Eagle Down

by Jessica Donati

  The initially stiff relationship between the Americans and the Taliban relaxed as discussions progressed; they even traded jokes now and then. Ambassador Olson was hopeful the process might lead somewhere and asked his principal deputy, Miller, to work with a technical team to hammer out a roadmap. By the end of a three-day round of talks, the two sides had agreed on a process to formally reopen the Taliban’s political office, but they failed to agree on the sequencing of events.

  The United States wanted the Taliban to announce the simultaneous start of talks with the United States and Kabul. The Taliban were consistent in their position, and had been for years: they would only agree to starting a peace process with the United States first, and afterward they would agree to talks with Kabul as well. As an alternative, the Taliban floated the idea of a buffer: announcing official talks with the United States first, and then launching a parallel, bilateral process with Kabul later on. But the Americans would not agree. They didn’t trust the Taliban to start talks with Kabul once the political office was formally opened in Doha for talks with the United States.

  The Obama administration’s policy was centered on the view that bilateral talks with the Taliban would undermine the Afghan government and weaken its position at the table. For the equal and opposite reason, the Taliban did not want to concede to talks with the Afghan government until the United States had publicly agreed to discuss the withdrawal of troops. Despite the gridlock over sequencing, the US delegation returned to Washington hopeful that their approach had shown enough progress to be rubber-stamped by the incoming administration and would be allowed to continue—and everyone expected Hillary Clinton to win the presidency.

  Footnotes

  1 US and Afghan intelligence agencies tried, ultimately unsuccessfully, to harness the splinter groups against Mansour. The CIA-backed NDS sought to provide financial and military support to local Taliban groups that had broken away from the main branch. Grounded in the idea that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the strategy was controversial because, technically, the groups were still Taliban and could easily turn against the government. To an extent, efforts to woo insurgents had always existed, such as the $200 million Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Program, a defunct six-year plan to pay about eleven thousand insurgents to lay down their arms (it eventually ran out of funding), and the Village Stability Operations, which wrapped up with the US withdrawal of troops in 2014.

  2 China had taken an increasing interest in Afghanistan since the United States had announced plans to withdraw. It worried about militancy spreading over its shared border with Afghanistan into Xinjiang province, where a violent separatist group driven by Uighur jihadists, known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), had taken root. Beijing believed that ETIM was trained and financed by militants in Afghanistan. In later years, China took further steps to contain the threat of insurgency in Xinjiang, rounding up the Muslim population and detaining at least a million in secretive reeducation camps.

  CHAPTER 23

  Thank You for Your Service

  CALEB

  CALEB used his walker to hop up and down their apartment block, ignoring the pain shooting up his right stump at every step. He was impatiently waiting for the skin graft on his left leg to heal. He couldn’t get a prosthetic fitted until that happened, and bearing all his weight on one leg was excruciating. He blamed the slow progress on Coumadin, an anticoagulant that prevented blood clots. When his surfer-blonde hair fell out in the shower, a common side effect of the drug, he secretly stopped taking it.

  A condition known as heterotopic ossification was also complicating his recovery. A bony growth at the end of his severed femur protruded into the thin layer of skin covering the bone, causing great pain when pressure was applied to the stump. The bone kept growing because the body mistook the injury for a fracture and sent bone tissue out of the severed end to repair the break. It was a significant complication for soldiers recovering from traumatic amputations. His doctors repeatedly modified the socket to try to ease the discomfort and prescribed strong drugs for the nerve pain. He began to hop laps of the apartment building, building strength. Ashley felt proud of her husband’s resilience. It wasn’t going to be easy, but things were already looking up.

  At the end of March 2016, Caleb went back to the Center for the Intrepid, the privately funded rehab facility, for his first prosthetic fitting on the second leg. It was thrilling to stand on both legs again for the first time in almost four months. He agreed to speak to a congressman about the rehab facility, understanding that this was part of his duty as a soldier. A day before the meeting, he received notification that his health insurance coverage had expired, all his appointments at the Center for the Intrepid had been cancelled, and he was no longer allowed to receive treatment. He knew it had to be a glitch in the paperwork, but he couldn’t help feeling a sense of panic. How long would it take to rectify? Why had the army let this happen?

  It turned out that his orders, which were required for him to continue treatment, were generated three months at a time, and the current set had run out. As a National Guard soldier, Caleb had to be on orders for any military-affiliated work, including participating in the recovery program at the rehab facility. The Warrior Training Battalion hadn’t told him that his orders would expire every quarter, and he expected to spend at least a year in rehabilitation. No one could tell him how to get new orders generated and restart his medical coverage. He had to wheel himself from office to office, asking questions. Until it was resolved, he was banned from the Center for the Intrepid. When his military ID expired and he wheeled himself down to the office to renew it, the staff at the desk turned him away. It was the beard again. He was shaving every few days, and some blonde stubble had started to show.

  “You turn back around,” the staff member told him. “We’re not giving you an ID card until you’ve shaved.”

  At the park with Ashley, Caleb fumed when a slight rise in a grassy hill proved too steep for him to walk. Every rock and slope presented a challenge. One day, he tripped and fell over in the grass and was unable to pick himself up. Ashley was strong, but at five feet one inch she was too small to lift him by herself. They hadn’t learned the technique for getting him upright. He tried and tried, but he toppled over on the unstable prosthetics and kept falling back to the ground. Three boys, each about ten years old, saw them struggling on the grass and came over to help.

  “Thank you for your service, sir,” they said, and tried to give him some money.

  Caleb felt moved and desperate at the same time. He didn’t want to become a victim or a charity case.

  OPERATION SURF, a nonprofit, invited Caleb to join a surfing trip in California for wounded soldiers that spring. He didn’t feel ready. The idea of taking a plane alone and swimming in the ocean with no legs was daunting. Barely four months had passed since he’d been injured, and he wasn’t used to his new condition. Despite his misgivings, he decided to go. The trip turned out to be a huge confidence boost. Caleb discovered that he could manage at the airport by himself. The waves were healing, and the sea-salty air made him feel like a person rather than a patient for the first time since the injury.

  There’s nothing I can’t do, he told himself for the first time. I just need to adapt to the new situation.

  Caleb wanted to experience the real, unfiltered world, the way it would be for the rest of his life. For months, he had the growing sensation that things were still too good. People kept asking how he felt. He didn’t feel bad enough. He still couldn’t grasp the gritty reality of being a double amputee. He had broken his existence down into short-term goals to avoid thinking about the future. Over the course of a week after the surfing trip, he quit all drugs.

  The cocktail of medication included opiates and Lyrica to block the nerve pain. The withdrawal symptoms were excruciating, and he begged for a break in his daily routine of physiotherapy and medical appointments. When he woke up to the reality of another day without
legs, now that he was off the drugs depression set in. Just getting out of bed required preparation.

  At the Center for the Intrepid, the doctors were sympathetic, but they refused to pause the schedule. To Caleb, their attitude seemed borderline callous, but he knew it was because they cared. The doctors set goals for their wounded patients that the amputees could never imagine for themselves. On the days when he didn’t have the energy to perform the exercises, fighting the doctors was even worse, so he kept going.

  It was one thing to walk around in a lab and exercise while hooked up to machines, but the real world was filled with obstacles, curbs, uneven ground, and slopes that were difficult to navigate. The Warrior Training Battalion continued to harass him about standards and task him with impossible duties. One day he was ordered to appear within the hour to pull weeds from the yard, something that was fine for soldiers recovering from minor sprains, but a huge undertaking for someone learning to walk again. He took it as one more sign that the army didn’t care what happened to him.

  The battalion also ordered him to start appearing at formations twice a day. Caleb was the only soldier in a wheelchair and lived an hour away from the base. He couldn’t understand why the army was not encouraging him to invest his mental and physical energy in his recovery. Angry, he wrote to a friend to ask for help dealing with the repeated expiration of his medical coverage and constant battles with the battalion.

  “I do not believe anyone has any idea what this does to soldiers’ mental health and their perspective of how the army cares for them,” he wrote in a four-page letter. “We have been at war since 2002 and this is still a thing!… Someone in my position needs to be focusing on healing mentally as well as physically, not be made to feel they are being chewed up and spit out by the idiotic paperwork maze that is the army healthcare system.” It seemed like everyone else could go home at the end of the day. Caleb had to live with Afghanistan every minute for the rest of his life.

  He continued to feel angry despite his progress. When he was sent to see a psychologist as part of his routine treatment, he released his rage.

  “Everything is difficult,” Caleb told him. “I can’t even pick up something that has dropped to the floor. The army keeps losing my orders. I’m getting harassed about my beard. Everything’s pissing me off, man! I just feel angry at the world all the time.”

  The psychologist said this was a typical reaction to the events that had happened to him.

  “I don’t want to be angry all the time,” Caleb insisted. “I don’t want to be angry with my family and put them through more stress after everything that has happened. Is there something I can take for my anger?”

  “The way you’re reacting is normal,” the psychologist repeated. “You’ll manage it better over time.” He promised Caleb one more appointment before he was discharged, potentially at the end of the year.

  The session made Caleb feel a bit better. A bit more confident. Perhaps he was processing things well after all. Perhaps he was going to be okay.

  The Center for the Intrepid offered every type of training scenario that could be imagined to prepare soldiers to return to normal life and activities. There was a driving simulator to assess readiness to get behind the wheel. There was an “activities of daily living” apartment to relearn everyday jobs like making the bed or changing a diaper in an unadapted space. There was even a fifty-foot swimming pool where soldiers could swim laps or try adaptive kayaking, and a “flow rider” that re-created the feeling of body surfing or paddling in rough water at the beach.

  For Ashley, the real turning point came when the nonprofit Task Force Dagger took the family on a scuba-diving trip. When the organizer mentioned it to her in December, she thought he was crazy. But sure enough, when June came around, they flew to Key West and learned to dive at the Special Forces school. Caleb thought it was surreal to be here and not get yelled at like a student. Because neither Caleb nor Ashley had tried diving before, it wasn’t an activity that had to be “adapted.” They learned together.

  In the summer, they planned the last step: Ashley had to go back to Tucson. Their older daughter was due to start first grade, and Ashley’s family leave was about to run out. She owed her job to her boss. She had dealt with her own paperwork problems when her employer’s administrative department refused to accept that her husband had been wounded at war, entitling her to an extended period of leave to care for him. When Ashley and the children moved back home, Caleb moved into a smaller apartment in Texas, aiming to be discharged by the end of the year.

  He learned to survive on his own. He had to drive to the medical center every day, fill the car with gas, shop for groceries, and navigate hills, curbs, and rocks. Although he missed the family, he found a new sense of self-worth. He had one last big goal: participating in the army ten-miler in the fall. When Caleb’s family came to visit him, he took his eldest daughter to the track to practice running. Ashley filmed them racing. Caleb wore special prosthetics for running and bounced along, arms swinging, toward the finish line after the little girl, who slowed down at the end to avoid outrunning her father.

  On October 9, 2016, Caleb staggered across the finish line of a ten-mile race with his old teammate Chris at his side. It took him three hours, and he was exhausted, and sweat made everything slippery. The prosthetics flopped around, his body throbbed and ached, but he’d done it. He had run ten miles less than a year after stepping on a bomb in Sangin. He pushed to be released from medical care and allowed to start his new life. He planned to leave the army even though others tried to convince him to stay. He didn’t want to be recruited to show others how great it was to be injured and still serve. He resented the battalion for the expired orders, the harassment over his beard, and the disregard for his injury. He just wanted to go home. Almost two years had passed since he’d left to prepare for the Afghanistan tour.

  A medical board had to approve Caleb’s discharge, and he was released in December 2016, just in time for Christmas. In Tucson, he decided to take on the role of primary caregiver at home, to make up for Ashley having looked after the family all year. She went back to work. Their kids were two and seven. Being a stay-at-home parent was harder than he’d expected. He could go to the store, do laundry, and drive, but parenting two small children was another matter. When the dog peed in the house, the kids were both howling, and the house was a mess, he felt overwhelmed. The old rage would return, Caleb would bottle it up for as long as possible, and then he’d explode. He’d hear himself yell and think, What am I doing?

  Ashley saw that he was struggling, but she couldn’t do anything about it. When she felt angry too, she tried to suppress it. She knew he was resilient and would work his way through these difficult emotions. She had weathered his changing states since they were teenagers. He would find his own way. Caleb felt bad about his rages. He didn’t want to completely let loose, because he knew that wasn’t good, but sometimes he couldn’t help it. He was aware that being angry was illogical, and yet he couldn’t control it.

  CHAPTER 24

  Trump Inherits the Afghan War

  Do not allow our very stupid leaders to sign a deal that keeps us in Afghanistan through 2024—with all costs by USA. MAKE AMERICA GREAT! We have wasted an enormous amount of blood and treasure in Afghanistan. Their government has zero appreciation. Let’s get out!

  —Donald Trump, Twitter, November 2013

  A BILLIONAIRE real estate mogul and a vocal critic of the war in Afghanistan, Donald Trump was exploring a presidential bid in the 2016 election. Trump’s “America First” campaign advocated for the United States to withdraw from costly overseas conflicts. In typically blunt fashion, he called the war a disaster, a waste of billions of dollars, and a misuse of resources that should have been directed to domestic schools and infrastructure. He even created a short video calling for the United States to withdraw.

  Trump came under pressure to explain his position as the race for the Republican nomination progressed an
d it became clear that President Obama would hand over the Afghan war to a successor. Afghanistan was a quagmire that had cost the United States close to $2 trillion by some calculations.1 But the national security establishment, given ample coverage in the US media, warned against a precipitous withdrawal. It was difficult to argue that leaving Afghanistan would not cause the country to collapse. Whether remaining there indefinitely would inevitably expose the United States to the risk of another 9/11-style attack was another matter.

  “At some point, are they going to be there for the next two hundred years? At some point what’s going on? It’s going to be a long time,” Trump told CNN in October 2015, when asked about his position on Afghanistan. “It’s a mess. And at this point, you probably have to because that thing will collapse about two seconds after they leave. Just as I said that Iraq was going to collapse after we leave.”

  IN OCTOBER 2016, a month before the US election, Heman Nagarathnam, the deputy in charge of the hospital in Kunduz during the Médecins Sans Frontières attack, was back in the city preparing to mark the one-year anniversary of the bombing. The building was still in ruins, its black, skeletal remains a dark reminder of that terrible night. The tent on the hospital grounds was ready for the memorial service.

  In the middle of the night, Heman heard gunshots and explosions. Outside, the sky was pitch black. Am I dreaming? he wondered. He wasn’t. Kunduz was under attack again. And as it had the previous year, it fell within hours.