Bring Out the Dog

Начало книги

We had a dry spell in Logar. It was February, during which the weather was dog shit, so a degree of slowness was expected. But this went beyond slowness. It was like peace had broken out and nobody’d told us. Nights we’d meet in the OPS hut for the mission brief. We’d tune the flatscreens to the drones—over Ghazni, Orgun, and Khost—only to find all three orbiting within the same cloud. We’d listen to static on the UHF. We’d stare at phones that never rang. We might’ve left it all behind, walked off the outpost and into the desert, never to be seen again. We might’ve created the Legend of the Lost Troop. Rather, we chose someplace where we imagined the enemy might be hiding—a compound on the banks of the Helmand River, a brake shop in downtown Marjah, a cave high in the Hindu Kush—and we ventured out there, hoping for a fight.

I thought of the Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima, who, when their island fell to the Americans, may not have known that their island had fallen. Who, not long after, may not have heard that A-bombs had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that their emperor had admitted defeat. Those soldiers hid in tunnels on Iwo for weeks after the war was over. For months, even. For them, the fight continued in those dark and narrow spaces, until they ran out of food. Until they drank the last of their water. Until, absent the means and/or the will to take their own lives, they climbed out of rat holes into the sun, to wander warm fields of lava rock, in surrender.

Читать дальше →