USA. Wiscasset, Maine. USA. 2007. The night before a memorial service for Andrew Small. He was nineteen when he was killed
during an ambush in Afghanistan, along with two other soldiers. The platoon had first arrived at
the Holiday Inn a few hours earlier and gathered at the bar. Some soldiers talked quietly in the
booths. A few of the younger soldiers got wasted. Trouble soon started. A well-meaning stranger,
a veteran of the Navy in the 1980s, told them he understood, and they shouted him out of the
bar. At closing time two of the most intoxicated soldiers got into a fight, and one tried to rip the
other’s ear off with his teeth. After a chase through the halls, they were separated and forced
into bed. The senior noncommissioned officers took turns standing guard at their doors for the
rest of the night. In the morning, one of them was still too drunk to attend the service and he
was left alone to sleep in the charter bus.
After the ceremony, Small’s squad leader Sergeant Jason Crawford grieved in the woods. He
lingered there until Andrew’s mother, Cindy, found him and held him in a long embrace. The
crowd had dispersed, preparing to meet again at the local recreation center. Crawford walked
over to Andrew’s grave, took off his pressed jacket, laid it carefully on the grass, and knelt
for several minutes in front of the stone. Etched into the marker was a portrait of Small in
high school, smiling widely. Crawford got up and walked out of the cemetery arm in arm with
Sergeant Wilder, another squad leader who had survived the same ambush. On the way to the
reception, Crawford stopped at a liquor store and pounded a beer. When he rejoined the unit, he
posed for photographs, smiling broadly with Andrew’s mother and father.