NOT A WAR STORY

     We were eating goat for lunch again. Staff Sergeant Williams and I were at the Afghan Army chow hall, a large tent that managed to feel like an elementary school field trip to Af-ghanistan. I smiled in conversation with the Afghan soldiers, moving the goat around on my plate to look like I was eating.

        Gunshots. This time from just a few tables away. Afghan soldiers ran out of the chow hall, some screaming. Chaos erupted all round, like a starter pistol had gone off. Everywhere was confusion. Had someone’s weapon gone off by accident? Not likely with multiple shots. Could the Tali-ban have gotten in? If they had, we would have heard ma-chine-gun fire. Were there other Marines in the chow hall? Were Williams and I the targets?

       Williams’s rifle was up. Unconsciously, I found myself mirroring his actions. He moved professionally through the crowd toward the gunfire. He wasn’t confused or frantic. He was calm and determined. He moved with authority. I fol-lowed close behind, glad that Williams was there to set the example.

       We saw an Afghan soldier down on the ground, bloody and surrounded by other soldiers. They waved for us to come over. Williams broke through and took charge. The Afghan had been shot in the head, his face covered in blood. But he was still breathing.

     Although I technically outranked Williams, in this situation I was relieved to see him take charge. “Sir,” he called to me. “Hold his head right here. Don’t let it come apart. I’m calling for medical.” He immediately radioed for a truck to get the wounded man to the doctors.

    “Can we save him?” I asked hopefully, holding the soldier’s face together as he gasped for air.

      “He was shot in the face,” Williams said in a tone that suggested it was a stupid question. “No chance.”

      The truck backed in within minutes and some of the Afghans helped us load the soldier into the back. As we sped down the desert road, Williams hooked up an IV. The bullet had come at such an angle that it split the soldier’s face in half.

       As we’d loaded him up, we learned over the radio that the shooter was another Afghan soldier, and that he’d already been taken into custody. It turned out that the two had been rivals, in love with the same girl back home. It had nothing to do with the war. Nothing to do with our mission, Islam, or the Taliban. It was the unsurprising result of having given guns to teenagers.

       I held the soldier’s face together as best I could, but I was only juggling irretrievably broken pieces. It seemed to me that’s what this war was—just a bloody mess that I was try-ing to shape into a face. No one thought we’d win this war. We were just rushing a dead patient to a doctor.

      Every soldier who’d been in the chow hall was used to getting shot at on patrol, but when it came during lunch, they screamed and ran away from the attack. No one raced toward the gunfire but Williams.

      Being on my team was a sort of exile for Williams. He was from Marine Recon, an elite unit I hoped to join someday. This was his sixth deployment in the ten years he’d been a Marine. He was tactically and technically a complete pro-fessional, but had a habit of getting into trouble. Flying in through Kyrgyzstan, Williams had gotten drunk, hit on a female superior officer, and tried to get me to fight him.

      Growing up, people didn’t think Williams would amount to much, which made him angry. What made him angrier is he knew they were probably right. He was angry that he’d been born to a bad family in a bad neighborhood. That he didn’t have any opportunities and felt he didn’t deserve them anyway.

      At 18, Williams took that raw anger to the Marine Corps where he took it out on himself and everyone around him. He got into fights, but he also put himself through the toughest training he could find. He was drown-proofed in the water, training that included blacking out in the pool under supervision. Daily, he ran with a full flak jacket and rifle, wearing a mask to restrict his oxygen. He used shame as a tool to shape his soul.

      But today, Williams didn’t look like the screwup. While everyone else was in a story they’d tell the rest of their lives, Williams looked like he was checking into another day at the office. He didn’t hesitate, weaving expertly through the crowd, prepared to respond to any threat that appeared. The anger that had once come out in drunkenness and picking fights had become something focused and noble.