Nemesis

My younger sister and I have lived together for two years. With our most recent four-legged addition, we've somehow acquired ten cats between the two of us. Seven of them were strays, four of them found by me, one by my sister, and two found by friends and turned over to us, the local crazy cat ladies. That’s a fact my live-in boyfriend, who is very much allergic to cats, must regret every time he takes another Benadryl or buys another box of tissues. But that’s his fault. He knew what he was getting himself into.

All these cats have their own distinct personalities. My morose Moros, found during a hurricane and so very skittish with his big, sad eyes. Or little diva Discord, found abandoned in a parking lot, deaf and so malnourished she never grew past kitten size. Wobbly R2, whose brain didn’t develop quite right but who doesn’t let that stop her from walking too close to the edge of the kitchen counter. A good story would be Fury Odinson, the one-eyed, toothless, eleven-year-old cat who loves to drape himself across my boyfriend’s shoulders like a cape. But being as that we only found Fury a couple months ago, his past is a mystery to us. So we’ll go with Nemesis.

Nemesis looks like a normal cat. With his vibrant green eyes, orange and white striped fur and chunky belly, he looks like a cat who has been doted on his entire life and slept only on the softest of cat beds. Until you pet him, that is. His fur feels short and coarse, and, if you feel along his right flank, you’ll feel a pellet from a bb gun stuck just under his skin. There are scars on his face you can see just beneath his fur and on the backs of his ears. And if you look into his eyes, you’ll see something different there, something a little too wise to see in a cat’s eyes.

I deployed to Kandahar Airfield (KAF), Afghanistan in 2018 as a private security contractor. At one point, KAF was a massive beast, with a boardwalk that featured actual restaurants, including a TGI Fridays. In 2010, people called KAF a “world away from war,” where people could almost feel like they were just having a normal day out back home. If they could ignore the uniforms, guns, and occasional rocket attack.

But all good things must soon be shut down by people with as many ribbons on their chest as on a craft store’s shelves. When I walked along the boardwalk in November of 2018, it was a much reduced thing but still way more high speed than anything else I’d seen on my prior deployments with the Army. I found a restaurant called Echoes where I would celebrate two birthdays, the perfect shop to buy scarves to send home as gifts, and a place called Kabob House that made the best chicken parmesan subs I’ve ever had. And one night, as I wearily made my way to the dining facility with two of my friends, I found something even more special.

I heard him before I saw him. A demanding, full chested meow that cut through the din of conversations from dozens of soldiers, contractors, and civilians. This bulky orange and white striped cat sat unflinching in the middle of all that foot traffic, forcing them move around him like water flowing around a boulder. Several US soldiers stopped to coo at him but there were signs posted around the boardwalk that forbade petting or feeding the animals. I watched as one soldier noticed a warning glare from a nearby Sergeant First Class and reluctantly led her group away from the cat.

After having saved so many strays through sheer dumb stubbornness, I wasn’t going to let a couple of signs or a scary E-7 keep me away from a cat. Any fear of rabies, getting scratched or bit was always overwhelmed by my unwavering desire to do one thing: Pet. The. Cat. So I sent my friends ahead with instructions to fetch me some chicken or tuna, planted myself off to the side of the boardwalk, and quickly made a new orange friend.

My friend instantly named the cat Fluffy because of his fuzzy winter coat and we soon had a routine. I sat outside with Fluffy while my guys got us chow. Some nights I had to shoo away the Romanians for the right to feed and love on Fluffy. I never knew that those stoic men, well known post wide for being gruff, abrasive, and sometimes downright rude, could succumb to the cuteness of a hungry, loud little animal. Other nights Fluffy wasn't there and I worried, but most of my evenings were spent on the boardwalk, bundled up in a winter coat and keeping Fluffy company.

I wasn’t in the best place mentally when I met Fluffy. My marriage had been slowly falling apart for months and I knew that, when I got back to the States, I would no longer have a home or a husband. At that point, the only thing I had going for me was the deployment, which brought me a decent, tax-free salary, a roof over my head, and food. I couldn't see a path out of it, though, couldn't see what would happen to me and my cats on the other side of deployment, and that terrified me day in and day out.

Fluffy, with his constant meows and affection, brought untold comfort into my changing world and provided a means of grounding myself against the anxiety I felt on a daily basis. Every time I saw him, a little knot in my chest eased just enough for me to get through the night and carry on through the next day. Sitting on the cold ground for hours with Fluffy cuddled up in my lap gave me a little hope that maybe everything would be alright.

Word about Fluffy spread amongst my coworkers pretty quickly. Most women on deployment get the types of pictures you’d laugh about with your girlfriends or quickly delete with a disgusted groan. Luckily, I soon became the crazy cat lady of KAF. Pictures of cats, not just Fluffy but other cats who hung around our entry control points and begged for food or water, filled my messenger app. It got to the point where I could track the movements of almost every cat on base.

My entire shift kept me up to date on Fluffy’s comings and goings, letting me know that they’d seen him here or there or that they’d given him a good meal. When I became a supervisor a couple months later, my guards already knew that the way to gain my favor was to be nice to cats. Fluffy helped set off a wave of kindness toward cats among the airfield guards that would last all the way through to the end of my two year deployment in KAF. Many cats were fed and given shelter because of Fluffy.

In January 2019, Fluffy had over fifty expat airfield guards looking out for him, as well as a platoon of airmen who worked alongside us contractors as airfield security. The Romanians loved him, too, and with his position just outside the dining facility, he was well fed. For a while, I thought maybe he had the life at KAF. Maybe he could be okay.

One night, Fluffy met my group and I near the entrance of the boardwalk. I called out for him as I crouched down to wave him toward me. A Navy girl nearby warned me not to touch him, that he might get me sick. I told her to mind her business but, as Fluffy hustled toward me, she lunged toward him and stomped her foot down. I watched in shock as she came breathtakingly close to kicking that poor cat in the back of his head. She missed but Fluffy immediately fled under the boardwalk to hide.

My heart shattered. If I’d been less concerned about Fluffy, I might have lost my job and gotten myself sent home with an assault charge. But instead I hurried under the boardwalk to check on Fluffy. My mind raced as I comforted him. He wasn’t safe here; he’d never be safe here, out here in the cold with people too selfish and stupid to have a little bit of sympathy for this animal’s situation. Not to mention the fact that KAF was an active airfield. Though Fluffy had never yet wandered out onto the tarmac, that didn't mean that he wouldn't get caught in the wrong area and be shot by the Air Force unit responsible for keeping animals away from the aircraft.

I had to find a way to get him home. I didn’t think it was possible but a google search helped me find a place called Nowzad. It was the first animal clinic in Afghanistan, started in 2007 by a former British Royal Marine named Pen Farthing. They were a charity group dedicated to reuniting service members and contractors with the local animals they befriended on deployments. Nowzad also took in animals found on the streets of Afghanistan and sent them to the UK or US for adoption. I emailed Pen immediately. A few days later, he emailed me back telling me they were willing to help Fluffy get to the States if I could get him out of KAF.

I couldn't get a new cat without knowing for sure what my future would hold. My husband had agreed to watch my four cats until I came back but I knew he wouldn't be willing to take on a fifth. For the first time in months, I finally faced that empty future and reached out to my sister. She'd been living in Pennsylvania with our mom while she looked for her own place and we came to an agreement. For now, I would pay her rent while she watched the cats and went to school. Our long term goal, one I would eventually meet by the end of my deployment, was to buy a house somewhere in Pennsylvania. A weight lifted off my shoulders; I had a home and so did Fluffy. Now I just needed to get help catching him and find a place to house him until I could make travel arrangements.

I went to the KAF Pest Control compound. A very unpleasant name for a group of the sweetest people I’ve ever met. They immediately gave me a tour of their facilities where I got to meet some of my worst nightmares. Scorpions only visible in UV light, camel spiders, and a parasite the length of my forearm that they’d pulled out of the water supply. Their manager agreed to help me catch Fluffy but he gave me a warning. They’d been able to catch every cat on base and release them back out into Kandahar Province at one point or another but they’d never caught Fluffy. He was too smart for their traps and too fast for them to grab.

They told me to call them when I saw him next. Two days later, at 8 pm, hours past their closing time, two men from Pest Control came to help me get Fluffy into custody. While I pet Fluffy and kept him distracted, one of the men snuck up behind him and got him around the neck with a dog catching pole. Fluffy, of course, lost his mind and began to struggle for all he was worth. The entire stressful ordeal, one watched by many Romanians and soldiers, lasted no more than a minute as the men wrangled him into a cage, freed him from the stick, and closed the door. Even upset and scared, Fluffy let me pet him through the cage and never tried to bite or scratch me.

With the help of a friend of mine from the Special Missions Wing, I was able to get Fluffy a ride out of Black Gate so he could meet up with a driver from Nowzad. From there, Fluffy made the eight hour ride up to the clinic in Kabul, where he was neutered and given all his shots. His fundraiser opened within a few weeks and me, being the impatient thing I am, paid for nearly his entire three thousand dollar flight out of pocket. But it was well worth it to get an email in May of 2019 telling me that Fluffy would soon be on his way home.

I was still in Afghanistan so my sister picked Fluffy up from the Philadelphia airport. Poor Fluffy, stressed and angry from a thirty-hour flight, got home only for my sister to realize his gums were bleeding and he couldn’t chew his food. One vet trip later and Fluffy came back home with only four teeth left in his head. A vicious gum infection, one he’d probably had for weeks, had gotten into most of his teeth. In order to get rid of the infection, the vet had to remove all of Fluffy’s teeth save for his upper and lower fangs. My sister said he was the bravest little cat, resilient and always affectionate in spite of his pain and confusion.

But he’d made it. We changed his name to Nemesis to better match his new siblings, my cats Nyx, Erebus, Moros, Discord, and Fury Odinson. Not to be confused with my sister’s Star Wars themed cats, Leia, Luke, and R2. It took a while but soon Nemesis learned that he could groom Discord and Leia and be groomed back, that he could curl up in the sun with Moros and Luke. He learned that he could play fight with Erebus but that Nyx and Fury would smack him if he got too rambunctious and he’d get yelled at if he chased R2.

We bought our home in January 2020. It has tons of room for all our cats to run and play with plenty of cat beds for them to nap on in the sun. They sit in the sunroom watching the birds and the herds of deer who wander around our neighborhood. My sister is two years away from her bachelor's with plans to pursue a masters at a school in Florida. I found two more strays in Afghanistan before I left: a brown and black striped cat named Franccc and a certain powerlifting former Marine who is horribly allergic to cats but still loves all of mine, though R2 and Luke are his favorites.

Because I stayed in Afghanistan until November 2020, Nemesis is now closer to my sister than to me. Which is fine. I only saved his life. But we both know everything about him, like how he hates when we shower. We’re not sure why, maybe he thinks we’re drowning, but he screams and tries to pull us out if we get too close to the shower curtain. Our staircase is his Thunderdome; if he’s there, anything that moves is prey. When he shows his belly, that not him begging for pets, that’s a claw trap. And, when he’s feeling lively enough, he will meow back at us in a way that feels awfully close to a real conversation.

Not only did Fluffy teach a group of grunts how to be kind to cats, he also paved the way for other animals to find their way home. Because of him, seven dogs and four cats were taken Stateside by members of the Air Force Security Forces. My sister and I took in three more cats from Afghanistan; two girls, Ginger and Amira, who found homes with friends nearby. And Franccc, who should have gone to another home but bonded with Nemesis in a day and ended up being added to our menagerie. Now these two little Afghani boys are attached at the hip. They spend most of their time napping together, wrestling, and terrorizing the house in the most adorable way.

There’s no way to know how much Nemesis remembers about Afghanistan. He spent four years of his life there but he’s less afraid of fireworks than I am after my own four years’ worth of deployments. So maybe he doesn’t remember growing up beneath a sky that was sometimes filled with mortars and rockets and C-RAM fire. He has a family now and a beautiful home in the Pocono mountains. When I look in his eyes and he chatters back at me like an old god trapped in a mortal body, I think he remembers enough to be a little grateful for each day here. I know I'll be forever grateful he's here.