Michael Gruber - The Good Son

And I hated the Russians for stepping on my land and I hated anyone who wasn’t us, and a month or so before my thirteenth birthday I got my chance to fight them. I started as a bearer for an RPG team, carrying bags full of rockets and booster tubes. On an ambush, I would hang back a little from the team and hand a rocket and a booster to the loader. The RPG-7 is a terrific weapon and guerrilla warfare would be nearly impossible without it, but it has the disadvantage of being fairly slow to reload and of leaving a trail of blue-gray smoke that points right back to the shooter’s position, which means you have to change position after you fire. But it’s also hard to get a one-shot kill on an armored vehicle at any range and so we always had one team with two RPGs; its leader was Mirzal, our best shot with the weapon, and there was a loader, Bohrum Khan, and now I was a bearer.

“Are you bored yet?” I asked Gloria.

“I’m riveted.”

“Why? I wasn’t riveted when I was doing it. War is pretty boring, especially guerrilla war. Most of it is hanging around and waiting for the other guys to send a convoy through so you can blow it up. And hiding. We did a lot of that.”

“Okay, did you do any heroics? Let’s cut to the chase here.”

“Oh, heroics. The problem with heroics is that it all goes down so fast you can hardly remember what happened. Other people have to tell you what you did, after. Why do you want heroics?”

“Women love heroes; it’s the secret shame of women’s lib. We want our precious eggies to get sprayed by guys who can defend us. And also, you have all these scars on you. Don’t you think I’m curious about how you got them? Surely you’ve been down this road before, the seductive powers of the hero and all.”

“Not a lot. I’m not that experienced with women, to tell the truth.”

“What? I thought soldiers were the horniest creatures on earth.”

“Yes, soldiers, but I wasn’t a soldier, I was a mujahid. A Pashtun mujahid. We didn’t mess with the local women. It would’ve torn the jihad apart.”

“So you were, like, celibate for the whole war? All of you?”

“No. There were plenty of sheep. Some of the big shots had boy harems. Others… well, for example, me and Wazir were an item after I became a fighter.”

“You were gay?”

“That’s the wrong language. I loved him and he loved me and we were warriors together. We shared our blankets. It was part of our war. It’s hard to put in an American frame. He was a terrific person, a terrific fighter, much better than me, a real leader and smart as shit. It was very intense, a kind of love-hate thing going on there too.”

“Because you thought he was smarter than you and a better soldier?”

“No, I admired the hell out of him for that. No, it was my mother at first. She sort of took him under her wing, spent a lot of time with him, and I wanted her for myself. “

“Why was she interested in him?”

“I don’t know. We never talked about it. I was embarrassed, I guess, and she didn’t volunteer anything. She was a very strange woman-is, I mean. They wouldn’t-I mean the family wouldn’t-really let her raise me; I was the eldest son of the eldest son, the heir. I guess that made her want to have someone of her own to form. You would’ve thought that Gul Muhammed would’ve objected, but for some reason he didn’t. They had a funny relationship too, practically never talked, but he would stare at her when she walked by, like she had two heads. I never could figure it out. So then later, because I could sing and knew a lot of poetry, ghazals and Rahman Baba and all that, I became a favorite of the Colonel, and Wazir got crazy jealous.”

“Why, did you do the Colonel too?”

“Of course. He was a great man. It was an honor to be asked. And Wazir found out about it and we had a knock-down drag-out fight and he kicked my ass. That was just before the Tsawkey operation-”

“Wait, what happened to him?”

“Wazir? I don’t know. If he survived the war and the Taliban afterward, he’s still up there. He might even be fighting against us.”

“How come you left?”

“I’ll get to that. Do you want to hear about my heroic deed?”

“After I pee,” she said.

I was still humping rockets for Mirzal and Bohrum Khan. We’d been hitting the outlying posts pretty regularly, shooting them up, killing DRA and stealing weapons, but now the Colonel wanted to take out the main post, which was set up in the two-story brick high school in Tsawkey town. We had about fifty mujahideen, with Kalashnikovs, Enfields, RPGs, and two PK light machine guns. They had a company of Democratic Republic of Afghanistan troops and a few Russian advisers.

We went in just before sunrise. I was part of a team under a commander named Sahak, twenty-one men and a boy, me, tasked to attack the south side of the school, and there were other teams going to hit the north and east sides simultaneously. I was carrying a satchel of rockets and boosters, a bag of Russian hand grenades, and an Enfield slung across my back, a load that weighed apporoximately as much as I did.

We had good cover in woods up until about a hundred meters off, where the enemy had cleared off the trees and brush. Our target was the heavy machine gun they had mounted on the roof, one of two up there in sandbagged positions. They also had a battery of 82mm Podnos mortars up there, so it was a pretty tough nut. We spread out along the tree line, and Mirzal, Bohrum, and I sneaked out and set up on a little rise a couple of dozen meters out. We were just aiming our first round when someone in one of the other attack groups must have stumbled or maybe he was just an asshole, of which we had a good number in our ranks, but there was a burst of fire off to our flank and immediately parachute flares shot up from the school and it was like we were in the movies, I could see the hairs in Mirzal’s beard. He took aim, though, at the bulk of the huge machine gun and I dropped to the ground, and there was this enormous noise and something heavy and wet dropped on me. I struggled out from under it and found it was the top half of Mirzal’s body, headless and trailing guts. He’d taken a full burst and the 12.7 had killed Bohrum too.

But the RPG was intact, all loaded, and when the flare went out and the rockets from the next one were just tracing a red pencil up into the night, I picked up the launcher without much thought and fired it at the machine gun. It was my first shot, but I’d seen it done often enough; the main thing is to remember that the rocket tends to fly into the wind and not away from it like a bullet. As soon as I shot I started running toward the school, because I knew I was dead if I stayed there and dead if I tried to make it back to the trees, and as it happened my shot just clipped the steel shield that protects a DShK machine gun from small-arms fire, and it exploded and one of the guns on the roof was out of action.

I heard a cheer behind me as the mujahideen swarmed out of the wood, and then the mortars started up and bombs fell among them but I didn’t look back. I just ran toward the school and a door in the wall. Other DRA were shooting down from the roof and out of loopholes in the walls. I could hear the snap of rounds going by and felt a sharp blow on my side, but I figured it was from the tip of one of the rockets, it was always happening, and the other men were pouring in fire at the guys shooting at me so I stopped, knelt, loaded my tube, and shot one at the door. It blew down and I ran up to the doorway and pulled out a grenade and tossed it in, wondering why the grenade was all slippery, and then I dropped my tube and the bag of rockets and went into the building with my rifle.