News From the Red Desert (5 page)

When the platoon reached the FOB, a helicopter was waiting. Deirdre nodded goodbye to the attentive platoon commander and to the terp and ran under the blades of the twin Huey as it started its engines. Their roar drowned out every other thought and a column of dust rose up like a shroud. A moment later they were headed south, back to KAF. She studied the road they had patrolled that day. Millet and wheat fields thigh-high with grain and the land shimmering under the sun. A man in a loose turban walked along the road carrying a hoe over his shoulder. She lifted her camera, but by the time she had it to her eye they were past him and all she could see was road and setting sun.

While Deirdre was lying in the dirt, Anakopoulus, back at KAF, was still seething at her. Going over his head like that, in front of his men, was as if she had climbed up and squatted on the counter and pissed all over him.

His first response had been a call up his chain of command, to logistics and the base OPS O. Who had considerably more standing than the media liaison major who had ordered him to give O'Malley the body armour. That was the last time the press officer would try something like that, that was for sure. His boss, who understood the resource he had in Anakopoulus, had invited him to listen in on the reaming he gave this Major Horner. You will never speak to Master Sergeant Anakopoulus again, do you understand, Major? You will come directly to me on any supply matters. And if you think you can throw your weight around with me, you just try it. Master Sergeant Anakopoulus is an important part of what makes this place work. You are not. Am I clear?

Anakopoulus did not have a high regard for the officers he reported to. He felt generally that he owed them much less than they owed him. He understood perfectly well why his boss was so enthusiastic about climbing all over Major Horner on his behalf. With him listening, too—that was never done. It was because this was the first time Anakopoulus had asked him for anything. His independence was so complete he had been almost autonomous. And now that he had asked for something, that was less true. He knew that. But he paid the price because nothing like that could ever happen again in front of his guys.

It was gratifying to hear that limp-dicked Major Horner being chewed out, but Anakopoulus's own satisfaction wasn't the point. His men needed to know he wouldn't put up with it. Stand up for your guys, in all circumstances, as best you can—it was his first and almost his only principle of leadership. Avoid being pushed around in front of them. But he had been. And so far as they knew, he could be again, which meant they could be. He replayed his exchange with the embed over in his head and inserted more biting rage and sharp phrases until, in this imagined version, she was left speechless.

She had been about to go out on patrol and he could have lent her some body armour for twenty-four hours. But her superiority—her presumption
that she was as much or even more involved in and as important to the mission as he and his soldiers were, and even outranked them in some sense—had made him lose his shit. He had been a soldier since he was eighteen. Thirty years. Then the shooting starts and leeches like her show up to take in the show and act like they're experts.

She would probably say there was a woman thing going on here, too. It was true that his crew were all men and he had been here a long time. Susie was one of only a few women he had talked with at length for years, and now they didn't talk, so he tried not to think about her.

But she snuck in sometimes. Like now. Opening the woman door in his head had let Susie through. He tried to shut it, but all the longing came up out of him even as he refused to acknowledge its existence or even his capacity to feel it.

It was better that his men thought he was raging about someone disrespecting them. He figured the more alert ones would know that wasn't all it was about. Losing his shit could not become a habit. For a dozen reasons.

At four that afternoon, as the men began to cycle off in shifts to the dining facility, he announced he was going for a long run. It was a good decision, getting out of there. Someone was going to mention her. The embed, he meant. All these rotations later, no one was left who knew that Susie had ever existed.

A
fter he had been in Kandahar for a year, he could tell Susie was struggling. She tried to hide it from him. In the beginning she'd told him everything about her days, wanted to involve him at the distance of twelve time zones in every decision she made. This annoyed him, made him think she was not self-sufficient enough to endure a deployment that was looking to be more and more protracted every day. They spoke often on the telephone but eventually their conversations grew less concrete—she slowly stopped telling him about the birthday parties her son attended, stopped asking him how to change faucet washers and how to replace fuses. The abstract generalities about her days—“busy,” “okay,” “I'm worried about his grades”—were dutiful and no revelation at all. He told her he had inquired about leave to go home many times but had always been discouraged by his overly dependent bosses. “We're at war, Master Sergeant,” he told her they had replied. He told her he had become sort of indispensable.

“I'm just so tired of being lonely,” she said, in response. She went to work, she made supper for her son and watched television. She told him she went out with her friends sometimes. She was ten years younger than him and that made the separation harder for her, she said. Her wants were stronger than his. Which was a shot at him, for being so far away for so long.

He ordered her presents from stores with websites. The Oprah books she had mentioned wanting to read, a new Gore-Tex raincoat, an opal ring. She appreciated the effort more than his taste, but it helped. They tried having phone sex a few times but he knew the phone lines were sometimes monitored and that inhibited him. He didn't tell her that, though, and she took his attitude as disinterest. She told him her boy missed him a lot, and asked him to write to him. Meaning, to her.

After he had been away for two years, she asked him what he'd think if she went out to dinner with a guy she'd met at a party.

“Like, on a date?” he asked.

“Not really. Kinda,” she said.

“That would be fine,” he said, taking the dare.

“You must think I'm terrible,” she said, her voice teasing and discouraged at once.

He made himself laugh then and after a moment he felt like he meant it. And then he did mean it. He didn't want her to be alone. “You being lonely and sad does not make me love you more,” he said. “I love you because you are you. And you are at your core a happy woman. Don't stop being you and I'll keep loving you. Be happy. Just please keep loving me.”

She was quiet then and he wondered if he had offended her. Then she said: “No one has ever said anything like that to me. I love you, too, Demetrios. I really do. I just need to get out of the house sometimes.”

He laughed, with relief, with tenderness. “I know what you need.”

“Well, that too.”

“Eventually they'll let me have leave.”

A
fter Anakopoulus got back from his run he showered and ate and walked back to the warehouse. The day shift had ended and there had been no new shipments in or out lately and so most of his soldiers were back at their barracks playing multiplayer Call of Duty. Anakopoulus headed into the back of his cavern, turning on lights as he went. The five thousand discrete objects he kept here were organized by NATO stock number rather than theme and so surprising neighbours were created: latrine disinfectant and chaplains' field sacrament kits stared across an aisle at one another. The smell of oiled canvas was strong. A crate of laundry detergent had been handled roughly and the scent of lavender freshness hung in the air. He could hear a forklift moving slowly and moved away from the sound. He wanted to be alone, and to drink in the feeling of capacity all this equipment lent him.

Though killing defines it, war is mostly not that. It is mostly eating and shitting and driving and washing and watching. For every combat soldier on the ground, there were at least fifteen others, making soup and fixing trucks and reconciling expense projections. A knife that was only edge would be nothing at all. This warehouse was mostly filled with things American men and women need to live anywhere. Toilet paper.
Radios. Towels. Batteries. The quantity of batteries he shipped out every month astounded him. Wet cell, dry cell, nickel metal hydride, lithium, he had them all.

Flammable supplies like fuel and motor oil went to a different depot that he also controlled, and explosives like grenades and ammunition went to one far from the barracks. He had received a memo about airlines' concern with lithium batteries and he had decided to store them separately—a major fire in the warehouse would be a catastrophe that would end his career. It wouldn't be the colonel he reported to who took the blame, that was for sure.

Rifles, pistols and machine guns were sent to him before being distributed to unit armouries; at any moment he had thousands of those here, too. This was a country awash with rifles, and every soldier on the base carried a pistol. Firearms were tools and they were common. You got into considerably more trouble by misplacing a weapon than a shovel, but they were basically the same thing. He had a whole row of .50-calibre machine guns packed in grease. Breech blocks were stored separately, and locked up. Cases of 9-mm Beretta pistols, M-4s, M-16A4s. And a few dozen very expensive handmade M-24 sniper rifles.

Of all the weapons he stocked, the ones he liked looking at the most were the AK-47s. It felt strange, stocking Russian weapons with Cyrillic markings and such a foreign-looking design sensibility. They could not be more obviously the product of a different way of thinking about war. He stocked them because the Special Forces dudes working with local militias carried AKs in order to fit in better.

The AK-47's stock and forestock was of oiled hardwood. The wood was part of what made it a heavy rifle, half again the weight of the plastic-and-steel M-4. The oldest construction material fit well on this weapon. It was chambered for the .30-calibre bullet that had dominated the two world wars and killed forty million. Those big .30-calibre rounds were created to stop charging cavalry.

The rifle had brought death to humans on four continents for half a century because it could be buried in the ground for two months and then dug up, cocked and fired. It was as robust as a sledge and could
be built by inept machinists. And in that perfect pragmatism dwelt its loveliness.

In contrast, the M-4/M-16A2 with its black steel in sharp trapezoids and triangles and plastic stock, is menace and precision. You cannot bury it for any length of time and imagine that it will work. It needs to be maintained. The American rifles were more accurate and more expensive to make and lighter to carry and in many ways the superior weapon. They fired a .22-calibre bullet that flew out at half again the speed of the older, heavier bullets, and had a flatter and hence more accurate trajectory over its four-hundred-yard effective range. The bullets killed more by their velocity than their weight. Striking flesh, they blew a cone of kinetic injury that, if it emerged on the other side, could be as large as an orange. If a bullet struck bone, it could be sent tumbling in directions that were almost random. Speed versus weight—the difference between the American and Russian ways of war could not be more concisely demonstrated. The Americans conquered Afghanistan in two months and took a handful of casualties. The Russians killed a million Afghans and lost a hundred thousand of their own over a decade—and still lost: in the modern age, speed beats weight.

And yet. All over the world, the AK was what rebels and dissidents and desperate men who fought in the hills preferred. It was cheap and available and robust. And maybe it couldn't be surpassed. Some things just get as good as they can be and subsequent refinements are not improvements: bicycles, pencils, umbrellas. Killing, at its essence, is stupidly simple: send a piece of steel into someone with sufficient speed and they die. As long as it keeps working, any rifle will do this.

Normally, thinking about the perfectibility of objects would have given Anakopoulus some satisfaction. The perfect flashlight. The perfect folding knife. The perfect desert boot. But the long-ago attainment of the ideal assault rifle made him think about mortality and futility. All those designers' lives subsequently spent trying to improve on it and failing. Whole working lifetimes wasted. These sort of thoughts were more and more on his mind lately, what with the way things were going.

Deirdre showered and made her way straight to bed. She bunked with five other civilian women contractors—cooks and accountants. None of them were around and she was grateful for this. She sat on her cot and rubbed her feet.

That had been the first patrol she had been on in Afghanistan since 2002. After the collapse of the Taliban she'd gone to Kabul, which was where the action had been, in those days: loya jirgas and vision statements and plans to build schools and hospitals. UN agencies were everywhere, and the great miracle of the Taliban's collapse had given confidence to every adventurer who wanted to help. Restaurants opened, serving Lebanese and Italian food, and aid organizations flooded in. She took a room at the Hotel Intercontinental and every night in the bar she drank with the western enthusiasts: reporters—war correspondents, rather, though there was little war in those days—USAID, MSF, UNESCO. Hordes of NGO workers. House and office rents tripled every two months. She put away her body armour. She drove around the ring road with no one but her translator for company. Everywhere she stopped, people crowded around, eager to talk. At least that's how she'd seen it then. Now, it seemed impossible. But then it seemed to her and to everyone she spoke to that a miracle had happened. She remembered the intoxicating joy of those days, the parties and the delight and the self-satisfaction—look what
we
did. Remembering made her shudder. But they knew so little then. Which is why no one really asked any questions when the Iraq drumbeat started.

She'd had supper with Stewart Robinson in Kabul, too, after he'd finished his walk. Most of the journalists presumed he worked for MI6. Those rumours did not keep them from talking to him—rather, the opposite: they lent him an air of substance he would not otherwise have worn. It changed what would have been viewed as a stunt into something more meaningful.

They'd met in La Taverna du Liban, a favourite restaurant of the expats. Walking to her table, she was greeted by three journalists and
noticed by another five. It was a poor choice. He had picked it. Next time she would choose the venue. When he arrived he was also greeted by his friends, who comprised everyone she knew plus everyone she didn't. He sat down and smiled at her, then said, “Every ferenghee in the city knows everyone else, don't they?”

“It's one big party. And you're the belle of the ball,” she replied.

“It isn't me they're looking at right now.”

“The gossip is beginning already,” she said, surveying the room.

“Let them gossip.”

“I'd rather they didn't.”

“They will or they won't. It's trivial.”

“For you, it's trivial. For me, trying to work, it isn't.”

“I think you'll find that if you just ignore that stuff it goes away. The women here become men quickly enough through their work. No one gossips like that about Alissa Rubin. She walked through the Khyber Pass last month. Did you see her piece on it in the
Times
?”

“Yes. That's her over there, isn't it? Is that Carlotta Gall she's eating with?”

He turned around and waved. “Yes.”

“Last time we met you were just about to leave Kandahar on foot.”

“Oh, I remember.”

She looked at him levelly. So it was like that.

“It was bedlam there, then,” he continued.

“I was there two weeks ago. It's settling down.”

“The fighting?”

“There's no fighting. The chaos of the place wasn't about fighting, it was about hurried building.”

“Well, the hurry is appropriate.” He was posturing as an old hand. As if anyone had been here long.

She remembered how she had humoured him. “You think the peace won't last?”

“I think we have a very short period of time to give enough back to the Afghans that we make up for our presence here. And after not much longer than that, no amount of giving will be enough.”

“They seem quite friendly on my trips around the ring road.”

“There is trouble on the way. Sooner or later. We're occupiers.”

She recalled how tempting it was to puncture him, but she'd demurred. She'd figured they would cross paths again and he was bound to be influential. She'd wished she'd known him well enough to mock his sententiousness. He might have enjoyed it. She certainly would have.

“There are a lot of people here, trying to make this place better. They're spending billions,” she'd said.

“There are a lot of people here, yes. Most of that money is going to them, though.”

“Still. We're not the Taliban.”

“The Taliban are Afghans.”

“The Taliban are monsters.”

“I agree. But we're not Afghans and they are.”

“You looked it, in Kandahar, in those clothes and windburn.”

“Not to them.”

“How is the book going?”

“I'm nearly done.”

“Can I read it?”

“I have a draft at my apartment.”

And she'd looked up at the waiter as he came to take their orders. Which was a relief. It had given her time to think. But of course she'd gone. He'd turned out to be a much better writer than she'd thought he would be. And she had to concede that what had struck her as arrogant and presumptuous in what he had predicted at that first dinner had turned out to be right. But at that point she hadn't yet been to Iraq.