And so this meeting had been brokered in an attempt to stop the fighting.
Two Bradleys loaded with heavily armed combat infantry were sent to the base as a demonstration of strength. Sarge was glad to be in the point vehicle. For most of the trip, he was able to enjoy the beautiful scenery rolling by without eating the other vehicle’s dust.
The truth was he loved Afghanistan and had even learned to love its people. The Afghans lived close to life and death. This was one of the places of the world where it was still common to see nomads living off the land. It was a very old place. Numerous armies had marched through it—Greek, Persian, Indian, Mongol, British, Soviet. The Afghans had beaten the British and the Soviets and had nothing to show for it; centuries of warfare had impoverished the country, and many people here lived as they had for thousands of years, in ignorance and poverty.
Sarge had grown up in Los Angeles searching for something he could not name. He spent his teenage years gang banging on the city’s hard streets as a corner dealer and later as muscle. He killed a boy three days before his seventeenth birthday, but they never caught him for that. A month later, his girl dumped him and he smashed windshields in a drunken, brokenhearted rage all the way up two blocks of Hillcrest until the cops finally showed up. He took a swing at one and they did a Rodney King on him. In court, he was given a choice of prison or the Army.
Two years later, he was deployed to Afghanistan. Found himself sitting on a Bradley, watching M1 Abrams tanks drive across fields of poppies overlooked by the wild mountains of the Hindu Kush and endless blue sky.
And that thing he’d been searching for? He’d found it.
The column followed the jingly truck into the base in a blinding cloud of dust. The men piled out of the truck. One hoary specimen, his eyes white with cataracts and sporting a long white beard, scowled at everything. The Colonel and his staff emerged from a large tent set up for the meeting and they shook hands all around. The old man with the beard stood off to the side, refusing to shake. Noticing Sarge, he spat and said something in Pashtun, ending with Yabba dabba doo!
Sarge knew the expression but had never heard it spoken. It was Afghan slang, roughly translating as, “falling crates that knock down houses.” During the invasion in 2001, the Americans dropped boxes of food onto the villages, and some of them landed on huts and destroyed them, a perfect little parable of the trouble with good intentions.
One of the other Afghans, the man who had waved to him from the back of the truck, laughed and said, “Do not take it personal. He thinks you are Russian. He thinks you are all Russians.”
“He’s got a long memory,” Sarge said. “Maybe he thinks I’m British.”
“Ha. Perhaps. English and Russians alike died here. I hope you will do better, my friend.”
“Inshallah,” Sarge said. If God wills it.
The Afghan laughed with feeling. “There is a path to the top of even the highest mountain,” he exclaimed, quoting an Afghan proverb. Then it was Sarge’s turn to laugh.
More jingle trucks pulled up to drop off more village representatives. The squad in Sarge’s Bradley dismounted in full battle rattle, showing off their firepower to the Afghans. The place was suddenly swarming with locals and heavily armed soldiers in a melee of salutations and small talk. The Colonel ushered them into the big tent for tea, and then it was quiet again in the compound.
A dollar got you fifty afghanis, the local money. Sarge had seen a lot of Afghanistan and particularly enjoyed visiting the larger bases that had a market day where you could buy local food, crafts, anything. He loved the food, especially the rice pilau, and ate it the way the Afghans did, using naan flatbread as a utensil to scoop the food into his mouth. But in these smaller bases, there was nothing to buy. And nothing to do except duck bullets.
Sarge talked to Devereaux about the base and its vulnerabilities for a few minutes, and then decided to join a few of the base’s soldiers sitting and smoking on buckets and ammo crates in the protective shadow of a concrete bunker. This little nook apparently passed for the base’s lounge.
“Welcome to Mortaritaville,” one of the soldiers said. “Got any cigarettes?”
Devereaux did, and they all got along fine trading jokes and war stories and cutting into MRE pouches looking for candy. Sarge found a comfortable spot on the ground with his back against a wooden bin holding water bottles. The soldiers were already laughing at Devereaux. The boys in the squad called him “the Afghan” because he loved to tell big stories. The smallest firefight became an epic starring him and the Bradley. Sarge loved this part of Army life. Shooting the shit and occasionally busting balls.
“Black and white don’t matter to me, Sarge,” Devereaux was saying. “I wouldn’t mind being a black dude like you if there weren’t so many fucking douchebags. I’d rather be white because there are more white douchebags than black douchebags, and so the odds of somebody being a douchebag to me are less being white. Does that make any sense?”
“At least you’re not a jinglie,” another soldier said to Devereaux, referring to the Afghans. “Everybody’s a douchebag to the jinglies. This place has been douchebagged since the dawn of time.”
Sarge laughed.
The meeting dragged on all day until the Afghan leaders piled into their jingly trucks and started the drive back to their villages. They were smiling when they left, which the soldiers took as a good sign. Word went around that the Colonel had made good progress in getting the locals back on their side. Sarge understood that he and his boys would stay the night, and then rejoin his unit near Mehtariam tomorrow morning. The valley filled with a familiar mechanical sound and he looked up, shielding his eyes against the sun’s glare with his hand, to see a pair of Chinook helicopters pounding air, escorted by a single Apache attack helicopter.
One of the Chinooks wobbled and abruptly fell out of the sky, crashing into the mountainside moments later and breaking into pieces as it rolled into the trees.
“Whoa,” Devereaux said to one of the base’s soldiers. “Did you see that?”
The soldier shook his head in wonder. His nose wrinkled and he said, “Man, that smells funny.” Then his eyes rolled up into his head and he collapsed screaming.
“Medic!” Sarge roared, kneeling next to the man to check his vital signs. “We need some help over here!”
But soldiers were falling everywhere onto the crushed stones, screaming.
The Colonel came running out of the tent.
“We’re under attack! Get to your posts!”
The Apache veered and collided with the other Chinook, bringing them both down onto the mountain in a spectacular, hundred-yard-long eruption of dust and stones.
The soldiers were falling and lay on the stones screaming, their bodies taut with pain.
“Holy shit,” Sarge said, and ran for the Bradley.
He sat in the commander’s station, panicking, his heart pounding against his ribs. What had happened to those men? Were they dead? If this were a biological or chemical attack, weren’t they all exposed? If the Taliban did this, the gloves would come off. They were begging the world’s best military for wholesale extermination, and they would get it.
After waiting for several minutes, he shifted into the gunner’s seat, working the periscopes to scan the heights for possible enemy attack.