A Killing in Wartime

A couple of weeks later, the seismograph crew was working through steep, difficult terrain. Pete’s ankles felt sore and wobbly. An hour later they were back at the Prineville motel. Car doors slammed as the men and women spilled out of the vehicles onto the parking lot. The crew split up. Some went straight to their rooms. A few diehards headed to the bar. For his part, Pete was famished. He walked to a diner in town. The streets were mostly empty. Streetlamps and dimly lit shop windows illuminated Pete’s path down the sidewalk. The night was cold. The peak dinner hour was already passed by the time Pete strolled into Al’s Diner. The place was almost empty, the only customers being a solitary man at one table and, at the other end of the restaurant, four high-school students who were talking and laughing. Pete recognized the man as Stu, the manager of the Facebook data center.

“Hey, it’s the wanderer. Join me if you’d like,” Stu said.

“The wanderer?” Pete asked as he drew up a chair.

“Yeah, the guy who wandered around Afghanistan without having an army to back him up.”

“That’s what I figured you meant,” Pete said with a laugh. The waitress came and announced the specials. Pete ordered the meat loaf and a Sprite.

“Sometimes I wonder if it was all worth it,” Stu said.

“What, Afghanistan?”

“Afghanistan, Iraq. It’s easy for politicians to start a war, but they don’t know what they unleash.”

Stu seemed momentarily lost in reverie.

“Especially ones that have never been in combat,” Pete said. “Which is pretty much all of them.”

“Yeah,” Stu said, looking at Pete. “Well, Kerry and McCain, they did their bit. John Kerry was a Navy SEAL in Vietnam and John McCain, he was a prisoner of war, held by the North Vietnamese, for many years.”

Silence again.

Stu’s eyebrows went up and he took a deep breath. The eyebrows dropped as he exhaled.

“Something happen over there in Afghanistan that you’re thinking about?"

“Yep.”

Pete hardly knew this man but for some reason he could not fathom he felt compelled to ask: “Wanna tell me about it?”

“Nope.”

“I didn’t mean to pry. But I can imagine.  I wasn’t there for long, but I saw what I thought I’d see. Politicians like to say they have hard choices, but until they’ve been faced with personally taking the lives of others, they don’t really know.  I left before I found myself really making one of those choices.”

“You realized that in just a couple of days?” asked Stu.

The 40-something waitress came with Pete’s meal and a pot of coffee. She refilled Stu’s cup and left, swinging her hips as she sashayed away. Pete watched her go. The cook, a big man with long brown hair tied back in a ponytail, was leaning against the counter, studying Pete and Stu.

“I had a friend who came back from…the war…really damaged.  Someone I really looked up to.”

“At least he came back,” Stu said. “It’s the ones that will never see their families again that get to me.”

Stu fell silent.  Pete waited expectantly.  When he left for Afghanistan, he had thought of soldiers just as cogs in the American killing machine, but Stu seemed like he might have come back more sympathetic than most.

“That’s cool. Don’t talk about it if you don’t want to,” Pete said, trying a little reverse psychology, because now he really wanted to hear what had happened to Stu in Afghanistan. “Maybe it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie. You lost a friend, but maybe there’s no reason to dwell on it.”

Silence. Stu took a sip of the black coffee. Pete began digging into the meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

“It happened about halfway through my time there,” Stu began. “Our platoon was outfitting for another patrol. It was going to be another scorching day. You try to carry enough water, but not too much. It was cold in the morning but no one would wear a jacket. It would just be more weight to carry later on when the sun got high and it got hot. Each man would already be carrying 50 pounds or more.”

Pete put down his fork.

“A specialist, this guy Kirby, had the M240B machine gun, and he would be carrying more weight than the others. So would another man who had a heavy device with an antenna that we used to jam cell phone signals and other possible triggers for IEDs. We all tried to go as light as possible. Climbing over berms and hunkering down in ditches is harder to do when you’re loaded down. Harder to get cover quickly when there’s incoming fire. But those two guys couldn’t avoid their bigger burdens. The gunner’s name wasn’t really Kirby, by the way. I just called him that after the character in the old ‘Combat!’ TV show that I used to watch as a kid. Kirby was the one who carried the big Browning Automatic Rifle. Most of the guys in my squad weren’t familiar with the show so I had to explain the reference.”

It was slow going that day as the soldiers walked through a village of hardened mud walls and dwellings. The afternoon before, two men with minesweepers had painstakingly gone over the ground, accompanied by a K-9, an explosives-detecting dog. As they walked, the soldiers in front looked at the ground for evidence of freshly turned earth – a sign that an improvised explosive device had been planted overnight. 

When they got to the open country beyond the village, the Americans became even warier. Stu’s platoon had lost four men in three weeks – two to small arms fire during ambushes and two to IEDs. One man had been killed and three wounded, one of them losing both legs above the knees.

Stu – Sgt. Whitman or just sarge to his charges – was worried about his men.

“Hey you there, Sullivan, don’t bunch up. And keep focused,” Stu called to one of the kids in his squad, a recent replacement for one of the casualties. As a newcomer, he hadn’t yet learned the caution that came as second nature to the seasoned soldiers. His first firefight or IED, and he’d learn pretty quick, Stu reckoned. Unless Sullivan was the one who was hurt in the explosion, which would be learning the hard way – a lesson learned too late.

The casualty rate had gone up since the company commander had assigned Stu’s platoon an Afghan interpreter.

Mohamed Gul was on loan from the Afghan National Army but was a question mark for Stu. He was obsequious, which raised Stu’s suspicions. Like he had to show the American soldiers he was on their side and was not one of those who would do a green-on-blue attack. Stu was starting to think that the uptick in attacks and Mohammed Gul’s arrival with his unit was not a coincidence.

Mohamed Gul was in his 20s but, like many Afghans, looked older than his actual age. He was tall and skinny and Stu supposed that women would consider him handsome, with jet black hair, a smooth, olive complexion and a trim mustache. He was quick to follow orders, insisted on calling Stu “sir” and even made Stu tea. Just do your job – you don’t have to ingratiate yourself with me, was Stu’s point of view.

The morning chill had dissipated. It was pleasantly warm, that all-too-brief period between too cold and too hot. Insects created an audio carpet of whirring and buzzing. There was the damn interpreter, Mohamed Gul, talking quietly into his cell phone, beyond the 50-meter range of the jammer. Mohamed Gul had been using his phone before they were attacked the other day, hadn’t he? Stu thought so.

Stu waved his arm to get Mohamed Gul’s attention, made the sign of a phone signal with his thumb and pinky extended then drew his finger across his neck. Meaning, hang up the phone.

“What’s the haji think, this is a time to chat on the phone?” Stu said to the soldier trailing behind him. “Who’s he talking to anyway?”

“Fuck if I know sergeant,” said the soldier, Benson, a redneck from Alabama who had been with the unit since day one and who, to Stu’s satisfaction, had his shit together and didn’t need any looking after. “All I can say is he’s brought us bad luck. Or maybe luck’s got nothing to do with it.” 

“Roger that,” said the soldier behind Benson. There was a snip-snap sound as the soldier clicked the safety on his rifle on and off.

A few minutes later the platoon was on a muddy embankment above a flooded paddy. It was either walk there or slog through waist-deep water, where any number of land mines could be hidden. The farmer was using irrigation methods that dated back centuries if not millennia, Stu thought. The village they had just passed through was probably much the same as villages Genghis Khan had encountered on his way across Afghanistan.

Yet the newest technologies created by man were used on these battlefields. Pilotless drones armed with rockets spotted targets with high-def cameras that instantaneously transmitted images to an operator in Virginia who pressed a button and snuffed out lives, as easily as pushing a button on a vending machine in the lobby for a can of soda. Beheadings of hostages by al-Qaida were videotaped and put on the Internet for the world to see. Mankind’s most advanced technologies, devices that showed his brilliance and how far he had come since the times he lived in caves and dressed himself in animal skins, were being used for the basest purposes – killing and war.

Kirby was directly in front of Stu. He slung the heavy M240B over a shoulder. About 30 meters beyond, the LT was walking next to his RTO, Jenkins, who was relaying information to the command post over the radio.

The men were walking with easy strides, in a well-spaced formation. Armed to the teeth and ready for action. This was a good bunch of guys, Stu thought. I would fight and die for them. We’ve become as close-knit as a family. Closer even. But we’re kind of exposed out here in Indian Country. If we get into a scrape, the Taliban might be the ones who fire the first shot. But we’re ready to throw a lot back at them.

The thought had no sooner passed through Stu’s mind when Kirby’s head rocked violently to the right and his helmet flew off. The machine gun dropped off Kirby’s shoulder and the big man toppled like a felled tree off the embankment. As Kirby pitched over, Stu could see a bullet entry wound, dark and ugly, on the side of his head. The machine gunner hit the murky water with a splash. Stu heard the flat crack of a rifle shot come from the left. His brain automatically calculated the lapsed time between the bullet’s impact and the arrival of the sound of the gunshot – no more than two seconds. Maybe a second and a half. That meant the sniper was a good five or six hundred meters away.

As he dove for Kirby to pull him out of the water so he wouldn’t drown – if he was still alive, which Stu doubted – another bullet flew by, buzzing like an angry insect as it passed within inches of his head. A heavy projectile. Maybe from an ancient Lee-Enfield rifle. Maybe from a 7.62 mm Dragunov. A second and a half later came the crack of the rifle. By that time, Stu was over the berm and hooking his right hand through the back of Kirby’s IBA vest. Kirby was face down in the water. Stu flipped him over. Kirby’s dead pale face stared up vacantly at him. The eyes reminded Stu of a fish out of water, slightly glazed and unblinking. Stu pulled Kirby’s upper torso to the edge of the water so he wouldn’t sink. Keeping low, the sergeant scrambled up the slick embankment and grabbed Kirby’s M240B. Stu looked to his right. The lieutenant and his RTO were lying flat on the embankment, peering over the rim toward where the two shots had come from. Other soldiers were in the same position up and down the berm.

“How is he?” the LT shouted at Stu.­

“KIA,” Stu yelled back, not wanting to say “dead” for some reason. KIA bestowed a bit of honor, the notion of dying in battle. Dead was just dead. As he looked over at the lieutenant and Jenkins, he saw smoke emerge from a line of poplar trees some 70 meters behind them. The smoke became a plume that sped toward the two men. Stu could see the RPG at the head of the plume. He had no time to yell “Watch out!” or “Duck!” or any other kind of warning. Not that it would have done much good. Time became gummy, seconds stretching into minutes, hundredths of a second into whole seconds. Stu watched with horrified fascination as the RPG plowed into the water just short of the embankment and exploded, showering the LT and Jenkins with water. They appeared unhurt. Several assault rifles opened up from the poplars.

Goddamnit! The platoon had walked into a trap. It was either stay on this side of the embankment and be exposed to the gunfire from the trees or go to the other side and be picked off by the sniper.

Stu aimed Kirby’s machine gun at the grove and pulled the trigger. White bits of bark came flying off, high and to the left of some shadowy figures moving below the poplars. He adjusted his aim, spraying the insurgents with a cascade of bullets and temporarily suppressing their own fire. Other soldiers in the platoon opened up at the men in the trees.

Stu, his back to the embankment, Kirby lying dead next to him half in the water, kept firing the M240B from just above his hip, low into the trees about 100 meters away. He had just a few more 7.62mm rounds left in the machine gun.

He looked over to his right and spotted Mohamed Gul. The terp had found a place of relative safety, a bit of high ground away from the platoon above the water where two poplars grew. How is it that he wound up in such a protected place? Because the fucking haji knew this was going to happen. Again. And the Taliban were set up for this ambush. They fucking KNEW we’d be coming this way.

Sgt. Stuart Whitman looked up and down the berm. All the men were busy firing at the Taliban. Stu realized the events of the past week had been building to this moment, when the platoon had been caught in yet another ambush and was trying to pour enough suppressing fire into the trees to force the Taliban to break off the attack, with no one watching Mohamed Gul. This was Stu’s chance to save his men from being set up again. The time to act was now. Now or never. He might never get another opportunity like this.

Without giving it further thought, Stu, leaning back against the damp side of the berm, rested the barrel of the machine gun between his knees, put the sight on Mohamed Gul and fired three rounds into the Afghan. Mohamed Gul lurched backwards from the impacts and then fell over like a rag doll. Stu looked left then right. Everyone was still focused on the trees where the enemy was, except for the lieutenant’s radioman who was now flat on his back. The gunfire coming from the poplar grove had diminished substantially. The Taliban were leaving.

A medic named Abe scrambled over like a crab to look at Kirby.

“You’re right. KIA. Poor bastard,” Abe said before making his way over to the radio operator, keeping low so he didn’t create a silhouette against the sky and make an easier target. Stu admired a man like Abe. Unassuming, yet fiercely loyal to his brothers-in-arms. Numerous times he had exposed himself to enemy fire to work on a wounded soldier or drag him to safety if he could.

The lieutenant was applying pressure to his RTO’s shoulder. When Abe took over providing the first aid, the lieutenant, a West Virginia coal miner’s son who had been best in his class at high school and earned a spot at West Point, picked up the mike.

“Flash, flash, flash,” he said, breaking into all other radio chatter. He gave the platoon’s location and called for a dustoff Blackhawk and an Apache escort. Jenkins had caught a bullet in the shoulder.

Benson and another member of the platoon noticed Mohamed Gul slumped against the pair of trees. They waded through the water to get to him. The Taliban were gone. After the furious bursts of gunfire, Stu’s ears were ringing amid the silence.

He made sure there were eyes and rifles looking outward defensively, including over the berm where the first shot had come from, then sloshed through the thigh-deep water toward Mohamed Gul. The body was motionless.

“We have one wounded, bullet in shoulder, and one, no, two, KIA,” the LT barked into the radio as he watched one of the soldiers who had reached Mohamed Gul give a thumbs-down sign, indicating the Afghan was dead. ­

Mohamed Gul’s hand clutched a cell phone. Stu leaned over and slipped it from the dead man’s fingers and put it into a pouch dangling from his body armor.

Stu quickly reviewed the situation. The M240B fired the same type of bullet as an AK-47. If there was an autopsy, no NATO-standard rounds would be dug out of the body, which would raise questions.

Stu looked up. Benson was looking curiously at him, his eyes lingering. Then Benson looked away with a hint of a smile on his lips.

The next day, Stu sat in a campaign tent at battalion HQ. It was empty and he had some privacy. He settled into a canvas chair next to a draftsman’s table covered in maps. A Blackhawk outside started up, the rotor wash causing the maps to lift an inch off the table, then settle back down as the chopper moved off.

Stu held Mohamed Gul’s cell phone. It was flecked with dried mud and blood.

Who had Mohamed Gul been talking to before the ambush?

He pushed the button that showed the call log. The number of an incoming call appeared, with the logged time corresponding to minutes before the ambush. This was the call that the haji had been on when Stu had angrily signaled for him to hang up.

Stu pushed redial.

The phone rang several times. Stu was about to give up when a woman answered. Her voice was quavery. He thought he could hear women wailing in the background.

“Salaam alaikum,” Stu said, the traditional greeting for Muslims.

“And peace be upon you,” the woman replied, in English.

Stu was taken aback. He didn’t know what to say next.

“Are you from the Army,” the voice asked.

“Yes. This was our interpreter’s phone.”

“He was my husband.”

Stu realized that he had not even known that Mohamed Gul was married, much less to someone who spoke English. But since Mohamed Gul was an interpreter fluent in English, it wasn’t outlandish that his wife would speak English too.

“I am very sorry for your loss,” Stu heard himself say.

“You are calling to express condolences. Thank you. We are burying him today. I am still in shock. Just before those Taliban animals attacked your unit I was speaking with him on the mobile phone that you have in your hand now. He had it on vibrate, you know, so I would not disturb the soldiers when I called, or give away your position if you were hiding.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Yes. I had been worried sick about him being on patrol with you American soldiers. But he insisted on doing it. ‘How else will we rid Afghanistan of the scourge of the Taliban,’ he would say. They don’t let women work or go to school. They make us wear burkhas. My last words to Mohamed Gul before he hung up were ‘I pray to Allah that you and the Americans will be safe.’”

Stu felt the blood drain from his face. He felt as if someone had punched him in the gut. He broke out in a sweat. He was glad Mohamed Gul’s wife was talking to him over the phone and not in person. She would have seen his reaction.

“Are you there?” Stu heard her ask through a ringing that had suddenly returned in his ears.

“Yes ma’am.”

Stu said a few more words and then got off the call as quickly as he could.

A half hour after Stu began telling Pete the story, or was it an hour, there was silence again at the table in the diner. Stu’s skin felt prickly and hot. His mouth was dry. He reached for his cup and took a sip of coffee. It was cold. He looked up and the cook was there standing over him with a steaming pot of coffee.

“The waitress is gone, but don’t worry, I’ve got you covered,” the cook said. He had a slight accent. “Syrian-style hospitality.”

“I am Farah,” he said as he poured Stu a fresh cup.

“Thank you, Farah,” Stu said.

Farah retreated back to the counter.

“So the military puts you, and all the American soldiers, into a country where we’re not wanted,” Pete said. “Where you often can’t distinguish a civilian from your enemy, right?”

“Well, it’s not like all Afghans didn’t want us there. Lots of them didn’t like the Taliban, because they were so hardline and repressive.”

“OK, but there’s no way the U.S. military can capture or kill every single person they don’t agree with, so it’s not like we can win the war. We can just keep them at bay, and maybe only for so long. The United States can’t keep its forces in Afghanistan forever.”

“OK, let’s say for the sake of argument we should pull out of Afghanistan. But in my particular case, I tried, convicted and executed an innocent man.”

“What about the other calls on the interpreter’s cell phone? Were any of them suspicious? Did you check them out?”

“I did. Most of the calls were to and from his own commanders in the Afghan army. The calls all checked out. He wasn’t talking to the jihadis.”

Stu had deliberately shot Mohamed Gul. But was he guilty of murder? Pete tried to put himself in Stu’s boots, in a remote part of Afghanistan, facing the threat of death every day and the need to keep his soldiers safe. From the safety of a diner in Prineville, Oregon, Pete knew it was impossible to second-guess Stu’s actions. Despite Pete’s opposition to the war in Afghanistan, he could sympathize with the situation the sergeant had been thrust into. Stu was now looking at Pete with unwavering gray eyes. Pete cleared his throat.

“You can’t blame yourself,” Pete said. “This is what our military is for.  We take young men, give them the ability to kill and tell them who to kill. We make high school kids into judge, jury, and executioner, with only training in the execution part.  It’s not like anyone takes the time to explain to you and your platoon about Islam, about Afghan history, about the complicated ethnic interactions that guide the conflict. The Pashtuns, the Hazaras, the Uzbeks. Their power struggles. Their hatreds. The guys who sent you there don’t think any differently of you – or of Afghans – than some numbers in a spreadsheet. They dehumanize the people in Iraq and Afghanistan. They dehumanize you, the soldiers, and turn you into killing machines. Then when the job’s done, you’re sent home with no support to turn you into normal human beings again. Sayonara, and here’s a ribbon for your service. You shouldn’t blame yourself for what you did in that situation. You should blame the American government for putting you in that situation.” 

“Yes, but Mohammed Gul was innocent.”

“You made a mistake,” Pete went on, feeling a bit like a priest at a confessional, but he found himself speaking from the heart, and he wanted to help lift some of the burden from this man. “I hope that you can resolve with yourself that you are not perfect. None of us is perfect.”

Stu’s eyes misted over. He quickly blinked the tears away.

“Thank you,” Stu said. “I’ll see you around. I appreciate you listening.”

He took out his wallet and put some money on the table. He walked out of the restaurant, his conscience, possibly, just a little bit lighter.

Pete walked out of the clean, well-lighted diner and down empty sidewalks to his motel, looking forward to zoning out in front of the TV before falling asleep. A sign on the bank helped light his way, going dark as it alternated between the time and the temperature:  28 degrees. A few snowflakes drifted lazily down.

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From Cowboy Jihad, by Andrew Selsky
Full novel is here https://www.amazon.com/Cowboy-Jihad-Andrew-Selsky-ebook/dp/B01K6MLK00/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Cowboy+Jihad&qid=1572019720&sr=8-1