One Bullet Away

Life at Pasni had a peculiar rhythm. Gear and Marines piled up there to be flown to Rhino. Fear of surface-to-air missiles in Afghanistan limited flights to the hours of darkness. In Pakistan, we kept up the illusion that American troops weren’t running offensive operations. That meant hiding in the stone hangars during the day, bored and sweltering. Once the sun set, the base burst into a frenzy of continuous movement. C-130s landed, loaded without even shutting off their engines, and disappeared back down the runway. Helicopters shuttled back and forth to the ships. Mountains of equipment moved from pile to aircraft to gone.

The night we arrived, the hangars were already full, so the platoon staked out a spot in a clearing next to one. I couldn’t sleep and took a walk to explore. Strands of white lights decorated baked brick buildings, giving the place a strangely festive air. I expected to see tables set with red-and-white-checked tablecloths and people drinking wine beneath the trees. Instead, I saw only forklifts carrying pallets of ammo and sentries standing along the edges of the field, facing outward toward the darkness beyond.

Before sunrise, we woke up and moved inside. We sat in the hangar all day. I repacked my gear for the fifth time. Marines around me played cards, slept, and congregated near the doors to breathe fresh air and talk.

“So the Cobra pumps a rocket into the building, right there in downtown Tirana,” one Marine was saying. “Civilians sitting around drinking coffee, reading the newspaper. Big fucking explosion, fucking concrete falling into the streets. And we’re in uniform. ‘U.S. Marines’ right there on my chest. ‘Marines’ on the side of the helicopter. Can’t just be like, ‘Sorry, guys, I don’t know what fucksticks are in that helicopter.’”

Another guy ratcheted up the intensity. “Mogadishu, brother. You ain’t seen shit if you ain’t been to the Mog. Skinny little fuckers running all over the place. Stoned outta their fucking heads on that leaf they chew. Khat, they call it. Makes them get crazy and shoot a lot. Stay away from the walls. Bullets travel along the walls.”

From a different cluster of Marines came comic relief. “I’m riding down the main street in Pattaya Beach, two beers in my hands, two whores behind me, and we’re on the back of an elephant painted pink. What? Yeah, I knew they were women. I grab-checked them. This wasn’t my first fucking deployment.”

As I eavesdropped, I realized that although they traveled a lot, they rarely saw the places they visited. Marines aren’t travelers in the traditional sense. They view foreign countries either from behind a gun sight or through the haze of a night on liberty. Perspective skews to one dimension, as if the Marines are the players and everything else is a prop. The same would hold true in Afghanistan, I suspected.

We knew strikingly little about where we were going. No one had foreseen operating in this part of the world. We had packed for training in Thailand, Australia, and Kenya, liberty in the Seychelles, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and long-shot contingencies like a final solution to the Saddam problem. Afghanistan was literally not on our map.

We had been given hastily made Pashto and Dari “pointie-talkie” cards, which listed English phrases appropriate to our situation, such as “Drop the weapon, or I will shoot,” and then gave both their written and phonetic translations. We had only rudimentary maps. Most American maps of Afghanistan dated from the Soviet occupation. Ours were large-scale with little detail and were plotted according to different data. Rhino was situated right at the intersection of four map sheets, which were rendered in three different scales and data. Finding your position on one map sheet was a simple task of plotting your GPS coordinates. Move a bit west onto another map sheet, though, and you had to move 141 meters north and 182 meters east to match the GPS coordinates with the point on the map. Farther north, and the correction was 130 meters south and 217 meters west. I lay in the hangar in Pasni, half-listening to the Marines’ stories, committing all this to memory and hoping I wouldn’t have to recall it under pressure.

Shortly after dark, Patrick came over and said, “Here’s your ticket.” He handed me a manifest sheet with the names and blood types of the Marines who would be on the plane. “We’re on the nine-thirty shuttle to Kandahar.”

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