The heat and humidity made the summer fighting even more challenging. It seemed that we could not drink enough water to keep up with what we lost under our body armor.
I watched Afghan children play cricket until they were sweaty and hot, then jump into the Kunar River to cool off. It reminded me of my own childhood. When I was just a little boy growing up in north Georgia, the sun would not just shine; it bore down into our skulls, heating our brains to unhealthy temperatures, which in retrospect may explain a lot of things. Sweat turned the dirt on our faces to mud, and our clothes clung like loose skin to our bodies. We didn’t know any different, had never experienced anything different, so we played on. Shade trees did not provide a refuge like they do out west where the heat is dry. Sweat did not drip; it drained down our shirtless torsos and collected like a sponge in our underwear, where it turned Fruit of the Looms into sandpaper that chafed our thighs with each stride, yet we played on with no hope for refuge.
On those summer days, days when a front-yard baseball game was more important than the World Series, since the Braves were already out of it, we walked to my mama’s little store, and she gave us each a Push-Up. That orange sherbet was manna for the soul—a gift from the very God that put that sun in the sky to cook our skin and turn our sweat to salt. It made me happy, as happy as a boy could or needed to be. Satisfied, we’d wipe our faces with the backs of our hands and return to the game.
Like the Afghan kids, we didn’t have air conditioners, so we jumped in the Coosawattee River or took turns squirting each other with a garden hose. I was reminded that no matter where you go, even in a war zone, children are children. What a blessing.
When we landed at our FARPs, soldiers ran out to the helicopters with an ice-cold bottle of water in each hand. It was delightful, like cool sheets on warm summer nights. We lined the dashes of our helicopters with water bottles; we dropped cases of water out the door of Kiowas to infantry patrols below, and we constantly beat the drum for our soldiers—“drink, drink, drink,” we told them.
The summer was filled with fight after fight, medevac after medevac. Apaches and Chinooks remained consumed with support to operations at Barg-e Matal, and the enemy in the Kamdesh Valley grew more and more emboldened. On the darkest of nights, when the complete absence of light made the deep crevasses of northern Kunar and Nuristan inexplicably uncomfortable, we flew into the cracks of the earth hoping that the eerie black veil of darkness would protect us, that the evil that lived there would not see us. Words cannot describe the utter absence of light in those deep valleys, valleys with no electricity reaching them, with no visible light other than the stars that dotted the sky like tiny holes in the floor of heaven.
Despite the heat, the danger, and the fierce pace, morale remained high across the task force. I love soldiers. They never cease to amaze me with their ability to have fun even during the toughest of times. They also provided many light moments in an otherwise stressful environment. You never know what you might see around soldiers.
I was raised to adulthood in a tribe of storytellers. It was in my blood. My people told stories for entertainment, some of which originally began as truth but over time transformed into beautiful yarns that retained only shades of the original tale. “There never was a story worth telling that didn’t deserve a little embellishment,” my grandfather would teach me. I learned the rudiments of tempo, tone, volume, and animation at his knee. It was an art I felt compelled to keep alive. And so I often told stories about coon hunting by lantern light, frog gigging in snake-infested ponds, and of course army stories, countless army stories. But what I found interesting over the years was that soldier stories rarely require embellishment. They stand alone as astonishing and almost unbelievable. You just can’t make this stuff up.
One night I woke up around 2:00 A.M. and had to go to the latrine. Our latrine was located in a mobile trailer about twenty-five meters from my hooch. I put my headlamp on and stumbled out the door half asleep, being careful to watch for snakes. When I entered the latrine two soldiers snapped their heads in my direction to see who it was. I suspect they had chosen 2:00 A.M. in hopes that no one would walk in on them. When they saw it was me their expressions gave it away: Great, it’s the commander.
To be honest they startled me too. One big, burly, shirtless soldier was bending over with his hands on the sink. He had a big fluffy white ring of shaving cream all over his neck and back, which was covered in a rug of hair that would have made a grizzly bear envious. The other soldier was standing behind him with a razor in his hand.
“What are you boys doing?” I asked.
Feeling a sense of responsibility, the soldier being shaved spoke up. In a humble, innocent, almost embarrassed tone he said, “Sir, my back’s hairy. My dog tags get caught up in all that hair, and it hurts. I can’t reach back there, so my buddy is shaving it for me.”
The other soldier looked at me and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, What are you gonna do, sir? He needed help, and I am his buddy.
While I had caught them in a compromising position, and it was quite comical, I was actually touched by the event. I went back to my room and laid down thinking about them. Very few Americans have ever experienced anything like that, to have to rely on their buddy to do things many would consider almost intimate. It was such a quintessential soldier moment. Soldiers will do just about anything to help one another out, and that’s one of the things I love most about a soldier.
I also realized that our soldiers, like me, were trying to comprehend the plight of the people we were there to help. One evening my copilot and I flew home from a mission in silence. For six hours we had covered a resupply mission just south of FOB Bostic. Several times during the flight he had mentioned the people and how he felt sorry for them. About halfway down the Kunar Valley he broke the silence. “They sure are poor,” he said matter-of-factly.
I could tell it had been on his mind for some time. I really didn’t know how to respond to that statement. I had thought about it, quite a bit, in fact. It was clear that they did not possess much materially. That’s how we Americans tend to measure wealth, on a scale from nothing to more than any man ought to have, but I knew better. I grew up in the Appalachian foothills of northern Georgia. My father worked in the cotton mills most of his life, risking fingers and arms around looms every day. When I was a young boy he cleared $26 a day working an eight-hour shift. It wasn’t until I was grown that I truly realized how poor we were. I could easily look to neighbors up and down the old country road we lived on and find someone who had less than we did. The thing is, we didn’t consider ourselves poor. Sure, there were things we wanted and could not afford, but that was the way with everyone we knew. The fact is, we were happy, and I’m not exactly sure how that factors in on the scale of wealth.
As I thought about what my copilot said, I wondered if these seemingly poor Afghans were happy; certainly the kids appeared to be so. How do you define a man’s wealth when he piles up a house from rocks he gathered on a mountain, when he sustains his family on a little grain he grows in a terraced patch of dirt, a few vegetables, and goat’s milk, and on special occasions a chunk of lamb’s meat?
They didn’t have to worry about the Dow Jones Average or the price of beef at Kroger. Their biggest concern for generations had been which empire or neighboring country would invade their lands. Following the Soviet war their burden grew to include extremist groups who bullied them and used their country as a safe haven from which to project global terrorism. We were there to do something about that, but since they had been occupied by foreign military forces for centuries, it was easy to see how they might be distrustful, have doubts and concerns about our long-term goals in their country.
Suddenly, I felt much better. I’d seen families working together in fields, swimming in the river, kids playing cricket and cooking over an open fire. I’d seen bare-chested boys chase me, waving, or throwing rocks at me; it didn’t really matter. Their brown skin stretched over bony frames that had never seen excess, never known abundance; they stood in stark contrast to most American children today. I figured those people had the one thing that truly made a family happy—love. Their lives would improve in due time. I was sure of that. The tide of literacy would eventually flood their valleys, and their lives would change, but my heart did not ache for them, because I saw families working and playing together every day—something that perhaps we, with all of our technology and modern-day conveniences, ought to pay more attention to. I looked to the east and saw beautiful snowcapped mountains, something you might see on a Christmas card. If they were deprived, it was in some ways rewarding to see people so poor living in a land so rich with beauty.
“They are poor in some ways,” I told my copilot. “Rich in others.”
* * *
Historically, the fighting season began to wind down in the fall, as the snows piled up in the mountains and began to breathe frosty air down into the villages. The snows had not quite begun to fall, but we had survived a long, hard fighting season and openly hoped for a lull in the action. Jack, Jillian, and I often sat in my office discussing what remained to be completed before we returned home.
“We’ve got less than ninety days left,” I said. “We’ve gotta get out of Barg-e Matal.”
“We’d better get out because we’re setting patterns and the intelligence intercepts clearly show that the enemy gets it. We’re flying over that mountain too much. We fly over it every day going back and forth. There’s also a village just north of COP Keating that is supporting the fight in Barg-e Matal, and attacks on Keating and Lowell in the Kamdesh. I think they live in that village and climb up on the ridge to observe us and control attacks at Barg-e Matal and in the Kamdesh. I’ve got this horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. The Kamdesh is going to be a problem,” Jillian said.
“Flying over that mountain is the only option other than flying right down the valley to get up there,” I said.
“I know, but the enemy is studying us. All they used to talk about were Chinooks. They wanted to shoot a Chinook down, but now we’re getting a lot of intercepts in which they are talking about targeting Apaches. I think that is because they have watched us and we’ve set a pattern,” she said.
“Well, if we can get out of there by the end of September, then we’ve got two new-moon phases left to close Keating, Lowell, and Fritsche. We can get it done if we prep everything ahead of time,” Jack said.
“I’d really like to get out of the Korengal as well,” I told him.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen, sir. We just don’t have enough time.”
“What sucks is that we have no flexibility anymore. Every airplane on the ramp is tasked out every day. We can’t even take a team of Kiowas and spend a day watching the passes into Pakistan,” I said, kicking my feet up on my desk.
Jack sat on the couch in his physical training uniform. His hair was oily, giving away the fact that he hadn’t showered or slept in a day.
“We had no idea how great life was when we first got here. We were full of ideas and had plenty of helicopters to go play with. Then the fighting season kicked off, then Bergdahl, then Barg-e Matal, and now we can’t even get a supply convoy to Bostic without surging the entire brigade to secure it,” Jack said.
“Do you think we can get out of the Kamdesh in October and November?” I asked him.
He furrowed his brow to support his confidence. “Yes, sir. I think we can.”
“I don’t know. Every time we go in there just to deliver mail, fuel, food, and water we get shot at. I don’t know how many turns we can get in per night. If we stack ISR, lay artillery on every location from which they could shoot at us, and use Apaches, we might get three or four turns before it gets too dangerous to go back in. I just don’t know,” I said.
ISR is intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. There are various manned and unmanned ISR platforms, which allow us to gather intelligence and watch the objective area with full-motion video. ISR is managed at the RC level, so we’d have to get CJTF-82 at Bagram to make us the priority for both months.
“Well, there will come a point during the move when we are committed, and there is no turning back. The ground guys will have to determine what that point is, but once we begin the retrograde and get enough men, weapons, and equipment out, it will be too dangerous to leave only a few guys on the ground, so we will have to finish it one way or another,” he said.
“Yeah, I know.”
We actually did begin to lean forward and retrograde some of the equipment from the FOBs in the Kamdesh as early as July, but we did not have permission to close the bases. Two thousand and nine was a presidential election year in Afghanistan, and President Obama was awaiting General McChrystal’s initial assessment of what it would take to complete the mission in Afghanistan. We knew that President Obama would use General McChrystal’s assessment to formulate his guidance for how America would proceed. No one wanted to get ahead of the president by closing a bunch of bases, which would be certain to make the headlines, nor did we want to create the perception that we were abandoning Nuristan right before the Afghan election. It was a very complex situation. We understood the political conditions, but it was extremely difficult to explain it to soldiers who were fighting for their lives day and night in an area that they saw as making no progress. If living and fighting in a small, remote outpost wasn’t difficult enough, the situation was made worse by the fact that they often did not get resupplied.
Our Kiowas were constantly fighting throughout the Kunar. The actual final resupply missions—Chinooks delivering supplies to the outposts in the Kamdesh—were only one piece of the equation. Supplies were first moved to Jalalabad by air and land. We did not have the air resources available to fly supplies from Jalalabad to FOB Bostic, but even if we had, it would not have been feasible to execute aerial resupply missions from Jalalabad all the way to the Kamdesh. The problem lay with the enemy forces between COP Monti, just north of Asadabad, and FOB Bostic.
The stretch of road between COP Monti and FOB Bostic is very narrow. It hugs the mountain on the west side of the road, and the river on the east side. Our local Afghan supply truck convoys were often ambushed along the narrow stretch of road between Monti and Bostic as they attempted to make their way north.
Terrain is not neutral. Whoever holds advantageous terrain has the upper hand. In this case the terrain was ideally suited for a handful of fighters to take out an entire convoy of trucks. They would lie in cracks between rocks on the cliff that towered above the single-lane road. When the convoy drove into the enemy’s ambush they simply shot the lead and trail vehicles with RPGs. This disabled the vehicles and trapped the remainder of the convoy. If someone did not immediately push the lead vehicle off the road and into the river, the enemy would begin shooting vehicle after vehicle, working from both ends of the convoy toward the center.
There wasn’t enough room to turn a truck around, and rarely enough room to squeeze by a disabled vehicle on the mountain side of the road. I once watched a panicked soldier who was being shot at try and get around a disabled vehicle on the river side only to have the riverbank give way under his vehicle. I had watched thirty trucks burn on that stretch of road as armed fighters ran from vehicle to vehicle shooting them with RPGs and killing local drivers who were brave or dumb enough to remain with their trucks. It was difficult for us to assist because they attacked from positions so close to the vehicles.
I remember flying over a convoy one day when enemy fighters shot the lead vehicle. The truck was instantly transformed into a ball of flame. There was no way to get around it. The driver sat gunshot in his seat as the burning truck consumed him. The local drivers had begun the movement with good intervals between trucks. They kept about thirty meters between them as they drove, but when the lead vehicle was shot they closed the gap until they were bumper to bumper with no possible way to turn around.
They were stuck and no one knew what to do. The driver in the second vehicle was scared to try and push the burning truck off the road with his truck, and he could not get around him or turn around. So, they all just sat there. That’s when I saw three men appear in front of the burning vehicle. They had rifles in their hands. I knew it was the enemy, but they were too close to the other vehicles to shoot. They quickly moved to the second truck. The driver saw them coming, but it was too late. He tried to get out of the truck and run, but they shot him before he made it to the back of the truck. I can see it like it was yesterday. He fell to the ground, and his white shirt slowly transformed to crimson red as he bled out.
Suddenly, the drivers of all the other vehicles exited their trucks and ran for their lives. The trucks sat lined up, idling with no drivers. The enemy then set all of the trucks on fire.
Jack and Jillian walked into my office one night after a convoy had been ambushed. They plopped down in chairs, slight grins on their faces, and stared at me.
“So I take it you two have colluded, and you’re here to gang up on me,” I said with a smile.
“No, sir,” Jack said in his ever-pleasant tone. “We’re just wondering what it will take before we figure out how to get supplies to Bostic without them going up like a Roman candle.”
“It’s the ideal spot for an ambush, and they know it,” Jillian said. “They are not idiots. They know the terrain better than we do, and they know we can’t do anything to stop them along that stretch of road. We have to clear the route in force,” Jillian added.
“I know. I get it, but the brigade is stretched thin in every location with Barg-e Matal on the plate,” I said.
“The only way to get this done is to commit a ton of resources to it. Otherwise, every convoy we send up to Bostic is going to wind up torched and in the river,” Jack said. “The guys at Keating, Lowell, and Mace are running out of supplies every few nights because we can’t get them to Bostic. We’ve got to find a way to get the convoy up there,” he added.
“Well, more helicopters won’t do it. I was up there last week, and I was all over the top of the convoy. They were attacked from point-blank range. Dudes with RPGs were right on the side of the road. I couldn’t shoot without risking hitting our guys or the truck drivers,” I said.
Jillian raised her brow and in a slightly sarcastic yet playful tone said, “Like I said, they aren’t idiots.”
“You’d think they’ve done this before. Like with the Russians,” I said. “So what do we do?” I asked, and looked directly at Jillian.
She took a big gulp of air, puffed out her cheeks, and blew it out. “Well, I don’t know, other than add more forces. We have to secure the route,” she said.
Jillian, my intelligence all-star and intellectual nonconformist, could accurately predict what the enemy would do, but she had few ideas about countermeasures other than “secure the route on the ground.” In truth I knew it was just that simple. It would take a significant amount of resources just to move supplies from Fenty to Bostic, but we couldn’t come up with any other suggestions, so that’s what I offered to Colonel George.
I vividly described to him how the enemy attacked the convoys. I told him everything I had seen while flying the missions. He got it, but he also understood that it would take several platoons to secure that short stretch of road, and he didn’t have infantry platoons just sitting around.
I could tell that he was frustrated, but he never openly showed it. He never got angry, never lashed out at others in frustration. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking the same thing I was. If we had never gone to Barg-e Matal we’d be out of the Kamdesh, and we would not have this problem. But, as my grandfather used to say, “If a frog had wings he wouldn’t bump his rump when he jumped.” Colonel George agreed that we had to do something, so it became a brigade operation.
We added convoy security vehicles—U.S. soldiers in gun trucks. We drove the convoys to Jalalabad during the day, then waited until dark to continue on to Bostic. We used the darkness and our night vision systems to our advantage. A large combat force picked up the resupply convoys at COP Monti. Meanwhile, soldiers occupied observation posts on the high ground above the route, while others manned checkpoints all along the route. We used two Kiowa teams to cover them, so the convoy always had coverage during their movement. We coordinated for close air support, but it was hard to use them in an attack mode because the enemy was always so close to the convoys. It took a lot of combat power away from other operations and made the resupply process go painfully slow, but we had no alternative.
While we struggled to get supplies to Bostic, and it frustrated me to no end, intelligence sources indicated a growing threat in the Kamdesh.
“Sir, they are looking for another Bari Ali event,” Jillian told me. “We are intercepting a lot of communications. They constantly talk about trying to overrun an outpost.”
Lieutenant Colonel Brad Brown had also been paying close attention to the threat reporting. He knew the danger to his men in the Kamdesh. He desperately wanted to add more combat forces to Lowell and Keating, but he was forced to use what men he had to try and secure the resupply convoys. In a thirty-day period Brad lost six platoon sergeants and a platoon leader, severely wounded or killed, securing the resupply convoys between COP Monti and FOB Bostic. We desperately needed out of the Kamdesh, but first we had business with Abdul Aziz.