Synaptic

This essay was prepared in response to a prompt in an Anthropology Topics course on Ethnographic Writing. The point was to explore a “confessional” style of narrative, which uses first- or second-person perspective to record a remembered event. Here, Travis Croxdale – Anthropology major, Central junior, and Afghan veteran – evokes both combat and personal transformation in war. I nominate this piece because of its compelling language as well as its moving conclusory metaphor on the dehumanization a young American experiences in military deployment.

-Cynthia Mahmood

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The air is dry, but it has the scent of stagnant water. A mildew sort of scent, baking under the dome of lingering clouds. Your breath comes short and ragged in the nine-thousand foot elevation, eighty-pound pack heavy on your back as your clothing, head to toe, leaves only your face exposed to sweat profusely. Your feet ache in their boots (the same boots, the same socks); your back aches and your neck too. Your muscles grow more tired by the minute.

As you scan the landscape around you, you must wipe your brow to keep the stinging perspiration from dripping into your squinting eyes. You notice a few farmers toiling in the distance. They pay no attention to you. The only sound you can hear is your heavy breathing and your only sensations are your bodily aches, the heat, the feeling of the earth being shifted beneath your every step. Your mind has gone almost blank in the abject glare of the Afghan sun.

With the others, you keep a pace of about four or five miles per hour, only slowing momentarily to sip your water or to maneuver around rough terrain. In that sparse landscape your eyes find minimal comfort: little vegetation in the valleys between rocky, snow-capped mountains, and no wildlife of note. On farmers’ lands there are a few domesticated animals: a herd of goats, an occasional donkey. The farm land is not flat. It is made of rows that elevate like wide steps up to the bases of the mountains. It would be beautiful if not for the war. You try not to become complacent in the endless trudging, but the constant stride forward and the near-hundred-degree heat seem never-ending. You swirl down the drain of boredom, pain, and the random thoughts that claw at your attention. You glimpse the next brother in front, but his clothes, his pack, his gait are all the same as yours. Slowly you become robotic. You stop for another drink of water, then push ahead. Step, step. Step, step. Step, step. Step, step. When you turn to look back, the farmers have disappeared. It is weird; they are there, then they are gone. A land full of ghosts. You trudge on: step, step.

At once you realize that this steady onward push has led you past the farmland and you have reached the outskirts of a village. The houses are made of mud and you find yourself in a Neolithic looking setting. The pathways between the dwellings are padded earth, hard as concrete. Nothing is more than one story high. Small sounds of human habitation emerge: a mortar and pestle, the cry of a child. As your eyes scan the buildings, your mind snaps to some state of attention. The zombie state of sweaty trudging has ended; something else is required. You experience this shift as if coming from outside yourself: disembodied.

BOOM! SNAP! SNAP! RATTA TAT TAT! RATTA TAT TAT! SNAP! POP! SNAP! POP! POP! THUUMMP! POP! POP! POP! BOOM! RATTA TAT TAT!

Your mind shifts from robot zombie to robot warrior at the first drop of a shell casing. Without conscious thought you turn to the location of the noise, aim, and squeeze the trigger rapidly. Scanning for the closest cover, you slow the rate of how often you send the little lead grim reapers towards the hidden noise. Little to no cover is available. There are only broken rocks and small humps in the ground. Sweat pours into your eyes, blurring your vision. You search the area, looking for the flashes of death to acquire a proper heading towards which your lead reapers can embark. Once obtained, you guide them towards their mark. With every squeeze of the trigger you smell the expended rounds as they leap from your rifle. The gasses produced from each shot begin to irritate your eyes until they tear up, and the tears flow down your face. The mixture of sweat and tears create an acrid, yet oddly refreshing cocktail that you lick from your dust-encrusted lips.

In the moment, adrenaline mutes the aches and pains of your recently exhausted body. Your muscles feel alive again, ready for any physical demand without question. Your mental processes flow smoothly, allowing you to see, hear, feel and think more clearly than ever before. As you gain your bearing you know it is time to move forward. You swiftly stand and move towards the chaotic noises and flashes of light. Now gliding effortlessly over the once-challenging terrain, you continue to move forward. You get closer and closer to the cacophony as you move down the narrow alleyway. You start to notice that the flashes have voices, not unlike your own. Loud, profane screams in a foreign language fill the gaps between each shot fired. Now the sporadic voices have silhouettes that occasionally reveal themselves to be persons, only to disappear again after each muzzle flash. Smoke and shadow blur the scene, but your thoughts are clear.

Continuing your push forward, you turn a corner and enter a new environment. Echoes from rifles firing are enhanced by the shortening of sound waves bouncing off the walls of the homes. This makes them louder than they were before, amplified as in a fun house. You find your way through courtyards and around small trees, but rifle echoes and yelling try ineffectively to disorient you. The unknown is around every corner. Your entire body and all your senses are keyed to a pitch of perfect functioning.

Suddenly your nose recognizes a familiar smell: body odor and spices. It is the scent of the living spaces of Afghans. The firing has faded to an array of distant popping sounds. You understand that these pops are not a threat to you; no, they are coming from your brothers who are watching over you with their own little lead reapers. Your pace slows as you work your way through the maze of walls. Your body feels light and empty but your heart pounds heavily and deliberately. You see a rudimentary wooden door and some draped canvas, and you know you must move through this entryway. The smell of arm pits and cardamom now shares the air with the scent of heated barrels and expended bullet casings. The sound of whispers wells up around you. You lean against the dirt wall that holds the door you are about to enter.

Your boots stabilize you along the wall as your brothers line up behind you, without sound and without instruction. A moment of heavy breathing is taken to regain full bearing. Then a quick intake of breath with no time to think is interrupted by the “ready” tap relayed from one brother to the next in unplanned choreography. The tap on your shoulder sends you into an explosive movement forward as you fall into the door, one by one by one. Suddenly you see faces emerge in the interior darkness: foreign, but not unlike yours. No time to process, no time to think, no time to consider. You move forward into the room, watching the faces fall to the floor with each squeeze of your trigger. Was that scream coming from your throat, or one of theirs?

You whip around: this one, that one, another one, a flash over there, a grim reaper here. No time for thought, only this ballet of death for which training has readied you. Robot.

In moments, you and your brothers are standing in a room full of ghosts. The smell of blood and shit complements the B.O., the spices, the bullet casings. You cannot fully see the carnage in the semi-darkness and the smoke. There is silence as you and your brothers check the other rooms. Into one, then another. You pat each other on the back, but you cannot feel the hands of your comrades on your shoulders.

As you look one more time at the faces of the dead on the floor, you have the sensation that you too have become a ghost. You try to grab hold of the self that you knew, but it has flown away. A ghost among ghosts.

Your unit leaves the village, to return to the fields and the trail. Somebody stays behind to do the counting: their dead and ours. It’s always more theirs than ours. Our superior technology; our overwhelming firepower.

Exhausted you trudge along, boots barely touching the ground. The brothers ahead of you and behind you have become translucent. The Afghan twilight envelops you in waves. Again a zombie, you think ahead dully to your evening rations, your dry socks.

A day has gone by: one more day of success in war.