House on Fire

25

The mansion was completely dark. Dawn would come soon. The wind still whipped, but it didn’t rain, just spattered a bit. We made our way back to the house. Her room was in the other wing, and we decided it made the most sense for her to enter at the back door.

“Remember, I’m Hildy,” she said.

Turned out that we both knew the code to the main house alarm — it was the month, day, and year that Conrad Kimball had first met his Natalya. That code his kids knew. The alarm was still on by the time I got to the front door, which just meant that I’d beat Maggie to it. I punched in the code, and it instantly disarmed.

The grand stone staircase was right before me. I padded up the staircase to the second floor, to the wing where I was staying. In the dark hall someone passed by quickly. I saw that it was Cameron, presumably going into his own room. Maybe he was too drunk to recognize me. I hoped so.

I located my bedroom and collapsed on the bed. I was exhausted. I glanced at my watch. Four in the morning.

I’d catch a few hours of sleep. My alarm clock would be Maggie Benson knocking on my door at eight a.m.

I dozed fitfully, had troubled dreams.

I still dream about things that happened to me in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can’t avoid it. If you don’t dream it, something’s wrong; you’re suppressing bad stuff. Sometimes I’ll dream about people dying. Friends dying. Or I’m exposed in a combat situation and suddenly my rifle jams. Regular people have anxiety dreams about, like, discovering they’re about to take a final exam in a course they forgot they had signed up for.

But if they’ve served in combat, they might dream that they’re ten shots into a guy, an enemy, and he won’t go down, he just keeps advancing.

I dream, sometimes, of combat situations I’ve been in. Probably because on some level my brain needs to keep processing these moments of high anxiety, to keep me sane. That’s my theory, anyway.

That night I dreamed of the time Sean Lenehan saved my life.

We were based in Asadabad, in Kunar province, in the northeastern part of Afghanistan. Our mission was to advise three hundred or so soldiers in an Afghan National Army kandak, which is their word for battalion.

One day one of our two interpreters, Abdul Rahim, rushed in to the team house and told us that the other interpreter, Khalid, had been kidnapped by the Taliban. He was being held in a house in a village in the Pech Valley, one of the most violent and dangerous areas in Afghanistan.

Abdul Rahim said he’d received a desperate call from a member of Khalid’s family. He wasn’t being held for ransom. They were going to lop off his head in the village square in the morning, to make an example of him.

Khalid was a slight man in his twenties who stammered a little in English but was a super-fast interpreter and a dear person. Everyone liked him. We needed him. There was no debate about whether to attempt a hostage rescue to get Khalid back. We all loved the guy and wanted to try to save him. We were all in agreement.

Our team leader, Captain McShane, called the company commander at Jalalabad and secured permission for a limited rescue operation. But how to carry it off? Normally we’d have a few days for mission prep, a few days to gather intelligence by whatever means possible. Then a day or two to rehearse. But if we were going to save Khalid’s life, we had to move that very night.

All we knew was that he was being held hostage in some compound in this small village. If we were going to move at midnight, we had maybe twelve hours to gather all available intel on the house where Khalid was imprisoned.

And since I was the intel sergeant, that was my job.

I begged Jalalabad to lend us a drone, a UAV, to fly and circle over the village for five hours and collect whatever info we could. We needed to develop a pattern of life, as it’s called. The company commander said okay.

That allowed us to locate the right house. It turned out to be fairly obvious: the only house in the village that kept a sentry on the roof. I estimated there were six to eight men inside the house.

The team leaders and I met in the Op Cen, the team conference room, sitting in metal folding chairs around a four-by-eight plywood table. It was a chilly afternoon. People don’t know how cold it can get in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. It snowed several inches every week.

When it was my turn to speak, I let everyone on the team know that this was going to be riskier than normal. There were far too many unknowns.

“So noted,” said Captain McShane, and everyone fell quiet for an uncomfortable few seconds. “Moving on.”

We came up with our CONOPS, or concept of the operation. Then all the fallback plans, the PACE plans — the primary plan, the alternate, the contingency, and the emergency. (The military loves its acronyms.) Our ops sergeant had put in a call to his higher-ups at Jalalabad for permission to use a couple of Black Hawks. He decided we’d infil via helicopter a few terrain features away. This would reduce the sound of the choppers.

Then we’d move on foot to the target area. Once we’d set up the observation and support positions, the stack would move toward the compound and position itself for entry through the front door.

Meanwhile, I got to work on the operational preparation of the battlefield, the OPE. That meant I checked on the weather, terrain, enemy situation, and so on. It was a cold, dry night, which was good. I requested overhead imagery. I did a terrain study using maps and photos, to help determine the infil and exfil routes. And where the choppers should land.

This was all on me, which just jacked up my stress level.

We rehearsed the mission a few times. Did a few walk-throughs. The warrant officer announced that I was going to be the first guy in the stack, since I was most familiar with Khalid. Sean was fourth. The hostage rescue was scheduled for midnight. Zero hundred hours.

And I had a bad feeling about this mission.

Partly that was because of the odds. You can only go through so many gunfights and not get shot. That was one thing. The odds said it was my turn to get shot. But partly too it was because I was number one in the stack. The lead guy’s the one who sets off the IEDs or gets shot. Someone’s got to be the lead, though, and plenty of times I had volunteered for it. But that day my Spidey-sense told me something was going to go wrong, so I didn’t volunteer — and got chosen all the same.

Over the course of the evening, while we waited for zero hundred hours, we all tried to decompress in our different ways.

Some of us worked out. Most of us hung out in our barracks. Some guys played online games; some listened to music. You often used to hear a 3 Doors Down song playing, “When I’m Gone” (“Love me when I’m gone, when I’m gone”). Merlin did Sudoku, super-advanced, black-belt stuff.

Some guys put on headphones and blasted music so loud you could hear it clearly in the barracks. A lot of the guys Skyped with their families, just to say hi. You weren’t allowed to tell them that in a few hours you were going on a hazardous mission in which you might be killed. Instead, you were “just checking in.” It was always the dangerous missions that inspired people to make one last phone call. Sean called Patty, and she immediately figured out something was looming, but that was just Patty.

Everyone was nervous. Your stomach gets tight. The adrenaline is pumping. I checked the fit of my helmet, made sure it was on right. Did a comms check to make sure my handheld communications device was working. I found if I spent some time before a mission doing all my pre-op checks, it kept my anxiety at a manageable level.

I read a book by Lee Child. I like the Jack Reacher stories. And I waited. I thought a lot. We didn’t know how many guys were in the house or what kind of arms they had. Nor could we tell how many might be lying in wait in neighboring houses. It had occurred to me — and I’d told the entire team my theory — that the Taliban had kidnapped Khalid as a way to lure us into an ambush.

Any of us could be shot or KIA that night.

There were too many unknowns.

At just before midnight, we gathered on the airfield near the two Black Hawks. It was our detachment of twelve, plus Abdul Rahim, the other interpreter, and what’s called a JTAC, an Air Force special tactics airman. That made fourteen of us. Seven in each chopper.

We checked our communications devices, the MBITRs. We checked and checked again: Did we have our tear gas grenades? Protective eyewear? Fragmentation grenades? It’s always the little things that go wrong, so you obsessively look at every detail. We examined our M9 Beretta pistols, our M4s, the magazine pouches for the M4s. Put on our earmuffs that plugged into our MBITRs, which protected our hearing but also let us all stay in communication. Made sure we had the gloves to avoid burns. Checked our NODs, our night observation devices — that’s night-vision goggles to you. One of our slogans used to be “We Own the Night.” In part, that’s because the enemy didn’t have night-vision equipment. We could see in the darkness, and they, at that time, could not. Maybe by now that’s changed.

We were all wearing body armor plates front and back. Hanging from the plate carrier was a bunch of equipment, including the medical kit.

That one you didn’t want to forget.

We all strapped into our harnesses in the helicopter and took off quickly. The doors remained open, despite the cold night. It wasn’t a long trip, maybe thirty klicks. On our headphones “When I’m Gone” was playing, like a soundtrack to our infiltration. It was intended to pump everyone up, get everyone hyped up and ready. To me, that night, it sounded a little morbid.

We landed in a small river valley, pulled off our seatbelt harnesses, and jumped out of the chopper. I could feel the icy river water through my boots. We were completely exposed.

We made our stealthy approach into the village, clutching our M4 rifles, and over to an observation point where we could see the compound where Khalid was being held. Sure enough, through our NODs, we could see there was one sentry on the roof, as the drone had spotted. One of our team members was watching the drone’s feed on a small screen and confirmed that the house was exactly as anticipated.

No one was standing guard outside. Earlier in the day someone had been there. Now, nobody. I didn’t like that.

Our four-man stack quietly moved in closer. A team sniper/ observer found a position from which he could see the back of the house. Ready to shoot any squirter, which is what we called someone who sneaks out the back door or window, running away from the attack.

The front door wasn’t terribly substantial, so we rammed it in instead of breaching it with an explosive charge. As we four entered the house, we tossed flash-bangs. There was dust everywhere, the smell of gunpowder.

And through our NODs we could see that the house was swarming with enemy soldiers. Were they expecting us? Had we just stepped into the middle of an ambush? Maybe we’d been betrayed by one of the Afghan soldiers we’d been training. Maybe one of them had placed a call on their mobile phone.

Or maybe it was something much simpler. Maybe they had simply heard the sound of the choppers and grabbed their weapons.

The air exploded with gunfire. Everyone, it seemed, was firing at us at once.

As the first one in, I was the first one shot. A couple of times. It felt like my left leg had been pierced by a flaming arrow. An explosion of pain. I crumpled to the floor. Later, I learned that the first round had broken my femur. The second one had pierced my femoral artery. It’s hard to describe the magnitude of the pain, but it took over my body, disoriented me. I saw blood spewing from my leg. I thought about the very real possibility that I might die in a matter of minutes. I struggled to get up but suddenly didn’t have the strength. This, I thought, was my time. It had finally come.

Suddenly I was being dragged across the room and out of the house. Sean, who was the fourth guy in the stack, had run into the house, exposing himself to the enemy, in order to grab me by a shoulder strap of my body armor. He pulled me across the floor, out the door, and then outside along the ground until he got me safely behind a high stone wall.

I managed to croak out, “Thank you.”

“Not done yet,” I heard Sean say as if from a distance.

Meanwhile, George Devlin, our communications sergeant, was on the radio, calling in a 9 line for a medevac helicopter. Sean got a tourniquet off my kit and applied it to my leg to stop the bleeding. He also put gauze and a bandage on the wounds.

Blood was everywhere. I was in shock, so my memory of everything afterward is hazy. I heard Sean muttering, and I asked him to repeat it.

“You know, there’s an ancient Chinese proverb,” he said. “If you save a man’s life, you’re responsible for it.”

My brain was operating just barely enough to allow me to rasp, “Having second thoughts?”

A Black Hawk medevac bird arrived moments later, and I was lifted into it on a stretcher. A medic on the chopper checked my airway, assessed me for shock, took my blood pressure, looked worried, and gave me a fentanyl lollipop. I licked it a few times. I don’t remember much beyond that until I woke up hours later in a surgical tent in Jalalabad.

I muttered, “How’s Khalid?”

Silence around me. A little louder, I said, “The hostage? How is he?”

“The hostage didn’t make it,” someone said.

Khalid had been executed minutes before we got there.

We never figured out whether we were betrayed by one of the kandak or if they were just alerted by the chopper sound.

Sometimes you just don’t know. Combat is iffy. Sometimes it just goes bad.