Chapter 1
I’ve been thinking a lot about morality lately. I wonder whether or not a man can be truly moral in war. At the end of these thoughts, becoming alive in the first moments of my death, I’m wondering if my moral absence in war has made me a good man, or if my lack of choice has made me an immoral one. Though my actions have been noticeably absent of adoptable conclusions, and I cannot reference a single moment in the course of my story that convinces me I’ve made some progress in the human endeavor, a sole instance that proves me a good man, I have been thinking about it, the question of morality, or at least I’ve been trying to. I feel better about trying to.
“Sergeant Olsen, you will drop that fucking weapon or so help me god, I will bring hellfire down upon you! I will ensure that you never receive forgiveness for your disgraces!”
There exists on these barren plains a true serenity that I’m ashamed to admit I never found. The beauty was as foreign to me as I was to this country and, save for a few inconsequential lamentations about the heat, I would be remiss to admit I ever made the effort to see it. Failing to notice the heat, however, an intense but not formally acknowledged abeyant to the beauty, was impossible. Moments of mind-altering hotness forced your hand, demanded action, created and destroyed illusions of choice to which only a fraud or spiritual sycophant claimed to know the answer, and only in acknowledgement did you find the salvation quietly offered you by the plains of this country.
Right now, I was unspeakably hot, and I was holding a rifle to my chaplain.
“A Chaplain, goddamn it! In the United States Army! I talk to god, SGT Olsen! To god!”
The possibility exists now, as I survey this picture-postcard wasteland looking for a means to escape, that I am more than likely looking for a place to confront scattered thoughts of war and morality. I claim no spirituality, and I realize that solely acknowledging the severity of a situation is not in itself salvation. I am simply looking for a place to make a choice. Since coming to Afghanistan as a member of a violently occupying foreign body, I’ve partitioned thoughts of war and morality in my mind, forbidding the accompanying ideology of one to muddle the other, and in doing so, forced these conflicting thoughts to explore other regions of my anima, mental caverns not yet traveled, searching for a quiet place to meet and beat the shit out of each other, somewhere that my conscience could not interfere, not even act as referee, mitigating arguments amongst lost thoughts to which I passed and said hi when thinking of other things but never confronted, never stood my ground and asked, “Why in the fuck do you two lie to each other so much? Why do you even exist?” Though I’ve waited until now to ask myself these most obvious of queries, I fear they have been far too saturated with uncertainty to be effectively answered. I instead realize these should not be a man’s last thoughts. I find comfort in blaming the effort on various nightmares and the many waking, illogical actions that stemmed from them. I just couldn’t get a handle on those nightmares.
“Private Johnson, subdue SGT Olsen immediately!”
I didn’t flinch. “You take one step closer and I’m popping this motherfucker.” And I meant it, finally. The conviction burned through the uncaring gaze I shot at Johnson as I kept my rifle steady on the Chaplain. Bullets screeched by not more than a foot above our heads. Some slammed into the armored vehicle we stood behind, creating a metallic drumbeat that almost sounded melodically orchestrated if you listened to it just right. My heart pounded in symphony to the bullets’ violent rhythm and I could see in the eyes of the Chaplain and the dozen infantrymen divided and covered behind the two other armored vehicles parked on both side of us that they were as amused by my circumstances as I was. Some of the soldiers returned fire to our unnumbered enemy, but most observed intently the odd situation unfolding before them. It was not often that a man could point a weapon at one of the many mouthpieces of god and in doing so attain spiritual sanctuary, though I doubt they considered the matter as deeply. More than likely, the blatant insubordination I presented to a military officer had surpassed their concept of right and wrong. They just couldn’t grasp the reasoning behind my actions. Neither could I, but I felt motivated by newly realized clarity, and I knew that if I surrendered it, if I yielded it to this false-prophet by lowering my rifle, that I would, in fact, be damned forever.
Being this close to truth was calming. I took a breath and surveyed my surroundings. At first-look, any man might have the air crushed from his lungs by Afghanistan’s unrefined splendor. Snow-capped mountains circled the valley and I stood still, allowing them to study my actions from about a mile in all directions and silently discuss the yet to be determined outcome of my ill-constructed escape plan. In my stillness, I thought: those mountains have killed men for years, from Alexander’s army to the hordes of Khan, British colonizers and scores of Mujahadin, the mountains had probably destroyed more soldiers than one man could know, and had killed even more with effortless, indiscriminate tranquility. I’ll remember those mountains when I die.
At south lies the pot-holed road we rode in on, surrounded fully by a golden and sparsely grassed desert, capable of sustaining only the fiercest of living creatures. To the north, maybe forty miles off, was Kabul, a truly magnificent city that retained half its majesty by imagining how it used to look before being reduced to rubble by years of tribal infighting. It is a city inhabited by ghosts and children, where a leaden god once sped through the streets in the back of wide-bed pickup trucks, carrying automatic rifles and pouring fiery wrath upon dissenters and unbelievers. Over the hill to the east, about ten meters from our disabled vehicle, stood a hill, of whose steepness I could not judge, and behind the hill lied our leaden gods, firing upon us with laughable inaccuracy.
Granted, I credit them for at least attempting to conduct the ambush with a semblance of tactical proficiency by initiating the whole thing with an improvised explosive device, of which disabled the front end of our center vehicle, causing it to flip on its side and thus halting our convoy; but be damned if those idiots could follow through with a single bullet that mattered, one that would attract the attention of every infantryman, and Johnson, and thus focus their eyes back to the battle and away from my schemes. Though bleeding and disoriented as a result of being thrown from the vehicle during the explosion, and also secretly grateful for the ensuing confusion that has abetted my potential escape, I was forced to concede these attackers firing upon us were not the same warriors that had expelled a Soviet occupier from their holy land and in the process, triggered a cataclysmic decline of an entire empire. The ambushers were not those men, but rather misguided products of a dusty, one-room madrassa and the misinterpreted words of an unconfirmed omnipotence.
“This is immoral, SGT Olsen! This is not how a soldier conducts himself in war!
I never conscientiously felt the need recognize that war and morality would always be at odds; I just knew it. My moral ineptitude arose from an innate feeling that I was somehow guilty of incinerating the sacrosanct home of a historically prostituted people. Of course I knew I didn’t start that fire, but I did nothing to extinguish it either. I spent so much time feeling numb, choosing to remain neutral to the choices with which I was presented, that I never once made a moral decision. I never believed in the inherent good of man, and I never once thought of myself as good. Through all the guns, the interrogations, the child molesting…I never stopped to question my motives, nor the motives of the men whom I served and failed. But then again, maybe I never needed to; my catharsis could come as a result of the choice I was about to make.
I grabbed a grenade lying on the ground. The barrel of the rifle remained fixed on the Chaplain.
“OLSEN!”
My hand brought the grenade to my mouth, and I clenched my teeth on the pin, pulling away with loose grip. The spoon dropped.
“JOHNSON! SHOOT HIM!”
The serenity of the mountains overtook me. I closed my eyes and threw the bomb in the direction of the hill. My brain screamed,
Five.
I opened my eyes and thought the most horrible thought about the Chaplain I could possibly think. I thought about seeing him in another place after this ordeal.
Four.
The rifle fell from my hands and I turned aggressively, as fast the fog of war would allow me. This was not a dream, my movement was not restricted by the prohibiting ether that flooded my dreams, and I could run, so I did, exposing myself to enemy, charging with my head down as quickly toward the enemy hill as my boots would take me.
Three.
I felt the impact of wide-eyed stares and gaped mouths beat at my back. The chaplain yelled something inaudible, probably unimportant.
Two.
The bullets continued, calling to me from both directions. The enemy was indefinable at this point; a man cannot stand in the middle of a battlefield and expect to be embraced by either side. I ran past the grenade. It had embedded itself in the sand at the bottom of the hill. Looking at it, I hoped the mental count I kept was correct. Rifle fire had kept the attackers’ heads down and I was fairly certain they had not yet seen my advance. I trudged uphill, digging my fingers into its dry face and hoping to find redemption at its apex.
One. One.
The last number came with a bullet. The feeling is hard to describe. The round struck me in the shoulder, the back side, just above my armpit. The muscle constricted sharply and my entire body ceded to the reflex enacted by my body’s natural defenses, almost as if my shoulder had been jabbed by a needle. I experienced the heat next. An unquenchable fire burned with prolonged instance inside my body. The heat was so strong that I did not immediately notice the second round enter my left calf until I fell, tumbling headfirst down the hill past several confused Afghanis, some of whom opened fire upon me as I rolled down the hill. Despite the proximity, the attackers held firm to my stereotype, and their fire did not strike me. So I was able to roll, and I did.
The explosion sent metal fragments in many directions. I received none, only the accompanying high-pitched ringing my ears caused by the shattering boom. While the attackers kept their heads down, a storm of dirt and smoke engulfing them, I kept rolling. The hill was so high, much more so then the view from the other side revealed. With every spin, I saw a new face, a different Afghan man to watch me fall. His entire life was revealed to me through his unique, indifferent visage, a bland response to the encompassing violence that paraphrased his twenty-some years of life on these plains. I received understanding in my descent.
Finally, a cliff, not a particularly steep one, but angled and deep enough to steal my consciousness.
*
On my first visit to Kabul, I heard an especially pleasing tale from a haggard-handed widow clad in a light-blue burka, the wardrobe of Afghani women during the reign of the Taliban. The burka was little more than a table-cloth with veiled net-meshing where the eyes were located. It covered the female figure from head-to-toe and made women appear as if they should be chasing Pac man around a fruit-filled game board.
Females found to be without the burka while outside were executed without question, as was done to the storyteller’s daughter nearly three years ago. As regaled to me by the widow, her daughter Miriam was arrested while buying bread. The widow had not asked Miriam to wear the burka. Her opinion, one of the few she could afford at the time, was that Miriam was too young to be considered a threat to the male sexuality.
Miriam was seized and placed in jail. There, she languished in unknown squalor for nearly a month before being taken to the soccer stadium to be publicly executed. The widow watched from upper-level stadium seating as her daughter, now wearing a burka, took an AK-47 round to the back of the head at pointblank range. From the mouth of a black-robed man carrying a bullhorn, the widow heard it announced that her daughter was killed for defying the word of god by tempting the faithful with her body. Miriam was seven years old. And, at the end of my fall, she stood above me. She covered her eyes from the sun with one arm and offered me her other.
