IStock Photo 2265622 © Rockfinder

I am standing in the pitch black of the early Afghan morning. This is part of the military: hurry up and wait. Get to the vehicles and do mission preparations hours ahead of time to make absolutely sure you rolled out the gate as planned. This often means you spend some quality time with your own thoughts. I thumb the safety on my weapon. Click click click click. I switch it back and forth between semi-automatic fire and safe. Click click click click. It is a bad habit I have developed, but I do it anyway.

The blistering heat has yet to rise and I am enjoying the brief kiss of cool breeze on my sunburned neck. The orange cigarette cherries of my chain-smoking Soldiers dance like fireflies in the darkness. They speak in low tones. At least I don't have the nicotine habit like they do. My ever impatient Platoon Sergeant, the lead enlisted person in my platoon and my right hand man, looks at his watch. He taps his foot, clears his throat, and disgorges a large brown blob of tobacco spit into the fine powdery soil we refer to as "moon dust." The spit makes a perfect crater, sending moon dust into a small eruption that lingers in the air a few inches off the ground. I look at him and we make eye contact. He knows me well enough, like an old married couple, to know what I want him to do. "LOAD THE FUCK UP YOU FUCKING FUCKS!" I have spent just about every waking moment with this guy since January of this year. I have yet to hear him complete a thought without a swear word. That is perfectly fine with me.

The patrol rolls out the gate. More moon dust is kicked up by our tires and floats away like a drab brown comet’s tail behind us. The guys chat aimlessly on the radio. One by one, patrols in the area come onto the net. Monotone voices of many Lieutenants like me make radio checks and rudimentary reports to their respective headquarters. Our patrol internal radio net is currently busy with discussing the reasons Taylor Swift should go on a USO tour of Afghanistan instead of AC/DC. Two Apache gunship helicopters buzz overhead like angry wasps. I entertain myself with drawing smiley faces on my window and daydream about sitting by the pool at my apartment complex back in Texas, watching girls in bikinis play volleyball.

This morning’s patrol is a standard one. We have done it so many times that I don't have to talk my lead vehicle through the route, he knows where to go. We crest a hill, and then follow the winding road down into a craggy saddle between two mountains. The sun begins to peak over the horizon, and I reach behind me and fumble for my sunglasses. "Damn it" I mumble. I drop them on the floor at my feet. They get covered in Redbull, anti-freeze that leaks from the window demister, and caked moon dust. This vehicle has been trashed by too much time spent inside and not enough energy spent on keeping it tidy. I mumble more in annoyance, now trying to fumble for my scarf I got at the bazaar last week. It is a typical checkered green scarf I see many Afghan men wear and I don't want it to get too dirty, but I don't have much of a choice. I sometimes wear it around my neck, but the last time we did a foot patrol I forgot, and now my neck is a cherry red.

My lead vehicle comes over the radio. "Uh, Sir, we got something."

We have wound down into the foothills now and we are nearing the outskirts of a small village. In the distance jingle trucks and their smaller cousins, bongo trucks, move like cattle into the town main strip to open up shop. Small cooking fires send lazy wisps of smoke through the buildings. Afghan architecture mostly consists of mud bricks, sticks, corrugated tin, and scraps of wood. The cresting sunlight was burning off fog on the canals to the west. Already a small horde of kids is gathering, hoping for candy. They love to follow our vehicles when we pass through a village. We are like big camouflaged pied pipers.

With a gloved hand I try to get the smears off my window and peer at the crops at the outskirts of town through several inches of ballistic glass. The blooming poppy fields look like a Monet watercolor through my smudged sunglasses. I mumble more curses and take them off to wipe again.

"Sir."

Damn it. I was another place in my mind. Couldn't this just be a boring nothing-happens patrol?

I key the mic to my radio. "Yeah whatcha got?"

"I don't know. You should see it."

This is an off response from my lead vehicle. The vehicle commander is a Staff Sergeant, a smart and competent man who takes initiative and has a good common sense factor. I trust him in the lead and it is not normal for him to have a response like this.

I let out a snort through my nose, reach behind me and grab my assault rifle, and clicking the safety switch the whole way, walk to the front of the convoy. About one hundred meters in front of us lies what looks to be a pile of rags. My lead vehicle commander hands me a set of binoculars. I put them to my eyes. I can't see anything. I mumble more curse words, toss my sunglasses in the moon dust, and look again at the pile of rags.

The first thing I see is a sandal. No, two. They have feet in them. Son of a bitch. It’s a body.

"Call Seven (my Platoon Sergeant) on the radio and tell him to get ANP" (Afghan National Police).

Two Privates dismount from the back of the vehicle and cautiously approach the body. The lead vehicle creeps forward to within twenty meters. Using a long prybar, the two Soldiers lift the corpse to see if it is booby trapped. The body moves rigidly as they manipulate it. He has been laying there for a few hours. There is nothing that could pose a danger underneath. "Hey man, he has no head" says one Soldier. I step closer. The man's clothes hung loosely against his bony frame. He is dressed in a traditional baggy shirt and large Capri pants made of the same fabric. There is a glob of brownish red blood mixed with moon dust where his head used to be. Like most Afghanis, he is small and slight compared to most Americans.

"'Ey sir, he got somethin' round his neck," drawls my Platoon Sergeant. He saunters up, slapping his finger with rhythmic snaps of his wrist on a can of Copenhagen. The rest of us have kept our distance from the body, as if we expect it to suddenly come to life and chase us. My Platoon Sergeant, with his odd slow gait, deliberately approaches to inspect.

He has seen many a mutilated corpse before. This is his first time in Afghanistan, but multiple tours in Iraq have desensitized him beyond being ruffled by something so trivial as our headless discovery. He leans over and plucks a small piece of paper tucked in the collar of the dead body. He unfolds the paper and attempts to decipher the markings on it, spits a bubbly brown blob in the moon dust, and screws his face into a scowl. "This shit ain't nuthin' but some Haji shit. Where Fred at? EY! GET FRED UP 'ERE!"

Fred, our jumpy young interpreter comes running to the front of the vehicle column and takes the paper in his hand. "This is what happens if you help the Americans," he stammers. He passes the paper back to me and fixes my gaze with wide eyes. I nod, and he retreats back to the safety of the vehicle. "Okay, let’s get a body bag, everyone get back in your trucks until the ANP arrive," I instruct the Soldiers standing around. I don't want my guys standing around gawking at the corpse, and I was beginning to get a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach by looking at it too. Regardless of who this man was, or what he did to earn such a fate, I was going to try to be as courteous as possible. It is bad luck in war not to respect the dead.

I climb back into my vehicle. "What we got L-T?" asks my driver. "It’s a body. Some local that helped us out in some way. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before—but then again, I don’t know what his face looks like.” I let out a nervous chuckle. “Taliban didn't like it so they cut his head off and dumped the body as a warning to others."

This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder what it is like for the people who live here. Months from now I am getting on a plane to escape back to the world of fast food and skinny models and three hundred channels of 24 hour sports and news and reality TV. Air conditioning and video games and flashy cars. A place where people try to eat less and work more to stay in shape, instead of a place where people try to eat more and work less so they don't waste away. This man wanted something different for Afghanistan and now he has paid with his life. Did he have a wife and kids? How old was he? I find myself wondering what happened to the head.

Down the road we can see a small group of civilians gathering. They are curious as to why we are stopped outside their village. It is probably one of their own who now lies decapitated on the shoulder of the road. They also likely know who is responsible, but out of fear of sharing his fate, they keep their mouths locked tight.

Someone raps on my window. It is my Platoon Sergeant. "Sir, the fuckin' ANP showed up. And you dropped yer glasses." He hands me my sunglasses, dirty as ever. I thank him and shut the door. The rest of the mission was uneventful. It was a boring nothing-happens patrol.

Click here for the previous entry.

75369N7556JG