American Cipher

by Matt Farwell

  When 2nd Platoon finally reached the initial bomb site, the MRAP wouldn’t fit on the wrecker and they wound up spending six days on the mountain road trying to find a solution. They were sleeping five men to a truck, ran out of food and water, and had to be resupplied by a low-altitude airdrop. What should have been a routine six-hour mission had turned into a tortured week-long ordeal. Eventually a team of mechanics arrived and cut the MRAP into metal chunks with acetylene torches, and 2nd Platoon returned to base.

  The breakdown in Omna had given the Taliban plenty of time to set traps and lie in ambushes on the convoy’s likely routes back to the FOB as they crawled home. The Americans were predictable that way. A Taliban triggerman remotely detonated a bomb buried in the road, blowing up the explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) team’s truck. Again, no fatalities, but the explosion was the signal for more Taliban lying in wait to attack—a classic ambush. The disabled EOD vehicle was stuck in the kill zone.

  Bergdahl heard gunfire and the distinctive pop-whiz of rocket-propelled grenades as they flew past his bulletproof window. It was both exciting and terrifying: armor-piercing bullets burned through the MRAP’s quarter-inch steel plates. The gunner in Bergdahl’s vehicle tried to return fire with his .50-caliber machine gun, but it malfunctioned, and Bergdahl passed him his SAW. Even though there was no way to shoot back from inside the truck, he felt vulnerable without his weapon. This, then, was Bergdahl’s first taste of combat: sitting useless in a million-dollar, up-armored, mine-resistant vehicle, watching through the portholes as his comrades tried to push the EOD truck out of the kill zone while returning fire and counterattacking in a maneuver the soldiers knew as Battle Drill Four: React to Ambush. Then, they heard hope from above: Close Air Support (CAS), the reason Americans rarely lost a long firefight in Afghanistan. Cuting their losses, the Taliban retreated back into the countryside.

  But the day could always get worse, and it did. Returning to base after their week outside the wire, exhausted but still coming down from the adrenaline high of their firefight, 2nd Platoon was greeted at the gate by their battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Clint Baker. The first thing he noticed was the stubble under their nylon chinstraps. “What, you couldn’t shave?” Baker demanded. Bergdahl was incredulous. This was Baker’s leadership? After their harrowing mission, in which any one of them could have died, how hard was it to say, “Good job out there”? The soldiers wanted to park their trucks, clean their weapons, use a real toilet, eat, sleep, shower, check email, or call home, but Sergeant First Class Hein passed down the first order from Baker: Before doing anything else, the soldiers would shave.

  FIVE

  OP MEST

  Lieutenant Colonel Clint Baker faced his own pressures. His battalion, Task Force 1 Geronimo, reported to Task Force Yukon, which was responsible for all operations in RC East, one of the military’s five regional commands. Task Force Yukon was commanded by Colonel Michael Howard, who ran his sector of the war as a sort of regional CEO, making his decisions after consulting his board of directors: civilian representatives from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Agriculture Department, the State Department, the Education Department, and every branch of the military.

  Also at Howard’s disposal were Human Terrain teams, anthropologists working for the Army to map the tribal and ethnographic structures of Afghanistan; and provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs), a hybrid military, State Department, and USAID development organization. Beyond even these, Howard had law enforcement liaisons from the FBI and DEA, bomb specialists, special operations troops, intelligence teams to help with targeting and detainee ops, and military THT units—tactical human intelligence teams—who kept an incentive drawer of illicit goodies for Afghan sources (liquor and porn were especially popular). It was all ad hoc—they’d never been organized quite this way before. Howard seemed to see all and know all, and he used that perceived omniscience to intimidate his younger officers, who called him Sauron, though never to his face.

  But despite all those resources, the Taliban in Paktika were proving maddeningly difficult to subdue. With orders from Howard to improve security, Baker directed his subordinates in Blackfoot Company to send out platoons and build an outpost nineteen miles southwest of FOB Sharana along a well-trafficked smuggling route. The idea was to man it with a combination of U.S. and Afghan troops who would intercept the arms, explosives, and Taliban foot soldiers that streamed in from the Pakistani border, roughly fifty miles to the east. They would establish security, identify the Taliban, separate them from the local population, and show the villagers that even here in Paktika they were better off with Karzai and the Americans in charge. With security thus established, the Americans would turn it over to the Afghans to run by themselves. First the small observation posts (OPs); then the FOBs like Sharana, Chapman, and Salerno; then the country. In the spring of 2009, with more than thirty thousand fresh troops on their way, this was counterinsurgency on the ground. This was the newfound commitment to what Obama called “the good war.”

  That had been the hope. The reality was that Bergdahl and 2nd Platoon had been ordered to dig bunkers for the new OP in what was clearly an Afghan cemetery, and no one seemed to care. The second, more shocking reality came when Bergdahl saw Lieutenant Colonel Baker kick one of the graves in a fit of rage. Bergdahl had already made his mind up about his battalion commander, and he shouldn’t have been watching him anyway. He should have been pulling security for the other guys working in the heat on the desolate hillside. The Army named it OP Mest for one of the Taliban-controlled villages nearby: Mest Malak. Only the Army would pick this spot for an OP. The men dreaded staying there, and after a few rotations, some of the guys in Bergdahl’s platoon started calling it OP Joke.

  To Bergdahl, everything in Afghanistan felt like a bad joke, starting with Baker himself. He commanded the entire battalion, and here he was throwing a tantrum like an angry child. He was screaming at Sergeant Greg Leatherman, getting right up in his face, chest to chest, for an old-fashioned Army ass chewing. An Afghan National Police (ANP) commander stood by his side, and Bergdahl thought Baker was putting on a little show for him. The show ended when he kicked the grave so hard it sent rocks clattering down and little clouds of moon dust puffing up like smoke from the sun-baked desert floor.

  The platoon shared the OP with the dead, and when they didn’t feel like walking down to the latrine, some soldiers would shit between the graves. The cemetery was little more than piles of stones harvested by leather-skinned old men who drove battered trucks around the desert, combing for scrap. The families of the dead stacked stones around the bodies in rectangular mounds and hung multicolored flags and rags from sticks to mark the area, like flowers in a place where nothing grows. These people have been fighting off foreign armies for generations, Bergdahl thought, and now they have to watch Americans desecrate their graves.

  The Army either didn’t understand or didn’t care what message it sent by building the OP on a sacred graveyard. As soon as they got there, the villagers complained. They told the interpreters, young Afghan men with American haircuts and American names like “John” and “Jack,” to tell the soldiers that this was a problem. The men didn’t like it, but the chain of command wanted this outpost built on this exact spot, graves be damned. The bad mojo might have been worthwhile if the OP were in a good tactical location, but it wasn’t. It was fully exposed to gunfire, mortars, and rockets. The natural cover provided by the surrounding hills and wadis worked both ways; there were huge blind spots where anyone could sneak on, or off, the base.

  To control the high ground and fortify the position, Sergeant Leatherman ordered his men to dig a bunker big enough for six men and their gear, high on the hill. It was early June, and it was hot. One soldier from another platoon had already been evacuated for heat sickness. Leatherman’s men were drenched in sweat as they shoveled the dirt and filled the prefabricated blast barriers with sand. Afte
r checking with the sergeants on the other side of the hill and hearing no objections, he let them shed their gear and strip down to T-shirts and uniform trousers. Rules were looser on the frontier.

  Baker was in a convoy driving toward the hill when he spotted them: 2nd Platoon, Blackfoot Company, 1/501. This wasn’t the first time he had seen these particular young men behaving like jackasses on his watch. Second Platoon was his problem child. Not a month had passed since he had written up a bunch of them for their performance in front of a British photographer with The Guardian. They had been out of uniform then too, lazing around and complaining about the mission in a video broadcast around the world. In several photos, one of the men—Bergdahl—was smoking a pipe.

  To Baker, The Guardian incident was a symptom of deeper problems. If soldiers couldn’t do basic things right, how would they do the more complex tasks the war demanded? How could they win the respect of the Afghan people and carry out the more nuanced requirements of the counterinsurgency mission? Baker handed out Field-Grade Article 15s to the two sergeants in charge, the most severe punishment he could administer shy of a court-martial. He told them that their conduct had endangered the entire mission and was no different from the child rapists who had destroyed the Army’s reputation at My Lai. Baker thought this was a clear message, and he thought it was received.

  And yet here he was, looking up at the hilltop OP in disbelief. According to his own command sergeant major, 2nd Platoon was the worst unit in the entire battalion. Now they were disregarding his authority again, dressed in a mishmash of half uniforms, none of them in body armor or helmets. Baker ordered the convoy to stop, invited the ANP commander and his men to join him, and charged the hill. Bergdahl knew that whatever was about to happen wasn’t his business. But as Baker stormed and raged, he couldn’t look away. Baker finished screaming, turned his back, paced and trembled with a terrible rage, and then wound up and kicked the grave with such force that his boot sailed chest high and the pile of stones went tumbling down.

  Bergdahl saw the young ANP soldiers turn to their own commanding officer with looks of shock.

  “What’re you doing!?” the Afghan officer shouted at Baker. “This is a graveyard!”

  It made no sense to Bergdahl. Had Baker intended to kick the grave to make a point? Defiling the dead was low on the list of ways to win friends and influence people. And if so, he proved that the COIN doctrine and the “cultural training” they had been force-fed since Alaska was bullshit. All of it. The whole idea that they were there to “help people,” the idea he had signed up for, was a scam. A grave is sacred in any culture. A life here is worth the same as a life back home. To desecrate a grave as an American, as the people who were sent here to spread liberty and fight oppression, was incomprehensible to Bergdahl. Which raised the second possible explanation: that Baker was not in control of his actions, unfit for leadership, and quite possibly insane. He was going to get them all killed, Bergdahl thought. Someone needed to do something.

  * * *

  —

  BACK AT FOB SHARANA, Bergdahl sent a coy Facebook message to Kayla Harrison. Her mother, Kim, was listed as his next of kin, to be notified if anything happened to him. If it did, he asked, could she please keep her mother calm?

  “Actions may become . . . odd,” he wrote. “No red flags. I’m good. But plans have begun to form, no time line yet. . . . I love you! Bowe.” He had been in Afghanistan less than a month.

  The message worried Kayla. She wrote back that she would do her best if and when that time came. “Exactly what kind of plans are you thinking?” On June 9, Bergdahl responded with a string of code intended to avoid triggering keywords—emails to and from soldiers in Afghanistan were scanned by both software and human analysts for violations of operational security, or OPSEC.

  “l1nes n0 t g00 d h3rE. tell u when 1 ha ve a si coure 1ine about pl/-ns,” he wrote. Kayla told him there was still time for thinking and asked him not to do anything “stupid or pointless.”

  “You know I plan better than that,” he responded. On June 14, Bergdahl requested an Eagle Cash debit card, the kind used by soldiers in Afghanistan at restaurants, coffee shops, and stores on base, and to withdraw money. On June 20, he took out three hundred dollars, and went to the on-base bazaar, which permitted Afghan merchants to sell trinkets, pirated DVDs, clothing, and blankets to GI’s. He bought a shalwar kameez, a long flowing shirt and loose-fitting pants, and a typical Afghan headscarf. The next day, he sent another email to Kayla. “How far will a human go to find their complete freedom?” he mused. “For one’s freedom, do they have the right to destroy the world to gain it?” On June 26, two days before the platoon rotated back to OP Mest for the final time before handing control to the Afghans, Bergdahl visited the FOB post office and mailed his laptop, journals, some books, and a Kindle to Kim. He followed this with a long email to his father’s account for both his parents to read. He didn’t mention the Article 15 he’d received for appearing out of uniform in The Guardian, but it was clearly front and center in his thoughts: Bergdahl called Baker “a conceited old fool” and worried about the fact that the good sergeants, like Leatherman, had lost their jobs. He continued:

  “In the U.S. Army you are cut down for being honest . . . but if you are a conceited brown nosing shit bag you will be allowed to do whatever you want, and you will be handed your higher rank. . . . The system is wrong. I am ashamed to be an american. And the title of U.S. soldier is just the lie of fools. The U.S. Army is the biggest joke the world has to laugh at. It is the army of liars, backstabbers, fools, and bullies.” As a signoff, he wrote, “I am sorry for everything.”

  His parents were immediately worried; it sounded like Bowe was coming unspooled.

  Before his platoon left for OP Mest, Bergdahl wrote more emails to his friends back home.

  “Hey there may be a shift in events at some point,” he wrote in a June 27 email to Monica Lee, a childhood friend from church. They’d grown closer after he joined the Army, and she’d become a sort of long-distance, wartime sweetheart. She had sent a letter and photo of herself to him at Fort Richardson before he deployed. “Its awesome. I love it. I love you. I will Carry it with me,” he wrote. To Lee, he came closest to articulating his plan: “Fear is only in your head, and it only has power over your mind if you allow it. I am going out of the wire again, but this time i am not sure when i’ll get back and online to talk to you. There are things i need to do, though this system i am in will not let [it] happen. This problem will be resolved. The afghan people do need help. Conceited soldiers from a failing country is not the answer.”

  That night at FOB Sharana, he posed a question to Sutton and Coe: “What do you think would happen if I walked off towards the mountains near Omna?” He told them he wanted to walk to India. He would go through Pakistan. It was about fifty miles to the border. He could do it. He said he was going to do it.

  Coe didn’t take it seriously. Escape fantasies were one of the platoon’s favorite topics. No one wanted to be dodging bombs in Paktika Province; they all would rather have been somewhere else. They schemed novel ways out. A guy could shoot himself in the foot, or run into the aid station with a grenade and pretend to have gone insane. Coe and Sutton had heard this sort of thing from Bergdahl before. “We thought he was just venting,” Coe said. “It was like, ‘Whatever, you’re full of shit. You’re venting, you’re bitching, and you’re releasing stress.’”

  On June 28, Bergdahl rode with his new lieutenant, John Billings, and three other soldiers from the FOB to the OP. They arrived at Mest, unpacked their gear, and settled in for their last rotation. Bergdahl asked Specialist Shane Cross, who had been issued a sidearm in addition to his heavy machine gun, what would happen if his M9 Beretta pistol went missing. Cross told him the consequences would be severe. Lieutenant Fancey had been removed from command for less. Bergdahl had thought about taking it with him, but decided then to leave Cross’
s 9mm pistol alone.

  On the night of June 29, Bergdahl and Coe went up the hill for a meal with the Afghan soldiers. Other guys in the platoon blanched at the thought, but Bergdahl made a point of eating with the Afghans whenever possible. Bergdahl felt that Coe—who had grown up as a Christian missionary in the jungles of Northern Venezuela, nearly three hours by bush plane to anything resembling a town—intuitively understood why it was important. It wasn’t for the okra stew; it was both the right thing to do and a commonsense precaution. The Afghans had been there before 2nd Platoon arrived, and they would be there after they were gone. Bonding with them could prevent the next not-so-accidental “green on blue” case, the Pentagon’s term for the epidemic of Afghan soldiers and policemen killing their American allies. Plus, the Afghans at OP Mest were mostly friendly; the platoon had given them nicknames like “Ice Cream” and “Crazy Eyes.”

  Seven years later, the dinner burned into Coe’s memory. He remembered the menu: tomatoes, okra, bread and cucumbers, onions, pickles, and fish from an aquafarm in Sharana. Later that night, Bergdahl gave him a memory card filled with photographs. The pictures were mostly of Alaskan and Afghan skies, clouds, sunrises, and sunsets. Bergdahl was “obsessed with the sky,” Coe recalled. It had seemed like the end of a normal day, or as normal as Coe could expect five months into his tour. As a late deployer, Bergdahl had been there just five weeks.