The Best American Short Stories 2014 (34 page)

The middles of the patties were uncooked, and strings of chicken slag lodged in my teeth. I ended up throwing most of the rooster away, then waited for the commercials and rushed to the bathroom to vomit. As a child, I learned that you must flush the toilet to get low water before vomiting, to minimize backsplash.

 

Conversations swirl beyond my partition, but none of them cover the first six minutes of the finale. The clerk with the dirty khakis is kicking the door of the copy machine. I have got to get a two-day package together for Brendel's before close of business. I have got to finish my notes. I have got to finish my notes.

FROM
The New Yorker

 

Logar, Afghanistan

 

W
E WENT THROUGH
a number of howitzer liaisons before Levi. His predecessors, none of whose names I remember, were able to build artillery plans in support of our night raids. They were skilled enough to communicate these plans to the soldiers who would fire the howitzers. In fact, any one of them would've been perfectly fine as a liaison to a normal organization. But ours was not a normal organization. Sometimes what went on gave normal men pause. And if they paused we'd send them back and demand a replacement. After a few rounds of this, the lieutenant in charge of the howitzer battery said, “Enough.”

Which was understandable, but not acceptable. So on our first night without a mission Hal and I took a walk to the howitzer camp. We set out from the dog cages under a full moon, which seemed to cast X-rays rather than light. Thus the dogs' ribs were exposed, as was the darkness below the ice on our steep climb uphill. The steel barrels of the howitzer guns were visible as shadows, and the plywood door of the howitzer camp was illuminated as if it were bone. Hal knocked on this door with an ungloved fist.

The lieutenant answered. “Hey, guys,” he said.

Hal pushed past him into an empty room. “Get your men in here,” he said.

The room filled with soldiers feigning indifference, but every one of them had ideas about the war. The variety of ideas among soldiers developed into a variety of ideas among units, which necessitated an operational priority scheme. As SEAL Team Six, we were at the top of that scheme. Our ideas about the war
were
the war. Therefore, we could knock on any unit's door in the middle of the night, assemble the soldiers in a room, and tell them what was what.

On this night, Hal told them that we needed a goddamn liaison. Then he searched the room for one. Levi's height—he was by far the tallest man there—made it easy for Hal to point and say, “How about you?”

You put a normal man on the spot like that and he'll get this look. Levi did not get that look. This may have been, at least partly, because Levi was Dutch, born and raised. Why he had joined the United States Army was anyone's guess.

“Yes,” Levi answered. “I am available. Howeffer, I have a pregnant wife in Texas, and in two weeks' time I would like to go there for the burt of my son.”

Hal, with his scar like a frown even when he was smiling, nodded my way. I nodded back.

“We can work that out,” Hal said.

 

So Levi became our howitzer liaison. He moved into our compound and had his mail delivered to our tactical-operations center. Packages arrived from his mother in Amsterdam. Inside the packages was a variety of Dutch candy.

Levi opened these packages at his desk. He removed the Vlinders and the Stroopwafels, but he always left the licorice Kattekoppen in the box. Apparently, Levi had loved these candies as a kid, and his mother was under the impression that he still loved them. But he didn't. So he set the Kattekoppen on the shelf by the door, where we kept boxes of unwanted food.

Perhaps “unwanted” is too strong a word. Better to say that no one wanted that particular type of food at that particular time. Everyone knew that a time would come, born of boredom, curiosity, or need, when we would want some Carb Boom, squirrel jerky, or a Clue bar. But until that time, the food sat on the shelf. And the Kattekoppen sat longer than most.

American licorice was red or black. It came in ropes or tubes. Kattekoppen were brown cat heads with bewildered faces. They made me think of a bombing attack I'd been involved in, in Helmand, during a previous deployment. We'd dropped a five-hundred-pound laser-guided bomb with a delayed fuse on a group of men standing in a circle in a dusty field. The round hit at the center of the circle and buried itself, by design, before the fuse triggered the explosion. The blast killed the men instantly, crushing their hearts and bursting their lungs, then flung their bodies radially. The dead landed on their backs, and a wave of rock and dirt, loosed by the explosion, sailed over them. The dust, however, floated above. As we walked in from our covered positions, it descended slowly. By the time we reached the impact site, it had settled evenly on the dead, shrouding their open eyes and filling their open mouths. Those dusty faces, their uniform expressions of astonishment, were what I thought of when I saw Kattekoppen.

Nevertheless, the day came when I pulled a Kattekoppen out of the bag and held it up.

“How's this taste?” I asked Levi.

“Goot,” he said.

So I popped it in my mouth and chewed, and I found that it did not taste goot. In fact, it tasted like ammonia. I ran outside and spat the chewed-up bits on the snow, but the bad taste remained. Thinking that snow might help, I ate some. When that failed, I ate dirt. But nothing worked.

Others who tried the Kattekoppen didn't even make it outside. They simply spat their vociferous and obscene rejections right into the trashcan next to Levi's desk. If these rebukes of his childhood favorite bothered Levi, he never let on. He just sat in his little chair, which was actually a normal chair dwarfed by his abnormal size, and with his wee M16 lying by his side, he drew circles.

In a perfect world, there would be no circles. There would be two points, launch and impact, and between them a flawless arc. But in reality our maps were best guesses, the winds erratic, and every howitzer barrel idiosyncratically bent. Not to mention the imperfect men who operated the howitzers—those who lifted the shells into the breech, who loaded the charges, who programmed the fuses. These men were exhausted, lonesome, and fallible.

So Levi's circles were graphic depictions of possible error. They described, factoring in the permutation of variables, where the howitzer rounds might fall. He drew them around our most likely targets and, since everything was subject to change, he did so in grease pencil on a laminated map. Every circle contained a potential target, along with a subset of Afghanistan proper, its wild dogs, hobbled goats, ruined castles, and winter stars.

Before a mission, I'd study the contour lines within these circles in order to understand how to navigate the rise and fall of the terrain. Similarly, I'd study the stamps on the packages sent by Levi's mother.

These stamps paid tribute to the painter Brueghel. Each stamp focused on a particular detail within a particular painting. For example, the image on the stamp featuring
Hunters in the Snow
was of the hunters and their dogs returning from the hunt. Staggering through knee-deep drifts, they crested a hill that overlooked their tiny village.

Returning from our manhunts through the snowy mountains west of Logar, I felt the weariness of Brueghel's hunters. Cresting the hill that overlooked our frozen outpost, I saw their village. And, within its fortified boundaries, I watched men go about their daily tasks as if unaware of any higher purpose.

 

As the time for Levi's trip home approached, the howitzer lieutenant correctly predicted that rather than work anything out, we'd simply take another of his men to cover Levi's absence. So he raised the issue with his headquarters. He did so via an e-mail to the 1st Infantry Division's command sergeant major, requesting an increase in manpower to cover our requirement for a liaison. The lieutenant forwarded us the sergeant major's response, in which the sergeant major said that the only fucking way he'd even consider this horseshit request was if we provided him with written justification ASAP.

The chances of our providing justification, written or otherwise, to anyone, for anything, were zero. So the night before Levi went home Hal and I paid another visit to the howitzer camp. That night, a blizzard clobbered Logar. I met Hal by the dog cage, as usual. The heavy snowfall had caused us to cancel that night's mission, and the dogs, which on off nights normally hurled themselves at the chainlink, setting off the entire dog population of Logar, were still. Likewise, Hal was not himself. He shivered, and his scar was barely visible. When we reached the door of the howitzer camp, he had to knock twice.

The lieutenant answered. “Hey, guys. I'm really sorry about all this,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Hal said. He poked his head in and saw a chubby kid playing mahjong on a computer. “We'll take him.”

“Uh, OK,” the lieutenant said. “But the sergeant major's going to be pissed.”

“Not my problem,” Hal said.

Hal returned to the compound to sleep, and I waited outside until the kid pushed through the door with a variety of coffee mugs carabinered to the webbing of his enormous ruck. “Ready!” he announced. And, with his headlamp on high, we set off down the steep, icy road.

Falling snow converged to a vanishing point in the beam of the kid's headlamp. When he fell behind, I could almost reach out and touch this point. But then he'd trot up alongside me, mugs clattering, and it would recede. On one such occasion, he presented me with a handful of bullets.

“Can I trade these in for hollow-point?” he asked. “I heard you guys roll with hollow-point. I also heard you guys muj up, in turbans and man jammies and shit, with MP5s tucked up in there. Like,
ka-chow!
That must be
wicked!
And I heard you guys have makeup artists that turn you into village elders so you can drop mad PSYOP on the GENPOP. Is that true? You don't have to tell me, but
holy fuck!
”

The kid fell behind, caught his breath, and trotted up beside me again.

“So can I get an MP5?” he asked.

I ushered the kid to the TOC and showed him Levi's computer. After booting up mahjong, he was quiet.

My next task was to put Levi on the rotator at dawn. The rotator was a cargo helicopter that every morning ran a clockwise route around the AOR. From our outpost, it would fly to Bagram, where Levi could catch a transport home. With daybreak less than an hour away, I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat back to watch the drone feed.

The drone was on the wrong side of the storm that sat over Logar, and its camera, which normally looked down on our targets, was searching a dark wall of cumulonimbus for a hole. Not finding one, it punched into the thick of the storm. For a moment, it seemed like it would be OK, then ice piled onto its wings as if a bricklayer had thrown it on with a trawl, and the drone hurtled toward earth. I wrote down its grid, because if it crashed we'd have to go out and fetch its brain. But as the drone fell into warmer air, the ice peeled away, and when it leveled off, its camera remained facing aft. I watched the drone pull a thread of the storm into clear morning air. By the time I heard the rotator's approach, the storm had passed.

Outside, covering everything was a pristine layer of snow, which dawn had turned pink. I started the pink HiLux. I honked the horn and it made a pink noise. Levi emerged from his pink tent with his pink ruck. I drove him down a pink road to the pink LZ. The rotator came in sideways, and its thumping rotors kicked up a thick pink cloud. Crouching, Levi and I ran through the cloud to a spot alongside the warm machine. A crewman opened the side door and handed me the mail, which included a package from Levi's mother. Then Levi hopped aboard and was on his way home.

 

The sun rose as I drove back to the TOC, and the whole outpost sparkled at the edge of the war. The stamps on the package from Levi's mother featured
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
. The detail chosen was Icarus drowning. What was not shown was how the world went on without him.

The new liaison was asleep in Levi's chair when I got back. I opened the package quietly, so as not to wake him. More Kattekoppen. I put it on the shelf with the rest and was about to go to bed when the phones started ringing.

Two soldiers on their way home from a bazaar south of Kabul had taken a wrong turn. They'd hit a dead end and been ambushed. Bloody drag marks led from the scene, which was littered with M9 and AK brass. Witnesses said that the soldiers had been taken alive, which meant a rescue operation, led by us. We received pictures of the soldiers from a search-and-rescue database. One soldier had a chin and the other did not. The TOC filled with CIA, FBI, and ODA. Then a massive helicopter slung in the missing soldiers' ruined truck. Its windows had been shot through, and bullet holes riddled the skin. The door creaked open, and blood trickled out. Their smell was still in it, along with the stuff they'd bought at the bazaar, intact in a flimsy blue bag.

The drag marks at the scene led to a tree line. The tree line opened onto a number of compounds, which we raided that night. Those compounds led to other compounds, which we raided the next day. The second set of compounds led to a village, which, over two days and one night, we cleared. That delivered us to a mountain. It took two nights and a day to clear all the caves up one side and down the other. Which led us to another village. And so on.

Time became lines on a map leading in all directions from Chin and No Chin's ambush. We searched for them night and day.

One night, we were moving along slowly, with the moon casting our shadows on the snow and the wind in our faces, when an air-raid siren blasted and a small village suddenly appeared on our left in an explosion of light. The village was just beyond a tree line. I could feel the siren in my throat. Fearing an ambush, I radioed the howitzers for a fire mission.