Hella Nation - Evan Wright [14]
Murphy explains to the translator, Mohammed Abdullah, that they don’t want to go into the village. “Of course, sir,” Abdullah says, gazing at the village with a serene smile. He is a pudgy man, about twenty-five, with a fidgety gap-toothed smile. He’s unfailingly polite and always appears eager to please the Americans. But like other ATF translators, he often seems not to listen to what the Americans are saying. “I will take you into the village, sir.”
Murphy and Ludweg reluctantly follow. Weighted down with about sixty pounds of body armor, ammo and weaponry apiece, their boots whoof up knee-high clouds of dust with each step. Beneath the Americans’ helmets, sweat pours down their faces. In the extreme heat, fair-haired Americans develop a strange complexion. Their skin burns red in blotches, but underneath it develops a sickly white pallor, especially on Ludweg. He hangs back, fuming. All the color has drained from his face, except for his nose, which is bright red, almost blinking like a clown’s.
By now, children are streaming out of spider holes in the buildings and walls. About twenty boys and a couple of girls, with fly-covered smiles, approach the Americans with their hands out, chanting “Kalam!” which means “pen,” and begging for candy, even cigarettes. Basic items such as pens are novelties in many poverty-stricken Afghan villages.
After a few minutes, two men emerge from the village, followed by a young girl missing most of her hair. She has an oozing, red sore across the bald portion of her scalp. Murphy gives the men about ten dollars’ worth of iodine solution and gauze, and explains how to use it. The two villagers shake his hand, then touch their hands to their hearts, a traditional Afghan show of affection.
Up by the Humvees, a small riot has broken out among children who surround it. Swinehart and Farrar stand in their turrets, hands on their machine guns, faces bright red and sweating. Theirs may not look like the most interesting job in the world, but in moments like this, you realize that holding a finger on the trigger of a machine gun in an alien village half a world away is a fairly profound responsibility. The weightiest challenge faced by the average college student their age is usually on the order of figuring out whether he’ll get laid more or less if he goes vegan.
Quast orders Swinehart to throw a plastic water bottle to the side of the vehicle to draw the kids away. As soon as he throws it, two boys, each about nine, race over, and both grab it, then start beating the shit out of each other. A man in a black turban, once the Taliban uniform, approaches out of nowhere. He has a scythe slung over his shoulder, with an enormous blade sticking out. Murphy, Abdullah and Ludweg walk up just as the man in the turban comes their way. Ludweg, nose beating red, drops his M-203 on the guy and stands back. The man in black cuts to the side of the Humvee where the boys are fighting and whacks both of them in the side of the head with his open hands.
It is late in the afternoon when the patrol returns to the Wolf Pack compound inside the ATF fort. D’Angelo calls them together for debriefing. Water bottles chill on a giant block of ice in a plastic chest. The ATF guys control an ice machine in Kandahar and trade the U.S. soldiers blocks in exchange for copies of skin magazines.
“Swinehart, what did you learn on your first patrol?” D’Angelo asks.
“I never seen a camel before, sir.”
“What else did you learn?”
“Them kids fighting over a bottle of water. I never seen anything like that. I’ll never forget that.” He shakes his head, grinning. “I saw another kid; he put his fingers over his mouth like he wanted a cigarette. Kid couldn’t have been more than six years old. And already smoking cigarettes?”
Farrar cuts in, saying to Swinehart, “Over here, six years is already like a third of a person’s life span. It makes sense to start smoking at that age.”
THE MEN IN THE PLATOON, like most other American soldiers, are in the almost unreal position