“Wheels up!” the air crewman yelled. He was nineteen years old, with a blond streak of hair trimmed high and tight. Only his accent revealed the cowboy beneath the shine and polish of military professionalism. The C-130 Hercules roared at 440 mph. It was able to go into dangerous terrain night or day, making it the workhorse of the U.S. military logistics network.
This was my third visit to Afghanistan in six months, and although it was getting to be routine, it wasn’t any less of a marathon. It was a sweaty and claustrophobic commute. I was thirsty, crammed inside with 125 other soldiers departing Ali al-Salem Air Base in Kuwait en route to Kandahar, Afghanistan. The 1,300-mile journey skirts Iranian air space and circles the shockingly beautiful Hindu Kush, a region most Americans will never see.
I was returning from an all-too-brief R&R at home with friends and family on a mid-deployment leave. At my departure, my mother cried as if I were going away for plebe summer while my dad maintained his typically stoic exterior even though he too was upset. I was returning to Afghanistan for another five months to support the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), an international coalition formed and maintained in response to the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks and in defense of other terrorist attacks in Madrid, London, and India. NATO had a UN mandate to establish good governance, internal security, and to sow the seeds of a democratic nation.
The touchdown at Kandahar Airfield was the culmination of a fancy combat landing. It felt like we were on a rollercoaster as the C-130 screamed high into the sky and then dropped low, finally swerving to a landing position. It is considered a combat maneuver because the plane shoots flares off the wings to distract any RPG strikes.
After helping unload the duffle bags, pallets of bullets, and rations, I called Maj. Fred Tanner, my best friend in country, to pick me up. As I waited with my body armor, an extra thirty pounds, I leaned against a protective barrier and thought back to the many unexpected twists and turns that had brought me, a Navy surface warfare officer, to this strange, remote place.
The opportunity had presented itself in July 2008. During a military fellowship at a think tank in Washington, D.C., I participated in a counterinsurgency (COIN) conference in which Afghanistan experts discussed U.S. policy. The guest of honor, Brig. Gen. John “Mick” Nicholson, presented lessons learned and battlefield perspectives from his recent command tour in eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar and Nuristan provinces. General Nicholson captivated the audience with tactical insights and a genuine compassion for the Afghanistan mission and purpose. He believed that the only way to win over the Afghan people was to fight side-by-side with them against the Taliban. The warrior spirit and trust are at the center of the Pashtu culture, and the people deeply respect their elders who survived the war with the Russians and later the mujahidin. In General Nicholson’s view, the best way to establish that trust was to fight, sometimes die, and soldier on with Afghan partners.
After the general’s talk, I approached him at the roast beef buffet line and introduced myself. General Nicholson stood 6 feet 3 inches and looked like he could run a mile in a respectable 6:00. He had salt and pepper hair, a weathered and tanned face, and piercing blue eyes.
“Your talk was outstanding, Sir. I understand you’re going to southern Afghanistan this fall. I’m going to Afghanistan in November. To Bagram,” I said.
“That’s great, Josh, what’s your mission?” he asked, speaking to me as though he had a personal interest in me. I was elated to think that he might actually want to know about my small part of the Afghanistan mission.
“I am going to be the public affairs officer for CTF-101, serving as a visitor’s officer,” I said. This admission was a bit embarrassing for me considering that Nicholson had just served fifteen months as a battlefield commander. In essence, I was going to Afghanistan as a travel agent, albeit one facing high risks. Serving as a visitor’s officer is not exactly Rambo duty, but it was closer to the fight, which was where I wanted to be. I sheepishly followed up: “It’s not great, but the best I could get as a Navy guy, and I want to be in Afghanistan.”
He could probably sense my dissatisfaction with the job. My best friends had already served two or three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I was anxious to get closer to the conflict. Still, I was caught off guard when he asked, “Wanna join my team?” Even though I had half imagined that approaching him might lead to some kind of opportunity, I never assumed it actually would. I stuttered, “Uh . . . My tour is six months, Sir, how long will you be going?” I was a little worried that he would say fifteen months. The time commitment was a constraining variable because there was only a twelve-month window in my career “pipeline” in which I could detour from my surface warfare trajectory. At the time I didn’t know that General Nicholson’s “team” consisted of only four other officers. This number seemed insubstantial relative to the task they were assigned to accomplish. As I would discover, General Nicholson had been given special tasking from the senior levels of the Pentagon to usher incoming forces to the southern region should U.S. combat operations surge in Afghanistan.
“At least a year. Are you in?” he responded in a way that implied that anything less than a year would be short. In that moment I felt as though I was being asked a fairly straightforward question: “Josh, do you, or do you not, have a spine?” This was my Rubicon, a moment that would undoubtedly change my life, but I took mere seconds to respond: “Sir, I’m in. Let’s do it, Sir.” It was the only correct response.
“Outstanding,” General Nicholson replied.
The time was August 2008, and although Barack Obama had not yet been elected president, the Department of Defense had already begun to focus more on Afghanistan than on Iraq, especially Afghanistan’s southern region. The new president, Republican or Democrat, would need to decide whether to send 17,000 more troops to Kandahar and Helmand provinces.
At the COIN conference, I had told General Nicholson about my experience as a military fellow and about the master’s degrees I had earned from the University of Maryland. I talked of my experience teaching political science at the Naval Academy and how I had proven myself as a capable communicator and staff officer. I’d also been at sea and had accumulated some “salt” as a surface warfare officer, particularly as an engineer officer in Yokosuka, Japan, managing the propulsion plant of a Navy cruiser. I was comfortable working in dynamic environments, and I had no problem doing grunt work. Maybe I would be a good fit to join his band of strategic planners.
General Nicholson filled me in on my new position. “Josh, you will have an important task. I want you to work in a SECDEF-endorsed Civil-Military Cell. It’s brand-new. You will operate side-by-side with other nations’ civilians and military officers and create a framework for economic development in southern Afghanistan. We start training with the NATO staff in Germany next month. I’ll work to get your orders changed. We need you there.” His small team consisted of three Army officers, a Marine lieutenant colonel, and now, me.
During the Afghanistan tour, I served as the CivMil Cell operation’s boss, energy analyst, agricultural adviser, general’s aide, infrastructure engineer, and strategic planner. With a tidal wave of soldiers and Marines inbound to Afghanistan, everyone, from the White House to congressional staffers, wanted to know more: What are the troops going to do? Where are they going to stay? How would we measure coalition success?
The team was General Nicholson’s brain trust, and he was the voice back to Washington on daily operations in Kandahar and Helmand. The CivMil Cell became the node for information flowing up to coalition headquarters and the U.S. embassy and outward to provincial reconstruction teams, those responsible for rebuilding civil society. We were not rugged combat arms officers on patrol, but we had an important mission: We were interlocutors for senior officials who needed to know how to allocate assets for the president’s renewed commitment to Afghanistan.
Australia, Canada, Denmark, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Romania were all key stakeholders and had participants in the CivMil Cell. During our NATO training in Germany months prior to deployment, we met experienced Afghanistan experts responsible for teaching inbound troops the social and economic dynamics of the region. Rodney Cocks, a former Australian army veteran working for the British government in Kabul, was a crucial link for General Nicholson as he established the first joint interoperability task force to address the nexus of crime, narcotics, and corrupt government officials. Sarah Chayes was also an irreplaceable adviser in Kabul. A former National Public Radio correspondent, she moved to ISAF headquarters to help advance good governance throughout the provinces. Both Rodney and Sarah would become close friends in-country and my knowledge-link to Kabul.
In ten months’ time, the U.S. secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the British prime minister, and the NATO secretary general all made trips to meet General Nicholson. In some of these meetings, I was a fly on the wall; in others I was a briefer and participant. My job put me face-to-face with congressional representatives and had me playing email tag with colonels in Kabul and Washington. Everyone wanted to know the plan, and we were the “subject matter experts” We did not, however, limit our communications to only senators, representatives, and colonels. We also talked to pomegranate farmers, grocers, Afghan contractors, foreign military staff officers, and non-governmental organizations to explain the tactical dynamics on the ground. Knowing the supply chain of the farmers or the value chain of exported goods fed into the detailed regional economic strategy that would enable a physical corridor, bringing goods to market to and from Pakistan.
Early in my tour, we befriended a U.S.-Canadian contractor working to improve pomegranate farming in rural areas outside Kandahar City. He worked with brave men who had been hardened by the elements and were desperate to have their contracts renewed by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). At one meeting in the RC-South Compound, I took notes as the growers briefed General Nicholson. Their pictures showed Afghans working on farms, nurturing and packaging pomegranates for export to Dubai. These men seemed genuine, but they were a few of hundreds trying to tap into the flood of aid provided by the U.S. government.
In some ways, my job was a bit like an MBA case study analysis combined with Hollywood event planning and a layer of danger to boot; we typically had to fly at low levels in a UH-60 Blackhawk to support off-base missions. We were always trying to further General Nicholson’s vision and affect positive Afghan-led change. Our focus areas were power generation, water development, and agriculture value chains. In addition, whenever a visitor was expected from abroad, oftentimes a well-known news anchor or columnist, the CivMil Cell would be asked to brief him or her on the “southern strategy” which was a comprehensive approach to stability operations and unified military and economic operations—shape, clear, hold, build.
As the workload increased for General Nicholson and my experienced British civilian boss, Philip Hatton, so did the output of the team. I frequently depended on skills I’d acquired at the Naval Academy for travel to remote outposts, dangerous convoys, and facilitating dialogue between Afghans and the coalition. When faced with a question at the Academy, we’d only been allowed five basic responses: “Yes, Sir.” “No, Sir” “Aye, aye, Sir” “No excuse, Sir.” “I’ll find out, Sir.” The most important lessons I’d learned as a plebe were resourcefulness and gumption, and they served me well on this tour.
The CivMil Cell’s mandate allowed the creation of a strategy that exceeded the boundaries of the formerly dominant provincial mindset. Helmand’s provincial strategy had been controlled by the British prior to 2009, and their counter-narcotics, agriculture, and security strategy had stopped at a border that most Afghan tribes did not in any case recognize. Kandahar province was managed by the Canadians, whose country had a tailored approach to reconstruction. Uruzgon and Zabul were controlled by the Dutch and Romanians, respectively. Meeting with key provincial civilian leaders, we brought together coalition partners at every turn and began to reap the benefits. Our coalition team developed detailed energy and agricultural analyses used to formulate President Obama’s Afghan strategy documents, which would later unleash economic opportunities in Helmand and Kandahar and all the way to Spin Boldak, the cross-border town and economic center linked to Pakistan.
As part of our analysis of the region’s resources, we took a closer look at the Kajaki dam, a strategic node for economic development in southern Afghanistan, but one that had had problems keeping the water flowing. Taliban fighters had planted improvised explosive devices along the roads leading toward the facility, and the Afghan government only had control of a five-mile radius of the facility. Our task was to assess the economic viability of the dam and prioritize its rehabilitation within the broader southern strategy.
Our post-Soviet helicopter circled the dam and began its descent into Kajaki. Andrew Scyner, a Canadian development specialist, 1st Lt. Russ Grant, an Army reservist handpicked by General Nicholson from IBM Strategy, and Marcus Knuth, a Danish civil affairs officer, were all part of the project team. Upon landing, we were picked up by a convoy of dilapidated trucks and driven a mile to the generator facility. Defense contractors lined the helicopter pad and were perched on the back of pickup trucks, ever vigilant of Taliban fighters, who were no fewer than three miles away.
For six hours we toured the facility. We went deep into the caverns of the sluicing system, along the bottoms of the fifty-foot generator consoles, and to the island tower eight hundred feet inward of the lake where the valve controls are managed. We were told that USAID had built the Kajaki dam in the 1950s and that a massive, electrical turbine generator had been installed in 1972. The foreman was Asad Fisulla, a fifty-six-year-old engineer who had been living and working around the plant since he was a teenager and could tell us what it had been like in the 1970s.
The facility was showing its age, but I could tell it was still highly functional. With only one turbine online, generator output was at fifty megawatts for all of Helmand’s and Kandahar’s 1.4 million residents. If the Taliban could be stopped from siphoning off power and destroying power lines, output could be tripled. Power was needed for economic growth, and economic growth was needed to get young Afghan men away from the madrasas where they were training to be Taliban fighters. The NATO generals had to decide whether high casualties were worth the risk to escort the remaining material up to Kajaki to repair the dam.
I realized that I was inspecting more than just a dam; I was inspecting the potential of a society to reinvent itself. Our team knew that reconstruction was desperately needed for the area to sustain any industrial development. In the end, we advised that the coalition subsidize generators rather than risk lives trying to clear the area leading to Kajaki.
In the final days of my time in Afghanistan, when our team needed more troops, I was reminded of the real sacrifices of military service. General Nicholson often said, “Things in the South will get worse before they get better. There will be more casualties when the U.S. sends in more troops” The high-level briefings, the grueling trips to the outer provinces, and the fear felt while serving in a combat zone do not compare to the grief of having a comrade killed in action. During my tour, I watched more than fifty coalition troops flown out in caskets.
In late June 2009, a West Point 2002 graduate and three soldiers from Crazy Horse Company died from an IED attack. A week later, a British combat engineer and friend, Ben Babbington-Browne, was lost in a helicopter crash outside Kandahar City. By the end of the month, July 2009, the surge of Marines who deployed lost their first soldier in Helmand province.
The funeral ceremonies, or what we called ramp ceremonies, tore at my heart. Whenever one was held, no matter what time of day, the entire base would shut down to pay last respects to the fallen. In the early part of my tour, I attended several midnight formations in subfreezing temperatures. In July, ceremonies continued even though it was a blistering 115 degrees on the tarmac. The eulogies were read in the casualty victim’s native language, and we all saluted the heroes as they made their final taxi out of Afghanistan.
I vividly recall the Dutch sergeant major barking with a thick accent, “Haand . . . Sal-oote.” Immediately, twelve hundred soldiers snapped upward with sharp salutes in honor of their fallen colleague. We sweat together as we held the salute. On my left was Jason Lewis-Berry, a Portland native who had left the moviemaking industry to be a State Department stabilization officer. On my right was Vicki Ferg, a Canadian reservist on a four-month rotation. Behind me stood Brian Madden, a USNA 2002 graduate, EOD supply officer, and the former star quarterback of the Navy football team. The composition of the group was surreal. How did we all end up here?
It didn’t matter. We were reminded of our common purpose as we held a bicep parallel to the deck and a forearm canted at a forty-five-degree angle. As we listened to another nation’s national anthem, we were all swelling with sadness for a fallen comrade and pride in our service. The sacrifice would be respected and remembered.
“Ready, Toooo. Troops—Fall out.” Time to get back to work, the mission must go on.
