“Lance Corporal Hall!”
First Sergeant Robert Pullen’s shout demanded the presence of one of his marines. Pullen’s skin had darkened under the Afghan sun and so had his demeanor. The only answer to his call was a desiccated breeze that hurried the dust across Helmand Province. Pullen faced the marines of Company G, known as Golf Company, of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division. All were at attention, in rigid rank and file, inside their mud-walled compound under a transparent September sky.
“Lance Corporal David Hall!”
Pullen bellowed with frustration and anger. If you had met Pullen back in the States in civilian clothes, you would have picked him out as a Marine First Sergeant. His jaw had been designed with a T-square. Tall, broad-shouldered, Pullen was armed with a glance that could burn a hole through a young marine. The men feared his anger and knew, with certainty, he would never let them down in a fight.
“Lance Corporal David... R.... Hall!”
Pullen howled, stretching Hall’s name and raising the decibels in search of the thirty-one-year-old. But as much as Pullen demanded to hear the voice of the marine from Lorain, Ohio, he did not expect it. Hall was dead. Seven of Golf Company’s marines were dead. The calling of the roll, shouting each name three times, was a ritual nearly as old as the Marine Corps itself. The marines attending the battlefield memorial faced both Pullen and, to Pullen’s left, seven battlefield crosses, a tradition dating from the Civil War. The “crosses” were assembled from each fallen marine’s possessions. Their sand-colored boots stood on the hard-packed desert floor. Rising vertically, above the boots, muzzles down, were their M-16 A4 rifles. At the top, on the butt of each rifle stock, rested their Kevlar helmet. Dog tags dangled from each rifle grip.
“Lance Corporal Stroud!”
The veins in Pullen’s neck swelled as he worked through the roll, pausing between each demand to let the echo fade. The assembled marines were expressionless statues except for eyes that glistened with memory. “Lance Corporal Jonathan Stroud!” If the power of Pullen’s roar could have brought them back from the dead, it would have.
“Lance Corporal Jonathan... F.... Stroud!”
Chris Everson, a bull of a man, was having trouble focusing his camera. A tough, no-nonsense South African, Chris is a legendary cameraman who has worked with CBS News for three decades. His pictures of the struggle in South Africa helped bring down apartheid. Chris had been my eyes and my conscience in war zones since we met in the Gulf War in 1990. Many years earlier, as a young cavalry soldier, Chris had been gravely wounded and nearly lost his life. He admired military men and swelled with pride at what they stood for. As Pullen called marines who would not answer, Chris’s viewfinder blurred with tears.
Golf Company’s battlefield memorial in 2009 was among the most moving events I witnessed in more than a decade covering the war in Afghanistan. Years after Pullen’s roll call, David Hall’s name continued to echo in my mind. Why had he sacrificed himself so freely? I discovered the answer many years later.
America’s longest war was fought in a land of abiding antiquity. One marine described the sense of it, as we watched a boy herding sheep through an irrigation canal in the southern desert near Kandahar. The city, more than 2,300 years old, was the site of a settlement founded by Alexander the Great.1 “Afghanistan,” the marine told me, “is like fighting in the Bible.”
On another trip, I was driving up the Shomali Plain northeast of Kabul. I came upon nomads in a caravan of twenty-two camels. Reds, blues and greens were woven into handmade clothes and saddle blankets. Tassels swirled in the wind. Small brass bells sang tink, thunk, tink, thunk, with each lurch of the camel’s stride. The men carried rifles in saddle holsters. A ruckus of children walked with the women. The expression of the riders, looking back at me, was severe but without hostility. They did not use the road—they crossed it, from one wild land to another. The pavement was a twenty-first century intruder which, only momentarily, interrupted their seventh-century world. These were tough people of profound dignity whose character reminded me of farmers and ranchers I knew as a boy. My travels through Afghanistan have taken me from the deserts of the Southern Plateau to the soaring Hindu Kush where India’s tectonic collision with Asia lifts the roof of the world.2 Afghanistan is about the size of my native Texas. It is beautiful and brutal, filled with willful tribes prone to the past. Among its nearly 35 million people, 65 percent are illiterate, 54 percent live on less than one dollar a day.3 Life expectancy is 64 years.4
To understand a people, I look to the games they play. I drew some insight into the Afghan psyche by attending ferocious battles of the national sport called Buzkashi, which, translated from the Persian means “goat dragging.” It’s an ancient contest that galloped into Afghanistan from China and Mongolia sometime after the tenth century. Buzkashi is played on horseback. It makes NFL football look like badminton. People are sometimes killed in Buzkashi, both players and fans. The field of play is a rectangle, larger than a football field, but about the same proportions. The object is to carry a headless goat, or headless calf, around a flag on one end of the field (inbounding) then charge 430 yards to the other end to drop the carcass in a chalk circle (the goal). Five men ride on each team. A calf is preferred to a goat because it is less likely to disintegrate during the match, which can last for hours. Here’s the catch. All riders are armed with rawhide whips about six feet long. When a rider manages to hoist the calf from the ground and onto his horse, the five riders playing defense for the other team whip the “ball carrier” and ram his horse to force him to fumble the calf. The rider with the calf relies on his four teammates to run interference, but with his hands full, he is largely defenseless. Typically, the calf carrier holds his whip in his mouth. The rare, great players, the Tom Bradys and Whitey Fords, have the strength to hold the calf against the horse with their leg and thereby free their whip for self-defense. When the calf is jarred loose somewhere midfield, the horsemen collide in a violent scrum to pummel for the prize. Matches I attended in Kabul were played at a full thunderous charge, hooves pulverizing the earth, whips flailing the wind. Crowds of hundreds or thousands press to the edge of the open field and attempt to stampede away when play runs out of bounds. Slower or inattentive fans sometimes do not live to see another game. They have a saying in Buzkashi: “Few men win. And no man wins for long.”
Buzkashi arrived on the ancient Silk Road which crossed Afghanistan and drew from both ends a Babel of cultures and religions. A century after Alexander’s invasion, about 250 BC, the Buddhist king, Ashoka, declared enduring peace. His edict was carved in Greek and Aramaic on a limestone pillar in Kandahar.5 The translation from the Greek reads:
...he has made men more pious and all things prosper throughout the world. And the king refrains from [killing] all living beings while other men and all the king’s hunters and fishers have ceased failing to exercise self-control.6
The declaration of peace is durably carved but the reality never was. Through antiquity, the region of Afghanistan was conquered and reconquered by invaders from nearly all points of the compass including Greece, India and Persia. In the mid-nineteenth century, the British occupied Afghanistan twice—to protect their interests in India and keep the Russian Empire at bay.7 These disastrous misadventures compelled Rudyard Kipling to write:
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle an’ blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.8
Russian soldiers faced a similar fate in the twentieth century when the Soviets invaded, in part, to create a buffer against the Muslim world. After Afghans cut up what remained of the Soviet’s nine-year occupation, the tortured nation tipped backward into the dark ages. In 1996, the Taliban—whose name derives from the word student—rose from the south to impose totalitarian rule.9 Girls were forbidden education, adulterers were publicly stoned to death, women were barred from work and men were whipped for smoking.
America’s vital interest in Afghanistan began fifteen days after 9/11 when a covert CIA team linked up with the Northern Alliance—a force of Afghan insurgents opposed to Taliban rule. By October 2001, the Northern Alliance, US Army Special Forces, US Special Operations Forces and US Air Force bombers, broke the Taliban grip on the capital, Kabul, and scattered the enemy. It looked like victory. Instead, America found itself marching behind Alexander the Great, King Ashoka, the British and the Soviets on the eternal campaign for domination of Afghanistan. Great powers rise and fall. Afghanistan endures.
In 2009, President Barack Obama decided to double down on Afghanistan in the hope that more troops and more economic aid would end the war. Lance Corporal David Hall’s Golf Company was part of an additional battalion of reinforcements from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force out of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. The company’s leisurely name was imposed by the NATO Phonetic Alphabet. Alpha Company, Bravo Company, Charlie Company and so on—down to Company G, Golf. Golf fought its way into Helmand Province in July that year. Helmand is the heartland of the Taliban, who were from Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, the Pashtun. The Pashtun are an ancient people who range from southern Afghanistan through neighboring Pakistan.10 They speak a unique language, Pashto, and see the Afghan-Pakistan border as an imaginary line they can’t imagine honoring. No US force had occupied Golf’s AO (Area of Operations) before. By the time I arrived, the marines were taking the highest casualties in Afghanistan. For that reason, my producer Henry Schuster and I embedded with Golf for 60 Minutes. Since joining 60 Minutes a decade before, Henry had become one of the broadcast’s finest producers. He would go anywhere, suffer any hardship, risk any danger to tell an important story. Wrapped in his impervious exterior was a first-rate analytical mind. At fifty-something, Henry had been everywhere and had seen everything which invested him with nonchalance that lent confidence to everyone around him. We handpicked our team from the best in the world. Chris Everson was my principal cameraman in Afghanistan, in Iraq, throughout Africa, the Middle East and as far away as Antarctica. Along with Chris, we brought cameraman Ray Bribiesca and soundman Anton van der Merwe. Ray, from Oklahoma, learned combat photography as a Marine Corps gunnery sergeant in Vietnam. He tended toward fearlessness and was tough as an old combat boot. The young marines of Golf called him “Gunny,” slang for gunnery sergeant. Anton, another South African, had once suffered a leg wound from a grenade while covering a riot against apartheid. He kept working without mentioning the inconvenience. Anton was meticulous in the worst environments—disinclined to look away from the bouncing needles on the VU meters of his audio equipment even when the “bounces” were propelled by gunfire. These were deeply experienced men, artists in our world, with an easy manner and an eighteen-hour work ethic. For decades, in deadly terrain, we always looked out for one another.
My team of five was issued olive drab cots on folding aluminum frames in the mud-walled open yard of Combat Outpost Burrow. Marines name new outposts after their fallen. Lance Corporal Dennis Burrow from Naples, Florida, had been killed two weeks earlier. A three-foot cross fashioned from scrap plywood was nailed to one wall with “LCPL [Lance Corporal] Burrow” lettered in red, horizontally, across the intersection of planks. Above his name were the words “Rest in Peace.” Combat Outpost Burrow was a jumble of about two dozen marines in a farmhouse loaded with body armor, sleeping bags and M240 machine guns. When we arrived, the marines were struggling with a difficult but not insurmountable problem. Someone back home had sent a pound of Starbucks coffee beans. Whole beans. Thoughtful, but not thought through. Lacking anything like an armored combat coffee grinder, the marines were using the flat side of an ax head to smash the beans. I’ve heard marines say, “If it doesn’t fit, get a bigger hammer.” There would be French Roast at Combat Outpost Burrow.
Ironically, Afghans know the territory Golf Company occupied as “Little America.” Back in 1946, the Afghan government hired the American engineering company Morrison Knudsen to build roads, dams and a system of irrigation canals in Helmand Province.11 Morrison Knudsen set up a headquarters in Kandahar and spent decades on the project, which was modeled on the dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Holding back the waters of the Helmand River was only part of the motivation. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations hoped the dams would also contain the tide of Soviet influence.
Helmand has to beg for three inches of rain a year. The miserly land is latticed with verdant strips, but only on narrow acres along the canals sated by the Helmand River. In 2009, America’s project from sixty years before was nourishing fields of marijuana. Golf’s marines marched through fields of “weed” five and six feet tall. On patrol, the marines chose to walk in furrows flooded with a mix of river and sewage. The enemy couldn’t hide an improvised explosive device underwater because the electronic trigger would short. Chris, Ray, Anton, Henry and I followed, waist-deep in the canals, holding our cameras and equipment over our heads. The marines slogged in ninety-five-degree heat, under body armor and fifty pounds of gear. The man carrying the SAW gun, the Squad Automatic Weapon, labored under an extra forty pounds. Each step yanked stubborn boots from the sucking, fetid mud. The exhausting terrain was safest, but on the way back, near the end of a six-hour patrol, there was always severe temptation to step on solid ground.
Golf’s headquarters was surrounded by an enemy they could rarely see—of that, the marines were constantly reminded. One marine had been killed in his bunk by a single round fired from outside the compound’s mud walls. One evening, I watched a huge, lumbering CH 53 helicopter coming in. It was light gray, sooted black behind the engine exhausts and marked MARINES. The copter settled just outside the compound. It was delivering barbecue, a special occasion for men digesting their second month of field rations. The pilot kept the Super Stallion’s rotors spinning for a quick escape. With the last of the pulled pork pulled, it heaved heavily back into the sky. I jumped at the sound of a sharp WHOOOP! BANG! An insurgent had fired a rocket-propelled grenade which just missed the CH 53. The five crewmen escaped as the rotors clawed for altitude. Barbecue! I thought. Christ!
Golf Company’s mission was counterinsurgency—cut down the bad guys, build up goodwill for the US-backed government. “No greater friend, no worse enemy,” the marines would say. The trouble was, the enemy was nearly impossible to identify. Camouflaged among the people were hardcore Taliban fighters, drug gangs, freelance warlords and mercenaries who would fight anyone for five dollars a day. “How do you know the enemy from the citizens?” I asked Dan O’Hara, a young lieutenant from Chicago who was leading one of Golf’s platoons. O’Hara was composed of sharp angles, tall and lanky. He was earnest and eager to use his GI Bill benefits to go back to college. He joined the marines because he feared he would regret not serving his country after 9/11. “You don’t know the enemy until they start shooting at you,” he said. “They’ll shoot and before you get the chance to close on them, they’ll run away and kind of just blend back into the population.”
By 2009, eight years into the war, civilian casualties had become the enemy of counterinsurgency. In a change in tactics, the marines were ordered to show restraint to avoid alienating the people. In the early weeks of its deployment, Golf reported zero civilian deaths but at the cost of seven marines. “Killing a thousand Taliban is great, but if I kill two civilians in the process, it’s a loss.” Battalion Commander Lieutenant Colonel Christian Cabaniss explained the trigonometry that connected his marines, the enemy and the people.
“How many of the enemy have you killed so far?” I asked.
“I have no idea and it’s really irrelevant,” Cabaniss shot back with an air of total confidence in the wisdom of the strategy. We were sitting in his plywood headquarters, with its entrance flanked by the Stars and Stripes on one side and the Afghan flag on the other. The plywood was shielded on all sides by corpulent, gray HESCO bastions. HESCOs (named for the British manufacturer) are giant cloth sandbags in a wire mesh that unfold to stand about five feet tall, three feet wide. Once propped open, they are filled with earth and stacked two deep and three high. Citadels of HESCOs became the architecture of the American occupation. Cabaniss was built of equally sturdy material: tall, athletic, blond, forty-something, Hollywood handsome. His diction was lightly shaded by Georgia palmetto. His father was a preacher. Apparently, adherence to the gospel, both divine and marine, ran in the family.
“Body count is not something that you track?” I asked.
“It doesn’t tell me that I’m being successful. The number of tips that I receive from the local population about IEDs in the area or Taliban in the area—that is a measure of effectiveness.”
“You talk about restraint,” I asked Cabaniss. “What do you mean?”
“As I told the marines before we deployed, it’s a three-second decision, especially with his personal weapon. The first second is ‘Can I?’ The next two are ‘Should I? What is going to be the effect of my action? Is it going to move the Afghan closer to the government or further away?’”
Solving the counterinsurgency equation so that it equaled the same number of marines he arrived with was up to the calculations of platoon leaders including Dan O’Hara. On a blistering summer day in August 2009, O’Hara was ordered to investigate one of those civilian tips about an IED that Cabaniss liked to count. O’Hara dispatched a squad led by Lance Corporal Jonathan Quiceno from Orlando, Florida. “Q,” as the men liked to call him, carried a cocky, calming presence. He had a habit of repeating “easy day,” like a mantra, as his squad threaded through small collections of mud-walled houses. He greeted farmers and swarms of curious children while expecting a gunfight at any moment. “Easy day” was a warning and a prayer.
At the head of “Q’s” squad, taking point, was Lance Corporal David Hall. Hall was thirty-one, an old man for a lance corporal. He’d been a marine three years. Hall fought in Iraq for seven months followed by a year back home. Now, he could almost see the end of his deployment in Afghanistan. Hall was on a search for meaning in his life so there was something poetic about his job, preceding the squad, swinging a mine detector, left, right, left, right, tick, tock, searching for a fleeting electronic squeal that might betray peril in his next step.
Before he joined the Marines, Hall had followed his father, Del, to the assembly lines at the sprawling Ford Motor plants in Lorain and Avon, Ohio. Hall installed dashboards or clutch fans that cooled radiators as the chassis of embryonic Econoline vans clanked by. He worked a good deal of overtime. In his last year he made more than $100,000. But, as his sister put it, “He hated every minute of it.” The Lorain plant’s beige metal facade slouches on acres of asphalt—looking like an institution, a prison perhaps. These confines weren’t for Hall. He’d caught a glimpse of the world at a young age when his mother, Lulu, welcomed exchange students to their home at 3863 Palm Street in South Lorain. The visitors came from Italy, Yugoslavia and Hungary. When the students returned home, Hall’s imagination traveled with them.
David Hall dropped his wrench and joined the Marines because “he wanted to do something, something positive,” his father told me. Hall considered nursing, but a friend encouraged him to join the Corps. He had no trouble filling out his combat fatigues at six-four and two hundred pounds. A remarkable achievement when you consider Hall came into this life weeks too soon. At birth, he weighed three pounds. His parents fed him with an eyedropper.
Now, in Afghanistan, Hall towered over his fellow marines. They could see his name, lettered in black, on the back of his Kevlar helmet as his head bobbed with each swing of the mine detector. Tick, tock, left, right. The warning Hall listened for could be faint, uncertain. There wasn’t much metal to detect. Homemade land mines, IEDs, were buried on trails or in courtyards, under a plywood pressure plate. The plywood was partially cut down the middle so it would break under the weight of a boot and close the circuit on a forty-pound bomb made of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. The enemy, whoever they might be on that day, paid villagers to plant the mines at ten dollars each.
On the last day of August 2009, “Q” led his squad to check out the tip about an IED. Maybe the tip was meant to be a trap, maybe it wasn’t, but the marines were soon pinned down by snipers. The temperature was rising past 110 degrees. The men needed cover from the rifle rounds and the lethal sun. David Hall volunteered to sweep a nearby mud-walled compound with his metal detector. “Q’s” squad had been in the compound before and knew it well. Two marines went along to watch Hall’s back. Hall cleared one section, then another. Easy day. Then came the rough, splintering sound of cracking plywood.
At Golf Company’s headquarters, on a piece of scrap cardboard, a marine had carefully lined in black felt-tip squares the days of their six-month deployment. The hand-lettered calendar hung from a green cord on the HESCO bastion at the entrance to the sleeping quarters. A line was drawn, upper right to lower left, through each passing day. At the top were lettered the words “You Can’t Stop Time...” The time that drew David Hall’s imagination was December 17. On August 31, he lacked only 108 lines drawn through finished days. Hall told Lulu and Del, back in Lorain, he would be home by Christmas. His parents planned to drive to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, to meet him as they did every time their son deployed or returned.
In the compound, a deafening eruption blasted a geyser of dirt into the sky. Earth and a spray of blood fell with David Hall. His fellow marines rushed to their first aid training. There was a crackle of radios and within minutes a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, decorated with large red crosses on white squares, thundered onto a field near the compound. Dust scattered like shrapnel. The marines rushed Hall onto the medevac. Twin jet engines spun into a scream. The pilot pulled the control lever called a “collective,” forcing the four rotor blades to gouge their pitch into the air. The Black Hawk leaped, tilting its nose down and forward like a sprinter lunging off the blocks. As it rose, enemy gunmen opened up with machine gun fire. The Black Hawk was too nimble. The medevac made good its escape, but Hall would not. He had been mortally wounded in the explosion of the buried IED.
The next day, I watched Lieutenant O’Hara gather Hall’s squad. When a marine is killed, the void he leaves is filled by worry and doubt—which a platoon leader must cast away quickly. O’Hara spoke quietly. This wasn’t the first time the young lieutenant had to have this talk. No one was in the mood for bullshit. “His death is not the fault of anyone who is sitting here,” O’Hara began, granting absolution. “If it belongs to anybody it would belong to me because I was the one out there who was in charge, making the decisions. So just understand, we’re doing the right things, we’re doing good work, we’re making a difference here. We’re here fighting for the people of Afghanistan.” O’Hara said what was expected of him. But no one in the squad and not Lieutenant O’Hara himself, truly believed they were making much of a difference and no one gave a damn about fighting for Afghanistan. What compelled marines to their feet each day was devotion—devotion to one another. In Shakespeare’s The Life of King Henry V, the king’s force is badly outnumbered as he prepares to lead his men into the Battle of Agincourt in the Hundred Years War. Yet he shouts that he wants “not one man more” because that would only dilute the honor among the men he famously calls “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”12
Only the bond of family is equal to the devotion that I have witnessed in combat. I saw it among the firefighters of the FDNY as they joined the battle of 9/11. Placing your life in the hands of another—and accepting responsibility for his or hers in return—is a singular combination of empathy, compassion and self-sacrifice—the universal constituents of love.
Lieutenant O’Hara ended his talk. “We’re here, ultimately, fighting for our country, which is what we all signed up to do.” None of the men had a problem following orders or “fighting for our country,” but if they were ordered to fight they wanted to fight. The rules of engagement for counterinsurgency were costing American lives. “It sucks,” Lance Corporal Quiceno told me on another foot patrol. Cameraman Ray Bribiesca and I dropped into tall grass with “Q” to watch a house where an enemy sniper was thought to be holed up. “Q” repeated, “It sucks. I don’t know another word to say it. It sucks because all you want to do is get them, you know, for revenge.”
“Because of the marines who’ve been lost?” I asked.
“Sure. I mean, how many times have we been shot at? How many times do we know a direction, a distance, a compound, a vicinity, where these guys are coming from and then, in a conventional war, that’s it. That whole compound would go. But we can’t drop ordnance on them because of civilian casualties. It’s frustrating. I don’t know if anybody really understands the amount of stress that the guys are already starting to feel, simply having their hands tied behind their backs.”
On September 2, 2009, a sleek white Evergreen International 747-400 cargo plane broke through a partly cloudy sky and touched down at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware. Strapped inside was a silver aluminum transfer case with labels indicating TOP and HEAD. By regulation, the case was packed with about sixty pounds of ice along with a Department of Defense form DD 2064.13 “Hall,” the DoD Certificate of Death read, “David R.” The case was tightly bound in the Stars and Stripes and borne off the plane by six fellow marines in battle fatigues and white gloves. Del and Lulu were there to welcome their son as they always did. Hall’s transfer case was lifted into a hearse. White gloves snapped a farewell salute.
Seven years later, David Hall’s sacrifice was still on my mind. In July 2016, I pulled into the driveway of a white clapboard house which presided handsomely over a manicured lawn. David’s dad, “Del,” short for Delmar, bought the house after his son’s death. Del welcomed me with a swing of the glass storm door and introduced me to David’s mother, Lulu, plus someone I wasn’t expecting—a man with mahogany skin and ivory teeth. Jean Fenelus smiled broadly. He was a thirty-year-old Haitian American from Brooklyn, New York, who the Halls called, “our ‘adopted’ son.” Fenelus had been a member of Hall’s platoon. “If anything happens to me,” Hall had told his parents, “take care of Jean.” That’s what they were doing, putting him up as their own while Fenelus studied for a degree in criminal justice.
Each piece of living room furniture matched as though it was still on the showroom floor. The word Believe was rendered in chrome over a doorway that led to the kitchen. In the adjoining dining room, a wooden cross threw a morning shadow on the wall. There was a pencil sketch of David mounted high in the living room, rendered from his official Marine Corps photograph. I settled into a couch next to the actual photo, mounted in a frame on a glass-topped end table. The Marine Corps seal, the Eagle, Globe and Anchor, was mounted inside the frame below Hall’s image. The eagle clutched a banner in its beak reading Semper Fidelis, “always faithful.” In the picture, David looks handsome with intense blue eyes and a long straight nose. He’s wearing his “dress blues”—a white hat and dark blue tunic outlined in the red piping of an enlisted man. His hair, which judging from Del would have grown thick with salt and pepper, was light and shaved “high and tight.” In the custom of all official Marine Corps portraits, David concealed his illuminating smile.
“David was always the one to volunteer,” Del said. “He was spirited.” Del and Jean, David’s platoon mate, told me David insisted on being at the front of each patrol, waving the rod of the mine sweeper, divining the fate of the others. When he was promoted to another job, David raised hell until they handed him his minesweeper back. “He wanted to do the most for the other marines,” Del told me. His father traced David’s sense of duty to an incident in middle school when David was bullied so mercilessly he had to change schools. After David had grown from a barely viable infant to a man only a fool would cross, he became the protective big brother for those he loved.
Del told me his son became disillusioned with the mission in Afghanistan because of a local practice that horrified American troops. Afghans call it “Bacha Bazi” which translates, “boy play.” It is the tolerated rape of young boys, most often by men of power including some Afghan military officers.14 Americans were ordered to look the other way. They were told Bacha Bazi was a problem for Afghanistan to work out and imposing American values would threaten cooperation. Hall could not square this order with his conscience. Del told me David planned to leave the Corps and use his GI Bill benefits to return to his dream of nursing school. I asked Del for his last memory of his son. He recalled an image of David on his final departure from Camp Lejeune. Framed in the window of the departing bus, David smiled back at his mother and father and raised two fingers in the gesture for peace.
Why did David Hall insist on “taking point”? Why did he demand his mine detector back after he was promoted to a safer job? I have a guess. Sweeping ahead of the squad carried with it unimaginable risk and unambiguous virtue. His mission, his personal mission, was not the dubious prospect of nation building or following orders that did violence to conscience. Skimming the soil with his divining rod was about only one thing, devotion to his brothers. Hall’s entire life had been a restless interrogation of the path ahead, searching for meaning beyond the reliable conveyor of Econoline vans with their regular delivery of paychecks.
The bomb was meant for the squad. David Hall suffered it alone.
Just as he always intended.
“Lance Corporal Schimmel!”
The same week David Hall returned home, First Sergeant Robert Pullen called the last of the names in Golf Company’s roll of the dead.
“Lance Corporal Patrick Schimmel!”
“Lance Corporal Patrick... W.... Schimmel!”
Just as no answer was expected in the battlefield memorial, there were no ready answers to the questions Lance Corporal David Hall might ask or the questions of his family. The United States had no choice in entering Afghanistan, but leaving a war is always plagued with complexities not imagined at the start. As of this writing, in 2019, our forces are still fighting America’s longest war. We have not won. Soon, young men and women who were not born to see 9/11 will be deployed in a cause they only read about in school. For every great power, through all eras of time, there should be a warning at Afghanistan’s door: “Few men win. And no man wins for long.”