The Fifth Man On A Four-Man Observation Post

I've told this out loud twice. Once to a VA counsellor who wrote something down and then didn't bring it up again, which I appreciated more than I can say, and once to my brother-in-law at a barbecue in 2011, which was a mistake, because he's the kind of man who says "no way" forty times while you're talking and then tells the story back to you wrong at Christmas.

So this is the third time, and it's in writing, which means I have to be careful, because in writing you can't do the thing with your hands where you show how big something was and everybody nods.

Here's what I want to say up front. I have four explanations for what happened on that hill, and three of them are boring, and I believe all four at the same time depending on the hour of the day. I'm not selling anything. I don't do the podcasts. When guys from the platoon find me on Facebook I answer once and then let it go quiet, because I've noticed that the ones who want to talk about it a lot are not doing great, and I include myself in that when I'm being honest.

But somebody should write it down while all four of us are still around to argue about it, and Bell's not doing well, so it's me.

I was twenty-two and I was a specialist and I was not good at my job. I want that on the record because most of these things you read, the guy telling it was apparently some kind of operator. I wasn't. I was an eleven-bravo with a knee that clicked and a habit of losing gloves. I got sent to that valley in October and I did not want to be there, and if you'd offered me a way home that involved losing a finger I would have thought about it for longer than you'd like.

The place I'm talking about was an observation post above a combat outpost in the northeast of Afghanistan. I'm being vague about the exact location on purpose and I'll tell you why: there are maybe sixty guys who cycled through that OP and about eight of them would recognise it from the details, and I'd rather they read this and know it's me than have somebody's cousin turn it into a video with sad piano music. The valley ran roughly north-south, the river was on the west side, the road was garbage, and the whole thing was overlooked by high ground that we did not own and could not own with the number of people we had.

The OP was a scrape on a shoulder of the ridge at somewhere over eight thousand feet. It had been built by the unit before the unit before us, and it showed. Two fighting positions with sandbag walls that had gone soft and were more like sandbag suggestions. A B-hut that was really a plywood shed with a stove in it and one small window that had been shot out and replaced with a piece of Plexiglas that had gone yellow. A generator we called the Widow because it ran fine for three weeks and then quit for no reason at the worst moment, like a bad marriage. A satellite antenna. A burn barrel. A gravity-fed water arrangement involving a bladder that we filled by hand from a resupply, because the spring was down the hill and down the hill was where you got shot.

We rotated up there four at a time for a week and then came down. It was a hated posting for the first two days and then a beloved one, because nobody up there made you shave, and the first sergeant did not climb.

The work was mostly watching. You sat in a position with glass and you looked at the same six hundred metres of hillside for four hours and you wrote down anything that moved, and almost nothing moved, and the things that did move were goats and the men who owned the goats. Twice a week something would happen — a burst from across the valley that hit nothing, a pop and a bang somewhere below that turned out to be an IED that had done its work on a culvert instead of a truck — and then the radio would get busy for twenty minutes and then it would be goats again. I have never been so bored and so alert at the same time, and I've never managed to explain that combination to a civilian.

The other thing you did up there was maintain. Everything on that hill was corroding or freezing or filling with dust, in that order, depending on the season. You cleaned weapons twice a day because Bell said so. You checked the sandbags. You burned what needed burning, which included, I'm sorry to say, everything, because that's how it was done then and half of us have a paper from the VA about it now. You wrote letters and then didn't send them because the mail was a joke. You had a running argument about something stupid that lasted the whole week; ours that week was about whether a bear could beat a gorilla, and it was still unresolved when Bell went down, and it stayed unresolved forever, which feels about right.

The four of us that week were Bell, Kowalczyk, Fuentes, and me.

Bell was our team leader, a staff sergeant, from a small town in Michigan, thirty-one, married with a kid he had seen for eleven days. He was the most competent man I have ever worked for and he was also a complete pain in the ass about weapons maintenance in a way that I now understand was love. He had a laminated photo of his daughter that he did not show people, he just had it, and once when the mail brought nothing for three weeks he sat with it in his hand for an hour and nobody said a word.

Kowalczyk we called Ski, which is not creative but nothing about us was. He was nineteen. He was from Chicago and he had opinions about pizza which he shared unprompted. He carried the SAW and complained about carrying the SAW and would not let anybody else carry the SAW.

Fuentes was the medic, and he was on loan to us that week because our regular guy had a stomach thing that turned out later to be a real problem. Fuentes was twenty-four and quiet and he read paperbacks with the covers torn off. He'd been up there twice before. He was the only one of us who had brought a proper sleeping bag rather than the poncho liner arrangement most of us were doing because we were young and stupid and thought cold was a personality flaw.

And me. Radio, mostly. Whatever else needed doing.

We went up on a Sunday. I know it was a Sunday because Ski was annoyed about missing a game he wasn't going to be able to watch anyway.

The weather turned on the Tuesday.

I want to explain what that means in that particular geography, because people hear snow and they think of a bad drive to work. Up there the weather did not arrive so much as get delivered. The valley would be clear and grey in the morning and then a cloud would come up it like something poured, and it would go from four miles of visibility to forty feet in under an hour, and it would stay for a day. That was normal. That happened weekly. We had all seen it and we all knew that when it did the birds didn't fly, which was fine, because there was nothing on that hill that needed a bird more than once a week.

What was not normal was that it started and did not stop.

By Wednesday morning we had maybe eight inches on the ground and it was still coming, and the wind had picked up and was doing the thing where it comes up the draw and hits the shoulder and goes around both sides, so the snow was arriving sideways from two directions at once and building drifts in strange places. By Wednesday night we had a drift against the north wall of the B-hut higher than my hip.

We were not worried. I want to be clear about that too, because people expect the fear to start early and it doesn't. Wednesday night was actually a good night. We had a stove and the generator was behaving and Ski made a thing he called goulash which was two bags of chilli mac, a beef ravioli, and eleven packets of hot sauce, and we ate it out of the pot with plastic spoons and Bell told us about a dog he'd had that could open the fridge. There's a picture in my head of Fuentes laughing with his head back and his boots off, and that's the last clean memory I have from that week.

Thursday was when the radio conversation changed.

I checked in on the hour, every hour, as you do. Thursday's check-ins started including the phrase "no lift" and then "no lift, next window tomorrow zero eight" and then, around noon, the S-3 shop telling us that a valley on the other side of the ridge had a vehicle over and everything with rotors was going there.

We had food. That wasn't the problem. Any OP has more MREs than it wants because nobody eats the ones with the omelette. What we had less of was fuel for the stove, and water, because the bladder was two-thirds down and the last resupply had been light, and because you use more water than you think when you're melting snow for it, which sounds like a solution and is in fact a job. Melting snow takes fuel. Fuel was the thing we were short of. Everything on that hill was a loop that ate itself.

Thursday afternoon, Bell went down.

Not down the hill. Down as in fell.

He was moving along the outside of the B-hut clearing the intake vent for the stove, which had drifted, and there was a section there where the ground fell away and somebody at some point had made a step out of an ammo can filled with dirt, and it had frozen and shifted, and Bell put his weight on it and it went out from under him and he came down between the hut and the sandbag wall with his right leg behind him.

I heard him say a word. Just one. Then nothing, which was worse.

Fuentes got to him before I did. By the time I got around the corner Fuentes was already saying the medic things in that flat voice they use, and Bell was grey, and his boot was pointing a way boots don't.

It wasn't a compound fracture. I want to be accurate. There was no bone through the skin and there was very little blood. Fuentes said later he thought it was the ankle and probably the fibula and possibly worse, and that the swelling would tell us in an hour, and the swelling did tell us, and what it said was that Bell was not going to walk down that hill.

We got him inside. That took the three of us and about twenty minutes and it was the single hardest physical thing I have ever done, not because Bell was heavy but because there was nowhere to put your feet and every time we moved him he made a sound he was trying not to make.

Fuentes splinted it with a SAM splint and two tent stakes and half a roll of hundred-mile-an-hour tape. He gave him something for the pain out of his bag. He did it well. I remember thinking, with a clarity I did not have about anything else that week, that Fuentes was very good and that I had spent two weeks not talking to him because he was quiet.

Then I got on the radio and I said the words that make things happen, and the answer came back that the words that make things happen were, on this particular afternoon, not making anything happen, because visibility at the pad was under a quarter mile and the ceiling was on the deck and there was no aircraft in the province that was going to come up that valley in that soup for a broken ankle.

They asked if it was life-threatening. I looked at Fuentes. Fuentes shook his head, and then made a face that meant not yet, and I said "negative at this time," and I have thought about that answer for twenty years.

That night the generator quit.

It was in character for the Widow but the timing was operatic. It went at about nine in the evening with a sound like a cough and then nothing, and I went out with a headlamp and did the four things I knew how to do and none of them worked, and I came back in and said so.

Without the generator we had no heater fan, and the stove was diesel and worked fine, and we had the two Coleman-style lanterns and headlamps, and the radio ran on batteries and the batteries were finite. So the situation on Thursday night was: four men, one immobile and in pain, in a plywood shed at eight and a half thousand feet, snow still falling, no lift, limited fuel, limited water, and a radio that we now had to ration.

I said "we're going to be fine" out loud, to the room, and Ski said "obviously," and Bell said nothing because he was under.

I'd like to tell you I slept. I did the thing where you lie with your eyes closed doing arithmetic about batteries.

Friday I don't have well.

That's the honest thing to say. Friday exists in my memory as about six separate pieces with nothing between them.

I know we melted snow in the biggest pot in shifts and it took forever and produced about a third of what you'd think. I know Ski went out to try to clear the antenna and came back with his cheeks white in patches and Fuentes made him hold his hands in his own armpits and made him say his middle name and his mother's address. I know we moved Bell twice because the floor was colder than we thought and Fuentes said the words about the ground taking your heat. I know we broke down two MREs into components and made a rule about the crackers.

I know Bell surfaced twice and both times the first thing he asked was whether anybody had checked the crew-served, and the second time Ski said "yes, Sergeant" in a voice that cracked in the middle and then went outside for a while.

I know I wrote a letter to my mother on the back of an MRE carton and that it was four sentences long and that all four were lies.

I know that at some point on Friday afternoon I was sitting against the wall by the door, and I was warm, and being warm was so nice that I let it go on for a while, and Fuentes hit my boot with his boot and said, "Hey. Hey. Not there."

That's the first thing. Being warm when you shouldn't be warm. Write it down as explanation number one.

The radio check on Friday at eighteen hundred was the last one where somebody at the other end sounded like they were also having a normal day. After that everything on the net was about the vehicle recovery and a TIC somewhere south, and we were a line item that was fine, because we had said we were fine.

Saturday is when the fifth man starts.

I have gone back and forth about how to write this part for about eleven years. The temptation is to build it up. I'm not going to. I'll just tell you what I have.

Saturday, before light, I woke up because somebody said my name.

Not my first name. My last name, the way it's said in the Army, flat, one syllable stretched a little, the way a squad leader says it when he's about to tell you to do something you won't like.

I sat up. The hut was dark except for the stove glow at the vent. Ski was asleep sitting up with the SAW across his knees like a sad statue. Fuentes was next to Bell with his hand on Bell's chest, asleep himself, hand still there. Nobody had said anything.

And the voice said: Check the pipe.

I want to be careful here. It did not boom. It was not in my head in the way people mean when they say that. It was in the room, at the volume of a man saying something to you at three in the morning who doesn't want to wake the others. It came from the direction of the door.

I said, out loud, "What?"

And nobody answered, and I sat there for a good while, and then because I was twenty-two and stupid and because the alternative was lying there, I got my boots on and went outside.