The Watch (28 page)

I can’t sleep tonight. I lie on my cot, then sit up with my hands clasped over my head. I do my best thinking at night, but it’s not working right now. My brain is fogged, my thoughts feel borrowed. I try to deal with the solitude that makes my job so different from the solidarity that binds the grunts. Someone once wrote that there are no good/bad dichotomies in combat decisions, only choices between bad alternatives—but that doesn’t make my task any easier when I’m attempting to cope with the consequences of mistakes that result in casualties.

Do I feel guilty about not being able to save Dave and Brian? Hell yes, of course I do. In wartime, the already hazy dividing line between brilliant and stupid decision making becomes hazier still—and while I don’t want to second-guess Connolly for what’s already happened, perhaps he did cross that line in sending a switch-out on foot into the mountains. Hendricks and Castro were both experienced officers, as is Eric Petrak, the platoon forward observer, but maybe Connolly erred in his reading of the mission?

So we’re alone with our burdens, he and I: the knowledge that every time we send men outside the wire, it could be to their deaths. Around me lies that dark shadow, and wherever I go, it precedes and trails after me. The only person unaffected by that shadow is my dad: in his amnesia I am protected. I can’t say that of anyone else, and especially not of Emily, once the closest to me. I’ve often wondered about that—wondered if, when I was lying next to Emily, she could sense the shadow, taste its poison, until eventually it all became too much, and she decided to quit …

I get up from my cot and drink some water. It’s unpleasantly warm, and I feel no better after I’ve finished drinking. My skin burns, my face itches: I’m covered with bites from sand fleas. It’s stifling inside this hut. A cry from some night bird drifts off slowly into the silence. Dave’s imaginary presence moves around in the darkness, and
I catch a fleeting glimpse of his face—or perhaps it’s Brian’s? All night I will hear their voices in my head.

N
IGHT
.

So I’ve been going over the battle over and over in my mind. Could I have done things differently?—maybe moved the platoon through the mountains faster so we could’ve reached Hendricks and his men earlier on? And even after we reached them, it was touch and go; the enemy seemed everywhere, but maybe I could have deployed the platoon differently? In the end, it was like we were fighting blind. We couldn’t save Dave and Brian.

E
ARLY
M
ORNING
.

No sleep last night. No one slept. We kept expecting an attack on the base, which, fortunately, didn’t happen.

M
ORNING
.

I feel devastated. I can’t seem to focus on anything.

I wish there was somewhere I could go and simply scream my lungs out.

Gotta hold it all in, boy, you’re a platoon leader.

Yo

u

   ’re

          a

               Fir

                        st Lieutenant. Christ, I was pressing down so hard with the pen, I tore right through the paper. That’s a first. All right, Nick, get a grip on yourself.

N
OON
.

Lunch today was fried chicken, and it smelled better than I could ever recall. I felt guilty eating, but I was famished. I sat at the table staring at my plate and wondering what was the point of it all. Across from me, the place where Hendricks used to sit was, of course, empty. I felt sick with grief and hungry all at once.

        In the end, I ate with a gigantic appetite.

        But then, on the way back to my hooch, I threw it all up.

E
VENING
.

I’ve retreated to my hooch with my iPod. I know exactly what I want to listen to. Mozart’s “Requiem” comes on:

        
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine:

        
Et lux perpetua luceat eis. Te decet

        
Hymnus, Deus, in Sion, et tibi reddetur

        
Votum in Jerusalem: exaudi orationem

        
Meam, ad te omnis caro veniet. Requiem

        
Aeternam dona eis, Domine et

        
Lux perpetua luceat eis
.

        
Kyrie eleison
.

        
Christe eleison
.

        
Kyrie eleison
.

When the CD ends, I press “play” again.

        
Eternal rest grant to them, O Lord; and

        
Let perpetual light shine upon them. A

        
Hymn becometh Thee, O God, in Sion:

        
And a vow shall be paid to Thee in Jerusalem
.

        
O hear my prayer: all flesh shall come to Thee
.

        
Eternal rest grant to them, O Lord; and perpetual

        
Light shine upon them
.

        
Lord have mercy on us
.

        
Christ have mercy on us
.

        
Lord have mercy on us
.

When the CD ends, I press “play” again …

        
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi:

        
Dona eis requiem
.

        
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi:

        
Dona eis requiem sempiternam
.

And again …

        
Lamb of God, who takest away the sins

        
Of the world, grant them rest
.

        
Lamb of God, who takest away the sins

        
Of the world, grant them eternal rest
.

And again, when the CD ends, I press “play” …

I press “play” again. And again. And again. And again. And again …

N
IGHT
.

Oh God, oh God, I know we’re all going to go one day, but if it’s my fate to die in this strange and hostile land, dear God please make it quick.

N
IGHT
.

I swore off writing, but here I am again, and why not, it’s a necessary refuge. I write to try to make sense of things before I go completely off the rails. I cannot let myself succumb to the illusion that there is no larger meaning to this war, no essential truths, nothing transcendental that’s bigger than the day-to-day. And yet, there’s no peace after hard-earned victory, no rest, and no locus of reality—only blank spaces in place of friends; poisoned air; and vast, dark silences.

D
AY
.

Daybreak begins with little flakes of light. It’s already hot, and the sun has barely breached the mountains. The desert takes on its familiar colors: four shades of gray, five of brown, nine each of buff and beige. I squint up at the jagged peaks, their slopes still shadowy with night. Very soon we’re going to have to take the fight into those mountains. Either that, or we remain cooped up in here, day after day, stuck on a cramped little desert island. We have to break out and set up those outposts. It’s only a matter of time. Of waiting for the right moment.

War is the only real connection we have with the people of this country.

They know it; we know it. We understand each other. We have an agreement.

We each have our code of retaliation; they call theirs badal; we call ours payback.

It’s the age-old spiral of attack and revenge.

The only difference between us—and it is significant—is that we’re visitors to this place. We don’t belong here; we’re not trapped by its ragged history, its chronicle of failures, its uncertain future. That makes it all the more critical for us to do what we need to do, do it quickly, and get out. Get out before we become part of the cycle of failure and violence. Get out before we become just another failed tribe.

D
AY
.

The men stand silently in full battle dress in the late afternoon sun, their red-rimmed eyes focused on the two pairs of boots and the rifles stuck muzzle-first into the ground. The chaplain from Battalion drones on and on but merely succeeds in adding to the air of unreality. Soon we’re drenched with sweat, and our uniforms are encrusted with white salt stains. Connolly stands some distance away from me, his eyes shadowed beneath a booney hat. My own throat is parched, my mouth dry and sticky. When it’s my turn to speak, I recall Lieutenant Hendricks and Sergeant Castro from our time together in Khost province, and keep it short. I would have liked to have said more, but I simply don’t have it in me.

Connolly speaks at the end, and his voice is strained. He begins by saying that he sees no point in giving the men a canned explanation that will sound lame even to him. He tells them that if it were up to us, we’d straighten out this place in no time at all. The U.S. Army knows how to do its job and do it right. But that isn’t the way things have been set up here, and we have an obligation to the Afghan people—the ordinary men and women and children—not to abandon them in their time of need. That is the litmus test, he says, and, even as we grieve for our fallen, we will do well to remember it. It’s hardly an adequate summing up for our losses, but it’s all that we have to make them bearable. We are a people of honor, sent here to set an example to those looking up to us.

He ends by saying that we’ve been entrusted with a task and a responsibility, and we’ll do what it takes to accomplish it.

As I walk away, I wonder how many of the men from Second Platoon blame us for the deaths of their leaders. It’s the cross that every infantry commander has to learn to live with, because it’s the one thing in war that doesn’t get any easier with experience. I feel sick to the pit of my stomach, and, on my way back to my hut, I overhear Pfc. Lawson speaking to someone, and what he says gives words
to my sentiments: It’s like I got this wound deep inside me, and it’s always hurtin’. Always, always …

I decide to stop by Connolly’s hut. He’s listening on his shortwave radio to the news of the latest efforts by the regime that we are propping up to reconcile with an enemy bent on our extermination. He turns to me and says: It makes me want to puke. Will someone please tell the suits running the show in D.C. that the Taliban and Al Qaeda are not interested in a bite of the pie; they want the whole damn thing? They’re committed to an all-or-nothing strategy, and we’re the thin red line standing between them and their clearly stated target: Western civilization.

At a certain point in the report, he begins yelling at the radio: For Christ’s sake, we’re talking about folks who consider beheading their opponents just punishment, not followers of the goddamn Geneva Conventions!

He switches off the radio in disgust while I walk over to the arsenal captured from the insurgents. It’s a motley collection of RPG7s, Kalashnikov variants, Chinese machine guns, RR82 mms, American-made M-16s, bolt-action Lee-Enfield and Mosin-Nagant rifles, and even one snub-nosed antiaircraft gun. The pile of weaponry takes up an entire corner of the hut. One of the M-16s has a series of Arabic letters and numerals etched on its plastic handguard. I translate it haltingly. It reads: “Gift to the inspired warriors of the Amir ul Momineen, 1996.”

In other words, already in the early years of Taliban rule, their leader, the functionally illiterate one-eyed Mullah Omar, was claiming the mantle of Umar, the seventh-century caliph of the nascent Muslim community and its second leader after the death of the Prophet Mohammed. So much for the modesty of aspirations of the erstwhile preacher of Sanghisar, a small village an hour’s drive north of Kandahar.

N
IGHT
.

I’m rereading the
de Vigny, which I like very much, and I come across this passage, which I must have glossed over the first time around: “War seemed to us so very natural a state for our country, that when, freed from the classroom, we poured ourselves into the army along the familiar course of the torrent of days, we found ourselves unable to believe in a lasting calm of peace.”

When I go over the passage again, it’s as if I can hear Emily reading it to me, and I experience a distinctly uncomfortable sensation, almost like guilt.

N
IGHT
.

We crouch next to the road, then sprint across it in single file. There’s a thick fog, but I know this place well. We run past the darkened houses, taking cover in the shadow of the trees. By the time I reach the backyard, the platoon’s all there. I signal to Tanner, and he leads the charge to the porch door and slams it down with his shoulder. Moments later, the boys are dragging out a bedraggled Emily with my little Jack in tow. I grab my son from her. Tanner spreadeagles her on the ground and ties her wrists behind her back. She whimpers with shock. I plant my revolver on the back of her head. As I pull the trigger, I hear myself yelling: You took a vow. You made a promise!

I wake up choking. My hands are clenched. I feel enervated, displaced.

The hooch is cool from the night. Outside, the sky is black, and all it is, is darkness.

Husband. Promise and commitment. And me—burning inside.

Displaced.

D
AY
.

This afternoon, Spc. Simonis, one of our snipers, asks me if he can examine the cache of captured weapons. He selects one of the heavy, long-barreled Lee-Enfields. Manufactured by the British Crown, it has a stamp from the government rifle factory in Ishapore, India; its date is 1916. In other words, we were attacked with a ninety-four-year-old weapon captured from earlier invaders.