For every technological advantage held by the Americans, the Taliban seemed to have an equivalent or a countermeasure. Apache helicopters have thermal imaging that reveals body heat on the mountainside, so Taliban fighters disappear by covering themselves in a blanket on a warm rock. The Americans use unmanned drones to pinpoint the enemy, but the Taliban can do the same thing by watching the flocks of crows that circle American soldiers, looking for scraps of food. The Americans have virtually unlimited firepower, so the Taliban send only one guy to take on an entire firebase. Whether or not he gets killed, he will have succeeded in gumming up the machine for yet one more day. “Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult,” the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote in the 1820s. “The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction.”
That friction is the entire goal of the enemy in the valley; in some ways it works even better than killing. Three days later we’re in the mechanics’ bay waiting for the Pech resupply to come in, two Chinooks that run a slow route through the northeast every four days picking up men and dropping off food and ammo. Tim and I are leaving the valley, and the Pech is our way out. The men are on edge because the sniper has been at it all morning, and when the first Chinook comes in, it immediately takes fire from across the valley. A bullet goes up the gunner’s sleeve without breaking his skin and exits through the fuel tank. It was supposedly his first combat mission. After a while a Black Hawk makes it in and drops off the battalion commander, Colonel Ostlund, who strides across the LZ flanked by several officers and two Al Jazeera journalists in powder-blue ballistic vests. One of the officers sees us crouched behind the Hescos and realizes that something must be up. “DO WE HAVE A SITUATION HERE?” he shouts over the rotor noise.
Once again, a couple of guys with rifles have managed to jam up an entire company’s worth of infantry. Ostlund and his staff get back on the Black Hawk and head across the valley for Firebase Vegas. I’m standing next to a tall Marine named Cannon who tells me that the war here is way more intense than most people understand. While we’re talking the shooting starts up again, a staccato hammering that I now recognize as the .50 out at Vegas. Cannon is wearing a radio and gets a communication on the company net that I can’t quite understand.
“Vegas is in a TIC,” he says.
The mortars start firing and an A-10 tilts into its dive and starts working the Abas Ghar with its chain guns. A minute later Cannon’s radio squawks again. “One wounded at Vegas,” he repeats for me, and then, “The platoon sergeant was shot in the neck, he’s not breathing.”
Hunter, who is standing near us, overhears this and walks away. He’s a team leader in First Platoon and knows the sergeant well. His name is Matt Blaskowski, and he’s already received a Silver Star for dragging a wounded comrade to safety during a six-hour firefight in Zabul. A while later Cannon gets another radio update.
“He died on the MEDEVAC bird,” he says.
Neither of us could know this, of course, but Cannon himself would be dead in a couple of weeks, shot through the chest during an ambush outside Aliabad. I was already in New York when I heard the news, and I know this is a stupid point, and obvious, but for some reason that was when I realized how easy it was to go from the living to the dead: one day you hear about some guy getting killed out at Vegas and the next day you’re that same guy for someone else.
Apaches finally come in and clear the upper ridges. Two days later I’m at the Delhi airport waiting for a flight home.
BOOK TWO
KILLING
We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
— Winston Churchill (or George Orwell)
1
SQUAD AND PLATOON LEADERS GATHER IN AN unfinished brick-and-mortar at the top of the KOP, tense and quiet in the hours before the operation. It’s called Rock Avalanche — a play on the battalion nickname — and will probably be the biggest operation of the deployment. The men will be going into some of the most dangerous places in the valley looking for weapons caches and infiltration routes, and what happens over the course of the next week could well determine the level of combat in the valley for the coming year. The men sit on a low bench next to an orange Atika cement mixer under steel rafters that do not yet have a roof and wait for Kearney to begin the meeting. In the front row is Rougle, the Scout leader, and then Stichter and Patterson and Rice and McDonough and Buno, all from Second Platoon. Men from the other two platoons stand and squat along the walls. They’re in their body armor and most of them have wads of chew under their lower lip. They’re so clean and well-shaven, they could almost pass for rear-base infantry.
Kearney stands before them with a rake in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other and reading glasses jammed crookedly under the rim of his helmet. At his feet is a sandbox that has been sculpted into a rough three-dimensional model of the Korengal. Cardboard cutouts of Chinooks dangle from strings where the air assaults will go in. The first phase of the operation is a sweep of Yaka Chine, one of the centers of armed resistance in the Korengal. Much of the weaponry that comes into the valley passes through Yaka Chine, as do most of the local commanders, and there is every reason for the men of Battle Company to think they’ll wind up in the fight of their lives. Second Platoon will get dropped off at a landing zone code-named Toucans and move in from the south. First Platoon will get dropped east of town and hook up with Second Platoon near a building complex nicknamed the “Chinese Restaurant.” From a distance, through binoculars, the building’s cornices are ornate and seem to curve upward in a way that suggests the Far East. It’s supposed to be the location of a major weapons depot.
“The other area we’re going to have to focus some of our efforts on is going to be the lumberyard,” Kearney says, pointing with his rake. “The lumberyard is where we believe that there is a lot of the caches, and it’s kind of the battle handover spot for the guys coming from the Chowkay Valley into the Korengal and then pushin’ it through Yaka Chine, where they end up divvying it up to the different subcommanders.”
Piosa comes forward and explains what Second Platoon’s task and purpose will be, then calls on Rice and McDonough and Buno to go into more detail for each squad. Rougle stands up and walks around to the top of the sandbox and points where the Scouts will come in and what their role will be in the operation. The radio call sign for the Scouts is “Wildcat,” and Rougle tells the rest of the company what the Wildcat element will be doing: “We’ll be occupying somewhere in this vicinity,” he says, gesturing with a pointer. “We’ll find a good place where we can set up the Barrett and the twenty-five. We’ll also be holding overwatch on the lumberyard.”
The Yaka Chine operation is expected to take twenty-four hours, and then the men will be picked up by helicopter and dropped on the upper slopes of the Abas Ghar and an intersecting ridge called the Sawtalo Sar. There’s intel about cave complexes up there and weapons caches and supply routes that cross over to the Shuryak and then on into Pakistan. The largest cave is supposed to have electricity and finished walls and a boulder at the entrance that can be moved into position with a car jack. When the fighters want to disappear, they supposedly jack the boulder into place from the inside and wait until the danger has passed. Chosen Company will be blocking enemy movement in the Shuryak Valley, to the east, and Destined will be in the Chowkay, to the south. The men of Battle Company will be on unfamiliar terrain with enormous loads on their backs chasing a fluid and agile enemy, and almost every advantage enjoyed by a modern army will be negated on the steep, heavily timbered slopes of the Abas Ghar.
Caldwell tells the men that if there’s no air they’ll be walking, but no one laughs because they’re not sure it’s a joke. Could the Army be dumb enough to make them walk the entire valley and then climb the Abas Ghar with 120 pounds on their backs? Each man will carry enough food, water, and ammo for a day or two, and after that they’ll be resupplied by
“speedball”: body bags of supplies thrown out of moving helicopters. There will be two full platoons on the mountain as well as Kearney and his entire headquarters element, a squad of scouts, and a couple of platoons of ANA. There will be long-range bombers and F-15s and -16s from Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, as well as Apache helicopters flying out of JAF and A-10 Warthogs and an AC-130 Spectre gunship based at Bagram. It’s a huge, weeklong operation, and it’s virtually certain that some men who are alive at this moment will be dead or injured by the time it’s over. Even without an enemy it’s hard to move that many men and aircraft around a steep mountain range and not have something bad happen.
The men spend the last hours of daylight packing their gear and making sure their ammo racks are correctly rigged. Chuck Berry is playing on someone’s laptop inside the brick-and-mortar. Donoho helps Rice adjust his rack, cinching it down in the back until it’s balanced and snug. Rice’s assault pack weighs seventy pounds and his weapon, ammo, and body armor will be at least another forty or fifty on top of that. Buno has a pack that looks so heavy, Rueda can’t resist coming over and trying to lift it. Moreno bets Hijar ten bucks that Hoyt can’t do twenty pull-ups on one of the steel girders in their barracks. He does, barely. The men paint their faces with greasepaint but Patterson makes them wipe it off and then they just sit and talk and go through the slow, tense countdown until the birds arrive. Some men listen to music. Some just lie on their cots staring at the ceiling. In some ways the anticipation feels worse than whatever may be waiting for them down in Yaka Chine or up on the Abas Ghar, and every man gets through it in his own quietly miserable way.
Shortly after eight o’clock the first Chinooks come clattering into the KOP from the north, rotors ablaze with sparks from the dust that they kick up as they land. First Platoon hustles on with their gear and the huge machines lift off and make the run south with their Apache escorts and then they come back to the KOP for the next load. At 8:41 p.m. the men of Second Platoon file into the back of their Chinook and sit facing each other on web seats with their night vision scopes down. The infrared strobes on the outside of the aircraft pump light out into the night in a long slow heartbeat. The aircraft fights its way up into the sky and tilts south and puts down ten minutes later at LZ Toucans. The men move out, grabbing their packs as they go, and a minute later they’re on the mountainside listening to the wind in the trees and the occasional squelp of the radios. Yaka Chine is three or four clicks away. The men fall into line and start walking north.
Kearney has signal intelligence teams scattered around the valley, three LRAS devices watching the town, and surveillance drones circling overhead. He is directing everything by radio from the summit of Divpat, a flat-topped mountain to the east. Almost immediately, drones spot two fighters moving toward Kearney’s position and a Spectre gunship, circling counterclockwise overhead, drills them with 20 mm rounds. That begins a game of cat-and-mouse where American airpower tries to prevent fighters from crossing open ground and gaining the protection of the houses in town. Later that night a group of fighters make it to a house outside Yaka Chine, and Kearney is granted permission by the brigade commander to destroy it with cannon fire from a Spectre gunship. Later, a B-1 bomber drops 2,000 pounds of high explosive on a ridgeline, where more insurgents had been observed positioning themselves for an attack.
The men of Second Platoon walk most of the night to the rip and boom of ordnance farther up the valley, and at dawn they find themselves close enough to human habitation to hear roosters crowing. A surveillance drone motors endlessly overhead. The men move slowly and awkwardly along the hillsides under their heavy loads but eventually come out onto a corduroy road built of squared-off timbers that serves as a skidway for the enormous trees that get cut on the upper ridges. The walking is easy but they’re wide open and after a while they leave the road and climb a brutally steep hillside to a grassy upland plateau. First Platoon comes into contact from a farm complex above town and they return fire, and then Second Platoon clears the buildings and waits in the bright fall sunlight while chickens peck past them in the dirt and cows groan from the alleyways.
Eventually a delegation of village elders tracks down Piosa and his men and leads them to a house with three children with blackened faces and a woman lying stunned and mute on the floor. Five corpses lie on wooden pallets covered by white cloth outside the house, all casualties from the airstrikes the night before. Medics start treating the wounded while Piosa’s men continue sweeping the village for weapons. They find eight RPG rounds and a shotgun and an old German pistol and some ammo and a pair of binoculars and an old Henri-Martin rifle — all contraband, but not the huge cache they were expecting. Prophet picks up radio traffic of one Taliban fighter asking another, “Have they found it, have they found it?” Obviously, they have not.
The civilian casualties are a serious matter and will require diplomacy and compensation. Second Platoon spends the night at a hilltop compound overlooking Yaka Chine, and the next morning Apaches come in to look around and then a Black Hawk lands on a rooftop inside the village. Ostlund jumps out like a strange camouflaged god and climbs down a wooden ladder to the ground. With him is a member of the provincial government — the first time a representative of any government, past or present, has made it past the mouth of the valley. Kearney arrives with Ostlund and quickly moves to the front of twenty or thirty locals with the weapons arrayed at his feet. There are old men with their beards dyed orange and eyes like small black holes and young men who don’t smile or talk and are clearly here to see, up close, the men they’re trying to kill from a distance, and young boys who dart around the edges, seemingly unmindful of the seriousness of things. Kearney is unshaven and shadowed with dirt from two nights on Divpat. The Americans are by far the dirtiest men there.
The locals sit with their backs against a stone wall and Kearney crouches in front of them to speak but soon stands back up. “I’m here to tell you guys why I did what I did. I’m Captain Kearney, the U.S. commander for the Korengal,” he says, and waits for the translator to finish. “When I come into villages and I find RPGs and weapons that are shot at myself and at the ANA, that indicates that there’s bad people in here. Good people don’t carry these weapons.”
Every few sentences Kearney stops to let the translator catch up, and spends the time pacing back and forth, getting more and more heated. “I can walk into Aliabad and not get shot at and not find any weapons… and I come into your village and I find RPGs.” He picks one up and waves it at the elders. “I bet I could give this RPG to any one of these younger kids and they’d know how to fire it — and they probably don’t even know how to read.”
He points to a young man seated in front of him. “You know how to shoot this thing?”
The kid shakes his head.
“Yeah, right.”
Kearney looks around. “You guys have insurgents here that are against myself and against the ANA and against the government. And they’re going to cause you guys to be hurt if you don’t help me out. I was able to pinpoint fifty insurgents that were in and around your village. The first building I engaged, the next morning when I get there I find five RPGs in it. So I know there’s not only good people in the building, there’s also bad people.”
Hajji Zalwar Khan, the wealthy and dignified leader of the valley, sits cross-legged on the ground directly in front of Kearney. He’s got a white beard and a handsome face and a narrow, aquiline nose that would easily pass for French at a Paris café. Kearney finishes by asking him point-blank for help: he wants Zalwar Khan to bring representatives from Yaka Chine to the weekly shura at the KOP. The old man says that Kearney will have to supply the fuel for the trip, and Kearney is about to agree but catches himself.
“I already told you: one Dishka and I’ll pay for your fuel,” he says. “When you tell me where a Dishka is, I’ll give you fuel for every single Friday for as long as I’m here.”
Zalwar Khan laughs. Kearney pinches the bridge of his
nose and shakes his head.
“Hajji, I trust you,” he says. “I trust you.”
Ostlund is up next. He stands there bareheaded and clean-shaven, looking more like a handsome actor in a war movie than a real commander in the worst valley in Afghanistan. His style is respectful and earnest and he appeals to the men before him as husbands and fathers rather than as potential enemies.
“We came here with a charter from the U.S. government with direction from the Afghan government and the Afghan national security forces,” he says. The translator delivers the sentence in Pashto and then stops and looks over. “And we were asked to bring progress to every corner of Afghanistan. Somehow miscreants have convinced some of your population that we want to come here and challenge Islam and desecrate mosques and oppress Afghan people. All of those are lies. Our country supports all religions.”
The translator catches up. None of the expressions change.
“All of my officers are trained and educated enough that they could teach at a university,” Ostlund goes on. “I challenge you elders to put them to work; put them to work building your country, fixing your valley. That’s what they’re supposed to do — that’s what I want them to do — but they can’t until you help us with security.”