Crossing the River No Name

Photograph by Carlos Javier Ortiz for The New Yorker
Photograph by Carlos Javier Ortiz for The New Yorker

Khost, Afghanistan: One rainy night, in March, 2009, we crossed a muddy field to intercept a group of Taliban who’d come out of the mountains of Pakistan. They were walking west. We were patrolling north to arrive at a point ahead of them, where we’d set up an ambush. The field was actually many fields, inundated by snowmelt and rain. Piles of rocks, laid by farmers, demarcated the flooded borders. Every so often we’d come across evidence of what had once grown in those fields: an island of blighted corn stalks, a soybean shoot—as perfect as a laboratory specimen—floating in a shin-deep lake. Someday, I figured, the sun would come out, the land would dry, and the farmers would be back to re-stake their claims. That night, however, they’d taken shelter on higher ground, and that entire miserable stretch of Khost was ours.

Electric rain streaked straight down in my night vision. Cold rose from the mud into my bones. It squeezed the warmth out of my heart. My heart became a more sensitive instrument as a result, and I could feel the Taliban out there, lost in the darkness. I could feel them in the distance, losing hope. This was the type of mission that earlier in the war would have been fun: us knowing and seeing, them dumb and blind. Hal, walking point, would have turned around and smiled, like, Do you believe we’re getting paid for this? And I would have shaken my head. But now Hal hardly turned around. And when he did it was only to make sure that we were all still behind him, putting one foot in front of the other, bleeding heat, our emerald hearts growing dim.

We made steady progress through the rain until we came to a river. The river looked like a wide section of field that had somehow broken free, that had, for unknown reasons, been set in motion. In fact, the only way to tell river from field was to stare at the river and sense its lugubrious vector. But to stare at the river for too long was to feel as if it were standing still and the field were moving.

Hal called on our best swimmers, Lex and Cooker, to cross first. They removed their helmets and armor. They kept their rifles and pistols. Cooker tied a loop at the end of a hundred feet of rope and clipped the loop to the hard point on Lex’s belt. He hooked himself onto the rope behind Lex, and they set off.

Lex and Cooker waded into the icy water. Long waves purled off their knees. Dark voids streamed from their waists. A third of the way across, they lay in the water and side-stroked. Their heads popped up and down on the surface. Their exhalations wove together in thick paisley clouds. The rope sank and oscillated in the current. Hugs tied on another hundred feet. Lex and Cooker crawled onto the opposite bank—forty yards across, and another twenty downriver—steaming from exertion and cold.

“Pair up,” Hal said.

With the rope now anchored at either end, the rest of us would cross wearing all our gear. The first pair—Hugs and Polly—carried the helmets and armor that Lex and Cooker had left behind. They clipped themselves to the rope and walked out. Hand over hand, they pulled themselves across the river, then heaved themselves onto the far shore, where they unclipped and joined the anchor. Hal and I were next. Hal hooked himself to the rope ahead of me and marched out into the river.

As far as I knew, the only thing in the world that scared Hal was water. Which was why he’d joined the Navy, and become a SEAL—to conquer that fear. And, for the most part, he’d been successful. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, he was able to overcome his trepidation by sheer force of will. But there remained that one per cent, wherein the invincible core of Hal’s fear would reassert itself.

The last time I’d seen this happen was September of 2004, on the Atlantic Ocean, in the middle of the night. We’d tracked down a freighter fifteen miles off the coast of Virginia, steaming east. Crouched in our High-Speed Assault Craft, or HSAC, we’d closed in on the massive freighter’s starboard quarter, just aft of the island, for a mock raid. It was a training mission; the hijackers on board the freighter were actors, and the rounds in our assault rifles were paint. But everything else was real: the crescent moon, the twenty-foot waves, the darkness between the waves, and the way the moonlight played on their quivering peaks.

The freighter’s gigantic engines were throbbing, their heat shining through the thick steel hull. Waves that flattened along the skin of the ship were re-forming perfectly in its wake, as if the freighter weren’t there. Meanwhile, Lex, at the HSAC’s helm, was bringing us in on a shallow angle, weaving through crests and troughs. Cooker, standing at the bow with the caving ladder hooked to a pole, was raising that pole toward the freighter’s bulwarks. At twenty feet and closing, I could hear the hiss of the waves slipping down the freighter’s skin. At ten feet, I could hear the sucking sound of wave troughs disappearing under the ship. That was when Hal yelled, “Stop!”

Lex cut the throttles to idle. Cooker retracted the pole. We all lay down in the HSAC, anticipating Hal’s call for an emergency breakaway, followed by a banked turn and a high-powered retreat over the waves. Instead, Hal remained silent, allowing us to drift away from the freighter. When I looked up at Hal standing in the HSAC in the moonlight, I saw that his usual infectious calm had been replaced by something spookier and more insular. It was as if he’d realized that our fight against the hijackers of the world would never end, so why continue? Five seconds later, though, he came to his senses. He ordered Lex to chase down the freighter. He directed Cooker to hook the caving ladder onto the bulwarks. And we followed him up the side of the ship, ascending through waves that enveloped us in their cool velocity and threatened to sweep us out to sea.

Later, when I asked Hal what had caused him to yell “Stop!” that night, he said that something hadn’t felt right. His answer had seemed credible enough, because nothing ever felt right.

The trek across the slick and forsaken field in Khost, for example. Or my heart’s reception of the Taliban’s mounting despair. Or the river, whose water smelled like rust and whose eddies trapped phosphorescent galaxies of undissolved fertilizer. The river didn’t appear on any of our maps. So, to anyone not standing on its ill-defined banks or wading out against its wily current, that river didn’t exist. If we were ever going to turn back, this would have been the time to do it.

But I followed Hal into the river—up to my knees and then my waist—to a spot about halfway across, where the current felt stronger at my feet than at my chest. The bottom kept shifting, and a dark crease formed on the river’s surface immediately downstream from us. That was where Hal froze.

“We need to move upstream!” I called.

Hal gripped the rope with both hands. “Right!” he shouted, without moving. Then he disappeared below the surface.

Standing my ground, I absorbed Hal’s weight on the tightening rope. Then the bottom gave out, and I went under.

It was as if I’d sunk into a black well. Still attached to the rope, I bumped into Hal. The current pushed us together, back to back, holding us submerged. We fought to unhook ourselves while the rope twisted. Hal bucked as if he were trying to break out of a straitjacket. His screams were silent, but I felt them in my lungs, and I watched the silver bubbles rise from his mouth.

“Try ‘Open underscore sesame.’ ”

Times before, when I’d thought I was going to die—like during that ambush in Marjah, on my first deployment, or, two deployments later, when our helo’s tail rotor was shot off over Shkin—I’d wanted to cringe and whimper at the coming end. Instead, I’d looked to Hal and seen him radiating calm, a calm that had transferred to me so wholly that I wouldn’t have known the difference had I passed to the other side.

Now Hal had run out of air. He clawed at me in an attempt to propel himself to the surface. In that way, he created enough slack in the rope for me to unclip.

I sank directly to the bottom of the murky hole and kicked off, but fell short of the surface. Sinking again, I drifted downriver. My armor, my weapons, felt weightless in the numbing cold. I floated through Hal’s wake: cascades of shear and compression, acceleration and stall. I looked up at the surface, trying not to panic. In a twist of glowing fertilizer, I saw the Virgin Mary.

Doubters, listen: if she can appear at an underpass in Chicago, if she can appear in the bruise on a woman’s thigh at an E.R. in El Paso, then she can appear in a whirlpool of diammonium phosphate, spinning on the surface of an unnamed river in Afghanistan.

Light emanated from her peaceful, benevolent face. Golden roses lay at her feet. She and I communicated telepathically.

“Am I saved?” I asked, bubbles tickling my lips.

“No,” Mary said.

“How come?” I asked.

“Saving you would require a miracle, and you’ve already used yours,” she said, not unkindly.

The miracle in question had occurred the morning of Saturday, December 8, 1984, on a football field in Deptford, New Jersey, during a playoff game for the Group III State High School Championship. I was a second-string junior, and not a day had passed since that I hadn’t thought about it, or about the events leading up to it, beginning with the dinner at Coach Z.’s house the night before the game.

Coach Z. lived in Ocean City, New Jersey, in a gray duplex on the bay side of the island, between an ice factory and a grass strip from which banner-towing Cessnas lifted off in summer. He’d grown up in Ocean City, gone to Ocean City High School, played cornerback for the Red Raiders, and been assistant coach for a decade before becoming head coach. “In all that time,” Coach Z. said, during the speech that he delivered over a spread of baked ziti prepared by Mrs. Z., “I’ve never seen a team this good, this big-hearted, this brave. Never one as touched by destiny.” And with that Coach Z.’s voice cracked, and he began to weep.

I had to resist the urge to laugh. I looked away and counted backward from a hundred, so as to avoid insulting a man whose only fault had been to stare failure in the face and carry its weight for the rest of us. Luckily, Maz, our team captain, stepped in and said, “Let’s win this one for Coach Z.!” And everybody cheered “Coach Z.!” in response, over and over.

Amid the ruckus, I laughed without fear of reprisal. Coach Z. laughed, too, while wiping away tears. And I took the opportunity to get something else off my chest. To Maz, who was standing ten feet away, I shouted, “I’m in love with your girl!” He didn’t hear me. To Gunner, our quarterback, who was standing right next to me, I hollered, “I’m in love with Maz’s girl!” Gunner yelled back, “Join the club!” Then the cheering died down, and we ate ziti.

Maz was a fullback, the type who preferred to block so that others might score. He was a born leader and an all-around good guy, the likes of whom I wouldn’t encounter again until I met Hal, years later. Maz, like Hal, made me feel as though I were part of something larger than myself. And, like Hal, he made me want to be a better person.

Back then, I had this wooden baseball bat, driven through with heavy nails, that I called the Morningstar. Nights, I’d sneak out the back door of my parents’ house on the mainland and carry the Morningstar along fire roads through the Pine Barrens. This was during the casino boom, when new developments seemed to spring up weekly. Finding one, I’d stroll its winding streets, and I’d admire the houses set back in woods, with moths orbiting porch lights, the smell of wild honeysuckle, and the tic-tic-tic of midnight sprinklers. Along the way, I’d pass perfectly good mailbox after perfectly good mailbox.

I’d destroy one of those mailboxes with the Morningstar. Then I’d destroy the next mailbox, and the next. And if, between mailboxes, I came across a parked car, I’d bash its tail-lights and shatter its windshield. And, at the end of all this, I’d look down the street at what I’d done with some satisfaction. I’d feel as though I’d put in a good night’s work.

The next morning, however, I’d be ashamed. Like the people who I knew were cursing me—waking up to find their mailboxes mangled, their tail-lights bludgeoned, their windshields caved in—I’d wonder, Who would do such a thing, and why?

Maz’s girl was a cheerleader, of course, and, therefore, present at Coach Z.’s house the night before the big play-off game in Deptford. Because she’d helped Mrs. Z. in the kitchen, I figured that she was the one who’d burned the cheese on top of the ziti just the way I liked it. I figured that it was some sort of secret communication between the two of us. Imagining what that might mean made the muscles of my jaw seize with desire.

Her name was Natalie, Nat for short. She was wearing a tiny blue dress and white heels.

After the ziti, everyone drifted into the back yard. Coach Z. was already out there, jingling change in his pocket, looking up at Cassiopeia. Seeing him lost in thought made me want to laugh again, which made me wonder again what the fuck was wrong with me. So I turned around and walked the other way, through Coach Z.’s house. Right outside the front door, I ran into Nat, standing on the porch with those legs. She looked cold.

“Can you give me a ride home?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said.

Nat lived on the north end of the island, in a development called the Gardens, where there were no mailboxes. Where, I supposed, letters and packages floated down under little rainbow parachutes. The Gardens had reflecting pools, lemon groves, and footbridges. It had terraces, verandas, and pavilions. As we drove past these things, Nat seemed not to notice. At a four-way stop, she leaned over and kissed me.

We drove past her house, across the wooden drawbridge at the north end of the island, and onto the sandbar where the White Deer Motel stood. The eponymous deer, made of cement and painted white, had lost an antler. The room cost ten bucks. The bed was cupped and creased like a fortune-teller’s palm. Nat and I spent the next few hours generating what felt like an interstellar transmission. One that explained, via tiny modulations, who we were, what music we liked, what languages we spoke, and all that we knew about the universe up to that point.

We held hands as I drove her home. When I dropped her off, it was still dark. I parked at the far end of the school lot and watched the sunrise from inside my car. Condensation fogged the windshield. I wiped a spot clear so that I could see the locker-room door. At 6:30, Coach Z. unlocked that door and propped it open with a dumbbell. Maz’s blue pickup arrived a few minutes later, followed by Gunner’s Firebird. Soon everybody was showing up. I entered the locker room with the crowd. I wanted to yell what had happened with Nat. I wanted to shout that love conquers all. Instead, I donned my sour pads and red jersey in silence. I laced up my cleats. And I carried my white helmet onto the bus that would deliver us up the Black Horse Pike to Deptford.

It was a defensive game, as predicted, scoreless at halftime. At the beginning of the third quarter, Deptford sacked Gunner in the end zone for a safety. With three seconds left in the game, the score was still 2–0, Deptford, with us on offense deep in our own territory. Nat was cheering as if this were the most important thing in the world. As if she’d forgotten all about what we’d done the night before. Out on the field, there seemed to be some confusion in our huddle. Maz called a time-out.

“One of my strengths as an employee is my ability to multitask.”

Coach Z. brought everybody in—offense, defense, special teams, and second string. “Listen to Maz,” he said. Maz, crouching at the center of the huddle, talked us through a trick play while drawing arrows in the grass. Looking over the huddle, I saw Nat. She raised a sign with Maz’s number written in glitter. She cheered her beautiful fucking head off. I looked past her to the distant end zone. The sun broke through the clouds and shone down on the uprights like something holy.

Seriously, it was like a picture on the cover of a program for the funeral of a kid who had played football his whole life and loved the game and died in a tragic accident much too young, and now here you were, stuffed into a coat and tie, sitting in a church pew, looking at that picture, as if you were supposed to imagine the dead kid on this field in the sky, scoring touchdowns left and right. Only, the sunbeams shining through the clouds over that football field on a cold Saturday morning in Deptford, New Jersey, in 1984, were real, and I heard the voice of God.

“You want a miracle?” God asked.

The huddle broke with a loud, sharp clap. Our team took the field. Coach Z.’s knees flexed under the weight of our imminent defeat.

“Please,” I said to God.

“All right,” He answered. “But just this once.”

So it happened. The curtain was pulled back. A giant, heavenly finger poked around among the cogs, and the curtain slid back into place. Some skinny kid, whose name I forget, was sprinting down the sideline, headed for pay dirt. No one was even close to him. Nat, crying tears of joy, hugged the other cheerleaders, girls whose purity she’d called into question as we lay naked at the White Deer. My heart buzzed like a tuning fork. A chubby ref with his whistle in his mouth jogged on a diagonal after the skinny kid, who was still all alone.

“You remember, right?” the Virgin Mary asked me.

“Of course,” I said, a little surprised that she hadn’t just read my mind.

Then the Holy Spirit that had infused that twist of undissolved fertilizer on the surface of the river vanished. And, with it, Mary’s warmth and light and the golden roses at her feet. I was left to drown, numb with cold, without regrets. Then I bumped into a rock and snagged on another. I crawled onto the river’s far shore, and I was saved.

Lex splashed up to me. “Shh,” he said, because I was heaving loudly, and we were close, theoretically, to the Taliban patrol. Lex whispered into his radio, “It’s F.S.,” which stood for Fuckstick, which was what Hal called me, usually just joking around. “He’s O.K.”

Lex splashed away, downriver. I stood, readjusted my goggles, and saw what was happening: my teammates on either side of the river, anchoring the rope. Others in the river, hooked to the rope, diving and surfacing. Still others walking up and down the banks with their rifles pointed at the surface, sparkling creases, eddies, and points where the dark water parted around rocks. Hal must have unclipped, too.

I turned to face the field, which was no less shitty on that side of the river, though the rain had stopped. My goggles clicked and whirred, trying to bring the darkness into focus. I walked into that darkness, half expecting to find Hal walking the other way. Like he had that night in Marjah, after we’d been separated by the ambush. Or that day in Arizona, during our HALO refresher, when nobody had seen his chute open, and we were all looking in the sagebrush on the windward side of the drop zone for his body, and he’d popped out on the leeward side, carrying his chute like a pile of laundry. Eventually, I stopped walking and just stood in the mud, allowing its cold to rise into me.

I felt the Taliban out there still, their hearts transmitting something more elemental than despair. Something more akin to chaos.

Digger had taken over in Hal’s absence. I heard him, over the radio, making the report back to Higher.

“Roger,” Higher said.

That’s it? I thought. Fucking Roger?

I wanted to get on the radio and tell Higher that a guy like Hal doesn’t just fall in a river and die. But then I was afraid that saying those words might make them true. Perhaps that was why Higher hadn’t said anything, either. We were in this gray area, status-wise, where nobody’d thrown out an M.I.A. or a DUSTWUN. Where no one at Higher had directed anyone to open Hal’s dead letter to figure out who his next of kin were and what their wishes might be, as far as notification went. Hal’s ex-wife, Jean, for example—at her desk on the third floor of the insurance building—who wanted her dad to break the news. Or Hal’s son, Max, in high school, in an unidentified classroom, with or without the friends he might have wanted by his side. The letter containing that information remained sealed in a box, with everyone else’s.

“Say intentions,” Higher asked Digger.

As Digger considered his options, it started raining again, in reverse it seemed, as if the rain were coming up from the ground to fill the clouds.

“I’m gonna leave a squad here to search and take the rest to intercept,” Digger radioed back.

I was relieved when Digger put me on the intercept. The river was dizzying, even with my back to it. I wanted to distance myself. I wanted to make it a thing I could look back on.

Digger called Lex, whom he was putting in charge of the rescue effort. Lex looked at Digger the way he used to look at Hal. As if he had no idea what came next.

“Let me know,” Digger said.

Then we walked away from the river, northbound. The sounds of the rescue, already quiet, fell away, and the heat signatures of the rescuers dimmed. Soon enough, behind us was no different from in front of us. The clouds refused to break. Rain wired the air in bright filaments.

The Taliban appeared in the east at first, as a low cluster of stars. Then as phantoms. Then as men with heat rising off their backs like creeping flames. They walked in a shapeless formation, bunching up and stretching out, because without night vision they couldn’t see one another. They couldn’t see themselves.

All we had to do was stand perfectly still, in a line parallel to their direction of movement, at a range of no more than thirty yards, and wait for them to walk right in front of us. Then wait for Digger’s sparkle, which would be our signal to open fire.

This wasn’t our first time running an intercept on a Taliban patrol across a muddy field at night. In fact, it was our seventh. During the course of our previous six intercepts, we’d developed and refined this tactic. The enemy would walk right in front of us, and Hal would choose one man. Not the leader, he had explained, whose mind had been made up. And not the dumb-ass in the back, either, who’d never know any better. But a man in the middle. A man who understood what was happening well enough to have doubts. A man who, having walked this far through darkness, cold, and rain, was no longer sure where he ended and the night began.

Such confusion registered on night vision. When Hal found this man, he would light him up with sparkle. The man wouldn’t know, because the sparkle was infrared; it operated on a frequency that the naked eye couldn’t detect. So, as far as Hal’s chosen man or any of the other Taliban knew, they were still walking in the dark. They were still on their way to their destination. Meanwhile, Hal’s sparkle would reflect off the man’s wide-open eyes and shine back out like some special knowledge.

That would be the man we’d spare. That would be the man who’d drop to his knees in the mud and, in the cloud of gun smoke, raise his hands in surrender. That would be the man who’d tell us who he was, where he’d come from, and why. ♦