“Then we noticed bullet holes in the mud huts, and blood spatters…”
Where have all the soldiers gone?
“We couldn’t make sense of it. We were tense… ready for a fight… then this old man comes out of the wheat field and he’s crying… and he’s screaming at us…” She took a breath and continued, “Our translator told us that four helicopters landed in the middle of the night, on each side of the village… American soldiers came into the village and went from house to house, pulling out all the men and the young boys… anyone who looked old enough to be a Taliban fighter, boys as young as twelve or thirteen… those who resisted were shot on the spot… including some women who tried to intervene… the rest of the men were taken to a drainage ditch at the edge of the village… about fifty or sixty young men, boys, and all the village elders, except this one who had hid, and they… shot them.”
Gone to graveyards, every one.
Operation Phoenix had been more surgical, targeting only the Viet Cong infrastructure in the villages. Operation Flagstaff sounded like Phoenix with a meat cleaver.
Maggie Taylor was composing herself, and Brodie listened to the torrential rain beating on the balcony.
Taylor continued in a flat, distant tone of voice: “We had dealt with complaints of U.S. soldiers killing civilians, and it was usually accidental—collateral damage. Or these complaints were made-up—a story to get compensation from the Americans. That was part of what we did in Civil Affairs. Pay for dead people, dead livestock, bomb-damaged houses… but what this old guy was saying… this was something else.”
Indeed it was. It was, in fact, a hard lesson delivered to the villagers, and by extension to all the surrounding villages, that there was a price to pay for providing a cash crop and part-time fighters to the Taliban. They certainly wouldn’t do that again.
Taylor gulped some of her cola, and continued, “This elder is crying… he says he lost four sons… and he shows us a big mound of freshly dug dirt and tells us it’s a mass grave of all the men and boys the Americans killed… the women dug the grave… with the help of some men from nearby villages. We still weren’t believing this and we wanted to see the bodies, but the elder says no, Islamic tradition prohibits digging up the dead, but he shows us all the shell casings that the women had gathered… from American M5 rifles… and he shows us a pile of blood-soaked clothing… he says men from the surrounding villages had stripped the bodies and wrapped them in burial shrouds… and then he takes us to the drainage ditch and we can see the water, red with blood…” She closed her eyes. “Our translator, a schoolteacher from Kandahar, was very upset, and he’s looking at us like we owed him and the elder some explanation.” She added, “It was awful.”
Brodie looked at her, wondering how long it took her to see the connection between that massacre and her reports to her erstwhile boyfriend.
Taylor stayed silent awhile, then continued, “We told the elder that we’d report this to our superiors and that military investigators would be coming to speak to him and to the women who’d survived, and we left. Quickly.” She added, “We were all pretty shaken by this, and most of us still didn’t believe we’d seen evidence of a civilian massacre by American soldiers…” She looked at Brodie. “I mean, the Afghans were notorious for lying to get compensation. They’d blame the Americans for Taliban killings and even for natural deaths.”
And then came the denial. The Americans couldn’t have done that. I couldn’t have done that. It’s what you have to say to yourself.
Brodie made eye contact with her. “Maggie, it seems obvious from what you’ve told me that what you saw, and what you heard from the witness, was strong evidence of a mass murder perpetrated by American troops.”
She nodded, but didn’t reply.
Brodie looked at his partner. She appeared more vulnerable than he’d ever seen her. Her professional polish made him forget sometimes that at the end of the day, Maggie Taylor was Magnolia Taylor, a country girl from the hills who had clawed her way out of a hardscrabble existence in a place that, like much of rural America, celebrated a kind of bold, unsophisticated, and unequivocal patriotism. She had answered the call without questions, and she’d worn the uniform