Wynne's War (21 page)

They'd made camp earlier that night three hundred yards from the trail they'd followed, tying their horses to picket lines and bedding down in a thick grove of pine. Russell and Wheels had moved a little apart from the others, up to where they could see stars through the canopy of limbs.

“He wasn't always like this,” Bixby said.

Russell glanced up at the moon and then back to the sergeant's face, half in shadow, half in light.

“Do you know what he did before?” said Bixby.

“Before the war?” asked Russell.

Bixby nodded.

“Wheels told me he was a hedge-fund manager,” Russell said. He didn't go on to tell the sergeant that he'd researched it and found that it was true.

Bixby regarded him a moment.

“I see what you're thinking,” he said. “He was some kind of shark who stole old people's savings. It wasn't like that. He wasn't greedy. You won't meet a more principled man.”

Russell glanced over to where the others were sleeping, dark forms crumpled across the pine-needle floor. A mist moved through the tree limbs.

“I watched him execute an unarmed prisoner,” said Russell. “I never seen anything like that. Not from an American, I haven't. Not from an officer.”

Bixby turned and looked out into the night.

“He walked away from it all,” he said. “Manhattan. The money. He would've been a millionaire. For all I know, he was a millionaire. After the Towers came down, he could've cashed in his portfolio and cruised down to some tropic isle. Could've stayed on at the firm and
bought
a tropic isle. What's he do instead?”

“Joins the army.”

“He quits a six-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year job and takes one that pays forty-four thousand and where any given moment the odds are decent you'll be shot or shelled or blownthefuckup.”

The sergeant's voice had started to rise, but he caught himself. He swiped the palm of one hand across his cheek, cracked his knuckles. “I'm trying to explain,” he said. “I can see that he likes you. That's not true of very many men. I'm not sure it's always true of me. I know he does things that don't seem right. Things that
aren't
right—no question about it. But it bothers me you might have a bad opinion of him.”

“I don't know that's how I'd put it,” said Russell. “‘Bad opinion.'”

“However you'd put it,” Bixby said. “I need you to understand. Because you're going to see things you might not get at first, things that are going to be pretty hard to square. He's not some egomaniac. Plenty of those in this line of work, but that's not who the captain is.”

“Who is he?” Russell asked.

Bixby sat there.

Then he said, “Last year we were working these villages north of J-Bad. Little line of adobe settlements. We'd go in and distribute vitamin packs and solar-powered radios tuned to the pro-American station run by our Bravo team. I'd do inoculations on the kids the farmers brought in, do what I could for the villagers. Their nutrition was pretty poor, and you had to treat them symptomatically. Pepto-Bismol and aspirin.

“There was this one village along the river that allowed us to work out of it. Kind of use it as a central hub. They'd let us spend the night, get our Humvees behind their walls. They put out word to the locals that Americans were providing medical assistance, MREs, paying bounty for artillery shells, explosives, anything you could use as an IED. The village elder was younger than you'd normally see, maybe forty, forty-five. He had a little boy about five years old that took a liking to the captain. Massoud. His father had named him after the G-chief that the Talibs assassinated in the fall of 'oh-one. He didn't have any use for the Taliban, and he had brothers who'd fought and died with the Northern Alliance. You could tell Wynne admired him, and the captain would teach his boy the English words for all the stuff he was wearing: his vest, fatigues, helmet, and patches. Got a New York Yankees cap sent over, gave it to Massoud. Boy never seemed to take it off. This was still the hearts-and-minds campaign, before everything went completely to hell.”

Bixby paused and ran a hand through his beard.

“But go to hell they did, and for two months straight they had us in Kunar doing raids. By they time we got back to working the villages, there was something nervous in the air. We'd been in a bad gunfight in Fallujah, back in 'oh-four; helo took fire and we almost lost the captain—”

“Wheels told me,” Russell said.

Bixby looked at him. He asked how Wheels knew.

“He said he'd heard it from a medic when we were stationed at the Rifles Base in Ramadi.”

“You were in Ramadi?”

Russell nodded.

Bixby was quiet for a few moments. He said, “Captain nearly died. They actually
pronounced
him dead. I think that's when all of this started. Maybe he went away and came back, and when you come back from something like that you don't come back all the way. I don't know. I was just glad we hadn't lost him. Saying he's the best officer I've ever served under doesn't do him justice. Best
man
I've served with. Period.”

“I think I might've gotten you off track,” Russell said.

“No,” said Bixby, “I got myself off track. So we were reestablishing contact with the locals, or trying to at least, but no one wanted to be seen talking to us. Farmers whose names we knew would go inside their houses whenever we passed. When we finally got down to the village by the river, we knew something bad had happened. Captain had us park the Humvees off beside this stand of mulberry trees, left Rosa and Perkins in the gun turrets to pull security, then we got out with our rifles and went in expecting an ambush.

“We smelled it before we ever saw it. Stopped us like we'd hit an actual wall, and we just stood there, blinking. Piles of excrement on the ground, trash all over. The huts fallen in on themselves. Smell was so bad I got an instant migraine. When we got back to the outpost, I had to throw away my uniform. Brand new Crye Precision and I just pitched it. Ended up taking the stock and rail panels off my rifle and tossing those too. Threw away my go-to-hell bag. Threw out the case for my med kit. Changed out the bladder on my Camel and tossed the Oakleys I was wearing. Ox ended up cutting off his beard and shaving his head down to the scalp. . . .”

Bixby trailed off into silence and sat there a moment. He said, “No one left but the kids, Corporal. An entire village of children. And I don't mean eleven, twelve-year-olds. I'm talking little kids: four, five, six—about the same age as Massoud. All girls, by the way. Just standing there in the doorways, staring at us. Only sound we could hear was the flies and our footsteps. We went down the little thoroughfare like sleepwalkers.

“Outside of one of the larger huts there was an old Afghan woman seated on a stool against the mud wall. Ziza walked up and started talking to her. Wynne said, ‘Ask her what happened,' and Ziza would question her in Pashto. Kept referring to her, when he'd translate, as ‘grandmother,' and from what he could gather, the Taliban had come into the village several weeks before. They'd executed the men, took the boys prisoner, beat the women bloody. Wynne was kneeling there beside the woman with a hand on her shoulder, listening to Ziza, shaking his head. Then he looked up and saw Massoud. He'd heard our voices and come from inside the hut to stand in the doorway.”

Bixby sat very quietly for several moments. It was after all, a story
Russell was listening to, but he could feel the panic rising in his chest. Like climbing that first steep hill on a roller coaster, that moment before you level out and the world drops away and you are betrayed to the fall.

“His eyes had been burned out and his ears cut off. They'd pulled all his teeth. When he opened his mouth, his gums were purple as a chow dog's. I knelt there between the captain and Ox. Ox was so furious he was shaking. Captain was calling Massoud “son”: ‘Who did this to you, son? Tell us who did this?' They seemed to have forgotten what language he spoke. I put my hands on the boy's shoulders—he couldn't have weighed thirty pounds. His bones felt like the bones of a bird. The Talibs had taken him to their cave and tortured him for several days. Then they brought him back to the village as a kind of living message to anyone who aided the infidel.”

“Why?” Russell asked.

“Why what?”

“Why would they do that? Why would you do something like that to a kid?”

“That's who they are,” said Bixby. “That's who we're fighting. In this culture, women are nothing. But sons? The son of an elder?”

“His eyes,” said Russell. “So he can't identify his kidnappers. At least it makes some kind of sick sense. But his teeth? What the hell for? What possible reason could you have for removing a kid's teeth?”

Bixby stared at him for a long moment. When the answer to his question dawned on Russell, a spasm of nausea and then of rage ran through him.

“You've got to be shitting me,” he said.

Bixby's voice, when it came, was very quiet, very calm.

“You have to understand. Rape, torture: these are our enemy's weapons. Like a rifle or grenade—”

“Not the same,” said Russell. “Not the same thing at all.”

“I agree with you, Corporal: it's
not
the same. But these are their weapons.”

“Bastards,” Russell said, and though the night was cold, he felt too warm inside his clothes.

Bixby nodded and then they just sat. Russell thought that if they'd do these things to a child, what the hell kind of hope did a POW have?

“So we called in an infantry platoon to evacuate the village. They loaded everyone into trucks and took them away.”

“Away where?”

“I don't know.”

“What about the boy?”

“Don't know that either,” said Bixby. “The captain called around to different bases, looking for him. For all I know, he still is.

“We started hunting them the next day. I watched the captain over the coming weeks. I'd never seen him more . . . I don't know what the word is. He'd been different after Iraq. Maybe dying does that. Or almost dying. Maybe it changes something in the brain. Chemically. But I saw it now, the difference. In some ways he was better, sharper. He barely slept. He'd sit there in the TOC going through hours of drone feed until he was able to track the guys who'd decimated the village to a cave in the mountains to the east.”

“He did that from drone video?”

“He did it from drone video,” Bixby said. “Not only that, he got hold of footage showing the bad guys coming down to the village the day they assaulted. Not the attack itself, but the infil.”

Russell shook his head.

“So,” said Bixby, “the mountain range they were operating off was right on the Pakistani border. Pretty ideal, because they could come out and wreak absolute havoc, and then when we tried to run them down with Apaches or airstrikes, they could slip over the ridge and be in another country's airspace and our gunships would have to return to base.

“Frustrating and very effective. But once we'd confirmed these were our guys and got the green light from command, we decided to go in on ATVs, little four-wheelers—”

“You had those?”

“They flew them out to us from Kandahar. You ever ridden one?”

“Not in the army,” said Russell. “We had them growing up on the ranch. Granddad and I used them when we built fence.”

“I liked them a lot.”

“They're great,” Russell said.

“Carson didn't think so. I don't have to tell you why.”

“The noise.”

Bixby nodded. He pointed toward where the horses were tethered out in the dark. He said, “What I'm telling you is really the genesis for what we're doing now. I don't know that I've even thought about it that way. But it's true. Carson got fed up giving away ‘tactical advantage.' ‘Breaking noise discipline.' His words, obviously. But I'll give it to him: that's precisely what happened. We went in at night, of course, with the headlights disconnected and parked two klicks out from our target, and still they were waiting for us. Almost got ourselves in an ambush. Ox took frag in the shoulder. Our warrant officer—man named Joel—was shot through the leg and ended up with a shattered pelvis. Almost bled out on the medevac bird. He's back in Bragg working as cadre in the Q Course. Which is how we ended up with Billings. He—”

“How'd you get the green light?”

“For the raid?”

Russell nodded. “Why didn't they send in the Rangers? Why didn't they send Delta or the SEALs?”

“Why do you think?” Bixby said.

Russell thought about it. The captain had obviously convinced one of the shot-callers in higher that his team should get to conduct a direct action assault, even though that wasn't what Green Berets were supposed to be doing, necessarily, and their involvement with the kidnapped boy and his village ought to have disqualified them. He sat with it a moment.

“Just how high up the food chain do the captain's supporters go?” Russell asked.

“Pretty high,” Bixby said.

“Can you not tell me?” said Russell.

“I can tell you.”

“Will you?”

“Of course not,” Bixby said. He leaned over and took another sip from his hydration tube, wiped his mouth and beard. “Thing is, you have friends in high places, you're going to have enemies in high places, too.”

Russell looked at the ground. He thought about that and then he thought about the disfigured boy.

“Least tell me you got them,” he said.

“We got them,” said Bixby.

“All of them?”

“All,” Bixby said. Then he said that when they'd assaulted the stronghold, they discovered what a cancer this particular cell had been.

“They had cardboard boxes—old boxes for Samsung VCRs —filled with jewelry, gold and silver. Boxes of wedding rings.
Boxes.
Think about that, Corporal. They'd been robbing the locals since the Talibs had taken over in 'ninety-six. Then we found the fillings.”