Hella Nation - Evan Wright [12]
Swinehart sweats it a moment, squeezing his eyes shut in deep thought, then answers: “Everyone exits through the hatch, sir?”
“Very good, Swinehart,” D’Angelo says. Swinehart’s ability to quickly adapt to conditions in Afghanistan proves one of D’Angelo’s pet theories about young soldiers: It’s easier to train the ones who don’t have a lot of education. “See,” D’Angelo explains as the men start getting into the trucks, “if you took a nineteen-year-old philosophy major in college and gave him Swinehart’s job, that guy wouldn’t know what to do. We put Swinehart on top of the truck with a machine gun in his hands and drive him into a village where people have their own personal weapons—shotguns, AKs—and they start waving them around.” D’Angelo spits a long stream of black Copenhagen juice into the dust. “What do you do if you’re Swinehart? We have very simple rules: You don’t shoot unless he aims a weapon at you. I trust a guy like Swinehart to follow the rules. If you put that machine gun in the hands of a nineteen-year-old philosophy major, he might think too much. We don’t want that. In the Army, everything is decided for you. Just follow the rules.”
SERGEANT QUAST, the thirty-four-year-old platoon staff sergeant, leads the initial patrol of the day from the first Humvee. A second Humvee follows about seventy-five yards behind. The basic crew of each consists of the driver, the turret gunner and the TC (truck commander), who also operates the radio. The patrols also include an ATF translator and a medic. For several days the soldiers have been excited about the prospect of driving new “up-armored” Humvees recently shipped in from the States. Until now, patrols were conducted in conventional thin-skin vehicles providing little protection against land mines. The new Humvees are fitted with 3,500 pounds of armor protection. But it’s not the safety features that have the men talking; it’s the fact that these new vehicles are rumored to have air-conditioning. All morning, Ramos has been repeating, “Dude, we’re gonna be cruising in the up-armors with the AC on full, windows all up and shit.”
The AC unit blasts with the noise and ferocity of a leaf blower, but hot air and dust pour in as usual through the open roof hatch where the gunner stands. The added armor interferes with the global-positioning-navigation unit, called a Plugger. The TCs now have to hold the Plugger about two feet out the window for it to operate.
There are other problems. The secure radios mounted in the Humvees cease to work once they get a few miles into the desert. So in order to communicate with one another, the soldiers ask friends and relatives to send seventy-dollar Motorola walkie-talkies you can buy at any Wal-Mart in the States. “The Army issues us its own walkabouts,” says Quast. “But they don’t work worth shit.”
One of the ATF translators has told the soldiers that there is a McDonald’s in downtown Kandahar. It’s nothing but a cruel joke, but since no one in the Fifth Platoon has ever seen Kandahar—a war-torn city of medieval bazaars and dirt roads clogged with donkeys and chickens—they have no reason to disbelieve the report. “What we ought to do,” says Quast, straining to see the trail ahead through the vehicle’s two-inch-thick armor windows, “is send one of the ATF guys into Kandahar and do a run on the McDonald’s.”
He shouts up to the turret. “You hear that, Swinehart?”
Swinehart leans down, hands still on the machine gun. “Yeah!” he shouts. “Get me Supersize everything!”
The desert is littered with the silver hulls of Russian fighter planes, wrecked tanks and missile trucks. Mosques, old Soviet barracks and schools lie in ruins everywhere. You can tell who blew up what by the style of destruction. Russian and warring Afghans flatten structures and whole villages through massive artillery and aerial bombardment. Buildings hit by the U.S. Air Force tend to have one neat blast down the center, leaving the four corners standing.
The destination for Quast’s patrol is the village of Mowmand, about seven miles up a dry riverbed. Homes