The Korangal Valley is sort of the Afghanistan of Afghanistan: too remote to conquer, too poor to intimidate, too autonomous to buy off.
—Sebastian Junger, War
Since the end of the Civil War, we have had a Southern army. The majority of our company and general grade officers, as well as high-level NCOs come from southern cities and towns of less than 7,000 people. That’s not so bad. If you want leaders who understand the real meaning of victory, ask the ones who have been defeated.
But then again, the South might just be different. In many ways, it has never been “the United States is” so much as “the United States are.” And the South is part of that “are.” Nobody up North, out West, or in the East talks about being able to kill “your own snakes” or ever uses the words “splendid behavior” to talk about someone’s actions. I learned how to drink whiskey in the Army. There was not a single company grade officer or senior NCO I met during my two years on active duty in the military, or those decades afterwards of keeping up with old army friends while making new ones, who drank Scotch or bourbon. It is Old Grand Dad, Early Times, Wild Turkey, and Southern Comfort. Not so bad.
Yet despite the obvious difference in drinking habits, for many from the South it is all still Gettysburg and Antietam, Spotsylvania and the Battle of the Wilderness. These officers and NCOs from below the Mason-Dixon line like to win, but they hate losing even more. And that must have been something that Jake picked up.
It wasn’t that Jake had not seen pictures of relatives in their uniforms all his life, but seeing is not necessarily believing. Still, he did look at the pictures on the walls of his parents’ home out in the hallways and going up the steps to the bedrooms for as long as he could remember. There was that sense of serving in the very air of the house, even though no one still alive ever talked about their time in the military and definitely never mentioned, even in passing, about having been in combat.
David Haberstram, the New York Times reporter in Vietnam and the author of The Making of a Quagmire, published in 1969 about the growing disaster unfolding in Vietnam, and seven years later, The Best and the Brightest, documenting the disaster that had indeed become Vietnam, explained that as a child in New York City in the late 1940s, he’d go out into the courtyards of the apartment buildings and watched his uncles and their friends, all veterans of the Second World War, play pick-up basketball after work or on their way back and forth from college paid for by the GI Bill.
They’d play shirts and skins. He remembered sitting on the steps of the fire escapes, startled and amazed that everyone who played skins had a scar, a part of a muscle or a limb gone, a bone that was clearly missing, or a strange limp when they ran.
The stunning part to the young Halberstam was that it was everybody. No one had escaped. No one had been spared. But no one ever said a word. No one offered an explanation for their wound or their infirmity, nor was anyone ever asked for or expected to give one. According to Halberstam, no one mentioned the war. No one complained or appeared offended or even troubled by the wounds. No one asked for help or to slow things down. And no one offered up an excuse, even if they tripped when they ran or couldn’t quite handle the ball as well as they should have. They were just there to play basketball. It was only much later in Vietnam that Halberstam was to realize that these were the ones who had survived.
In a very real way, watching those shirts and skins pick-up games, the young future reporter had caught the essence of combat. Everyone was at risk and what finally happened was simply a matter of chance or luck. That was what was so scary and so real and why everyone kept so silent about combat. No one talked about it and no one asked why half the muscles of a shoulder or along the neck were gone. They already knew. They didn’t have to ask.
Jake was not only raised in the quiet shadows of the military, but in the shadow of the Marines. Jake’s mother’s twin brother had been in the Marines. Two of her other brothers were in the Army. Jake’s father’s younger sister had been in the Army in the ’80s and his brother in the Marines. His father, too, had been in the Marines when the Marine barracks in Beirut had been blown up. There were two grandfathers, one who had been a captain of a frigate during the Korean War, and the other who fought in the Army throughout the whole of the Second World War in Italy and Germany.
Much like Halberstam was drawn to the silence of those wounded and crippled veterans playing basketball in the alleys of New York City, Jake had been drawn to the very silence of those pictures. Toward the end of Jake’s senior year in high school, his father, concerned about his son’s two older friends who had already graduated and not gone to college and were without jobs and just lying around all day, was determined that his son would not end up the same way. So he sat Jake down one Sunday and gave him three options after graduation: college, working full time, or the military.
Jake didn’t argue or, for that matter, even have to think about it. Later, his father would remember how simple it had been and how matter-of-fact. “That’s OK,” Jake said, “I don’t think I have the grades for a really good college. I’m going to enlist.” It was almost as if his son had grown up right there in front of him, even as they were talking.
That was March 2007. The war in Iraq was not going well. In fact, the whole country was approaching the abyss. Iraq had descended into a full-scale civil war, with 1,000 civilians dying each month. The gunmen of Al Qaeda, along with their suicide bombers, were carrying out large-scale massacres of Shiite civilians, and the Shiite militias, some in Iraqi Army uniforms and supported by Iran, retaliated by massacring thousands of young Sunni men. Iraq seemed lost, with American troops hopelessly caught up in the turmoil and being killed and wounded in increasing numbers by both sides.
None of this was of any real concern to Jake. He was right about not having the grades to get into a first-rate college and everyone, including his father, knew that an entrance-level job would have bored him, while still giving him plenty of time to goof off and get into trouble.
So Jake and his father went down to the recruiting offices inside the Air National Guard Terminal at the Metropolitan Airport. Jake kept his preference to himself as to which branch of the armed services he was considering.
The Navy was out from the beginning. Jake had no desire to go to war on a ship and had no interest in flying off aircraft carriers. The Army recruiter was almost too slick about the benefits of service, including bonus pay and the fact that having military experience would be a plus for any future civilian employment.
The Marine recruiter offered nothing except being the point of the spear. “The first in. And the last out.” Jake’s father went along because he thought that with his being there and being a veteran that none of the recruiters would go off the deep end or run the risk of lying. But he did feel that the Marine recruiter had offered more of the truth than any of the other recruiters. Jake saw that too and with his father having been in the Marines, made that same choice.
“It’s the Marines,” he said. Walking back to the car, his whole demeanor changed. They had gone to the recruiting offices as father and son, and had left as two marines. As they approached the car, Jake stopped. “If it’s all right with you,” he said, “I’d like to enlist right away. At least as soon as the paper work is ready. There’s no sense waiting.”
Jake went back on his own to the recruiting office early the next week. He called his parents to tell them that if they wanted to watch him sworn in that they should drive out to the recruiting center, that he’d wait until they got there. His mother managed to be proud.
Jake’s parents laid off him for those last few months of school, letting Jake do pretty much what he wanted. Iraq was still out there. But the surge was working. By degrading Al-Qaeda’s leadership, the influx of new troops was able to reduce the scope of the civil war. This allowed everyone to take a deep breath and step back from what had been an approaching catastrophe.
Afghanistan was back in the news. The Marines, who wanted no part of garrison duty and baby-sitting any kind of new Iraqi nation-building, had put Afghanistan back up on their front burner and were lobbying the Pentagon to send them to Helmand Province.
The surge had bought us time in Iraq to try to buy us time in Afghanistan. It might well have been the time for counter-insurgency rather than counter-terrorism, but even with counter-insurgency, you still have to kill the bad guys.
Jake took his parents up on their obvious lack of supervision during those last few months of school. But the two wars and the Marines were always out there, like a worrisome breeze blowing in from the future. The day after graduation, Jake said that it made no sense to wait until the end of September, which was his enlistment date. He had the date pushed up and went into the Marines on July 12, 2008.
It was the week that a unit of the 173rd Airborne Brigade occupying the Wanat Outpost in the Konregal Valley in Eastern Afghanistan was attacked by over 200 Taliban. The battle, described by those who were there as the “ Blackhawk Down” of the Afghanistan War, went on for almost half the day. The firefights in Iraq usually lasted no more than half an hour.
The forty-eight Americans and seventy-four Afghan soldiers were outnumbered three to one. At the end of the battle, nine U.S. troops were dead and twenty-seven were wounded, a casualty rate of 80 percent. The 245-page After Action Report describes the fight “as remarkable as any small unit action in American military history,” including those in Vietnam. The report, created by a member of the Army’s Combat Study Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, details automatic weapons that turned white-hot and jammed from non-stop firing, while the severely wounded continued to feed ammunition to those still able to use their weapons. The battle ended only when helicopter gunships and F-15s strafed and bombed the Taliban positions, killing dozens of the attackers.
The AAR cited a lack of preparation time for the 173rd before being sent from Iraq to Afghanistan. The strong implication that fighting on the desert plains of Iraq within an urban population, with well-developed roads and other types of substantial infrastructure, was different, and should have been recognized as different, than fighting village tribesmen in isolated valleys and mountain areas.
There were also tactical concerns about the total absence of an operational plan for the combat that was sure to lie ahead for the 173rd. After all, the Russians had fought in those same mountains for more than a decade and were never able to occupy or control any of the major mountain passes or valleys. And the Russians had a force of over 250,000 troops with absolutely no rules of engagement—able to kill and blow up anyone and anything they wanted.
But the real explanation for the failure at Wanat was centered on the fact that the U.S. forces had faced off against a far more sophisticated enemy than they had faced in Iraq or in Afghanistan in 2001. The world of fighting in Afghanistan had changed in the eight years we’d been there and apparently nobody in charge had noticed.
The report stated that, “The Taliban can and does now operate as a disciplined armed force, using well-rehearsed small unit tactics that can challenge the American military for dominance on the conventional battlefield.”
There were other lessons that should have been learned in our seven years in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The areas that had been chosen for our outposts were linked by rutted trails easily blocked and sabotaged, while Wanat itself could only be reached quickly by helicopter.
Those at Wanat never had the construction equipment to build adequate fortifications for, as the report explains, a “defensible outpost,” while a lack of fresh water and currency to buy favors and win the support of the villagers surrounding the outpost had been contributing factors to the lack of military preparedness.
More importantly, there was a lack of an increase in air surveillance once the commanders had made the mistake of attending a village council uninvited. It made clear, to anyone who understood the local customs, that the Americans were not welcomed there.
The numbers of killed and wounded civilians from air strikes over the preceding eight years had added an element of revenge to the centuries-old dislike of any foreigners. There is an Afghan expression that has not changed in some 3,000 years: “You might decide whether or not you come into our valley, but we will decide if we let you out.”
At times during the daylong battle of Wanat, there were sustained individual firefights at distances of less than ten meters. During the later part of the battle, Taliban fighters managed to work their way through the concertina wire that was the only defense against an attack, killing the platoon commander with a volley of AK-47 rounds. The morning after the battle, what remained of the 173rd was pulled out of Wanat. The outpost was simply abandoned.
For those who remembered, it was all eerily similar to “Hamburger Hill” in Vietnam. The 101st Airborne fought the North Vietnamese to a standstill, suffering more than 500 casualties, only to pack up and go back to their base camp the next day, giving whatever it was that they’d been fighting for back to whomever had held the mountain the day before the battle began. There is some thought now, as part of the surge in Afghanistan and for tactical reasons, of sending the Marines back to Wanat, though whatever unit they send back will not have an easy time of it.
The Marines though, did learn something about how to fight in Iraq, and have begun to use that learning as they have been shifted to the mountains and plains of Afghanistan. In war, as in education, it is never what you teach, so much as what you emphasize, that is important.
The Marine lobbying had paid off and units were moved out of Iraq into Helmand Province to re-supply U.S. bases that had already been there. The Marines understand that while you might have to show a friendly and helpful face, someone is still going to have to do the fighting and in Afghanistan those fights would be difficult and deadly. That whole “First in and Last out” hasn’t changed in some 250 years. But as Jake’s father had learned, and now Jake was to find out, neither had basic training.
Basic training for the Marines has remained what it has always been. It is the “tear you down and then build you up again” process, only this time as a marine. Whatever else might be said of the Marines, they are not very good at mending fences and would rather be respected or feared than liked.
For Jake, it was not so much that a new person emerged, but rather that the Jake who had always been there gradually took over. Still, there are very few eighteen-year-olds who will not grow up a little by learning that, when someone tells you to do something, they expect you to do it. Life is supposed to be, and usually is, a very serious and demanding place. That in itself could become the Marine’s motto.
Jake took his thirteen weeks of basic training at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego. He didn’t feel the training was as difficult, or as trying, as his father had warned. There had been some tough moments though, when sleep-deprived and exhausted, he barely managed to keep going; a few times, he almost didn’t. But in the Marines, “almost” doesn’t count. If you do it, you do it. In the world of the Marines, the real things are sometimes just that simple.
But even with that, Jake felt that things had been turned down a notch to get everyone through the thirteen weeks. In a way he was right. Some Marine units had already been deployed five or six times to Iraq. The Corps was feeling the strain and needed all the men and women they could get, even if they weren’t quite ready yet.
Everyone in Jake’s class—with the edge taken off of the most difficult parts of the training—made it through Basic, though there were a few that he wasn’t so sure would be there if things went wrong. What he did learn from the Drill Instructors, what all of them learned, was that if you don’t fight back you are doomed. The assumptions they’d all grown up with, that if you were nice to people, they would be nice to you, was a lie, and that the best response to force was force, a preparation for the moment, maybe months away, when people they didn’t even know would be trying to kill them. It was sobering, and he understood that is was realistic. It was an attitude, if not yet an understanding, that would soon save his life and the lives of others around him. In the end, Marines break things and kill people or they die.
From Basic Training, Jake went on to Marine Combat Training at Camp Pendleton. It was deadly and impressive. The Marines had never believed the message of “Mission Accomplished.” Since the invasion of Iraq, the training had grown more focused and more intense. Whatever else was going to happen in Iraq, the enemy would have to have more than good planning or luck to kill a bunch of Marines. Jake told his father with absolute confidence during one of his phone calls home that no one could stand up to a 50-caliber machine gun. “You can’t even hide from one.”
Jake’s father heard the respect and awe in the very calmness of his son’s voice. Whatever else was might be happening, his son was growing up. In Afghanistan, the 50 was to become Jake’s favorite weapon. It would be the weapon that would save his life and the lives of those around him.
At the end of MCT, Jake received an MOS as an Audio Communication Specialist and went on with a small group of trainees to the Marine base at Twenty-nine Palms, California for six weeks of training as a field radio operator, ending up with an “0261” or MOS of Field Radio Operator.
After Basic and MCT, the six weeks at Twenty-nine Palms weren’t all that hard. It was mostly classroom work and Jake became a gym rat. Somehow he knew that being in shape was as much a part of being a marine as was the whole issue of survival and being able to use a weapon better then your enemy. He didn’t want to have to blame himself if things went bad or went wrong. Besides, they had gone far enough in their training to begin hearing stories about Afghanistan from those who’d been there and had managed to make it back home.
These weren’t quite cautionary tales, but reality stories of having to carry fifty pounds of body armor at times moving straight up, while the bad guys wearing sandals and carrying some water and an RPG or AK-47 with a dozen rounds of ammunition, jumped from rock to rock like billy goats.
Following Communications School, Jake slimmed down and buffed out. He went back to Pendleton not only unable to fit into the T-shirts he’d been issued the first day of Basic, but having to find pants two sizes smaller at the waist. He learned how to communicate with most of the world at the same time that he’d become able to protect himself and defend the nation.
He took the communications training very seriously. A First Sergeant told him at the very beginning of his training that in a battle or a firefight, the radio is going to be yours and your unit’s most important weapon.
“You call in what you need—artillery, gunships, fighter-bombers, reinforcements, med-evacs. Without the radio, you may not be killed but you will be fucked.” Jake was ready to be a Marine and not just act like one.
At Pendleton, he was assigned to the 1/5 (1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division). The day he received his unit patch, a helicopter flying through the Kunar Valley in Helmand Province, ferrying a reduced company of Marines to an outpost near the Kaligal River, was shot down. It was the exact same spot where, twenty years before, Russian helicopters were shot down ferrying Russian troops into that same river basin. It was close to the bridge destroyed 2,300 years earlier by Afghan tribesmen who had trapped half of Alexander the Great’s Army, forcing him to marry the daughter of the local tribal chieftain to get what was left of his troops out of Afghanistan and into India.
A week into Pendleton, the newly regrouped and outfitted 1/5 went back to Twenty-nine Palms to spend a month at Mojave Viper, an exact replica of an Afghan village set out in the desert. Those marines already in Iraq were being sent to Helmand Province in Afghanistan, along with the new deployments from the States.
Jake thought the four weeks at the village was useful. It certainly seemed real enough, but there was way too much lecture stuff. You didn’t have to spend a whole afternoon in a classroom doing diversity training to figure out that Muslim villagers still living in pre-biblical times had different views on common courtesy and how women should be treated. You could also be pretty sure that a villager of any age or sex might not like Christian soldiers walking around behind sunglasses, armed to the teeth, looking for all the world like Imperial Storm Troopers out of Star Wars—even if they were handing out candy and offering to build better roads and new schools.
The 1/5 left for Afghanistan on May 28, 2009. Jake called his parents to say good-by and tell them not to worry. Jake’s father managed to wish him good luck without his voice cracking. His mother didn’t do so well.
The 5,000 marines of the 1/5 flew into Manas Airbase in Kyrgyzstan and from there to Bagram Airbase near Kabul. They were put into trucks and taken to Camp Leatherneck, the large Marine base in Helmand Province. From there, the 1,300 Marines in Jake’s headquarters supply company moved out to their operational area some eighty miles north of Camp Leatherneck.
Despite the 110-degree heat, they wore full body armor, their M-4’s locked and loaded as they took off in their armored Humvees, armored personnel carriers, and MRAPs for the Forward Operating Base (FOB) Geronimo in the Grit Valley, a supply route into Helmand Province and eventually the city of Kandahar. They were to protect the supply convoys to and out of Geronimo. No marines had been in the area since the war had shifted to Iraq in 2003.
The week before Jake’s unit had left for Geronimo, the Taliban in Pakistan had blown up a major bridge leading into Afghanistan. They then systematically destroyed a convoy of some forty stranded tankers that were carrying gasoline and aviation fuel to the military bases in Western Afghanistan, including their FOB in the Grit Valley. They’d be short of fuel for a month once they got to Geronimo.
Jake looked at the map of Helmand Province at Camp Leatherneck and figured that his company would be covering an area of a couple of hundred square miles—until someone told him that Helmand Province itself was over 78,000 square miles. Looking again at the map, Jake was surprised to find that Afghanistan was literally twice the size of Iraq and apparently had 10 million more people. And as far as he could tell, there weren’t more than three cities in the whole country.
There was a legend on one of the maps that stated there were more than 45,000 villages scattered across the country and up into the mountains bordering Pakistan. It didn’t take a genius to realize that 13,000 troops, 50,000, or even half a million, could easily get lost here. What Jake didn’t know was that others looking at similar maps through all the centuries had much the same feelings.
When it became clear to the Russian generals that they were failing in Afghanistan, they recommended that the majority of the Russian Army, some 5 million troops, be sent there. The Soviet Government, realizing the foolishness of that recommendation, simply said no. Three years later the Russians were gone, having left for home. But it wasn’t only the Russians. After the whole British Expeditionary Force of over 20,000 men were killed in Afghanistan in 1842, Kipling wrote these lines: “If you find yourself wounded on the Afghan Plains and the women come out to cut up what remains; then roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your Gawd like a soldier.” It was neither irony nor poetic license. It was the truth.
If Jake felt alone on those first few supply convoys, he understood that the marines out in the villages in platoon-sized outposts were in a worse situation. If they were attacked, it would be life or death from the first shot. The only way to survive out there would be for the villagers to help, or at least warn the different garrisons about an impending attack. Without warning or constant overhead air surveillance, the Taliban could be on top of you before you knew it.
At least at Geronimo, they’d had the equipment to bulldoze the dunes around the base into a reasonably effective barrier. All they took as incoming was the occasional mortar round or some poorly directed sniper fire. Jake’s orders took his company, their trucks, his Humvee, his radio command net, and his 50-caliber machine gun out over the most dangerous roads, river basins, and plains in the world.
It was terribly hot, during the middle of the day upwards of 120 degrees, and dusty, the kind of dust that got into your mouth, your food, all the equipment, wheel hubs, and gear trains. For weeks, no Taliban were seen.
But in the mountains, it was different.
The marines up there were always being ambushed. There were almost daily probing movements around the perimeters of their outposts. Some of the mountain areas were almost impassible. It was all straight up and straight down with sixty pounds of gear on your back, and you couldn’t see very far and you couldn’t see very much.
The Taliban had time to organize a battle plan, stockpile weapons and ammunitions, and attack the bases and outposts where and when they wanted. The mountains also made the use of helicopters and fighter-bombers problematical. The helicopters didn’t work well above nine or ten thousand feet, the air is too thin at those heights for good lift and in the hot weather with the hot air rising, even less so. You couldn’t get med-evacs in, so at times the marines would have to carry the wounded down off the mountains on stretchers. Even with their own medics, they lost a number of wounded by not getting the right care during that golden hour after being hit.
But it wasn’t only the thin air, the Taliban could easily shoot down gunships in the narrow passes leading to the valleys. Any chopper flying into and out of the valleys would have to come dangerously close to the sheer cliffs of the canyon walls. It was the perfect place to bring down a chopper that could not maneuver and had to take only one path in or out through the mountains.
The need for re-supply, as well as the widely scattered and difficult-to-defend outposts, left marines everywhere scrambling just to hang on. With the choppers always flying out at the edge of their “specks” and the danger of being shot down in the steep mountains and narrow canyons always a concern, most of the supplies had to come in by road.
And that was a problem where the roads were easily sabotaged. Supplying 30,000 troops by trucks on roads coming in from Pakistan was already a problem. Jake heard that some of the marines in the mountains had run out of ammunition, while others, who had to keep firing during what were prolonged fire-fights, had burned out one M-4 barrel after another until they’d run out of barrels.
But in the wide expanses of Helmand Province, it was IEDs. Around Geronimo, the Taliban didn’t have to show and run the risk of being killed by attack helicopters or bombing runs of the fighter planes. They could plant the IEDs without being seen, or pay villagers to do it for them.
The open plains of Helmand Province, along with the hundreds of miles of deserts and dry riverbeds, gave everyone a wide view of the surroundings. They could plant their IEDs, be able to see where you were from a distance, and set off the explosives at just the right time to do the most damage and kill the most marines.
As far as Jake could see, for the 1/5 and the convoys they guarded, as well as the marines in the different outposts, winning simply meant surviving. He remembered how back at Camp Leatherneck, some sergeants mumbling that the only way they’d be able to pull this off was to have a lot more troops on the ground.
The immediate problem the 1/5 faced were the roadside bombs, which could be buried anywhere. There were no paved roads, so planting an IED meant simply digging a hole and putting in the explosives with a detonator plate, or hooking it up to some detonator cord that you cover with dirt and set off from half a mile away.
Holes and ruts on the roads were everywhere. It was impossible to tell what was recently dug. Even in the short time that Jake was there, the Taliban had begun using more powerful bombs and were clearly becoming more sophisticated in their use. It didn’t seem to matter to them if it was armored vehicles or foot patrols. They were out to simply kill Americans.
The book The Good Soldiers describes exactly how it happens and it happened all the time.
“They drove with headlights off and night-vision goggles on that at 12:35 a.m. flared into blindness. Here came the explosion. It came through the doors … it was perfectly aimed and perfectly timed, and now one of the soldiers was on fire…”
When they’d first arrived in Helmand Province, the Taliban had set the IEDs to explode when a vehicle passed over the pressure plate. When they started to use rollers out in front of the armored vehicles to set off the explosives, the Taliban reset the plates with a time delay so that the explosive charge would not go off under the rollers, but under the vehicle.
The explosive charges were themselves becoming more sophisticated and more powerful. Jake had seen 40-ton MRAPs turned over, with everyone inside having either broken bones or head injuries. As for the foot patrols, if the Taliban spaced the charges just right, with a good view of the path the Marines were taking, and judged their distances correctly, they were sure to kill or wound everyone in that squad and most likely cause a concussion in everyone, if it were a platoon.
A large IED took out one of their armored vehicles during a convoy patrol. Everyone inside except the gunner and the driver were killed. The chopper on the med-evac was shot down coming in to take out the wounded. Jake could swear that he had seen the smoke trail of a rocket coming out of the hills near them a moment before the chopper exploded. It was amazing, but even without the med-evac their medic managed to keep the two alive, having to do a tracheotomy on the gunner right there on the side of the road.
The medic had wrestled the gunner quiet. While the rest of them set up a perimeter defense, he took out his knife and, grabbing the protruding piece of jaw bone, forced back the soldier’s head and calmly cut open his throat, then punched a hole into the windpipe. A sputtering of blood and foam came out through the incision, and as his breathing eased, the marine quickly quieted. There was another explosion up ahead and the rattling of small-arms fire. Jake watched while the medic took an endotracheal tube out of his kit, slipped it in through the incision, and threaded it down into the soldier’s lungs, listening for the normal inward and outward hiss of air, then reached for the morphine.
They managed to carry both of the wounded down to a Humvee, jury-rigged to carry the stretchers. They would try to make it back to their base camp. It had gotten to the point in their area of operation that if you could hear the boom, it was good. It meant that you were still alive after the bomb went off. A number of those who were near an IED when it went off would be confused and rattled after the explosion even if there were no obvious wounds. But they would tell everyone that they were fine and just walk away to go back to what they were doing.
Jake’s war soon had nothing to do with winning hearts and minds, protecting the civilian population, and not shooting up wedding parties, but simply making it back to base camp with the job done, the supplies delivered, and all the equipment intact, with nobody killed or severely wounded. That was called a good day.
There had been a U.S. Aid project during the 1950s in some of the areas they were patrolling. Engineers had dug canals through the valley to bring water to the crops of wheat and corn. Now, the crops were opium poppies and marijuana, with some of the plants five and six feet high. In some places the crops were so dense that is was almost impossible to walk through the fields. When the crops were planted to the edge of the roads, the fields were perfect places for ambushes, which the Taliban could not resist. In Helmand Province that could be a big mistake. Every now and then, the Taliban would do something that foolish.
One early morning, the marines took some fire from the edge of a poppy field. Jake was on top of his APC, manning the 50-cal. He used the machine gun to mow down the plants as surely as if he were using a scythe. They killed ten Taliban that morning and had no more trouble on that part of the road for weeks. The marines always preferred a straight-up firefight to what they called the “death at every corner” crawl that they had used in Iraq and in the larger towns and villages of Afghanistan.
During his months at Geronimo, Jake spared his parents the worst of it. He didn’t mention the time that his 50-caliber and two others on accompanying Humvees, along with their Mark 19 automatic grenade launchers, stopped a column of supply trucks and oil tankers from being blown up and all the drivers killed or taken prisoner.
Jake stayed on the top of his Humvee out in the open, bullets ricocheting off the armored plates surrounding him, his own machine gun chewing up the surrounding hillsides, keeping the Taliban from moving closer. After gunships were called in, the Taliban, hearing the sounds of the approaching helicopters, had no choice but to leave or be killed.
While at Geronimo Jake had heard about a shift in strategy to counter-insurgency, whatever that was. When someone asked a sergeant what that meant, the sergeant, clearly annoyed, shrugged it off, muttering that counter-insurgency only came in two sizes—long and very long.
Moving around as much as they did, Jake saw that things weren’t going as well as the official pronouncements. There was a lot that wasn’t going right. But it was the kids that troubled him the most.
When the 1/5 had first gotten to Helmand Province, the kids would be cheerful and jabbered whenever they stopped or pulled over to wait or rest for a while. They passed out candy and kids would take it. But as the weeks past, the villagers seemed to be keeping their kids away from them. Those who did come up weren’t smiling as they did previously, some of the older kids had actually taken to throwing rocks at them when they passed through the villages.
The Taliban might have become more cautious in trying to stick them in the eye, but they were obviously warning the villagers not to help. And Jake couldn’t blame villagers for listening. Over the years, the plains had been swept by U.S. and NATO troops countless numbers of times. After a couple of weeks, the troops would just get up and leave and the Afghans who’d helped, or been given work, were worse off. There were stories that Jake believed were true about the Taliban coming back into a village after the American or NATO troops had left and killing all the men who had worked for them, even killing the kids who had acted as lookouts for the American or NATO troops.
Jake understood that if things didn’t change, really change, that they’d probably have to leave like everyone else. The Afghan Government knew it. The Afghan people knew it, and the Taliban knew it. And that didn’t make much sense to him as they crawled slowly along another dirt road, always looking for signs of recent digging—places where the Marines weren’t quite liked anymore, and definitely were not trusted.
There were rumors about new orders coming down from Central Command changing the Rules of Engagement. Apparently, the higher ups were growing more concerned about the increasing numbers of civilian casualties, and to cut down on the collateral damage they were changing the rules to shoot only at people who were shooting at you. But Jake had no idea how to tell the good guys from the bad guys before they actually started shooting. It would be like walking down one of the streets at home, trying to decide whether the person coming towards you was Catholic or Lutheran. If you had to wait for someone to be shooting at you before you could fire back, you’d probably be dead even before you could pull the trigger. To do something like this was lunacy.
Jake heard an officer comment one evening that this fight was not about the Taliban, nationalism, or terrorism, but what he called “valleyism.” Jake didn’t say anything. He just listened, but reluctantly had to agree. These people only care about what is happening in their own valley. These Afghans have never known any central government and they’d never liked or tolerated any occupying force, whoever they were. He just couldn’t see how what they were doing would work. Whatever else was going on or whatever else people were being told, Afghanistan was not going to be easy.
There were comments from the British troops who were still in Afghanistan as part of the shrinking NATO coalition that, whatever they did or however successful the American offensive might appear to be, the fighting would be dropping off during the fall months no matter what happened. “As soon as the leaves start falling off the trees,” the Brits offered, “the Afghans fighters give up and go home, since they can be seen more easily maneuvering with the leaves gone. During winter nobody can fight, so the only way you’ll be able to tell if you are actually winning is to wait for the spring and see if the fighting starts up again at the same level that it ended. That’s the way it’s been here for the last 3,000 years. Nothing is going to change just because you guys are here with your gunships and armored personnel carriers. After all,” they would add with British understatement, “this is Afghanistan.”
Jake did guard duty when one of the captains went out to speak with a group of elders in one of the valleys. It was crazy. The captain talked about putting a paved road through the valley. It would allow the locals to make more money, to make them richer. But what the captain wanted was to have them help the Marines with security. If they did that, then the captain would bring all kinds of money and projects to the valley. Jake doubted that would ever happen and was put off that bringing lots of money to the valley was the reason they were there and getting killed.
Like all nineteen-year-olds, Jake was into music and an avid listener of tapes and disks from rap to country and western, including the oldies but goodies. There were days coming back from patrols that he couldn’t help but wonder if the new Twenty-first Century Creedence Clearwater version of “Waist Deep in the Muddy” that ended with “It will be a long dark night before this thing is done” didn’t say it better, and maybe more sadly, for his war than Pete Seeger had said it for Vietnam.
A week after the meeting with the elders, Jake heard that six U.S. advisors had been killed at an Afghan National Police Training Center near Kandahar. Apparently, a trainee had turned around at one of the rifle ranges and shot the six instructors dead. It baffled Jake, as it did the other marines who heard of the shootings, that anyone would be foolish enough to give an Afghan, trainee or not, a full clip of ammunition. Thirty rounds was just so stupid. Anyone in the 1/5 would have handed out one or two rounds at most. That way if they turned on you they’d only be able to kill one or two before they’d run out of bullets. What had happened at that rifle range was Alice in Wonderland stuff. Those guys who had been killed hadn’t even noticed that they had fallen down the rabbit hole.
The week Jake was promoted to corporal, he sent home a package of pictures that had been taken during his promotion while his unit was taking a rest and refit back at Camp Leatherneck. When his mother opened the envelope, the gritty dirt and dust of Afghanistan fell through her fingers onto the kitchen table. She stared at the small mound of grayish sand and started to cry.