One Bullet Away

On December 22, I woke up covered in frost. A heavy dew and freezing temperatures had coated my sleeping bag overnight, and it cracked as I sat up, sending little avalanches of ice onto the sand next to me. Tora Bora. It was my first conscious thought each morning. I stood up stiffly and hobbled toward the COC, willing the blood back into my legs. Captain Whitmer was there, studying a map.

Our plan had been refined. We would fly to Bagram and then on to Jalalabad. Part of the task force was already up there and had reported that the runway would support a C-130. From the Jalalabad airfield, we would move overland to two valleys near the Pakistani border. There we would set up blocking positions while special operations units called in air strikes on the caves where the fighters were hiding. If they tried to flee, they would run right into us. Captain Whitmer gave me a map of the valleys and told me to memorize it. This mission, once fantastic, was inching from possible toward probable with each passing hour.

I joined Patrick on Christmas Eve at a Mass near the end of the runway. It was nearly dark, and a couple of dozen Marines stood around a makeshift altar — a poncho liner thrown across stacked boxes of machine gun ammo. The chaplain was relaxed and wry, noting the old adage about there being no atheists in a foxhole. “I suspect many of you are more lapsed than my normal crowd, but given the circumstances, this can’t hurt, right?”

We sang “Silent Night” and “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” I closed my eyes and crossed the ten thousand miles to home, imagining my family doing the same thing. They would go out for Chinese food, an old tradition, and then to a party we’d gone to every Christmas Eve for more than twenty years. The night would end at Midnight Mass, where they would sing these same songs. I hoped they would know I was safe and wished I could tell them that most of my days were a walk in the sun.

Our service was interrupted by a line of airplanes thundering overhead. Each began as a drone far up in the dark sky. Because of the missile threat, planes arrived over Rhino at ten thousand feet. Then, with the safety of Marines below, the pilots flew a steep corkscrew down to their final approach. The C-130s flew in darkness until near the runway threshold, when they flipped a switch and bathed the field in light. Their landing lights stretched from wingtip to wingtip, like ten cars driving abreast. C-17s looked the same, but only through night vision goggles. Their landing lights were infrared, invisible to the naked eye.

Mass was over. Thinking about the night’s long-range patrol out beyond Rhino’s lines shattered my fragile illusion of peace. I had to get back to the tower to finish planning for it. Patrick and I walked off into the darkness together. We were both so busy with missions and our platoons that we rarely had time to talk.

“How you doing?” His tone invited a longer answer than the question usually did.

“Frustrated, man.” I poured out all my bottled-up gripes — sitting in the static defense, running from the RPG teams, the operations officer’s callous treatment of my platoon, sleeplessness, concern about the Tora Bora mission. All of it. Patrick stopped walking and turned toward me, cradling his rifle across his chest. He nodded encouragement and listened without interrupting as I continued. After so many weeks of wearing a stoic mask before the platoon and Captain Whitmer, bitching to Patrick was a relief.

“Feeling better now?” he asked with a smile, knowing that I did.

We shook gloved hands and wished each other Merry Christmas before returning to our platoons.

Christmas morning dawned clear and cold. The patrol had been uneventful, and I walked the lines to see the Marines. I thought some of the younger guys might have a hard time that day, but they were festive. A captured tumbleweed stood next to each fighting hole, pruned by hand into the triangular shape of a little pine tree. Candy and mini Tabasco bottles from MREs hung from the branches. There were even gifts. During the past week, Marines had squirreled away packets of cheese or pound cake — MRE delicacies — for their buddies. The mortar section, with great ceremony, presented me with a dog-eared porn magazine. I returned the favor, flipping two cans of Copenhagen into Staff Sergeant Marine’s hands.

When I returned to the tower, Jim was standing over a cardboard box, looking disgusted. A Christmas card from the commander of U.S. Naval Forces in the Middle East, based in Bahrain, was taped to the outside. It was addressed to “U.S. Marine Platoon, Camp Rhino, Afghanistan.” Inside were two dozen bags of microwave popcorn, an electric fan, and Jackie Collins novels with titles like Hollywood Husbands and The World Is Full of Married Men.

“Bro,” he said as I climbed the stairs, “do you ever get the feeling that no one has a clue what we’re doing out here?”