Chapter Fourteen – THEN

 

Kyle

 

The tough times don’t define you.  It’s how you respond to them that does.

It’s my fifth tour to Afghanistan, but the adrenaline rush as we disembark the plane never lessens each time.  I was eighteen when I joined the military, and every second of every year since has revolved around honing my skills for moments like this.  The culmination of every exhausted moment spent perfecting my shooting and infantry techniques, navigational skills, combat tactics, weapon drills, and tracking exercises. 

War. 

After orders at the Combat Outpost, we head out through the jungle, thick with dense vegetation, to find a suitable surveillance point.  On the steep, narrow, winding road as we climb high into the mountains, the bushland momentarily becomes thinner and I look out the dust-covered window of our SUV to see Australian and British soldiers loading up their trucks to head out as well.  We reach the precipice and slowly trek down the other side.

We’re trained to work in darkness, in any weather conditions, and in complete silence, using only hand signals to communicate. To seek out and close with the enemy, to kill or capture him, to seize and hold ground, to repel attack by day or night regardless of season, weather, or terrain. 

In the bowels of the mountains, we use the terrain to our advantage, creating a hide that allows us to remain undetected while we survey the comings and goings of people.  We take photographs with our military-grade cameras, and document everyone we see as they walk through the bushland and nearby dried river bed.  We take notice of how old they appear, if they are fit, if they’re soldier-like, how they move, if they set patterns.  It’s important to gain as much intelligence as possible.

“Metal, can you take over surveillance?” my comrade, Cameron Zeek asks me in a barely audible whisper.  We’ve been close since our recruitment days, where we shared a room.  Even though each one of my brothers is considered family, I’m closest with Zeek.  He had given me the nickname ‘Metal’ during my recruitment weeks.  Apparently, my brother thought I was hard as metal, so aptly named me so.  I didn’t consider myself that way, though.  I was already goal-orientated and psychologically tough.  It dawned on me pretty early on that the Army didn’t care if you were naturally athletic or good at everything they threw at you.  What they cared about was how you reacted when you failed, when you were fatigued, hungry, and in pain.  It’s in those moments, the true you exposes itself.  The Army can’t deploy people who have defeat inside them.  Where my brother saw a recruit who was hard as metal, I saw inside myself a boy becoming a man, determined to never quit.

I give a sharp nod and he moves past me, through the tunnel we created amongst the bushes, and I take his place, lying on my stomach, looking through long range binoculars, concentrating on scanning the area to ensure nothing is out of place. My eyes move with natural ease, like I’ve been trained to do.  Foreground, middle ground, background – right to left.  The unnatural technique demands more focus and has a greater likelihood of identifying something out of the ordinary, rather than scanning past it like most would when they look left to right.

The militia knows we’re here.  They don’t know where, but they know we’re here somewhere.  The feeling of being exposed never leaves you.  The feeling of having someone’s eyes on you, yet you can’t see them is unnerving.  You swallow that dread, and replace it with calm stoicism, determination to do your job, and do it well.  To have your comrades’ backs – and knowing they have yours – and never let them, yourself, or your country down.

 

Ten days later, we have accumulated enough intelligence on a local village to let our presence be known.  It’s not about driving in there, guns blazing, and taking out every civilian you lay eyes on.  It’s a calculated move to show the innocent civilians that we’re here to protect them, and a move to force the militia out of their routines.  A show of force to win the hearts of the locals.  The innocents.  We drive through the village slowly in our convoy of SUVs, flanked by foot soldiers, weapons at the ready.  Mosques, mudbrick huts, and young children playing catch my eyes as I cast an assessing gaze over everything in my line of sight.

Down the dusty gravel road a little further, a male aged approximately twenty – fighting age – catches my attention. He gives a cocky smirk as we slowly pass by.  His cold, black eyes meet with mine and he holds my stare.  Unrelenting.  I have no doubt he is either Taliban, or sympathetic to the cause, and something about him has the hairs on my neck prickling, so I take out my camera and photograph his face.  Then I send it back to Headquarters for the IT guys to run a facial recognition scan on him.

 

Our camp on the eastern side of the village is basic.  We sleep in a sleeping bag with our boots on, beside the SUVs.  The sky above is so clear we can see the stars for miles.  The temperature at night dips, so it’s cold, uncomfortable, and if the wind picks up, the dust that blows in your eyes in fucking torturous.  When my day patrol crew rests and the night patrol take over, right before I close my eyes to sleep, I allow my thoughts to drift to Liv.

She’s almost due to have her baby.  A baby my brother, Brant, will never get to meet.  My gut twists.  Over the years, I’ve lost plenty of comrades – my brothers by choice – but none of those losses cut me as deep as losing my only blood brother.  The fact it was car accident, just like our parents, only added insult to injury.  Now his girlfriend will soon deliver their child without Brant there to support her.

I’ve always had a strange attraction to Liv, but it’s not something I’ve ever entertained. She was Brant’s, and they were happy.  I wasn’t going to come between their relationship and make a play for her.  Knowing she’s alone now made this mission a hard one to accept.  My past four tours, I’ve not hesitated to fly out wherever, whenever.  But this time was different.  I only said yes because my Aunt Celia lives nearby to Liv.  If she wasn’t there, I would’ve found a way to delay my deployment.

Even so, deep in my gut, I know this will be the last time I go to war.

 

Our days monitoring the village are relatively uneventful.  We make our presence known and regularly do foot patrols on a rotation.  The six other men in my crew, three of whom I’ve known since our recruitment days, are all anxious to go into combat.  When you possess the weapons techniques and tracking skills like we do, it’s anticlimactic spending your days doing foot patrols in villages.  You can’t help but feel you could be doing more, if only we were given the go ahead.

We don’t have to wait long.  The following week, we’re called to orders at Combat Outpost and instructed that we will be flying out in Black Hawks in under an hour.  Our mission is to rappel into the jungle green zone – a notorious area that the enemy defend vigorously – and locate the recon area, where another team has been conducting surveillance for the past eight days with confirmed enemy sightings.  From there we will move to a known supply route and set an ambush.  Our orders are to capture or kill.

 

 

In the dark of the night, we move through the thick bushland in formation.  The night vision googles covering our eyes, our only source of light, allow the pitch black to appear like daylight with a green tinge.  The camouflage paint on our faces provides concealment from any infrared technology the enemy has.  We creep through the long grass in complete silence, using hand signals to communicate, stealth in our approach toward enemy territory. 

My heavy breathing fogs up my night vision goggles.  My heart is pounding in my chest, not knowing whether an unseen sniper will start shooting at us at any moment.  The pack on my back is heavy.  Everything inside me is screaming to turn the other way and run.  But I’ve never quit in my life, and I won’t start now.

The terrain is rough.  The rocky ground is covered in six-foot-tall grass, which is good for coverage, but difficult to maintain a vision of our surroundings.

I spot movement to the left from the corner of my eye and immediately raise my hand so the boys behind will stop.  I pull out my binoculars and locate four Taliban one-hundred-fifty yards away from us.  Two have assault rifles on them, the other two have pistols.  They stand in a semi-circle, talking quietly.  One is smoking.  I crouch down and turn around to face my men.  Using hand signals, I indicate what I’ve seen.  Zeek uses his binoculars to verify.  The original plan to set an ambush and lay in wait for hours or days is quickly aborted upon the confirmed sighting. Despite this, everyone knows what to do. This is what we train for, after all, contingencies – making the best of bad situation.

No hesitation.  No fear.  No mistakes.

The boys move forward, while I quickly and near silently radio through an update to Headquarters.

“Charlie Oscar, this is Westwood. We’re in the Green Zone.  Enemy sighted. Over.”

“Roger that, Westwood.”

I move forward, finding a position with coverage while simultaneously taking note of my brothers’ location.  A tree branch snaps, breaking the silence of the night and drawing the attention of the Taliban.  I watch them through my infrared scope as they turn in our direction, and without pause, begin firing at us.  We return fire, keeping low to avoid the gunfire.  From the hideout behind them, more Taliban appear, firing in our direction.  The sound of rapid gunfire fills the air, bullets crack past us, too high to make contact with our low positions.  I line up one Afghan and squeeze the trigger on my M4.  He drops and I move to focus on another, while dropping my jaw to speak into my headset, notifying our Alpha Sergeant that we have Troops in Contact.

“Charlie Oscar, this is Westwood.  We have contact in the Green Zone.  Wait out.”

Our training and teamwork fuse together seamlessly, and despite the lingering fear in our guts, we start moving toward the fire.

Run down. Crawl. Observe. Aim. Fire.

We slowly close in on the Taliban force, until they withdraw into the dry creek bed.

In less than five minutes, the gunfire ceases and silence descends.

“All clear?” Zeek asks.

“Clear,” we all reply, meaning none of us are hurt. 

We quickly and invisibly begin moving toward the hide, still alert, still covering each other and poised for attack.

“We got two squirters,” Zeek says, referring to the two militiamen who escaped when the bullets started firing.

After confirming the mud hut is clear of the enemy and Improvised Explosive Devices, we take photos of the dead militiamen, itemizing their weapons and equipment, before calling in the Medical Examiners for a closer look at the bodies.  We want to know everything about them, including the last meal they ate.  Then we reconvene and trek back down to the briefing site.

The adrenaline rush that comes from a gunfire is explosive, but the resulting aftermath of that rush is absolute fatigue.  Regardless of how weary we feel, we push through, finding that second wind of energy we know is just beyond the wall of exhaustion.