Wynne's War (31 page)

“We get lost out here, they'll be finding the both of us dried out like locusts.”

He turned and glanced back at the corpse of his friend and saw swarms of flies at either end of the blanket. He stopped Fella, then doubled back along the ten feet of lead line and began to swat furiously at the insects. The flies would disperse for several moments and then immediately return. He felt his throat growing tight and the tears starting to come, but he knuckled them away, turned his horse, and rode back down the trail.

He rode for the next several days, the hours bleeding into one another, the days merging into nights. His watch had stopped at some point. He didn't know when. On the evening of the fifth day, he counted rations and found he had two meals left and half of another. He'd no idea how much farther he had to ride or how much longer he'd even be able to, and the horses had six boxes of oats left between them. He'd been lucky, so far, when it came to water, but he couldn't count on his luck to hold. He made a cold camp in a high pass on the mountainside, inspected the horses' hooves. Their coats were in need of grooming and their tails had started to grow out, but other than that, they were better than could be expected.

He slept fitfully that night and woke bleary-eyed before dawn and sipped water from his canteen. The numbness had traveled farther up his legs and he sat there kneading the muscles with his fingers, but it wasn't the muscles that were the problem. He glanced over to Wheels's body, which he'd left on the horse for fear he wouldn't be able to get it back on.

He laughed to himself, and it was as if he were laughing for Wheels, laughing where his friend would have laughed. Then he came to himself.

“C'mon,” he said. “Keep it together.”

He rode all that morning and afternoon and when evening came, he didn't stop to make camp, just continued along in moonlight, staring distractedly at the stars.

Morning found him descending a narrow path that wound down from a low mountain, and he watched the sun breach the horizon and illuminate the cragged range of peaks to the east. He reined Fella to a stop and sat watching. Wheels's horse continued forward several feet behind him and then it stopped as well. He'd run out of water in the night, and his tongue felt swollen inside his mouth and his head felt like it would split. He'd almost learned to ignore the ache in his back, but the sharp electric pain down his right leg couldn't be ignored and the numbness had traveled to his knee. Russell turned and glanced back at Wheels's horse and the corpse of his friend tied over the saddle, and he looked again at the sky. Very high, a carrion bird circled.

By noon, others would join, six vultures wheeling against the bright blue sky. In the early evening, he paused among a stand of dry and splintered acacia, climbed down from the saddle, then tottered and fell. He sat there with his legs bent beneath him. He lifted his hands and pressed his palms against his eyes and then he looked up at Fella. The horse was standing there above him. She took several steps forward, bumped Russell's shoulder with her nose. Russell reached up and ran his hand back and forth under her jaw.

“I don't know,” he told her, shaking his head. “I just don't know.”

He glanced past Fella at the dead man's horse, the stallion beginning to bow under the weight of his friend's body. He had been going to do something about that, but now he just sat. It occurred to him he might have difficulty getting up and then it occurred to him he might not be able to get up at all. The sensation of pins and needles ran up and down his legs. He leaned over and lay on his side. He didn't bother with his sleeping bag or blanket and he didn't bother to hobble the horses. If he were to pass in the night, he wanted them to have some chance at escape. Dusk fell around him and then the moonless dark, and he lay curled in on himself, sleeping fitfully and awakening to the howling of wolves, though whether real or imagined, he could never have said.

 

He would have died if it hadn't been for the patrol. They found him early the next morning hunched against a lightning-splintered tree trunk, the Afghan militia emerging from the mist like apparitions, with their leader, Bari Gul, striding at the head of the column. Russell watched these men and he watched Bari, recalling that the last time he'd seen this man, he'd poured five gallons of gasoline down the severed neck of a corpse and set the body ablaze.

The Afghans constructed a makeshift litter from pine saplings they'd hacked to length with their machetes, folding a blanket between. Bari directed four of his men to lift Russell and bear him toward the American camp. Russell was in a delirium of pain and dehydration, and when he glanced over, he saw that several of the Afghans were snatching at Fella's reins and trying to lead her away. He watched Fella dig her hoofs into the earth, snorting and shaking her head, fighting a short man who tugged at her bridle. The man pulled until sweat stood out on his forehead, and then he doubled his grip on the lead line, took a switch from the ground, and began swatting the horse on the flank. Fella whinnied and reared, and then Russell was off the stretcher, tottering forward, screaming for the man to leave her alone, if he touched his horse again, he'd kill him. The Afghans surrounded him and tried to usher him back, but Russell struggled, striking one man in the face, knocking down another. He'd almost reached Fella when motes began to swarm before his eyes. The world seemed to shift on its axis, and the ground rushed up to meet him. He lay there, passing in and out of consciousness. Bari Gul leaned over him.

“It is not to worry,” he said. “The animal will be provided.”

He smiled and swept a hand between them.

“Everything,” Bari said.

 

When Russell came to, he was in the infirmary tent at Firebase Dodge. The first thing he asked about was his horse, and the next was the body of his friend. The doctors who tended him didn't know anything about horses, but they said Corporal Grimes was being prepped for flight, and the following evening Russell was loaded onto a Black Hawk next to a body bag containing Wheel's remains. The helicopter lifted, circled the spur of the mountain, and then headed southwest toward Kabul.

He was in the hospital at Bagram Airfield for just over a week—hooked to saline IVs and dosed with Dilaudid—and then one afternoon, two orderlies pushed him down a hallway and out onto the tarmac, where he was placed aboard a C-130 outfitted to transport casualties from Kabul to Riyadh. He asked one of the men where he was being taken, and the man said “Germany,” locked his stretcher into the fuselage, and injected something into his catheter.

He vomited twice on the plane ride, and when they put down at Ramstein Airbase, he was carried out and loaded onto a truck, driven some distance, and then placed onto a gurney and wheeled into a building. Fluorescent lights in the ceiling. Hospital rooms passing on his left and right. Men on beds and men limping down the hallway on crutches and men seated in chairs wearing thin paper gowns.

They took x-rays. They did a CAT scan and an MRI. The surgeon who came to visit said Russell had ruptured a disk in his lower back, herniated it on both sides, split the annulus. As he spoke, he had pictures that he pointed to with his pen. He said that the procedure they'd perform was called a laminectomy. They'd suck out the disk at L5, S1, fuse that part of his spine, and graft bone between the vertebrae. Russell listened to the doctor very intently, and when he was finished speaking he asked the man if it would hurt.

“You'll be out,” the man told him. “It's a ten-hour procedure.”

“I mean after,” said Russell. “How will I feel after it's done?”

“Like you've been worked over with a baseball bat.”

“But I'll heal?” Russell asked. “I'll be able to ride?”

“What do you ride?”

“Horses,” said Russell.

The doctor straightened his glasses.

“Let's take it one step at a time,” he said.

 

Russell was awake, but the anesthesia was so strong he could barely open his eyes and what little he could see was bright and blurry. Around him, the beeping of machines, monitors, groaning from men on the beds to either side. He lay there, time passing at unfamiliar speeds, and then there was a woman standing at the foot of his bed.

“How are you feeling?” she asked him.

“Mmmmmmm,” he said.

She pulled back the sheets and touched his right foot. She asked if he could feel her hand.

“Cold,” he said.

“That's good. Are you starting to hurt?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Hold on just a second.”

He didn't know where it was she thought he'd go. He was beginning to feel his spine, less painful than strange, and then the nurse was back, this time at his side.

“I'm going to put a little something in your IV.”

He wondered what exactly ‘something' was, and then a warm feeling suffused his body and it felt as though he might actually lift off the mattress.

“Does that feel better?”

He tried to tell her yes, it felt wonderful, but he couldn't operate his mouth.

Then he was being wheeled down a hallway. His mouth suddenly began working, and he spoke to people whom he couldn't open his eyes wide enough to see, and then he was in an elevator with an orderly and they were going up.

“No hard feelings,” Russell told the man. “You were one of the good ones.”

“Thanks,” the orderly said.

In the room he was assigned, a figure came to hover at his bedside, and he knew by the smell of the cologne it was his grandfather. Russell tried to open his eyes, but now they wouldn't open at all, and he thought,
This is happening, I am not dreaming this.
He reached to touch the man, and there was no feeling in his fingers, no feeling in his face. His hand was like something connected to him by string.

“How'd you find me?”

“I know how to find you,” his grandfather said.

Russell lay there. There was a low hum in the room. He didn't know what from. He went to reach for his grandfather once more, but his arm didn't seem to be with him anymore and he ended up exhaling a long breath, a sound like a deflating tire. It seemed to keep going and going. Then he inhaled. He could feel a burning sensation in his lungs, not unpleasant. He told his grandfather he'd done something bad.

“What is it that you did?”

“I don't know if I should tell you.”

His grandfather didn't respond for a moment. The sheet felt cool against the tops of his thighs. The light was bright and very warm, and he had the notion if he could just unseam his eyes he'd be granted a rare and radiant vision.

Russell lay there—the humming from something just to his left and the cool of the sheets on his legs and the light pulsing red through his eyelids.

“I disobeyed,” said Russell. “I didn't follow my orders.”

His grandfather asked how come him to do that.

“How come me not to follow?”

“How come you not to follow.”

“My orders?”

“Your orders,” his grandfather said.

Russell thought about this. He said it was because they were wrong.

“Well,” said his grandfather.

“I'm just not going to do whatever. There's things I've decided I'm just not going to do.”

“Well,” his grandfather said.

Russell lay there in the warm humming light. He felt like he should just go ahead and get it over with. He started weeping at some point, but there was no sound. His face was wet. Then his neck.

“They're going to kick me out,” he whispered. “They're going to give me the boot for sure.”

“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh,” said his grandfather, “I don't know about that.”

“They'll do it,” said Russell.

“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh,” the man said.

He went on to say other things. He seemed to be somehow younger. Russell hoped the man would tell him he was proud, but that wasn't what he said.

The man said that the world was spinning faster, things moving more quickly. You hoped they'd stay the same, but of course they couldn't. He said none of this really mattered, because he'd always known Russell would be all right. From the time he was a little boy, his grandfather could already tell.

“It don't matter how your momma turned out. It don't matter about your dad.”

Finally he said that Russell was getting older and soldiering was a young man's burden. He said he'd like to see Russell put his hands to others things. He didn't say what those other things were.

“What am I supposed to do?” he asked, but the man didn't answer.

Russell lay there. He drew a breath from deep in his stomach and managed to force open his eyes. There was an IV stand and the heart monitor, a clear tube running from under the sheets filled with yellow liquid, another running alongside it filled with red. There was a tray with a pitcher of water on it, a plastic vase of flowers, but his grandfather was gone.

 

When Russell woke the next morning, there were two men seated in folding chairs on the other side of the room: one bald and bearded in military dress, the other clean-shaven with wire-rimmed glasses, white shirt, gray slacks, and black patent shoes. The bald man wore the Class-A service uniform—dark green, the rank insignia of a major on his epaulets—and the black flash on the beret in his lap denoted 5th Special Forces. The men noticed he was awake, turned to regard each other, then rose, carried their chairs across the bright tile floor, and placed them next to Russell's bed. They stood for several seconds. The spectacled man was the taller of the two but he also looked softer, like he spent his days behind a desk.

He pointed at the bald man and said, “This is Major Serra. My name is Fisk.”

Russell cleared his throat. Something traveled down it, hard and sharp. He asked them who they were.

“I'm Major Serra,” said the shorter man. “This is Special Agent Fisk.”