Spare

But no. Just as none of us was eager to draw the Taliban’s attention, I was eager not to draw the attention of my fellow squaddies. My main goal was to blend in.

One of the arrows pointed towards “The Cannons,” two enormous 105-mm guns at the back of the non-working shower block. Nearly every day, several times a day, Dwyer fired off those big guns, lobbed massive shells in a smoky parabola towards Taliban positions. The noise made your blood stop, fried your brains. (One day the guns were fired at least a hundred times.) For the rest of my life, I knew, I’d be hearing some vestige of that sound; it would echo forever in some part of my being. I would also never forget, when the guns finally stopped, that immense silence.

11.

Dwyer’s ops room was a box wrapped in desert camo. The floor was thick black plastic made of interlinked pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle. It made a weird noise when you walked across it. The focal point of the room, indeed the whole camp, was the main wall, which featured a giant map of Helmand Province, with pins (yellow, orange, green, blue) representing units of the battle group.

I was greeted by Corporal of Horse Baxter. Older than me, but my coloring. We exchanged a few wry cracks, a rueful smile about involuntary membership in the League of Redheaded Gentlemen. Also, the Balding Brotherhood. Like me, Baxter was fast losing coverage on top.

I asked where he was from.

County Antrim.

Irish, eh?

Sure.

His lilting accent made me think he could be kidded. I gave him a hard time about the Irish, and he returned fire, laughing, but his blue eyes looked unsure. Crikey, I’m taking the piss out of a prince.

We got down to work. He showed me several radios stacked along a desk under the map. He showed me the Rover terminal, a pudgy little laptop with compass points stenciled along the sides. These radios are your ears. This Rover is your eyes. Through them I’d make a picture of the battlefield, then try to control what happened in and above it. In one sense I’d be no different from the air-traffic controllers at Heathrow: I’d spend my time guiding jets to and fro. But often the job wouldn’t even be that glamorous: I’d be a security guard, blearily monitoring feeds from dozens of cameras, mounted on everything from recon aircraft to drones. The only fighting I’d be doing would be against the urge to sleep.

Jump in. Have a seat, Lieutenant Wales.

I cleared my throat, sat down. I watched the Rover. And watched.

Minutes passed. I turned up the volume on the radios. Turned it down.

Baxter chuckled. That’s the job. Welcome to the war.

12.

The Rover had an alternative name, because everything in the Army needed an alternative name.

Kill TV.

As in:

Whatcha doing?

Just watching a bit of Kill TV.

The name was meant to be ironic, I figured. Or else it was just blatantly fake advertising. Because the only thing getting killed was time.

You watched an abandoned compound thought to have been used by the Taliban.

Nothing happened.

You watched a tunnel system suspected to have been used by the Taliban.

Nothing happened.

You watched a sand dune. And another sand dune.

If there’s anything duller than watching paint dry, it’s watching desert…desert. I wondered how Baxter hadn’t gone mad.

So I asked him.

He said that after hours of nothing, there’d be something. The trick was staying alert for that.

If Kill TV was dull, Kill Radio was mad. All the handsets along the desk gave off a constant babble, in a dozen accents, British, American, Dutch, French, to say nothing of the various personalities.

I began trying to match the accents with the call signs. American pilots were Dude. Dutch pilots were Rammit. French were Mirage, or Rage. Brits were Vapor.

Apache helicopters were called Ugly.

My personal call sign was Widow Six Seven.

Baxter told me to grab a handset, say hello. Introduce yourself. When I did, the voices all perked up, turned their attention to me. They were like baby birds demanding to be fed. Their food was information.

Who are you? What’s happening down there? Where am I going?

Besides information, the thing they wanted most often was permission. To enter my air space or to leave it. Rules forbade pilots to pass overhead without assurance that it was safe, that a battle wasn’t raging, that Dwyer wasn’t blasting away its heavy guns. In other words, was it a hot ROZ (restricted operating zone)? Or cold? Everything about the war revolved around this binary question. Hostilities, weather, water, food—hot or cold?