn’t anymore. No one she knew had a father who died in Vietnam. Nor a grandfather in World War II. Who are all of these people who died in the Argonne and Iwo Jima and the Mekong Delta? Real people, they really fought, and then they died, and some of them got trees too, but they were as distant to her as the dead of Iraq and Afghanistan were to all of the students she sat next to in class every day.

But there could be a purpose in planting a tree, Jenny thought. A tiny, tiny purpose. The war is so far away, the people who planted this tree have no idea what it really means, what it represents.

This little tree is not about remembering, like they said. It’s about the washing of hands, putting the war and its obligations behind them. They planted this tree to forget.

IN THE CENTER of the northwest Florida military coast that stretches from Pensacola to Fort Walton Beach to Panama City, along the inward side of Okaloosa Island, off the main tourist drag but against a dock on the water, on the narrows that connect the larger bay to the Santa Rosa Sound, there is a run-down bar named Helen Back. It is not an especially large or nice place, and the view is limited. The rock and reggae bands that play on a small wooden stage are only all right. The beer selection is basic, and to a New Yorker, the pizza is just okay.

This dive is a dingy local watering hole in all aspects but one: the stickers that cover the glass doors and bar back, insignia that form a wallpaper of fighter squadrons, mobile units, SEAL teams, SF outfits, and EOD companies. Helen Back welcomes us all home.

Every year, over the first weekend in May, the EOD community of all four services gathers at the EOD Memorial at Eglin Air Force Base to remember our dead. The official service is held at the memorial wall on Saturday morning, rain or shine. The unofficial ceremony, at least since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, is Friday and Saturday night at Helen Back.

Thursday night too, Wednesday and Sunday sometimes as well. My wife, Jessie, and I usually fly in Friday morning and find the party already started. One year, when we arrived and dragged our bag upstairs to our shared rented condo in a huge beachfront tower, our old friend Matty from Las Vegas met us at the door. He had a glazed look in his eyes.

“Matty, are you drunk already?” I asked.

“I got drunk on Tuesday,” he said. “What day is it?”

We all hit Helen Back before the sun was even down that night. The bar was full, and loud, and the bartenders were already moving at double speed filling drink orders. Matty bought two pitchers for the three of us, and we clinked plastic cups and so the memorial begins.

Jew, our other roommate, meets us on the deck by the water. Some people take that name the wrong way. Jew is what he calls himself. I’ve heard his mother call him that. He’s got a tattoo with the EOD badge except the stars are replaced with six-pointed Stars of David. Anyway, Jew is crashing with Matty and us, but he’s been drinking down by the beach all day with Reese, so this is the first we see of him.

First thing Reese always does is shake your hand. I’ve decided he loves doing that because his right hand is a mangled mess; in Afghanistan an IED blew in his face while he was lying on the ground disarming it. He lost an eye, part of a leg, most of his hand. Don’t like shaking his claw because it gives you the creeps? Fuck you! He’s the one that only has three fingers.

Matty wants to drink Yuengling because it’s cheap here, but I can’t drink that fast enough to get drunk, so I order a couple of rum and Cokes. Straight well drinks—don’t ask for anything more complicated than one liquor and one soda.

The sun finally sets, and the bar is packed like grandma’s church on Easter morning. A congregation of EOD techs is mostly young men, though some are middle-aged and a fair number are women, not just wives and girlfriends but operators too. More muscular, not especially short hair, beards if guys are going over or just back or contractors. Lots of tattoos, on just about everyone, men and women, sleeves and legs especially. More cigarettes and dip spit cups than is currently fashionable. Only a few guys pay close attention to their clothing—who cares about such frivolities?

Since Iraq and Afghanistan, we have a few new rituals. When we arrive at Helen Back, we usually go to the center section, between the main bar and the outdoor patio, and without asking we stack all the plastic lawn chairs and move them to one side. This creates a space free of obstacles for the wheelchairs. Many of the wounded guys are drawn to each other to catch up, relax, talk surgeries and rehab and new prosthetics. After a long day, some of the double and triple guys have taken off their legs and are resting in the chair. One is excited he is getting new lips soon. Another has a T-shirt that reads “$10 for the leg story.” A third is fending off a guy trying to ride him like the Tilt-a-Whirl at an amusement park; just because you lost a leg doesn’t mean you are given quarter from the relentless shit-talking and pranks that every other EOD guy must endure. On a bet, someone licks Reese’s fake eye. Ty is showing off his new arm, and how it can grip a beer. The old one would spontaneously squeeze and spill; the new one is as steady as the cup holder in your minivan.

A robot finds the IED, and then you try to use a robot to disarm the IED, but the robot blows up and then you blow up and when you get home you get a new robot leg and a new robot arm and become the robot yourself. If you’re as lucky as Frost. Wars are all fought by babies, sometimes babies without arms and legs.

Wheelchairs everywhere, but also dogs. A few retired military working dogs since adopted, most specifically trained therapeutic dogs. Reese got a dog because he lost that eye and he was sick of bumping into shit. If you lost your leg, you get a big dog, so you can lean on him for support when you tire. And if the crowds still bother you, you get a smaller companion dog, so you can just find a corner and rub his ears and stare into his eyes when needed. And if you have nightmares, you still take your dog everywhere, because that dog saves your life every night, licking your face in the worst of the thrashing until you snap out of it and wake up, and how can you leave a companion like that in the hotel room alone?

The talk is of work and guns and motorcycles, and the sequence goes like this: take a job overseas, sell your bike before you go, come home, buy a new gun and new bike to celebrate. Everyone wants to know if you’re going back. No, I’m not. Not as a contractor, not as a writer. Not yet. I’d go back now if there was a way to ride with Matt Schwartz on patrol. All of us would, for a whole list of such names.

And everyone wants to know about Fye, since I’ve seen him most recently. I pull up pictures on my phone and show off the new brace he has for his leg. It’s called the IDEO, and it is a sort of exoskeleton, providing support for the right leg he is trying to save. I talk about how Fye is off the narcotics, his memory is slowly getting better, he’s finally walking, and has started powerlifting to stay motivated during the long bouts of therapy that keep him from running or riding a bike. In the end, Fye wouldn’t grow back all 12.7 centimeters of tibia and fibula bone that he lost. He was six-foot-two when he started, but infections and complications slowed the regrowth process. After eight months of prolonged traction, doctors noticed his new shin was growing in a curve, so Fye endured another round of surgery to break the fresh bone and straighten it. After a year of fighting, the doctors gave up at eight centimeters of reconstruction. Fye is six foot now, though he reminds me he’s taller when he wears the brace and the right sneakers. Those few inches make a difference; Fye looks slightly out-of-proportion in the photos on my phone, his torso just a bit too large compared to his lower half.

One of the people asking about Fye is Angela Olguin, the EOD tech who originally texted me to say Matt Schwartz had died. She wants to know about Fye, but she also wants to talk about Matt, and we finish our drink and I pour another from the pitcher, and soon Angela is wiping tears from the underside of her eyes so her makeup doesn’t run. “Fuck, sir!” she says, mad I’ll ruin her mascara. So she changes the subject: “Hey, look at this. Haha. Jew balls!” She shows me the photo on her phone, and yes, there is a picture of Jew’s scrotum, shiny and clean.

There is a shout from the bar, and the crowd pushes in and then a rush of orders. What just happened? Matty passes the word. Somebody just reenlisted, and he put a fair chunk of his bonus on the bar. It’s a race, how fast can we drink it away? We all get at least a few.

Reese’s Alive Day is the same day his best friend Tony died. We don’t talk about that much. In the men’s bathroom, John rolls himself into a stall while other guys piss in the urinals. John’s a triple amp, got one arm left, and more. “Yes, I still have my dick, in case anyone wants to know!” he shouts from behind the door. Better than some, but we don’t talk about that much either.

Then Jew arrives with the bottle of Don Julio and a Helen Back waitress who doesn’t drift far from his elbow. Someone says tequila makes their clothes fall off and then we do a round and the waitress refills the shot glass and then we do another.

Normal sights at Helen Back: shouted stories, whispered tears, men hugging, women kissing, pass the cherry, chants of “E-O-motherfucking-D” followed by silent drinking.

Jessie has been arm in arm with Jenny Schwartz all night, and the two are deep into their cups when I find them again. Jenny left the girls asleep in their hotel room, an older cousin offering to take the trip and babysit so Jenny could break free and relax for the first time in months. Jenny seems desperate for the opportunity to unwind, exhale, droop, like a dress let off the hanger that puddles on the closet floor. A friend of Jenny’s brought a tray full of shots, and we all take one and toast Matt.

Oh, it burns, hot as Satan’s hoof. For today, from hell’s heart, we weep.

Eventually, it starts raining, and we are driven under the few awnings and thatched tiki roofs. Who cares? By now we can hardly hear anyone speak anyway. The goal is not to reminisce but rather simply find the faces of old friends. We are used to long separations from one another, so there is comfort in physical proximity, as if we are all each other’s security blanket. I put my forehead on Jew’s back and breathe.

THE NEXT MORNING, despite all that had happened the night before, Matthew Schwartz was somehow still dead, so we put on our suits and uniforms and drove to the memorial ceremony on the other side of the bay.

The EOD community is not often known for demurring. EOD stands for many things besides Explosive Ordnance Disposal: Every One’s Divorced, Egos On Demand. But where it counts, at the memorial itself and the ceremony associated with it, we are a model of restraint. We live well, and we mourn well. The memorial weekend inspires a certain quizzical awe of one’s personal continued existence, and while there is a lustiness to be found in each unexpected breath, there is also humility.

The monument to EOD technicians who died in service is physically unassuming, on the side of a sand-pitted back road, away from the flight line and main hub of Eglin Air Force Base. It is a sanctuary on the grounds of the main EOD training center, as shrine to monastery. A simple wall, not overly tall or long, curved and tapered, constructed of poured concrete, not marble, and the small open-air plaza it encloses is paved with average bricks. Four brass cenotaphs are struck to the wall, one for each service. Over three hundred raised brass names are attached to the plates. Behind the wall, a single American flag, a line of palm trees, a thicket of piney woods, and then, appropriately, acre upon acre of old bombing range as the final backdrop.

Nothing is gilded. No statue of a general upon his horse or green copper man in a bomb suit. When a mainstream military unit, such as infantry or armor, held a memorial service in Iraq or Afghanistan, the physical monument to gather around was always spare: boots, rifle, helmet in a cross, dog tags hanging like a shroud. The EOD wall doesn’t even have those.

A thousand or more men and women attend the service where we add the names to the memorial. The men wear dress uniforms and suits, and the women wear dress uniforms and short spring dresses and cork wedge heels, tattoos on shoulders and babies in strollers. Most sit on bleachers and open-air folding chairs, but special tents are erected to protect the families of those honored; the ceremony and flag presentation can be hard enough without the oppressive sun or a chilly late-spring soaking rain. The memorial is particularly well attended by our wounded brothers, though an outsider would have to be observant to spot all the steel poking out of pant cuffs. Guys who were relaxing in their wheelchairs the night before seem to make it a special point to put on their legs and stand in uniform for the event.

The ceremony opens with a famous general or admiral speaking words of glowing praise, about glory and self-sacrifice, about skill and danger and the fear we instill in our enemies. It is the one day a year we let others brag for us. In the seats, faces are stone and eyes are red.

The second part of the ceremony is the simple reading of every name already on the wall. Each service takes a turn reading their own list, Army, Marine Corps, Navy, then Air Force. It is the only point in the ceremony that the average EOD technician speaks. I timed it once; it takes twenty-seven minutes to read the entire list of our dead. Recently, they had to change out the old plates that bore all the names because they were running out of space. The monument was almost full, so they installed new plates, and the names are printed much smaller. Now there’s plenty of room for more.

Everyone who died has a name, and they read them all and you start to get numb. By Korea and Vietnam, they start to blend. But then there is a little shock when they say the first name you recognize, a name you really knew, then another name of a guy younger than you, then a good friend from your first assignment. They haven’t said your best friend’s name yet, and you think they might not. Maybe it’s been a mistake the whole time. But then they do say your best friend’s name, they say it like any other, and you want to stand up and yell STOP! just so everyone slows down and realizes what just happened. Can’t we just stop a while, and think about him for a good long time? Just a moment ago, this person was. No, in all of the most important ways he still is. But they read the name as quickly as any other, and the moment passes, and you squeeze your wife’s hand.

When the representative of each service is done with all their names, they say this: “We remember.”

Do not be deceived by this simple declaration. It is more injunction that reflection; carries the weight of duty, not hazy peace. It is a task to be done now, and the day after, and the day after that. It is fresh mud to labor through. It is a soaked log to heft and split and stack. It is an already sharp blade to hone. There are no laurels upon which to rest.

When the Marine Corps gunnery sergeant says, “We remember,” after reading the seventy-eight names on the Marine tablet, what he is really saying is, “Stop!” just like you wish you could. He’s saying, “You volunteered for this. You are the one who wanted to join up. Well, now you’re here, and my best friend in the world is on this wall, and the least you can do is remember his goddamn name for the rest of your life. He’s dead, and you’re alive, and it’s a tiny thing to do, remembering, and you’re going to do it because the only way his sacrifice begins to make a lick of sense is if it isn’t forgotten.”

“We Remember” is scrawled across every program and banner and website associated with the event. It is the Facebook update for every EOD technician on the morning of the memorial. It is the mantra of everyone with a personal friend on the wall, and after fifteen years of war, only the newest graduates do not have one.

The official motto of the EOD community for decades has been: “Initial Success or Total Failure.” Iraq and Afghanistan have all but replaced it with “We Remember.”

We remember that there were 184 names on the wall when we started these wars. We remember that we have added 130 names since. We remember that this has been our bloodiest conflict ever, twice as many EOD dead as in World War II, three times as many as in Vietnam. We remember that in 2012, at the height of the Afghan Surge, we didn’t add eighteen names to the wall during the memorial ceremony, but rather Chauncey, Christopher, Mark, Eric, Michael, David, EJ, Daniel, Nicholas, Stephen, Kraig, Nicholas, Chad, Kristopher, Joe, P-Nut, Matthew Seidler, and my friend Matthew Schwartz.

We remember that the oldest name on the wall is that of Navy Ensign John M. Howard, born 1917, graduate of the third-ever mine disposal class at the Washington Navy Yard, killed in Britain in June of 1942 taking apart a booby-trapped German underwater mine. We remember that, as of the editing of this book, the newest name is that of Army Specialist Justin Helton. He was thirteen years old on 9/11, and killed in June of 2014 in the Arghandab district of Afghanistan, in the heart of the valley that had taken so many limbs and lives. Helton was killed along with four Special Forces soldiers, their interpreter, and an Afghan Army soldier, via friendly fire, when the air control and coordination system broke down and a B-1 mistakenly dropped a bomb on their position.

We remember that there will surely be a newer name by the time you read this. We remember that there could be new names before this book is even published.

The final portion of the ceremony is silence. Not a word is spoken or a note of music played, as folded flags are presented to the families of those whose names are newly added to the wall. The length of the silence depends on how many names there are. In recent times, it has made up more than half the ceremony.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, chunks of years went by when no one was added to the wall. The annual ceremony was almost a formality, a lightly attended reading of the names, somber and respectful but small, with none of the immediacy that the post-9/11 wars would bring.

Did they know then how good they had it? I think so. I think enough Vietnam and Gulf War veterans knew what was coming. Not the specifics, of course, but the potential, the inevitability of war-brought grief that lay just beyond the next ridge.

“Screw up and you go on the wall” was the regular admonishment in EOD school. No one had to ask which; there is only one wall when EOD techs converse. Across the street from the school, every EOD student saw the wall, the stakes, every day as they trained.

But the rebuke itself reveals a prejudice in our prewar thinking. For twenty-five years, since the Vietnam War ended, nearly every name we added to the wall died because of a mishap: accidental explosion, mishandling of ordnance, plane crash in Egypt, a Humvee rollover while clearing a desert bombing range. The lessons we learned in EOD school kept us safe in an accident-prone world. One ended up on the wall because of stupidity or ignorance or bad luck, but not maliciousness. Working with unstable ordnance was dangerous enough, but at least no one was actively trying to kill you.

Those days are long since passed.

In the Iliad, the dead fall into two categories. The named characters—Achilles, Nestor, Paris—know that if they die in battle they will be remembered. The second group, the unnamed masses that throw themselves on Troy’s walls, are as forgotten in death as they are anonymous in life.

No more. Not only do we now remember every individual soldier, but we kill our enemy by name.

JENNY SCHWARTZ AND the girls sat under the white tent with the rest of the honored families. Matt had died five months ago, but having a general kneel at your feet and hand your daughter a flag for her daddy wasn’t getting any easier. They already had a pile of flags back in Wyoming. Eighteen names were just added to the wall, and Matt was second to last. Her girls watched every other family cry and then tried to bite their lips when their time came. It was like a second funeral, but worse.

I should have buried him at Arlington, Jenny thought.

Put your husband in Washington if you want to have a life and move on. Bury your husband at home and consign yourself to purgatory.

She understood that only now, that the question of burial is not about where but with whom. Whom should he lie with? That’s what she should have asked. In Arlington, you lie with your brothers and the circle is closed. In Traverse City, though, he lay there alone, in a field of snow-covered gravestones, waiting only for her. No matter what she may do for the rest of her long life, she is abandoning him if she doesn’t loyally return.

The Engineer’s detonation on that road between Leatherneck and Kandahar, first a flash and then silence and then thunder, was an atonal shriek that cannot be silenced. It threw Matt’s truck in the air, threw her whole life into the air, leaving her very existence ringing like an unresolved chord until she go lie down beside him. She must eventually. The natural order demands it.

In Arlington it would be done by now, but in Traverse City it hangs, always on the edge of hearing.

AFTER THE MEMORIAL ceremony, the main crowd trickled away, but the afflicted still gathered. Some approached the wall as they would a relic or shrine, to have their picture taken with a particular name or to simply feel the raised letters under their fingertips. Others wandered the halls of the EOD school, searching for their class photo now twenty years gone. As these unaffiliated mourners milled about, several families—Schwartz, Seidler, and Bell—separated from the group and went into a spare classroom adjacent to the main hall.

That morning, Jenny Schwartz and her girls and Matt’s parents and family would receive two briefings: the personal story of the team’s last day, and the Air Force’s official post-blast investigation.

First up was Senior Master Sergeant Chris Schott—Schottzie to everyone who knew him—the ranking enlisted EOD tech in Matt’s unit. He had returned from Afghanistan less than a week prior and chose to be with the families of the dead instead of his own. Jenny thought he looked like he had some things that he clearly needed to say.

Schottzie told them all the whole story of January 5, 2012.

He told them how he started every day the same: getting a cup of coffee and then texting every EOD team that was out on the roads and away from the main base at Camp Leatherneck, to check on their status and spirits and health and to show them he loved them. And the whole team, Schwartz and Seidler and Bell, Team Tripwire they called themselves, were chipper and motivated and eager to roll. He told them how that afternoon, at a boring administrative meeting at the EOD battalion headquarters, a Navy ensign had stepped in to interrupt and ask, “Who owns Tripwire?” How the ensign had said there was an IED strike, all occupants were unresponsive, and Army engineers were breaching the doors. How he had called his friend, the chief of the Air Force pararescue squadron, and had asked for their help, because they had jaws-of-life to breach armor, and he couldn’t stand the thought of his men being trapped. How there had been initial confusion, because the ops center was receiving reports that three “soldiers” were down, instead of three airmen. How he went to the hospital on the British side of base, because guys got hit in the JERRV all the time and the truck was so tough, and it had been so long since the EOD community had lost a team this way, he expected to be bullshitting with all three of them by sundown. How the British officer who ran the helipad had approached him at the ambulance port and said he could go inside because they didn’t have three “soldiers” coming in, they had three “heroes.” How he didn’t understand at first, how he had said, “Of course they’re heroes, they’re Air Force EOD techs!” How he didn’t understand until the Air Force rescue bird arrived with three flag-draped stretchers. How he had then broken down in tears, and vomited, and beat the concrete blast walls with his fists until his hands bled.

They needed to know that all three men got the white-glove treatment. He had personally identified each body. They looked like they were asleep. He knew Bell and Schwartz had expressed a preference for a Catholic service on their records, so he skipped the British Protestant chaplain on duty and found the priest, a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel built like a cathedral. He had helped load them on the C-130 during the dignified transfer. He had searched their armored truck for a week to find every personal effect. They needed to know he had done everything he could, which would never be close to enough.

When he was done, he asked if anyone had questions. The room was silent. No one moved, except for young Aliza, Matt’s eldest daughter but only eleven years old, who looked around at the adults as she tentatively raised her hand. Jenny nodded at her.

“Yes, honey,” Schottize asked.

“Was there a fire in the truck?”

One of her daddy’s shirts had burn marks all over it. She didn’t know where they had come from. Jenny knew Aliza meant it to be an innocent question. The families don’t know all of our nightmares; Matt had shielded them from all the worst ways we die.

But then Jenny saw all of the color drain from Schottzie’s face. It looked like he had stopped breathing. Over the last eleven years of combat, Schottzie knew what a fire meant. He had seen more than his share. He understood what happened when a team got trapped in a burning truck. Short ribs in the Alabama smoker.

Schottzie finally inhaled and answered.

“No, sweetie. There was no fire. Your daddy didn’t feel a thing.”

THE SECOND BRIEFING, the post-blast report, was borne by Major General Timothy Byers.

General Byers had two stars. His title was The Civil Engineer. The Air Force, like the Marine Corps, ultimately organizes their EOD forces under the engineering branch, and so General Byers was responsible not only for every carpenter, backhoe operator, plumber, electrician, draftsman, and firefighter in the Air Force but every EOD technician as well. He had attended the memorial specifically to speak to the families of every Air Force EOD technician placed on the wall that May morning. General Byers carried a binder and briefing, and with the aid of Senior Master Sergeant Tom Allen, who had compiled the official post-blast study, he intended to tell every wife and mother exactly how their husband and son died.

In 2008, there was not even an investigation into Frost’s attack. In 2011, Fye’s report went into a black hole, and he never heard what happened. In 2012, a two star general sat down with the family of a sergeant to explain every detail.

Matt was on a route clearance mission, between Helmand Province’s Camp Leatherneck and Kandahar to the east, this much Jenny knew. She didn’t know any of the rest that follows.

General Byers was formal and clear. He told Jenny that Matt had done everything right. The report explained the training Matt had received before he deployed, the equipment he was issued, and the type of truck he was in, that it was the stoutest the military had. The report said Matt’s team was on a route clearance mission with Army combat engineers, supporting the Marine Corps grunts of the Second Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment in Operation Double Check, a push into a remote area north of Sangin to find IED manufacturers. General Byers didn’t say it this way, but we understand: Matt was hunting for the Engineer.

The report said that Matt’s route clearance team discovered an IED on the road and they had stopped to disarm it. That they successfully used the robot, disrupted the device, searched for others but found nothing. That just as they had remounted and moved a short way up the road, a second device detonated as Matt’s truck drove over it.

General Byers told Jenny that Matt was targeted, they were sure. It wasn’t an accident, or the general chaos that struck Fye. Matt wasn’t just unlucky. Two Army vehicles had driven over the device, but it wasn’t triggered until the JERRV arrived. The explosive charge was massive, meant to kill the indestructible EOD truck. They were looking specifically for Matt’s team.

The report said the JERRV’s doors were locked and damaged, and initially Matt and his team were trapped. But the soldiers in their convoy attached chains to the back hatch and successfully ripped it from its hinges. The chains didn’t snap, they made it to Team Tripwire. The report said their vital signs were checked three times—by the medics in the convoy, by the helo crew, by the surgeon at the hospital—and there was never any hope. The three had died instantly, they had died midsentence, just as the autopsy showed.

Another EOD team from the Marine Corps then responded to the scene and did a complete workup. The blast was so large it had thrown Matt’s JERRV into the air and dropped it on a mud wall. They found evidence in the crater in the road. They found a command wire running between the road and the hide the ambushers had used. They found a battery there, other evidence too, and because you couldn’t see the road from the battery, they knew multiple attackers had set up the shot. There had to be a spotter and a triggerman at least. General Byers gave Jenny a map that showed everything, where Matt’s truck was hit, the security arrangement, the qalats and walled compounds, the command wire, the triggerman.

The report said that they had found a water bottle at the firing point, and that it was covered in fingerprints and DNA. That they had used the biometrics database to find the triggerman.

The report said they knew who killed Matt. They were actively monitoring his area, they were searching for him at that very moment, and when they found him, they were going to kill him.

IT WAS ONLY a couple of weeks later that Schottzie got a text.

The text said: Spec Ops targeting op, 3 High Value Targets KIA, positive biometric match to Tripwire evidence.

Schottzie smiled, just a little.

I got a similar text at the same time, from an EOD brother on the inside, who still had access to the real-time communiqués of the war.

All my text said was Call me. It was like that message in front of the Christmas tree months before. My hands shook. I did.

“I thought you’d want to know,” my brother said. “They got the guy who killed Matt.”

My head swam. Lowering Matt into the frozen ground. The lucky who lost their legs. JIEDDO said, to win the war we had to move Left of Boom. They said the evidence is how we would come to know him. The battery and the command wire and the water bottle went into the black hole, and some analyst had put it all together. A pop from the biometrics database. Who worked all night while the TIC lights strobed? What grainy photo did they use? A task force, a contractor, a trigger pulled, a sparkle on the forehead. Did they read Matt’s name in the MC-12 during the mission? Did they remember why they hunted?

I thought about Jenny and her three little girls and whether this news would bring them comfort. At the memorial wall weeks before, we had spoken every name, and now Matt’s killer had a name as well.

For my part, I never cared as much about the actual name as the certainty it conferred. That name, whatever it was, represented specificity, the discrimination of one target over another, the knowledge that the system had worked and that the right man had been identified and hunted and killed. So I had to ask:

“Did we just get the spotter and the triggerman?” I said. “Or did we finally break through and get the Engineer?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “How can you really know for sure?”

The Engineer’s brother is dead, and so is mine, and now, perhaps, he too. I would never know for sure, but we have learned that the point is this:

Some people are worth killing more than others.