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Metra Media
Mina shouldn’t be online. Nothing good comes from scrolling through comments on social media, but she cannot help herself.
The chatter around her latest post is mixed. Most comes from within Afghanistan, but she also has viewers around the world,
her dispersed compatriots. They watch her from all corners of the globe, tethered to their homeland by a rope that grows longer
by the day.
Dear God, why is our country so doomed?
I knew this would happen. Our politicians are money-grubbing snakes.
At least now there will be peace.
Mina wants to scream. Peace is not the absence of war. It is the presence of security and justice, and she feels anything
but safe right now.
They’ve destroyed our beautiful religion.
Have you idiots forgotten what the so-called heroes did to our people?
The commentor has posted a link that Mina clicks, against her better judgment. It leads her to a video of a Special Forces
pilot and a talk show host.
MOAB. Mother of All Bombs. We love our acronyms, right? Now, that’s not really what the letters stand for, but it sure does
describe the beast pretty well and it’s a hell of a lot more fun to say than Massive Ordnance Air Blast.
It was nearly twenty-two thousand pounds of deadly force, a green pencil-shaped explosive with a yellow tip and powerful wings.
Why would anyone name a bomb a mother? Mina had wondered. A mother created life and a bomb—did the Americans not realize what
bombs did to life?
Mina’s tea grows cold as she listens to the pilot recount the bomb dropped over rough terrain in Nangarhar Province at 7:32
p.m. local time on April 13, 2017. The bomb slid out the rear cargo door of a Lockheed MC-130 and detonated above the old
soapstone mines where Islamic State militants were believed to be holed up in caves. The mushroom cloud could be seen for
miles.
The MOAB was an air-blast bomb, which unleashed its wrath midair when a proximity fuse on its nose ignited the warhead. It
caused a crunch of air pressure that could and would wipe out life within a nine-block vicinity. In the video, the pilot walked
through the technical sequence of events.
The bomb detonates in the air, atomizing the fuel it carries. A secondary explosion ignites the atomized fuel.
While other bombs created shrapnel or fragmentation, the MOAB destroyed with a tsunami of pressure. It turned people inside
out, blew their lungs out of their mouths with such force that there were no remains to retrieve. No bodies to count.
Nothing to bury, but plenty to grieve, Mina thinks grimly. She wants to stop the video, but there’s something deeply honest about the way this man was speaking,
and honesty was so rare these days.
It’s twice the size of the Daisy Cutters used to clear jungles and make way for helicopter landings in Vietnam. But it’s also
smaller than a bunker buster.
The American president had been asked if he’d authorized the use of the bomb, and he said he had given the military total
authorization. That’s why they’ve been so successful lately, he had said.
Lately.
Had the president been talking about the operations in Afghanistan or was he talking about other places Americans were dropping bombs?
It had been a busy few months. Nearly sixty Tomahawk missiles fired into Syria.
An airstrike in Iraq that killed more than a hundred civilians.
But the conversation was not about the dozens of small bombs, the ones that flew under literal and metaphorical radars.
This one was about the bomb that came with alpha energies, the matriarch of all bombs.
It’s more of a message, really, the pilot explained.
What’s the message? the host asked.
That we’re willing to use unprecedented force to win this thing. That we’re doubling down. That we’re not quitting until we
are victorious. We’ve got to get into their headspace. So much of war is psychological. Shock and awe, you know. Flex a little
muscle and scare ’em off.
Hell yeah.
The Americans declared that they had taken rigorous precautions and conducted extensive surveillance to avoid civilian deaths.
They claimed, and the Afghan government confirmed, that no innocent lives were taken in the attack. The host didn’t bring
up Daniel Hale, the former U.S. Air Force intelligence analyst convicted for disclosing that nearly ninety percent of Afghans
killed in airstrikes were unintended targets. Or the unofficial acronym for children killed in error: TITS. Terrorists in
training. Why bring it up? Everyone knows war is messy.
Villagers about two kilometers away reported feeling like they were bombed. A farmer lost two cows. Homes had windows blown
out.
Mina remembers the parliamentarian from Nangarhar talking about the teacher who had been killed by the blast, along with his
son.
Thirty-six ISIS fighters were killed in the attack, the Americans declared. Hang on, new information coming in.
The number was a moving target.
Fifty-one. Eighty-two. The final count was ninety-six.
ISIS reported they did not lose any fighters, but terrorists were not to be trusted. What about the teacher and his son?
He’s right about one thing, Mina thinks as she tries to rub the tension out of her temples. So much of war is psychological.