James Tabor: The Deep Zone

Father Wyman loved the fifty-cal because it was more light cannon than machine gun. It could reach out and touch at two hundred meters, no problem. Wyman depressed the trigger twice with his good thumb and the gun bucked. He felt the detonation of each round, the blasts milliseconds apart.

BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM . That one blew apart the boulder.

BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM . That one blew apart the sniper.

“Scratch one haj…” Wyman said, but then the adrenaline ran out. White-faced, with his shoulder squirting blood, Wyman dropped out of the turret and collapsed on the Humvee’s floor.

DeAengelo “Angel” Washington was a Crip from South-Central, but he had been born again, was just as Bible-struck as Wyman, and the two had grown as close as brothers. Angel had been riding shotgun with his SAW—squad automatic weapon—up front. He jumped back, pulled Wyman’s body armor off, stuck a tampon in the tubular wound, pushed three ampicillin caps into Wyman’s mouth, and gave him water.

“That hurt, dog?” Angel was holding Wyman in his arms. Wyman was big, but Angel was built like Mike Tyson.

“Not too much.” Smiling, voice soft, dreamy. “I get him?”

“You got the mother. Dog meat now.”

Angel turned and screamed “MEDEVAC!” at the Humvee driver, Corporal Dorr, a quiet young soldier from Arkansas, who was staring back at them, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. “CALL MEDEVAC, DOORKNOB, YOU DUMB CRACKER, ’FORE I SHOVE MY KA-BAR THROUGH YOUR EARHOLE!”

Wyman and Washington were paratroopers of Viper Company, 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment. COP Terok sat high on one side of a steep, twelve-hundred-meter mountain overlooking Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. The Korengal River flowed through the valley’s green floor, throwing silver loops around yellow fields of wheat, disappearing into the blue distance. Early in the mornings, white clouds curled around the black mountain’s flanks and hid the valley floor completely, and at such times Wyman and Washington agreed it was so lovely and peaceful that it could have been heaven. But this was perishable heaven, and by 0800 hours sun seared away those clouds, uncovering a valley of death laced with infiltration routes for veteran fighters from Pakistan.

Just after noon, orderlies rolled Wyman on a gurney into Terok’s medical unit. He looked pale and spooky-eyed, but he was conscious and holding a black pocket Bible on his chest with his good hand.

“Hello, Sergeant,” said Major Lenora Stilwell, MD. She was trim and pretty, with short brown hair and kind eyes and freckles from the Florida sun. Her Tampa practice was orthopedic surgery; her Terok practice was gunshot wounds and blast trauma. Not so different, she told the people back home—surgery was surgery. But that wasn’t true. It was very different.

In a way, Wyman was lucky, getting to a real doctor so quickly—and he had, incongruously, the Taliban to thank. Because Terok did such a good job of sending hajis to meet their seventy-two virgins, the Taliban had targeted it for annihilation. Then, of course, the Army had decreed that Terok would never fall. Dien Bien Phu and Khe Sanh redux. More, bigger, fiercer Taliban attacks, worse atrocities. More troopers, arty, gunships, Bradleys, drones. Taliban and Terok, two scorpions in a jar, stinging each other slowly to death.

The one benefit of the Army’s commitment was a combat support hospital (CSH). Most COPs had plywood cubicles with extra sandbags where medics stanched bleeding, doped up the bad cases, and waited for Chinooks. Terok had an actual little hospital with two surgical theaters, two ten-bed wards, twelve nurses, and three doctors. One was Lenora Stilwell.

“Hello, ma’am.”

Good strong voice, Stilwell noted.

“Are you hit anyplace other than the shoulder?”

“Don’t think so, ma’am.” The kid was grinning now. Amazing.

Nurses scissored off his uniform, started IV ampicillin, removed the tampon, irrigated the wound.

“What’s your name, Sergeant?”

“Daniel, ma’am. Wyman.” That stopped her. Stilwell’s son was named Danny.

“Do I hear a little Kansas there?”

“Yes, ma’am. Delacor, Kansas. You, ma’am?”

“Tampa.” Stilwell probed, assessed. His jaw muscles clenched. “Ketamine twenty cc’s IV,” Stilwell instructed a nurse without looking. “Through and through. You are a lucky young man, Daniel.”

“Ma’am?”

“Bullet missed bone. A couple centimeters lower and you’re minus an arm. I’ll clean you up, start you on antibiotics, get a drain in place.”

“So then I can go back?”

“Back where?”

“With the squad. Angel and all.”

“You’ll be here awhile. Maybe Kabul.”

“No way. Really, ma’am?” Kabul was the home of CENMEDFAC, the big military hospital. He looked more troubled by that possibility than by the wound.

“Way. We want you to have that arm for a long time. Hey, it’s not so bad here, Daniel. We have some vivacious nurses.”

“Ma’am?”

“Hot.”

“ Oh . Well.” The grin returned. “Thass good. Thank you, ma’am.”

He yawned, the ketamine working. Without his combat gear, Wyman’s wide blue eyes and towhead buzz cut made him look more like the high-schooler he had so recently been than the expert killer he was now. That had been the hardest thing for Stilwell. Not the gore and carnage—those she saw in operating theaters every week. But the youth. Kids too young to drink whiskey in a bar damaged in every imaginable way and some that were simply unimaginable until seen. That was the hardest part.

Her Danny was fifteen and talking about enlisting already. In a few years, a doctor in some godforsaken corner of the world might be ministering to him. Her eyes felt hot. She put a hand on the exam table to steady herself.

“Are you okay, ma’am?” She had thought him asleep, but he had been watching, concerned, up on his good elbow now. He was worried about her . Stilwell patted his healthy shoulder, eased him down.

“I’m fine, Daniel. I was just thinking…”

“Ma’am?”

“Nothing. You go to sleep, Sergeant.”

Wyman rubbed his eyes like a little kid and dropped right off.

The next morning Angel visited. Wyman’s bed was one of ten in a long, rectangular room. Only two others were occupied: by a corporal who had dropped an eighty-pound mortar tube on his foot and a Humvee driver with back injuries from an IED.

The quiet struck Angel. Outside there were whapping helicopters and thrumming generators and outgoing arty thumping like the drums of God. Never quiet. Here, it felt weird. Dead . Angel stopped at the blue curtain drawn around Wyman’s bed.

“ Wy . You awake? How you doin’, dog?”

“All good, Angie. Come on in here.”

Angel thought Wyman looked normal, a little drowsy maybe. His shoulder was bandaged and he had needles in both arms.

“What they sayin’, Wy?”

“No biggie. Hit muscle, missed bone.”

“How long you be in here?”

“Doc said couple of days.” Wyman was not going to mention Kabul. Bad juju.

“Ain’t the same without you on the five-oh, Wy.”

“Roger that. Anything happening?”

“Same ol’ same ol’.”

Wyman yawned. “I think they been giving me a little dope.” Crooked frown. “Don’t like th’ stuff.”

Angel chuckled. “Oh my. Back in the ’hood, dog… No, forget that. Look, Wy, I’m gonna go, let you sleep. You need anything?”

“All good, Angie. Thank you f’ comin’ over here.” Eyelids drooping.

“You send for me, you be needin’ something, hear?”

“I will. See you later.”