Part 9 (2/2)

”My f.u.c.king hand's gone!”

”What?”

”My f.u.c.king hand's gone!” He held it up.

”Oh, s.h.i.+t,” said Cerezo.

The medic grabbed his aid bag and hopped out of the Humvee. Only then did he realize that the truck was still moving, with no driver behind the wheel: Barnett wasn't there.

The adrenaline rush that nearly every soldier experiences in battle affects each differently. When the hormone adrenaline, or epinephrine, is released, it can constrict air pa.s.sages and blood vessels, increase the heart rate, cause tunnel vision, relax the bladder, and prompt the nervous system's fight-or-flight response. Adrenaline is such a powerful chemical that people often become quite literally addicted to it, pursuing extreme sports, riding motorcycles, and engaging in other live-on-the-edge activities to feed the addiction. Postdeployment, many soldiers become thrill-seekers for the same reason.

In some individuals, adrenaline excites a self-preservation instinct that can quickly turn into cowardice. In others, it creates clarity and inspires courage. In Keating's Humvee, the gunner's legs were shaking so much that the lieutenant joked, ”What the h.e.l.l are you doing up there, dancing? Keep shooting!”

Barnett had jumped out the driver's door of the last Humvee in the convoy. Cerezo found him behind the vehicle, with his hands on the trunk. ”Doc, I'm bailing out,” Barnett explained, suffering the effects not only of an adrenaline reaction but also of a head injury: it was apparent that he wasn't quite right. ”No, motherf.u.c.ker!” Cerezo screamed. ”Get into the vehicle and stop the truck before it goes off the cliff!”

”Oh, okay,” Barnett said, snapping out of it. He climbed into the Humvee and stepped on the brake. Then he grabbed his SAW light machine gun, got out of the truck again, and ran over to a small stone wall on the right side of the road, from whose cover he began firing up at the mountain.

Cerezo meanwhile opened the right rear door of the Humvee, pulled Cline out, and flung him onto the ground, next to the wall. He heard bullets pinging off the Humvee. As the rest of the convoy remained locked in a firefight with the insurgents, Cerezo tied a tourniquet on Cline's forearm and began to a.s.sess his other wounds, checking his arteries, ripping off his sleeve.

”Oh, s.h.i.+t,” Cerezo exclaimed.

”All right,” insisted Cline, ”just tell me what the h.e.l.l's going on! If I'm going to die, I want to know!”

”You're not going to die,” Cerezo a.s.sured him. But in truth, he wasn't so sure. Shrapnel had taken off Cline's left bicep, and he was bleeding out. Cerezo took the tourniquet off the sergeant's forearm and refastened it around his shoulder area. He put Kerlix gauze in the hole in his arm and wrapped it with Israeli trauma dressing, a multipurpose bandage that applied pressure and sterilized wounds.

Back in the Humvee, Pa.s.sman saw that Yagel was in the truck and fine, having dodged the RPG by leaning forward toward the winds.h.i.+eld. He was on the radio, talking to his first sergeant. Pa.s.sman now noticed that his own right leg felt wet, and suddenly his back started throbbing.

”Sergeant Yagel, am I bleeding?” he asked.

Yagel himself had chunks of shrapnel in his right shoulder and back. He grabbed Pa.s.sman's pants, then pulled his hand away. It was covered with blood.

”You're okay,” Yagel said. ”It's Cline's blood.”

From his perch in the turret, Pa.s.sman began firing at the enemy again. He watched as the senior medic, Sergeant Billy Stalnaker from West Virginia, ran from Humvee to Humvee, taking cover each time and making sure everyone was okay. Todd Yerger followed behind at an unhurried pace, looking as if he were out on a leisurely stroll, with rounds bouncing around him as if they were raindrops.

”Is CAS coming?” Pa.s.sman asked Yagel, referring to close air support.

”No,” Yagel told him. They would have to get out on their own, with no cover.

Next to the stone wall, Cerezo was wondering to himself, What the f.u.c.k do I do with Cline's fingers? As he was wrapping them into Cline's hand, Stalnaker ran over to them and hit the wounded man with some morphine. After a minute, Cline got up on his own and stumbled back to the truck.

A sergeant handed Cerezo his M16. ”I got one of them,” he told the medic. ”A kid. Had a gun.”

Once all were accounted for and back in the Humvees, the convoy pulled forward a couple of hundred yards, made a U-turn, and headed back toward the Kamdesh PRT. On the way, Cline felt something dripping down his neck. He mentioned it to Cerezo, who checked and saw that some shrapnel had hit the left side of his jugular.

”Don't lose my wedding ring,” Cline told him.

After they pulled in to Kamdesh, Cline was put on a stretcher. Netzel ran over to help Pa.s.sman out of the truck; he was obviously having trouble walking. Netzel touched his leg and came up with a handful of blood. ”I think that's Cline's,” Pa.s.sman said. ”I think I'm okay.” He went to lie down, and Cerezo hurried over. The medic could now see that the gunner had a three-inch gash in his back. Cerezo began to cut off Pa.s.sman's pants and belt so he could find out what was going on with his leg.

”No, dude, this is a brand-new belt,” Pa.s.sman objected. Cerezo cut it off anyway. The RPG had peppered the gunner's leg with shrapnel from the top of his hip to the bottom of his knee, the fragments ranging from the size of BBs to the size of quarters.

Pa.s.sman and Cline were medevacked to Forward Operating Base Naray. Amid the haze of his pain, Pa.s.sman asked a doctor about Cline: ”Were you able to save his hand?” ”No,” the doctor said, in the tone of someone announcing a baseball score. Cline's left hand had been amputated at the elbow.

On their subsequent chopper ride to Bagram, Pa.s.sman and Cline were placed next to each other. Cline said he wanted to hold Pa.s.sman's hand with his surviving right hand. He asked Pa.s.sman about his injuries, about his life. Pa.s.sman, for his part, couldn't stop looking at Cline's missing arm. They were separated upon landing.

When Gooding was on R&R, Keating had sent him an email: ”My puppy is barking,” it said.

This was a reference to a statement made by a guest speaker at Fort Drum who had counseled troops on how to prevent posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. The lecturer had likened the typical symptoms of raging emotions, central nervous system reactions, and panicky breathing to ”a puppy's barking.” Keating's email was his way of signaling that he had hit his limit of combat fatigue and needed to be relieved of command. The timing of Gooding's return would be good, too: Keating was looking forward to his own R&R in October. It would let him clear his head, steady his heart, and come back recharged and ready to lead again.

Howard had told Keating that he wanted him to switch Able Troop's focus from strictly fighting the enemy to counterinsurgency work: more meeting with local leaders and a.s.sisting on development projects, less driving around trying to find insurgents. That wasn't so easy: ”n.o.body told them them,” Keating would quip about the enemy. ”The little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds keep shooting at us every day.”

Some of the chatter picked up over the radio indicated that the HIG insurgents were not planning on heading to Pakistan for the winter this year. Putting a hopeful spin on it, Army a.n.a.lysts interpreted this as a sign that the enemy was worried that the United States might make progress with its counterinsurgency program during the interim, and that the insurgents might return to a Kamdesh that no longer afforded them refuge; HIG was determined, the a.n.a.lysts believed, to prevent that from happening. Keating felt good about the Americans' chances, but he was also certain that Kamdesh wouldn't be the end of it.

”Ultimately,” he wrote to his father, ”I think we are going to dismantle this organization”-referring to HIG. ”But one thing we're still a little slow on the uptake about is that in this tribal culture, another group will replace them. A group that is just as vulnerable to greed, infighting and murder as the last. We can change the faces and names, [but] we will never change the values and the vision for the future that these people have spent five thousand years developing, perfecting and perpetuating through their common law, religion and teaching.”

”I can't wait for you to get here,” Keating had emailed Gooding.

The counterinsurgency efforts commenced. Keating, Saenz, and Boulio traveled to the village of Mandigal, to the north of Kamdesh on the way to Barg-e-Matal. Keating planned to join up there with Lieutenant Colonel Tony Feagin to conduct a shura with the village elders, while Saenz and Boulio were hoping to find some locals who might become intelligence sources. Feagin headed the provincial reconstruction team in Mehtar Lam, Laghman Province, and was responsible for all of Nuristan as well. In August, he'd moved into the Kamdesh PRT. While Able Troop was in charge of security at Kamdesh, Feagin was the overall senior mission commander, with a staff of about thirty-five people under him focused on the development of the area, including a civil affairs team, a military engineer officer, and two Army Corps of Engineers civilians.

Saenz and Boulio knew that the best pools of candidates to serve as sources were, first, elders looking to plead their case for a project to be undertaken in their village; and second, twenty- to twenty-five-year-old unemployed, semieducated males, literate and with maybe with some high school under their belts but not much more. The likeliest members of this latter group often had something a bit off about them and seemed a touch desperate-perhaps they'd been picked on, or they needed cash to get married or to support a large family. Saenz and Boulio used such weaknesses to persuade these men to work with the United States, offering them a way to feel better about themselves while also helping their nation.

Mandigal was a medium-sized village, typical for the area, with log-and-stone homes stacked one on top of another up the hillside. As the Americans entered the settlement, their eyes were drawn to a wooden overhang resembling a covered bridge, its huge wooden pillars decorated with intricate and ornate carvings, a craft for which the Nuristanis were renowned. Keating and Feagin were met by the elders and escorted to the shura room, in a building next to the main road. Served gla.s.ses of scalding tea saturated with sugar and presented with cookies and bowls of raisins, nuts, and jujubes, the U.S. officers and the elders discussed the need for everyone to work together and then went over a prioritized list of projects for the village, the most important of which was a micro-hydroelectric plant.

As Saenz and Boulio, accompanied by First Sergeant Yerger and four of his headquarters soldiers, walked down the main road, villagers gathered on rooftops and in doorways to stare at them. The intelligence collectors made small talk with anyone who seemed even remotely friendly, asking basic questions about the village and the lives of its people, trying to loosen everyone up.

One of the local Afghan policemen told Saenz that he would take her to meet the women of his family if she wanted. Saenz immediately accepted the invitation.

The twenty-five-year-old Saenz had been a student at Texas State University when she watched the second plane hit the tower. Her brother was in an Army Ranger battalion, and her first thought was, What's going to happen to him? In the weeks after 9/11, the two of them often spoke about what she could do next. Saenz wanted to help plan missions, to collect information that would prepare soldiers like her brother for the battlefield. With this in mind, she joined the Army.

Sitting in what appeared to be a biblical-era log and stone house in Mandigal, Saenz was a long way from Texas. The villagers gave off the odor of poverty, of dirt and sweat. There was even a faint whiff of urine in the air. The children had distended bellies. They were all very tiny.

”Here,” one Afghan woman said to Saenz through her interpreter. ”Take my child.” She handed her baby to the American.

They were beautiful, the five Afghan women before Saenz-the young mother, her mother and grandmother, her sister and sister-in-law. Their skin tones ranged from fair to deeply tanned, and their eyes were piercing greens and blues. Often when Saenz went out on her intelligence-gathering operations, the locals would tell her that they were descended from Alexander the Great, and these women sure looked it, though experts would have dismissed such claims as folklore.

They were friendly, even warm, these women-hence the young mother's offer to let her hold her baby, Saenz thought. She explained to them what the PRT was all about, how the Americans were there to develop the area and make the Nuristanis' lives better with water-pipe schemes, wells, and schools.

She thought to herself, Sweet! Female sources. Maybe some of them will get upset with their husbands and give me information.

”I work directly for the commander at the camp, on security issues,” she told the women. ”If you ever see anyone causing problems, let me know.”

”Take my child,” the young mother said again, though Saenz was already holding her baby.

And then she realized what the woman meant.

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