15
BRITISH LIEUTENANT COLONEL: Your Marines
seem to have exceeded the ops plan.
U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICER: Well, of course.
They’re Marines.
THE MARINES ASKED for Helmand. United States Marine Corps forces had been in Afghanistan from the earliest days, with a brigade operating south of Kandahar in December 2001 and expeditionary units going in and out over the next seven years. With Iraq drawing down and the Marine effort in Anbar largely completed thanks to the Sunni Awakening, the commandant himself, General James Conway, sought a greater role in Afghanistan. Almost as soon as General Dave McKiernan requested more U.S. troops, in late 2008, Conway offered Marines. He requested one concession. The Marines wanted their own distinct area, like Anbar Province in Iraq.
Kandahar was the obvious place. But the Canadian brigade operated there. They knew the area, had paid for it with a lot of lives, and they wanted to keep it, at least in 2008 when Conway made his offer. Within three years, Canada reassessed and gladly handed it over to the Americans. But they weren’t there yet.
The British were. Having faced a buzz saw at Now Zad, Sangin, and Musa Qala in 2006, the British very much wanted help. Getting 10,672 Marines into north Helmand sounded great to the hard-pressed UK brigade. It would more than double the ISAF troop strength in the desert province. So the Marines went to Helmand.
Ruddy, pugnacious Brigadier General Lawrence D. Nicholson commanded the Second Marine Expeditionary Brigade going into Helmand. An ROTC graduate of The Citadel, a state military college in South Carolina, Larry Nicholson looked, talked, and led exactly like the Marine infantry officer he was. He had a lot of troop time, highlighted by command of Marines in the Balkans and Iraq. Nicholson had also been a United Nations observer in the Palestinian territories and had attended the NATO Defense College in Rome. As was becoming more typical of general officers in the age of Petraeus, Nicholson thought about his public image and cultivated it a bit more than most. But that was a secondary consideration. His mission and Marines came first.
Nicholson assessed the area and quickly identified Marjah as a problem, probably the biggest one in Helmand. The farming community of eighty thousand, seventeen miles southwest of the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, served as a Taliban base camp. Gunmen walked openly there. Buildings held stocks of arms and ammunition. Some houses served as IED factories. The Taliban dunned the locals, who harvested the vast surrounding poppy fields and refined some of the opium right in town. Drug money came easy in Marjah. The poppies grew well, a heritage of an irrigation-canal system tied to that moribund 1950s U.S. Agency for International Development Helmand River project. The Kajaki Dam remained unfinished, but the irrigation grid near Marjah watered a hell of a fine poppy crop. Taliban bomb planters had wired up all the trails, booby-trapped the little cement-slab footbridges over the drainage ditches, and planted traditional land mines along major dirt roads. British soldiers stayed out. Afghan soldiers did too. British aircraft even avoided overflying Marjah.
“If Marjah is the worst place you’ve got, let me go there first,” Nicholson said to McKiernan in early 2009. The four-star said no. He didn’t want a big, bloody battle during the August 20 Afghan election. Both men remembered well what had happened in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004. And Marjah smelled a lot like Fallujah in the bad old days. It offered a Taliban-liberated space full of cranky Pashtuns who would immediately scream to fellow southern Pashtun Hamid Karzai in Kabul. “It’s going to be too political,” McKiernan warned. “It’s going to be too big of a fight.” It all conjured up the admonition of Marine General Jim Mattis outside Fallujah, by way of Napoleon Bonaparte: if you’re going to go after an objective like Marjah, you need to take it. It wouldn’t do to get started and then back away. In the spring of 2009, the ISAF commander wasn’t up for it.
Now Stan McChrystal ran ISAF. He very much wanted to take Marjah, clear it, hold it, build it, and, in a new addition to the Bush-era formula, transfer it to the Afghans. At first, he wondered what good his strongest new contingent, the Marines, could do way out in Helmand. Then he saw the opportunity. Marjah was enemy-infested, isolated, and achievable. What worked there could also work in Kandahar and, later, points east. Following President Obama’s December 1, 2009, announcement of the troop surge, McChrystal recognized “there was an appetite for an operation with rapid, observable impact.” That became Marjah.
McChrystal pointedly followed his own orders. The assault wave included three Afghan battalions from the Third Brigade, 205th ANA Corps, as well as the Third ANA Commando Battalion (Afghan Rangers), and police elements. With the large Afghan contribution, the operation became known as Moshtarak (Dari for “together”), which had also been the name of two failed 2006 attempts to secure Baghdad and so was not exactly a good omen. This Operation Moshtarak would be different; committed to making it work, Stan McChrystal sought approval for it from the local elders at a public gathering in Lashkar Gah. He personally briefed President Karzai, asked for consent, and got it. He even arranged what he called a “government in a box,” a group ready to take over as soon as Marjah came under ISAF/Afghan control. Karzai appointed a new governor, picked out a new supporting cast, and made noises about going to Marjah himself after the fighting ended. ISAF promised funding for projects and services. ISAF also drew up a detailed media coverage plan. The world would see what happened in Marjah.
All of the preparations went on in full view of the Taliban. They watched as Marine and Afghan companies tightened the noose around Marjah, securing a line of platoon positions fronting the town. Leaflet drops announced the pending operation, and although literacy was uncommon among rural Pashtuns, word got around. Beat-up cars and trucks full of people and property clogged the roads out of town. Nearly 2,700 Marjah residents showed up in Lashkar Gah seeking shelter. A good number of Taliban left too. But hundreds stayed. The usual reports surfaced naming Arabs, Chechens, and Pakistanis among the holdouts, although, of course, almost all of the actual enemy fighters encountered turned out to be locals. The Taliban might have been being brave, or stupid, or arrogant, or perhaps they were just unwilling to accept that this time, ISAF meant it. Marine observation posts reported, drones filmed, and rumors circulated. Every night, shadowy figures put more bad things in the ground around Marjah.
Meanwhile, at corps level, Lieutenant General Rod Rodriguez lined up the forces. The detailed planning and mission execution fell to British major general Nick Carter, commanding RC-South. A peppy, pushy fellow, portrayed as dashing by the London press, Carter proudly styled himself “the Petraeus of the British Army” and fully embraced the July 2009 ISAF tactical directive. His operations orders included colorful language telling subordinate commanders to “discombobulate” the opposition and place the enemy “on the horns of a dilemma,” all while incurring “zero” civilian casualties. “Our young men and women refrain from using lethal force,” one of Carter’s staff officers said, “even at risk to themselves, in order to prevent possible harm to civilians.” Other than brief helicopter flights to a few quiet forward positions, Carter supervised RC-South from his large, well-appointed command post at the Kandahar Airfield. So be it. Day-to-day leadership in Marjah fell to Brigadier General Larry Nicholson. He was up to it, and had no intention of running things from some distant computer terminal.
Under Nick Carter’s willing thumb, Stan McChrystal’s micromanagement of lethal fires greatly constrained the entire undertaking. In their extensive preliminary reconnaissance, Marines identified dozens of hostile locations, all good targets, but, of course, all thoroughly interleaved with civilian homes and activities. Denied the usual preparatory airstrikes and artillery fires, Larry Nicholson and his Marines chose to clear Marjah from the inside out. They would employ helicopters to hop over the IED-encrusted outer layers surrounding the town and land in the hole of the Taliban defensive doughnut. The Marine Corps had pioneered vertical envelopment in the Korean War. In Marjah, they would draw on these long-established close ties between Marine aviators and infantry. Although McChrystal, ISAF, and RC-South surely telegraphed a lot of the punch, they had not disclosed its timing or exact nature. Prevented from using shells and bombs, Marine riflemen and Afghan askari (soldiers) would drop out of the night sky. Then they’d do the dirty work in the old style, house to house.
Marine Aircraft Group 40 dumped infrared parachute flares from circling KC-130 transports. A person on the ground would see nothing with the naked eye. Through their night-vision goggles, Marine aviators followed a string of flares that lit the way into the grid of canals and mud huts like streetlamps floating in the still winter air. The helicopters went straight into Marjah proper, delivering Company A and Company B of the First Battalion, Sixth Marines at 3:00 a.m. sharp on February 13, 2010. Each of the three-engine CH-53E Super Stallions inserted a platoon or so of Marines and Afghan soldiers. The men expected hot landing zones, given the estimated four hundred Taliban in town. Instead, the packed mud was cold, the dust minimal, and the starry night black and quiet. The temperature in the high desert hung in the upper thirties, damn cold for southwestern Afghanistan, even in mid-February. Dogs barked, but not an electric light or oil lamp shone. Marine riflemen and Afghan askari shifted their heavy loads, an average of seventy pounds of Kevlar body armor, water, and ammunition for the Americans, less for the thinner, slighter Afghans. The Marines aligned their night-vision goggles on the front of their helmets, turning the dark world of Marjah luminous green. Unopposed, they moved out.
Up north, somebody was shooting at the British Eleventh Brigade landings at Nad Ali. Marjah remained quiet, but the Taliban a few miles away tried to fight back. As he plodded forward, Lance Corporal Matthew W. Hunter glanced up and saw it. “I remember seeing those AA [antiaircraft] guns go off—that was the sign,” he said. “It clicked that this was real.” They weren’t really air-defense weapons, just Russian-made DShK 12.7 mm machine guns, the heavier cousin of the U.S. .50-caliber. But Hunter and his brother Marines got the Taliban’s message: Enemy advances, we retreat. But when it suited them, they shot on the way out.
To the southeast, Company C of 1/6 Marines didn’t enter by helicopter. They planned to come overland, across the grain of the north-south pattern of canals and footpaths. They knew better than to use the little cement bridges or the hard-packed trails. Their own patrols and constant surveillance identified so many known and likely IED locations that the Marines guessed it might take all day to walk a mile into town to link up with Company A. But to resupply their forces in Marjah, the Marines needed a ground route cleared. Company C got the task.
For weeks, the company had been holding a series of outposts, overwatching Marjah, getting ready. The enemy moved openly in front of them, and their foes’ constant digging probably wasn’t preparation for planting petunias. There had been clashes and losses, two Marines killed and three badly wounded by IEDs in a vicious late-January encounter. Marine first lieutenant Aaron McLean watched four unarmed Pashtun males with black flags taunt them from a mile or so away. The enemy knew that if they didn’t show weapons, the Americans couldn’t engage. “I didn’t call air to destroy that damn house,” McLean explained later. “I was too sick about our losses to argue rules of engagement.” The Marines watched and waited.
Now, at last, in the predawn darkness as the helicopters clattered away, the men of Company C acted. They walked slowly away from Outpost Husker, looking up through their night-vision goggles to see the marking lights of the departing helicopters heading back north out of Marjah, toward the long runway twenty-five miles away at Camp Leatherneck. The Marines shook out into a long, loose column. A point squad led the way. Four-man fire teams moved out two hundred yards to either flank. A trail team drifted back, turning around every ten steps or so like human gun turrets, keeping an eye out for unwelcome followers. You had to put out such teams or the men would gradually drift together into a long, single file, boot after boot, step after step, nobody watching anything but the back of the man in front of him. That’s when the Taliban usually opened fire. Good infantry units spread out and kept their security up. Sergeants saw to it. But it slowed progress.
So did the ground itself. On the photo map, the mile did not look too bad. There were only a few abandoned huts, easily skirted. The silent, black poppy fields stretched all around them, with little irrigation ditches every ten yards or so, bigger channels every thirty, and waist-deep waterways every hundred. Each watercourse had a knee-knocker wall rimming it. On the big canals, the mud wall rose up almost to your neck. You had to lean forward, grope for vegetation handholds, crawl up one side, splash across, then clamber out, with helping hands offered and accepted. The water was still, oily, and ice-cold. To avoid the IEDs, the Marines and their Afghan partners slowly staggered right across row after row of these water obstacles. The drier stretches meant walking through fields of waving poppies, wet, mud-streaked boot tops scraping through the premier opium-production fields of Afghanistan. It beat tripping off IEDs.
You had to walk carefully. The column stopped and started every few minutes. Each time it halted, the men took a knee or leaned up to an irrigation mud wall and propped their rifles over the top, scanning, waiting to pick up and move ahead. Using night-vision goggles meant looking at the route through a field of view about the size of a cardboard toilet-paper tube. Peripheral vision didn’t exist. That combined with heavy loads of gear affected your balance on the already uneven dirt. Marines slipped and slid on the clammy mud. The clatter of stumbling men marked almost every barrier crossed. Sometimes you heard some sloshing in the canals. People kept the cursing to themselves. Nobody talked except in whispers, to pass orders or send a radio report. The less heavily burdened Afghans, more at home in the rural night, moved confidently, heads up, pacing the slower Marines. Stop and start. On it went. Nobody hit an IED, though. Doing it the hard way was paying off.
By 6:30 A.M., gray light grew strong enough that the Marines could stow their night-vision goggles. As a rooster crowed, two shots cracked—Kalashnikovs, of course. Some of the Taliban must have stayed behind to face the attack. The Marines and Afghan soldiers dropped behind the canal walls. Nothing followed. The Marines slowly rose, like tired old men, dirt-stained, wet from the water, wary. They again started forward.
Another shot sounded. That was an American rifle. Word came back. The point man had shot an angry dog outside a farmhouse. Somebody seemed to be inside. The Marines asked for an Afghan fire team to come up and enter the house—the tactical directive über alles, of course. Everybody took a knee, facing “outboard,” as the Marines put it.
A series of AK shots hammered from straight ahead, from a canal bank, it appeared. The Marines and Afghans returned fire with rifles and machine guns. The Marines aimed, the Afghans less so, but better than usual. Of course, nobody really had a clear look at the bad guys. The field manual says that when you take shots like this, you should return fire at “known or suspected enemy positions.” Experienced riflemen learn to judge based on noise, muzzle flashes, puffs of dust, and just plain instinct. Those worked. When the Marines ceased fire after a few minutes, no more AK rounds came back. After about twenty minutes, a passing drone puttered overhead and sent pictures of three dead insurgents. When a search team found them, one had a handheld radio. All were armed.
The commander of 1/6 Marines, Lieutenant Colonel Calvin Worth, linked up with Company C about this time. His Company B and their Afghan teammates had just cleared the Koru Chareh bazaar in north-central Marjah. The happy askari ran up a big Afghan flag. Now Worth and his security team got with Company C to see how things were going on the outskirts of town.
Worth and his translator approached Jawad Wardak, the owner of the dead dog. Wardak’s single-story adobe house had dried poppies on the ground in front of it. Five young men, all unarmed, all delivering the standard Pashtun stink-eye, huddled behind Wardak. “I’m very sorry about your dog,” Worth offered. “Hopefully we haven’t done any damage to your home.”
“It’s no problem,” Wardak replied. He was saying whatever it took to get these Americans to move on. While Worth conversed, men of Company C found a ten-foot mud wall just south of Wardak’s home. The wall hid seventy explosive devices. Wardak shrugged—they were news to him. Sure.
As Marine engineers rigged up demolition charges to destroy the munitions, the American and Afghan infantrymen saddled up and moved on. Just to the west, they came across another waterway. More sure-footed in daylight, the Marines and the Afghan soldiers slid one by one down the sandy bank wall. Men kept their weapons up as they waded across the waist-deep cold water in the canal. Something didn’t look right about a house to the northwest. It had a dirt-wall corral out front. The point men thought they saw movement, but maybe not.
Maybe so. Crack. Crack. AK-47 bullets whipped overhead, followed by the rhythmic chugging of a PKM machine gun. The Marines scrambled up the canal bank and returned fire. Rifles and machine guns joined in. Worth immediately called for his mortars to engage. They did. Two, four, then six dirty-gray bomblets burst on the house. Nobody asked about civilians. The mortar hits finished off the enemy. The point squad, with Afghan soldiers in tow, found four dead Taliban in the house.
Those would turn out to be all of the day’s contacts, but naturally, nobody knew that then. So the column kept clearing structures, splashing through canals, and tripping over mud piles. Marine engineers behind them, tracing a parallel route, cleared the major trail into Marjah. They detonated IEDs and land mines by the dozen. It took until four thirty, almost sunset, before Company C linked up with Company A in the front courtyard of a smashed-up building near the shot-up Loy Chareh bazaar in the southeast corner of town. Marjah belonged to the Marines.
The inside-out ploy worked superbly. Company C’s coincident cross-country attack also surprised the Taliban. Cal Worth’s 1/6 Marines and their affiliated Afghans from the Third Brigade, 205th ANA Corps set up eleven checkpoints in key neighborhoods. While the British cleared out Nad Ali to the north, 3/6 Marines operated northwest of Marjah, and the Third ANA Commando Battalion and their U.S. Special Forces advisers worked in southern Marjah. Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi put out a press release avowing that they wanted to limit civilian casualties, so their tactics would emphasize “hit and run.” Thus far it had been mostly the latter. Enemy advances, we retreat.
The tactical directive reared its ugly head on February 14 when 3/6 Marines attempted to hit an enemy-held building in north Marjah. Hung up by hostile machine-gun fire, two men wounded already as they tried to close on the structure, the Marines called for a guided 227 mm (9-inch) projectile from the high-mobility artillery rocket system (HIMARS). The rocket resembled a JDAM bomb in that it followed GPS coordinates in order to strike within ten yards of the aim point. This time, the resultant shot hit on target, but either the spot was wrong or, more likely, the Taliban had shielded themselves among civilians. The Afghans immediately reported ten dead civilians, all women and children, of course. The Marines thought eleven had died. ISAF raised it to twelve.
In Kabul, General Stan McChrystal immediately suspended all use of HIMARS fires. The regular routine ensued: Karzai complaints, ISAF apology, compensation money paid, more screws cranked on the fighting units. Thereafter, Major General Nick Carter at RC-South decided that he had to approve any air or artillery fires. He did not approve many. For the Marines, who had traditionally relied on supporting fires of this sort, it was very awkward. Routine requests for fire degenerated into lengthy radio debates. Young riflemen paid the price.
Brigadier General Larry Nicholson and Sergeant Major Ernest Hoopi almost got a taste themselves. At midday on February 16, forward with their men as usual, the Marine leaders took a few moments for a symbolic gesture. They accompanied the new governor, Haji Abdul Zahir, into the Koru Chareh bazaar. Already in town to take charge of liberated Marjah, Zahir represented the government-in-a-box promised by McChrystal. Zahir knew about boxes. A returned expatriate, he’d spent four years in a German jail for stabbing his stepson. Now he strode through the market greeting his new constituents. Most extended their hands, curious and polite.
One elder was less than happy. “We are all Taliban here,” he growled. “You represent a corrupt and murderous government. I’ll give you a chance. But if you betray me, I’ll kill you and your entire family.” Zahir listened, unperturbed. He’d heard worse.
Somebody else chose that instant to deliver another opinion. A burst of AK fire erupted from a canal bank to the north. The Marines took cover, and the rifle platoon pulling security for the governor immediately returned fire. Sergeant Major Hoopi did likewise, moving to position Marines. One of them turned to him.
“Dad, I got it.” It was his son Sean, a lance corporal in Company L, 3/6 Marines. Sean Hoopi and his fellow Marines quickly cleaned up the episode. Nicholson, trailed by reporters, stood tall. He noted that such things happened. It was all part of clearing Marjah.
The few remaining enemy infiltrators bided their time. At dusk two nights later, as a platoon of 1/6 Marines prepared their night patrols in the courtyard of their outpost fronting the Loy Chareh bazaar, a single gunshot sounded. The enemy aimed at the rooftop bunker, threading the needle to strike a Marine inside. The round caught Lance Corporal Kielin T. Dunn right in the face. Four Marines pulled the stricken Dunn out of the lookout post. They got him downstairs and carried him out on an Air Force medevac helicopter. He didn’t make it.
His comrades returned fire in volume. Up on the roof, the gunners traversed the big .50-caliber machine gun, ripping bullets across the unoccupied buildings on the north end of the marketplace. The Marines called in 81 mm mortar rounds too. They even got permission to bring in an A-10 Warthog, an unusual concession from the RC-South headquarters. The A-10 unleashed its deadly 30 mm Gatling gun. The heavy shells tore the roofs off several mud huts. It probably did no good. The Marines never found a Taliban body, partly because nobody was exactly sure where the fatal bullet had originated from.
Taking Marjah and holding it that first week cost the lives of eight U.S. Marines and six Afghan soldiers and wounded nearly thirty. Three of the dead were Marine engineers, indicative of the congested belts of mines and IEDs lacing the fringes of Marjah. A hundred or so Taliban died, and the rest evaporated, submerging into the population from whence they’d come to wait for their moment. The Afghan askari fought, not exactly the way the Americans did, but well enough. The new Marjah district governor, Haji Abdul Zahir, was on the job, a start toward something that might evolve into governance. Satisfied, Stan McChrystal invited President Karzai to visit as he’d promised.
On March 7, the Afghan president arrived in Marjah with McChrystal at his side. It was Karzai’s show. An overflowing crowd of several hundred greeted Karzai in a mosque for a two-hour shura, a traditional Afghan meeting of the minds. The president experienced a reception similar to Zahir’s inaugural market walk. Giving evidence of how he got his job and why he kept it, the Afghan chief executive waded right in. He knew how to work a room. After a brief speech, he took questions and comments.
Most locals gave him respect. Some most vociferously did not. Karzai didn’t help his case by appearing alongside Abdul Rahman Jan, the predatory pedophile former police chief, and former governor and drug-smuggling kingpin Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, both known confidants of the Afghan president. When Karzai hailed the new civil authority, Haji Zahir earned a round of applause, mainly for not being the other two thugs. For a man who got scant credit from most Americans and little affection from most of his countrymen, Karzai showed moral courage in making the trip, the first by any senior Afghan not wearing a uniform and carrying a weapon.
The Marjah operation buoyed McChrystal’s spirits. He hailed it as a “litmus test for the validity” of the strategy. “On display was our ability to conduct effective counterinsurgency in Afghanistan,” he said. McChrystal also applauded the performance of ANA and ANP forces and the “Afghan government’s commitment and ability to bring legitimate governance to a skeptical population.” He didn’t oversell it—few buyers existed at this point in the war. But a win was a win. Kandahar would be next.
Success in Marjah, even a qualified success, still left one critical question in the mind of the ISAF commander. As McChrystal put it, “The action offered the chance to determine whether it was possible and appropriate to sharply limit the use of our overwhelming advantage in lethal fires.” Possible, certainly—that much was obvious. But was it appropriate?
You could never tell what the Pashtun villagers really thought. Afghans did not have much experience with polling. The farmers and herders often told canvassers what they thought the questioners wanted to hear rather than their actual beliefs. Yet postoperation polls in Marjah didn’t comfort those who subscribed to Stan McChrystal’s thinking. Despite all the “courageous restraint,” 96 percent believed “a lot of civilians” were killed in Marjah. Only 3 percent figured that changing the conduct of ISAF units would prevent Taliban recruitment. As a final kick in the teeth, 67 percent thought that NATO and the Kabul regime would not defeat the Taliban. These numbers didn’t deviate much, if at all, from findings in earlier years. If anything, they trended more negatively. Put bluntly, the objects of ISAF’s affection were not feeling the love.
ISAF’s men and women, especially those in fighting battalions, also had strong reservations, to put it mildly. This courageous-restraint business clearly rankled all but a few true believers or outright sycophants. Companies and platoons lost people trying to adhere to this policy. In the east, a U.S. attack triggered a horrific ambush in the Ganjigal Valley on September 8, 2009, costing the lives of five Americans and eight Afghans. The defense of Combat Outpost Keating on October 3, 2009, resulted in another eight U.S. dead and twenty-two wounded. Both of these brutal firefights underscored serious concerns with limiting artillery fires and air support. In each case, the freedom to engage known or suspected targets before the enemy closed in tight would have greatly limited friendly casualties and might have reversed the circumstances that brought on these desperate engagements. McChrystal’s solution, and that of his subordinates in RC-East, amounted to pulling back to larger populated areas and thus avoiding putting small units out in isolated positions. If only they could get the enemy to go along with this plan. Guerrillas by their nature look for little, separate elements. Missions and friction, complicated by awful terrain and unpredictable weather, ensured that platoons and companies kept ending up out on their own. Without ready firepower on call, the results promised to be ugly.
One ISAF NCO raised the question directly with the man himself. Staff Sergeant Israel Arroyo of the First Battalion, Twelfth Infantry, slogging through the poppy fields, vineyards, and drainage ditches in hotly contested Zharay District west of Kandahar, finally had enough. On February 27, 2010, he sent an e-mail directly to McChrystal. Arroyo stated that he understood what he called the ISAF “restraint tactic,” but “it is telling the men that they should not shoot even if they are threatened with death.” Having seen comrades fall already—seven killed and dozens wounded from the battalion in the last two, supposedly quiet winter months—Arroyo said that he and his squad “don’t want to lose any more.” He invited McChrystal to come without a large security team and go on foot patrol with Arroyo’s men. McChrystal accepted the invitation. Within two days, the general arrived at platoon Combat Outpost JFM in Zharay, ready to patrol.
McChrystal joined up with Arroyo’s squad. After a short briefing, the men strapped on their body armor, buckled their helmets, and leveled their carbines. Off they went, with the four-star in the column. It wasn’t the usual faked-up great-man stroll but a real mission. The general watched, listened, and learned. And he sweated. He had been out before with SOF raids. But this one was different. It went on and on, and it took something out of the men even in the temperate late-winter air. In the blazing heat of Afghan summer, it would be incredibly draining.
For hours, the men worked their way through claustrophobic grape fields. The Pashtun farmers in Zharay didn’t use trellises. Instead, to support the vines, they built row after row of head-high mud walls. Every field became an intricate waffle iron, a packed dirt and foliage maze with but a few entrances and exits. The Taliban knew it and aimed to catch the Americans in the narrow corridors between the mud walls. They put IEDs on the obvious turn points and exits, and then, out of spite, put them at random spots too. The ground played you false every time. It was like Chutes and Ladders with live bullets. “They could see eighteen inches to their left and right, and rarely more than fifty feet to their front or rear,” McChrystal later said. “Above, only a slice of sky.” Nothing happened that day. It usually didn’t. But when it did . . .
Afterward, the general sat and talked with the soldiers. Like Karzai visiting the citizens of Marjah, Stan McChrystal had both the physical courage to go out on the ground and the moral courage to try to explain himself to the skeptical riflemen. They still didn’t buy the new tactical directive, but they respected the general for coming to their outpost and walking with them. Arroyo thanked the general in person and then followed up and thanked him again by e-mail, a sentiment echoed in another e-mail sent to him by Corporal Michael Ingram, one of the squad’s aggressive fire-team leaders.
On April 17, a Taliban IED killed Mike Ingram.
A lesser man that Stan McChrystal would have sent a sympathy note and avoided a wrenching session with Arroyo and his soldiers. But Stan McChrystal knew he had to see these riflemen again. One of the hardest things for any commander is losing soldiers, and this loss hurt more than most. McChrystal took it hard. His second meeting with the squad, on April 28, became tense and emotional. The general listened more than he talked.
The men mentioned that their battalion had overinterpreted and amplified the ISAF tactical directive, making it even more restrictive. One 1–12 Infantry order directed squads and platoons to “patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourself with lethal force.” Which IED-dotted grape field would that be? Which hateful Pashtun village? Given such strictures, one soldier asked McChrystal what they were doing in Zharay. Another emphasized that he wanted to use preemptive fires. Better them than us, the private said. McChrystal warned the young men of the moral burden that comes with killing—even when the deaths are justified—and ended quietly with “don’t get cynical.” The troops listened, but their body language showed they did not, and likely could not, agree. The meeting ended in sadness.
To the general’s credit, these events did make him think. With this strategy of tactics, reducing the counterinsurgency to prevent civilian casualties, McChrystal had chosen an exceptionally difficult course. Men like Kielin Dunn and Michael Ingram paid for that decision with their lives. Because he truly cared for his people, Stan McChrystal paid in his way too, carrying a horrific weight that only those at his level truly understood. Staying steady under pressure, strong in sorrow, defines a commander. Though he definitely second-guessed himself, McChrystal did not modify the ISAF tactical directive. By McChrystal’s reckoning, it worked in Marjah. Kandahar was next. Maybe success there might make Ingram’s death count for something.
The poignancy of Stan McChrystal’s gathering with Israel Arroyo’s riflemen featured one jarring aspect. Among those in the small room at the platoon compound was Michael Hastings, a reporter for Rolling Stone. It didn’t seem right to have a journalist present for such a difficult personal discussion. But there he was.
Hastings was there with the general’s full agreement. The journalist had come warmly recommended by McChrystal’s personal press assistant Duncan Boothby, himself a well-connected civilian sent over by the ISAF commander’s media-conscious West Point classmate and NTM-A commander, Lieutenant General Bill Caldwell. Well, McChrystal didn’t know much about dealing with journalists, as his misadventures the previous fall had shown. You didn’t worry about such things in the SOF arena. McChrystal trusted Caldwell, though, and learned to value Boothby’s instincts.
Boothby saw a lot of good in Michael Hastings. The writer’s brother had served as an infantry officer in the Tenth Mountain Division. Hastings understood the military, having been embedded with line units in both Iraq and Afghanistan. His fiancée had died in a Baghdad ambush, a personal tragedy that sharpened Hastings’s fervent interest in the war. Perhaps emboldened by the media avalanche that accompanied, and by and large ably reported, the Marjah mission, he thought an in-depth article about the ISAF commander made sense. In addition, the idea of granting access to a writer from Rolling Stone appealed to McChrystal’s creative, unorthodox streak. Maybe he would make the cover of Rolling Stone, an unusual place for a general. Well, it was an unusual war.
Given what later transpired, many questioned the wisdom of granting continuous close contact to the representative of a publication better known for covering the likes of Snoop Dogg, Lady Gaga, and Bono. But McChrystal read widely and recalled that Rolling Stone also regularly published excellent political and cultural commentary. Hunter S. Thompson, Joe Klein, and William Greider had all covered elections and domestic politics for the magazine. Tom Wolfe’s colorful history of the early space program, The Right Stuff, started as a series in Rolling Stone. Michael Hastings seemed to be part of that tradition.
Hastings followed the ISAF commander in April and May of 2010, even accompanying him on a trip to Paris and Berlin. McChrystal and his personal aides didn’t get the usual fifteen-day rest-and-recreation leave given to every U.S. soldier who’d been in country for a year, so they tried to relax a little between meetings in Europe. McChrystal’s wife, Annie, flew over and joined him in Paris to mark their thirty-third wedding anniversary. She had seen her husband fewer than thirty days a year since 2003. In their off-hours, such as they were, McChrystal and his people drank and talked freely. Volcanic dust from an eruption in Iceland delayed air travel across Europe, prolonging the trip for a few days. Hastings took a lot of notes.
Most journalists understand that with full access to any senior figure comes the opportunity to hear loose talk. The military tells commanders that the press covers what’s said under several categories. On the record means that if you say it, they print it. On background allows a reporter to quote you as “a senior military official” or “a senior commander.” Off the record means they don’t print it word for word, don’t attribute it at all, but they gather the information. But the experts always warn you: Treat it all as on the record. Watch what you say.
Duncan Boothby never quite pinned down the rules for Michael Hastings. Stan McChrystal and his team thought their personal off-duty banter to be off the record. They figured that any quotations used had to come from the various official meetings that Hastings observed, including events like the blunt discussion at Combat Outpost JFM. Hastings decided otherwise. He personally liked McChrystal, found him impressive, and wanted to let him and his men speak for themselves. Most journalists would not have run with many of the quotations. But some would, and Hastings was one of them. In World War II, such warts-and-all reporting explained how General Joseph Stilwell became known as “Vinegar Joe” and why Dwight Eisenhower quailed almost every time George Patton spoke to reporters. The tolerance was higher back then with the world at war. And neither Stilwell nor Patton had offered thoughts about his commander in chief.
Hastings’s article “The Runaway General” appeared in the June 22 edition of Rolling Stone. Hastings characterized McChrystal as “a snake-eating rebel.” The writer offered a compelling description of the foot patrol and both meetings with Staff Sergeant Israel Arroyo’s rifle squad, gave good background on Stan McChrystal’s long service and ascetic personal habits, and commented on the general’s well-meaning attempts to limit civilian casualties. Nobody paid attention to those parts.
Instead, the trenchant, inflammatory pull quotes made the news. McChrystal said that Ambassador Karl Eikenberry “betrayed” him and “covers his flank for the history books.” Ambassador Dick Holbrooke was “a wounded animal.” National security adviser and former Marine four-star James Jones was a “clown” and “stuck in 1985.” President Hamid Karzai was “locked up in his palace the past year.” Senators John Kerry and John McCain were “not very helpful.” When Vice President Joe Biden’s name came up, McChrystal asked, “Who’s that?” An assistant replied, “Biden? Did you say: bite me?” Finally, the general called President Obama’s 2009 strategic review “painful,” a process that left him “selling an unsellable position.” He thought that the president was “uncomfortable and intimidated” dealing with the military leadership. Some words came from the ISAF commander’s own mouth. Most came from his staff. But the damage was done.
The published profile cold-cocked Stan McChrystal. “How in the world could that story have been a problem?” he thought at the time. The ISAF commander expected a gonzo portrait, sure—it was Rolling Stone, after all—depicting him out on patrol, consulting with NATO officials, dealing with Hamid Karzai, drawing up plans for combat operations, and so on. He was appalled to see word-for-word transcriptions of long-forgotten asides and trash talk. Stan McChrystal knew the old warning: Play with media fire, get burned. Hastings had charred McChrystal to a cinder.
In retrospect, Stan McChrystal faltered because he tried to be something he wasn’t. The success of Dave Petraeus inspired many, including McChrystal, to try it themselves. Yet the Petraeus touch with the press reflected a lifetime of calculated preparation. You couldn’t just show up after decades in the company of rough-hewn riflemen, let alone years in the shadows, and ride the tiger that was the contemporary American news media, not without a hell of a lot of homework, a generous scoop of good luck, and a nose for the media near ambush. Brains, bravery, devotion to duty, and love of soldiers weren’t enough. This explained why most soldiers, especially the senior ones, the George Casey and Dave McKiernan types, dealt with reporters only when they had to, said little, and moved on. You never really won with the press. If you stuck to your talking points, you didn’t make much news and broke even. But if you started yapping, well . . . Perhaps McChrystal should have read more closely the admonition offered by that other Rolling Stone contributor Tom Wolfe:
Every career military officer, and especially every junior officer, knew that when it came to publicity, there was only one way to play it: with a salute stapled to your forehead. To let yourself be turned into a personality, to become colorful, to be portrayed as an egotist or rake-hell, was only asking for grief, as many people, including General George Patton, had learned.
The ISAF commander immediately apologized, but that hardly quelled the ongoing media uproar in Washington. He well understood that this was the end. When summoned back to Washington by the president, McChrystal offered his resignation. Obama accepted it. First McKiernan, now McChrystal—Afghanistan was chewing through generals, all right.
With McChrystal gone and the Afghan campaign in a critical state as the first surge brigades arrived, only one man would do: General David H. Petraeus, architect of the 2007 Iraq turnaround, commander of U.S. Central Command, counterinsurgency guru, the first military man since Colin Powell whose name meant something to the average American. On the early afternoon of June 23, the president walked into the sunshine of the White House Rose Garden and introduced Petraeus as McChrystal’s successor. “He is setting an extraordinary example of service and patriotism by assuming this difficult post,” said Obama. Resplendent in his dress greens bearing numerous bright badges and row after row of ribbons, standing erect and pensive next to the president, Petraeus looked like a coiled spring, born ready for this moment.
Certain commentators referred to his new position as a demotion from overall theater command to running the Afghan war. They missed the larger point. With the good war hanging in the balance, America knew exactly whom to call. Like the song said, our nation turned its lonely eyes to him.