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.

The stove exhaust ran out through the wall on a stack of pipe with a rain cap, and the drift on the north side had come up around it, and the snow at the top of the drift had a crust from a day of melt and re-freeze, and the cap was maybe a third buried on the upwind side, and there was a hole in the crust around the pipe that was the wrong colour. Yellow-brown at the edges. Not soot. Something else.

I don't know enough to tell you the exact chemistry of what was happening. What I know is that I got a stick and I opened the whole thing up, and I dug the drift back from the wall on that side for about four feet, and while I was doing it my hands started shaking in a way that wasn't cold, and I sat down in the snow for a minute with my head between my knees.

When I came in, Fuentes was awake and looking at me.

He said, "You feel that too?"

I said, "Feel what."

He said, "Headache. Behind the eyes. Since yesterday."

I had a headache. We all had headaches. We'd had headaches for two days and had put it down to altitude and dehydration and the general condition of being us, and Fuentes was a medic and had not caught it either, and that is not a criticism of Fuentes, that's what carbon monoxide does. It makes you stupid before it makes you dead, and one of the things it makes you too stupid to do is notice that you've become stupid.

So: explanation number two. I heard a voice because I was mildly poisoned, and the poisoned part of my brain had noticed the pipe and produced a voice to tell the rest of me, because that's a thing brains do under load. That's a real phenomenon and I've read about it since. It's tidy. I like it a lot.

I like it a lot except for the part where the voice knew before I did.

The rest of Saturday we kept the door cracked, which cost us heat we could not afford, and we ran the stove lower, which cost us more, and Bell's leg got worse.

Not the fracture. The swelling had gone the way Fuentes said it would and then kept going, and there was heat in it, and Fuentes did not like the colour of the toes, and Fuentes started using the phrase "if we don't get him off this hill" instead of "when we get him off this hill."

I got on the radio and I stopped saying we were fine. I said the other words. There was a long pause and then somebody senior came on the net, and I could hear in his voice that he was doing math with the same bad numbers we were, and he said, and I'll never forget the phrasing, "Understood. We are aware of your situation. Break. There is nothing at this time."

There is nothing at this time.

Ski cried about ten minutes after that, quietly, facing the wall, and I pretended to be fixing something. Later that night he told me about a girl he was supposed to marry and I have never repeated a word of it and I'm not going to now.

Saturday night is the main event and I'll try to just say it.

It was the four of us in a room about twelve by sixteen. Bell against the far wall on two air mattresses we'd found and a pile of everything soft we owned. Fuentes next to him with the aid bag. Ski by the door. Me between the stove and the table.

Sometime after dark, I woke up — or came to, I genuinely can't tell you which — and there was a man sitting on the ammo can by the stove.

He was wearing our stuff. That's the detail I keep coming back to. Not a shape, not a shadow, not a figure in a cloak. Snow gear, the same as ours, hood back, gloves off, hands out toward the stove the way everybody sat, and a beard like everybody had by then. He was maybe forty. He looked bored and he looked competent and he looked cold, and honestly he looked like every third guy in that battalion.

I looked at him for what felt like a long time. I was not afraid. I want to underline that. I have been afraid many times in my life, including twice that week, and this was not it. It was the feeling of realising there's a guy at your table at a chow hall and you don't know when he sat down.

He said, "You need to get him off the floor and you need to keep him talking."

I said something like "he's on mattresses."

He said, "The floor's taking it through. Get him on the pallet."

There was a pallet. It was outside behind the burn barrel with a foot of snow on it and we had walked past it forty times.

Then he said, "And don't go down the north side."

I said, "Nobody's going down anything."

He said, "In the morning you'll want to. Don't."

And then Fuentes said, from the dark, "Who are you talking to?"

I turned my head — and I mean I turned my head, this was not a wake-up, I had been awake — and when I looked back at the ammo can there was nobody on it.

Fuentes and I had a conversation then that lasted about ninety seconds and that I've reconstructed with him twice since, and our two versions agree except for one thing I'll get to.

He asked what I was doing. I said I thought there was somebody in the room. He asked me if I meant Ski. I said no. He was quiet for a bit and then he said, "Okay," and then he said, "we're all pretty cooked," and then he said, "help me move Bell."

We went out and got the pallet. It took both of us and we had to kick it free of the ice and it broke a slat, and we got it in and we got Bell onto it with a poncho liner over the top, and Bell woke up enough to swear at us both fluently for about a minute, which Fuentes said was the best sign he'd seen all day.

I have never known what to do with the fact that the practical advice was good.

Sunday morning, before light, Ski wanted to go down the north side.

This is real and it's the part that no explanation of mine has ever fully covered.

The reason was sound. The route down the north shoulder to the COP was shorter and steeper than the switchback we normally used, it was the way the previous unit's guys had gone when they were in a hurry, and Ski's argument was that with the snow packed the way it was you could effectively sit down and slide most of it and be at the wire in forty minutes and come back up with a litter team and fuel and batteries. He was nineteen and he'd been listening to Bell breathe for two days and he wanted to do something. If I'd been him I'd have wanted the same.

And I said no. I said no in a way that surprised me, out of my mouth before I'd decided, and when he pushed I said no again and I said it with my hand on his sleeve, and eventually Bell surfaced enough to say "listen to him," and that was the end of it.

Three days later, when the weather broke and a team came up, one of the guys mentioned in passing that the whole north shoulder had let go — the snow, a slab of it, big enough that it took out a section of the old switchback further down and moved a boulder that had a name because it had always been there. They didn't know when. Sometime in the storm.

Now. I know what you're thinking, because I've thought it for twenty years. It's a snow-loaded lee slope in a storm cycle. Anybody with any mountain sense would have said don't go down the north side, and there were probably four guys at the COP who'd have said it too, and maybe I'd absorbed that from somebody at some point and it came back out of me in the shape of a bearded man by a stove. Explanation number three. That one's good too. I've had it read back to me by a professional.

But I didn't have any mountain sense. I was from Ohio. I'd been on skis twice.

We got off that hill on Tuesday, in the end, which made it nine days up for a seven-day rotation and six days from the last resupply. A bird got into the COP pad in the morning and a team came up with a litter and four of them carried Bell down in relays and it took most of the day and I don't remember much about it except that somebody had brought Gatorade powder and it was the best thing I have ever tasted.

There was a debrief of sorts at the COP that evening, which mostly consisted of a lieutenant apologising to us in a way that was clearly costing him something, and a warrant officer asking me detailed questions about the generator that I could not answer. Nobody asked me anything I would have had trouble with. I want to be fair to them: they had spent six days trying to get to us and failing, and one of them had a nosebleed from arguing with somebody about it, and the reason nothing came was weather and not indifference. I've read enough since to know that a different set of decisions two valleys over might have got a bird to us on the Saturday, and I've decided not to be angry about that, which took a while.

Bell had surgery in Bagram and then in Germany and then twice more at home. He kept the foot. He walks with a limp that he'll tell you is from a motorcycle if he doesn't like you.

Fuentes went back to his own platoon two weeks later and I saw him maybe six times after that.

Ski got through the tour, got out, and does something with HVAC in Illinois. He has three kids and posts about all of them.

I did the rest of the deployment and another one and then I didn't.

Now the part that made me write this down.

There are three things that don't sit right, and none of them are the man himself. If it was just the man I'd have filed it under cold, gas, fear, and youth, and got on with my life. It's the housekeeping around him that keeps me up.

The first is the water.

Fuentes ran the water. That was his thing, he was the medic and he was the one paying attention to who'd drunk what, and he had a notebook — an actual little green memo book — and he was tracking intake and output for Bell and, because he was thorough, roughly for the rest of us. When we got down he handed the pages to the PA at the aid station, standard stuff.

Two years later Fuentes emailed me a photo of that page, because he'd kept the notebook. And in the column for Sunday, in his handwriting, is a tally for five.

Not a name. Just five marks where there should be four, and then it's four again for the rest of the day and for Monday. He has no memory of writing it. His theory when he sent it was that he'd double-marked Bell because Bell was getting fluid separately. His theory when I called him about it, an hour later, after he'd looked at it for an hour, was less confident than that.

The second is Ski.

Ski does not believe any of this. He's very clear about it. He was there, he was awake for a lot of it, and his position is that we were four cold guys who had a hard week and that I'm a nice man who took some damage. He's said this to my face and I've never argued.

But at Bell's mother's funeral in 2014 we were all three of us in a parking lot afterwards in our bad suits, and Ski said, not to anybody in particular, "The thing I hated was the sitting up." And I said what do you mean, and he said, "Sitting up on the ammo can when it was your turn on the stove. Freezing your ass off."

Nobody sat on the ammo can. It was where the stove tools went. There was a milk crate for sitting.

I said, "The ammo can?"

And Ski's face did something and he said, "The crate. I meant the crate," and he changed the subject, and he has never once brought it up again, and I have never asked, because he's happy and I'm not going to be the one.

The third thing is the sentence.

I never told anybody the exact words. Not the counsellor, not my wife, not my brother-in-law at the barbecue. I told people there was a man and he told me to move Bell and not to go down the north side, and that's what I told them, in those words, in that order, because that's what it comes down to.

In 2019 I was on the phone with Fuentes about something else entirely, insurance, I think, and out of nowhere he said, "Can I ask you something about the OP."

I said sure.

He said, "That night. When you were talking to nobody. Did he say something about the floor?"

I said yes.

And Fuentes said, "'The floor's taking it through.'"

Exactly that. Word for word. Including the through, which is a strange way to say it, which is why it stuck in me in the first place.

I asked him how he knew that. He said he'd assumed I'd said it to him at the time and it had lodged. I said I hadn't. He said then I must have. I said I hadn't. There was a long quiet on the phone and then he said, "Okay, well," and we talked about insurance.

So there it is.

Explanation one: hypothermia and exhaustion. Well documented. People in extremity see and hear things, and four sleep-deprived, dehydrated, half-frozen men in a plywood box at eight and a half thousand feet are a laboratory for it.

Explanation two: carbon monoxide. Almost certainly true regardless. The pipe was fouled, we had the headaches, and CO gives people exactly this — the sensation of a presence, auditory stuff, a feeling of being watched or accompanied. If I had to put money down, this is where it goes.

Explanation three: my own brain, doing its job under load and handing me good advice in a costume, because a voice from a competent-looking sergeant is easier to obey at four in the morning than a vague worry. There's a name for a version of this. Climbers get it. Sailors get it. The men who came off the ice with Shackleton got it and one of them wrote about it and the phrase stuck: the third man. It happens to people at the edge and it has happened for a very long time and it is not, in the ordinary sense, mysterious.

Explanation four is the one I don't argue for. I just can't get rid of it.

Because the pipe was actually blocked. The floor was actually taking it. The north side actually went. And I was a twenty-two-year-old from Ohio who did not know any of those things.

I'm not asking anybody to believe explanation four. I'd think less of you, honestly, if you took it on my word. I've given you every reason not to and I've given them to you first, on purpose, because I'd rather be the guy who talked himself out of it in public than the guy who needs you to say yes.

What I'll say is this. Bell is not well now, and it's not the leg. When I visit, we don't talk about that week, because there's nothing there either of us wants. But the last time I went, when I was leaving, he was in the chair by the window and he said, "Hey," and I turned around, and he said:

"If you ever figure out who that was, tell him thanks from me."

I said, "Who?"

And Bell, who was unconscious for most of it, who was on a pallet on a plywood floor with a leg going bad, who I would have sworn under oath remembered nothing at all, looked out the window at his daughter's car in the driveway and said, "The other guy. The one who kept telling you to keep me talking."

I'm not going to add anything to that. I've been adding things to it for a decade and it hasn't helped.