Having Once Served

He was a reservist in the 82nd Airborne Division, a significant rung below enlisted man, and he got the shit jobs. His CO dumped visiting low-level suits from the Afghan government on him to show around the air base in Kandahar. He’d mutter Fucking hajis under his breath, trying to impress any grunt within hearing distance, or he’d shout Airborne! to show he was tight with his brother soldiers. The Afghan suits looked at him in surprise, but no one else paid any goddamn fucking attention.

I gotta carry these guys, he’d complain when he escorted journalists from one interview with the brass to the next. Again no one gave a rat’s ass, though sometimes he did get a sucks-to-be-fucking-you shrug. He showed new reservists where’d they’d bunk. You ever been shot at? he’d ask them. Do you know what it means to be situationally aware? Don’t fall behind or stop moving, even if you drop your equipment. You’re going to be cold, wet, miserable. You’re going to get enemy fire. Can you handle that? They looked at him wide-eyed, kids who had joined the reserves to pay off college. After a while, he knew, they’d stop listening. They’d get bored and restless and say Fucking hajis just like him, and not because they hated Afghans but because they hated the time, the pointlessness of doing drills only to escort food convoys to some shithole village they’d never see again. Why that village? Why not another? He never knew and neither would the new guys who, after a while, were no longer new.

He rarely went out on a mission. The few times he did, his M4 looped around his shoulder, he’d carry a wag bag to woof in because he got airsick. Despite his queasy stomach, he always found a formation of Chinooks waiting to lift off inspiring. He’d jog aboard, strap in, and feel himself rising off the ground and into the air surrounded by four-engine turboprop aircraft and all their loud power. Before they deplaned, he shook hands with the other grunts because no one knew whether they would live or die after they landed. They’d run down a ramp, hunched over, and dive on the ground. Peering through the sights of his M4, lying flat on his stomach, legs spread behind him, the reservist never saw anything but desert and scrub. With no incoming fire, he’d get up and trudge at least five meters behind the man in front of him, just as the man did behind him, a precaution to prevent insurgents from taking them out as a group. But if the bad guys were out there, they weren’t shooting. He walked through grain fields and pockets of sheep grazing in the heat on grass sprouting between rocks, and he’d suck water from his CamelBak and watch boys herding the sheep and old men sitting outside square mud huts, and he felt nothing but tedium and perhaps, he thought, the Afghans felt nothing but tedium, too, because nothing happened. After a long day he’d return to base and hang out with the pilots who had flown the choppers that day. He got to know them but not well. He just hung with them. He didn’t say much. He sought nothing more than to exist on the periphery of their lives and be mistaken for a pilot instead of a reservist. They didn’t give a shit about a wannabe sitting at their table.

So, it really fucked his mind when two pilots died on a medical mission. They flew a UH-72A Lakota out of Kandahar on a Sunday night to deliver supplies to a village near Mazar-e Sharif in the north where some children had eye and head injuries from a mine blast. The bird crashed from mechanical failure about an hour after liftoff.

The reservist had just finished chow. As he left to do laundry, the pilots received orders about the mission. Maybe...