2

The Fort

An Outpost of Progress

—Joseph Conrad

October 2003

After a brief layover in Uzbekistan—a common insertion point for Afghanistan-bound troops—the C-17 set us down at Bagram Air Base, the large military installation in Parwan Province that housed the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force (CJSOTF) for Operation Enduring Freedom. There, at the base’s operational headquarters, Camp Vance, we were put through the expected routine of reporting, briefing, processing, and prepping for our upcoming infil.

I disliked the paperwork, but the briefings did give me a clearer sense of where we were headed. The capital of Kunar Province is the small city of Asadabad, which sits at the junction of the Kunar and Pech Rivers, about six miles from the Pakistan border. On its outskirts lay a military base known variously as the Puchi Ghar Army Fire Support Base, Forward Operating Base (FOB) Asadabad, and simply “Abad.” It was at this FOB that we were to be stationed.

By all accounts, Abad was a well-run military establishment, and well defended by a combination of regular infantry, Special Forces teams, CIA guys, and Afghan irregulars whom the CIA had trained. Nobody suggested, however, that it was an unthreatened site.

A Russian post during the Soviet occupation, it had been overrun in the 1980s by a mujahideen force that had slaughtered the entire garrison rather than taking prisoners.1 In its new incarnation, the post had been coming under attack from insurgents—in some cases, no doubt, the mujahideens’ children. In mid-July, three coalition soldiers were wounded by an IED just south of the base. Later that month a B-52 had to respond to rocket attacks on the compound itself, and additional rocket attacks had occurred in August. As we boarded a Chinook for transport to Asadabad, we were well aware that we were entering a war zone.

The helo flight took about an hour. There were nine of us on this hop: the eight who had come from Bragg plus an Air Force air support specialist, Courtney Hinson, who had joined us at Camp Vance in Bagram. Courtney was a young stud who was likable the minute you met him. He liked us, too. Coming from a large Texas family, he had asked to be assigned to us because of our positive work ethic, which recalled one of his father’s favorite sayings: “Many hands make light work.” Still in his twenties, Courtney was already a seasoned combat veteran, having seen action in both Iraq and Afghanistan. As our unit’s dedicated TAC-P, Tactical Air Control Party specialist, he would prove to be an invaluable asset.

Randy Derr, our team sergeant, had gone a few days ahead of us to prepare the transition with ODA 361, the Special Forces team we were replacing. He was responsible for recording the lessons they had learned and passing them on to me and the rest of the team. I knew Randy would do a solid job, but I was disappointed that I couldn’t get a few days myself with the outgoing captain. Hammerhead Six was taking over a strategically important area in the War on Terror, and the handoff of the baton seemed limp at best.

As we headed east toward the Hindu Kush, the terrain seemed like a drier version of our own rugged West—the deep clefts and soaring ridges of classic ski country. I smiled to myself, thinking that we were probably better prepped than most teams on their initial deployment to Afghanistan. As part of the 19th Special Forces Group, we had prepared not at North Carolina’s Fort Bragg or Kentucky’s Fort Campbell but at Utah’s Camp Williams, where the land more resembles the terrain where we would be fighting.

We were a mile or two away when I first saw the fort. And fort was the word. I had imagined the chain-link fences, sandbagged walls, and concertina wire that are typical of Army bases in this region. From a distance, the FOB didn’t look like that. Its high walls were dun and gray, a mixture of adobe and stone, and they looked like they had been built a thousand years ago. I found out later that they preceded the Russian period by many, many years. Aside from some metal guard towers that the Soviets had added, the enclosure looked like it belonged in an old Hollywood movie: a remote British outpost as imagined by Warner Bros. As the Chinook approached a landing zone just outside the walls, I allowed myself a quick mental picture of regimental banners and pith helmets. But then the LZ came into view and I got serious.

The CH-47D is a two-rotor, twin-engine cargo helicopter that can carry more than thirty pax (passengers) or twenty-six thousand pounds of cargo. Two door gunners sit just behind the pilots, and there is sometimes an extra gunner on the rear ramp. Passengers exit the aircraft from the ramp, and this rear-door exit is a little slower and more cumbersome than just hopping out of the open sides of a Blackhawk. If you’re dropping into a hot landing zone, you have to do it seamlessly to clear the bird and quickly set up a defensive perimeter.

Every member of the team understood how to execute that move, so I knew that once the helo touched down, everybody would be doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing. I wasn’t mistaken. At touchdown, as the propwash flew away from the bird, the eight of us were down the ramp at a snap. In seconds we dumped our bags and cargo clear and formed a 360-degree security position around the aircraft. Our objective was to secure the LZ and the aircraft and to be in a defendable position once it lifted off and the operation began. Textbook stuff, really.

On this particular LZ, though, once the Chinook lifted off and the dust settled, we saw that the landing area had already been secured. It was being overwatched by the post’s guard towers and by a couple of gun trucks just off the LZ. Before I could stand up I heard a familiar voice laughing at us for having successfully secured an already secure landing zone. “Looks super, guys. If you’re done practicing infil techniques we can unload the gear.”

Wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and the first hints of the beard that SF guys are obliged to grow in-country, there was our team sergeant, Randy Derr, raising a hand in greeting. “Good to see you,” he said. “Welcome to Abad.”

Up close, the exterior of the FOB continued to resemble the mud fortresses that the British had occupied in India. Inside, though, it looked much like any other Army base. Covering an area equivalent to three or four football fields, it contained enough low buildings—some wooden, some adobe—to house, feed, provision, and train a garrison of two hundred men. About 120 of these, we learned, were regular Army, plus another twenty-five Afghan irregulars; aside from a few CIA guys, the rest were Special Forces ODAs like ours. A few ODAs had been in Afghanistan since 2001.2 We were replacing one of these early arrivals, ODA 361. When they left, we would be one of three Green Beret units based at the post.

The garrison also included six Afghan soldiers who had once been anti-Taliban militiamen and had recently been reconstituted as procoalition mercenaries. Randy explained that we were inheriting them from the outgoing ODA, and that the inheritance was sanctioned by ties of blood. The six were the nephews of a local warlord, a former mujahid named Malik Zarin, who was devoted to the Americans for reasons that probably had as much to do with self-interest as with love of country. According to Randy, when he agreed to loan the young men to us, he had first gathered them together in their village and said, “If anything happens to the Americans, don’t come home.” Talk about incentives.

I wasn’t entirely convinced of the nephews’ devotion. I had heard enough about tribal allegiances to suspect that loyalty to Americans was a fungible commodity. But I was willing to wait and see. I put Randy in charge of their training and supervision, and hoped that, in developing a bond with him, they could become our ears and eyes as we worked with other indigenous troops in the future and interacted with local villages.

We also inherited an interpreter. Mashal was an educated man from Jalalabad, and his fiancée was a teacher there. Randy said that ODA 361 had given him a glowing report, and in our first meeting I understood why. He had a perfect beard, wore American-style battle dress, and had a chipper, contagious attitude. Working first with the CIA in 2001 and since 2002 with the ODAs, he was devoted to his country and loyal to the Afghan-American cause. After a successful operation, he would often thank us for leaving our families behind to help his country. He was a bright, hardworking ally, and immensely likable.

We were also joined at Asadabad by an additional weapons sergeant, Ian Waters. Ian was originally attached to the 20th Special Forces Group, but he was reassigned to us for the Hammerhead Six deployment. That brought the number of our Green Berets up to ten—just two men short of a traditional A-Team complement.

Once we settled in, we also met up with the members of the Special Forces B-Team that had deployed with us. This term might call for a word of explanation. In civilian usage, A is seen as “better” than B, but that’s not what it means in Special Forces. Among Green Berets, twelve-man A-Teams are the front-line ground troops, engaging the enemy head-on and executing the ground mission. They can’t do this without expert supply and logistical support, and that support is provided by a B-Team.

In a typical SF company, you have six Operational Detachment Alphas (ODAs), each commanded by a captain like me, and one Operational Detachment Bravo (the B-Team), with the B-Team and the company itself commanded by a major—in our case a Maj. Kimball Hewitt, who was also the Abad commandant and my immediate superior in the chain of command. Three companies comprise an SF battalion, commanded by a lieutenant colonel. Our battalion, headquartered at Bagram’s Camp Vance, was led by Lt. Col. Marcus Custer, Hewitt’s immediate superior. Along with the other A-Team leaders, I was going to be given a wide scope of responsibility for our team’s operations. But all of us knew that we couldn’t get anything done without B-Team’s assistance.

That broad responsibility had a big impact on how I saw our mission, and on how my perspective sometimes meshed with, and sometimes diverged from, that of the higher-up command. That complicated picture was the result of a Special Forces tradition in which A-Team leaders are far more responsible for setting their own agendas than are company commanders and even battalion commanders in the regular Army.

I had been in the regular Army in Kosovo, so I knew that, operationally speaking, it was a top-down organization. Generals set the big picture strategy; colonels, lieutenant colonels, and majors devise plans to implement pieces of that strategy; and captains and lieutenants (often leading companies and platoons) come up with tactics to move those pieces into place. These junior officers have no strategic responsibility and therefore no way to influence decisions made sometimes thousands of miles away at the top of the chain. They must carry out operation orders someone else has devised.

Special Forces do things differently. Because we operate in remote areas about which military planners know relatively little, it’s rarely feasible for a senior officer working out of Fort Bragg to devise anything but a very general strategy. When Patton was pushing across Europe in the last days of World War II, he knew the terrain, he had good communications structures in place, and he was fighting a well-trained but entirely conventional army. With those operational advantages, he could confidently make pronouncements like, “We will reach the Rhine by Friday.” Such confidence would be laughable in places with impenetrable terrain, lousy communications, and an enemy that blends in with the civilian population. In places like Vietnam and Afghanistan, a rigid top-down command structure won’t work. To help you set and execute a strategy, you need eyes and ears on the ground to understand the human terrain upon which these wars are fought. Green Beret A-Teams provide those eyes and ears.

I knew all this before we arrived in Asadabad. I knew that a plan to “neutralize” the area’s bad guys wasn’t going to be spelled out in a memo from the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). I embraced that knowledge. It was a matter of pride for me, and for the rest of the team, that we were going to be entrusted with making our own war plans and be held accountable for their success or failure.

What I didn’t know was the extent of the territory for which we were going to be responsible.

Once the team had moved all our gear into our “team house”—a couple of rooms of plywood and mud in the corner of the FOB—Randy gave us the lowdown on our situation. On his advance hop, he had been accompanied by the team sergeant of ODA 935, one of our sister teams also assigned to Abad. Both sergeants wanted the best housing and the best mission for their teams, and it was our good fortune that Randy opted for action rather than comfort. He conceded the comfortable housing to ODA 935 in exchange for getting what he suspected would be the more interesting area of operations (AO)—the Wild West country north of Asadabad. Thanks to his negotiation, we ended up with spartan digs but a target-rich, challenging environment.

“The horse trading wasn’t that tricky,” Randy explained with his characteristic wry humor. “There are a lot more possibilities for unconventional warfare north of the base, and it turned out that the guys in 935 really liked where they slept.”

Our new AO was confirmed in a meeting with Major Hewitt, the quiet, reserved senior SF officer at Abad and the de facto base commander. We met him in the map room, a large planning area whose walls were lined with military charts. After he welcomed the team, he called our attention to a huge map of northeastern Afghanistan. A blue pin in the middle of it indicated our position. Pins of other colors dotted the rest of the map, indicating suspected nests of Al Qaeda or Taliban activity. The operable term was suspected. The pins showed locations about which the Army had bits of intel, but they didn’t tell us anything about which bits were reliable. Lots of pins, but more questions than answers.

With a pointer, the major outlined what he identified as our AO: Kunar Province and adjoining Nuristan Province. We watched as he dragged the pointer north from the blue pin up to the Tajikistan border, then made a long semicircle east and south along the Pakistan border, and finally closed the circle west and north back to its origin. We were responsible for everything between Asadabad and the Tajikistan border. That included the huge, mountainous province of Badakshan, one finger of which (the Wakhan Corridor) touched the Chinese border. But intel hadn’t detected much activity in that inhospitable area, so it was likely we’d be focusing our operations on Nuristan and Kunar.

Looking at the map, I started doing some rough geometry in my head. Scott Jennings, sitting next to me, was scratching figures on a piece of paper. He looked up, showed me the paper, and smiled. Scott was a man of few words, but his expression said it clearly: Is this guy kidding?

“Major,” I said, “our math whiz intel sergeant here estimates that the area of operations you have outlined covers five thousand square miles. Give or take.”

Hewitt chuckled. “Pretty close,” he said to Scott. “Kunar’s just shy of 5,000 square kilometers, Nuristan just under twice that, so your new backyard is 14,167 square kilometers. Give or take. That’s 5,468 square miles. About fifteen of you, right? Counting the Afghans. That’s 364 square miles per man.”

I had to hand it to Hewitt. He made an obviously ridiculous proposition sound intriguing and maybe even doable.

It wasn’t as if he had much choice. In 2003, there were only ten thousand coalition troops in Afghanistan. The Pentagon was concentrating on a new war in Iraq, which had begun in March, leaving commanders in Afghanistan with limited resources. As the majority of supplies and personnel were still being airlifted into the country, the challenge of managing supply, medical personnel, and maintenance was staggering. About eight thousand of the troops in-country were support personnel based in Bagram and Kandahar. That left only about two thousand men in the field to fight a very widespread insurgency, and many of those troops were occupied more in defending FOBs than in patrolling and gathering intel. Most field missions, therefore, were far wider than an armchair strategist might desire. In 2003, Major Hewitt didn’t have twenty teams to distribute around all that sprawling real estate. He was dealing with the resources he had, and what he had was us.

Judging from the grins on my team’s faces, they were taking it all in stride. I’m sure some of them were thinking, Major, you’re nuts, but nobody said it. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was hearing the motto of the Navy Seabees: “The difficult we do at once. The impossible takes a little longer.”

So we were to be the frontier guard for an area roughly the size of Connecticut. After I got over the initial jolt, I found myself pleased at the prospect. It was a huge responsibility, and I appreciated the trust. But it did raise questions about feasibility. Surely SF command, in giving us that massive area, didn’t expect the fifteen of us to cleanse the entire area of hostile influence. Surely there had been some thought given to where we might most effectively focus our attention.

When I asked Major Hewitt this question, he just said, “It’s your show. The teams before you have been chasing Taliban and Al Qaeda around these hills for the past two years. We’ve crushed a lot of them, driven others into Pakistan, but the stragglers are a bitch. I wish we had some addresses, but we don’t. That’s for you to find out. When you do, tell us what you need. Any assets, anytime. Understood?”

I understood all right. I understood that the SF tradition of letting the ODAs define the mission had its downside. Before that meeting, I was pumped to be given the authority to develop my own strategy and write my own orders. Once I discovered that this meant driving all the snakes from Connecticut with fifteen men, I was momentarily daunted by the task before us.

The situation made me think of the old Wild West story about a town in the midst of a riot that calls the Texas Rangers for help. An hour later one Ranger saunters into town, Colts on his hips and a glint in his eye. “Where’s the trouble?” he asks.

“They only sent one Ranger?” asks a bewildered citizen.

“There’s only one riot, ain’t there?” the Ranger replies.

Like the Ranger, we’d figure it out, just as special operators from Robert Rogers on down had figured it out. But 360 square miles a man. Why not a thousand?

Implementing a strategy under the conditions described by Major Hewitt would obviously entail leaving the confines of the fort. Asadabad was a landing zone, a get-your-crap-together preparation place. If we were going to scour Connecticut for bad guys, we were going to have to get mobile, and to do it fast. This dictated much of our activity for the next couple of weeks.

For starters, we were going to have to get used to the terrain. In War, a record of his year in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley (an offshoot of the Pech Valley), journalist Sebastian Junger observes that, given the tactical importance of holding high ground, “an enormous amount of war-fighting simply consists of carrying heavy loads uphill.”3 Nowhere is that comment more apt than in Kunar Province. Asadabad itself is only 2,700 feet above sea level, but that figure is misleading, since the city sits in a mountain valley, and the walls of that valley rise in jagged creases to several times that height; within a couple of hours’ walk from the FOB, you could be in windswept passes a mile and a half high. Since we would likely be carrying heavy loads up such inclines, we had to get our lungs and our legs in shape.

We started the conditioning immediately, by taking daily hikes from the FOB to one of the observation posts (OPs) that formed the compound’s outer perimeter. Manned by squads of infantry, the OPs were half a mile away from the base and about another half mile up. Afghans do hikes like this without breaking a sweat. For us, the first climb brought back fond memories of being pushed beyond your limits in Special Forces and Ranger training. “It’s just like Mountain Phase of Ranger School,” our senior weapons sergeant, Dave Moon, joked, “except without the blueberry pancakes.”

After a week, with our muscles adapting to the strain, we were clamoring up the slopes almost like goatherds. But that first trek? When we reached the OP, the young, already acclimated infantry on duty looked at us with eyes of self-satisfied pity. I don’t mind admitting that we were smoked.

We also had to get used to being off-road rally racers. ODAs aren’t typically armored units, but this was Afghanistan, where villages were miles apart and where IEDs were almost as plentiful as poppies. When we left the relative safety of Abad, we might have to drive at breakneck speed from one hot spot to another, and we might easily become the targets of random bomb planters, not to mention more organized groups of attackers. We would have to become adept at driving the vehicles that, like the Afghan irregulars, we were inheriting from ODA 361.

There were four of these: three armored Humvees and a Toyota pickup. The Toyota, which we were told was the Taliban’s vehicle of choice, was no problem, but the Humvees required a learning curve.

The High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (Humvee) is a U.S. government vehicle whose armored version in 2003 cost a quarter of a million dollars. Small change by Pentagon standards, but when you put three of them together and threw in a pickup, it added up to real money. For us that represented a huge fiduciary responsibility. Not to mention the fact that when we were on the move, the trucks would serve as motorized fortresses, our only protection against rockets and IEDs. We had good reason to give special handling to Uncle Sam’s rides.

Asadabad had a motor pool that handled the Humvees’ mechanical upkeep. Driving the things was another matter—a challenge which this handful of American males took to quickly. As teenagers, we had all done our share of pretending to be Dale Earnhardt, so the prospect of taking the corners too fast in a three-ton minitank was a little bit like getting extra ice cream. We all took turns at this, on the flats beyond the fort, as I assessed which of us would probably handle the rigs best if we were dodging enemy fire. Everybody was competent at the wheel, but Jason Mackay, Roger Wilcox, and Mike Montoya seemed to have an edge on the rest of us, so I decided that unless circumstances dictated otherwise, they would be our designated drivers.

That done, we turned to figuring out our moves on a routine patrol (if there was such a thing) and how we would respond to Kunar’s surprises. For the next week, when we weren’t in the sack or at chow, we divided our time between workouts in the base gym, firing practice on its range with our Afghans, and practice drills with the vehicles. I wanted to refine a standard procedure for any and all emergencies. What would we do if we lost a tire? Hit an IED? What if someone got shot? How would we approach a suspected target? In any given scenario, who would stand where with what weapon and be responsible for what job?

Like most Green Berets, I’m a believer in the adage “The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.” Practicing with our guns and vehicles was a way of maximizing the chances that if there was going to be blood spilled, it wouldn’t be ours.

But it’s also possible to overthink. By the second week in October, with our practicing becoming almost automatic, I was starting to think we were caught in the snare of preparation. It was time to switch from drills to live ammo missions.

We were ready to check out the hunting in the wilds of Connecticut.