through and quickly slid down the wall on the backside. And there was his body. I had to catch my footing to keep from stepping on the corpse of the ANA soldier. I somehow managed to avoid his splayed limbs and stepped around him. He had been shot through the gut, coming through the same hole in the wall I had just struggled through. He had bled out in a couple of minutes. We loaded the body into a plastic stretcher that cinched down to create a strange womb, to securely transport it to a nearby field we could use for a landing zone. A few of us, alongside some ANA, rotated out on carrying the stretcher. We drug the body through the ankle-deep water and pushed it up over the walls to roll down the other side. In the stretcher you could hear and smell the blood and shit swishing back and forth. The first time—and only time-it broke me, we were at the end of the first day of a two day operation. It was about six months into the deployment, and Afghanistan was beginning to wear. That day was a culmination of It. Whatever It was. We landed that morning, about three a.m., and pushed into a nearby village. A couple of weeks earlier we had discovered, quite by accident, that it had become a Taliban stronghold. They had forced the locals out, planted IEDs in the roads, and turned rooftops and compounds into fighting positions. We were in the first compound at day break, to begin a long, slow process of trying to clear the village one mud hut at a time. The day drug into the early afternoon, and we were nearly finished. The village was totally abandoned. A ghost town scattered with pots and pans, sleeping mats, and shell casings from the previous weeks. The roads were lined with IEDs, so we had to scramble over walls and rooftops. Exposing ourselves in mad dashes to get back to cover. The rule of thumb in Panjwai was you never got the one up on the Taliban. They always ambushed us. Word came down on the radio, our First Sergeant was lost, trying to move south to our company’s other elements. He wasn’t even an infantryman. He was a tanker who had been sent to our company because he had all the right connections with all the right people. To really get out there, in the shit. He was 24
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