Boom

1 June 2017, Duluth, Georgia

It’s our anniversary today, yours and mine. Five years.

This year, I almost forgot. 

It was the body at the end of the driveway that jarred it loose, the memory. 

Maybe one of the cats got it, or maybe it got shocked on the power line casting its shadow out into the street by the mailbox. It was a quail, its graceful headdress feather still swooping over its gaping little beak, its stippled feathers ripped open and ragged at the gut. 

The smell. Sweet, rancid, somehow sticky. The smell of death.

The smell of you.

***

1 June 2012, FOB Salerno, Afghanistan

It was warm. Just warm. And soft, not the full-on gritty blast furnace kind of heat you got in Kuwait or the real looks-like-Mars parts of Afghanistan down there near Kandahar in the Helmand province. Outside of the wire here at Sal were fields, and crops, and even inside the wire we had trees and grass that looked almost kind of a lot like the real thing back home.

I walked down the gravel road running from the Ed Center to the DFAC, the one parallel to the perimeter fence with its wire and its Hesko barriers and the drainage ditches on either side. I was coming around the corner of the latrine connexes parked next to the PX’s storage warehouse when a young soldier ducked out from the other side and started walking towards the DFAC as well. He was about five feet in front of me. We smiled and said hello.

Grey

Suddenly, I was three feet in the air and tilted at an implausible angle, facing towards the right across the road and the source of the blast and my feet trailing away somewhere off to the left.

But it was quiet.

Until the wave of sound roared over us all. And the splinters of wood and wire and rock and God knows what all else started raining down on us. In an instant that seemed to unroll over the course of years, all of us who were outside when the bomb went off found ourselves coated from head to toe in chalky grey dust, as if we’d been born grey and would live out the rest of our lives that way. 

Somehow, I could tell that my hair was stiff and spiky now, full of dirt and strange things. I was so close. There were probably bits of Taliban in that dust, of the one who’d blown himself up with the truck, particles of the pink mist a body turns into when it’s been liquefied in a blast.

As I lingered up there in the air about three feet off the ground for what seemed like a very long time, part of my addled brain told me how the earth shook, though the silent words took a long time to form. I felt it, that lag, that long gap between the swerve and the words to describe it. Explosion. Shock wave. 

Grey.

Even before I hit the ground again, while I was still up in the air along with all the dirt and splinters and shredded bits of barbed wire and human being, I knew that something had changed. There was a before and now there was an after and nothing would ever be the same again.

Grey.

Really, it seemed to take a remarkably long time to get back down on the ground again. This was a trick of perspective and shock, of course, but it felt like I drifted gently back and forth on the way down, like a piece of scrap paper or a dead leaf kited by the breeze along a sidewalk. But, eventually, there I was, back on my own two feet. I didn’t even feel an impact thud.

And then it was a little bit like time started back up again.

It was raining grey now. Even in Afghanistan, where most days it rained something unpleasant, this was a real bitches’ brew: dust; gravel; shredded wood ranging in size from toothpicks to charred, twisted knots that could cave your skull in; odd bits of wire, plastic, and paper; churned up shitdust from the poo pond; shards of metal and glass; explosives residue; and shredded, misty clots of human flesh and bone.

The nice young soldier I’d passed the time of day with before had been treated less gently by the shockwave. He’d been knocked sideways, spun around, and then rolled back towards me and right up to my feet like a bowling pin. He fetched up right there at my toes, lying on his back, his black skin and hair suddenly bleached a sickly greyish white with dust. We locked eyes and just stared at each other for a couple of very long seconds. 

And then he scrambled to his feet and took the fuck off.

And left me there.

Gawping after him and yelling, “Hey, where’s the nearest bunker? Hey!”

But I got my wobbly legs working again, and I took off after that specialist at a speed I never thought my body could attain. We pounded back around the corner of the PX, whose storeroom had just been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade that smashed it into splinters, and past the good bathrooms and One-Legged Paul’s car concession to our right, and then over the faded old wooden steps of the old PX that would never open its doors to sell Skoal again, and to the maw of the low concrete bunker next to the battered old USPS mailbox on its rusty metal pole.

It was probably over a hundred degrees inside the low concrete bunker next to the PX. The roof was so low even I had to duck my head to keep it from scraping against the rough cinder blocks of the ceiling.

I just stood there in the archway for a moment, there by the entrance.

It was hot. There wasn’t enough air to breathe. And more and more people kept piling in, throwing themselves in headfirst at full tilt, so wave after wave of sweltering bodies kept surging towards the middle of the bunker and falling back. We roiled. From somewhere far away, I felt myself mouth that word with a tongue caked in dust. Roiled. Like rats.

Our soldiers were responding to the scene now, vests and helmets thrown on over whatever they had on at the time—shorts, boxer shorts, sweatpants, jeans, more or less full uniforms. A group of American soldiers engaged the Taliban right outside our bunker, the crossfire loud and louder and louder again beyond comprehension. As my ears rang and ached and finally went numb, some part of my mind mused that, if any of us managed to live through this, we’d probably end up deaf as a post. We were mostly helpless, weaponless civilians, but we did have two soldiers in there with us. 

“I want soldiers locked and loaded at either end of this motherfucking bunker!” the senior soldier bellowed. “The rest of you motherfuckers get down stay down and shut the fuck up! Have your motherfucking IDs on display or you will get shot! ID or no ID, any and all of you durka-durka-lookin’ motherfuckers get the fuck out! Now!”

That wasn’t nice, some little part of my good liberal mind couldn’t help but comment. He shouldn’t have said the durka-durka part. 

But the senior soldier had a point, however inelegantly expressed. It was pretty obvious to us all already that an attack this complex couldn’t have been carried out without someone on the inside. 

Or several someones.

Someone was yelling for a tourniquet.

“Tear some strips out of your fucking T-shirt!” someone else screamed.

Words started coming out of my mouth.

“I should go help him,” I said.

The guy next to me shook his head. “Ma’am, you should get down and keep still,” he said. “I been through these before and this is about as bad as it gets. We got to sit tight till they get the birds up in the air. If we’re still here when they get the Apaches up, we might make it out okay.”

I tried to take a knee like he had, but we were so crammed in there I couldn’t get my knees all the way to the ground, ending up in some kind of half squat.

And then we all slewed over to the left just as someone outside yelled, “Suicide vest!”

One of the Taliban blew himself up outside our bunker. The wall was about a foot thick, and it sounded like he’d lit himself up about two feet away from that.

The sound smashed into my skull. I couldn’t hear very much or very well after that. To this day, I have a ringing in my ears. 

Your echo.

“Okay now, let’s calm these people down,” I said to the man next to me, the one with the moustache who’d told me to get down. He was a big man, tall and pretty broad, and his big voice and presence helped me get the attention of the thicket of limbs shaking around us.

With his help, I got people’s attention, asking them to line up as best they could up against the bunker walls, trying our best to leave an aisle of open space down the middle so we could hear and see the soldiers at either end and help them if we could. I took the arm of the Ghanaian boy who was still riding the wave of his fellows’ bodies, and we guided his feet back down to the gravel floor. The firefight was ongoing outside—how long had it been? Five minutes? Five hours? 

You never really know how you’ll react in a situation like this, no matter how much training you get. But, no matter how lucky or blessed you are, no matter how smooth your road, eventually the time will come when you’re forced up against what you’re capable of. You never know what you’ll find there—the place where you come face to face with all the things you’re prepared to do to get the things you want, or really that one thing you want, that we all want. A vision of ourselves we can be proud of. That we can show off to others. 

How different were we from each other, really, I wondered later, the Taliban with their suicide vests, practicing their goodbyes in front of their mirrors and dreaming of YouTube hits and virgins, and us Americans with our myriad stories, our abandonments, our divorces, our failures, our desires to prove wrong all those little voices in our heads whispering you’re no good, I should have told you to get lost months ago, you’ll never be worth anything anyhow. Who wouldn’t do anything in their power to buy their freedom from all those voices out there?

Eventually, my Army student Bob and his soldiers were tasked to help check and clear the buildings near their barracks. Every structure on the FOB had to be inspected to make sure that no insurgents had concealed themselves in there, and that all bodies had been found. The possibility of booby traps or other explosive devices had to be eliminated. As Bob and his troops went on their rounds, spray painting names, dates, and statistics on doors just like they did in Hurricane Katrina, Bob saw a young soldier staggering between two battle buddies who were half-carrying him towards the base hospital. The boy, who looked like he was maybe twenty years old, clutched at his neck with both hands where a piece of sharp shrapnel had sliced into him, there where the neck joins the shoulder. 

Bob found out later that the boy had died. 

Reports differ on the details of the attack. Some say one soldier was killed, and some say two. The number of civilians who died varies depending on whether you count local nationals or not. 

But that boy died. Like so many others did out there. 

I think about them a lot, just like I think about the boy Bob saw getting carried off to Medical a lot, from that day to this. 

Surely at least some of those dead boys, or the ones who came back missing arms, legs, external genitalia, large parts of their minds—surely lots of them had lives they enjoyed before they went off to war. Surely lots of them who never came back, men and women, had families who loved them in uncomplicated, supportive, peaceful ways, and husbands and wives and children they wanted to come home to and who wanted them. Surely they had all these things. And what happened? They didn’t get to go home and live long enough to weather some of the turbulence, the disappointments, and the odd contentments of middle age? And I did? 

And then something happened.

As I remember it, the helicopters roared up in the air just after the Big Voice called out Iron Curtain. And, as we heard the thup-thup-thup of the Kiowas circling the airspace over the FOB, more and more of the soldiers who’d charged out of their b-huts in various stages of dress and undress came tearing across the courtyard toward our bunker near the center of the base.

In the face of this onslaught, what was left of the Taliban started to melt away. One of the last insurgents left alive, perhaps the last one, staggered away from the bunker and back across the perimeter road the way they had come in. Then he blew himself up in the drainage ditch near the hole in the wall. Snipers lit him up with bullets to make sure he was really dead and to try to trigger any secondary explosives his body might harbor as booby traps.

And that was how his journey ended. That was you.

****

It was Saturday afternoon now. Come Monday, we had school to start. And we hadn’t even gotten all the blood up off the floor yet. But we did. That Saturday and Sunday, we swept and mopped, we dusted and then we swept and mopped some more. Would we have any students? Would they make it on Monday? Would their supervision let them? What kind of shape would they be in? We had no idea.

***

We didn’t die. You did. You blew yourself up right there by the drainage ditch, parts of you mulching into the thatched weeds and tufts of spiky Afghan grass and the odd crumpled plastic water bottle that hadn’t made it to a recycling bin.

We thought we got all of you the first go-round. We didn’t. The smell gave it away, sour sweet like old rotten papers lining plastic trays of chicken breasts, ones you’d left in the garbage too long.

By Monday, the first day of school, someone had figured it out.

“They’re doing what now?” I asked the PFC helping us pick up the books in the computer lab.

“Sarn’t got a bunch a folks on a detail out there at the big ditch,” he said. “They pickin’ up bits a haji body they missed after that muthafucker blew himself up. Wanna go watch?”

Silence.

“Aw hell naw,” Mike said. “None of that Stand By Me shit for me. No thanks.”

Bardy and I looked at each other. We knew we were going to look at them gathering up the pieces of body. It was going to happen and we couldn’t stop it.

We watched them gather up the shreds of you, whatever they could find, placing your remains in a body bag far too large for the purpose. 

Then, because we couldn’t stay there all afternoon, and because our students needed us, we headed back to our shot-up classrooms and the rest of that uncertain summer pelted and thrashed by hail and rain so harsh and scouring it seemed like it was out for revenge.

***

1 June 2017, Duluth, Georgia

I admit it. I wasn’t very sorry when you died. I even felt something like triumph when I stood over that ditch, watching them scrape up what was left of you. It’s you I think about the most, out of all your group. You, the one whose rotting corpse I smelled and never forgot.

I think about you differently now. When I smelled death again in my mother’s driveway, I sat behind the wheel of my new car bought with my contractor money and wondered about you. 

I will never know your name, but I’ll never forget you, you know. One thing I’ve learned in my life—when you do someone a wrong, when you break into a life or end one with an unnatural, violent act, it makes a bond. So here we are, you and me, the rest of your dead friends, Bob and that soldier boy who bled to death from the shrapnel wound. I don’t know where we’re all headed on this journey, but you will be with us to the end. And I am so, so sorry it had to happen this way.

Happy Anniversary.