Guy Crouchback had a good war. Though an English Catholic aristocrat and nearly forty years old, Guy finagled a commission with an infantry regiment and then the commandos. He endured challenging training, served in half a dozen countries, and saw a few skirmishes, but emerged none the worse for wear. Guy came out of World War II healthy in body and mind, despite his disgust with his country’s compromises and betrayals. A young bride and a tidy inheritance waiting back home were ample salves for that.
Guy Crouchback’s battles were confined to the page; his service was as the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. Nonetheless, Crouchback embodies something real: the very British idea that one can have “a good war.” This is largely absent from American war literature, but it is an entirely possible outcome of wartime service. I know because I had a good war in Afghanistan.
In late May of 2009, I found myself standing erect in a squad bay straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, staring across at another fellow attempting to take his leave of civilian life. Both of us were trying not to show our amusement with the theater of “pickup,” as screaming drill instructors tore through our belongings in the opening hours of Marine Officer Candidates School.
Like that other candidate across from me, a lacrosse coach with a law degree who was well north of thirty, I’d taken an odd route to this odd summer camp. A drink-derived broken ankle and a scholarship for graduate school in England had eaten up four years of my life; by the time I put on the uniform that summer, I was just a few months shy of needing an age waiver myself. Thankfully, surgery to saw off bone spurs on my foot—Donald Trump’s road not taken—had been a success and I was in decent shape for the rigors ahead.
What was I doing in Quantico, Virginia, running and rucking and yelling in a ten-week job tryout?
I didn’t come from a military family. Soldiers and sailors were the heroes in 90 percent of the books I’d ever read, but I didn’t actually know any. My dad, like most of his cohort, had managed to avoid Vietnam, while diabetes had kept his father out of World War II. One of our earliest ancestors had been briefly jailed for opposing Hamiltonian tyranny during the Whiskey Rebellion, but we weren’t a family with much military heritage to speak of.
What there was came on the losing side of both world wars. My maternal great-grandfather Otto, sent to the Western Front in World War I, had been a lucky Landser (German foot soldier)—lucky enough to survive the trenches, anyway. His son, my grandfather, was drafted in 1944 at age eighteen, as the Wehrmacht marched relentlessly in the wrong direction. He, too, was extremely lucky: one of just eight survivors in his company after a battle near Smolensk, he was captured and shipped to Siberia. He didn’t return home until four years after the war ended.
The brother of his future bride was not so fortunate. My great-uncle, a smiling, boyish medic, disappeared on the Eastern Front as the Red Army neared its final victory.
Such service under the swastika was not spoken of with shame in my grandparents’ quiet brookside home, but it was certainly not celebrated. My Pomeranian grandmother, her village now a part of Poland, would still cry in her seventies when speaking of her lost brother. She would always end with a simple conclusion: “Krieg ist blod.” War is stupid. I heard her, but I didn’t listen.
I came to military service without any external pressure or expectations. What I did have was an ideological attraction to the military.
I had spent college as a callow campus conservative, throwing darts from school newspapers at liberal professors, The Vagina Monologues, and other easy targets. Defending the Iraq War, launched during my junior year, was on brand. A 2004 summer internship at the American Enterprise Institute, then the beating heart of neoconservatism, didn’t dull my chairborne ardor for a crusading post-9/11 American foreign policy.
Graduate school, luckily, did. Ensconced in England for four years, I got to watch Iraq fall apart from a remove—far from both the battlefield and America’s domestic Sturm und Drang. Thank God for that. I’d like to think if I’d been back home I would still have resisted the temptation to cheerlead for the team and become a dead-ender for America’s worst blunder in generations. But who knows. As we’ve learned in spades over the past two decades, political tribalism is a hell of a drug.
I spent those four years in the UK studying imperialism and insurgencies, albeit wars that had ended on the edge of living memory. Looking at Britain’s decades of “small wars” helped reinforce the utter folly of America’s campaign to remake the Middle East. By the time I returned to the United States in September 2008, I didn’t believe Iraq was anything other than an unmitigated disaster, regardless of the newest self-aggrandizing narrative about a surge of troops having turned the tide.
But while home in New Hampshire the previous summer, I had walked into a US Marines recruiter’s office—because I did and do believe in citizen-soldiers, republicanism, and an apparently archaic ethos that says a healthy young man probably ought to spend a few years wearing his country’s cloth. America’s vaunted “all-volunteer force” is in many ways a delusion, a way to pass the buck on the heaviest burden of citizenship, our collective guilt assuaged with lip service and idolatry, unearned pride and undeserved pity. But I was a volunteer.
Some blend of genuine patriotism, desire for adventure, lifelong fascination with war, and the benchwarmer’s need to prove he could play drove me to seek a Marine commission and combat service. And though by then I had accepted the reality of the Iraq fiasco, I still basically bought the idea that Afghanistan was “the good war”: morally justifiable, necessary, and salvageable. I chose the Marines because a friend was headed that way and told me that the Marine Corps had higher standards and would always be the “first to fight.”
Officer Candidates School was both a blur and a slog. One slept little, ran much, marched everywhere, and learned the basics of the Marine Corps in sterile classrooms and barracks discussions. Leadership was evaluated in field problems, all of which seemed to conclude with the frenzied firing of blank rounds and a charge into the Quantico tree line. Our platoon had a score of prior enlisted marines, who were generally ready and willing to help us civilians. Most of the platoon graduated.
TBS (the Basic School) and IOC (the Infantry Officer Course) followed. Despite a penchant for blisters and being a pull-up or two shy of the max score, I put infantry at the top of my wish list at TBS. I was a garrison slacker but did fine in the field and the classroom. I also got lucky. The selection process for most Marine Corps officer jobs is done in order of TBS class rank—but broken into thirds, to ensure a “quality spread” across the most coveted positions. When selection time came, I sat at 99 in a class of about 285 and had my pick of jobs. A better day on the rifle range or at land navigation, and I would have been at the very bottom of the first third, bound for an adjutant’s office or a supply warehouse.
IOC, shrouded in mystique and a code of omertà, was mostly TBS on steroids. For the less athletic or masochistic among us, it was “the best time you never want to have again.” One lieutenant, more of a gym stud than most, went down on a run with a core temperature of 107 degrees and never stood in front of a platoon. The rest of us benefited from nearly three months of incessant field training, numerous live-fire ranges, and instruction from handpicked captains. All were Iraq or Afghanistan veterans, many both.
I and a dozen other newly minted infantry officers volunteered for light armored reconnaissance, the Marine Corps’ Stetson-less cavalry, and we were soon living on the beach in lieutenant-filled McMansions in Southern California, awaiting the return of our battalion from its latest Afghanistan deployment. Unlike previous generations of new Marine officers, we didn’t join units already in combat. The battalion came home, took post-deployment leave, and then we butter bars—new second lieutenants—were each handed responsibility for about two dozen marines and four eight-wheeled armored cars.
We had nearly a year before the battalion returned to Afghanistan, but the training flew by. I stubbed my toe more than most lieutenants, but forbearance from subordinates and seniors alike enabled me to begin to grasp what leadership looked like. The marines, I slowly realized, were incredible. Heavily tattooed, a cigarette or a dip never out of reach, but baby-faced as often as not, the lance corporals would run through a brick wall for you, the corps, or, most of all, their buddies.
Two things were hammered into us during that lengthy pre-deployment workup: counter-IED and counterinsurgency.
IEDs (improvised explosive devices) were homemade roadside bombs, responsible for the vast majority of casualties in Afghanistan by the time I got there. Our evil spirits, they were warded off with electronic jammers, metal detectors, bomb dogs, and plenty of dispersion—spreading out our vehicles and marines to minimize casualties. Some battalions were finding themselves in veritable minefields in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. The 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment had a horrific deployment there a year before us, with twenty-five marines killed in action and nearly three dozen amputees. The specter of their experience was always in the back of your mind.
Counterinsurgency was the doctrine, if not the dogma, of the day. Largely reliant on cherry-picked examples of decolonization campaigns from the past century, counterinsurgency preached “the people are the prize,” “courageous restraint,” and “money is a weapon.” Like latter-day Episcopalians, few of us ardently believed, but we all mouthed the hymns when required.
The Marine Corps had decided its cavalry was best employed in the most open country available, so our battalion was sent to “the Fishhook,” the southernmost area of operations in Helmand Province. Named for a pronounced curve in the Helmand River, the Fishhook was remote even by the standards of a remote, rural region. The outgoing commander in our new area, a short, lupine Southerner, pronounced it “the West Virginia of Helmand Province.” A desert shelf descended to a small, flat, greenish cultivated zone named Wazirabad. Only a few kilometers wide, the strip of farmland hugged the river.
The adult male illiteracy rate in the Fishhook was over 80 percent. Most farmers wanted to be left alone by both the insurgents and the government. The Taliban, the outgoing marines told us, were nowhere to be seen.
It was something, but it wasn’t war. One of the other companies got in a few gunfights and hit the occasional IED, but for us in Alpha Company it was police work, only with an extra few dozen pounds of gear on your back. Miles of slow foot patrols every day, endless cups of tea with local elders and heads of households, the Helmandis invariably polite but indifferent. There would be new American faces soon.
I hadn’t expected Fallujah or the Tet Offensive, but I also hadn’t expected this.
On our very first patrol, I was introduced to counterinsurgency’s fruits. A dozen marines eagerly set out from our dusty patrol base on the shelf down to the line of small villages and extended family compounds below. Bushels of dirty cotton were rotting in many of the fields we passed. Villagers told us that the Afghan government had pushed them to grow cotton as an alternative to opium poppies, then reneged on promises to purchase the crop. The farmers, fooled once, prepared for a poppy harvest the following spring.
Despite the lack of enemy activity, there was a steady drip of evidence indicating that the counterinsurgency campaign was going nowhere fast.
Knowing little of the area, we detained a young village mullah based largely on the fact that he looked too polished, too clean, too wealthy for Wazirabad. We narrowly avoided a riot as we hustled him out of the village. Back at the patrol base, one of our Afghan interpreters, the only real points of continuity in a campaign of seven-month rotations, quietly told me that the mullah had been there for quite a while. He was returned home with hollow apologies.
A squad from the elite Afghan National Interdiction Unit, their version of the Drug Enforcement Agency, was sent to assist us for a week. Their American advisor, a retired narcotics agent, admitted to me that he was nonplussed: Why were his trained plainclothes investigators now in uniform, tasked with searching random motorbikes in the back of beyond?
Our census operations, a counterinsurgency totem and thus a daily metric of progress, depended on biometric devices that the Afghan police would never use—if we would even hand them over when the pullout came.
And then there was the master sergeant who advised me that if you could manage to sleep twelve hours a day, the deployment was really only three and a half months long.
Risk aversion was the order of the day. We went “op minimize,” hunkering down in place, for sandstorms (when medevac helicopters couldn’t fly) and also for big American holidays—no one wanted to tell a mother she’d lost her son on Christmas Day. It was manifestly clear that, contra Vince Lombardi, winning wasn’t everything; it wasn’t even anything. We were, as that master sergeant fully grasped, just marking time.
Lacking either enemies to hound or friends to mentor, we did the American thing: we threw money around. After many rounds of tea with village elders and heads of households, we determined that the best thing we could do for the Wazirabad villagers was provide a basic primary school. A hospital and cell phone service were well beyond our powers and patience, but a one-room schoolhouse? That we could do.
A hatchback full of Afghan contractors drove down to us from the relative metropolis of Nawa, four hours north. Despite their evident fear and disdain for the backward Fishhook farmers, these men built a crude schoolhouse in a few days, while my bored marines stood guard, smoked, and cracked wise. It seemed to matter little that there was no schoolteacher nor any school supplies.
After the school was complete, I returned with a patrol to examine their handiwork. I’d never built anything more advanced than a machine gun trench, but this … didn’t look good. There were already holes in the masonry, and the windows were held in place by slim red-painted bamboo poles. The Wazirabad school, the ostensible crown jewel of our efforts here, looked like an Afghan child mass casualty incident waiting to happen. My company commander, initially skeptical of my architectural assessment, came out to look and quickly agreed with me. Our new school could collapse on its future occupants at any time.
I duly trudged down to Wazirabad the next day and went door-to-door, shamefacedly telling elders that the school was unstable and their children must not even play in it. They immediately one-upped me: they’d never wanted a school, they told me with straight faces, and wondered why we’d built it. Whether this change of heart was the result of threatening Taliban night letters or some more mundane mercurial Afghan tilt, we never found out.
The Wazirabad school stood as an empty white elephant, a small monument to slapdash American counterinsurgency practice—and a danger to whoever might wander into it. Luckily, as they’d always preached to us student lieutenants in Quantico, “the enemy gets a vote.” A couple of weeks later, just after dark, the patrol base was rocked by the sound of a blast close by. Racing to a guard tower, I grabbed a thermal binocular from the marine on post and saw the school’s smoldering ruins and a car tearing off into the desert. A patrol the next day confirmed that the Taliban had saved US taxpayers a couple thousand dollars and the battalion engineer officer a headache. I still haven’t found a better metaphor for our war in Afghanistan than the Wazirabad school.
The morning after the school blew up, our towers came down. Our company had new duties a few dozen miles down the river: a new base to build, new villages to patrol, perhaps a little more excitement. Patrol Base Wazirabad, the supposed guarantor of security in the region, was just a scorch mark in the sand when we drove away.
At our new patrol base, created in a week by marine engineers, we had housemates: a company of the Afghanistan Border Police. The paramilitary ABP was near the bottom of the barrel among the alphabet soup of Afghan security forces. Our partnership was mediated by a border advisory team, a grab bag of marines from different specialties. Some were great fits for the challenging advising mission. Some weren’t.
The border police had a distinctive gray chocolate chip camouflage pattern, ball caps, and cheap sliding-stock AK-47s. They occasionally accompanied us on patrol but mostly did their own thing, roaming about in green “Danger Ranger” pickup trucks, so named for being unarmored death traps. Marines, of course, patrolled exclusively in heavily armored vehicles.
A month or so after we built our shared outpost, a marine from the advisory team told us that the frequent ABP patrols into the nearby villages were foraging trips. The men hadn’t been fed by their own supply system in months. Rumor was that their cancer-stricken colonel in the provincial capital was pocketing their ration money.
We turned the patrol base over to them that spring and departed with little more than a halfhearted “good luck.” The ABP abandoned the remote outpost and followed us back north two weeks later. No one could blame them.
One thing we weren’t doing was killing insurgents. In seven months, my entire company of 150 marines killed exactly one Talib, a participant in a foolish motorcycle-borne attempted ambush of one of our foot patrols. This luckless machine gunner ended up having a 500-pound bomb dropped on his head, with no civilian casualties and relieved high fives around the combat operations center.
On the journey home, awaiting a flight while snacking on popcorn and beer at our way station in Kyrgyzstan, I did the math. It cost roughly $1 million to keep one American service member deployed overseas to a combat zone for one year. Add in daily air support, all those engineering assets, satellite communications, and broken gear … I figured the American taxpayer had spent about $100 million for us to kill one Talib. Just how little the Taliban had spent to keep us there was unknowable but even more depressing.
We could claim some other successes, to be sure. One of my sergeants collared an actual bomb maker, a scared kid who was then entrusted to the vagaries of the Afghan justice system. My talented group of NCOs, lacking visible enemies, became bloodhounds, reading the terrain and using handheld metal detectors to find scores of buried weapons caches. There was some satisfaction in that: taking machine guns, bombs, rocket-propelled grenades, radios, and a lot of ammunition off the battlefield. But we’d still spent $100 million to kill one Talib.
I left Afghanistan and quickly set to figuring out how to get back. I hadn’t scratched the itch. I knew I should have felt fortunate, but I didn’t. I sought out the advice of our battalion gunner, a universally admired warrant officer who’d fought in three wars and was the best marine mentor I’d had. He gave it to me straight: “Don’t go back to Afghanistan thinking you’re going to fix anything over there. Go back if you want to test yourself and try to improve your skills as a marine and an infantryman.”
It was justification enough for me. I was slated to sail the Pacific with a marine expeditionary unit when a friend and fellow lieutenant told me that he’d been picked for some oddball Afghanistan advisor deployment with a battalion from the Republic of Georgia. Surf and Singapore sounded like a better deal to him. We spoke to our executive officer and got approval to switch. I was off to the Caucasus a few months later.
Serving as a combat advisor with the Georgians only compounded the absurdity of Afghanistan. Georgia had signed on to both of America’s major post-9/11 wars, though at one point they had to ferry their men home from Iraq to fight the Russians. Undeterred, the Georgians eventually committed a two-battalion force to Afghanistan, though they seemed barely able to manage it.
Georgia’s outsized troop contribution was driven by the country’s quixotic bid for NATO membership. But though they wanted to make the Americans happy, the Georgians were understandably less than eager to bleed for an alliance they didn’t belong to. Our job as marine advisors was to ensure that they did the bare minimum, which in this case meant protecting a dirt track that was the main supply route for the dwindling coalition force in northern Helmand. Our request to get “Hessian” as our advisor team’s radio call sign was swiftly denied.
The outgoing unit had had a rough deployment. They had lost ten soldiers to a pair of suicide bomb attacks on their bases. The Georgians had then gunned down an Afghan family on a motorbike, in what was officially described as a botched escalation-of-force incident. Preventing our battalion from killing any more Afghan civilians was nearly the top priority for us.
The idea of victory was even more absent than it had been two years prior. The word would have provoked laughter had it ever been uttered.
That winter, I was told point-blank by a superior officer: “Nothing here is worth the life of a marine.” He probably meant it. But like the rote invocation before a live-fire exercise back home at Camp Pendleton—“Safety is paramount!”— the words were immediately invalidated by the circumstances that provoked them. However true, it was better left unsaid.
We got through the deployment without losing any of our marines or Georgians, but there were a few close calls. One marine was shot in the hamstring as we maneuvered to kill a rare Taliban sniper who actually could shoot. Another got shrapnel in the neck from a rocket-propelled grenade. Numerous vehicles struck IEDs. A Taliban recoilless rifle round shredded our base’s outdoor latrine, but at a rare moment when no Georgian or marine was relieving himself into the PVC “piss tubes.”
My team escaped fatalities, but a unit supporting us lost a marine in the final weeks of our deployment. A teenage lance corporal, he drove one of the hulking mine-resistant vehicles for a route clearance platoon, a combat engineer unit that periodically swept our dirt-track “road” at a glacial five miles per hour—about as unenviable a task as could be had by marines in Afghanistan. A massive bomb tore through his vehicle one December day, flipping it on its side. We watched, helpless, from a couple miles away, our surveillance blimp recording the explosion, the medevac, and finally the resumption of the engineers’ slow progress down the route that had brought us all there.
We were united by country and corps, but none of us on the advisor team knew him. The route clearance marines were only occasional visitors to our patrol base. They slept in our dusty parking lot every few weeks, sharing quips and hot rations, then saddled up and were gone in the morning. The loss, and the letter home, weren’t ours to bear.
At the end, we demilitarized (a euphemism for “demolished”) some of our bases and turned the remainder over to tired paramilitaries from the Afghanistan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP). The ANCOP were in a battle for their lives as soon as we drove away.
Between and after my deployments, I talked to friends about the war and read as much as I could. I tried to force myself into open-mindedness and intellectual humility. Yes, Helmand was a mess, with the Taliban just waiting us out as we squandered blood and treasure in pointless exertions—but perhaps elsewhere in Afghanistan we were winning?
If we were, I could find scant evidence of it. Everywhere you looked, the Taliban were either enduring or ascendant. The Afghan security forces remained brittle and corrupt. Stories of them failing in combat were legion. Like our South Vietnamese clients before them, they had been molded into an army that knew only the American way of war, which they would never be able to properly apply—or afford.
Friends who had served in other corners of Afghanistan had stories similar to mine. An enlisted Navy SEAL friend dismissed his work on the opposite side of the country. America’s elite raiders, he told me, were spending most of their time killing “dirt farmers.” When John Sopko, the US government’s relentless and honest special inspector general overseeing Afghanistan reconstruction, came to Camp Pendleton to interview other combat advisors, a friend who was there was shocked by the candor with which these marines laid out story after story of waste, abuse, and failure. Sopko, he told me, “didn’t bat a fucking eye.” He’d heard it all before.
All wars, per one recently depedestaled American rebel, are terrible. But unlike Iraq, Afghanistan was not a war of American aggression. The attacks of September 11 demanded retribution for reasons both moral and practical. We had gone in legitimately, and we did try to fight a clean war among the people, however impossible that was.
Where we failed was in vastly misjudging our probability of success. Had American soldiers returned home after a short and sharp punitive expedition—however atavistic such a campaign might appear to modern eyes—the war would have achieved something. But we stayed for another two decades, attempting to accomplish what we couldn’t even adequately explain.
At some point in their training, military officers usually learn about Napoleon’s corporal. The story, probably apocryphal, is that Napoleon would bring a lowly corporal into the room when his marshals were drawing up their plan for a battle. If the plan didn’t make sense to the corporal, Napoleon told them to toss it out.
Our battalion commander was a good man: cerebral, caring, extremely competent. He led by example, coached and mentored constantly, and was the last man to turn in his vulnerable light armored vehicle when it was belatedly accepted that these Cold War reconnaissance platforms weren’t built to withstand IED strikes. Yet on the eve of the deployment, when a noncommissioned officer had the (laudable) temerity to publicly ask the colonel what our mission was in Afghanistan, he struggled to lay out something that would have satisfied Napoleon’s corporal.
In choosing to waste both American and Afghan lives in pursuing unattainable and incoherent maximalist goals, our just war became immoral. My battalion lost two marines in that slow spring of 2012, both blown apart by Taliban bombs while fighting for gains we all knew were meaningless. They both died for their buddies: one walking point on patrol, the other taking the most dangerous place in a vehicle, the driver’s seat, to give a promising young lance corporal some time in the turret. There is undeniable honor in that. But they shouldn’t have been there.
I left the Marine Corps on New Year’s Eve 2016. I made my way to Washington and sought to help reorient American foreign policy toward prudence, resilience, and realism. Absent a true catastrophe, this may be an even more Sisyphean task than transforming Afghanistan. But in our post-9/11 world of surrogate patriotism, American veterans have a uniquely powerful moral voice on matters of war and peace, unhealthy as that may be in a republic.
Since boxing up my cammies and dress blues, I have done what I can to bear witness to the foolishness and hubris of our wars in the Greater Middle East. “Ending endless wars” is now conventional wisdom, earning lip service from even the most hawkish politicians and pundits. But I watched the announcement of bin Laden’s death from my couch in California, six months before I deployed for the first time. It took America another full decade to withdraw from Afghanistan.
I came by my knowledge of America’s wars honestly but easily. I returned home with stories, self-knowledge, a Combat Action Ribbon, all my limbs, and, most important, all my marines. The few Taliban we managed to kill were at far range, annihilated by rockets or air strikes. We avoided any Afghan civilian deaths. In time, my interpreters even made it to the United States. I sleep soundly at night. I had a good war.
Many of my friends who served have not been so lucky. One left a leg in Kandahar. Several will struggle with post-traumatic stress for the rest of their lives. Relaying the words of a Spetsnaz veteran of Russia’s war in Afghanistan, one close friend told me: “It’s like having the TV on in the background. You can turn it down but you can’t turn it off.” Most veterans I know have lost more friends and comrades to suicide than they did to the enemy.
What the Afghans call “the American War” ended suddenly in August 2021. As the final American forces withdrew, the Afghan government in Kabul collapsed with surprising speed. Everywhere I served in Helmand had fallen to the Taliban years earlier. Thanks to either Providence or dumb luck, I paid little price for my participation in America’s longest foreign war. Our country can’t say the same.