introduction
pencil and paper, with dust and blood
"My concerns are not with you or with others who try to do a good job with military reporting, etc. My problem is with people like my friend who truly wants to believe that by reading a book he can understand the experience. When he first mentioned WAR, I asked if Junger carried a gun. If he was there for the entire tour. If he participated in the traditional hazing or was hazed. When he said no to all, then I knew he would be reporting as best he could but could not possibly get it right."—John W. James
So wrote a friend of mine, a former Marine and Vietnam vet, during an e-mail discussion of Sebastian Junger’s WAR. That comment stuck with me—I even bookmarked it—and as I found myself embarking on a journey, solo, to Kandahar, Afghanistan, the words took on a new relevance and imposed a certain burden of responsibility. I’d be three weeks in Afghanistan. My actual embed time with an army medevac unit in Kandahar, minus all the travel and waiting, would probably total about two weeks. Enough time to get some drawings done for sure, good drawings, maybe even great drawings, take pictures and video, talk to people, and take notes to accompany the visuals. But two weeks was miles away from Dexter lkins, Sebastian Junger, Jon Lee Anderson, or Bing West territory. The mission goals were humble. No great American novel, no grand statements. Not knowing what to expect, my challenge would be to keep my attention disciplined once things started taking on a life of their own. Fellow combat artist Michael D. Fay refers to what we do as "witness art." It’s a good term. It’s our testifying to events happening in real time, be they tedious and mundane or abrupt and chaotic. Whatever needed to be said would come primarily from the drawings, which would be the visual record of my observations and responses. A good drawing walks an interesting tightrope of being in the moment and reflecting on that moment, from the visual impact of a subtle gesture to the energetic desperation of concentrated activity. In between those successes are all the false starts and failed attempts at capturing that which at times eludes even the fastest of hands and sharpest of eyes.
Landing in a hot zone
The vehicle looked like a crushed toy
Crew chief Sara Nichols grimly prepped her semiautomatic and held it at the ready. This crew was no stranger to hot-zone landings, and knowing they would be doing a pickup in the midst of live fire focused the concentration. The chase copter tailed us from overhead, and above it flew a pair of Kiowas. We were moving fast and low to the ground, low enough to touch the treetops, and with a strong sense of urgency. The pilot in command (PC), Jon-Kristian Edstrom, was clearly pushing it. The Black Hawk felt like a stolen car racing around side streets and alleyways trying to stay ahead of the cops, and I was in the backseat.
From the ugly plume of black smoke rising above the village in the distance, it was obvious we were arriving. Instead of slowing down, Edstrom kept accelerating and doing some fast bobs and weaves, eventually leveling from 130 to 140 knots (about 150 to 160 miles per hour). From my vantage point, I was able to catch a glimpse of the ground below me where the smoke originated. We were over a typically small-sized farming village composed of a few primitive structures. A now halted convoy of armored vehicles, MRAPs, had been snaking its way through the village on a lone dirt road. Motorbikes, a favorite form of Taliban transportation, were very present in the vicinity. gures could be seen darting around in the nearby fields, and chaos ruled. My split-second view of an MRAP as we skimmed over and into the smoke showed a vehicle that looked like a crushed toy. The crew had a better view, and they were stunned that the MRAP had been split in two and cratered by what was obviously an unusually powerful IED.
Foul-smelling smoke and ash from the burning MRAP, some of it still quite hot, poured in through the open windows of our Black Hawk, swirling and landing everywhere in the cabin as we drew closer. Bitter-tasting cinders filled my accidentally opened mouth. Edstrom banked the Black Hawk hard and almost on its side as he slowed to make a landing. A spot had been designated in advance, and Edstrom lowered the bird, but the ubiquitous red-clay "moon dust" kicked up by the rotor blades created a brownout. Edstrom lost all visuals and, unable to see where he was landing, aborted the attempt, doing another accelerating loop around the village and fields, in effect another roller-coaster ride, to come in for another try.
Enemy fire had been suppressed, but that wasn’t a guarantee that it would stay that way. A new site was chosen in a field very close to the first landing zone, and he brought the Black Hawk down, this time deliberately trying to create enough brownout to blind the view of any sniper still lingering in the area. Ironically, Edstrom’s plan was frustrated by a surprising lack of moon dust in the new landing area, so he just went ahead and touched down. Nichols, her weapon ready, quickly slid open the door, hopped out, and surveyed the scene as medic Daniel Sherwin and medic-in-training Megan Louise Bergman also jumped out to meet the team of army soldiers ferrying a gravely wounded member of their squad. The original call was to pick up five Category Alpha, critically wounded soldiers. But those numbers had shifted rapidly toward KIAs as more information was relayed during the hurried flight. The litter was rushed on board, and our Black Hawk was off the ground again in an instant, setting a course for Role 3 at KAF (Kandahar Airfield), the state-of-the-art emergency facility that served the area. Another medic team from KAF would follow us to pick up the remaining dead. Edstrom had nid any KIAs on the flight back. Experience and statistics were unequivocal: Placing KIAs next to the wounded robbed them of the will to live.
downtime
Among the weight lifters and the sleep junkies
August in Kandahar. Hardly any relief from the oppressive fury of the heat. Once the day kicked in and you stepped outside the air-conditioned barracks, it only intensified the sense that you were simply enduring the day. I found myself during these stretches thinking of Winslow Homer’s iconic Civil War painting Home, Sweet Home. It shows Union soldiers standing around their camp tents, bored stiff. Tedium is a significant part of military life; I’ve long heard war described as stretches of tedium eventually interrupted by outbreaks of chaos. It was a cliché that seemed to hammer me with its truth with each passing day of my embed.
What to do with the downtime between missions is a constant issue. And when you’re waiting for too long, the boredom seems to find its own momentum. As one pilot told me, "This place makes you super lazy. Not enough people take the opportunity to do other things, like study, read books, take a college course. Just sit around watching movies." She told me this while eagerly planning an upcoming culinary vacation to Italy for herself and her husband, also a member of a copter team.
Internet service was not always reliable, but many crew members had laptops with serious memory capacity, enough to hold tons of games and other distracting applications. Teams stuck together in the tactical-operations center. A call could come in at any time, and the capability to scramble quickly was important.
Sleep. That was another way to pass the time, and it was vital. Once you realized how very quickly something could happen, how quickly a mass casualty could intensify the schedule and make rest nearly impossible, how exhausting back-to-back missions could become, grabbing as much sleep as possible whenever you could became a priority. Much of this sleep also happened in the AV room. It was a near perfect setting: the dark, cool comfort of the video-center room, with seemingly thousands of movies stored in various hard drives to pick from. What team members chose to watch varied wildly. I quickly realized that art-house flicks were not the go-to choices among these medevac crews. Sometimes I tried to escape the inertia-inducing pull of bad comedies by stepping outside and into the dusty, dirty blast furnace of 120-plus-degree heat.
For many, maintaining the discipline of physical training was another antidote to the tedium. I understood this was something one was supposed to do in the military, but I still couldn’t understand ercising at KAF, where the air was thick with talcum-fine dust and the smell of feces, thanks to the "poo pond," where the collected excrement of 30,000 people got deposited daily. In fact, the only thing I could imagine more pointless than ercising here would be showering. But bodies needed to remain in condition to perform the many tasks that required strength and endurance. That would never change. If you weren’t smoking, watching movies, or sleeping, you were working out. And then, of course, maybe having a smoke.
d.o.a.
that fteen minutes was an Eternity
The medics immediately set to work on the victim. The GI, a young, strong-looking man, was limp, his arms and legs gelatinous. I thought of a Raggedy Andy doll. Skin tone was impossible to determine, as he was completely caked in dust. Eyes closed. No signs of external bleeding, but he looked mangled and bloated from edema. Both his legs had tourniquets applied near the hips to prevent him from bleeding out. I was struck by how swollen his left thigh was—like a water-filled balloon. There was no visible chest activity, and the medics determined there was no pulse, which meant no blood flow. An IV was out of the question. Instead, an IO (intraosseous) that went directly into the bone marrow of the breastbone was administered; it’s a way of replacing fluids when the patient is bleeding out too fast. There had been an attempt to perform a tracheotomy on the ground before we arrived, but it hadn’t worked, because air was escaping from the hole in the neck. Medic Daniel Sherwin expanded the tracheotomy to insert a breathing tube. Radial (wrist) and carotid pulses were negative. Medic-in-training Megan Louise Bergman continued administering CPR for the remainder of the flight while Sherwin pulled every trick he had out of the bag, trying to stave off the inevitable—what in all likelihood had already taken place. The hospital team was waiting as the copter touched down and the door slid open. In those brief moments before the body was transferred to the doctors, my attention was drawn to the soldier’s right leg, dangling loosely at midcalf over the end of the litter. The boot looked terribly heavy, almost waterlogged, and it seemed that it was only the skin that prevented the leg from separating at the break. It spoke volumes about the pulverizing injuries the GI’s body had absorbed in the concussion of the blast. I did one last sketch in those few seconds of suspended time before the body disappeared from my view. The entire flight to Role 3 had taken about fifteen minutes.
My camera was not with me, but I still have video of that flight—it’s in my mind’s eye. I can see the rapid actions and quick thinking of the medics around the profoundly lifeless and unresponsive body of this warrior. I am aware that my focus was on what was in front of me. I am aware that I felt nothing as I drew, so ruthless was the concentration required to capture the reality taking place before my eyes. In those moments, there was no room to feel fear, horror, sadness, or anxiety; there was no room for reflection. In that quarter-hour eternity, I was connected to the subject, as connected and in the moment as the medics performing their lifesaving protocol, as the pilots flying to the ER, as the crew chief covering everyone’s back. It is what I was there to do: witness and tell the story.
We learned later that the pilot’s decision to abort the first landing attempt had been a blessing. The Taliban, having planned ambushes long enough to predict where a medevac copter might land, had planted a secondary IED to take us out. Either we would have landed on it, or one of the medics or the litter team likely would have tripped it. The second bomb was found and detonated at the site.
the smoke break
they sought refuge from the white-hot day
When you’re inactive, it means no one is hurt, no one is dying. No one is suffering. All good, right? The better angels within us applaud. However, inactivity also mean battles with boredom. Boredom is enervating, uninspiring. For crews, it means sitting around doing nothing; for me, it means drawing crews sitting around doing nothing. Boredom looks for remedies. One of those remedies is smoking.
Everyone in medevac crews smokes. Like a fiend. That’s probably not a fact, but it sure felt that way to me. Those who carry the weight of responsibility for the safety of their teams—the pilots and crew chiefs—stand out as the worst offenders when it comes to lung treatment. Every conversation—from the prosaic to the philosophical—seemed to warrant a cigarette. Pilots especially seemed to find any excuse to grab a pack and start pufng away. I think it was simply a way to escape the inactivity and boredom that are an unavoidable reality between missions.
Of course, there’s a perverse irony at constant play here—like doctors smoking—and the medevac teams knew it. It’s part of a larger irony when it comes to being tasked with saving lives in the middle of a war. Missions create purpose, opportunities to put into action one’s hard training and hopefully save a life. But a mission is confirmation that something bad has gone down.
The bunker is where a whole lot of the waiting happens. If I want to, I can sit here all day and eventually run into the whole unit seeking this inadequate refuge. It’s just off the landing zone, long and narrow, with the bare minimum of creature comforts: some benches, a few ofce chairs in various degrees of disrepair. Distancewise, it’s a quick run to the helicopters. The shade doesn’t really reduce the temperature by much, but you’d be a fool not to take advantage of it. It’s also a designated smoking zone, a place to sit alone with your thoughts or talk away the boredom in the company of others while consuming those Marlboros.
And after I’ve spent part of a day in the bunker, the boredom starts to work on me, too. It forces me to reframe my embed imagery: these interior views of the bunker rather than the interior of a Black Hawkon a Category Alpha run. Shadows, stones, and concrete. Slouching figures hiding from the blinding light of the white heat outside, fidgeting, inhaling tobacco along with the ever present talcum-powder dust in the air, watching their strings of gob hit the pebbles below.
the civilian
she hovered over him like an alien in a space suit
The litters were brought on board. One was enclosed in green plastic. The fait accompli—a KIA. The other was our surviving Alpha, an Afghan police ofcer with a shotgun blast to the abdomen. Medic-in-training Megan Louise Bergman, under the watchful supervision of Daniel Sherwin, began her medical protocol, checking the police ofcer’s vital signs as well as probing for any other injuries. The dark-eyed, thickly bearded Afghan lay silent, his abdominal dressing wrapped securely. He stared at the ceiling, revealing little more than a kind of stoic detachment betrayed only momentarily by flashes of attention. He was simultaneously very much there and not there, almost as if he were choosing to ignore his situation. His heavily bandaged left hand rested on his narrow hairy chest. His naked legs were smeared and matted in partly dried blood. As Bergman moved over his seminaked torso, continuing her examination, he maintained his attitude of impenetrable calm.
In the middle of my sketch, it occurred to me that Bergman, a female, was administering to this Afghan male. I imagined him trying to make out her features under the helmet to see if she was a woman, and I wondered how he felt about this intimate dynamic. It was all speculation. I wondered if his awareness of his vulnerability in front of a woman drove his disengagement from everything happening around him. Was he denying the shame and embarrassment of having a woman tending to him? Or was he, like many of his fellow Afghans, less invested in the idea of staying alive, instead submitting to whatever fate was determined by Allah? Several of the medics viewed this attitude from a nonjudgmental, philosophical perspective. In a world where death is such an integral part of daily existence, where the average life span doesn’t make it past 50, the Western attitude of fighting the inevitable isn’t practical. The medics’ theory was that the urgent need to "save a life" was different where one sensed no ability to alter fate. Whatever the reason, the cop’s stillness allowed me to focus on his inscrutable expression and body language as I sketched him. Was he even aware of me? Did he even care? It was bad enough that a woman, a redhead, was hovering over him like some alien in a space suit. We flew on toward the Afghan hospital at Camp Hero. In all likelihood the best medical attention he would receive was happening on our ambulance Black Hawk. The hospital at Camp Hero, after all, was referred to as the place "where Afghans go to die."
Victor Juhasz, an illustrator, is a contributor to GQ and a member of the U.S. Air Force Art Program.