The Road Ahead Read online

  THE

  ROAD

  AHEAD

  Fiction from the Forever War

  EDITED BY

  ADRIAN BONENBERGER

  & BRIAN CASTNER

  Foreword by Roxana Robinson

  For all who have left home

  and returned again

  CONTENTS

  Roxana Robinson FOREWORD

  LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

  Brandon Willitts WINTER ON THE RIM

  Kayla M. Williams THERE’S ALWAYS ONE

  Alex Horton SMALL KILL TEAM

  Matthew Robinson BLEEDER

  Elliot Ackerman TWO GRENADES

  Lauren Kay Halloran OPERATION SLUT

  Christopher Paul Wolfe ANOTHER BROTHER’S CONVICTION

  Nate Bethea FUNERAL CONVERSATION

  Thomas Gibbons-Neff 3x5

  Teresa Fazio LITTLE

  Brandon Caro THE MORGAN HOUSE

  David F. Eisler DIFFERENT KINDS OF INFINITY

  Colin D. Halloran SALT

  Eric Nelson BLAKE’S GIRL

  Kristen L. Rouse PAWNS

  David James HADJI KHAN

  Shannon Huffman Polson BROWN BIRD

  Michael Carson WAR PARTY

  PJ Frederik THE CHURCH

  Matthew J. Hefti WE PUT A MAN IN A TREE

  Benjamin Busch INTO THE LAND OF DOGS

  Maurice Emerson Decaul DEATH OF TIME

  Adrian Bonenberger AMERICAN FAPPER

  Brian Castner THE WILD HUNT

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  FOREWORD

  Why not trust the body?”

  That’s the question, isn’t it? That’s the question asked by PJ Fredrik in his dark commanding story, “The Church.” That’s the question that military drill, and training, obedience and muscle memory is driving at: trust the body. That’s what you need to do in the war zone.

  But the body is not alone. We are something more than body, as this wonderful collection of stories shows us.

  Going to war is the great expedition, a journey that changes the traveler in ways that could not have been imagined. Travel is broadening, they say, and so it is. In this case, it’s deepening, too, and wounding and painful, also breathtaking and expanding. Who can say how the soul will react?

  These writers can say. The writers of these stories, men and women who served in war zones, who have walked through the dust of Iraq and Afghanistan, who have spent their days breathing and feeling and living those places during the extreme weather event that is war, are here to say just how the soul will be changed.

  When I began my own deployment into the war zone, that is, when I began to explore what war means to a soldier, and I began talking to veterans, I was struck by the way they would deliberately reject my assumptions. Any assumption I made, it turned out, was incorrect, which is more or less the reality between veterans and the civilian world.

  I once asked a former Marine, deployed twice in Iraq, how he’d felt when he’d learned that there were no WMD. I asked with great trepidation, afraid I might be asking a question he didn’t want to hear, or that I’d rouse some sleeping beast of resentment or hostility toward the great lumbering machine of the military, some hostility he didn’t want to show a civilian. It could be anything, his response. I prepared myself for an IED.

  Instead, he gave me a sunny smile. He said, “Roxana, there comes a time in a young man’s life when he wants to go to war.”

  Okay. I was reminded that the way a veteran has seen the combat zone was never what I expected. If I imagined brutality, I’d find tenderness. If I expected a wounded soul I’d find mordant humor. Veterans themselves were not what I’d expected: they’re greater, smarter, more damaged, more resilient, more greathearted and courageous, more frightened and grieving, more articulate and more dumbstruck, more ruthless and small-minded, more brutal and more tender.

  Brutal and tender is one way to characterize these stories. From “Teresa” Fazio’s silkily chilling “Little” to Benjamin Busch’s hallucinatory “Into the Land of Dogs,” these stories come from writers who create exquisite sentences and deep emotional engagement. War, like love, demands everything of you, as these stories show. It invades every aspect of your life, its imminence casts a long shadow before it, as shown by Michael Carson’s wonderful story “War Party,” which takes place entirely before deployment, and it casts a long shadow behind it, as every single one of these stories show. It’s hard to mention one story without mentioning all of them, because all of them are compelling, engaging, and essential commentaries on a theme that has been a part of human history since history was first painted on smooth surfaces.

  This collection is part of the intersection between the military and the literary. When I first ventured into the world of the military, I was struck by the generosity and energy of the people I met there, and these editors, Adrian Bonenberger and Brian Castner, are exemplars of that energetic generosity. With this volume they’re making sure that the members of their tribe—the military—can see themselves reflected, their experience set down, their feelings made known, their thoughts made real, for the rest of the world to understand. And their own stories remind us that we can never reach the end of this terrain, never come to a full comprehension of this place.

  All these stories are important: they are part of who we are, whether or not we like what we see, whether or not we’ve been to the war zone. They show us the most important thing a writer can tell us: this is what human beings are like.

  Roxana Robinson

  Cornwall, Connecticut

  July 2016

  LETTER FROM

  THE EDITORS

  Only a few years ago, it looked as if we’d closed a chapter in our nation’s history, and were set to wind down two wars. Remember the time before ISIS, when we were leaving Iraq? Remember when the surge so pressed the Taliban that we could justify leaving the Afghans to fend for themselves? The authors of this anthology remember that time very well; many of them were still serving on active duty. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—the longest in our nation’s history—are their wars. They saw what it meant to take part in the first all-volunteer war, the first war where women played such prominent and widespread ground-combat roles, and first where the heavy moral, financial, and emotional costs were borne by such a small percentage of the American people.

  Many firsts, but this war yielded another superlative that receives far less attention. America has never before, by any measure, fought a war with such a well-educated force. Not only do soldiers have unprecedented technical skills, but many are also steeped in war literature, readers already well-versed in the canon from Hemingway to Herr. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is an entrenched high school standard for the generation of men and women we sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. They knew what a war story looked like even before they put rifles over their shoulders and marched, drove, or flew to battle.

  Modern life is faster, more complex, more quickly changing than ever before. So why not also the development of the veteran writers making sense of these conflicts? We should not be surprised that war literature is evolving at such an unprecedented pace. The first-draft-of-history now gives way to deep reflective fiction in only a few years; readers waited decades for the equivalent after World War II or Vietnam.

  Which is to say that the stories you are about to read are more thoughtful, empathetic, generous, and fantastic than any we’ve ever had from veterans of a war that is still ongoing. We are all of us accelerated.

  Stories and narrative are powerful subtle things. They can smother strict history. The screaming horses of All Quiet on the Western Front convey the horrors of trench warfare more effectively than any stack of statistics. But this myth-making ability can be deceptive. Whe
n Americans talk about war literature, for example, what we really mean is Western war literature. How many of us have read a World War I story by a former member of the Russian Empire, let alone its Ottoman rival? How many stories can you name by Japanese, Chinese, or Siamese participants in World War II? And who gets to tell “authentic” war stories, the kind that transcend fact? Combat veterans? All veterans? Family members and friends? Citizens of the country that sent them?

  Any writer who uses “veteran” to describe him or herself bears a burden of authenticity. The average reader—who, unlike us brooding war writers, occasionally puts down Caputo and Salter to enjoy celebrity chef tell-alls and vampire romance young adult novels—can mistakenly assume that when a veteran tells a war story, they are definitively saying this is how it was, as opposed to this is how it was for ME, or, in the case of many stories, this is how I imagine it was for someone else. Yes, we use our imaginations too; note stories in this collection like Kristen Rouse’s “Pawns,” about Afghan truck drivers, or Brandon Willitts’s “Winter on the Rim,” about a grieving widow, or Matt Hefti’s “We Put a Man in a Tree,” about the haunting dead.

  These stories will not be the last word on the wars. Narratives evolve, and though the pace quickens, the depth and breadth of the race expands, frustrating expectations of a finish line. Nothing in this anthology is definitive. The first books from Iraq and Afghanistan were largely shoot-’em-up memoirs, war-plan nonfiction by strategists and generals, and memoirs by conflict reporters like Sebastian Junger. When the Iraq War portion of this conflict appeared to end in 2010, the fiction that appeared soon after was retrospective. That’s what it felt like, at the time.

  This collection, on the other hand, was written during the rise of the Islamic State and Boko Haram, Iran’s emergence as a major regional power, and the resurrection of Russia as a source of funding for proxy wars. This anthology was written and edited after the invasion of Ukraine, while China built islands in the South China Sea, and while the USA expanded its footprint in Syria and Iraq. For the first time in our lives, we are beginning to realize that Forever War might be more than hyperbole. A generation raised during the Clinton boom has seen war proliferate during adulthood, profitably so, and along lines that give one reason to believe, based on factual rather than narrative history, that we have more and greater conflict to expect, rather than less.

  The stories in The Road Ahead respond to the imaginative challenge of a world accustomed to ceaseless conflict. Some soldiers come home from war, others return again and again. Some civilians flee while others are left stuck in a perpetual violent limbo. Ask us for a solution to this conflict, or a prediction of the future, or even an explanation of how we as a country ended up here, and we present this book. It moves from particular to general, from real to surreal, from the thing as it is to the thing as it could be.

  Another anthology with another perspective from editors who just shed the uniform will surely follow, by voices and from a time and context we cannot imagine today.

  Without the work that came before it, this collection would surely not exist, and so we owe a number of debts of gratitude.

  To Phil Klay, whose National Book Award–winning collection Redeployment not only established the short story as the preferred medium to examine these wars, but also set a mark for the rest of us to aspire to.

  To the editors and contributors of Fire and Forget, the breakthrough anthology of war fiction to arise from Iraq and Afghanistan and an inspiration to the editors of this volume. We learned that while taking on such a challenge was probably a fool’s errand, sometimes that fool’s errand ends up being necessary.

  To the community of veteran writers that almost universally work to support and develop each other’s craft. This network takes many forms—writing workshops like Words After War, the veteran-themed reading series at the Old Stone House and Voices From War, yearly meet-ups at AWP—but the end result is clear: when we solicited stories for this anthology, our issue was one of too many options, rather than too few.

  A final note on the process of building such an anthology. Adrian Bonenberger conceived of the idea for a new fiction collection and initiated the first call to writers, and Brian Castner served as de facto managing editor, but during the submission phase, the compilation of stories for this anthology was the work of many hands. Teresa Fazio and Aaron Gwyn served as invaluable frontline editors, doing yeoman’s work on the first drafts of many of these stories. This volume would not exist without the voice and perspective of Teresa, and academic and craft expertise of Aaron. Art is a collective endeavor.

  The editors, with gratitude—

  Bonenberger

  Castner

  Fazio

  Gwyn

  WINTER ON THE RIM

  by Brandon Willitts

  After sunrise, Joyce walked into the yard to feed and water the animals. She took comfort in her morning chores. She gathered the feed and walked to the pen. The chickens roamed the yard. She called to them and scattered their feed. The goats were skittish and demanding, like cats. They waited to leave their shack in the pen until Joyce broke the layer of ice formed overnight in their water trough, and only after she’d busted through the ice would the two creatures poke their heads out to watch Joyce fill the feeding buckets with hay and alfalfa. She left the pen and latched the gate.

  “You two remind me of the girls I hated in high school,” Joyce said to them. “Saved from the dirtiness of the world by everyone else’s work.” When they craned their necks out of the shack, she yelled, “Keep it up, you two. You just might starve to death.” She went inside to watch them feed.

  Joyce pulled a juniper log for the woodstove and boiled water for a bath. As she undressed, she saw her reflection in the bedroom mirror. She turned to her side to measure herself in profile. She was startled by her body’s starkness; the long runs and farm chores had worn her as thin as paper.

  Winter had arrived too soon. Months before all of this, Joyce tried desperately to get ahead of the chores, to defend the cabin from the advancing cold. In the afternoons, after her run, she sat on the porch steps and watched the horizon. She saw her first winter coming, just in the distance, as though it sat waiting above the mouth of the Mogollon Rim. And as the days grew shorter, winter slid a little further down the canyon walls, gathering momentum as it flowed along the valley.

  She fixed her hair in a bun atop her head, turned to the steaming basin, and washed her face. As she dipped the rag in the water and wrung away the excess, she thought of how Michael took to washing her hair. His hands and fingers were calloused, but he was gentle and dedicated. He worked out any knots she had. He made such an effort to make the cabin into their home. He wanted her to be comfortable, to be happy.

  After her bath, she dressed. She checked the animals, the weather. The sun shined boldly in a clear, cloudless sky. She sat in a chair next to the woodstove, wrapped herself in a blanket, and looked into the bedroom: the unmade bed, her clothes in a pile on the floor.

  Two photographs hung outside the bedroom. The photographs were framed, black and white, their edges stained yellow by age. Joyce studied them. One was of Michael’s grandfather in his dress blues, taken before he left for Korea. The other was of Michael, a chainsaw perched on his shoulder, leaning against a massive ponderosa pine, taken during his first season with the Forest Service.

  The woodstove popped and sizzled. She shifted in her chair, remembering the day she lost him. She’d been in the goat pen when the sound of a truck pulling into the cabin’s driveway propelled her out of the pen and around the side. Thinking it was Michael she rushed to the driveway. Instead she saw two men from Michael’s crew, Dan and the FMO, getting out of a lime green Forest Service truck. Michael was dead. Burned up in his fire shelter. And four others were dead too somewhere in Idaho. She ran toward the woods, and sat curled against the remains of a ponderosa, sobbing uncontrollably, until the cold drove her inside.

  After Michael’s funeral,
Joyce’s mother begged her to come home, even forced her husband to drive down to Young to retrieve Joyce. But when Joyce’s father arrived he never mentioned Oregon or home. The two of them sat on the porch, shared coffee, and talked about Michael. He asked about the cabin, about chopping wood, about feeding goats, and about winter in Young.

  Later, she made dinner, and the two ate in peace and comfort, almost for the first time. It was the peace and comfort she’d tried to cultivate with Michael. That next morning, she made him breakfast, and when he left, he turned and kissed her on her forehead.

  As she watched her father’s car lurch down the gravel road, bucking with the ruts, she waved. After the final dust settled, only the sounds of his car were heard. And only after the sound of her father’s car faded entirely, lost in the distance and the mountains, did she return to her cabin.

  It wasn’t just her mother who urged her to leave Young. No one understood her decision, perhaps least of all herself. She resisted, anyway; stood fast, stayed in the cabin. It was a choice that seemed to anchor her to the landscape. She didn’t need to understand. She’d find her way. She would tend to things. If she refused to leave, she’d be as close to Michael as the earth allowed.

  A truck door slammed and a voice called out her name. She jumped in her chair, startled. The blanket fell to the floor. The screen door opened and someone knocked. She watched the door.

  “It’s Dan,” he said, knocked again. “Joyce, you home?”

  “Yeah, I’m home,” she called back to him. “Be right there.” She went to the door. Through the tiny panes in the door, she thought Dan’s figure looked hazy and distant, as though he was underwater. He was standing on the edge of the porch, looking toward the mountains. She watched a moment as he shifted his weight and leaned against the railing. He stood smoking, silent. She opened the door and walked out onto the porch. “Hey, Dan,” she said.