Hella Nation - Evan Wright [11]
The Fifth Platoon’s only glimpse into the horrors of war occurred early on the morning of April 18, when they pulled guard on the gunnery range—“Osama House”—after four Canadian soldiers, serving as part of the U.S.-led coalition, were killed in a friendly-fire accident. It happened at about midnight when an overzealous American F-16 pilot dropped a five-hundred-pound bomb on the Canadians, mistaking their gunnery practice for hostile fire. “I saw a torso,” says Farrar, who spent a whole day with the platoon guarding the accident site. “That was enough.”
Farrar, fair-haired and a lanky six-feet-one, moves with a slowness that’s both lazy and deliberate, and says he joined the Army to get money for college. “I never thought there was going to be a war,” he says. “There were guys at Fort Campbell who squirmed out before we deployed—like a kid who developed ‘dizzy spells.’ I thought of doing that, but fuck it.” Farrar holds an unusual position in the platoon. His superiors consider him one of the platoon’s best soldiers, but he is also the lowest-ranked. About a week after he arrived, he was busted down two ranks to buck private when an infraction he’d committed back at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, caught up with him. Farrar is sketchy about the details but allows it had something to do with a urine test. (Bad luck seems to dog Farrar. On a recent mail call, while his buddies opened letters and boxes of cookies from home, Farrar received a parking ticket. “This girl didn’t write me for three weeks,” he says. “I told her to pack her shit and get the fuck out of my house. Now she’s got my car.”)
AT ABOUT 0600, the platoon strap on about sixty pounds of protective gear and equipment apiece and climb into three Humvees. They drive out the front gate of the American camp and go less than a mile, to a former Taliban command post surrounded by fourteen-foot-high mud-brick walls, which belongs to America’s ally in Kandahar, an army known as the Anti-Taliban Forces (ATF).
The Fifth Platoon stay here for days at a time while running patrols, sleeping in heat-up Marine Corps pup tents in a dusty field opposite the ATF command post. After pulling into the fort, the men scramble out of the Humvees and make for the tents, each racing to find the one with the fewest rips and, ideally, zippers that work. You would think staying in the fort would be a hardship duty, but spirits are high. Specialist Armando Ramos, a twenty-year-old from Bakersfield, California, who has a three-year-old daughter back home, says, “Dude, this is the only place where we have the privacy to jack off.”
Farrar groans, “I am so sick of beating off.” Ramos adds, “I see a stick figure of a naked chick someone drew in the latrines, and I’m ready to go.”
Before the first patrol, D’Angelo assembles the men for a briefing held beneath a parachute strung up in a corner of the walled fortress for shade. Once they sit down, D’Angelo turns to the new guy, Private Jason Swinehart, a nineteen-year-old former high school football player from Ohio who arrived in Afghanistan only five days ago, his bag packed with George Strait and Kenny Chesney CDs.
“Private Swinehart, where are we?”
Swinehart looks around, grins, turns red. “I don’t know, sir.”
“We are outside the wire,” D’Angelo says in his most patient, speaking-to-a-dumb-fuck voice. The Kandahar desert is basically one vast, unmarked minefield. Three ATF soldiers were killed several weeks earlier when their Toyota pickup hit a mine less than a mile from the ATF fort. Two more died in a mine blast just beyond the perimeter of the air base. The American and coalition soldiers have been luckier. In April, a Canadian patrol hit a mine, but they were in an armored vehicle and no one was hurt. D’Angelo turns to Swinehart again. “What do the occupants of the lead vehicle do if they hit a mine?