The Fearsome Particles (15 page)

“Excuse me.”

The men’s latrine was full except for one stall with an unflushed toilet. I went in there and rattled the flimsy door shut. I closed my eyes and tried not to breathe and tried not to think. Then I thought maybe I should pee, because other people might think it was weird that I was standing there in a stall doing nothing, not making a sound. But to pee I had to open my eyes, and I couldn’t open them. I tried but I couldn’t. So I gave that up and just pressed my arm across my face while a lot of soldiers and men I didn’t know, and never would know, jostled and joked around a few inches away from me. And as long as I was in there I just kept standing and kept silent as best as I could.

At the end of lunch, I caught up to Zini on her way out to the compound. She stopped and touched my arm.

“What happened to you?” she said. “Are you sick?”

“No, I’m okay. But I was thinking – can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

While I was in the latrine I’d gotten this idea of something I could do. But I was going to need help and she was the only one I trusted to ask. I pulled her off to the side, away from everybody streaming out of the kitchen to go back on duty.

“Do they ever let any support guys like me outside the camp here?”

“Outside the camp? Civilians?” She seemed startled. “Why would you want to?”

“Just – could it ever happen?”

A curl of hair had come loose at her temple and Zini tucked it under the edge of her cap as she thought. “Maybe if we’re trying to do some
CIMIC
thing for pr and somebody has skills that are needed?” She thought. “Last roto there was that awful
disease people were getting from sandfly bites, and they took a German specialist out to look at them. God, I saw pictures of some of those people and it –”

“Okay! That’s good. That’s what I was thinking. So is there any chance I could do something like that? Like maybe if there’s a well someplace that’s polluted, and they need somebody to fix it?”

She squinched her face up. “There’s probably a lot of wells out there contaminated in some way. I don’t know of any one in particular.” Then she studied me. “What’s up with you, anyway? I haven’t seen this much action out of you since you got here.”

There was nothing I could say to her that wouldn’t sound pathetic, that wouldn’t make her think I was trying too hard to be Legg’s friend, even though that wasn’t it at all. I just wanted to do something for him; I wanted to thank him. And that wasn’t something I could ever say out loud. I wonder sometimes if I’d told Zini then everything I was thinking, whether she would’ve said don’t bother, don’t waste your time, and everything would have turned out differently. But at that moment I just shrugged. “I was thinking I could do something helpful, you know, for Christmas. And you’re in the Command Office, right?”

She kept looking at me. “If we did get you outside, there’d have to be extra security.”

“Okay.”

Her mouth pulled sideways, like she was looking at a car she might buy. Then she reached up with two hands, shaped her beret, and nodded. “Okay, let me think about it.”

F
or two days I hardly saw her, and when I did she just smiled and passed right by me. So I started to think she’d forgotten, or decided it wasn’t important, and I hated myself for going to her. Then on the third day, as I was filling my cup at the coffee machine, she came up and stood beside me. She had this air about her, something sparkly.

“Christmas,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“It’s a time of giving.”

When I looked at her full on I could see she was smiling.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “I’m very good. I had to wait for the right moment, because Colonel Hister, our
CO
, he has certain times when he’s receptive, and certain times when he’s not. And when Hister’s vulnerable, you have to jump on him.” I think she said that louder than she’d expected to, because she looked over both shoulders. “Anyway, he’s always hunting around for ways to decrease tensions with the city, and he’s a man who appreciates a holiday gesture. So I told him there’s a
COF-AP
employee here who wants to give up his Christmas trip home so he can do something nice for Afghanistan.” Her face went serious. “You still want to, right?”

“Uh, yeah. Absolutely.”

She gave a crisp nod. “He wants to hear your idea.”

A
t three o’clock that day, I was sitting in the Command Office. On the outside it was a ramshackle combination of three white-painted
ISO
units joined together. Inside it was divided into two rooms. The one you entered first was cluttered with storage
shelves and desks for two military assistants – Zini and Lieutenant Bob Jayne, who I’d seen around because he’s hard to miss but I’d never met before. The inner room featured a big Canadian flag, a map of Afghanistan and the surrounding territory, two potted palms, three upholstered office chairs, an impressive oak desk, and a whiteboard. And right at that moment Colonel Raymond Hister, a tall, fit guy who seemed more like a math teacher than a soldier, was standing at the whiteboard drawing circles on it.

“This is you, Kyle,” he said, tapping in the middle of an apple-sized circle he’d just drawn with a black marker. He looked back to make sure I understood I was the apple-sized circle.

I nodded.

Off to the side, halfway between me and the whiteboard, was another man sitting in one of the upholstered chairs with his arms tightly crossed. That was Mike Oberly, Camp Laverne’s
COF-AP
deputy project manager. I recognized him from the first support personnel briefing I went to after I’d arrived, when he gave us a long speech about following rules and being professional and representing all the good things about Canada in this poor, screwed-up country, when all most people cared about was were they going to get shot at. Since I’d been shown into the Command Office, Oberly hadn’t said very much, and he seemed a little annoyed. But right now he was extremely focused on the whiteboard, as if what the colonel was drawing up there might be an important national secret.

Colonel Hister finished off another, larger circle, higher than the first, and he tapped it. “This is me. Or we could say, the Command Office.” He looked back. “You’re following?”

I nodded again. “Yes, sir.”

Hister put down his black marker, picked up a blue one, and drew a line connecting the two circles. “This,” he said, thudding the board with his middle finger, “is the path of your idea.” My idea hadn’t been discussed yet, other than to acknowledge that I had one, and that it had something to do with Camp Laverne, the people of Balakhet, and Christmas.

Hister turned partway toward me. “Seems like a good path, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

Hister shook his head. “It’s not.”

Over in the armchair, Oberly still had his arms knotted up and he was shaking his head too, as if he was right there with Hister in thinking the path of my idea was crap.

Now Hister picked up his black marker and drew a third circle.

“That’s me,” said Oberly, jabbing his head toward the third circle, as if his arms were useless, or shackled.

“Mike Oberly here” – Hister tapped the circle and turned – “is the
COF-AP
DPM
, as you know.” He capped the black marker, picked up the blue one, and drew a line connecting the circles representing me and Oberly.

“That’s the good path,” said Oberly.

Hister extended a hand toward the
DPM
. “Mr. Oberly is familiar with how we do things, Kyle, so he’s absolutely right, this is the good path. But is it complete?” He raised his eyebrows.

“Um. I don’t think so?”

“No, it’s not, because in this scenario, I haven’t heard the
idea yet.” He set the blue marker back down. “Now” – his voice turned cheerful – “look at this …”

This time he reached for a completely new marker, a red one, and he used it to draw a line between the Oberly and Hister circles. He turned toward me with a smile that was half charitable, half triumphant, and tapped the red line. “Here’s where the action is.”

Then he set the red marker down and began drawing a huge circle in the air with his finger. “What I want you to understand, Kyle, and as I’ve already explained to Zini – ideas are like fuel and need to flow in a certain direction, like gas in a car. Now in a car, you have fuel lines to govern the flow, but in a camp like ours, we have a process. It’s a process that we like, that we feel works for us, and that we want our support personnel to follow as religiously, if you will, as our military personnel. Because it keeps everything running in an orderly, efficient manner.”

Hister stopped drawing a circle in the air and turned to Oberly. “Did you have anything you wanted to add, Mike?”

Oberly stared at the board with a reverence you might give to something in a museum. “Not other than that there is the path we’ve used every day since day one.”

“Right.”

“And it’s a frigging good one.”

“No question about it.”

“Well” – Oberly shifted in his chair – “as long as he understands.”

“I think he does,” said Hister. Then the colonel rolled out his chair, sat down at his desk, and smiled into my eyes. “Now
that that’s cleared up, and since we’re all here, let’s talk about how we’re going to bring a little Christmas joy to our Afghani friends.”

“W
ake up, asshole.”

It was five-thirty in the morning, the Friday before Christmas, and Legg was standing over my bunk dressed for patrol in full gear, including the flak vest he sometimes called his “Kabul dinner jacket.” He was holding his C7 assault rifle in his left hand and punching me in the shoulder with his right.

“Get up if we’re gonna do this fuckin’ thing.”

Right away, Colonel Hister had seen the community-relations value in my idea. The first part was to take twenty thousand litres of our filtered, treated water and distribute it in fifty-litre jugs to the hospitals, mosques, and orphanages of Balakhet (we had to get the jugs flown in, which took a week, and for twenty-four hours after we emptied the holding tank to fill them, nobody in camp could have a shower). The second part – which required me going outside the camp – was to check the water quality of five public wells and, where necessary, treat the water with chlorine. Hister agreed that one of the wells I should look at was the one near the school, where the roof had been fixed, because it was good to remind people about other good things the military had done. He approved the extra security detail, which meant Legg would be involved for sure. And he agreed that the Friday before Christmas was the right day for what he named “Operation Slaked Thirst.” He was obviously, Zini told me, “in prime receptivity mode.”

The community relations and military procurement parts of the operation were given to Lieutenant Bob Jayne, in the Command Office. I was put in charge of water handling and treatment, which meant I was the one who had to fill up all the jugs. Only once, after about six hours of killing my back, when a jug slipped out of my hands and spewed water all over a bag of calcium hypochlorite tablets, which meant evacuating the
ISO
unit until the toxic air could be cleared, did I stop and think about all that was going on because of me. And how strange it was that I was going to so much trouble to make something happen, and to be part of it, for somebody who claimed he didn’t care about anything. But then I remembered I’d quit school and gone to Afghanistan just because it was the last thing my dad would want me to do. So I figured maybe I was just a guy who went to extremes.

In the tent, Legg sighed and clomped around while I got dressed. There wasn’t much light, but he must have seen Joe/ Joel asleep in his bunk because he grabbed the guy’s leg and shook it. Joe/Joel sucked in a breath and levered up off his pillow.

“Wha’ the fuck?”

“Checkin’ for sandflies. Go back to sleep.”

It was cold outside, colder than I’d expected, and the light was soft and sort of pink. Out by the water treatment
ISO
, three canvas-sided
HLVW
trucks were already lined up with their engines rumbling – each of them had to be loaded with about a hundred and thirty water jugs – and in front of them stood Lieutenant Jayne with a sheaf of papers in his hand. When he saw me jogging toward the
ISO
, he came right for me.

“What the hell, Woodlore,” he said. “You working on Central Canada time or what?”

“Sorry.” I got to the
ISO
and swung open the wide door. “This whole show was your idea.”

I knuckled the sleep out of my eyes and pointed inside. “There’s a hundred jugs in here, plus that bag of chlorine tablets. And there’s three hundred more jugs in the supplies tent.”

“Okay,” said Jayne, glancing at his papers. “So who’s loading it?”

I just looked at him. “Well … I thought –”

He jabbed his glasses up his nose. “You thought I’d get some soldiers to do the grunt work, so you didn’t arrange for any
COF-AP
people to be here.”

At that moment it seemed possible the whole thing could be called off, and it felt like everything at the edge of my sight was receding.

“Is that right?”

My throat was closing. “Yes.”

Jayne looked fierce for a moment, and then his expression shifted, like a coin catching light. “Yeah, that’s what I figured,” he said. “So you can thank me for rostering up six men to do your work.” He began to stalk off and as he did he waved his papers toward a military photographer who was standing near one of the trucks, rummaging in a green canvas bag. “Guess we can’t have pictures of one skinny civilian hauling twenty thousand litres on his back.”

With six men plus me working, the trucks were loaded and rolling within an hour. Lieutenant Jayne sat up in the lead truck because he had the maps and the names of officials, and with
him, besides the driver, rode a language assistant named Nila. She was a tall, quiet woman, a former schoolteacher, and the red and gold hijab she wore didn’t quite cover the scars and blinded eye she’d gotten in the days of the Taliban. (She’d allowed her ankle to be seen, according to the story I heard, and for that she’d been beaten with a camel’s bridle by her fourteen-year-old nephew.) I sat in the second truck between the driver and one of the guards, doing my best to protect the testing kit from the dust being churned up by the first truck and coming into the cab. Legg was stationed in the third truck with the photographer, and I had a good idea how much swearing was going on back there in the grit cloud from the two trucks in front.