Minister Without Portfolio (3 page)

THE TOILETS WERE AT
the far end of the compound and these too were prefabricated and there were instructions in several languages about how to sit on the toilet and how to keep the toilet clean. Henry Hayward realized that these two sections of the compound
were the most important to keep functional. Although bedding was crucial and the canteen too. But you did not think of these because there was enough to eat and the cots were adequate.

The screen and the toilet were the furniture he would sorely miss if he were off compound overnight or on an extended sortie. If he was a soldier. Of course he did not have to worry about this, he was a subcontractor with Rick servicing the structure put in place by SNC-Lavalin. He had to push tubes full of wiring through tunnels in the ground and thread them under rivers to connect up the busted grid and listen to sonar equipment for a clear contact. But they did all sorts of work. One time they had to rewire an Afghan house. He was surprised at how modern the house was, there was not a traditional bone in its body. He was with John and Rick one afternoon when they had to cut through a door with a reciprocating saw and enter a hallway while Tender Morris, attached to their civilian unit, kept a lookout for Taliban. Got your pistols, he said. There were tea sets and some plates and small pieces of furniture that looked like they had been handed down from someone old but the rest of the infrastructure was brand spanking new. A set of particleboard bunkbeds and three teenaged Afghan boys in windbreakers dancing to a stereo and playing bongos and electric keyboard.

8

They worked through the spring and into the hot summer until there was trouble in the southern provinces and, after a security assessment from Ottawa, funding was restricted for the services Rick Tobin provided. A civilian support worker had been killed in a rocket attack. They were violating the mandate, Rick Tobin said, that they be used in a stable environment. It was the first of July and the minister of defence had flown into the base to celebrate Canada Day and told them directly their revised plans. The minister had served wild turkey burgers and hotdogs from a train of barbecues with red maple leaf flags on toothpicks punched into the buns. He was celebrating the draw-down in troop allocations as if this was something to be positive about. It was one of those ceremonial dinners where the minister makes sure the national papers have photographed him wearing a festive apron while doling out maple-custard ice cream.

The minister explained to Rick that their contract was being adapted to meet the desire of operational deployment. We have to achieve mission success while operating within an imposed troop
ceiling, the minister said. Certain hybrid situations for support trades were being considered. Would they ride with the military? Dressed and armed for robust situations?

What do you think about that, Rick said to them. He had John and Henry alone in a bubble corridor. Either that, or we go home.

Henry Hayward looked at John. You have to live on the edge, John. Or you're taking too much room.

Easy for you to say, John said. He was serious. You don't have kids.

Henry had never heard John play this card before. And he didn't like how humourless he was. But they got on board. The powers that be pencilled in Rick's request and that's how they lingered on at Camp Julien. Tender Morris thought it hilarious that they would be coming out on patrols after they did small arms training and a twenty-day soldier qualification course. You have to be issued new apparel, Tender said. And a beret that needs shaping. Tender showed them how to do the shaping.

You get a razor, he said, and you shave all that fuzz off. Use a single-blade razor and draw it over the inside and the outside. Do it lightly. Now, put the beret on and pull the string so it's snug. Tie it off and cut the strings at the knot.

John: Why not burn the strings?

Tender: Trust me you don't want fire next to a beret. Now you're ready to shape it. Put it on and hop in the shower. Turn the water on warm and just let it run over your head. No stay in there. Ten minutes. Okay get out now and dry off, here's a towel. Keep the beret on. Let it dry on your head. Keep pulling it over and combing it down. Leave it on until suppertime. And keep it in that shape, don't fold it or flatten it.

I'm going to wet mine and put it under my mattress overnight.

Tender Morris: Wet it and blowdry it. You can shave it close and put it in the freezer, that works too.

John: Then tie it and burn off the strings down to the knot?

Jesus no fire. Shave it until it's flimsy but don't get any bare spots.

Tender showed them how. John stood in the doorway with his wet beret on his head, pointing it at the sun.

It's like wearing a solar panel on your head.

You got to remember, guys, it's an ongoing process.

Why not use a straight razor.

Soldier, this is a don't ask don't tell army.

It doesn't matter if the razor was straight or not, girl.

I use a razor that cuts both ways.

What about a grill lighter.

Your beret will stink.

They received ammo and a clip for their Sig Sauers. They started going out in the jeep.

9

Kabul River runs from the mountains of the Hindu Kush into Pakistan, north of the Khyber Pass, where it joins the Indus River and then flows south to the seaport of Karachi. Halfway through its drift to the sea the river weaves into the city of Kabul where women bring baskets of washing and crouch in its water. Tender drove into the river, almost dry in the late summer, and up past the ruined shell of Darul Aman Palace. He gunned it around the refurbished Ghazi stadium where buzkashi competitions used to be held in the traditional days and then, when the Taliban were in power, a woman was shot in the head on the perimeter of the eighteen-yard box in front of thirty thousand spectators. Henry remembered that footage. She had killed her husband. The surface of the field was being removed now by heavy equipment as though the soil had been contaminated and new artificial turf installed and soon men with artificial legs will run here and wheelchair basketball was occurring in a cement court nearby. There are women training to be amateur boxers.

They drove through a refugee camp and parked the jeep and children ran up to them. Rick had long wiggly balloons. He
threw out a soccer ball and it bounced towards Nasem, a man Rick could trust to oversee the ball and make sure the kids shared it. The tents were set up with canvas tarps over ridge poles, the walls fired mud brick three feet high and the tarps held down with boulders tied to stays. There was a blue hand-drawn sign telling you the tribes that were in the camp. Nearby a well that was just a pipe coming out of the ground. Several families with blue plastic containers. A man carried a tower of twenty-two bricks in a tether on his back, he was hauling them out of a chalk field where lay the shells of old Soviet tanks. A brightly painted truck was covered in dust.

They overtook bicycles and tricycle handcarts made with wooden wheels and had to show their papers to an anti-mortar platoon. Sheet metal workers hammered tin for portable stoves. A kiosk with a man braziering meat and waving a big woven straw fan in the shape of a hatchet fed the stove little slats of wood from fruit crates. Tender stopped the jeep here to eat. There was a café with open windows to the street, a brocaded tapestry of a freedom fighter on the cement wall. The air smelled of toasted sesame seeds. A boy who had survived a landmine and had no arms begged for money. Their kebabs came on an aluminum plate with naan bread in the shape of a split fish. The people here knew Tender.

We need greenery, John said. I need to rinse the dust out of my ears.

I'll take you over to Lake Qargha. We can drive through Shakar Darah—you'll love that valley, Tender said. It's a bit like home.

Out of the dry chalky desert rose a plain that Tender had visited many times, a valley of lush green unlike anything Henry
had ever seen in Newfoundland—Tender must be out of his mind. The jeep descended into the green and the humidity rose like a soft moist brush against the face. There were flowers here and an oasis of green that the mind encouraged to creep over the land, to perhaps—in some wild biology—be released across the homeland of the soul. We're here to assist, Henry thought. He could not articulate the idea, but he felt a compulsion to counter the devastation he had been witnessing on the ground. Tender yanked on the handbrake.

10

They came upon Americans doing recon—they knew they would intersect them in the morning—and they compared themselves to these units. Tender was annoyed at the marines, how they don't wear unit patches. The only patch a marine needs, Tender said, is the anchor, globe and eagle. That screams elite. And John Hynes hollered this out into the hot thin desert air. Yes sir, the self-centred, cocky, overbearing marine!

Tender: And the marine recruiters, they all wear dress uniform to international events.

Landpower, baby!

Tender Morris: The professional ethos of the corps.

What does the corps sell?

All three of them with fingers in the air: Commitment, honour, integrity!

John: And elitism.

No education, no bonus.

Go pound sand, man.

It sets them off from the air force at least.

Who show up in coveralls.

More fingers: Many are called but few are chosen.

You left out the thousand and one ways to annoy everybody in the room with grand tales of how great the marines are.

I got to say I like this beret over their patrol cap.

It could be worse, we could be wearing the blue helmet.

Hey the UN motto: where there are genocidal dictators we will be nearby doing nothing.

THAT WAS HOW THEY TALKED
. Once, just before Tender went on leave in the fall, he drove them beyond backup helicopter surveillance. It made them all feel alive to the raw possibility of being killed and there being no one to help them. The sergeant in charge at Camp Julien had said you must have Patrick Morris supervise you at all times. You hear how stringent the rules are for engagement—it takes four or five signatures for a piece of paper to leave the building—and who can leave the forward operating base, but the thing that is true, too, of all human occupations is that familiarity leads to a loosening of procedure and the trust of those in positions of power to sense when to let the line remain undrawn. So for a month, while Tender returned home with Rick Tobin and relaxed and made love to Martha Groves, Henry and John stayed close to a desk. But the day after he came back they went on wild patrols and moved through a quadrant to dispense food rations and inflated soccer balls and deliver education supplies to small one-room schools with large black chalkboards that seemed from another century—Tender Morris hovering at the perimeter with a C7, ready to engage. Afterwards, on their way back to camp, they sat in the jeep and spoke of things like boot blousing, how the pants are easy to blouse when it is wet but when it's hot there's no ventilation at the bottom of the cuff.
Tender was against blousing, then you don't need a camouflage boot as the pantleg covers the boot. That string you tie at the bottom of the tunic, Tender said, is useless. There are pockets on the chest that the flak jacket covers, so you have to sew pockets on your arms. And the fabric was designed for infrared protection, but aren't the enemy using night-vision goggles?

They detoured around a Leopard tank blockade and an infantry company shoring up a bridge with chicken wire and rock. They ate rations that you heated in a bag with a chemical that was activated by water. They were living a life.

11

There was a Labour Day disco at the base sponsored by the Dutch. They were bored so they invited a couple of servicewomen to shoot pool in Kabul. A television bolted to the ceiling with Al Jazeera. Hammered, they were hammered, and they were being pressed by some American servicemen to finish up their game. A chopper had landed and the Americans had poured out of it and they were tired of being polite. One of them, Henry heard him, said this is a takeoverable operation.

What if we were Americans, Henry said, so he could be overheard.

Let's not be Americans, Tender said. Let's be outlaws. Except for Henry—he's our minister without portfolio.

What the hell is that.

You're not committed to anything but you got a hand in everywhere.

Henry accepted this. He didn't know what it meant but he accepted the position, the honour, the judgment. He didn't have a wife or a house and he was an employee. He was enjoying, at the moment, the presence of a Canadian female soldier but they
were not allowed to kiss or even hold hands and this limitation suited him. He was quietly growing back his pinfeathers for love. They were drinking rum.

Orange Bliss is my favourite, the servicewoman said. Deadly, deadly. I'd drink that straight up. I wouldn't put nothing in that.

John: It tastes like medicine.

Servicewoman: That's banana.

The names of the drinks are all sex names. Panty ripper, pink pussy, blowjob, sex on the beach, screaming orgasm, slippery nipple.

Tender: You must work in a shooter bar.

John: What's your strongest rum. You don't have any Martinique? I just want to see if it's as bad as it used to be.

Every guy I got to try Orange Bliss loved it.

Performance in the world is full of fakery, John said. He was staring at the Americans now who were not paying him any attention.

You and Henry, Tender said quietly, you're not soldiers. You're drinkers.

That's not what I'm talking about, John said. The Americans were staring at the TV and waiting, it seemed, for the table to get knees and walk away from these idiot Canadians and position itself over them.

We're drunk here, guys. We are enjoyably drunk.

One of the servicewomen: All anyone is ever trying to do, deep down, is be loved.

Her friend, the one Henry liked, the Orange Bliss lady, said, You are way lost here. Let's get back to the important things. Another round.