Hella Nation - Evan Wright [9]
As they prepare for their patrol, Farrar and a couple of the other gunners stand on top of two Humvees to mount machine guns in the turrets. Lieutenant Donate D’Angelo, Jr., a twenty-six-year-old from Ramsey, New Jersey, leans on some sandbags outside, studying a plastic-encased patrol map.
The first thing you notice about D’Angelo, the platoon leader of Five Delta, is his physical power. He is about five-feet-eleven and weighs 195 pounds, with much of that weight carried in his shoulders and massive biceps. A week ago, he set a regimental record in Kandahar for his weight class by bench-pressing 325 pounds. D’Angelo played soccer at West Point, boxed for three years and completed Army Ranger school, during which he survived a lightning strike that killed the man next to him.
“Today,” he says, “we will drive through some minefields and drink tea with village elders.” He looks up with a sort of grin or snarl. It’s tough to tell. D’Angelo is the son of Italian immigrants. “I’m like the black sheep of the family for being in the Army,” he says. “My brother’s twenty-three. He’s a bond trader in Manhattan, making a hundred and twenty thousand a year, and I’m making thirty-five thousand living in a tent in Afghanistan with fourteen other guys.”
“Step aside, sir!” a soldier shouts. “Dust devil coming.” From across the parking lot, a brown cyclone whips up from behind a row of porta-johns; D’Angelo steps back five paces while the funnel slips by. “You get used to the dust here after a while,” he says. Most afternoons, forty-mile-an-hour winds kick up dust storms that blow into the airfield like a thick fog, reducing visibility to a few yards.
“Do people at home still care about the job we’re doing over here?” D’Angelo asks. He speaks softly, but emphasizes every syllable, as if laboring to make himself absolutely clear, just in case you happen to be a dumb fuck. “Are they still patriotic and all that, or have they forgotten about us?”
D’Angelo spits a thick stream of brown juice and adds, “You know, I took it kind of personally when the Towers fell. That was my backyard. To say I wanted to put my life on the line for America is too abstract. I came to Afghanistan to protect my mother, my sister and my little brother.”
THERE ARE ABOUT FOUR THOUSAND SOLDIERS based at Kandahar Airfield, as well as an additional one thousand coalition soldiers, most of them Canadian. The three-square-mile encampment at the base, seized from Taliban control last year, is the one piece of land in southeastern Afghanistan the United States controls absolutely. The barbed-wire perimeter is heavily fortified with machine-gun nests, bunkers and guard towers. Of all the personnel stationed here, less than a thousand are actual infantry soldiers. The rest serve various support roles—truck drivers, computer technicians, inventory accountants—and this is the only Afghan soil they will ever set foot on.
In the six months since the Americans took over, Kandahar Airfield has gone from a mine-strewn ruin to a makeshift thriving city. Life inside the wire has its own peculiar rhythms. Americans at the camp inhabit their own time zone—the Pentagon’s worldwide standard, known as Zulu Time, which here is four and a half hours behind local time, meaning that dawn breaks at about 0030, or just past midnight.
At this hour, the bombs usually start going off as part of the work done by the ordnance-removal teams, and you begin to see early-morning fitness nuts jogging, toting grenade launchers and pistols—everyone is required to carry their weapons at all times. By 0400 Zulu, the local Afghan workers show up, including a team of former mercenaries supplied by the local war-lord, who tend the old rose garden outside the terminal while armed guards keep a watchful eye, lest one decides to hide a bomb in the bushes. All day long,