Bring Out the Dog by Will Mackin

Author:Will Mackin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

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IN HIS INVOCATION, the chaplain called God “the author of life.” Hal told a joke, then opened it up to the rest of the troop. We sat on the wooden benches, looking up at the ammo can on the podium, waiting for someone to go first. That someone was Frank, with his boxer’s nose and his big Hawaiian shirt.

Frank reminisced about the night Mir had torn open the barricaded shooter’s throat. This had happened at a walled compound at the base of the Khost bowl, under a new moon. The shooter had hidden behind a woodpile in the far corner of the courtyard. He opened up on us from there as we filed through the gate. Frank’s recollection differed from mine in that Frank felt like he was walking on the moon, whereas I felt like I was at the bottom of the sea. Regardless, we agreed on one key point: what had driven Mir to launch himself at the triggerman, and kill him so viciously, had been love, pure and simple.

Next, Chuck told the story about a mutt who’d lived on the range in Texas, where Chuck had spent the decades between Vietnam and Afghanistan. Chuck explained how, leaving the mutt behind at the house, he’d ride off on horseback to mend distant fences. Not even Chuck knew when he’d be back. Yet this mutt, who apparently lay on the front porch from one unchanging day to the next, did. Furthermore, the mutt knew, from three hundred and sixty degrees of total emptiness, the direction from which Chuck would return. Walking this line, the mutt would meet Chuck halfway. Chuck ended his story there, leaving us to imagine their reunion on a dry, level plain, where shade cast by tall clouds crept over scattered rocks. After Chuck, it was my turn.

I told the story of how Mir had once bitten my hand. This had happened on a winter’s night, at an outpost high in the mountains bordering Pakistan. I was outside, in the snow, walking to the shitters. Starlight had fallen on Able and Mir walking toward me. As we’d converged, Mir had wheeled around and chomped my hand. His teeth had hit bone, and it had stung like a motherfucker. I’d said as much, loudly. Able had stopped walking and turned on his headlamp.

“What?” he’d asked.

“Fucker bit my hand,” I’d said.

Able had shone his light on Mir, bug-eyed and panting steam. Then he’d turned his light on my hand. Through the fog of my own breath, I was surprised to find the skin unbroken. I was surprised that my hand was not on fire.

During my eulogy for Mir, I talked about how sharply that bone had stung. How that sting had spread to every other bone in my hand. How it had risen into the bones of my arm and neck. How the pain had almost made me feel bad for the enemy.

Subsequent eulogies turned into calls for revenge. The inevitability of this saddened me more than Mir’s death, or the fact that the men we’d been after the night before had escaped.

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