• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1398 0

care packages. The resourceful lieutenant, whose father served a stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in the southern African country of Lesotho before driving a Volkswagen Beetle from that landlocked country to Afghanistan in the late sixties, also noted that he had a surplus of money distributed to him from Task Force Devil for “base improvements.” Well, he figured, improving the girls’ school is a clear improvement of the base. The request for donations spread like wildfire back home. Churches held fund-raisers, businessmen friends of Bartels’s father kicked in, even the National Football League ponied up some supplies. The Big Windys had to make extra trips in mid-June to handle the influx. By late June, through combining the “base improvement” funds with donations from home, Bartels had five hundred schoolgirls’ uniforms crafted locally, paying five thousand dollars for their manufacture. The students proudly showed up at the school in brand-new outfits, carrying their brand-new school supplies in brand-new backpacks that sported such team logos as the Steelers, Jets, and Broncos. It was an almost tearful sight to behold for the Marines.

One of Bartels’s most important assets in his campaign to improve the lives of the locals of the Pech region arrived one rainy June afternoon in the front seat of a white, slumped-suspension Toyota Corolla. To glean information about anticoalition militia weapons caches in the region, Bartels had been working with a local elder named Nawab (who had proven to be instrumental in bringing in Najmudeen during 3/3’s tour, and with whom Bartels and the Blessing Marines would continue to work to outwit the area’s bad guys during ⅔’s deployment). “This is pretty shady stuff,” he told his small security element before meeting an information source brought in by Nawab. “I’m gonna be carrying just my Nine [Berretta M9 9 mm handgun], that’s it. No helmet, no flak. I’m gonna have to get into the small car with this guy, his driver, and the source’s terp, and if the car takes off, light up its tires with the 240 and the SAW. If somethin’ happens to me—if I’m killed—light the entire car up. If things go bad and I make it outta the car, light it up on my mark,” Bartels coolly instructed his M240G light machine gunner and his squad automatic-weapon gunner, punctuating his order with a wry grin. He also had Ronin for support, with Keith on the M40 sniper rifle, prepositioned to take out individuals inside the car if things went south. Nervous, but never showing it, he sprinted through the pounding monsoon rain and hopped in the backseat next to his contact. As if the shutting door were his cue, the man sitting in front of the lieutenant spun around, and with a wide, toothy, and gummy smile, exclaimed, “Hello! I am Sultan! I am the interpreter!”

“Your English—it’s perfect!” Bartels responded, stunned.

“Yes, that is right!” the hoarse-voiced man stated, sporting an ear-to-ear grin below a shock of jet-black hair. Bartels, who had been suspicious of two of the five terps attached to the base whom he felt to be corrupt, had been on the lookout for new translators, ones without recent ties to Pech region (Matt figured outsiders were less susceptible to nepotism-inspired corruption).

“What’s your story? Where you from?” The lieutenant fired off questions to Sultan, ignoring the man sitting next to him—the one he’d arranged the potentially dangerous rendezvous in order to meet. Bartels learned that Sultan grew up in Asadabad during the seventies and eighties; but he, like many of the Kunar, fled to Pakistan during the height of the Soviet occupation.

“My brother, when I was seven, was executed. Right there!” He pointed toward the building that housed Camp Blessing’s Afghan Security Forces contingent.

“Huh? Right . . . there?” Bartels gestured toward the building. “Inside the camp perimeter?”

“Yes! The schoolhouse. The Russians tortured and then shot my brother in the head!” Sultan emotionally responded, his voice beginning to quiver. He explained that for years, he and his family had survived a number of