What They Found (19 page)

“Shall I call you Noee the Plumber from now on?”

“If you like.”

He put his arm around me and we sat quietly. I imagined him trying to think of something clever to say, running lines through his head, testing them against his sense of poetry, and rejecting them. He wasn’t holding me very firmly, which was good. Once he moved his hand up so that it just touched my breast and I moved it away.

I still felt as if there was something more I should have
been saying or doing, something I’m sure Abeni would have known to do. Perhaps everyone felt like this at some time in their life. I just sat with him, with his arm around me, feeling his chest rise as he breathed, the heat of his body warm against my cheek.

As we sat I couldn’t turn my mind off no matter how I tried. Now I worried about how to negotiate leaving. Would he walk me home? How would he say goodbye? Would I let him kiss me? I wanted him to kiss me. But right now I wanted him to let me just be in the small moment that surrounded us, and not think about what it was I was supposed to do, or feel. I wondered if there would be a moon, fat and sassy, over the tenement roofs, daring me to be bolder than I thought I could be.

Maybe with Kyle, with his sweet poetry, it might be possible to be bold. I was as nervous as I always was with men but, for the first time in my life, I felt that I could try to figure it all out.

T
he small transport plane touched down harder than Corporal Curtis Mason thought it should and lumbered down the narrow runway. Through the port windows he could see the first rays of daylight streaking along the distant horizon. He grabbed the sling of the M-16 he had been carrying for the past few months and slung it over his shoulder. Across from him the two other Special Ops troops gathered their gear while trying to catch a glimpse of their new territory through the small windows. Curtis felt his stomach jump as he reminded himself that they were in Mazar-e-Sharif to replace soldiers who had returned in body bags.

“Gentlemen, welcome to northern Afghanistan.” The heavyset sergeant who greeted them had a name tag that
read “Duncan.” “We will be bunked down a mere thirty-five miles from the border to Turkmenistan and the lovely Pyandzh River. Hope you all brought your water skis.”

The jokes were always the same. How they would have all the comforts of home, how easy the mission would be, and, yes, try to avoid getting killed.

He had spent nearly seven months further south, outside of Kandahar, and had hoped for a rotation home when he, Timmy Moffett, and Jerry Maire were given temporary duty assignments to work in the northern area. None of them liked the assignment. Civilian Affairs specialists were to mingle with the locals and show them how good Americans really were and how great it would be for Afghanis to stumble into the twenty-first century. In return, or at least the way the theory worked, if the locals found out something that the military needed to know they would send the appropriate signals.

“How did the guys we’re replacing get nailed?” Moffett, a tall white boy from French Lick, Indiana, broached the question first.

“Two by an IED,” Duncan answered. “One by a sniper when he lit up a cigarette at night. It’s careful time twenty-four/seven these days. We don’t think it’s the locals but some characters who have sneaked into the area and are trying to turn back the clock a few hundred years. We think we found the rag-heads who took out our boys. They’re buried alongside the road.”

The IEDs, improvised explosive devices, were what all of the Americans feared most. Left by the roadside, in trash bins, in stores and restaurants, they could go off at any time, triggered by remote control or trip wires. What they did to a human body was not to be thought about.

Curtis had already decided he didn’t like Sergeant Duncan. He was too cocky, and “rag-head” sounded too much like “nigger.”

Focus. He had to keep focused until he was rotated out. There was a rumor another Special Ops group, with their own CAs, would be brought into the area and then he would be on his way home. Home. Mazar-e-Sharif was nearly six thousand miles from 145th Street in Harlem.

He and Moffett were assigned to a squad, seven guys in a mix of sloppy uniforms. Some had grown beards. They all wore bandanas around their necks in case of sudden sandstorms and they all wore enough clothing, even in the oppressive heat, to conceal the body armor.

Mazar itself was typical of the towns he had seen in Afghanistan, barren by American standards, with people who could have drifted directly out of the pages of the Old Testament trying to scratch out a living as they made their way through the remnants of decades of war. Burnt-out vehicles, the bleached bones of animals, the pockmarked buildings that dotted the area alongside the road were grim reminders that these people had been suffering a long time. There was a crew of American engineers
and Afghani workers building a new road that stretched northward toward the border. The Americans were potbellied, red-faced men who wiped at their faces continually, trying to keep the insects away. The thin Afghanis worked methodically. They did as much of the work by hand as they did with the bright yellow backhoes.

There were twenty-three men assigned as Civilian Affairs troops and Curtis saw only two blacks, a tall first lieutenant and a cute black sister who sometimes wore specialist-two insignia. He avoided both of them, but then the sister came up to him in the mess area and asked if she could sit.

“Sure.”

“The Blue Mosque in town is what you have to see,” she said. “And take pictures to show your kids if you have any.”

“Don’t have any.”

“So, where you from?” Her face was dark and round, with eyes slightly lighter than Curtis thought they should have been. But it was her smile, warm and genuine, that seemed to reach out across the narrow table.

“Harlem,” Curtis said. “You?”

“Philly” she had answered. “I got to say Philly because my time over here is too short to give you the whole formal name.”

“I thought I would be on the way home this week,” Curtis said. “But I’m looking around and noticing this is not Harlem.”

“Time has a way of dragging over here.”

“What do you do?” he asked.

“Same as you, Special Ops, building bridges. I’m supposed to deal with any women we come across. The only women I’ve dealt with so far are a few standing fifteen feet behind their men,” she said. “And by the way, the name tag reads ‘Sanders’ and the missing part is ‘Marian.’ ”

“Hey, Marian.”

“Hey, Curtis,” she said. “Got your name from the company clerk. You career?”

“No,” he said. “Not career. Just counting my days to getting back into the world. You?”

“I’m thinking of what I want to take in my first semester at Spelman,” Marian said. “Right now I’m thinking of ‘Gracious Lady 101.’ ”

“Sounds good to me,” Curtis said, returning her smile.

Marian finished the sandwich she had brought to the table and the container of apple juice. “I’m off. Got to have my nails done.”

She was making light of her tour, something Curtis hadn’t wanted to do. Not since he had seen his first dying man.

“Never get too easy with yourself,” he remembered his grandfather saying. “You never know what’s around the next corner.”

Or the next patrol.

* * *

He was with Lieutenant Wayman, a couple of Civilian Affairs Ops, and two Afghani civilians doing a quick cover of a particularly irregular part of the road leading north from the camp to see if it could be traversed by heavy armor. They were in a GMV, a ground mobility vehicle, just over two clicks out of camp when a shot sounded from behind the vehicle. The local sitting next to Lieutenant Wayman stiffened in his seat and then slumped forward with a heavy sigh. Lieutenant Wayman slammed on the brake and twisted in his seat.

“Anybody got a direction on that?”

“No.” Curtis, looking around frantically, felt his heart race. It was still an hour before night and they knew that the sniper who had knocked off the local could be up to a half-mile away. Worse, he could have any of them in his gun sights.

Wayman started up again and moved quickly down the road. Curtis suggested maybe they get off the road.

“Can’t do it here,” Wayman said. “They might have opened up to get us to go off the road onto an IED.”

They drove the next fifteen miles of the patrol in under twenty-five minutes. The other local, an older man, somewhat browner than Curtis and wearing a loose shirt that came down over his thighs, patted the back of the man who had been shot. Curtis saw the way the man’s arms flapped with the bouncing of the vehicle and knew he was dead.

Back at the camp they let some other locals take the body.

“They’re Sunnis,” Lieutenant Wayman said. “That’s one of the reasons we’re dealing with them up here. A lot of them have close ties to kinfolk in Iran. We’re fighting this war and getting ready for the next.”

Wayman’s voice was low and flat. Curtis looked up at him and saw the tension in his face. He kept clenching his teeth between sentences. It was this war that was getting to the lieutenant, not the next.

Curtis shut him out. The guy killed had been less than eighteen inches from him. The sniper might have been aiming for him and missed.

The commanding officer of the Special Ops contingent increased the patrols. Rumors got around that the incident was a test, to see if the Americans were prepared for an attack. They made plans, trying to put them on paper while acting as casual as possible so that the locals wouldn’t think they were getting nervous.

“I thought these people were going to be glad to see us,” Moffett commented.

“The Afghanis don’t have the theory down yet,” Duncan answered with a smirk.

Two nights after the death on the road, Curtis woke in a cold sweat. For a moment he didn’t know where he was, and then he remembered where he was and panicked because he didn’t know where his weapon was. He
knocked it out of the leather rifle holster he had bought and mounted on the side of his bunk and heard it clatter onto the plank floor. He retrieved it quickly, and listened in the darkness. Nothing, except for the slow breathing of Moffett in the nearby bunk.

He fell back across the bed, the M-16 tucked against his side. A glance at the clock’s glow-in-the-dark numbers told him it was only a quarter to two.

He hadn’t thought, either back home or at Fort Dix, that he would be scared. But seeing how easily death insinuated itself into the camps, how quietly it waited along the roads, how it jostled and pushed in the streets, had unnerved him.

Think about home, he thought. Focus on his mother, slightly overweight, in the kitchen. The kitchen that had needed painting for years. Focus on his father sitting at the end of the table drinking cold coffee in the mornings. Focus on being home, and away from the war.

Four days passed without incident and he began to breathe easier, or maybe he wasn’t as conscious of his breathing as he had been. Marian had tried to talk to him again. In a way he thought she was light. She was always up in somebody’s face chatting away. He wondered if she was giving anything up beside that marvelous smile. She was as friendly to the white soldiers as she was to him. He told himself that he didn’t want to be friendly with her, or even to talk to her while he was in country.

June days were long but not too hot. The basic color of Afghanistan was light brown and in the summer months it was unbelievably dry. A thin layer of sandy earth covered everything so that the old buses, the mule-drawn carts, the mountains viewed through the haze and swirling dust, even the people were the same soft brown pastel.

The Afghanis were a decent sort, but he didn’t like dealing with them. The CAs were supposed to treat the civilians with respect but they all knew that the suicide bombers and the faces behind the guns were the same color and mentality of the men they spoke to on street corners and in the small markets leading toward the city.

“If I was as desperate as some of these people I would go to the side that offered me my next meal,” a Southern Special Ops troop drawled over breakfast. “I heard that two of them had a fight almost to the death over a first-aid kit.”

A first-aid kit in a land where there were still thousands of mines buried throughout the countryside was no small matter. Curtis had never seen so many people with feet blown off, or walking with improvised canes.

Don’t feel pity. Don’t think about them. Shut out everything but getting home.

He didn’t think it was fair that he had been moved out of his company to a different command. Kandahar had been dangerous but they knew the city, and they knew where most of the bad guys would strike. It wouldn’t be
in the Green Zone, in the barracks area. In Kandahar you had to worry about patrols, but once you were back at the base you could relax with whatever diversion you could find, volleyball, pool, books.

“You’ll get used to this place in a few days,” Sergeant Duncan had told him. “Then one day your name comes up on the bulletin board and you’re on that big silver bird headed toward the Promised Land.”

Curtis wanted to believe him.

They were to travel due east to Kunduz, to a small settlement where the local well was supposed to be polluted. Moffett, Marian, an Afghani interpreter, and a medic rode with two would-be badasses from an airborne unit. They started at first light and pushed across the rugged terrain as fast as the cumbersome armored vehicle would go. By nine they were in what they thought would be the area and stopped on a small hill to check the maps.

The attackers, rising up from the nooks and crannies of the hills, were incredibly young.

“Back off! Back off!” The badass screamed as he sent a volley of automatic fire into the first of the masked figures.

Curtis felt himself lifting his M-16, felt its kick in his arms, felt the panic in his chest, and realized he wasn’t aiming at anything. He was just shooting, just spewing death where it might land.

They backed down the hill, the automatic weapons firing in staccato bursts at the dark figures popping up like play targets along the hillside.