Blast Radius

By Joshua Swink

The bug lounged in my chocolate milk.  It made concentric circles as it moved itself around in my glass.  “Hey Led, are these concentric circles?”  I ask Ledener as I shove the milk under his nose.  He makes the face of someone trying to hold back his lunch, “Most likely tangent circles.” I slide the glass back under my watchful eye and consider his answer.  “What the hell do you know, you’re just a rifleman.”  I drink the glass of lukewarm milk down, bug et al.  After all, this milk came from a cardboard container that had been against the outpost wall for weeks. So what did it matter.  Milk shouldn’t be shelf stable.
When I tell people later about the war these are the stories I skip.  I don’t tell them the real stories, the true stories. The true stories are the ones people wouldn’t believe.  How we have to store meat under the mortar pit since the Army won’t provide us a refrigeration unit or how three day old bacon tastes the same rotten or otherwise.  This is the frontier I tell my soldiers as we count bottles of water and divide them by thirty-four.  This simple calculation makes you feel intelligent.  I have now used math to figure out in three days if a helicopter doesn’t come we will be drinking our urine.  This isn’t true we never result to this, we simply just remain thirsty.  After you have peed in a bottle and swirled it around enough times you have to fight the urge to smell it.  After drinking one bottle of water a day for half a year urine starts to look like a viable option.  The Army has these weird posters on every latrine wall you every enter showing you how hydrated you are according to the color of your piss.  I’ve been dead for six months according to the latest urine sample in my bottle. I slowly pour out this bottle into the mountain dirt half with regret that I may actually need that later.
We continue to patrol, water or not.  The outpost we are on is often called, “The Most Dangerous Place in Afghanistan.”  We laugh because we know it is bad, but there are much worse.  When they built this on the border overlooking the Bermel valley the purpose was to, quote, catch rockets.  It is strictly where forty-five people are supposed to sit and return fire at mortar teams. Those tricky bastards now fire rockets at us from inside of Pakistan, we can’t fire back.  On an average mortar and rocket Tuesday we sit in the crow’s nest, eat stale popcorn that someone got in a care package two months late and watch.  “Think this is the good team or the bad team?”  We ask ourselves.  The crow’s nest is the bunker on top of a guard tower, it isn’t safe but when you have no water, no edible food and no shower you have a wish to catch a rocket for the Army.  We have rocket hour, which is misleading because rockets and mortars start at daylight and continue until dark.  During the day time you go outside the bunkers to patrol or man the walls to return fire.   Otherwise, you hide from rockets and hope they don’t hit close.
Like the water that never arrives, neither do replacements.  You don’t sleep because you can’t, there is always a job to do.  Sometimes you fill sandbags just in case you will need them later.  Lately we have taken to going to half security so people can rest.  We don’t wear out gear or shave.  The Army brass would lose their minds, but they are comfortable in Bagram where they have ice cream socials and Jazz night at the USO.  Last week the HESCO wall slid down the slope and now a third of our West wall is open.  The Company commander at the large Forward Operating Base promised Engineers soon, until they arrive we just have to take the chance the enemy doesn’t recognize our wall is missing.  At this point I hope they do.
Ledener stands up from the bunker throws away three day old MRE applesauce “I’m going to go burn shit”.  He says this casually.  When I tell my friends later about War I don’t talk about burning our feces.  I don’t talk about how afterwards when I am in the wooden bathroom I have two thoughts on my mind. The feeling that I don’t want a rocket to hit the building, I don’t care if I die, but I don’t want to be dead covered in fecal matter.  The second thought is the feeling of kerosene against my ass.  When you burn your shit, you do so with a long metal rod stirring it as it takes an inordinate amount of time to burn down.   After you burn it you slide the metal bucket back under the hole and kerosene fumes never escape.  “This can’t be good for my body” we always say wondering how many people in my Platoon will get a form of cancer because of everything we burn on this mountainside.  We burn it all, you name it, and we toss it into the burn pit.  Lithium batteries are especially fun to watch explode.  When surrounded by explosions all day you still enjoy watching it happen when you can control it. 
Thirty-four people begin that year on the outpost, all hovering outside of the blast radius.  All white knuckled when the rockets cut through the air.  Each and every one of us looks to the other waiting for one of them to breakdown, because then that gives you permission to break down.  It never happens, we all remain brave. We have each other and that is why we truly have nobody.   
Yesterday Frank Mcelan stepped on a toe popper in the Wadi.  He was walking in the file following behind second squad and looked back at his team leader to check spacing.  When he turned around he stepped dead set onto it.  When we got to him and cleared an area he was dead, left lower leg was jerky.  He still had a smile on his face, he had escaped the blast radius.  Funny thing about this, he never smiled in real life. We called a medevac and gave them our grid.  “Roger, that area is currently a black flight area.”  “What the hell does that mean” Ledener says as he stomps away screaming into the radio. The weather is too bad to risk a helicopter.   As it turns out Mcelan is stored under the mortar pit next to the meat, waiting for the next bird inbound so he can go outbound.  Water can’t come in, bodies can’t get out. 
I walk down to the burn pit to volunteer to help Ledener.  When I get there I can see it in his eyes.  He won’t survive this war, he will go home for sure.  He will survive the combat portion of this but he won’t survive the war.  Nobody from this mountainside will survive this war.  When I talk about war I don’t talk about eyes, or the look.  I don’t discuss the smiles on the face of a man who never smiled. His body smelled better than the food we eat, even after a week under the mortar pit.  I don’t talk about the gloves covered in filth as it makes concentric circles in the flames burning the shit of people who will be dead sooner than later.  When I talk about the war I don’t really talk about the war, I talk about anything else but it.  If you’ve never been inside of a blast radius you don’t really want to hear about it, you want to feed off the excitement of war.  The funny thing about a blast radius is the subjectiveness of it.  So when I talk about the war I lie.  So would you. 

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Joshua Swink is married to his best friend, has five kids, and is currently on active duty. He has completed four deployments, two each to Iraq and Afghanistan. Joshua served with the 101st and 10th MTN and has served as a Drill SGT. When he is not writing, he is chasing kids, running ultramarathons, learning about everything he can get his hands on, and attempting to help families who have a childhood cancer through his 501c3 the For Beydn Foundation named in honor of his ten year son who passed in 2014 from T-Cell ALL.