War Stories: True-Life Fiction from America's Troops and Families in the Global War on Terror

By Donovan Webster

"War Stories" is a compilation of short fiction based on my reporting for magazines like Vanity Fair and the New York Times magazine and takes up narratives from that reporting that didn't fit with the narrative I was telling in the actual magazine story. I've changed names, locations, etc., invented some stories whole cloth, and used them to tell of soldiers, pilots, families, and others enmeshed in the global war on terror. Each has numerous specific fictionalized aspects that weren't part of the actual reporting, rendering them fiction. It too should come in around 290 pages. Some of the stories are heart-breaking, others hopeful. It's a full meal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503512146

Donovan Webster

Donovan Webster has written three books, including the prize-winning Aftermath: The Remnants of War. He has also written for major magazines such as Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and the New York Times magazine.

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Copyright © 2015 by Donovan Webster.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014919550

ISBN:      Hardcover         978-1-5035-1212-2

                Softcover           978-1-5035-1213-9

                eBook               978-1-5035-1214-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 03/17/2015

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CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Maybe

Bailando

Others

Time

Gears

Waiting

He

Packages

Leaving

For the Loughlin family,

who helped me and believed in me when even I questioned whether

this work could sustain a life.

Thank you.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

T he fictionalized stories in this book are all based a fair bit upon real experiences during my reporting on the Global War on Terror over the last decade and a half. The actual reportage—from places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, North Africa, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines—has appeared in magazines from National Geographic to Vanity Fair to The New York Times Magazine , among others. Still, by necessity of creating a magazine-length story, I have had to leave some narrative tangents and other aspects of this reporting out. Some of these narratives left behind, in a now fictionalized form, are contained in the book you hold in your h ands.

Many have sacrificed in this post–September 11th world. Their stories deserve to be told.

A portion of profits from the sale of this book will be directed to the Wounded Warriors Project (www.woundedwarriorsproject.org) and to Project Healing Waters (www.projecthealingwaters.org).

MAYBE

T he dust in the air tasted inexplicably … extra dry.

It was even drier than the cooked-down scent of the hayfields and wheat fields back home in central Kansas during August. It even seemed drier than the dust in other parts of this treeless, vertical, and rocky landscape called Afghanistan. It—the dust—was on Baker’s tongue and up his nostrils. It bit at his body a little, like salt.

But that wasn’t the biggest thing going on. Still, it is what crossed Lieutenant Colonel Jeffery Baker’s mind at the moment. More important—more central—was the hostile fire pouring in from all sides. It came in the form of AK-47 bangs and small rifle-launched grenade and mortar explosions. Once in a while, a big 81-millimeter shell would blast in nearby.

It didn’t seem possible. The hostile fire came from uphill, from downhill, from all flanks—left and right, above and below—along the gravel and patchy pavement road stretching from nowhere to more nowhere. The assault was mostly bullets and mortar rounds, thankfully. The occasional shoulder-mounted rocket hit nearby, each giving off that characteristic incoming zhiiiippp—BANG! before coming up short, or the larger mortar rounds that kept marching closer with each new strike, sending new geysers of dust and rock into the blue sky. The assault had been going now, in fits and starts, for 40 minutes.

All Baker could do was be relieved that the Afghans had never been very good shots. He had been in Afghanistan now on four different 13-month tours, plus two long-term special-ops visits to Iraq. All following September 11th.

He was tired of it all. And as the bullets hit around him and the team, and as the shells fell, he thought of the family farm outside Barnard; the house with its porches on the front and back, the gold of the wheat fields, the white sheet-metal buildings where his father and brother were always banging on some piece of machinery back in the shadows. Both his mom and dad were still alive. His older brother, Dave, basically managed the family’s business—a cattle, wheat, and hay facility—so his folks could relax and travel. Baker himself was 42 years old, had been married once, briefly, to a woman who had cheated during his long absences, and they, thankfully, hadn’t complicated things by having children. His hair was getting gray threads in it.

Maybe there was still time to start a more normal life.

Baker understood that the Afghans generally attacked in surges, like waves washing onto a beach, then they retreated as quickly. They weren’t into protracted firefights, as they neither had the firepower nor the will. And if he and the guys around him defended themselves, returning fire on occasion, they’d probably get out OK. Also, they could always call in air cover, which would kill a lot of the bad guys but—and this was important—would also piss the rest of them off even more about an American presence there.

This last part was something he was trying to avoid.

There were 21 of them: a 12-man team of his guys from the 82nd, a few SEALs, and a few CIA or DIA and Delta Force guys. They had been out three days for a vehicle and on-foot survey. The orders were hunt but don’t kill. And now they were on the way back to base, but they’d gotten pinned down inside a few house-sized boulders.

Baker sat up on the desert hardpan, behind the big rocks. He had been down flat, pretty much prone, for the last few minutes. Bullets were still chipping the boulders around them, sending bits of sharp rock—ballistic shards—at him and the other guys through the air when each bullet struck.

The irony was that nobody in the group had yet to make the usual new-guy admission. You know, If we don’t get out of this … And, he noted to himself, there were a few new guys in the team.

Under fire, everybody got to say that once, telling the other guys to pass along to their wives or kids or families that they loved them and were thinking of them at the end. But in the field, after that, making the admission a second time was just not done. And it still wasn’t the time for that.

It wasn’t that dangerous—yet.

Baker took a moment of pride. Despite it all, he’d never said it.

It doesn’t matter if you are in Afghanistan or Kansas, he thought. When the moment really comes, nobody can save you.

He’d made his peace with that.

The assault had started with a dead goat. It lay on its grayish back—its legs and small, shiny black hooves pointed to the sky—in the middle of a road that ran through a narrow neck of angular, vertical-sided valley between treeless mountains. There was high ground all around. It was a perfect ambush choke point.

The goat had clearly been gutted. Something too big had been put into its body cavity. A wire seemed to have been buried beneath the gravel of the road, leading to somewhere else.

"Shit, this can’t be right, said Davis, a Delta Force F-wing guy with shoulder-length blond surfer-boy hair, a big mustache, a black-and-red plaid shirt, and blue jeans on. He braked the Humvee, stopping it 60 yards up from the dead goat. He paused. Boys, he shouted over the sound of the engine and into the radio’s microphone, this is about to get bad. Stop! Now!"

A second later, the fire began coming in. It came from all around. Davis opened the driver’s door and stepped out of the vehicle. He stood there in the fire, stepped away to better see the whole convoy, and pointed to the other Hummers. Then he swung his arm to the right. "Those rocks, over there! he shouted as he pointed toward a chaotic circle of boulders. Get behind those rocks!"

He reached back inside the vehicle’s still-open door and grabbed both his M4 rifle and his black Sig Sauer pistol, which had been slid into the cleft between the driver’s seat and the console. He stuck the pistol into his trousers behind his back. His belt held it in place. He stepped back to the Hummer then looked around at the other guys still inside the vehicle. He had hazel eyes. He shook his head and checked each of them in their eyes.

"You stay in this car, he said pointing at the other passengers one by one with his right index finger, then pointing to the vehicle’s interior floorboards, and you may well die."

A bullet glanced off the windshield, shattering it slightly in that spiderweb pattern that happens with Hummers. Bullets were hitting all around Davis, pinging the open door—one, coming from left and slightly uphill, seemed to go past right shoulder to lodge in the dashboard on the passenger’s side. It ripped into the black-sheathed padding, exposing the white foam beneath. "Come on! Get a move on!" he shouted.

There were more radio calls made from the comms on their belts as they hustled toward the rocks. They decided to possibly call in air support. By radio, the base was instructed to put all local attack gunships on ready.

The bullets and fire kept coming randomly. These guys on ambush, despite hanging around longer than usual, weren’t leaving anytime soon. And if it kept up much longer, they were about to get a lesson from the US Department of Defense. Rock chips and that damned dry dust were in the air.

After a few more minutes, Davis finally said, OK, I’ve had enough of this shit.

He picked up his radio. He gave the coordinates for both the Army team to be protected in the valley and also the centers of fire around them, then advised that if the helicopters could, they should use suppressing fire rather than killing force.

They just wanted to flex a little muscle and get our asses out, Davis told the Base.

The enemy fire kept coming. Two or three minutes later, the slomp, slomp of Apache attack helicopters was audible. At less than two miles out, the Hellfire rocket and .50-caliber chain gun assault from the air started on the Afghan sites. It had been almost an hour since they’d taken initial fire.

The rocks that had been protecting them were black and gray. The helicopters were narrow from the front and black and faceted like jewels to throw off enemy radar, which the Afghans didn’t have in any great measure. As the helicopters kept firing, everything on that stretch of ground was shaking deeply. Hellfire missiles are laser- guided, and each one delivers 17 pounds of high explosive. Each Hellfire detonation sent roiling, oily, black-and-orange columns of smoky fire into the sky. With each Hellfire explosion, the earth shook again. Also aboard the helicopters were the sleeker Hydra rockets. They are packed with finned darts that, at impact and explosion scatter randomly, like sharpened grapeshot. Should things not improve quickly, those would begin coming