Tag: death

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Day Tripper

Provincial Police Headquarters, Kandahar City

Got a good reason/For taking the easy way out/Got a good reason/For taking the easy way out now

I stare up at a late-model Toyota Hilux, white with red racing trim down the side, sitting parked, incongruously, ten feet above the ground and atop a faded-maroon rusted steel shipping container, a dirty twin mattress balanced on its roof like a hat.  It is an odd place to put a mattress, I think, on top of a truck on top of a shipping container.  A wood and concrete water tower, ancient looking but likely built by the Russians, partially obscures my view, as does a tree of undetermined type.  I know it is brown.  Everything here is brown.  There are varying shades, but far and away the most abundant is a sandy, tannish-brown, the color of the earth here in Kandahar Province, pervasive in the brick used to make the buildings, or in the mud and straw mix used to cover those bricks, or in the dust that covers everything from brick to tree to child to perched Toyota Hilux.  Even the one frog and one lizard I see – the sum total of non-avian wildlife I spy in a thirty-day period – have adapted to a gritty light brown the exact same color as the ground upon which they walk; I would have stepped on them but for their movement.  The houses and villages here, too, would be unintentionally crushed were a giant to walk among them, they rise up from the earth seamlessly, giving the effect they have either been molded out of the ground below or the earth scraped away from around them.

I turn from the truck and water tower and walk back towards Police Headquarters (PHQ), a two-story building on one end of a small dirt and gravel courtyard surrounded by other nondescript two-story buildings, stepping over a rivulet of sewer water and then around a line of men of varying ages waiting to do business at PHQ.  There is activity here, the ubiquitous goings-on of daily life at a bureaucratic center, noteworthy only because of the loaded pistol on my hip and the stark absence of women.  I see only one, though she sees me first, furiously waving her hand at me, an exaggerated version of the hand-and-arm signal my grandmother, in her rare moments of impatience, would use to hush me up.  The woman is in full burqa, squatting in the courtyard against the passenger side door of a truck, no skin visible but for her left hand and wrist, and that only because of her extended-arm wave, violent, not to say hello or to beckon but clearly to indicate that I should, immediately, cease looking at her.  I suspect she cares not that I was not, in fact, looking at her until her waving caught my attention, first causing in me curiosity that quickly shifted to bewilderment and then to something just short of alarm as I suspected this hand-wave was the functional equivalent of her running her hand across her throat.

This is very much Kandahar.  The American footprint here is small, the few tents and plywood buildings housing Security Force Assistance Team-10 (SFAT-10) so jammed together into a space about as big as a basketball court I turn sideways to walk between them.  SFAT-10 is on an open base, meaning the Americans walk around freely between their own small area and the police headquarters next to it, walking past a mosque in between; and though there has been a glut of “blue on green” (the board game-simplistic name given to the event when Afghan Soldiers shoot coalition forces) attacks in Afghanistan, this is PHQ, a relative zone of safety run by a Chief of Police one American calls a “god-king.” The Chief is a young man, somewhere in his early thirties – Afghans tend to give their birth date in brackets, like [in the winter, before the Russians came]; he’s also a Brigadier General and Chief of Police with neither military nor policing experience who rose to power the old-fashioned way, by being a complete but discriminate ass-kicker.  Another American tells me he enjoys power and popularity because he is the epitome of what a Pashtun man should be, which I take to mean that in conjunction with valuing honor and respect, he has no problem sending you on your way, metaphorically speaking.

I have come here to speak with the Chief via the good graces of both the Chief and SFAT-10, who picked me up from my own home at Kandahar Airfield in a three-vehicle convoy of giant, armored vehicles having a passing similarity to a semi truck with a gun turret. Kandahar Airfield (KAF) itself is as a big a base as any in Afghanistan, essentially the acreage of any one-runway international airport, plus outbuildings, and a deployment experience here is a world away from the smaller, spartaned existences of the FOBs and COPs and VSPs spread throughout the villages south and west of here.  At one of these male-only outposts, you might walk past a Soldier nonchalantly pissing, openly, into a steel pipe sticking out of the ground specifically for this purpose, and time is passed by patrols and camp improvements during the day and video games and muted masturbatory sessions by night, but KAF has indoor showers, and a KFC, and a T.G.I. Friday’s, and its own currency and at least six different dining facilities and The Boardwalk, an oval, wood-planked, covered walkway with shops and restaurants and barber shops on the outside and a turf football field, basketball court, and hockey rink, courtesy of the Canadian forces, on the in.  I spend less than thirty days here, but the surreality of the multitude of nations and uniforms and civilian contractors and armored vehicles and budding Boardwalk romances and sheer bizarreness of the post-apocalyptic Mad Maxness of it all never lessens.  Rocket attacks are spare but marked by their own oddity, precursed with a siren and a disarmingly calm human-imposter female voice.  The siren wails and then, over a camp-wide P.A. system, the Rocket Attack lady warns:  ROCKET.  ATTACK.  ROCKET, ATTACK.  Her digitized accent is slighted to the British just enough to share their air of understatement and calm, yet still conspiratorial and a bit creepy and certainly not human enough to assuage my suspicions she’s in on it, like she knows the rockets are coming and waits until the last minute simply to continue to exert her dominance over us.  There are just one or two sirens in a matter of weeks, but then there is a night with five in a matter of a few hours, two of which are followed by audibly impacting rockets, and she has us scrambling from vehicle or office to bunker and then back again, multiple times, like cockroaches when the lights are turned on.

SFAT-10 picks me up in their M-ATVs, huge, rubber wheeled vehicles one driver tells me handles “like an F-150”; we wind our way past the NATO barracks, and the infamous “poo-pond,” indisputably Kandahar Airfield’s signature landmark, a Walden Pond of treated human shit.  We exit KAF through one of the several Entry Control Points and onto the highway towards the city.  The forty-five minute drive from KAF to PHQ in Kandahar City is smooth and uneventful; I pass it largely by staring out the thick, quadrilateral slit of window to my left, looking forward only when I feel the beginnings of backseat-nausea.  Each vehicle is manned by four personnel: a driver, a TC (truck commander), a security man, and a turret-gunner; their radio chatter is brilliant in its mundanity.  They discuss the vast array of dirt available at KAF; their live-burial preferences, were their choices limited to concrete, gravel, or sand; how much it would hurt to get run over by one of their own vehicles (clarifying question: “are we talking head to feet, or feet to head?”); how many pounds in a ton; the cultural and religious transcendentalism of Hacky Sack; how KAF, due to the excess of sports injuries, is the most dangerous place in Afghanistan; the delicious irony in the name of the gypsy people of Afghanistan, the Kuchis.  A female soldier in another vehicle delivers, spoken word and over the radio, the first forty-five seconds of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s magnum opus, “Baby Got Back.”

My vision of Afghanistan is asterisked: I have a uniform, and a gun, and I travel via helicopter or armored vehicle and see the world through bullet-proof glass.  I have no beard.  I speak with the locals exclusively through a translator, outside of my disastrously pronounced “asalaam alaikum,” “sangyee,” and “manana,” and I speak with them only because of the tragedy imposed upon them by an American soldier who murdered their children and wives and fathers.  I am neither a Muslim nor one of the People of the Book.  I am an intruder, I reside here only for an eye-blink, and, being Western and specifically American, my worldview is based selfishly upon me and how I fit into it, not upon my father’s history, or my tribe’s, or my people’s.  Yet, also being Western and specifically American and perhaps a bit introspective, I have opinions, and difficulty squaring them, or posing them for that matter, and am perplexed by much that is Afghanistan. I, perhaps unfairly, also determine that I could be here one hundred years more and my perplexity would not be much diminished.

On the way home to America I stop, again, at Ali al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, for years now a stopover for service members on their way forward, or home; once a thriving metropolis and now a bit of a ghost town as one war ends and another, presumably, winds down.  The USO is still open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and always populated by Soldiers and Marines and Airmen in uniform, asleep on couches or armchairs or on the phone to family at home or, most likely, either playing or watching first-person shooter video games.  For some, just like real life. There are six televisions and 360 degree viewing of, I assume, some version of Call of Duty, the sights and sounds of death and destruction and carnage piped in for your viewing and listening pleasure, be it four a.m. or in the heat of the late afternoon.  Like the Afghans I see, I know not how to square what I see with what I think, and with my own asterisked experiences, and I think instead of Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote, to paraphrase, that words are simply abbreviations anyway, perpetually inadequate to properly express what you see and feel, which I take to mean you have to be there to know it, and even then it’s probably not enough.

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The Ninth Life

My grandfather spent the first months of his life as a widower sleeping above the covers of his decades-old queen size bed. Changing the sheets required the initiative of his daughters; my grandfather felt that if he washed anything he would lose, forever, the pillow-case smell of his wife. He and my grandmother had been married some fifty years when she died over twelve years ago, and in some sense, I think, he has simply been waiting around to die.

Over the last few days, it seemed increasingly likely that day had come.  My grandfather isn’t supposed to have aspirin, but had unknowingly been swallowing 325 mg of the stuff each time he followed up his vanilla ice cream with an Alka Seltzer tablet.  The aspirin ate a hole in something, he started leaking blood internally, then throwing it up.

We have been down this road before.  Several times in the last few years, and a few isolated events over his lifetime, have prompted his five children to make the one- to seven-hour trek from the nether regions of Nevada to his hospital bedside, muscling past the hovering priest and fawning nurses (even in the throes of death, he’s a bit of a charming fellow).

But again my grandfather has defied the cumulative effects of age, odds, loneliness and preservatives; again his children have packed up and went back home, heads shaking in equal parts admiration and disbelief.  To be fair, for a man who subsists almost entirely on bear claws and Hot Pockets, every day he gets up is a spit in the face of the devil himself.

A funeral is an ablution for the life of man.  Tragic and cheerless for those who die young; a maudlin celebration for those whose lives have been full and satisfying, but an ablution regardless.  It is also, unfortunately, a chit you can use just once.  But why?  Why are there no eulogies for the living?

My grandfather has always been, with the exception of his brief hospital stays, in full control of his faculties.  He continues to hunt and ride horses even in his 87th year, walks daily, and possesses a wit that seems to only get more lascivious as he ages (he recently told his nurses he didn’t want an X-Ray because he was worried it would make him sterile).  He takes my grandmother with him just about everywhere he goes, she the permanent resident of the left side of a small oak box, he the would-be tenant of the right. He buys her flowers regularly. When he comes into town on cold-day errands he leaves grandma at his youngest child’s house so she won’t get cold, and if he wants to stay only briefly grandma provides a ready-made excuse: can’t stay long, I’ve got your grandmother in the car.

My grandfather is simple.  My gut tells me that definition means something different to you than it does to me, but I don’t know a better single word to convey my admiration for the man.  Dictionary-dot-com lists twenty-nine different uses, and of those I think the one coming closest is free of deceit or guile; sincere; unconditional.

A high-school graduate, in his lifetime he has been a first-generation American, a hair-tonic hocker, a newspaper boy, a retriever of moonshine for the drunks under Bayonne’s bridges, a sailor, a World War II veteran, a pipe-fitter, a miner, construction worker, heavy-machine operator and a member of the Greatest Generation.  He is a pioneer, part of the post-World War II westward migration; a cowboy, a hunter, an amateur rancher, artist, and leather-worker; a husband, father of five, grandfather to eighteen and great grandfather to sixteen (with number seventeen on the way).

He is also, for me, an unfalteringly good example of what it means to be a man.  He wishes ill-will to no one, and is the least judgmental person I know.  I have never heard him raise his voice and never heard him swear in anger.  He deflects praise, takes responsibility for his actions and expects others to do the same. His most prized possession – he told me once – is his family.  No contest.  I know every man sins, but I wager we could use both hands, less thumbs, to accurately account for the times in his life he has lied, cheated, or stolen (and make fists if you want to count the times he failed to correct it). He used to drink, daily, but when he realized he was an alcoholic he just quit.  No twelve-step program, no intervention, no relapse – he just quit.  Simple.

He uses words sparingly.  I once read Ernest Hemingway won a bet by writing a story with just six words (For sale: baby shoes.  Never worn); I think grandpa could give him a run for his money.   If something doesn’t sit well with him, he might say “that’s not right.”  Only later, after I began to develop my own moral compass, did I realize he didn’t mean “that’s incorrect,” but something much, much closer to

life is but a series of decisions, of interwoven threads not only keeping you tethered to the ground but keeping your friends and families close, close where they can pull you back down, if need be, or even give you yards of slack to make your own way.  If you are lucky, you can pull them right along with you, or let them lead you back on course.  But if you make that choice, or tolerate those who choose to make such decisions, even in passing, you might take those first steps down a path that ends someplace you just don’t want to be.

He grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, one of the most densely populated cities in America, but home is, and has been, a double-wide trailer at the end of a quarter-mile long dusty road in the high deserts of Nevada.  And though his blood is Irish, and his heart belongs to a dead German, his soul is unmistakably and firmly set in the salty dirt of the sagebrushed American West.  Here was – is – his dream: to own a horse, to be a cowboy, to raise a family and work the dirt and hunt and fish and never take more than you need and respect others and have your own space.  And he did it, he has it all – maybe not much to you and I, but it is everything he ever wanted.  Simple.

Josey Wales is one of my favorite fictional characters, and I have only recently put a fine point on the reasons why: but for the six-shooters and the inclination towards serial killing, he is a man who reminds me of my grandfather.  I think he and Josey would get along right well.  Neither say much, but say what they’re going to do and do what they say.  Both kind to animals and lovers of the earth, they have understated senses of humor, respect other people and above all else love their families.

Appropriate, then, to borrow Josey’s simple words for a fallen companion and put them to my living grandfather: I rode with him, and I got no complaints.

 

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Curtains for the Zen Dog

I killed my dog on Monday.  To be more precise, I suppose, I told a vet to kill him.  I wasn’t the trigger puller, or in this case the plunger-pusher, but it felt like it.

Late Sunday night Mojo pissed himself, on his bed, and then couldn’t stand up to move out of the mess.  For almost 18 hours his pulse rate was at a drug-influenced 170-200 beats per minute, but uninhibited it raced to 300.  It should have been a steady 110.  On the way back to the clinic Monday evening, the cardiologist told me he had collapsed once again, and though when his heart was pulsating in the lower range of that 170-300 frame he was literally pulling the vet techs around the hospital floor, they had to give him drugs more and more frequently and his lows were causing him more and more distress.  Three of the four valves of his heart were paper thin.  “It is not a bad thing,” she said, “to put down an 11 ½ year old Great Dane.”

I know this, I told her.  Most Great Danes live 8-10 years, frequently have hip and heart problems, and lug around significantly less than 180 pounds.  But this was my friend, a dog who has been, with the exception of his several brief stays with the Jenks’ and two long ones with my mom, my roommate and companion for the last eleven years.  That’s almost 30% of my life.  It’s 73% of the time I have been in the army.  It would be 15% of my entire time on earth should I live to my 74th birthday, the average age of an American male.  Euthanizing an 11 1/2 year old Great Dane might not be a bad thing, but it is certainly not a good one.

In his younger years Mojo was, in the most emphatic sense of the word, a beast.  He would pull me on my mountain bike, on a dead-on sprint, for almost two miles.  More than once he pulled me off of it.  He inadvertently broke my mother’s forearm in a game of tag.  He could play touch rugby for hours, was a decent hiker but a terrible swimmer (distances were limited to however far he had to go to drape himself over me floating on my pool chair).  He was in a few fist-fights and liked being around fringe characters.  He possessed a pair of the biggest testicles you ever saw, and didn’t mind me showing them off.  He was a great roommate. Though he didn’t bark much, and would never bite anyone, if he was home I never needed to close (let alone lock) a back door when I was at work for the day.  He was house-trained so quickly and so well that I once mistakenly blamed one of my friends for drunkenly wetting my bed when I was out of town for a weekend.  And if he did make a mistake, he always told me so, usually as soon as I walked in the door. He could be rough around the edges, I will grant you.  His breath was atrocious. He sometimes picked on smaller dogs, leaving me feeling like the guy who shows up at parties with the belligerent frat boy no one really likes but pretends to.  He was never accused of being brilliant; his sheer dumbness, in fact, may have been his most endearing quality.  But his drawbacks became nothing but background noise when he leaned against you or dropped his enormous head into your lap and stared at you with his slightly crossed eyes.

Mojo had taken well to our Capital Hill neighborhood, and no one had perfected pretentiousness better than he.  I would leave him in the front yard while I sat on the porch, reading and smoking a cigar, my view of Mojo obstructed by a hedge row but knowing exactly how he was sitting: front legs stretched out, head up and nose elevated slightly above parallel, hind quarters off to his left.  Sphinx-like, were the Sphinx dressed in business casual.  One could not walk by without noticing Mojo, sitting in the sun, a Zen dog in an ambitious city.  People would, more often than not, talk to him.

“You are huge.”

“You are a horse.”

“Oh. My. God.  You are beautiful.”

 Not once in two years did Mojo rise from his position to meet a dog-less person (and those with dogs usually moved along quickly).  He rarely bothered to even make eye contact, and would frequently shift his gaze further away from whomever was standing in front of him, his answer to all compliments uniform: “I know this.  Now please move along so I can ignore someone else.”

But now here we sit, facing one another, him on a lowered stainless steel cart, me on the floor with my legs under him, one arm around his neck and the other scratching his belly.  He looks sad, but I don’t know if it’s because he is, in fact, sad, or if it’s a product of me bawling childishly.  I know we can’t sit here all night long, but I’m not sure what else to do. I impulsively take a picture of him with my cell phone and immediately regret it. The picture is stygian, his face long and skinny and cartoonish like a Pat Oliphant sculpture.  A few friends are here with me, and I ask them to step outside so I can I tell my dog, in private, how much I love him and how thankful I am to have had him as a friend for so long.  I hug him once for my mom and once for me.  He barely raises his head.  And then death knocks on the door.

Death, oddly, looks an awful lot like a thirty-something Connie Chung. She carries in her hand three syringes: one large filled with a milky fluid, one large filled with something appearing to be watered-down Pepto Bismol, and one small.  The first shot, death/Connie Chung tells me, is anesthesia, which will put Mojo to sleep so he feels no pain or discomfort.  The second, and I think the third – I’m not really listening at this point and so I don’t know what she said – induce cardiac arrest.  What I do know is that there is asleep and there is dead.  Asleep feels like Mojo asleep.  I can see his chest heaving, still feel his heart racing.  My own heart races; I want to stop this.

“Hey!  Ha Ha!  Just kidding!  Sometimes Mojo and I like to play jokes on each other!  He licks my face when I’m asleep, I pretend I’m going to euthanize him!”

But Connie Chung is quick, and the second syringe is emptied and then the third.  And though I am familiar with my dog asleep, dead is another matter.  I feel the full weight of his anvil-sized head, see and hear his last breath, feel the cart move as his 180 pound body, for the first and only time muscleless, fully relents to gravity.  A forearm slips off the table.

I am, probably, Godless.  But I love life, and karma, and symmetry, and existentialism is a pretty cool concept and maybe just maybe Elysium is a real place.  I like to think so.  And sometimes life gives us those little reminders that we all come and go, and good often replaces bad, and trees grow in dirt, and being with is usually a better thing than being without.  If you’re lucky, the timing of these reminders is such that it’s harder to write it off as mere happenstance when it is so obviously and joyously karma or symmetry or, if you prefer, God.  Such is my Mojo-less ride home, when I call my good friend Patrick, waking him because he’s been up all night with his wife Andrea helping her to deliver their new daughter.  I had previously suggested they name her Patandrea, but they’ve gone instead with Fiona.  I jokingly tell Pat that Fiona’s and Mojo’s spirits have passed one another in the other-world, and we should hope Mojo’s spirit hasn’t inserted itself into Fiona’s body.

Pat says she could do a lot worse.