The Last Hour (15 page)

A few minutes later we were on our way, the oversized tires crunching in the snow. Dega Payan was a three-hour drive under normal conditions. In this, it was going to take all day.
 

“Hey Sarge?”

“Yeah,” I said. It always unnerved me when Kowalski called me Sergeant or Sarge. When we met, I’d been a PFC out of basic training, and he’d been a grizzled staff sergeant with ten years under his belt. A DUI back at Fort Drum had seen him busted back to Private.

“Do me a favor,” he said. “I can’t ask the other guys, bunch of fucking numbskulls. I need to send a pic home of me wearing this ribbon for my little girl. Can you take a shot for me?”

“Yeah, sure,” I replied. He reached in his pocket and passed over a small digital camera. I leaned back against the door, trying to get a decent shot. He kept driving but had a fierce grin on his face. Kowalski was a real dick sometimes. But he loved his little girl.
 

I took half a dozen pictures, just in case they came out blurry.
 

“There you go, man.”

“Thanks.”

“How’s she doing?” I asked.

“Alicia? Just great. My mom sent me an email yesterday with pictures from her birthday party.”

“Did she get everything she wanted?”

Kowalski grinned. “Yeah. You should have seen the pics, man. Best birthday ever.” After he said that, his face screwed up, unhappy. “Wish I could have been there.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking out the window at the white mountains in the distance. Say what you will about Afghanistan, it’s a breathtaking country. But it wasn’t New York.

“Any luck with her mom?”

“Fucking bitch,” he muttered. I guess that answered that. Nasty divorce. For whatever reason—I had no idea what—Kowalski had gotten custody of their daughter.
 

We were quiet the rest of the drive. Kowalski wasn’t much of a talker anyway, and I was watching outside, an activity that served dual purposes: it was heartbreakingly beautiful out there, and I needed to keep an eye out for bad guys.

It took almost seven hours to get there. Seven cold, lonely hours. We traded off driving, and after the second switch, sometime during the fourth hour, Kowalski started a running monologue about life in the Army, his three previous deployments (twice before in Afghanistan, once in Iraq), his ex-wife, who he once loved but now hated, and his observations about the soldiers in our company, which ranged from racist to hero-worship, depending on the object. I kept half an ear tuned, but Kowalski wasn’t really talking to me ... he was talking just to keep occupied.

It was three in the afternoon when we finally rolled into Dega Payan. It’s a shitty little village up in the mountains, and until recently was completely cut off from the rest of the province. No electricity, no jobs, no nothing. The biggest employers in the area were the opium smugglers and poppy growers.

The first thing we saw rolling into the village was the burned out girls’ school: one of two that had been firebombed late last year. The building looked forlorn, abandoned. Near the road, a line of woods stretched. Not enough to count as a forest, but enough to hide a sniper. A line of small dun-colored walled compounds comprised the village, maybe a few dozen dwellings in all, spread over a half-mile stretch. Smoke rose from holes in the roofs of a few, but the eastern edge of the village was ominous, a dozen or more houses nearly completely covered in snow, rock and ice which had slid down the mountainside.

I swallowed when I saw it, my stomach tensing. By this time, the other two squads, 18 men in all, had already peeled off, surrounding the village to provide security. Staff Sergeant Martin’s squad, including my own fire team, continued to the center of the village, where we dismounted. The moment I stepped out of the Humvee, I felt the snow through my trousers above my boots.
 

Lieutenant Eggers and Staff Sergeant Martin were already standing at the lead vehicle with Jamshed, our translator. “Stay here,” I said to the others, and then I slogged through the snow to the command group, getting there at the same time as Sergeant Hicks.

An elderly man stood shivering in the cold, speaking to Jamshed. Jamshed ... I didn’t know his last name ... wore the uniform of an Afghani policeman, and gesticulated wildly as he spoke with the old man. Finally, he turned to Eggers and said, “Lieutenant, he says only the worst wounded leave. But there may be survivors in the houses, a family was pulled out alive about an hour ago.”

Eggers eyed the houses buried under the snow. “All right. Martin, get your squad moving ... we’ll work west to east. Just go right over the walls and shovel out near high windows. We need to get those people out of there if we can.”

“Roger,” Martin said. Then he turned and shouted, “Third squad, form up! Bring your entrenching tools!”

The guys ran over, breaking out folding shovels as they approached. After a few moments of discussion, we moved toward the first house. Eggers left to go check out the positions of the rest of the platoon, and we were soon joined by Sergeant Colton.
 

Our goal wasn’t to completely uncover the house, it was simply to gain access to a door, a window, or any opening we could fit through. No one had to be asked to dig: we knew how urgent it was. Not to mention, it was cold as hell out there, and the movement helped. Every once in a while I stopped, peeled off my gloves and scarf, and chafed my ears and nose, trying to warm them up.
 

You don’t make it through any length of military career without doing a lot of digging. It just comes with the territory. Sand bags. Slit trenches. Foxholes. Digging is part of military life. But this was different. I could feel the tension, and see it on the frozen faces of the men. All of us had been in this village, several times. We’d all seen the kids running around, the families. We didn’t have any idea how many, if any, had survived. And that gave us an urgency to dig as quickly as we possibly could.

“I got a door!” Paris shouted just a few minutes after we started at the first house. I looked ... he had dug down to what appeared to be the top of a doorframe. I don’t know whether the place had a door in the first place, or if the snow had knocked it in, but there was certainly nothing there now, just an opening, with the barest corner clear of snow.

“Kowalski, Roberts,” I called, and pointed to Paris. The three of us moved over there and shoveled frantically, quickly widening the opening. Of the four of us, Paris was the smallest. The second we had enough snow cleared for him to fit in the opening, I said, “Paris ... go. Check it out.”

He nodded, then set down his entrenching tool and removed his web gear, unslinging his rifle and passing it to me. Then, feet first, he wriggled his way through the opening with nothing more than a flashlight.

We fell silent, no movement, no digging. I could hear the other fire team at the next house over, digging through the snow. A faint wind blew in from the east. Paris slid down the mound of snow into the house.

He should have taken his rifle, I thought. I felt tension in my gut. The silence was unnerving. More footsteps, then a gasp and a muttered curse. I swallowed. What the hell was he doing in there? What was taking so long?

I saw Sergeant Colton looking my way. I waved him down, and he waded through the snow toward me.

“What you got?” he asked, quietly. For some reason, all of us felt the need to nearly whisper.

I gestured. “Paris is checking it out.”

We watched, and then I called out, “Paris? You good?”

He coughed. And then he spoke, and his voice cracked midway through the sentence. “On my way out.”

Thirty seconds later I heard scrabbling from inside, boots in the snow, as Paris made his way out. Then I saw a hand coming through the small opening. Colton and I reached forward and pulled, sliding Dylan right through the opening. He took a second to catch his breath, and then stood.

I’ll never forget the look in his eyes when he stood and faced us. He opened his mouth to speak and then closed it. His jaw was working, and he swallowed. His eyes looked hollow, haunted. And then he said, “Kids. A family. Six of them.”

And then he walked away from us, ten feet, then twenty, and stood there; his back to us, shoulders shaking.

I’ve always been taught when a guy breaks down like that, you give him space. Give him space to pull himself back together before he has to face anything else. But Colton ... he was different. He was like a good dad. He walked over to Paris and put a hand on his shoulder. I couldn’t hear what he said to him. Roberts and Kowalski watched, and I did too, and finally I said to the two of them, “Come on. Move on to the next house.”

And so we moved on, and a few minutes later, Paris rejoined us. I didn’t want to think about what he’d seen in there. A whole family frozen to death. Kids, he said.
 

The next house went pretty much the same, except that digging went quicker, because we had rhythm now. But when we got the opening wide enough to go in through a window ... at least wide enough for Paris ... I didn’t tell them to stop. I could go in the next one, or Kowalski. I didn’t want to see that look in Paris’s eyes again.

But he said, “Stop. It’s big enough, I can get in.”

Crap. I nodded, and we stopped digging, and then Paris was scrambling to wriggle into the window. As soon as he was in, we started shoveling the snow again. I wanted him to be able to come out quick if he needed to.

Then I heard his voice. “Aw, fuck!” I could hear despair in his voice. More footsteps. But then, sudden shouts. “Sherman! I need help! I got a survivor, a little girl!”

And then we were digging again, furiously, until there was room for Roberts and me and then Kowalski to slide in the window and down to the floor.
 

And then I understood. I understood that hollow look in Dylan’s face. Because inside, the first thing I saw, the bright sunlight shining through right onto them, was a woman, dead, still holding her dead baby at her chest. They were huddled together with two other children and a man.

But it was in the cupboard where Dylan had made his find. Shivering violently, pale, the tip of her nose blackened by frostbite, a little girl. Nine years old, maybe. Maybe after her parents died, maybe before, she had closed herself in there with heavy blankets. Inside the enclosed space, she’d somehow managed to survive.

“Son of a bitch,” Kowalski muttered. “We gotta get her out of here.”
 

“Careful,” Paris said. “I don’t even understand why she’s alive when….”

Kowalski kneeled down in front of the girl. She was still huddled in the back corner of the cupboard, her eyes wide, unblinking.

“Come on, girl,” he said. He gave her a sad looking smile, probably the first smile I’d ever seen on Kowalski’s face. “Let’s get you warm, okay?”

I don’t think she understood the words. But she understood the tone. He gestured for her to come to him, and she ran and threw her tiny little arms around his neck.
 

I blinked, hard, and cleared my throat. “Kowalski ... get her to a Humvee, get it running, get her warmed up. Roberts, go find the medics.”

So the three of us helped Kowalski out with the little girl, then Roberts left right behind him. I looked at Paris and said, “Good one, man. You saved that little girl.”

His eyes darted to the rest of her family ... all dead, then said, “Thanks.”

We didn’t find any more survivors in the houses. In all, thirty-four villagers ... nineteen of them children ... froze to death.

An hour later, I stopped to grab a smoke, just as the helicopters were arriving. Hick’s fire team had finished their assigned houses, and he walked over and stood beside me. Both of us were silent, standing there in the snow. I didn’t have to ask what he was thinking, because his team had found pretty much the same thing as mine. Hicks was a sharp soldier and a good leader. But he was human, and right now, his face was grim.

A medic picked up the little girl out of the Humvee and started to carry her toward the small crowd of villagers. She wasn’t injured enough to go out on the medical flight. She wore a blue flowered dress with long sleeves, long brown hair tied up in pigtails, and had big round eyes. As the medic carried her to the villagers, her eyes sought out Kowalski. He called out, “Wait!” and ran over to them.

Kowalski said something to her, and she nodded. I don’t know what he said. I’m sure she didn’t either. But whatever it was ... maybe something I don’t understand, because I’m not a dad with a little girl... she got it.
 

He took the little pink and white ribbon off his web gear and tied it up in a bow in her hair. She waved, and then hugged him. I had to bite my lip.
 

Kowalski turned around and walked back toward us. He saw me watching and gave me a nasty look. “What the fuck are you looking at, Sarge?”

I smiled, took a drag off my cigarette, and said, “Nothing, Kowalski. Nothing at all.”

By the time the choppers cleared out of Dega Payan, it was getting dark, and very cold. Cold like I’ve never experienced before or since. I don’t know what the temperature actually was. But when you’re a thousand miles from nowhere, and there’s no electricity, and you can hear the wind howling down off the mountains, then the cold gets to be bone deep. The kind of cold that can make you wish you could just die and get it over with, where you get sharp pains in your extremities before they just go numb.
 

The kind of cold that can freeze an entire family in their home.

Sergeant Colton pulled back one squad, leaving only one on the perimeter. The rest of us holed up in a vacant hovel or in the Humvees, running them periodically to let the heat run. We rotated the overwatch squad out every two hours so they wouldn’t freeze to death, which meant no one got any sleep that night.
 

A number of us were going to have trouble sleeping anyway. Dead combatants were one thing. They were the bad guys. Not easy to deal with under any circumstances. But today we’d pulled thirty-four bodies out of those frozen, buried houses. Most of them kids.