Chapter Text
In March, Karen spends a drunk night rereading a manila folder she swore she’d never open again, crying and alternatively screaming and punching one of her pillows. She wakes up with the most fuzzy, rank cottonmouth she can remember since two years ago at Josie’s.
But on the precipice of this hangover, this brutal, throbbing monster that came at the hands of some shitty $5 pinot-noir Karen bought with high hopes she might cook with but never did, she makes a choice.
Karen calls a man about a place called Kandahar.
This starts with exhaustion, and the mind-numbing blur of insomnia: with days that normally ran to ten hours now bleeding into twelve, fourteen hours as she attempts to juggle her stories for The Bulletin, with stories Ellison wants her to leave alone.
And Ellison picks up on it, sorta, in that bared-teeth sarcasm of his, even as he heaps praise upon her in the only backhanded way a jaded reporter can: by sticking post-its to the extra-large coffees he sneaks into her office in response to her stories
"DEA pissed, good job," one reads.
Another, when she comes to work with a black eye that she insists she received at a boxing class: "You know you have insurance, right?"
And then, after Karen may or may not spend three days awake and working at the office: "Insurance benefits incl. Ambien. Caffeine addiction doesn't have rehab option, sry."
The last one she brings to his office, knocking angrily on the door and narrowing her eyes when he motions her in.
"Really?" She points to the scrawl.
Ellison is unimpressed. "Go home, Karen."
Karen does her homework in the only disturbingly thorough and obsessive way she knows how: she first talks to academics about Kandahar, visits Middle East and geo-political professors at NYU, talks to lingual and cultural specialists at Yale – one guy specifically who had a background in Pashtu, whose family left in the initial onslaught in 2002.
Academics tell a story of the inexorable drag of time, the headache-inducing complexity of Afghanistan and how there’s a damn good reason it was called the ‘Graveyard of Empires.’ Kandahar, specifically: the nexus of Pasthu calture that resisted the Soviets tooth and nail, where the vacuum state that existed after the fall of the Najibullah government was a reason the Taliban first found a foothold there. One man tells her how the incessant violence and sexual assault by the mujahedeen was what capitulated Kandahar hearts and minds to the Taliban, who promised stability and safety but spoke little of the sacrifices that would entail.
And then when the Americans came: the Haqqani Network, out of Pakistan, the underhanded dealings of ISI funding the Taliban. How Kandahar experienced a massive surge in NATO and US troops in 2010 to attempt to push the Taliban from its stronghold. Civilian casualties. Coalition injuries. Bombs and drugs and everything inbetween.
In short, what academia gives Karen about Kandahar is a goddamn headache, and for two weeks after she finally compiles all of her info, her interviews, her notes and scrawl, she sits at Ben’s desk at The Bulletin and doesn’t realize she’s been rubbing at her temples for over half an hour until Ellison walks by and glances in.
“You’re developing a pretty interesting tic,” he tells her, then quickly evacuates her presence before she can yell something scathing at him.
The grunt side of the coin is a little more painful and intimate. A little messier. How many deployments is that? Who deployed? With which unit? When? Frank is a dead man, and even though in court they were able to vouch for his being in the Marines through now-dead Schoonover, the files otherwise have vanished into the ether. No, he was not a decorated Marine. No, he did not save his unit in a canyon up in the Waziristan. He did not exist, period. Please stop calling this office for information.
So going directly at it by mentioning the foreboding, three-syllable name of a supposed mass serial-killer doesn’t work well. But Karen narrows down the crushing amount of years and combat and blood to a stretch between 2010 and 2012, not admitting that those years came from her nervous foray into the Punisher’s house, when it was still Frank Castle’s house and still standing. From dates she saw scribbled in the corner of platoon photos, trying not to trip on the errant kid toy here and there on the carpet.
2010 – 2012. Karen takes a deep breath, grabs an armful of folders and dives in.
Kandahar is a place in Afghanistan where one could come to the startling conclusion that dirt had a variety of odiferous smells, where the opium poppies would bleed black tar and where haggard, bumpy mud roads hemorrhaged blown-off limbs and brain trauma.
“Fucking massive,” is what James Hedges tells her about the IEDs he encountered, a retired embedded journalist with the New York Times. He cradles a whisky but he’s looking out a spot past her shoulder, watching the traffic outside the window. “The sound was – was like an angry god. It was a physical force that would bodyslam you like some WWE shit.”
She’s here about his time embedded with the 2/7 Marines, but it turns out there’s much more where that came from and here they are.
“How often did this happen?” she asks quietly.
His eyes get distant and he fixates on the horizon.
“It felt like every goddamn day,” he says, and then, with a snort that makes it obvious he’s trying to relieve the tension in the conversation as he brings his gaze back to her: “My tinnitus amongst the staff at the paper is legendary.”
And that’s the tricky thing, here, continually skirting glances at the lips of buildings and hoping to see black, and dreading to see red. Continually creating a mantra of, He’s dead he’s dead he’s dead; to feel okay about burrowing into a place that all others seem to want to forget, to bury.
One man talks about his unit’s encounter with bacha bazi, nine year old boys dressed up as girls and dancing for men who were going to rape them. Or how other little kids were sold off to pay debts, trafficked to Pakistan (because that is where all bad things are born, the SPECTRE headquarters if this was a James Bond novel) when their parents couldn’t make enough money on crops not poppy related.
The others, ultimately, tell her Kandahar exists in uncomfortable contradictions:
It is 20,000 square mile wallow of misery.
It is fruit orchards and blossoms, bright and vivid against the stale brown of dust.
It is 450,000 people who are a large group of expletives that Karen does not necessarily write down, even when Corporal (former) Juan Browning taps angrily at the table and insists that she does.
It is a place where the food was actually pretty damn good, but you always had to be aware the next day you might have the shits the whole night through.
And then Karen finally finds it, finds the blip:
In 2012, Kandahar was where all of them died.
((Well. Not all of them.
But too many of them. ))
Sergeant Paul Gutierrez only relaxes after the third beer, and even then, his shoulders scream cagey. He is proud of his shaggy (as he dubs it) ‘caveman beard,’ and tells her a lot of guys luxuriate in the facial hair they weren’t allowed to grow during their time ‘in.’
He does not have a trigger finger tic like Frank did(does), but Karen has found that not many of the people she’s interviewed exhibit that same kind of clench jawed, black-eyed rage of the Punisher.
Instead, Gutierrez insistently jumps his knee beneath the table, Karen only knows this because occasionally, he rests his foot on the leg of the table, sending the vibrations all the way through her notepad and the recorder resting next to her glass of water.
“How much do you know, I guess, is the real question.” He finally says. They’d spent the better part of an hour bullshitting and talking work, talking New York, because Gutierrez took the booth closest to the back exit, because he found a corner where he had three walls of protection, and because, even at a height greater than six something and a build like a brick wall, Gutierrez seemed uneasy.
“I understand that Kandahar is a shithole,” Karen says, deadpan, and Gutierrez gives a bark of laughter.
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, that would be some of it.”
“I also understand that your unit suffered a casualty count that it hadn’t seen even in Iraq, since Vietnam.” She says this quieter, and Gutierrez’ gaze immediately goes hollow.
“Yeah,” he says, after a long moment. “Yeah, that would be some of it, too.”
Karen swallows, leans forward, “So…so what’s the rest?”
“You ever heard of a guy called Schoonover?” He asks.
Three days later, there’s white plastic clinging to her blouse that she belatedly realizes is a skull fragment and Gutierrez is splattered and crumpled on the linoleum floor of his apartment's kitchen out in New Jersey.
Karen’s heart is attempting to pummel its way out of her chest and she’s scrabbling backwards on her ass to try to reach her purse when she hears the belated, muted bark of what must be a suppressed weapon, and oh jesus fuck; she had not been taking this as seriously as she should have and her hands shake as she tries to reach for the handle of the gun and –
An audible sigh comes from around the corner. Karen’s pulling out the .38 as best as adrenaline can help her, backed up against a kitchen cabinet and arms locked but feeling a trembling start in her legs as she hears heavy footsteps round the doorway.
Black cap, beard, dark eyes but the raccoon-mask of bruises is suspiciously absent, even with a bleeding nose and red smears on his face and neck.
Frank Castle sees the .38 and the blond hair splattered with blood and lowers his pistol.
There is a meaningful pause.
“Goddammit,” he rasps, then: “Goddammit, you are nearly worse than fuckin’ Red.”