WHILE ROGER HILL sat in the TOC, tapping out an email to Battalion about the firefight in Maidan Shar, Larry Kay walked outside and looked up at the sky, taking a moment to soak in the alpine view. He listened to the stars and wondered when he would become a father. He thought about who the next president would be and sincerely hoped he would be one of the last men to have to take in Afghanistan’s beauty through night vision goggles while carrying a hundred pounds of gear and wielding a weapon.
The Shockers were on their way back with the EPWs. Kay drew his sidearm, chambered a round, and reholstered it. He was a clear-eyed pragmatist. His longing for peace had zero bearing on the fact that his soldiers were returning to base carrying men with whom he was at war. Kay sat down on the steps and waited.
Moments later, one of 4th Platoon’s beat-down Humvees rumbled through the gate and pulled up in front of the TOC. Davis jumped out of the TC seat, breathing fire. He pulled a blindfolded, flex-cuffed prisoner out of the truck, and steered him to Kay. “This piece of shit almost killed Sergeant Wilson!”
Ask an infantryman what his reaction is when someone shoots at his brothers and the answer will most always be “rage.” It’s an instinctive, familial fury. For Davis, it was as marrow-deep as if the prisoner had shot at his blood brother.
Just then, the prisoner tried to break free. Kay grabbed him by the shirt, lifted him, and jammed his back against the building. Ripping off the blindfold, he looked the prisoner in the eyes, inched him slightly higher, then let go. The enemy fighter slid to the ground. Kay pointed to his pistol then waved his finger in front of the prisoner’s face in a no-no motion.
English or no English, the EPW got the message: If you try to run again, you will be shot. He did not move again.
The rest of 4th drove the other two Afghans onto the FOB, where both landed in the aid tent. The gaping wound in the first prisoner’s buttocks was serious. Kay turned the uninjured prisoner over to SPC Joseph Coe, who escorted him to the TOC and kept him under guard.
For the next half hour, Hill sequestered himself in the conference room writing his report on the firefight. Then Kay poked his head through the door. The entry control point guards had called the TOC, he said. Airborne had visitors.
Hill glanced at the clock. Bizarre. It was the darkest watch of the night, well past midnight but nowhere near dawn.
“Who is it?” Hill said.
“It’s Governor Naeemi’s assistant, Hanif. COL Shah is with him, and some guards. Six of them.”
Shah was head of Wardak’s National Directorate of Security, NDS.
“Find out what they want,” Hill said. “Take Chris. And Sammy.”
This was MAJ Chris Faber’s swim lane, dealing with local officials. A Las Vegas native and graduate of West Point and the Naval War College, Faber had been working farther south at FOB Salerno on COL Pete Johnson’s staff, designing the brigade’s counterinsurgency campaign plan. But each outlying FOB typically needed an operations staff headed by a field grade officer—a major or higher—who could nurture relations with local officials. So brigade had sent Faber to Wardak—minus a staff. Where the 82nd had run a seventeen-man ops staff, Faber was the lone guy.
Though senior to Hill, Faber, thirty-five, was not technically in Hill’s chain of command. Still, Hill was finding in him a reliable foxhole ally, a sharp, levelheaded officer who could handle himself with Wardak’s unruly cast of characters.
Kay grabbed Faber and Sammy, Hill’s terp, and the three walked down to the gate. Kay looked the visitors over. Naeemi’s assistant, Hanif, wore a navy blue windbreaker, Shah a sport coat over a light blue dishdasha.
After a round of traditional embraces, the whole group walked up to the TOC, where Hanif immediately broke into an urgent plea that ended in an action item: “We would like you to release the prisoners to us.”
Kay and Faber glanced at each other, puzzled.
“You can take custody of the one who isn’t wounded,” Faber said. “But we are obliged to provide medical treatment to the other two.”
“Thank you so much,” Hanif said. “The governor would have been so upset if his security guards were put in jail.”
“Wait! Hold on,” Faber said. “You’re going to transport these men to a detention facility, are you not? They opened fire on American soldiers.”
Hanif and Shah seemed to draw themselves up a bit, make themselves taller. “No. We are taking them back to the governor’s compound,” Hanif said.
“Okay, look,” Faber said. “When our soldiers spoke to those men in English, they opened fire.”
Suddenly, Shah interjected loudly, speaking rapid-fire Pashto to Sammy, as Hanif continued to insist that the prisoners be set free.
Faber stood his ground. “Unless Governor Naeemi calls me right now and explains what’s going on, we’re not releasing those men. They shot at our soldiers. We’re not going to just give them a pat on the head and send them on their way.”
Hanif pulled out his phone and dialed, spoke a few words, then handed his phone to Faber, who listened and asked questions.
Kay knew Shah spoke English, and tried to lighten the mood. “Excuse me, Colonel,” he said, nodding at Shah’s sport coat/dishdasha combo. “Where can I get a suit like that?”
“Kabul,” Shah said with a wry smile. “It’s cheap. I will take you there.”
Faber was still on the phone, talking to Naeemi. He considered the governor a good man, as honest as a politician can be in a country where being on the “wrong” side (i.e., cooperating with the Americans) could cost a man not just bad press or political fortunes, but his life. The Wardak governor had once showed Faber a portfolio of his accomplishments—articles with pictures of Naeemi with President Hamid Karzai, the two men rising together to power. Naeemi was clearly proud of the association.
Faber finished with Hanif’s phone and pulled Kay aside. “The governor is insisting that those men are his private security guards. He wants us to let them go because he has to travel from Kabul tomorrow, and I agreed.”
Kay stared at Faber. Growing up in Florida, he had once visited an alligator farm in the Everglades. That farm had smelled exactly like gator shit, and the prisoner Davis brought him smelled exactly like that farm. He wondered why someone in the private employ of the most powerful man in the province would smell like Taliban straight out of the bush. Also, Naeemi’s security detail was always in uniform. This guy’s clothes looked like he’d been living in a cave.
Still, Faber was the field grade, and he trusted Naeemi. Kay found Coe and ordered him to cut the flex-cuffs off the uninjured EPW. But just as Hanif and the NDS entourage were about to walk out the door with their prize, Wilson and Mo walked up with Hill in tow.
Wilson assessed the situation instantly. “Sir, that fucker almost killed me,” he said to Hill. “He shot my night vision goggles off. I could have died, and we just let them go?”
“Wait a minute,” Hill cut in. “What’s going on with these guys?”
“The governor wants us to release them. They’re part of his PSD,” said Kay.
“I’ve already spoken to the governor and approved their release,” Faber said.
Hill tensed. “Sir, can I speak with you for a moment?”
He walked with Faber back down the hall. Throughout the deployment, Faber and Hill had managed to minimize friction in their overlapping lanes of responsibility, and had done so with relative ease. Faber dealt with the provincial government officials on a day-to-day basis. Lots of necessary yet snail’s-pace handholding of the government staff. That rapport was hard to develop and even harder to maintain. Hill, meanwhile, was the battlespace owner, the officer with overall command authority in Wardak.
Hill found himself a little taken aback by what had just transpired. He and Faber had always kept each other in the loop. Regardless, Hill had heard the Shockers’ escalation-of-force procedures on the radio with his own ears. They were textbook. And even if he had not heard them for himself, he knew his men and respected their decision making. He wasn’t about to question it, not like this.
When the two men reached Faber’s office, they stepped in and Hill closed the door. “Sir, I’m not letting these guys go. Not yet. They are enemy fighters.”
“Okay, Roger,” Faber said, “but the governor is insisting that this is a case of mistaken identity, and that these men are a part of his security detail.”
“But we just listened to the whole thing over FM comms,” Hill said. “We know what happened.”
We heard it, Hill thought, and what we heard matches the word of three seasoned combat veterans: Wilson, Mo, and Davis. To simply let these guys go was politics bleeding all over the mission, blurring its boundaries—and now, it seemed, altering the facts themselves.
How did we get to the point in a war, Hill wondered, where we are so afraid of political ramifications that we start to lie to ourselves and say, well maybe it didn’t happen the way our guys say it happened? The way we heard it happen?
The buck had to stop somewhere, Hill decided. Someone had to trust senior, combat-hardened NCOs. Hill’s men had to know that their leadership had their backs, that this shit was not going to fly.
“Sir, I hate to do this,” he said to Faber, “but I’m not going to let the EPWs go free. Not until I know more.”
Faber knew Hill’s position as combat commander had to be respected regardless of rank. He nodded his assent and Hill returned to the foyer. Ignoring Hanif and Shah completely, he pointed at the enemy fighter and said to Coe, “Put his blindfold back on. Once Doc bandages up the others, they all go into the TOC conference room under guard.”
“But sir, Major Faber just—” Coe began.
“Stop. I’m not going to repeat myself.” Hill’s eyes grazed the room, stopping on Kay. “These guys don’t move unless I say so. Understood?”
“Roger that, sir.”
Mo and Wilson helped Coe walk his detainee into the conference room. Faber began damage control with the Afghans. Hill continued into the TOC, where Kay was on the phone with the Battalion XO, Major John Karagosian.
Karagosian’s voice was loud enough that the call might as well have been on speaker. “Larry, I heard your guys just shot up a bunch of Afghan National Security Force guys. What the hell happened up there? And what’s this about someone throwing a grenade? Who threw a grenade and why?”
Hill gritted his teeth to keep from blurting, Yeah, sometimes we do that sort of thing in combat.
Kay muted the phone and offered it to Hill, who shook his head. He didn’t have the energy.
Kay punched the Mute button again and spoke into the receiver. “I’m not entirely sure who threw it, sir, but it seemed like the best course of action at the time. From what I understand, it was an appropriate measure of force considering that the ANSF opened fire with automatic weapons.”
“Yeah, okay,” Karagosian said. “Make sure you guys write a detailed incident report. I can’t wait for this to blow up tomorrow. All right? Out.”