Whistles from the Graveyard by Miles Lagoze

Author:Miles Lagoze
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers
Published: 2023-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9 “Nuther Day, Man… Nuther Day”

It happened right after one of our designated marksmen got shot in the head and a combat engineer got his legs blown off and we all saw Avatar for the first time. Someone got a bootleg version of it on their hard drive and we all gathered to watch it in a mud hut. We were crowded around watching those blue fuckers fly through the air, and I knew with every fiber of my being that this was the beginning of the end for many things that defined us as a society.

We lost three people because they sent an undermanned, overambitious, single platoon (that’s roughly twenty-five guys) across the Helmand River to set up an outpost in the middle of nowhere. It appeared that the battalion commander, Colonel Rockwell, was thinking we hadn’t really done enough war for the past six months of the deployment, and his chest was feeling a bit empty in terms of the ribbons he was hoping to come back with. Any time the BC orchestrated a little troop movement, he received a Bronze Star with combat V for valor. It made sense, if you think about it, because it takes balls to accept an award for sending other people to do something suicidal.

One could say I had been willingly roped into this mission. There was only a month left on our deployment before we were set to go home, and the platoon they chose had been selected because they hadn’t been doing much for the past six months beyond keeping watch on a few detainees back at the FOB. They woke up each morning, stood watch around the airstrip, and made sure nobody tried to scale the jagged hills overlooking the base to take an RPG shot at one of the incoming aircraft.

They had also informally picked up the job of Afghan Army social coordinator. They would hold lots of shuras and meetings with them and the locals, engagements that would usually end with everyone feeling more confused about what we were supposed to be doing than they were before the meeting began.

The platoon had been hearing bombs drop across the river all week; a MARSOC team was sent out there—those burly guys who acted holier than thou because they were allowed to grow beards and didn’t have to wear uniforms—and within the first two days of them getting there, they lost one guy and took another casualty—a double amputee—then quickly retreated back to Camp Leatherneck. They needed some fresh souls to take over the area, and we were next up.

The Afghan campaign was full of these overly simplistic missions, whereby someone would get it in their heads that we were done sitting around waiting to get blown up, and needed to go out and take the fight to the enemy instead. It was real cowboy shit, and the Marines loved it because it felt like we were in an actual war; we’d get to ride in a helicopter and maybe see the enemy at some point.

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