Whoever Saves a Life
By: Matthieu Aikins
Tags: Editors Pick, War, Syria

Back at the station, they stood outside, joking. The brief call had stirred them out of their daylong torpor. Suddenly, Abu Sabet pointed directly above them. “A plane!” he said. They all jumped and looked skyward — but it was just a star in the lavender sky.

“Planes don’t fly with their lights,” scoffed Annas.

“Maybe the pilot left his handbrake on,” joked Surkhai.

Looking sheepish, Abu Sabet got into his little taxi and drove home. He had a wife and kids who still lived in the city. The rest of the team settled into their nightly routine of laying about the bunk room, which held, in addition to the bed and sleeping mats, a fan, a propane burner, and a small television on which they would get the rebel and regime news broadcasts. One of the guys had brought a plate of cool, purple plums from the market. The rebel-held half of the city was still not yet fully besieged — the regime and ISIS were closing in from both sides — and there was still food in the few markets that remained open. They sucked the sour pits and cracked open a bowl of peanuts. An hour passed. And then there was a tremendous flash and boom.

To be hit by an explosion at close range is to experience light and sound as darkness and silence; silence as your ears ring louder than any sound, darkness as dust and smoke envelop you. The air filled with flying chunks of cinder block, and the men were pitched forward onto their hands, the floor suddenly gritty with debris. Khaled leaped to his feet and rushed with the rest of the team out into the pitch-black lot. The station had half-collapsed, and the power had gone out. One of the guys, Omar, had been hurt and a group led by Khaled threw him into the cab of the truck and peeled out. The rest of the team ran across the road and crouched in a narrow space between two houses — they could hear the planes coming back in, and could see red anti-aircraft tracers arc up from the rebel positions to meet them. Another blast sounded close by; the door to one of the houses opened and a young couple, the man cradling an infant in his arms, came out and hurried off into the night.

After about 20 minutes, the bombing subsided, and they dared to smoke again. Annas and Surkhai came out and stood by the road. The moon had risen in a yellow half-circle above the station; no one wanted to go back in, for fear the planes would return. An ambulance screeched up, and the driver got out, gaping at them in astonishment. “When I saw the bomb drop here, I came as fast as I could,” he said. You could see the whites of his eyes. “God has saved you because he wants you to save others.”

The firetruck returned, and Khaled got out. “Omar’s okay,” he told the group. “He just cut his foot.” He stood for a moment and surveyed the grim-faced half circle. The guys were badly rattled. But the Hanano team had never run from the site of a blast. He quickly made a decision. “We’re going to stay here tonight and guard the station,” he announced. “And in the morning, we’ll go somewhere new.”

Nodding their assent, the guys lit up fresh smokes and started joking to break the tension.

“I hope we move to a nice big school,” said Annas.

“They always bomb schools,” responded Surkhai.

They sat in a line on the curb, leaning their shoulders against each other and listening to the shelling, their cigarette embers blinking in red procession, until the sun rose in place of the moon.

By daylight, they saw how close the bomb had fallen. The large house next door had vanished; in its place was an enormous crater filled with crushed debris. At the center of the crater were a few twisted sheets of heavy steel, the kind used in underground propane tanks — all that remained of a very large barrel bomb. It had obliterated the house and blown down a 20-yard section of the heavy stone boundary wall, before smashing in part of the station. If the bomb had dropped ten yards closer, they would all have been killed.

The loss of the station was a psychological blow. They had mourned their teammates there. But the building was on the verge of collapsing, and they had no choice but to move. There was no shortage of empty buildings in Aleppo to choose from, and early that morning Khaled had surveyed a school in a neighboring area. It was a sturdy, three-story building with a basement they could shelter in and a big parking lot for the trucks. It would do. Khaled called another Civil Defense team — there were four in Aleppo — to bring a dump truck so that they could load up the gear from the station.

As they were pitching equipment into the dump truck, they heard the roar of an incoming helicopter and, spooked from the night before, ran for cover. Two booms sounded in quick succession, and the team came back out, dusting themselves off and kidding about who had run away fastest.

A call came over their crackly, shoddy radio: Civilians had been hit. Khaled delegated his protégé Annas to take the rescue truck, and he and several of the guys jumped in and raced toward the smoke, the siren wailing. The bomb site was on a main thoroughfare in Sakhour, near a park and an intersection that had been sliced in half by a high earthen barrier to protect against snipers. “Stop stop stop stop stop,” shouted Annas when they’d reached a safe distance; the team jumped down and started running toward the site.