The Valley (3 page)

Soon, orange and brown vines of crepe paper would encircle the rafters and the walls would fill up with the paper cutouts of turkeys, pilgrims, and cornucopias that he remembered from Thanksgiving time at elementary school. The feast—four feasts, really—on that day would be unbelievable.

“
FOBbits”
was the Army term for soldiers who spend their whole deployments living on the FOB, working in air-conditioned little office spaces and eating chow and rarely venturing outside the base. It was a term Black had once used himself, before he became one.

It was dark when he emerged into the cooling night. Passing under an aluminum awning he heard another voice calling him. This one he didn't recognize.

“Excuse me there, sir.”

He turned and saw the rank. He stopped, glaring.

Sergeant major is the highest of the enlisted ranks. Sergeants' sergeants, in for life.

A favorite sergeant major project is squaring away young lieutenants, whom they generally view as bumbling embarrassments to the officer corps. Black didn't know this one, but he looked the part. Short, stocky, fiftyish, square chin, mouth a grim line.

“Well, sir, if you don't mind, you're just a little crooked here. . . .”

Black's own hand slapped hard over his own American flag patch at just the instant he heard the tearing sound of the Velcro coming up. The sergeant major's iron finger and thumb were momentarily caught beneath his palm. The man's eyes went wide.

“I do mind, Sergeant Major.”

Black turned and stalked off into the dark, leaving the flabbergasted old soldier with his mouth hanging open.

That was dumb.

The guy would find out what unit Black was in. A sergeant major can find out anything. He would tell the story like Black had struck him, which was basically as bad as punching out a general.

“Hey, sir!”

He ignored the voice from behind him. Some other sergeant who saw the thing, no doubt, coming to do a citizen's arrest on a lieutenant who'd violated the cardinal rule of always kissing a sergeant major's ass.

“Hey, sir!”

Heavy hand on his shoulder. He windmilled it off him and spun around in the dark, hands up and ready to shove.

“GET THE FU—”

Cousins. Standing there wide-eyed in the dark, his face confusion.

Black felt himself deflate. He said nothing. Just turned around and walked away.

“Sorry, Sergeant Cousins,” he mumbled as he disappeared between a row of generators and shipping containers.

He didn't stop walking until he got back to the S-1 shop, didn't stop to talk to the couple of S-1 soldiers who greeted him along the way—didn't respond to their “evening, L.T.” or return their salutes. He didn't stop as he weaved his way through the desks and swept up the manila envelope, already on his way back out the door.

Didn't even stop, really, as he knocked on his commander's door, two temporary buildings over. Didn't wait for the inevitable “Come!” but just strode through as he knocked, envelope clutched in his hand.

Lieutenant Colonel Gayley, the battalion commander, responsible for the lives and welfare of the unit's four hundred soldiers, barely looked up from the papers on his desk. He was busy signing something.

“Oh, Lieutenant Black. Good. Sergeant Cousins found you.”

Black blinked.

“Here, have a seat. I've got something for you.”

He gestured offhandedly at one of the two chairs permanently stationed before his desk. Every commander in the Army had two chairs before his desk. He rooted among his stacks.

“Okay, here we go.”

Gayley located a packet of papers, which he began skimming.

“This is the thing.”

“Sir?”

“You're not going to like it.”

B
lack had decided a while back that Gayley was not a bad guy, as far as commanders went.

True, the beating bureaucratic heart of the Army had a slobbering crush on officers like Gayley. Somewhere in a lab at West Point his instructors had mixed him in a bowl, whipping into him the precise proportions of accountability, flawless attention to detail, chipper optimism, and bold cooperativeness, folding in a hardy tolerance for paperwork and a relentless professional ambition, with a dash of tanned physical perfection for flavor. They had tried and failed many times before, but when they poured Gayley into the mold and pulled him from the oven, they saw what they'd made and cried,
That's it!
then hugged one another and drank reasonable amounts of sparkling cider to celebrate.

He was a little of everything and a little of nothing. He yelled at the right people, didn't yell at the wrong people, didn't fail in his duties, didn't cause surprises or embarrassments. He was just so.

Despite these attractive qualities, Black felt less of the natural suspicion that someone like Gayley would ordinarily fill him with. Most commanders in Gayley's position, having a lieutenant in Black's position fall into their lap, would have put that lieutenant in the flunkiest officer job in the whole battalion and forgotten all about him.

Which was precisely what Gayley had done. Being assigned involuntarily to the S-1 job was essentially an announcement by the Army that
This officer is not suited for any other task.

But Gayley had not forgotten about Black entirely, and in his own way he'd made a project of his young lieutenant. Mostly this entailed asking him how things were going from time to time, and on the rare occasions when the two were alone giving well-meaning motivational talks on the themes of Making the Most of Things, Turning Setbacks into Opportunities, and Keeping Your Chin Up, sometimes with a bona fide clap on the shoulder for punctuation.

Black tolerated these with more patience than he ordinarily would, because while most officers in the battalion either ignored him completely or were openly hostile, Gayley was merely insufferably patronizing. That he could work with.

Besides, there were aspects of Gayley that Black genuinely respected. He was not fat, for one.

And Gayley had not, in his methodical hand-over-hand up the Army ladder, lost the ability to be succinct. Somehow, despite being known throughout the battalion as a Dudley Do-Right with golden hair and a six-sided jaw who harangued unsuspecting soldiers at length about the power of positive thinking, Gayley could still get to the point when it came to actual work. True to form, he tossed the packet of papers across the table so Black could see it.

“Fifteen-six officer.”

“Sir?”

He picked up the sheaf.

“Fifteen-six, son. It's your turn.”

Army Regulation 15-6 governs investigations of misconduct within a military unit. The 15-6 investigation is the commander's initial inquiry into possible wrongdoing. The offense might be significant or trivial, might lead to nothing or to court-martials and ended careers. But it all starts with the 15-6.

The investigation must be conducted by an officer of greater rank to the individual or individuals suspected of the wrongdoing. Because most of the people in the Army are not officers, and because most higher-ranking officers don't want to spend their time serving as amateur internal affairs investigators, most 15-6 investigations can safely be shunted off on lieutenants, the lowest-ranking officers, without violating any rules.

Black remembered how a friend had explained it to him when he drew his first 15-6, involving a break-in at a barracks back in the States.

You are investigating soldiers who don't know you, because the regulations require that the fifteen-six officer be from a different unit from where the misconduct happened. So they see you only as a rat. You get no help from the unit itself, because you
are
a rat, and also because you are a lieutenant, and no one respects lieutenants because they haven't proven anything to anyone yet. No one trusts you, you get no help, and the whole thing will suck.

No sense drawing out the pain. Black began skimming the cover sheet. Gayley said nothing.

He recognized the unit involved. Third Battalion, 44th Infantry Regiment, abbreviated 3/44, had its headquarters and barracks on the far side of FOB Omaha. Black often passed through its neighborhood on foot while walking across the base.

He stopped short when he got to REASON FOR INVESTIGATION. He looked up at Gayley, confused.

“A
warning
shot, sir?”

“Whole new war, Lieutenant.”

He was talking about the change.

With the military pushing further and further into the rural backlands, its leadership in Washington had pushed out new “rules of engagement” for when and how American troops would use force. Someone had figured out that it's tough to convince civilians you are there to protect them when you keep shredding cars full of people who didn't realize they had to slow down at the checkpoint, or vaporizing four homes with a five-hundred-pound bomb when you really only wanted to get the one bad guy in the one house.

These stern directives, filtered through ordinary bureaucratic tendencies, predictably resulted in many, many routine 15-6 investigations over largely routine uses of force, even when that force resulted in no harm to people or damage to property.

Black realized he was looking at one of these situations right now.

Some soldiers had fired warning shots near some Afghan civilians in a tense situation in a village a few weeks earlier. Had accidentally killed a local man's goat the night before, apparently, and there had been some kind of confrontation the next morning when they went to make amends. It looked like no one had been harmed and, aside from a broken flower pot or something, there had been no property damage. The situation dissipated, and the man had been paid in cash for his loss.

So now Black would have to trudge across Omaha, corner these soldiers on their free time, and grill them over having, by the looks of it, done the right thing.

“When are they coming in, sir?”

“Huh?”

Gayley seemed confused.

“Their next trip in from the field, sir.”

Ordinarily, for an incident occurring away from the FOB, you'd wait and interview the soldiers at their unit during one of their periodic resupply trips back to base. Another plus, then: He'd be interrogating guys during their few precious hours of downtime in the middle of a war.

And they're gonna spend their one rest day answering some strange officer's questions and feeling like criminals and thinking about what a fat lot of good doing the right thing did them.

Gayley shook his head.

“They're not coming back in.”

Now Black was confused.

“They're busy fighting a war, Lieutenant,” Gayley explained. “They're not coming back for this. You're going to them.”

Busy fighting a war.

“Sir, can I ask a question?”

“Shoot.”

“I haven't been to the field since I came to Omaha, except to fly out for R&R leave and back again last week.”

He cleared his throat.

“Am I the best choice here?”

Gayley didn't blink.

“It's the new selection system,” he grumbled. “Integrity in selection or some bullshit. Apparently I can't be trusted to pick my own investigating officers anymore.”

He was talking about the other change that had come out along with the new rules of engagement. Now 15-6 officers were to be assigned by computer at the division headquarters, multiple levels above Gayley's office. It was essentially random.

The colonel's face betrayed nothing. But Black had hung around the S-1 shop long enough to know that nearly any regulation like this allowed leeway for a commander to decide that a given officer was not fit for a given duty. Either Gayley thought more of Black than he let on, or he recognized the task for the pointless makework it was and didn't want to spend one of his other lieutenants on it.

Hard to say.

“Where are they located, sir?”

Gayley cleared his throat.

“Combat Outpost Vega.”

He did not elaborate. Just looked at Black as though waiting for a reaction.

“I'm not familiar with that location, sir.”

Gayley nodded once and picked up a folded map. It was covered with topographic markings and military grid lines. Black saw a lot of green.

Gayley flipped it like a Frisbee. It spun across his desk and straight into Black's lap, startling him.

“You're going up the Valley.”

—

There were many valleys in the mountains of Nuristan, and many were hard places where people died hard deaths. But there was only one Valley. Black didn't even know its proper name. But he knew about the Valley. Everyone at FOB Omaha did.

It was the farthest, and the hardest, and the worst. It lay deeper and higher in the mountains than any other place Americans ventured in Nuristan, beyond the front range you could see from Radio Hill, and beyond the peaks that lay beyond those. You had to travel through a network of interlinked valleys, past all the other remote American outposts, just to get to its mouth.

From there the Valley wound upward, snaking this way and that through the steep mountainsides and apparently, as Black had heard from tales whispered and retold, terminating at its highest point in a narrow pass that crossed over the ridges and into Pakistan. No one could say, because no American had been that far.

Black knew that there were outposts in the Valley, though he didn't know how many or how far in. Stories circulated back to Omaha periodically, tales of land claimed and fought for, or lost and overrun, new attempts made or turned back, outposts abandoned and retaken.

They were impossible to verify. Everything with the Valley was myth and rumor. No one on the FOB seemed to have met anyone who had been there.

Black would hear the young soldiers in the S-1 shop talking once in a while.
Did you see the Valley guys in the chow hall last night?

Then skepticism from another soldier, followed by protestations to the contrary, joined by another soldier whose buddy said he talked to them and yes, they
were
Valley guys.

Black concluded that the place was far enough away that any soldiers who went there mostly stayed there—spent most of their tour in the mountains and rarely returned to the FOB. When or if they did, they probably just kept to themselves or slept.

He didn't blame them. The only hard information he had seen were the casualty reports, which came down from Brigade headquarters weekly. 3/44 Infantry regularly had the highest counts. Now, 15-6 paperwork in hand, Black understood why. They had been cursed with the Valley.

Whatever the rest of the truth of the place was, he had only been certain that he would never know.

“It's six hours by ground convoy,” Gayley was saying, “and a hell of a lot shorter by air.”

Black considered the mess of paperwork now splayed across his lap. Combat Outpost—COP—Vega seemed small. Tiny, really.

A “cop,” as the joes said it, typically didn't comprise more than several hasty structures with incomplete barriers around them. COPs were meant to be compact and highly defensible, to the extent a tiny base in the middle of enemy territory could be defended.

Vega looked typical in this regard. It had been built right on the slope of the mountainside, well above the river that ran along the bottom of the valley. It had limited views and was surrounded by high ground on all sides. A nice fat target.

“I don't know how Three-Four-Four's gonna get you there yet,” Gayley went on. “Their commander's gonna let me know.”

He pointed across the desk at the map draped over Black's knee.

“But I would hope for ground, because helicopters don't stay airborne very long up in that place. Those fuckers get shot down all the time when they fly down below the mountaintops.”

Black brought the map up to his face. The outpost was accessible by a road, or a track, or what passed for it. But from the reports in his hands it sounded as though at some points there was no road or trail whatsoever, other than what had been worn by American vehicles, which were not exactly making daily trips up there.

“That's what I've got,” Gayley said tersely. “What are your questions?”

It was the line that squared-away Army officers always used at the end of a briefing.

Black rooted in the file and brought out a personnel roster generated by the S-1 shop over at 3/44's headquarters. COP Vega was manned by a single infantry platoon, not at complete strength. Forty-seven guys, unless someone had died since the last report had been generated.

Which was entirely possible. The outpost came under attack, frequently. It had been in place roughly a year, and whoever did not want it there had clearly not given up on the idea of making it go away.

“Why there, sir?” he asked. “Why such a poor tactical location?”

Gayley raised an eyebrow at hearing the word “tactical”
cross Black's lips.

Let it go.

“They had to build it there,” Gayley explained.

Vega's mission was interdicting the flow of foreign fighters crossing the border from Pakistan, down through the higher parts of the mountains and into the rest of Afghanistan. The Valley was a key route. The express lane.

“Everything funnels through there.”

Black nodded.

“What else?” Gayley pressed, ready to get back to his evening.

“That's it, sir.”

Gayley nodded once and watched Black wrestle the paper pile together.

“These Vega dudes are no joke, Lieutenant.”

Black looked up at the colonel.

“Their world is no joke. They're strung out and they've lost a lot of buddies. They are not going to be happy to see you poking your nose around their outpost.”