DAYCHOPAN DISTRICT, ZABUL PROVINCE, JANUARY 2014—High in the mountains of Southern Afghanistan, Johanna Smoke followed Afghan soldiers over rocky terrain and past the jumble of barbed wire that spanned several feet across the dry sand.
She was on foot, as were several of the men on the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division mission, and the weight of her gear combined with the heightened threat of IEDs, which were much harder to spot in arid, unfettered land, slowed her gait. With each step she glanced down at her boots, quickly scanning the earth immediately around them for slightly disturbed gravel or sand—any signs of explosives in this vastly barren terrain. Smoke and her translator were the only women among the more than one hundred infantrymen working the four-day mission, and by midmorning the small group she had been marching with finally made it to the remote ANP headquarters.
Often described as “desolate” and “rugged,” much of Daychopan, aside from its small pockets of farms and struggling orchards, had been abandoned. Once considered too dangerous for development, the Afghan government cut funds to the district. There was little to no business activity and few of the markets that, though meager, dominated downtown life in other districts across the province. To the Army, the area meant frequent reports of rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) fire. To the Afghans who lived there—in small pockets of isolated communities spread across the desert—it meant a heightened fear of insurgent attacks.
During Smoke’s mission she would be the only female soldier attending the all-male shura, and she would see the level of fear that still existed in the hearts of those living in the district.
The police headquarters was one of the smallest and most remote police compounds in the country. Its only building was stone with one story and an open courtyard in the square structure’s center. Offices for the Afghan policemen who regularly worked the outpost were sprinkled in rooms around one side of the building’s perimeter, and catty-cornered from the main entrance were rooms filled with bunkbeds and lockers where the policemen, even those whose families lived elsewhere, slept. Attached to the wall that surrounded the compound, reaching high above its front-facing far corners, sat narrow watchtowers. In between, two members of Smoke’s combat unit (dubbed Combined Task Force Duke) stood guard, sniper weapons slung low across the fronts of their bodies.
Smoke walked behind a member of her unit’s security team underneath the black tarp that sheltered the police compound entrance from the searing sun. She cut a sharp left around another set of barbed-wire fencing curling its way across part of the entrance and walked through the opening of the headquarters building. When she reached the courtyard she saw several Afghan men sitting under an awning to her right. The dark covering shaded the group of twenty Afghan elders, sitting on their knees, only the small mats they had brought with them protecting their shins from the ground underneath. The men had gathered, much like men in other shuras before them, to talk about security in the district and the upcoming elections, which inevitably made villagers a target for Taliban reprisals. Smoke’s commanding officer stood in front of the group, his back to the police headquarters building, a few rusted chairs sitting in front of him. The men directed their attention to the commander. They were anxious to hear about the US military plans to keep their families safe.
When Smoke wasn’t talking to the Afghan men, she was observing them. And the fact that not one had a female with him confirmed what the military already knew—that Taliban dominance in the region was high and that efforts to pump up security were overwhelmingly needed.
But beyond being an intelligence gatherer, on missions like this, Smoke was there as an example of female accomplishment. The commander wanted her to talk to the men participating in that shura and show them that women could serve, just like men, even under threatening circumstances. Just as Smoke stood guard, so too could their wives, sisters, and daughters. In the most isolated parts of the country, where the number of Taliban fighters nearly surpassed the general population of those sparsely inhabited communities, police officers were needed. And the US Army didn’t mind leaning on reluctant husbands and fathers in an attempt to get local women to fill a void that was rolling back American military strategy.
But even as she maneuvered across rugs partially shaded by the tent’s thick black tarp—walking around the men who remained seated in order to remove herself as a potential distraction from the rest of the shura—Smoke’s focus never veered from intelligence collection. Even the smallest of atmospherics, she knew, were worth noting.
As she approached the edge of the tent a man who sat lounging on the steps of the police barracks caught her attention. Smoke couldn’t, at first, see his face, but his stature looked familiar. His hair was a brownish red, he was heavy set, and his legs, even with bended knee, were long enough to span the last few risers of the building’s front stairs, allowing his feet to touch the ground. He looked down at his large hands as he threw small bits of orange peel to the ground. Puffs of dust plumed at his ankles. He raised his head only to smile at the man to his right as he stuffed bits of fruit in his mouth. His reddish beard, Smoke noted, was unmistakable.
Although he was an ANP criminal investigator, he was a suspected operative. He had never actually killed an American soldier. He was careful not to link himself to attacks that took out US service members at FOBs or blew up convoys during patrols. He never talked about his links to the Taliban. In fact, the high-ranking Afghan government official appeared to be working with allied forces. He seemed to do everything right.
But according to the military intelligence officer, the US Army had suspected for some time that he had been working for the Taliban as an operative, feeding the insurgent group the locations of service members along with mission schedules and targets. And in return, Smoke said, the Taliban paid him lucrative sums of money. What the Army couldn’t figure out was where this operative would show up next. He seemed to randomly appear, sometimes during US missions, like the one Smoke was on, that focused on antiterror tactics pinpointed at protecting local communities.
Smoke slowly walked out of the tent’s protective shade and nodded toward her translator, who joined her as she approached the investigator. He, along with the men around him, stood as soon as Smoke was close enough to reach out her right hand and introduce herself.
As she shook his hand, she gave her name, told him that she knew of his work on criminal investigations, and wanted to introduce herself. Although they had never met, he recognized her name immediately.
He had heard of the great work she was doing for Zabul’s women’s center and for the woman who ran it, Smoke recalled him saying.
And like any good intelligence collector, Smoke made her target comfortable by giving information about herself first. With a tone that implied she was straining to make casual small talk instead of probing for more details than she was about to give, Smoke told the suspected operative about her work to rebuild the women’s center. She also mentioned that the woman who ran the center needed transportation to their FOB and wondered if he’d be able to help.
He flashed a broad smile and then proceeded to give her information that the US military would use to track his whereabouts for the next several months. She had given him all the prompting he needed to fall into a role that came easily to many Afghan men. He became the all-knowing male and Smoke the passive female he was eager to impress.
Just in case she needed to contact him about providing transportation for the director of the women’s center, he gave her multiple cell phone numbers. She was encouraged to use them at any time to contact him. He has a daughter, he mentioned. He reassured her that he’s a strong supporter of women’s rights. Smoke thanked him.
“How often are you in that area near Qalat City?” she asked. “Where do you usually travel?”
By the time the conversation was over, Smoke had learned the areas of the district where the criminal investigator traveled most frequently. She found out where the suspected operative lived, how often he visited Qalat City—the town in Zabul where her base, FOB Apache, was located.
As he walked her through the barracks to show her how some of the men he worked with lived, she had managed to draw from him details about his schedule for the next several weeks. After her translator relayed Smoke’s questions, she also wrote down key words from the man’s response, ones that the captain would later use to recreate the exchange with as much accuracy as possible in her intelligence report. From the conversation, Smoke figured out the suspected operative’s patterns of life—daily travel habits that can tell an intelligence field operative plenty about how to track someone.
After an hour of talking, Smoke’s heart rate began to return to normal. During all that time she was reading his face, his gestures, any indication through his body language that he might be getting irritated, suspicious of all the questions she had been asking. She found none. After the second hour she got nervous again, afraid that perhaps she was spending too much time with him. She was relieved when, out of the corner of her eye, through the open doors of the barracks, she saw the men who had come to the shura begin to disperse. She thanked the operative for his time and walked out of the compound sure that soon the soldiers who were left on this last day of the mission would need to return to the base.
Smoke stood to the right of the outer compound wall waiting for the chopper that would transport her team back to FOB Apache.
The captain turned her head as gusts of wind blew small rocks and soil against her helmet. She could hear the blades begin to slow as she walked away from the compound and toward the chopper, which landed right outside the barbed wire for the return flight. Choppers never landed this close. The primary landing zone usually forced long treks, like the mission’s early-morning march. Smoke ducked under the blades knowing, from the commander’s announcement just moments earlier, that FOB Apache had been attacked. There were no details.
By the time the chopper landed in Daychopan, members of the base’s quick-response team had already been alerted of the shooting. Those soldiers, who were notified during emergencies on and around the FOB, had likely already rounded the corner just outside the motor pool where the shot soldier had collapsed.
As Smoke boarded the helicopter and strapped in, she looked directly into her commanding officer’s eyes, studying his expression for some sense of reassurance. The swoosh of the blades grew louder as the chopper slowly lifted off the ground. Smoke and her translator shifted forward with the momentum of the Chinook as it departed Daychopan with little security. There were gunners on high alert on either side of the Chinook, but the dozens of infantrymen who had arrived ahead of the officers to provide mission security were long gone. The confidence Smoke was looking for in her commander’s eyes, the reassurance she leaned on during tough missions, was gone. The bird they occupied flew into uncertainty. No one knew whether the base shooting was an isolated incident. No one knew yet who was responsible. There could have been other attacks planned across the country, including on the small compound they occupied for their mission in Daychopan. The longer the unit stayed on the ground, the more vulnerable it was to attack. But air strikes were also a possibility. And the frequent RPG attacks in this deserted southern section of the country prompted some chopper pilots to refuse to fly this far into Daychopan territory.
Members of the quick-response team ran through the motor pool, ducking behind vehicles to avoid gunfire. It took the team more than an hour to find and gun down the killers—two Afghan soldiers who had been stationed on the base to train and learn from the US military. In the middle of the search another soldier, a member of the team, was shot and injured.
During the two-hour ride back to Qalat City Smoke thought about the information she had gathered that day. She had spent most of the mission next to a man the military had been trying to pin down but couldn’t. She had gathered more than the usual atmospherics that filled FET intelligence reports.
Instead, this report would give key information on the location of a man who for years had been on the military intelligence watch list. Afghan locals had reported seeing the operative talk to insurgents. Her biggest worries were whether she would make it back to the base that night and whether the man she had spent most of her time talking to that day would turn her into a target.
The team had returned to FOB Apache too early to land—the threat level was still too high. The Chinook circled the FOB for more than thirty minutes. Smoke looked down and saw the combination chain-link and mud fence that circled the perimeter and was reminded of how small the base actually was. She ran down the list of people she knew who had been left behind while she participated in that day’s mission. She also thought about the Afghan military members who worked, slept, ate, and recreated on the base with American soldiers every day, the ones who had become like brothers to everyone. She had developed tight relationships with soldiers on both sides. She prayed that the dead soldier and the two Afghan guards in danger weren’t among them.
Smoke would later learn the details of the attack: an argument had started between two soldiers on guard duty—one American, the other Afghan. As the argument got heated, the American soldier began to walk away. The Afghan soldier followed and opened fire. Soon after, another Afghan soldier joined the shooting.
The American’s body was found only moments before the chopper arrived at the FOB. He was barely out of his teens.