The First Stone Read online

  Jakob has been closer to the gaming world than the rest of them. In ninth grade, he worked as an intern at a media firm that designed games in Vesterbro. First he had to sign an agreement, promising not to tell anyone what he saw on the screens where new games were under development. But the clause didn’t include the murals in the cafeteria showing two chicks in hip-high boots and leather bras, each one holding a whip in her gloved hand.

  “Their leather panties were so tight,” says Jakob, “that you could smell their pussy juice.”

  He only mentions the detail about pussy juice that one time. Mads, with the cleft chin—who everyone knows is the platoon’s highest scorer—looks at him and wrinkles his strong, dark eyebrows. Mads shaves every day. After all, the cleft is more important than any beard. “Pussy juice,” he says. “Did you say pussy juice?” Jakob nods, already unsure of himself. “Listen to this expert,” says Mads in a voice thick with disdain. “Tell us, how does pussy juice smell? Really, I’d like to know. Because my nose has been close on many occasions. But, damn, I’ve never picked up that detail.”

  “Come on, Mads.” Jakob’s tone is only a millimeter away from pleading. “Everyone knows what pussy juice smells like.”

  “I certainly don’t. Does it smell like cinnamon? Or is it fish? Boiled cod, maybe?”

  “Hey, man, control yourself, will you. There are women present.”

  Hannah turns toward Jakob. “Guarantee you that it’s you who’s putting all those screenshots on the computers. Titties.dk. HotBottoms.dk. EpicBoobs.com. Do all of us really have to look at your sleazy fantasies?”

  Every time Hannah logs on in the container where the army set up computers with internet connection for the soldiers, the same wallpapers pop up—and she suspects Jakob of creating them: a parade of women on their knees with their ample bottoms in the air exposing their glistening, freshly shaven genitals.

  Athletically built, her shoulder-length hair gathered in an elastic band at her neck, Hannah has a six-pack where girls normally have a soft curve. Personally, she thinks a well-toned body is usually a sign of loneliness. That’s how she got hers before becoming a soldier: rollerblading alone on steep ramps, wearing a heavy pair of Aggressive Inliners; alone on the edge that second before jumping down the vert ramp’s five-meter-high, almost vertical side; alone with torn ligaments, aching knees, twisted ankles; and alone with the triumph when completing a full 720 degrees in the air.

  Here, they train together, not because they’re bodybuilder freaks but because the untrained body can’t endure the heavy weight they have to drag around while on patrol. They have to be able to shoot and dodge bullets with forty kilos on their backs—and they can’t do that without regular rounds of leg presses and hand weights.

  Viktor, the platoon’s staff sergeant and Schrøder’s second-in-command, is in his mid-thirties and was a social worker in civilian life. He also worked as a CrossFit instructor in training centers all over Denmark, places with names like the Boiling House, the Print Shop, the Smithy, and the Dairy, closed-down factories with raw concrete floors and crumbling walls that at one time were whitewashed. Viktor has a tattoo on his chest of a die with the six facing up. He knows that CrossFit also involves feelings. It’s not only the physical exertion that makes men scream, groan, and gasp during the tough exercises, when every muscle in your face is strained with concentration and your pulse is pounding. You also walk around with pain inside—expressing it in words doesn’t help. And you shouldn’t anyway. It has to be shouted. When they do CrossFit workouts, they groan as one.

  What made Hannah volunteer for the army? It’s a question she asks herself frequently. Why combat instead of communications?

  She attended recruitment day at Antvorskov Barracks. They were handed uniforms that were too big and asked to smear camouflage cream on their faces, so that their skin took on the same color as the camouflage uniforms—which looked as if they’d been designed for the Danish beech woods instead of some distant desert. She looked at the other girls: several of them were just as tall, many were even striking, she thought. They crawled in and out of armored vehicles and were given weapons to hold. Some grabbed the weapons awkwardly, while others had a natural grasp on them. She belonged to the latter group. The metal in her hand made all the difference; the deadly weight seemed to comprise a counterweight to her own body, bringing it back into a balance she hadn’t known in a long time.

  Hannah enjoyed training, especially the last eight months when the exercises became goal-oriented. Although it was tough, she grew accustomed to it. There was discipline, but as long as she understood its necessity, she didn’t mind.

  She often thinks about the skateboarder Danny Way, who pulled off the stunt of a lifetime and jumped over the Great Wall of China. She can’t fathom the training that must have taken. She imagines the enormous ramps set up on each side of the wall. Without them, the jump would have been impossible. That’s how she sees the army: gigantic ramps that will enable her to jump over the Great Wall and into a new life.

  Jakob turns bright red as soon as Hannah makes her accusation. Red! Doesn’t the boy have any self-control? “It wasn’t me,” he says evasively. He glances over at one of the others in the platoon, a thin guy with a long neck and a surprisingly small head. “It was Sidekick.”

  Sidekick is a nickname. His real name is Andreas, and he’s the platoon’s internet nerd. Sidekick shakes his birdlike head in defeat and refuses to respond.

  “Seriously.” Hannah is smiling. “Do you guys have happy hour over there in the container? Are you all jerking off together?”

  “Shut up, Hannah. Everyone jerks off out here. Just like you girls have your fingers up in the cookie jar.” Mads is the only one who doesn’t look embarrassed.

  Årslev spits a brown stream of snuff into the gravel. He’s the platoon’s proud homeboy, nicknamed for his hometown, and he never gets tired of talking about the town’s local brewery, Midtfyns Bryghus. He has a special fondness for one of the brewery’s ales, Rough Snuff, a sweaty skipper ale that contains brown algae and snuff tobacco. Årslev is a big devotee of snuff. In Swedish style, he shoves the snuff under his upper lip and frequently spits out a brown stream, with a satisfied expression on his face.

  “You asked me why I’m out here,” Schrøder interrupts. “I was tired of shooter games with bald psychopaths. I wanted to do something big—like World of Warcraft or Halo. A game that would make you feel you’re part of something bigger than yourself. You know what I mean?”

  “Yes, of course.” Jakob is back to his cocky self. “Off as many people as you can. What else?”

  Michael hides his face in his hands. Little brother has made a fool of himself yet again. The others are laughing. Surprised, Jakob looks around.

  “That is exactly wrong.” Schrøder shakes his head and smiles. “Tell me, Jakob—do you really believe that the mission you’re on right now is to shoot as many people as possible? Is that what Helmand means to you? The Helmand Killing Games? What do you think the desert is? A PlayStation? Then you’d better think again—at least with me as your platoon leader.”

  “Of course we have to take care of each other, too.” Simon, the platoon’s medical assistant, is a slender guy whose black hair contrasts his blue eyes. If he hasn’t shaved for a few days, a lonely little tuft of dun sprouts on his chin. And not much else.

  “Now you’re getting it,” says Schrøder. “Is there anyone watching your back in Call of Duty? No, right? You have only yourself—and anyone who has only himself out here is never going home. Do you understand me? I know I’m saying something you’ve already heard a thousand times before. This isn’t about offing as many people as possible. It’s about taking care of each other. But we aren’t here just for our own sake. We’re here for the Afghans’ sake, too. Try to think of them as part of your squad. Then what happens?”

  “You mean these hopeless Afghan soldiers we’re supposed to believe can be trained?” Michael shrugs his broad shoulders. Jak
ob laughs.

  “No, I mean the local population. The civilians. The farmers. The children. The women.”

  “Then it gets fucking complicated!” says Jakob.

  “Exactly, it gets fucking complicated,” insists Schrøder. “But that doesn’t mean it’s less challenging. So it gets more challenging. It’s fine to look at being here like a video game. But think of it as a game that takes more than just quick reflexes. It also involves the brain and the heart. Hearts and Minds! Are you with me? Now we’re getting closer to it!”

  “You’ve been to Greenland, man.” Michael nods over at Adam.

  “Northeast Greenland, up where nobody lives. So, actually I haven’t been to Greenland. I’ve just walked around on some ice.”

  Adam, one of the platoon’s three sergeants, is almost two meters tall; he has a wiry mane of chestnut-colored hair and a thick, full beard in an even darker shade. Having spent two years as a member of the Sirius Patrol in Northeast Greenland, he looks like a polar scientist—and polar scientists from another century with heavily bearded faces framed by sealskin caps appear on the covers of the pile of books he keeps beside his bed. There’s a quality of reticence about him, as if he has imbibed the silence of the icy wasteland.

  “If this were just a game, you’d already be one level up in comparison to the rest of us. You would be able to choose your new abilities, see in the dark or follow a scent. Upgrade your weapons.”

  “I can already see in the dark,” says Adam dismissively. “Haven’t you ever heard of infrared goggles? Do the Taliban smell any different than other Afghans? I don’t think so. And weapons? I don’t need any more weapons.”

  “No, you just need permission to use the ones you have.” Michael looks over at Schrøder, as if to challenge the platoon leader.

  Schrøder takes up the challenge. “You’ll never hear those kinds of orders from me when you have Taliban in your sights. I’ll never tell you that you just need to imagine it’s a joystick you’re holding. It’s never just some pixels on a screen you’re shooting to bits. It’s a person.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” says Michael. “A person with only one thing on their mind: to shoot off our balls.”

  “A person who has a father, brothers, cousins, maybe even a wife and a couple kids—a whole list of future avengers. Shoot one Taliban and you’ve only cut one head off the Hydra. Three new heads will grow in its place.”

  “Which is really better? Working on video games or being in the military?” Jakob has once again returned to his favorite theme.

  “They’re not really that different. Either way, you learn to work as part of a team. Imagine all the effort that goes into creating even the simplest image on-screen. Imagine the thousands of ways the story can develop. There are two hundred and fifty of us working on a game, a little fewer than we are here in the camp. Directors, artists—some concentrating on the main character, others on the minor characters. Some are background illustrators. Others specialize in motion. Do you have any idea how hard it is just to make a figure walk naturally up a flight of stairs? There are casting agents, studio bosses, technical managers, creative managers—and we outsource a lot of work, too. There are firms that create nothing but factory floors or police stations, messy desks, office chairs with worn seats. That last one is the Chinese’s specialty. Advanced movements—that’s Hollywood. And we’re sitting in the middle of it all. We’re the experts, every single one of us. Two hundred and fifty strong, three years.”

  “Holy shit, if we used the same amount of time to prepare ourselves . . .” Sidekick sighs as if he’s wound up in the wrong place.

  “Yeah, we’d never get out of here!” Mads cuts him off.

  “Oh, fuck!”

  Michael looks over at Jakob. “What is it now?” Jakob is sitting with his flak jacket on his lap and holding the tourniquet in his hand. “I can’t understand this thing.” He looks around hopelessly, as if somehow it’s their responsibility and not his own.

  “Don’t you ever listen?” Michael stares despondently at him. Jakob’s nose is a bright red. “And did you forget to put on some fucking sunscreen again?”

  Jakob ignores him. “Can someone explain the purpose of this shit?” He holds out a black Velcro band with a small plastic pin.

  Hannah walks over to him. “You’re lying on the battlefield. You’ve been hit. You’re bleeding. You use the tourniquet to stop the bleeding. You place the Velcro band around your arm or leg just above the wound and you tighten it with help from the pin.” She tightens the band around his arm. “Like this.”

  Jakob looks up at her, smiling. “You smell good,” he says.

  “Shut the hell up and listen.” Hannah gives the pin an extra twist.

  “Ouch!” says Jakob, teasing her. “Why do I have to do it myself? Why can’t Hannah do it?”

  “Because mommy isn’t always nearby,” says Mads in the exhausted voice he uses when talking to Jakob.

  “Because you’ve probably been wounded in the middle of a firefight,” says Simon patiently. “You’re lying in the middle of a minefield, bullets whizzing by your ears. If someone comes out to help you, they’re putting their own life on the line—and then there are two on death row instead of one. We have to beat the enemy first. Then Sørensen and Sylvester have to sweep the area before I move in. That could easily take an hour. In the meantime, you’re dead from blood loss, all because you weren’t listening properly during your first aid course.”

  Schrøder nods appreciatively at Simon. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to give our local idiot here an extra lesson in first aid.”

  “Why not just give him a ticket home?” asks Mads.

  “Control yourself.” Michael turns angrily toward Mads. The leopard on his shoulder turns with him and looks as if it’s snarling at him.

  Mads shrugs. “Just don’t tell him about the lollipop.”

  “Lollipop? You mean the morphine lollipop? I’ve already eaten it. Can I get another one?”

  Simon can’t believe his ears. “You’re kidding, right? Are you stupid or what? Christ, that’s only meant for when you’re lying all alone with your guts hanging out and you can’t move an inch because it hurts so fucking bad. Do you think it’s for fun? Well, I’m not giving you a new one, damn it.”

  “Calm down. I only licked it a little.” Jakob looks around. “We could make a film about our experiences out here. We could film ourselves.”

  “Yeah, why not! But then we really have to experience something. Make something happen.” Mads looks excited about the idea. Otherwise, he rarely backs Jakob up about anything. Jakob lights up in his perpetual smile. His evasive maneuver has succeeded.

  “It’ll never work.”

  Jakob glances uncertainly from one face to the other. It’s Michael who’s opposed.

  Mads turns toward Michael. “Do you always have to be the party pooper?”

  “Most of the time we’re just sitting on our asses. We’re never going to use our guns. ‘They sat on their asses!’ Who wants to see that film? What’s the greatest danger we’re facing out here—dying of boredom?” Michael folds his hands in prayer and looks up at Helmand heaven. “Dear God, bring us a little fucking action!” He smiles at the others. “Now I’ve invoked all the gods. Something has to happen!”

  “I wouldn’t pray for that if I were you.” Schrøder’s voice sounds unusually serious.

  2

  Among the platoon’s men, Lasse, Nikolaj, and Daniel are the most trigger happy. They go on and on about TIC’s—troops in contact with the enemy. To emphasize their readiness, they wear a Glock field knife, with its sixteen-centimeter-long blade, strapped across their chests, so it’s easy to grasp. “You’re never going to use that,” says Viktor, indulging them. “If you end up in close combat, it’ll be because everyone’s out of ammo. So I suggest you bash in the Tali-bob’s head with your rifle instead of trying to skin him with that fruit knife.”

  The trigger happy tend to gather around Dennis, who
makes a big deal out of coming from a family of officers. Not that it’s something he’s proud of—just the opposite. For a number of generations, the Danish officer corps has been nothing but a bunch of surrender-happy cowards, better suited to custodial work at the Arsenal Museum. “Google it,” he says, ideally when Viktor is in earshot. “April 9, 1940. The website’s called Hour by Hour. The Germans invade at four o’clock in the morning. Two hours later, the Danish government surrenders. That’s our total war experience in the past hundred and forty years—two hours! If you were an American, your father would have fought in Vietnam, your grandfather in Normandy, your great-grandfather in the trenches at Verdun, and your great-great-great-grandfather in the Civil War. The US Marine Corps has a motto: semper fidelis. What do we have to be faithful to? A hundred forty years of whiny passivity.”

  Just the thought of his father, a desk major at Holstebro Barracks whose entire battle experience involved an unfortunate encounter with an electric lawnmower, makes Dennis flush with fury all the way up to his tightly cropped blond hair. “‘Shoot a Taliban for me,’ the idiot said when I left. Before that he asked me to show him how fast I could take apart and reassemble my rifle. He stood there staring as if he understood anything at all. ‘Show me how fast you can shine your shoes, you fucking civilian,’ I told him.”

  “And yet you think you can handle everything your cowardly ancestors couldn’t,” says Viktor when Dennis starts to attack the rules NATO troops must abide by, that soldiers fire only in self-defense and never at an unarmed opponent.

  “It’s like fighting with our fucking hands tied behind our backs,” says Dennis. “These hillbillies out here are all armed. They just hide their weapons when we get close and then pull them out again as soon as we turn our backs. Everyone knows that. I’m not here to babysit Afghan schoolgirls. I’m here to fight.”